The Washington Post National Weekly - February 21, 2016 by The Wenatchee World

Worst Week Jeb Bush 3

Politics Disorder in the high court 4

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Jeb Bush by Chris Cillizza

n Tuesday, NBC's Peter Alexander asked Jeb Bush about how important winning the endorsement of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was to his chances in the state’s Feb. 20 primary. “She is probably the most meaningful endorsement there is. If she is going to give an endorsement, it would be the most powerful, meaningful one in the state,” Bush said. Less than 24 hours later, Haley threw her endorsement to Marco Rubio, Bush’s fellow Floridian and the man who is well on his way to seizing the establishment mantle that looked to be Bush’s birthright when he first got into the race last year. “I’d rather her endorse me,” Bush told Yahoo’s Hunter Walker in the immediate aftermath of the endorsement. Well, yes. Even before the Haley endorsement, Bush’s trend line in South Carolina, which he and his campaign have long proclaimed as “Bush country,” didn’t look good with Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Rubio slotted into the win, place or show slots. The simple fact, as I have noted in this space before, is that without a topthree finish in South Carolina, Bush can’t continue on in the race as a serious candidate. The rats appear to be jumping off the ship, too. In a piece headlined “Bush Machine Running on Fumes,” Eli Stokols wrote Friday:

KLMNO WEEKLY

Jeb Bush speaks to voters on Thursday in Columbia, S.C.

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

Even before Haley’s endorsement, several longtime Bush donors were emailing one another Tuesday morning, expressing a collective readiness to intervene and tell Bush, depending on his finish here Saturday night, that his time is up. Any momentum that Bush was hoping to build coming off of his fourthplace finish in New Hampshire and his best debate performance of the race last weekend was entirely blunted by the Haley endorsement and the pre obituaries published Friday. Jeb Bush, for having to attend your own political wake, you had the Worst Week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 19

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY TECHNOLOGY BOOKS OPINION COMMENTARY

4 7 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER The president faces not simply a partisan divide, but a deep mistrust that seems to affect the very way Americans hear the president’s words and see each other. Photo illustration by The Washington Post

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

A new dynamic on Supreme Court BY

R OBERT B ARNES

ustice Antonin Scalia’s sudden death last weekend shifts the dynamic of the Supreme Court and undermines conservative hopes for far-reaching victories this term on important, highly controversial issues such as abortion, immigration and unions. If Republican leaders hold to their pledge not to confirm anyone President Obama nominates, it could affect the next term as well, having a dramatic impact on the cases an eight-member court accepts and decides in the term that begins in October. The battle lines being drawn will probably only add to the concern that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. expressed recently that the officially nonpartisan court is being viewed with the same skepticism that voters reserve for the political branches. In the short term, conservatives could still prevail on many of the casesbeforethecourtthisterm.But the wins could come in the form of tie votes that preserve the status quo rather than provide precedents that will shape the future. On other issues, an evenly divided court would mean upholding lower-court victories that liberals were trying to preserve. “The possibility of big conservative wins this term has gone down dramatically,” said Irv Gornstein, head of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown Law Center. If the court splits 4 to 4 on a case, the ruling simply affirms the decision of the appeals court from which it came, without setting a national precedent. No opinion is issued. And Supreme Court experts agree that votes Scalia would have taken on cases already argued do not count. In some cases, such as whether Obama properly used his powers to shield from deportation millions of illegal immigrants who have longstanding ties to the country, a divided court could doom the president’s chances of implementing the program. That is because a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled against him.

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

With Scalia’s death, an evenly balanced court undercuts conservative hopes for sweeping wins But Scalia’s absence might restrict the court from making a more far-reaching decision about the president’s powers, a question that it added when it agreed to hear the case. In some cases, a diminished conservative majority might mean unexpected victories for liberals. The best example of that concerns a battle over public employee union fees that the court considered last month. At oral arguments, the court seemed prepared to hand a significant defeat to organized labor and side with a group of California teachers who claim that their freespeech rights are violated when they are forced to pay dues to the state’s teachers union. The court’s conservatives — Scalia included — appeared ready to junk a 40-year-old precedent that allows unions to collect an “agency fee” from nonmembers to support collective-bargaining activities for members and nonmembers alike.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had ruled for the union. And with the Supreme Court’s liberals seemingly united in upholding the precedent, a 4to-4 vote would mean the union victory would stand. Scalia’s death could even affect cases not yet teed up for the court’s action. Last week, the court, on a 5-to-4 vote, stayed implementation of Obama’s ambitious proposal to limit carbon emissions and reduce global warming while the plan is challenged. The court granted a stay request from more than two dozen states, plus utilities and coal companies, that said the Environmental Protection Agency was overstepping its powers. The court’s granting of the stay did not address the merits of the challenge but indicated the five conservative justices thought the stateshaveraisedseriousquestions. The stay was unusual because no court had yet ruled on the legality of the plan. Now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will

James Peck of Springfield, Va., lays flowers at a makeshift memorial for Justice Antonin Scalia on the steps of the Supreme Court.

hear the challenge in June. If the appeals court upholds the plan, would the four remaining conservatives feel it was worth accepting an appeal if it were clear that it would be impossible to get a fifth vote from one of the liberals? That sort of gamesmanship will play out in the months before the court adjourns at the end of June. And the result could be that the law wouldbeinterpreteddifferentways in different regions of the country. For instance, a Texas law that imposes new restrictions on abortion providers was found constitutional by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. A 4-to-4 tie would uphold that finding. But a similar law in Wisconsin was struck down and would be unaffected by the court’s tie in the Texas case. One option for the court is to hold on to a case and have it reargued in the new term that begins in October. It has employed that option in the past when there was a transition. But there might seem little reason to do that if there would be no new member of the court until months after a new president is inaugurated in January. The court’s dynamic will change in other ways. For the first time in decades, conservatives and liberals will be on equal footing in the eightmember Supreme Court. Without Scalia, there are four members of the court, all nominated by Republican presidents, who most often vote conservative — Roberts and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. But Kennedy is the justice in the middle, voting with liberals on issues such as the death penalty and gay rights. The court’s four liberals, all named by Democratic presidents, have had success when they have voted together and brought Kennedy, and occasionally Roberts, to their side. They are Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. It is the first time in generations that the court’s ideological divide so neatly aligns with its partisan appointments.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

KLMNO

POLITICS The last three justices — Alito, nominated by President George W. Bush, and Obama’s choices Sotomayor and Kagan — faced opposition in largely party-line votes during their confirmation process even though there was no controversy about their qualifications, Roberts said at a law school speech in Boston. “When you have a sharply political, divisive hearing process, it increases the danger that whoever comes out of it will be viewed in those terms,” he said. “If the Democrats and Republicans have been fighting so furiously about whether you’re going to be confirmed, it’s natural for some member of the public to think, well, you must be identified in a particular way as a result of that process. “And that’s just not how — we don’t work as Democrats or Re-

publicans.” Labels aside, the court will be different without Scalia. Because of their sway, the conservative justices have never had to be as strategic as their colleagues on the left. They often agreed on the outcome of a case but split over the reasoning. They wrote separately even in major cases; Scalia was famous for not joining an opinion unless he agreed with every word of it, even the footnotes. And Scalia’s brand of constitutional interpretation, or textualism, sometimes led him to take positions he said he found uncomfortable. He sometimes joined unusual coalitions of the justices in cases such as upholding freespeech rights of those with whom he disagreed or siding with criminal defendants who challenged law enforcement techniques. n

Outlook for some cases on the docket Here are some of the most promi nent cases on the Supreme Court docket that could be affected by the absence of Justice Antonin Scalia: Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin The Supreme Court in July agreed to consider again whether race-conscious college-admission plans are constitutional. Two years ago, the court voted 7 to 1 to send the University of Texas at Austin’s plan back for further judicial review. Upon reconsideration, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit once again upheld the program. In a 2-to-1 vote, the panel concluded that UT’s limited consideration of race was “necessary” and narrowly tailored to meet the university’s compelling interest in achieving student-body diversity. The court already was working with one less justice in this case; Justice Elena Kagan sat it out, presumably because she worked on the issue when she was President Obama’s solicitor general. That means only seven justices would decide whether the appeals court was correct to uphold the program. l

United States v. Texas Obama’s executive action shields from deportation more than 4 million people who are parents of citizens or of lawful

permanent residents and allows them to “come out from the shadows” to work legally, as Obama put it when announcing the program in November 2014. The executive action was put on hold by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. A split court would uphold that decision and keep Obama from implementing it before he leaves office. But it might be more difficult to answer broader questions about a president’s powers in such matters. Zubik v. Burwell Also before the court is another challenge to the Affordable Care Act, this time over whether religiously affiliated organizations such as universities, hospitals and charities can be freed from playing any role in providing their employees with contraceptive coverage. The case pits questions of religious liberty against a woman’s right to equal health-care access, and it will be the fourth time the court has considered some aspect of what has also come to be known as Obamacare. Seven appeals courts that have decided on the controversy found in favor of the Obama administration. But one did not. Presumably, a split court would mean the law is interpreted differently depending on the region of the country. n

Time spent considering Supreme Court nominees In the past 115 years, the average time for Senate confirmation/rejection has been 37 days, but in the period from Richard Nixon’s presidency to the present, the average has been 63 days. DAYS between nomination and . . . confirmation rejection or withdrawal PRESIDENT

NOMINEE 0

Barack Obama

100

66 82

Harriet Miers

John G. Roberts Jr. (nominated to replace O’Connor, but switched to replace Rehnquist)

Stephen G. Breyer

Bill Clinton

Ruth Bader Ginsburg George H.W. Bush

Clarence Thomas

David Souter

Anthony M. Kennedy

Robert H. Bork

114

Antonin Scalia

William H. Rehnquist (nominated for chief justice)

Sandra Day O’Connor Gerald Ford Richard Nixon

John Paul Stevens

33 19

William H. Rehnquist

Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Harry A. Blackmun

G. Harrold Carswell

Clement Haynsworth Jr. Warren E. Burger Source: U.S. Senate Historical Office

120

Samuel A. Alito Jr.

