The Washington Post National Weekly - August 9, 2015

Politics They won a battle, lost their jobs 4

Worst Week Jeb Bush 3

World What’s across the ocean? 11

5 Myths Dropping the atomic bomb 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

VETERANS AFFAIRS: “I’d fire everybody. ...

We have a bunch of guys that don’t know what they’re doing and tremendous corruption.”

TAXES: “Frankly, it would be nice to get rid of everybody and just have either a fair tax, a flat tax or certainly a simplified code.”

OBAMACARE: “I would repeal and replace the big lie, Obamacare.”

TRUMP’S PLATFORM:

BECAUSE I SAID SO In projecting the GOP contender’s political vision, he doesn’t always follow the right, left or even logic.

ISIS: “Take back their wealth. Take back the oil. ... You bomb the hell out of them and then you encircle it.”

PAGE 12

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WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Jeb Bush

by Chris Cillizza

J

eb Bush was doing just fine answering a question about stripping federal funding from Planned Parenthood at the Southern Baptist Convention on Tuesday. Then it all went wrong.

“You could take dollar for dollar — although I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues — but if you took dollar for dollar, there are many extraordinarily fine organizations, community health organizations, that exist, federally sponsored community health organizations, to provide quality care for women on a wide variety of health issues,” he said. “But abortion should not be funded by the government.”

The 15­word aside contained in that quote — starting with “although” and ending with “issues” — almost immediately created a firestorm. Within the hour, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign tweeted: “You are absolutely, unequivocally wrong” at Bush.

Sensing that he was in danger of tarnishing his conservative­enough­to­win­a­Republican­primary­but­ electable­in­a­general­election image, Bush quickly backtracked.

“With regards to women’s health funding broadly, I misspoke, as there are countless community health centers, rural clinics, and other women’s health organizations that need to be fully funded,” Bush said in a statement. “They provide critical services to all, but particularly low­income women who don’t have the access they need.”

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BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS

As you might guess, that didn’t quiet Bush’s critics.

Clinton’s campaign launched an online advertising campaign urging supporters to “tell Jeb Bush he’s wrong on women’s health.” And even Republicans grumbled, noting that his gaffe allowed Clinton to change the subject from the news that the FBI was looking into the security protocols of her private e­mail server.

The timing couldn’t have been worse for Bush, who needed to spend the week prepping for his first debate in 13 years. His performance Thursday night at the Fox News/Facebook debate wasn’t bad, but it didn’t wipe out the damage from his gaffe earlier in the week.

Jeb Bush, for turning an aside into a full­blown controversy at exactly the wrong time, 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. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 43

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY ENTERTAINMENT BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Business mogul and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has talked about lots of issues, but with few detailed plans. Washington Post photo illustration; Original image, Istockphoto; Donald Trump image, The Associated Press

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POLITICS

They’re jobless and joyful

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

The nonprofit Freedom to Marry was wildly successful. The reward: It’s closing shop.

K AREN H ELLER New York BY

H

ow ecstatic is Evan Wolfson, given that he is soon to be unemployed and that the organization he founded, nurtured and helmed is shuttering for good?

“I feel exuberant and happy and proud and lucky and gratified,” he says, sitting in Freedom to Marry’s sunny Chelsea office.

More? “I just feel this wave upon wave upon wave of love. I’m inundated with love, and it hasn’t stopped.”

Although the path to legal same-sex marriage appeared swift, it took more than three decades for the self-described “Mr. Marriage” to get to this moment of unrestrained bliss.

He now oversees the rare nonprofit organization that will go out of business because of resounding success.

On the momentous morning of June 26, his staff members gathered in the conference room, which was decorated with framed newspaper front pages heralding previous court and legislative victories, to await the Supreme Court

ruling on same-sex marriage, which made it the law of the land and effectively ended the 12-yearold organization’s reason for being.

There were hugs and toasts with champagne served in clearplastic cups. #LoveWins tweets exploded. Wolfson, Freedom to Marry’s president and sole lawyer, returned to his office to read the decision written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy for the 5to-4 majority.

And he wept.

“This really signals to other courts and decision-makers that the day of the gay exception in the

Same-sex marriage supporters celebrate in front of the White House on June 26.

law is over,” Wolfson, 58, says.

“We’re being brought into the central institution and language of love. It goes to the very reason why we’re discriminated against, which is our love.”

Wolfson is an optimist by nature, professionally if not always personally. Married since 2011 to molecular-biologist-turned-management consultant Cheng He, he was for many years, by his own admission, “whiningly single” and prone to saying, “Those who can’t do, litigate.”

Legal same-sex marriage has been his primary cause since his

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POLITICS third year at Harvard Law School, when he wrote a paper arguing for it.

He received a B. When legalizing same-sex marriage has been “your legal brief and legal agenda for 32 years, you’re carrying other people’s hopes and expectations. You need to rally the troops, pivot and keep them on the path forward when you have setbacks,” says Wolfson, whose office is decorated with images of his heroes (Lincoln, FDR, Martin Luther King Jr.), several photos of the Obamas towering over him, souvenirs from his wedding and a box of cereal adorned with his image that General Mills made to honor his efforts. He concedes, though, “I’m the last person you would put on a Wheaties box.”