George W. Bush

Ronald Reagan

Elena Kagan Sonia Sotomayor

— Robert Barnes and Terri Rupar

WEEKLY

92 17 DAN KEATING AND PATTERSON CLARK/THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

P HILIP B UMP

BC put together an estimate of the number of delegates won by each of the Republican candidates for the presidential nomination after New Hampshire’s primary. Donald Trump was in the lead with 17. Ted Cruz was in second with 11. So with a slew of one-time candidates (like Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie) out of the race thanks to the all-important Iowa and New Hampshire contests, Trump is only . . . about 1,200 delegates short of the nomination. In other words: After all of the “here’s how caucuses work” and the “who can put together a turnout effort in New Hampshire” stuff, the leader in the Republican contest had 1.3 percent of the delegates he needs to win. Assuming that ABC’s estimates are accurate. And excluding the fact that Fiorina’s dropping out looses her one delegate to the winds of fate. The party primaries are partyrun, with rules set at the top but implemented in 50 different ways. More than 50 ways, including the delegates awarded by territories. Dozens and dozens of ways. So, with voting underway, here’s our beginner’s guide. The Republicans By Super Tuesday, March 1, things get real as far as how many delegates are awarded — and by March 15, fully half of all of the delegates that will be awarded will be given out. March 15 marks another important moment. It’s the date on which states are allowed to start handing all of their delegates to whoever wins the state, should they wish to do so, instead of having to parcel them out based on the percentage each candidate earns. In other words, if that winner-take-all standard had applied in New Hampshire and Iowa, Trump would have gotten all of New Hampshire’s 23 delegates and Cruz all of Iowa’s 30. (Except that there are some delegates who aren’t bound to candidates, except maybe they are. Let’s just skip this for now.) Not every state that votes or caucuses after March 15 will be winner-take-all. Above is a look at how the allocation will work in each state. “Proportional” contests divvy

THE FIX

The messy delegate process, explained Delegate allocation process As categorized by Frontloading HQ (frontloading.blogspot.com)

up delegates based on the percentage of the vote — often with a minimum required percentage. (Rubio surpassing 10 percent of the vote in New Hampshire was important because it put him over the threshold to get any delegates in the state.) “Proportional/winner-take-all” states give the winner a set number of delegates and divvy up the rest. And then there are other systems, such as in California, where delegates are allocated based on congressional district results.

Since the math for delegate allocation depends on final vote tallies and hitting benchmarks and rounding up or down and a number of other factors, news outlets like ABC have to do their best to get the complicated math right. It’s an estimate. And it’s messy. But it could be worse. The Democrats For example, it could be the Democratic process. In general, the allocation of Democratic delegates looks simi-

Delegate estimates for GOP candidates prior to S.C.: Trump: 17 Cruz: 11 Rubio: 10 Kasich: 5 Bush: 4 Carson: 3 Fiorina: 1 Christie: 0

Source: ABC on Feb 10.

lar to that of the Republicans. The Democrats also have complicated rules and margins and percentages. But they also have superdelegates. There are 4,000-plus delegates who are awarded by the votes/ caucuses/conventions in the states. That does not include the 712 superdelegates, who can vote for whomever they want. So when Bernie Sanders won New Hampshire by a wide margin, the Daily Caller estimated, he got 13 of the state’s 24 pledged delegates to Clinton’s 9, with 2 unallocated. But the state also has eight superdelegates, six of whom are backing Clinton. That’s 15 delegates for Clinton from New Hampshire to 13 for Sanders, with four (2 pledged and 2 super) not committed. Win for Hillary! According to Bloomberg’s count (meaning the media outlet, not the possible candidate), Clinton already has nearly 400 delegates to Sanders’s 44, thanks to superdelegates who have committed to supporting her. In 2008, this was a source of enormous consternation: What if Obama won the pledged delegates but Clinton swamped him with an advantage among superdelegates? Happily for the party, that was avoided eight years ago. But the goofy maintenance of superdelegates raises that specter once again. (Here’s where we come back to the part about unbound Republican delegates we mentioned above. There are some unbound delegates in the Republican process — mostly party chairs and other big shots — who could theoretically vote as the Democratic superdelegates do but, according to FrontloadingHQ, the national party is mandating that they follow the vote in their states.) The parties aren’t stupid. They are balancing several oftenconflicting needs: Let the states do their own thing, avoid a problematic convention and get this over with as soon as possible. The Democrats, until about six months ago, figured they were in the clear in 2016, thanks to the dominance of Hillary Clinton. The Republicans figured that there would be an interesting contest between experienced Republican politicians, with a smooth landing facilitated by a process they deliberately streamlined after 2012. Nope. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Sea stars are turning to goo BY

D ARRYL F EARS

arming waters in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans have increased the prevalence of diseases that are turning sea stars to mush and killing lobsters by burrowing under their shells and causing lesions, two new studies say. The outbreaks are so lethal, according to a biologist involved in both studies, that at least one species of sea star has vanished off the coasts of Washington and British Columbia and the lobster fishery, already decimated in southern New England, will likely be threatened in Maine. In the Pacific, a wasting disease called epizootic is blamed for the disappearance of the technicolor sunflower sea star. It’s also laying waste to the ochre sea star that scientists at Cornell University, the University of Puget Sound and Northeastern University, as well as other institutions, examined for the latest research. Their reports were published this past week. Numerous climate studies have shown that the oceans are warming. In addition, 30 percent of the carbon released into the atmosphere ends up there, leading to acidification that’s further destroying coral, shell life and other organisms. The sea-star study was led by Morgan E. Eisenlord, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell, and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Both in a laboratory and at 16 sites on the San Juan Islands off Washington’s coast, researchers determined that ochre sea stars gradually became sicker as water temperatures rose slightly. Conditions simulated in the lab confirmed what the scientists observed in the field. As temperatures rose, the disease became more prevalent, and adult ochres died within days. The disease, plus death, was more prominent in temperatures between 54 degrees and 66 degrees Fahrenheit. For the adults, the risk of death was 18 percent higher at 66 degrees. “The little ones seem to be more resistant,” said Drew Harvell, a Cornell professor of ecology and

NEIL MCDANIEL

Warming oceans are killing starfish and lobsters, scientists say evolutionary biology who studies marine diseases and was involved with both reports. “It takes them longer to get sick, but once they do, they succumb quickly.” The researchers say all sea stars have carried the epizootic virus for a long time, based on 50-year-old museum collections. Warming waters and perhaps genetic change in the virus appear to increase its potency, Harvell said. Ochre sea stars mysteriously washed ashore in California in 2011, but no one knew why. When the disease outbreak was first detected in 2013, scientists thought it might be contained to the waters off Washington and southern Canada. But over the more than two years since, it has been identified as the source of mortality in 20 species from California to as far north as Alaska. “This outbreak came so quickly, by the time we knew enough about it, a lot of it had already happened,” Harvell said. “The ques-

tion for this year in our minds is what will happen in Alaska. The sunflower star that used to be very abundant in this area is gone. It used to be that you could see 30 in one dive.” The lobster study also traced the increase in epizootic shell disease to warmer waters. The syndrome — first observed in the late 1990s in Long Island Sound off New York and Connecticut, Block Island Sound off Rhode Island and Buzzards Bay off Massachusetts — is marked by the rapid deterioration of lobsters’ shells. It spread rapidly, particularly in females, which molt less often than males and carry their shells longer, exposing them more to the disease. One laboratory experiment that examined the effect of the bacteria detected them at 50 degrees. At that temperature, the disease moved slowly. But between 50 degrees and 68 degrees, it progressed faster. Even after an old shell was shed through molting,

A healthy sunflower sea star is seen off British Columbia. The species has all but disappeared there.

the new shell was quickly infected. Lobsters showing signs of shell disease are not marketable. “Shell disease has devastated the southern New England lobster fishery, and now with warming, it’s led to a situation where the Maine lobster industry may be at risk,” said Jeff Shields, a professor of marine science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and a co-author of the study. The study was led by Jeffrey Maynard, then a post-doctoral associate in Harvell’s lab at Cornell. It also was published in the Royal Society B as part of the journal’s marine disease special. Shields said scientists will be on the alert for increases in shell disease levels off Maine this spring and will warn natural resources managers if that’s detected. To offset the stress on lobsters, the researchers could recommend targeting pollution, boat traffic and modes of transmission in the affected areas. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

A U-turn in a tough-on-crime state R OB K UZNIA Los Angeles BY

ose Gonzalez remembers feeling disoriented as he stepped out of Chuckawalla Valley State Prison and into the vastness of the Colorado Desert. A corrections van was waiting to shuttle him to freedom. The driver rolled down the passenger window and told Gonzalez to get in. The door handle felt foreign in his fingers, and he struggled to open it. “I’d never been able to open my own door in 20 years,” he said. Gonzalez had just served a long stint on a life sentence for his role in a grisly 1996 murder. Until his release last April, Gonzalez had no doubt he would die in prison: “If you had a life sentence . . . you were going to do life. No one was getting out.” But Gonzalez, 36, returned to society and is now answering phones in downtown Los Angeles as a paid intern for the AntiRecidivism Coalition and Human Rights Watch, two nonprofit groups that sponsored the law that cleared the way for his release. Gonzalez is among thousands of felons benefiting from a grand experiment, an act of mass forgiveness unprecedented in U.S. history. In California, once a national innovator in draconian policies to get tough on crime, voters and lawmakers are now innovating in the opposite direction, adopting laws that have released tens of thousands of inmates and are preventing even more from going to prison in the first place. The most famous is a landmark ballot measure called Proposition 47, which in 2014 made California the first state in the nation to make possession of any drug — including cocaine and heroin — a misdemeanor. More astonishing is the state’s decision to show leniency toward violent offenders, including murderers like Gonzalez. For example, the state has ordered parole hearings for longtime inmates convicted of committing violent crimes before they turned 23, requiring authorities to consider anew whether immaturity at the time of the inmates’

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

California frees thousands of inmates, including violent offenders, but critics say it’s gone too far offense argues for their release. Meanwhile, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has approved parole for roughly 2,300 lifers convicted of murder and about 450 lifers sentenced for lesser offenses — a revolution in a state that released only two lifers during former governor Gray Davis’s entire four-year term. And more reforms could be in store. Last month, Brown unveiled a ballot measure that, if approved by voters in November, would grant early release to nonviolent felons who complete rehab programs and demonstrate good behavior. Progressives across the nation have applauded California’s Uturn. “There is a gathering sense that the public is considerably less punitive than people had thought,”

said Joe Margulies, a professor of law and government at Cornell University. But with crime in some of California’s largest cities ticking up after years of sustained decline, many law enforcement leaders and victims’ advocates say the state has gone too far. “Our hope was folks getting out of prisons are going to come out and be model citizens,” said Christine Ward, executive director of the Crime Victims Action Alliance. “Unfortunately, we’re not seeing that.” Forced to reduce crowding Over the past decade, California’s prison population has fallen by more than 50,000 inmates — by far the biggest drop of any state in the nation, according to the Public

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has approved parole for thousands of inmates, including 2,300 who, like Jose Gonzalez, above, were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Policy Institute of California. Today, the state locks up nearly 113,000 people in 34 facilities that were designed for roughly 83,000 people. The effort was accelerated by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Brown v. Plata in 2011 that the state’s overcrowded prisons amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. The court ordered the state to reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of capacity within two years — effectively requiring the release of tens of thousands of inmates. In an acerbic dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia called it “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a criminal-justice advocacy group, said it is extremely rare for state officials to pass laws that send prisoners home early. The only previous example, he said, was a decision in Michigan in the late 1990s to revoke a law that required anyone convicted of selling more than 650 grams of cocaine or heroin — even first-time offenders — to be sentenced to life without parole. Releasing prisoners convicted of violent crimes is rarer still, Mauer said. While some states have created new parole procedures for youthful offenders, most are willing to release only first-time offenders. But in California, as many as 90 percent of inmates in 2013 had either a violent or serious felony conviction, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. That left the state with little choice for bringing prisoner counts down. “We’ve created this myth that we’re filling prisons with drug offenders — like some guy, a college sophomore, who was arrested with a single joint and was sentenced to 10 years in prison,” Margulies said. “I’m telling you, that guy doesn’t exist.” ‘If this guy gets out . . .’ Marc Klaas calls the trend “madness.” Klaas, 64, is the founder of the Klaas Kids Foundation, one of the nation’s leading childsearch organizations. He created

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

NATION the foundation to give meaning to the death of his 12-year-old daughter, Polly, who was snatched from her Petaluma home in October 1993 by a repeat offender who raped and killed her. The horrific crime came amid a national spike in murders fueled in part by the crack cocaine epidemic. Within months, California voters responded by adopting the signal reform of the era: The “three strikes law,” which sent criminals away for life upon conviction of a third felony, no matter how minor. Other states followed, and the nation’s prison population soared. Today, softening three-strikes laws has become a central goal of prison reformers. Criminal-justice policy is “like a pendulum, swinging towards a spirit of rehabilitation,” Klaas said. “What it doesn’t take into account is that evil really exists.” Klaas mentioned that the wife of a friend was murdered by one of the youthful inmates who is now eligible for a special parole hearing under California law — “a 16year-old boy who wanted to know what it would feel like to murder somebody.” The killer told Klaas’s friend that “if he ever got out of prison, he would come back and finish the job with the rest of his family.” “If this guy gets out,” Klaas said his friend told him, “I’m going to have to kill him, to protect my kids.” So far, 250 inmates have been released under the Youth Offender Parole law, most of them violent offenders. As many as 16,000 more remain eligible. Meanwhile, a study by Stanford Law School found that Proposition 47 had unlocked the cell doors of nearly 4,500 prisoners since taking effect in late 2014. Sheriffs, police chiefs and prosecutors speculate that Prop 47 has contributed to a recent rise in crime and homelessness in major California cities, arguing that the law eliminated a useful billy club: the threat of a felony conviction to steer addicts into treatment. “It’s a vicious cycle,” said Kirk Albanese, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. “You’ve got an addiction, we are not holding you accountable, and you’re back into the cycle of using. How do you support that habit? Stealing. Our burglaries are up, car theft is up, break-ins are up —

California inmates housed in-state 147,424 150k

100

Peak of mass incarceration 162,804

Two days after Brown v. Plata ruling 143,565

Brown v. Plata court-ordered capacity 137.5% of design capacity

112,792 44.3% decrease since 2006 peak

Design capacity 82,707

Nov. 7, 2001 Nov. 1, 2006 May 25, 2011 Jan. 20, 2016 Note: Numbers do not include prisoners California houses outside of state borders. Source: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation DENISE LU/THE WASHINGTON POST

they are all up.” Hilary Chittick, a veteran judge for the Superior Court of Fresno County, said Prop 47 has “decimated” her ability to force addicts into treatment. “The public had a house with a leaky roof and bad pipes,” she said. “So they blew up the house.” New directions post-prison Prop 47 supporters acknowledge the problem and say efforts are underway to address it. More drug courts, for instance, are opening their doors to misdemeanants as well as felons, said Prop 47 co-author Lenore Anderson, executive director of the advocacy group Californians for Safety and Justice. “If you think that you need a stick in order to mandate treatment, that option is available with a misdemeanor,” Anderson said. But Prop 47 supporters reject the notion that the ballot measure contributed to localized spikes in crime. Early reports indicate that recidivism among inmates released under the full range of reforms has been low. Among the recently paroled is Ryan Lo, who at age 17 gunned down the ex-boyfriend of a 16year-old girl in a bizarre murderfor-hire plot carried out in an isolated Orange County canyon. Thanks to the Youth Offender Parole law, Lo was released in 2014 after serving 23 years of a 29years-to-life sentence. “When I went to prison, they

took guys like me and put them in the meat grinder,” Lo said. “Seventeen-to-20-year-olds were being thrown into the hardest prisons we had, and they’d watch us get chewed up. They’d tell you flat out, ‘You’re not allowed to go to school. You are a lifer; you are dying here.’ ” Something of an autodidact, Lo, now 41, did go to school and eventually earned six associate degrees while in prison. Since his release, he has found work as a night security guard through the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, a nonprofit group founded by Scott Budnick, an executive producer of the comedy film “The Hangover.” Stanley Bailey was sentenced to life under the three-strikes law — for possessing a syringe while in prison. Released in the fall of 2014, Bailey, 53, now drives trucks, hauling cargo in and out of the Port of Los Angeles. The L.A. native recently completed a marathon and has reunited with his high school sweetheart, an outdoorsy type who works in advertising. They are engaged. “My faith, my job and her are the things I hold dear,” he said. Ingrid Archie, a 34-year-old single mother from a gritty neighborhood in South Los Angeles, owes her freedom to Prop 47. Archie, who grew up a foster child and wound up dealing crack cocaine, was serving 18 months on a probation violation when she learned that Prop 47 would downgrade her latest crime from a felony to a

misdemeanor. Archie was discharged nearly a year early on Aug. 14, a day before her eldest daughter’s 14th birthday. Using the $200 in cash that released inmates receive at the gate, Archie took her daughter out to dinner. She now holds a job and is taking classes at a community college. “Prop 47 helped me to know that there are people out there that want us to succeed even though we made a mistake,” Archie said. ‘Beacon in the dark path’ In general, more than half of inmates released from California prisons — 54 percent — return to prison within three years. Among lifers paroled under Brown, the Los Angeles Times found, fewer than 2 percent have committed new crimes. Among the 2,100 inmates released after the softening of the state’s three-strikes law, only about 6 percent have returned to prison. Michael Romano, director and co-founder of the Stanford Law School Three Strikes Project, attributes the success of this cohort in part to extensive rehab, but also to a kind of forgiveness psychology. “The state is saying, ‘We made a mistake,’ ” he said. “In every case, a judge has reviewed the case and decided, ‘You’re no longer a danger to public safety.’ It’s a vote of confidence and a public cleansing.” For Gonzalez, that cleansing came in the form of a seven-hour parole-board hearing in December 2014. During the arbitration, so much jargon was flying around that Gonzalez had trouble reading the room — until his attorney gave him a thumbs-up under the table. It was the second major pivot point in his life. The first was the night in 1996 when Gonzalez, then 17, helped fellow gang members kill a drunk person who was talking trash. Gonzalez was not the triggerman, but he admits he landed a few punches. This year, with the help of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, Gonzalez applied to both the University of California and California State University systems, where he hopes to further the studies in social and behavioral science he began in prison. “I believe in the power of education,” he said. “It is that beacon in thedarkpathIwastaking.It’sgoing to help me find my way out.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Stanley Bailey was sentenced to life under a “three strikes law” for possessing a syringe while in prison. But Bailey was released — now, the third strike must be for a serious or violent offense.

Ingrid Archie owes her freedom to California’s Proposition 47, which downgraded possession of any drug from a felony to a misdemeanor.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Iraq dam collapse could kill 500,000 L OVEDAY M ORRIS Baghdad BY

f breached, it could unleash a 180-foot-high wave down the Tigris River Basin and drown more than half a million people, with floodwaters reaching as far as the Iraqi capital, about 280 miles to the south. The collapse of the Mosul Dam would be catastrophic for Iraq. The dam has been called the most dangerous in the world for the past decade. But recent assessments by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers say it is at a “significantly higher risk” of failing than previously thought. The dam’s structural problems became evident as soon as the reservoir behind it was filled in 1985. It is built on layers of clay and gypsum, a soft mineral that dissolves when it comes into contact with water, and the dam immediately began seeping. Since then, about 100,000 tons of grout have been poured into the structure to prevent it from collapsing. But even this stopgap measure has been disrupted by the Islamic State, which briefly seized the dam in the summer of 2014. The militants still hold the nearby city of Mosul, their de facto capital in Iraq. Political wrangling and a financial crisis in Iraq also are complicating repair work. The hydroelectric dam almost certainly has an “unprecedented level of untreated voids” in its foundation, according to the Army Corps of Engineers’ report of Jan. 30, which was made public recently when it was submitted to the Iraqi parliament. The monitoring team has identified “significant signs of distress,” it added. When the Islamic State took control of the dam, a rigid daily routine of pouring grout into the structure to keep it from collapsing was missed for six weeks, and logistical issues have plagued the process ever since. Meanwhile, a government decision to deprive Islamic Stateheld Mosul of electricity by blocking the flow of water put additional pressure on the dam as water levels rose.

SAFIN HAMED/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Islamic State’s presence has disrupted fixes for structural problems Top-level U.S. officials have voiced their growing concerns to the Iraqi government, an adviser to the prime minister’s office said. They have regularly invoked Hurricane Katrina but warned that the devastation could be “a thousand times worse,” the adviser said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman. If the dam fails when water levels are high, the flooding would be disastrous. Mosul, about 30 miles to the southeast, would be hit by a 65-foot wall of water and wiped out within four hours, studies have said. Farther downstream, Tikrit is expected to be deluged in 50 feet of water before the torrent bursts another dam at Samarra. Within 48 hours, floods 13-feet deep would reach Baghdad. Concerns are becoming more acute as Iraqi security forces pre-

pare for an offensive to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State, the adviser said. The adviser said Iraqi security officials, worried that militants may try to sabotage the dam if they think they have lost the city, have drawn up emergency plans. Meanwhile, the use of heavy munitions could put additional pressure on the structure, he said. Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources has played down the threat but was persuaded to reopen the lower gates of the dam to relieve some pressure, even though it meant power was restored to the militant-held city farther south. The Italian company Trevi recently won a bid to repair the dam and is expected to sign the contract soon. The cost is estimated to be more than $300 million, the adviser said, adding that the expense probably will be covered by

A worker tries to strengthen the Mosul Dam on the Tigris River in Iraq. Recent assessments by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers say it is at a “significantly higher risk” of failing than previously thought.

the World Bank. But the repair bill comes as Iraq is desperately seeking financial assistance as oil prices hover around $30 a barrel. Iraq’s water minister, Mohsin al-Shammari, who is politically aligned with the anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, has dismissed U.S. warnings. He said in an interview with an Iraqi television station that there is only a “one-in-a thousand” chance that the dam will fail. He has also criticized the predictions as an excuse for sending more foreign troops to the country; Italy has said it would send 450 soldiers to provide security for the Italian firm. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has stressed the need for the work to begin quickly. Melting snow and more rain are expected to increase pressure on the dam this spring. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

A ‘worst-case scenario’ for Zika virus J OSHUA P ARTLOW Caracas, Venezuela BY

n the crowded waiting room of the Vargas de Caracas hospital, the walls are decorated with peppy pro-government slogans: “It’s only possible with socialism.” But the Zika epidemic has struck as the socialist-ruled country is spiraling into economic chaos and the public health system has been stripped of many basic tools of modern medicine. Hospital patients get wheeled past closets overflowing with trash. Stray dogs wander the hospital grounds. Doctors perform surgery without sutures and gauze. “Little by little, medical care is disappearing,” one doctor said. Lisseth Salas arrived at Vargas de Caracas in a state of partial paralysis, suffering from Guillain-Barré syndrome, which has been linked to Zika. Two other hospitals had denied her service — one because it had no neurologists, another because she wasn’t in the military. As she has recovered, Salas has lacked the immunoglobulin treatment her doctors would prefer to use. “We haven’t had absolutely any of it all year,” said Sabrina Maldera, an internal medicine resident at the hospital. “We’re trying to treat patients with our hands tied.” In the Latin American fight against the Zika virus, Venezuela stands apart. While other nations bombard their airwaves with public-service warnings about mosquitoes and publish tallies of new cases, Venezuela has played down the epidemic and choked off information about its spread. For more than a year, President Nicolás Maduro’s government has refused to release its weekly epidemiological bulletin, just as it has hidden statistics on inflation and the homicide rate. Public health experts and doctors believe that the government is dramatically lowballing the Zika toll, which officially stands at around 5,000 cases. Some independent experts estimate that there have been more than half a

ALEJANDRO CEGARRA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Venezuela’s economically ravaged health system has left doctors’ ‘hands tied’ as disease spreads million cases of the mosquitoborne disease, which would give Venezuela the second-largest Zika total behind Brazil. The government has acknowledged 255 cases of the rare Guillain-Barré syndrome since Zika arrived last year, more than twice the number in neighboring Colombia. The Venezuelan government has reported three Zika-related deaths, although it has not provided details. Former health minister José Félix Oletta said Venezuela is still in the “ascent phase of the epidemic wave.” “Venezuela is showing the perfect scenario for how not to do things, in health,” said Oletta, who is part of an independent medical network that estimates there have been 412,000 Zika cases. “If you don’t establish good communications, the first thing that grows isn’t the epidemic, it’s the fear, the panic.” Health experts believe that Zika arrived in this oil-producing country sometime last year, crossing the porous Amazonian border with Brazil. The Aedes mosquito that

carries the virus is common here: Venezuela has suffered outbreaks in recent years of dengue and chikungunya, viruses that are also spread by the insect. Unlike Brazil, Venezuela so far has not seen a spike in cases of microcephaly, a birth defect that results in a baby having an unusually small head and can cause seizures and developmental delays. But doctors say such cases could hit as soon as April, when mothers infected by Zika over the summer start giving birth. Last month, Venezuela’s new opposition-controlled National Assembly declared that the health system, with its shortages of medicine and equipment, had created a humanitarian crisis. “The system isn’t prepared,” said José Manuel Olivares, an oncologist and opposition lawmaker who heads the health commission in the National Assembly. Public hospitals in Caracas look worn and disheveled, with graffiti-tagged walls and broken windows. As crowds look on, relatives hoist their wounded out of

Lisseth Salas sits in bed at the Vargas de Caracas hospital. She was admitted in a state of partial paralysis, suffering from a syndrome linked to Zika.

Number of Zika cases An independent medical network estimates that there have been 412,000 cases in Venezuela. Venezuela’s official count of cases stands around 5,000.

cars and carry them on bloodstained stretchers or roll them in dented wheelchairs past soldiers guarding the doors. The ninth floor of the University Clinic hospital, one of the country’s largest, has become a makeshift pediatric ward, because the air conditioners broke last fall on the floor designed to treat children. Doctors there say they have shortages of lab tubes, catheters, inhalation masks, X-rays, suction hoses and antibiotics. The hospital the other week was treating 12 Guillain-Barré patients, more than at any time that doctors could remember. Two patients have already died. “This is totally unusual,” said one doctor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “Every day, new Guillain-Barré cases are coming in.” Even for a normal case of Zika, which can involve a mild fever, a rash and joint pain, doctors say they are hamstrung. Many hospitals and pharmacies lack basic acetaminophen, the pain reliever sold in medications such as Tylenol. Residents have to scour the black market for scarce materials such as mosquito nets or repellant. Women who might fear getting pregnant during a time of microcephaly risk can’t find birth control at pharmacies. “How do we do family planning if there is no birth control or condoms?” asked Oletta, the former health minister. “The solution will be abortion.” But abortion is illegal in Venezuela in most cases. The Zika outbreak has exposed in the public health sector the kinds of stories of misinformation, scarcity and government mismanagement seen in other parts of Venezuelan life. “It’s a microcosm of the whole country,” David Smilde, a professor of sociology at Tulane University who has researched Venezuela for two decades. “You have a government that doesn’t value transparency. You have a medical system in collapse.” “It’s like a worst-case scenario,” added Smilde, who contracted Zika himself while in the country in January. n

COVER STORY

‘WE’RE LITERALLY GROWING APART FROM EACH OTHER’ The nation’s political divide is being widened by an increasingly deep mistrust of anyone — politician or citizen — on the other side of that gap BY GREG JAFFE

s President Obama spoke of the country’s deepening sense of alienation and an ger last month, a teacher in Michigan listened, her eyes fixed on the stonefaced Republicans in the House chamber who in her view represented the problem.¶ “Let’s get over the party lines and work together!” she tweeted during the president’s State of the Union address. ¶ In Maryland, a re tired lawyer was listening to the exact same words. He, too, was worried about the anger and division gripping the country, but as Obama spoke, his resentment toward the president only swelled. ¶ “Hearing him complain about political rancor is frankly nau seating,” he wrote. continues on next page

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

from previous page

The two tweets flashed across the Internet within seconds of each other, each in their own way capturing the country’s mood and the challenge facing the president in his final months in office — not simply a partisan divide, but a deep mistrust that has become so entrenched that it seems to affect the very way Americans hear the president’s words and see each other. Obama rose to national prominence on the promise that he could deliver a less fractious and more rational politics to the nation’s capital. “Even as we speak, there are those preparing to divide us,” he had warned in his 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention. “Well, I say to them tonight there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America. There’s the United States of America.” And yet 12 years later, Obama is confronting a far more vexing political problem than the one he first described as a product of cynical Washington “spin masters” and “negative-ad peddlers” who would “slice and dice our country” along party lines. According to experts who study polarization, Americans don’t necessarily disagree more on policy. What has changed is the level of mistrust, and even vitriol, Americans have for politicians and their fellow citizens on the other side of the political divide. It is a suspicion that makes people question their neighbors’ motives, their sincerity and their intelligence. “What’s changed is people’s perception of other ordinary citizens,” said Doug Ahler, who studied polarization at the University of California at Berkeley. “We’ve become so entrenched in our partisan identities. . . . It’s like a really intense sports rivalry. It’s not about policy but an emotional distrust of the other side.” A senior White House official put it event more bluntly: “We’re literally growing apart from each other.” A major focus for Obama this year is to blunt those divisions by trying to remind Americans of the values they share. “It will be core to what you hear from us this year,” said David Simas, the White House director of political strategy. “You can expect to hear it in every setting, in every place, around any topic and speech, because it is that important to the president.” Obama’s opening shot on the subject was the State of the Union address — a speech he labored over, writing and rewriting its final section on the country’s corrosive and divided politics, according to aides. “I’m addressing the American people now . . . ” Obama said as he began his pitch that night.

n Boyne City, Mich., Erin Mastin, 36, the second-grade teacher, was listening. “Our public life withers when only the most extreme voices get all the attention,” Obama warned. “Democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn’t matter.” This was how Mastin felt, and she was sure Obama felt it, too. When George W. Bush was president, she had picked apart his speeches,

COURTESY OF ERIN MASTIN

“Republicans can’t even clap for curing cancer because it involved a Democrat. Let’s get over the party lines and work together!” Erin Mastin, 36, is a second-grade teacher in Boyne City, Mich.

Democrats’ and Republicans’ skewed perceptions Democrats and Republicans may think they know each other, but a 2015 study revealed a gulf on mutual misunderstanding. Democratic and Republican respondents were often far off base in their assumptions about the other party’s demographic makeup and, in some cases, those of their own party as well. Democratic Party demographics % Black Republicans estimated: Democrats estimated:

46 39

Actual percentage:

% Atheist/ agnostic

% Union members

44 37

% Gay/lesbian/ bisexual

38 29

25 9

Republican Party demographics % Earn over $250K/yr Democrats estimated:

Republicans estimated:

% Older than 65

44 38

% From the South

% Evangelical

44 40 36

Actual percentage:

Source: Douglas J. Ahler and Gaurav Sood. 2015. “The Parties in Our Heads: Misperceptions About Party Composition and Their Consequences.” Working paper: University of California at Berkeley. CRISTINA RIVERO/THE WASHINGTON POST

44 43 34

like a teacher scouring a paper for plagiarism or a parent’s assistance, to figure out which parts he truly believed and which parts had been written for him. “He would have never used that word on his own,” she often recalled thinking as the former president spoke. She never felt that way about Obama. “Just the way he speaks is genuine,” she said. “I know he has speechwriters, but those are his words and his feelings.” For her, Obama’s final State of the Union and his call for a “better politics” was an attempt to sort through the country’s unfinished business, to face up to his failures in office and prepare Americans for the dangers that lie ahead. “It was almost like a will,” she said. “This is what you need to do when I’m gone. This is what’s going to happen, and you need to stay strong.” Obama pressed forward in his address, speaking of a political system that often seemed “rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some special interest.” “Too many Americans feel that way right now,” he said. “I think everybody feels that way,” Mastin agreed. She could feel the influence of money in politics in her classroom, she said. In recent months, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative Michigan-based think tank funded in part by billionaires Charles and David Koch, had begun posting teachers’ salaries online. Their goal was to highlight the need for teacher pay based on performance rather than seniority or degrees. Mastin saw a darker purpose. “I believe their agenda is to destroy public

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

COVER STORY

JACK PETTIT

“Obama, the most partisan and divisive POTUS in history, still can’t resist preaching and vilifying those who disagree.” John Pettit, 81, is a retired lawyer in Easton, Md.

education,” she said. She shared the president’s sense of frustration most acutely on the issue of gun control. After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, her school instituted active-shooter drills. “You have to shove all 24 kids into a little tiny area, and we all have to sit there and be quiet until the police come around,” she said. For the first few years, it was scary for her students. “Is this for real or just practice?” she said they would ask. Then it became a routine part of the school year. “To have it be a normal thing is just really sad,” she said. She thought of the times that Obama had teared up when talking about the Sandy Hook shooting and said that she knew exactly how he felt, because she had felt the same emotions. “Why can’t we do something?” she imagined him asking in the Oval Office. On her television screen, Obama was confessing his regrets over the growing rancor and suspicion in the country that had grown on his watch. “I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide,” he said. It was the only line in his speech that didn’t ring true to her. “I felt like he was set up to fail from the beginning with that,” Mastin said. “The Republicans weren’t going to let him have that victory at all.”

ohn Pettit, an 81-year-old retired lawyer, listened to the same speech in his living room in Easton, Md., his anger building as the president spoke of the dangers that lie ahead if the country did not fix its politics and change its course.

“Those with money and power will gain control over the decisions that could send a young soldier to war, or allow another economic disaster, or roll back the equal rights and voting rights that generations of Americans have fought, even died, to secure,” Obama said. To Pettit, the single sentence encapsulated all that Obama had done to divide the country over the past seven years. “Hard at work preaching to his parallel universe,” he tweeted. Pettit had a ready list of Obama’s failings: He had pushed through the Affordable Care Act without a single Republican vote. He had expanded government assistance to the point that 49 percent of the population — including Social Security recipients — depended on some form of federal help. Instead of working with mainstream Republicans, Obama had demonized, ostracized and ignored them. “Democracy can work, and you can make people feel heard if you really work at it,” he said. “But he never really worked at it. He never worked with Congress.” Deep into Obama’s second term, Pettit could feel the country’s mood shifting and turning darker. His dentist insisted to him that Obama was a closeted Muslim — a conviction that Pettit said was absurd. “It really offends me to hear people talking about a politician’s religion as a problem,” he said, even as he suggested that his dentist’s critique was probably grounded in Obama’s foreign-policy failings. “I think it’s shorthand for saying Obama is more sympathetic to radical Muslim extremists than he should be,” Pettit said. Pettit had always considered himself a center-

KLMNO

right Republican and not especially ideological. Before retiring, he had run the Washington office of a big, national law firm, where he worked closely with Democrats and Republicans. He was not passionate when it came to gun rights and broke with the Republican Party on most social issues, such as same-sex marriage and abortion. He sometimes struggled to explain why the president’s two terms in office so infuriated him. “I’m sure Obama is more complicated than I think,” he said before quickly pivoting back to the president’s many flaws. He was “arrogant,” “naive” and “inexperienced.” On the night of his State of the Union speech, Obama was warning of the dangers of giving in to the creeping cynicism and mistrust that he could sense was spreading through the country. “There will be voices urging us to fall back into our respective tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don’t look like us, pray like us or vote like we do,” the president said. Pettit listened and summed up his feelings in a tweet. “Obama, the most partisan and divisive POTUS in history, still can’t resist preaching and vilifying those who disagree,” he wrote.

he challenge for Obama — and virtually every politician — is breaking through in a climate defined more by alienation, frustration and anger than differences on policy. Policies can be modified or changed. But how does a president persuade an angry and mistrustful nation to actually listen to each other? “It’s an amazing puzzle,” said Simas, the White House political strategy director. “Once we lose the ability to talk to each other, we lose the ability to reach consensus, which is at the core of politics in Washington and every town hall around the nation.” Obama has promised to make a greater effort in the coming year to engage with Americans who disagree with him, as he did at a CNN town hall meeting on guns. As attention shifts to the candidates, senior White House officials said that Obama’s role as a sitting president will allow him to rise above the fray. That was Obama’s goal in the State of the Union. In Michigan, Mastin listened as Obama spoke of an immigrant child working late on her science project and a teacher who bought extra supplies to help her. “That’s my voice,” she recalled thinking. In Maryland, Pettit listened as Obama described a worker who clocked extra shifts to keep his company open and the boss who paid him higher wages “instead of laying him off.” “Saintly worker, evil employer,” Pettit recalled thinking. “I don’t know why he does that. Suggesting that the boss appreciated him by not laying him off diminishes the point.” Obama finished his speech. In the House chamber, Democrats rose to their feet to applaud while Republicans sat silently. “Well said, Mr. President!” Mastin tweeted. “Profiles in pathetic delusion,” Pettit countered.n

WEEKLY

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

KLMNO WEEKLY

TECHNOLOGY

Teen apps bring dangers and dollars Parents may be absent from these online spaces, but ads certainly are not

M ICHAEL S . R OSENWALD

Teenagers, a historically wily demographic, are increasingly moving their digital social lives from public sites where their parents hang out to smartphone messaging apps, giving them nearly complete privacy in their online social lives. Apps such as Kik, Line, WhatsApp, Ask.fm and Whisper can often be used anonymously, without parental controls, and in Snapchat’s case even automatically erase inappropriate pictures. The popularity of these apps is showing up in surveys and focus groups. Kik’s use has soared to 40 percent of teens. To parents, many of whom are so clueless about technology that they rely on their children for tech support, the danger is obvious. To advertisers, the opportunity is enormous. They are butting in on the discussions, figuratively and literally. Line, a messaging app started in Japan in response to a devastating earthquake, is trying to make inroads in the United States selling animated digital stickers of pop culture characters ranging from Snoopy to Darth Vader. “At a loss for words?” says Line’s website. “Spice up your chats with animated and talking stickers!” On Kik, advertisers are texting with teens using bots. MTV, Under Armour, Funny or Die, Amazon, fashion blogs, movies, the Indianapolis Colts and The Washington Post are using artificial intelligence to push their brands with quirky conversations. This reporter to the MTV bot: “Hi!” MTV bot: “Why hello there! I know we just met, but you should check this out . . . ” “This” is a link to MTV.com. Blynk Style, a fashion-adviser bot: “Lets get started. Tell me what you want to see.” This reporter clicks “Men’s fashion.” A picture pops up of a man in an outfit this reporter would never wear. “It’s fascinating,” said Catherine Boyle, an analyst with eMarketer.

KIK

When a Kik app user engages with the messaging service’s bot, it mimics a real conversation — or at least tries to.

“These messaging apps present very different ways for brands to engage with younger consumers. Banner ads are never going to work. Branded bots are a really clever way to let brands offer a more natural presence of themselves.” For Kik executives, the endgame is not just advertisements. It’s what they call conversational commerce. The company is modeling itself after WeChat, a Chinese messaging app with nearly 700 million users who buy things and pay bills through the service. Kik executives imagine a day when users can chat with bots that help them buy clothes or other products without leaving the app. Like this: “I really need a pair of black shoes.” “If I could speak like that to a chat bot and it came back with ideas, that’s a lot easier than browsing around,” said Paul Gray, Kik’s director of platform services. “I

think this generation is keen for that.” New shoes, teen drama, and selfie after selfie — sounds like pure fun. But teens have followed dark paths on messaging apps, bullying kids, sending nude photos, meeting up with strangers who turn out to be pedophiles. Experts say that handled correctly, these new social malls can be treated by parents the same way as the offline malls. That is, by putting limits on what is allowed to happen there, building enough trust and understanding that teens aren’t afraid to seek help. Parents should make clear, experts say, that they can and will monitor what happens on their children’s phones, either by looking or using an app that reports activity back to them. “They have to know that safety is important,” said Leticia Barr, a parent of a middle-schooler and former Maryland elementary

school teacher who blogs at TechSavvyMama.com. “It’s just like when we used to hold their hands crossing the street.” In many ways, the teenage desire to stay ahead of parents digitally is no different than wanting free rein at the mall — to hang out with friends, drum up drama, trade zingers, and even meet strangers. “What happens on these apps isn’t public, which is why the kids like them,” said Catherine SteinerAdair, a Boston-area psychologist and author of “The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age.” “There are no parents around. There are no teachers around.” That’s positive, in some ways. Like hanging out in the basement while their parents watch television upstairs, teens experiment with their identity, goof off, learn what they value in friends. Kik pushes that idea by not requiring phone numbers or other real identifiers — just user names, however many someone wants. For parents, it’s difficult to know when they need to step in. About half of teens don’t tell anyone about online sexual solicitations or pornography, according to studies by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. Why? Some teens don’t think the situations were serious enough. Others fear being cut off from the services, which is seen as roughly equivalent to being sent to an isolation island. The angst is not all that surprising given what smartphones have become in society, for adults and teens. They aren’t just transmitting gossip about friends and pictures of fancy meals. “These exchanges are banal and mundane,” Richard Ling, a mobile communication scholar at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, wrote in a recent paper. “This does not mean, however, that they are not important. It is through these seemingly prosaic exchanges, which are most likely only entertaining to the immediate participants, that we weave the threads of social cohesion.” n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

MILITARY

KLMNO WEEKLY

Learning to sail by the stars again BY

A NDREA P ETERSON

eter Hogan was surprised at how heavy the sextant felt in his hand when he squinted through its eyeglass this past week, the first time he had ever held one. For centuries, sailors used sextants to plot their location on the trackless sea, lining up stars in the sky to find their own place on Earth. Hogan is a sailor, too — a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, surrounded by some of the most advanced geolocation technology ever devised. But even though GPS can pinpoint Hogan and his shipmates on the most remote oceans on the planet, the Navy is once again teaching them the ancient art of celestial navigation. That’s because batteries run out, systems get hacked, and even advanced technology can be balky. In a pinch — or in a war — sailors need something to fall back on. And stars and sextants have been working pretty well for hundreds of years. So the Naval Academy started teaching its sailors how to navigate ships by looking to the heavens again this academic year. The training was dropped altogether in 2006. But amid concerns about cyberattacks and new weapons that can shut off the electricity of a ship or plane, the Naval Academy made celestial navigation a requirement for third-year students. “Redundancy is the best policy,” said Lt. Alex Reardon, who taught three sections of the class. Especially since, when it comes to a Navy ship on the open seas, “we’re typically alone in what we do.” That could be a major problem in the event of a cyberattack, said Salvatore Mercogliano, an assistant professor focused on naval history at Campbell University and former merchant mariner. “The big concern the Navy has is that some sort of event takes out the GPS system — that somehow a nefarious group or nation is able to disrupt it — and all of the sudden you have no means to cross the Atlantic or the Pacific because the

AMANDA R. GRAY/U.S. NAVY

GPS replaced sextants, but amid concerns about tech vulnerabilities, it’s good to have a backup system that you’ve come to rely on doesn’t work anymore,” Mercogliano said. The fear of cyberattacks did not factor into the decision to resume celestial navigation training at the Naval Academy, said Lt. Commander Kate Meadows, a naval public affairs officer. But Reardon cited such risks as one of the reasons why students need the class. Those students clearly had those threats in mind: When Reardon asked them why they thought the Naval Academy brought celestial navigation training back, one said cyberattacks and another said EMPs — electromagnetic pulses that could be weaponized to knock out power. “Especially if you’re in a wartime scenario, maybe the GPS or the satellites are shot down — radar isn’t working or jammed — and you’re forced to go dark, so you can’t use your electronics,” then celestial navigation might become invaluable to a ship needing to

figure out its location, Hogan said. But it’s not just that sort of nightmare scenario that could cause a ship’s high-tech gear to stop working, Reardon said. During one of his recent tours out at sea, flooding in his vessel’s generators caused the whole ship to lose power — and while some systems had battery backups, they don’t last forever, he said. “It was a little bit scary not being very comfortable with celestial navigation and being in that situation,” Reardon said. A power loss on the open waters could be even more consequential because Navy ships are generally isolated at sea. A wrong turn could mean the difference between sailing in safe waters or those owned by Iran or North Korea. In fact, over-reliance on emerging navigation tech has resulted in Navy problems in the past. In 2013, a naval minesweeper called the USS Guardian went aground on a World Heritage site

Petty Officer 1st Class Clarence Ilijic teaches Seaman Eden Boyd how to operate a sextant on the amphibious dock landing ship USS Rushmore in 2014. The Navy restored sextant lessons for some of its officers in 2011, and the Naval Academy restarted lessons for cadets this academic year.

coral reef near the Philippines thanks in part to a digital chart that misplaced the obstacle and its navigation team relying “exclusively on electronic fixes derived from GPS” to guide them while failing to heed lighthouses, according to a Navy report on the incident. Problems like that, as well as the threat of losing access to high-tech tools altogether, are why basic celestial navigation training is important for sailors, said Mercogliano, the Campbell University professor. “We shouldn’t get too comfortable with our technology — there should always be an ability to double check,” he said. In the 1700s, sailor started using a device known as a sextant to track their position using the heavens. Sextants use a series of mirrors and a sliding arm to help measure the angle between celestial bodies and the horizon. Those measurements, the precise time they were taken, nautical almanacs, and a series of complex calculations, allow sailors to triangulate their location even when far out at sea. Newer technologies have all but replaced the humble sextant. GPS pinpoints a location by measuring how long it takes for messages from at least three of the satellites to arrive at a receiver — almost akin to an automatic version of the sextant measurements and calculations navigators once did by hand, but using satellites instead of the stars. And GPS can nail down an exact spot within meters, while even a skilled celestial navigator may be off by several miles, Reardon said. The Navy at large also stopped training its fleet on celestial navigation in 2006 but restored lessons for navigators and assistant navigators in 2011, said Meadows, the naval public affairs officer. There may be at least one other fringe benefit for sailors learning celestial navigation: It may give them extra appreciation for the nighttime views when out at sea. “You just have stars from horizon to horizon — there’s really nothing like it,” Reardon said. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Rethinking how we view learning N ON-FICTION

O THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING LITTLE What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups By Erika Christakis Viking. 376. $28

REVIEWED BY

N ORA K RUG

nce upon a time, Erika Christakis was one of thoseanxiousandcompetitive moms who sent her son to preschool and worried that he was “staring at a piece of carpet fluff all day.” “I wanted pictures for my refrigerator!” she complained. Now her son is out of preschool, and Christakis, a certified teacher and former lecturer at Yale, has a considerably different attitude. If her first book, “The Importance of Being Little,” isn’t quite a defense of Carpet Fluff 101, it is a fervent rebuke of academic-style early education — testing, flashcards and so on. Instead, Christakis favors a more nuanced approach, centered on the child and based on play. She makes a powerful and persuasive case, even if it’s hard to see how such a system would work on a large scale. Christakis, not one to shy from controversy (she recently resigned her post at Yale amid a campus firestorm over political correctness and Halloween costumes), expertly weaves academic research, personal experience and anecdotal evidence into her book. In her comprehensive analysis, rote learning and testing come under as much fire as their opposite: permissive environments “fueled by gauzy fantasies of a more wholesome and child-focused world” absent of any adult guidance. Christakis is calling for an idyllic middle ground. “It’s not simply inadequate resources or a faulty moral compass that explains the state of early education,” she writes. It is “a lack of understanding of how children actually grow and learn.” She argues that many early educators — including parents — have lost sight of the most important factors in any learning environment: kids themselves and our relationships with them. Formal learning is almost beside the point — and in some cases, she writes, unnecessary. “A parent who’s ever spent a magically lazy and unplanned day with an in-

RICHIE POPE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

quisitive child — watching subway trains come and go, or setting up a dish-washing station in the kitchen, or building sandcastles on the beach — surely has experienced the curious insight that some very powerful learning can go on in the absence of the bells and whistles we call preschool.” In addition to extolling the virtues of learning outside the classroom, Christakis criticizes much of what takes place inside it. Teaching the alphabet by introducing a letter every week, she writes, is “wildly inefficient.” What’s more, this method shows “no appreciation for letter frequency,” a vital literacy skill, nor does it help children understand “the functional purpose of an alphabet.” Less-academic and seemingly harmless lessons also come in for criticism. The Thanksgiving project of a turkey in the shape of a child’s hand, for example, “reflects a limited view of children’s creativity, derived from an adult-imposed agenda.” Crafts ought to be more free-form: “Your child is not a refrigerator magnet,” Christakis writes.

Yet Christakis is acutely aware that this kind of thinking can go too far. The idea of child-centered teaching, she admits, “sends people running for the hills, conjuring images of the open classrooms of the early 1970s, where kids loafed in bean bag chairs all day and tried to teach themselves to read.” So what’s the alternative? It’s here that Christakis’s argument becomes a bit more fuzzy and idealistic. It’s not simply a matter of “reducing screen time and ponying up more Legos.” Rather, she writes, “young children need to know and to be known. For this to happen, they need a learning habitat that allows them to have a relationship with someone who truly understands them.” That’s a tall order. Though Christakis points to examples — such as classes in which children are guided through a conversation about a subject rather than taught a lesson about it — she doesn’t quite show how such programs would work on a large scale. The kind of “high-quality, meaning-based curriculum” she posits requires even more attentive teaching than the scripted curriculum rampant today.

One concrete fact Christakis points out is that the “key predictor of teaching quality” is salary. It’s a hard truth that runs up against another one: The average day-care provider lives “on the edge of poverty,” making less per hour than a truck driver, a bartender “and even some middle-class teenage babysitters.” How would these high-quality teachers and programs be funded — and be made available to families of all income levels? Christakis doesn’t quite say. “The Importance of Being Little” makes a bracing and convincing case that early education has reached a point of crisis: “The evidence that young children are losing ground is startling: the steep rise in preschool expulsions and mental health diagnoses, such as ADHD, in children barely out of diapers; the invention of new cognitive disorders to explain ‘problems’ like daydreaming and clumsiness, an epidemic of test anxiety . . . coupled with a crisis in the quality and availability of child care and the intrusion of technology on essential personal interactions” threaten “the smallest and most vulnerable members of American society.” Christakis’s solution may not be realistic, but her book is a rare thing: a serious work of research that also happens to be wellwritten and personal. Her son, she writes, never quite became one of those kids who brought home pictures for the refrigerator; instead he made things out of masking tape and carried around a bag full of his scribblings. It was only over time, and after some blunt talk from her son’s teacher, that Christakis came to see her son’s behavior as something to celebrate rather than fret about. It is her recognition and exploration of this mystery — what it means for her as well as for American education — that makes “The Importance of Being Little” so engaging and important. n Krug is an editor at Book World.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A taut thriller on author’s home turf

Shatner’s farewell to Leonard Nimoy

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

ome years ago, when the Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbo was gaining international acclaim, I had only praise for “The Redbreast” and “The Devil’s Star,” the third and fifth novels in his series about detective Harry Hole. But his eighth installment, “The Leopard,” clocking in at more than 500 pages, was “a bloated, near-total disaster,” I wrote. “Reading it, I came to imagine myself trapped in a vast, fetid swamp from which I might never emerge.” Those, I thought, would be my last words on Nesbo. He would go his way, and I would go mine, to our mutual relief. But such are the vagaries of the book-review business that I now find myself addressing his 14th novel, “Midnight Sun,” and I’m happy to say that I enjoyed it. In part, that’s because it’s a compact 273 pages. It tells a simple story — in the best sense of the word — and tells it well. Unlike thrillers that deal in incomprehensible plots and cheap thrills, this is the believable, focused story of a young man trying to escape the consequences of crime and facing hard choices about love, religion and life itself. At the outset, Jon Hansen steps off a bus outside a small town in the far north of Norway, near the Arctic Ocean. He’s a likeable, nonviolent hashish dealer from Oslo who has angered a big-time drug lord and is running for his life from hired killers. He arrives carrying a gun he doesn’t know how to use and finds an isolated cabin. He tries to avoid the locals but nonetheless becomes infatuated with Lea, the daughter of the town’s minister. Ten years earlier, at 18, she was forced to marry a brute who had raped and impregnated her. He’s a fisherman, now missing at sea and possibly dead. Lea, her father and her 10-yearold son belong to a zealous religious sect. Her son eagerly informs Hansen that he’ll burn in hell for all his smoking and moonshine-

drinking and his indifference to religion. Lea is more kind but no less devout. Still, an attraction arises between her and Hansen. Nesbo describes her affectionately: “Her hand was firm and warm, like a smooth, sun-warmed stone.” But the question of religion won’t go away, and Nesbo examines it from several points of view. Hansen admits, “I didn’t believe in life after death, but I did believe in death after life.” Lea’s father confesses to moments of doubt but holds fast to his faith. Lea insists she can never reject her religion and go off with a drug dealer, yet she gives him hope when she declares her belief in “people’s capacity for goodness.” As a young man, Nesbo lived in this desolate part of Norway — this land of the midnight sun — and he describes it well: “A silent emptiness, a reticent relentlessness. Even the greenery of summer held a promise of harder, colder times that would try to pull you down, and which would win in the end.” Killers arrive from Oslo. Hansen’s situation seems impossible — gunmen closing in, his romance hopeless — and he’s close to suicide. Still, best-selling authors rarely let suicide stand in the way of a dramatic showdown, so we read on to see whether Hansen can outsmart the killers and win the woman he loves. The reception of this book will be interesting. Last year, Nesbo published “Blood on Snow,” a shorter novel about another young man fleeing the wrath of an Oslo drug kingpin. That novel left some readers yearning for the moreextravagant thrills of his Harry Hole series. Certainly the Hole books, at their best, have been excellent. But it’s good to see Nesbo apply his talents to something more modest, but no less admirable, such as “Midnight Sun.” n Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post’s Book World section.

MIDNIGHT SUN By Jo Nesbo. Translated from the Norwegian by Neil Smith Knopf. 273 pp. $23.95

LEONARD My Fifty-Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man By William Shatner with David Fisher Thomas Dunne. 278 pp. $25.99

REVIEWED BY

J EN C HANEY

few years before Leonard Nimoy died last February at 83, he stopped speaking to William Shatner, his close friend since their many “Star Trek” adventures. As he explains in “Leonard,” his new book about that relationship, Shatner still isn’t sure what caused Nimoy to freeze out his Starship Enterprise other half. “It remains a mystery to me, and it is heartbreaking, heartbreaking,” Shatner writes. “It is something I will wonder about, and regret, forever.” That revelation, both personal and laden with questions, is much in keeping with the overall tone of Shatner’s book. At times, the actor recounts his connection to Nimoy with great candor and reverence, particularly when he discusses how that bond solidified after the death of Shatner’s third wife, Nerine Kidd, who drowned in the couple’s pool in 1999. But readers may wish they got a little more fly-on-the-wall perspective on the lengthy friendship born in a place where few are: on the set of an iconic sci-fi TV series. As Shatner says at one point, “When I think about Leonard, my memories are emotional more than specific.” His memories often read that way, too. “Leonard” is essentially a traditional biography, but one that is filtered through the prism of its author’s friendship with his subject. Shatner — who co-wrote the book with David Fisher , his collaborator on his 2008 memoir, “Up Till Now”— recounts his fellow star’s path from aspiring actor to the world’s most famous pointy-eared Vulcan, as well as forays into directing, philanthropy and other creative pursuits. As Shatner notes, he and Nimoy were both raised in “lower-middleclass Orthodox Jewish immigrant families” — Nimoy in Boston, Shatner in Montreal — and struggled to build acting careers that could support them and their

families. That common ground, not to mention the shared experience of being associated with “Star Trek” for most of their careers, rooted them to each other. The stories that Shatner shares about their “Trek” clashes and camaraderie — on the original series, in the movies and on the convention circuit — are largely ones that Trekkies have probably heard or read before. Certainly by now, fans know the major highlights of Nimoy’s career, although the book dutifully runs through those anyway. The chapters that delve into Nimoy’s drinking problems, which he eventually overcame, and his strained relationship with his son, Adam, who also became an addict but eventually got clean and reconciled with his father, are more revelatory. Nimoy’s own attachment to alcohol enabled him to provide a special kind of support for Shatner during his marriage to Kidd, who was an alcoholic, and in the wake of her death. “He enveloped me in his arms as his brother, and we cried together,” he writes. “He was always there, kind and loving and available.” Some may find it a bit opportunistic of Shatner to publish this book as the anniversary of Nimoy’s passing approaches. But Shatner’s regret over his mysterious falling out with Nimoy suggests what this book really is: a goodbye, the literary equivalent of that scene in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (1982) when Kirk and a dying Spock say farewell by placing their hands against a pane of glass. For those who still tear up at the mention of that moment, “Leonard” will feel like essential reading, even if, just like the relationship on which it is based, it leaves some lingering issues unresolved. n Chaney is a pop culture critic and author of the book “As If!: The Oral History of ‘Clueless.’ ”

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Ginsburg and Scalia’s friendship was exemplary IRIN CARMON is co-author of “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg” and a national reporter at MSNBC.

The question comes every time. “Excuse me, but there’s something I don’t understand about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” someone will ask my coauthor and me at each event since we published “Notorious RBG,” a lighthearted biography of the justice. “How could she possibly be friends with Scalia?” Now that Senate Republicans have vowed, mere hours after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, to block any Obama nominee to replace him, it’s worth considering the answer. Nino and RBG, the court’s most famous odd couple friendship, the subject of the recent comic opera “Scalia/Ginsburg,” stood as an example of warmth and professionalism across traditional divides. For Ginsburg, who has been outnumbered throughout her career, it was also about making the institution work, no matter their disagreements. Sure, the two justices, friends since the 1980s, had some things in common. They shared a love of opera. They came from outerborough New York City. Before they were two of the nine, they were contemporaries as law professors and served together on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. But the reserved Clinton appointee and the bombastic Reagan pick had vastly different views on the constitution and the role of the court. Had Scalia been a justice when Ginsburg was arguing women’s rights cases before the court throughout the 1970s, he certainly would have voted against her. He wrote the solo dissent to her majority in U.S. v. Virginia, the opinion that ended women’s exclusion from the Virginia Military Institute, and formed the capstone of her lifelong fight for gender equality. “This is not the interpretation of a Constitution,” Scalia complained, “but the

creation of one.” Scalia bitterly opposed the Supreme Court’s gradual recognition of rights for gays and lesbians; Ginsburg was the first justice to preside over a same-sex marriage. Scalia referred to the Voting Rights Act, the law protecting ballot access for the historically disenfranchised, as one of several “racial entitlements” that Congress would be hardpressed to end; Ginsburg ferociously dissented when the court gutted it. And yet. One former clerk told us Scalia was Ginsburg’s favored souvenir shopping buddy when they traveled together. On a trip to India, they famously rode an elephant, with Scalia sitting up front. What about feminism? “It had to do with the distribution of weight,” Ginsburg deadpanned slyly. They shared New Year’s Eves with their families and friends: “Scalia kills it and Marty [Ginsburg, Ruth’s husband] cooks it,” recalled one guest, former Bush solicitor general Theodore Olson. “I never heard them talk about anything political or ideological, because there would be no point,” Ginsburg’s grandson, Paul Spera, told us. In 2010, when Chief Justice John Roberts announced Marty’s death from the bench, Scalia wiped tears from his eyes. “If you can’t disagree ardently with your colleagues about some

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg often differed sharply in their court opinions but were still close friends.

issues of law and yet personally still be friends, get another job, for Pete’s sake,” is how Scalia once described their lifetime appointments. “As annoyed as you might be about his zinging dissent, he’s so utterly charming, so amusing, so sometimes outrageous, you can’t help but say, ‘I’m glad that he’s my friend or he’s my colleague,’ ” Ginsburg said. Sometimes, she said, she had to pinch herself to not laugh in the courtroom when Scalia said something audacious. Even in that VMI case, Ginsburg was grateful for how Scalia disagreed: giving her a copy of his dissent as soon as possible, so she could properly respond. “He absolutely ruined my weekend, but my opinion is ever so much better because of his stinging dissent,” she said. Whether or not it was how Scalia saw it, for Ginsburg their public friendship also made a statement about the court as an institution: that it was strengthened by respectful debate, that it could work no matter how polarized its members were. Ironically, Scalia’s death has laid bare just how endangered such comity now is in Washington. And Ginsburg, for one, has acknowledged it. When I interviewed the justice last year, I asked her about the court chipping away at the major civil rights legislation of the last century. She responded by talking about another branch of

government, Congress. Specifically its inability to act as it did after the court’s decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, when legislators took up her dissent’s call to fix what Ginsburg saw as a grievous injustice to women denied fair pay. “At the moment, our Congress is not functioning very well,” she told me, and laughed. She added, “The current Congress is not equipped really to do anything. So the kind of result that we got in the Ledbetter case is not easily achieved today. Someday, we will go back to having the kind of legislature that we should, where members, whatever party they belong to, want to make the thing work and cooperate with each other to see that that will happen. I mean, it was that way in 1992 when I was nominated for this good job. There were only three negative votes. And my hope and expectation is that we will get back to that kind of bipartisan spirit.” Friendship across ideological lines may not technically be a thing of the past. After all, Ginsburg’s younger colleague Justice Elena Kagan gamely took up arms to hunt with Scalia after Republican senators challenged her on guns during her confirmation process. But judging from the political deadlock that has already emerged around Scalia’s replacement, threatening the very functioning of the court, that bipartisan spirit is long gone. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

The art of doctoring is dying JERALD WINAKUR practiced internal and geriatric medicine from 1976 to 2012 and is author of the memoir “Memory Lessons: A Doctor’s Story.”

For almost 40 years, I practiced general internal medicine and geriatrics in my own office. I had tens of thousands of face-to-face interactions with a group of folks who, with time, grew to trust me. I respected them as well; many I came to love — a term that I hesitate to use in this hypersensitive age. Given how geographically dispersed families are today, for many of my older patients I functioned as a surrogate son. There is no doubt that the kind of medicine I was fortunate to practice is disappearing. Most doctors are employed by large group practices, hospitals or insurance companies. Many want to have personal connections with their patients but have too little time. Young primary-care doctors are relegated to assembly-line clinics; their patients pass through as widgets, not as individuals with complex inner lives, wrought family structures, varied spiritual and cultural beliefs — not to mention their individual capacities to understand and deal with their medical symptoms, diagnoses and multiple medications, as well as their own hopes and fears. Physicians are now insulated from knowing too much about their patients. It is all about the technology, the testing, the imaging, the electronic health

record, the data — once collected by the doctor, but now so regulated and overwhelming that paramedical professionals have been enlisted to record the socalled minutiae, the often rote information in which may lie important clues. I teach medical students now. All they have to do is look at me to know that I am — in the vernacular of the day — a “dinosaur.” They know little to nothing about how medicine was once practiced. They have experienced the system only as it currently exists. Students now — and, of course, there are exceptions — are looking to choose a field that will allow them the lifestyle and personal time they want, along with the compensation they feel they deserve for the hard work they will endure, for the debt they have accumulated. Most won’t

consider a career in family medicine, general internal medicine or geriatrics. Many new career opportunities have opened up as the role of the old primary-care attending physician has been crushed and splintered in this postmodern medical age. The shards sparkle with possibility: hospitalists care for sick inpatients and are charged with rapid throughput by their administrative overlords; nocturnists do this job as well — but at night; intensivists take over when work in a critical care unit is required; transitionalists step in when the patient is ready to be moved on to rehabilitation (physiatrists) or into a skilled nursing facility (SNFists). Almost at the end of the line are the postacutists in their long-term care facilities and the palliativists — tasked with keeping the patient home and comfortable — while ending the costly cycle of transfers back and forth to the hospital. And to think that not so very long ago I did all these tasks myself and practiced across all these varied settings. I was there whenever and wherever my patients needed me. My students want to know — in all the tumult of medical care today — how they can appear to patients as if they are

“connecting” with them. I suggest examining their patients: listening to hearts and lungs, palpating abdomens, assessing extremities, pulses. This intimacy between a caring doctor and a trusting patient seems a time-honored, engaging and even useful way to cement the doctorpatient relationship. But, for many, this is a bridge too far. Students learn now on plastic dummies; their physical examination skills are poor to nonexistent. They are taught an almost slavish reliance on technology. If I could, I would reinvent myself today as a “confidentialist.” Someone who has the time to really get to know a patient. Someone available to be confided in. An advocate, not just for the moment, but across time. An explainer about what’s wrong; an educator about what will help and what will not. Someone who has the knowledge and confident wisdom to stand down the legions of specialists with their scalpels, catheters and scopes; the backbone to stand up to bottom-line-toeing administrators and self-serving insurance executives and policy wonks. Once I was a primary-care attending physician. It was the closest I came. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

OPINIONS

BY HORSEY FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

Skewering inequality in the U.S. KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL is editor and publisher of the Nation magazine and writes a weekly column for The Post.

Depending on whom you ask, Michael Moore’s latest documentary either “shows off his kinder, gentler side” or shows that he is “angrier than ever.” Headlines have alternately described “Where to Invade Next,” released in theaters nationwide recently, as “lighthearted and optimistic,” “radical,” Moore’s “funniest film in years” and his “most subversive.” It is, in other words, Moore at his best. But the film is a departure from Moore’s previous work for one major reason: Instead of pointing his camera at problems in the United States, in “Where to Invade Next,” Moore embarks on an international search for policies that might help Americans live better. Throughout the film, Moore personally “invades” foreign countries to learn about their ideas, many of which actually originated in the United States, and reclaim them for the American people. The result is both an entertaining romp and a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved by thinking outside the box — or, in this case, our borders. Many American viewers will be startled by the policies that Moore encounters on his journey, including free college tuition in Slovenia, generous paid vacation time in Italy, and statesponsored reproductive health

services in Tunisia. And that’s precisely the point. Even though the entire film was shot abroad, “Where to Invade Next” is ultimately a commentary on inequality in the United States, where basic economic rights that are taken for granted elsewhere are increasingly out of reach for much of the country. Accordingly, the film is perfectly timed for the moment, in which the devastating impact of deeply entrenched inequality is on full display in Flint, Mich., and elsewhere. And it’s especially relevant to the 2016 election as millions of Americans, largely due to Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), are coming around to the idea that the kind of progressive policies Moore highlights can and should be part of their lives. Indeed, it is an unhappy coincidence that “Where to Invade Next” was released amid the ongoing crisis in Flint,

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

Moore’s home town, where a corrupt government’s futile costcutting efforts poisoned the city’s water supply with toxic lead. But while Flint may have been “forgotten,” as Moore recently said, the city’s residents are far from alone. In cities and towns across the country, rising inequality is taking a heavy toll and fueling the decline of the middle class. As the Pew Research Center reported in December, the middle class is shrinking both as a percentage of the population and in terms of the nation’s overall wealth, more and more of which is being accumulated by those at the top of the economic ladder. As a result, a growing number of Americans believe that the economy is rigged against their interests, and that belief is shaping the 2016 presidential campaign. Exit polling from the New Hampshire primary found that Democratic voters ranked income inequality as their top concern, making it plain to see why Sanders won in a rout. Meanwhile, the disturbing rise of Republican demagogue Donald Trump is largely a consequence of white, middle-class angst and anger. Beyond voters’ visceral response to inequality, there is also the metastasizing problem of inequality in our elections themselves. Six years after the

Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United, the role of money in politics continues to expand. The 2016 election is projected to feature record spending totals, much of it coming from super PACs and “dark money” groups funded by billionaire donors. Yet, while this is in many ways a perilous moment for the nation, there are some promising signs for our fragile democracy. As a coalition of reform groups shows in a new report titled “Our Voices, Our Democracy,” the American people are speaking out and “demanding a government that is truly by the people, where every voice is heard and every vote counts.” In November, for example, voters in Maine and Seattle overwhelmingly approved ballot initiatives to make their elections more democratic through public financing systems. The momentum for action to fight inequality of all kinds can also be seen in President Obama’s recent call for automatic voter registration and in movements such as Black Lives Matter and Moral Mondays. In a 2014 speech, Moore commented that “humor can be used in a devastating fashion to shake people out of their seats and do something.” The headlines are right: “Where to Invade Next” is funny and angry and optimistic and radical. Go see it, get up and do something. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2016

COMMENTARY

KLMNO WEEKLY

It’s time to kill the $100 bill

L AWRENCE H . S UMMERS

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arvard’s Mossavar Rahmani Center for Business and Government, which I am privileged to direct, has just issued an important paper by senior fellow Peter Sands and a group of student collaborators. The paper makes a compelling case for stopping the issuance of high denomination notes like the 500 euro note and $100 bill or even withdrawing them from circulation. I remember that when the euro was being designed in the late 1990s, I argued with my European G-7 colleagues that skirmishing over seigniorage by issuing a 500 euro note was highly irresponsible and mostly would be a boon to corruption and crime. Since the crime and corruption in significant part would happen outside European borders, I suggested that, to paraphrase John Connally, it was their currency but would be everyone’s problem. And I made clear that in the context of an international agreement, the United States would consider policy regarding the $100 bill. But because the Germans were committed to having a high-denomination note, the issue was never seriously debated in international forums. The fact that — as Sands points out — in certain circles the 500 euro note is known as the “Bin Laden” confirms the arguments

against it. Sands’s extensive analysis is totally convincing on the linkage between highdenomination notes and crime. He is surely right that illicit activities are facilitated when a million dollars weighs 2.2 pounds, as with the 500 euro note, rather than more than 50 pounds, as would be the case if the $20 bill was the high denomination note. And he is equally correct in arguing that technology is obviating whatever need there may ever have been for high denomination notes in legal commerce. What should happen next? I’d guess the idea of removing existing notes is a step too far. But a moratorium on printing new highdenomination notes would make the world a better place. In terms of unilateral steps, the most important actor by far is the European Union. The 500 euro note is almost six times as valuable as the $100 bill. Some actors in Europe, notably the European Commission, have shown sympathy for the idea, and European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi has shown interest as well. If Europe moved, pressure could probably be brought on others, notably Switzerland. I confess to not being surprised that resistance within the ECB is coming out of Luxembourg, with its long and unsavory tradition of giving comfort to tax evaders, money launderers and other proponents of bank secrecy and where 20 times as much cash is printed, rela-

tive to gross domestic, compared with other European countries. These are difficult times in Europe with the refugee crisis, economic weakness, security issues and the rise of populist movements. There are real limits on what it can do to address global problems. But here is a step that will represent a global contribution with only the tiniest impact on legitimate commerce or on government budgets. It may not be a free lunch, but it is a very cheap lunch. Even better than unilateral measures in Europe would be a global agreement to stop issuing notes worth more than say $50 or $100. Such an agreement would be as significant as anything else the G-7 or G-20 has done in years. China, which is hosting the next G-20 in September, has made attacking corruption a central part of its economic and political strategy. More generally, at a time when such a demonstration is very much needed, a global agreement to stop issuing high-denomination notes would also show that the global financial groupings can stand up against “big money” and for the interests of ordinary citizens. n Summers , the Charles W. Eliot university professor at Harvard, is a former treasury secretary and director of the National Economic Council in the White House. He is writing occasional posts, to be featured on Wonkblog, about issues of national and international economics and policymaking.

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