The ruling’s timing proved felicitous: It came on the penultimate day of the court’s session, at the end of New York’s vibrant gay pride week and just before the Fourth of July. Symbolism, parades and fireworks abounded.

“I remember marching on July 4 down to Battery Park after we lost Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986,” Wolfson recalls, referring to the Supreme Court decision that upheld a Georgia law banning sodomy. “And that was a low moment for the movement.”

Many nonprofit groups, either venerable or freshly minted, will always carry a full agenda and most likely never will close up shop — unless they have a lack of support. Freedom to Marry was conceived as a single-issue campaign, similar to those in a political race — though without a fixed end date. Litigation was left to legal groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, where Wolfson worked for a dozen years.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling, the speech of the group’s 30 staffers slid immediately and deliriously into the past tense.

They won. Mission accom­ plished. Writing in the New York Times the day of the decision, Wolfson noted, “the campaign I lead — led! — has now succeeded and will close its doors.”

So Freedom to Marry is closing its doors. Not today, but soon.

“The goal is to wind down over the next couple of months in a

STAN GODLEWSKI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

“My family thought I would be doing this for many years. And then we kept winning and winning and winning.” smart, strategic and collaborative way,” says Wolfson, author of “Why Marriage Matters.” In January, he and the group’s leaders informed staffers that they would be given three months after the decision, should it prove favorable, to look for work.

“It was a way of saying to people, ‘We want you to stay focused. We don’t want you to be worrying about what happens next,’ ” Wolfson says. “It lightened a lot of anxiety people had.”

Now, he oversees perhaps the happiest staff of most likely briefly unemployed people in the nation. “Our staff is pretty sought after,” says deputy digital director Adam Polaski, 25.

The office is comparatively reserved and placid, 60-hour workweeks now a thing of the recent past. Fundraising ceased immediately. Freedom to Marry had budgeted for the three months of salaries and the lease, plus underwriting for a blowout party for 1,000 on the Thursday after the decision at Cipriani Wall Street.

Vice President Biden said, “I’ve never been so happy to be with an

outfit that’s going out of business.”

The organization’s remaining work is largely archival, accumulating and storing documents from a triumphant campaign.

“It’s a good boring,” spokesman Kevin Nix says. “It’s refreshing that, for once, the work is over, and it’s going to stay over.”

Wolfson said that many of the documents will head to Yale University, which he attended as an undergraduate student. While he is talking in his office, a staffer enters to borrow his 141-page Harvard Law paper, the only copy, which is treated like Freedom to Marry’s Magna Carta (though there are more copies of the latter).

Staffers — 20 in New York and 10 in satellite offices — are openly looking for work. No sneaking into private offices to take calls or surreptitiously sending e-mails to would-be employers. Inquiries are constant.

“It’s really felt like we’ve been sprinting through a marathon and an Ironman,” says national campaign director Marc Solomon, author of “Winning Mar-

Evan Wolfson, Freedom to Marry’s founder and president, relishes in his finished job — and his unemployment.

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riage.” “We look great now, but there were plenty of losses and stresses along the way.”

“This model is now what everyone wants, when 10 minutes ago everyone thought I was crazy,” Wolfson says. “We’ve been asked by probably 20 different movements, let alone other parts of our movement, to talk about some of the lessons learned here.” Those other movements include everything “from civil rights, women’s rights, education, juvenile defense, gun control, a range of environmental causes, education reform, hunger, global human rights and rehabilitating former inmates,” he says.

Polaski recalls reporting for work days before graduating from Ithaca College in May 2012, so inexperienced in the job market that he feared the offer might be rescinded. When he arrived, “we only had six states that had legalized marriage,” he says. “So we understood this would be a long haul.”

On his first day, North Carolina defeated same-sex marriage. It would be the last legislative loss.

His second day proved better when President Obama announced his support for the issue.

“My family thought I would be doing this for many years,” Polaski says, “and then we kept winning and winning and winning.”

Polaski has decided to remain in the gay rights movement.

Along with a few of his co-workers, he has been hired as deputy digital director for Freedom for All Americans, a just-launched campaign to win comprehensive nondiscrimination laws for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

Many other staffers still don’t know what they’ll be doing, including Wolfson.

“I need to step back after 32 years of waking up every day to drive to winning marriage, to figure out who am I when I’m not Mr. Marriage,” he says. “It’s one of life’s most exciting challenges and also one of the scariest: What do I do next?”

He’s considering all options and, perhaps, some travel with his husband.

“We’ve worked ourselves out of jobs, but the larger cause is not finished,” he says, “fighting for the same issues we always have — equality, inclusion, safety, freedom and respect.” n

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POLITICS

Special treatment for a reserve VIP BY

C RAIG W HITLOCK

O

f all the candidates vying to become the nation’s next commander in chief, none has spent as much time in the military as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham. The South Carolina Republican retired from the Air Force this summer after a 33-year career, including two decades as a reservist while serving in Congress.

Graham is running as a national-security hawk, calling himself a “battle-tested leader” with “a lifetime of military service.” Images of him wearing camouflage in the field are a common thread in his campaign.

But a detailed examination of Graham’s military record — much of it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act — shows that the Air Force afforded him special treatment as a lawmaker, granting him the privileges of rank with few expectations in return.

During his first decade in Congress, the Air Force promoted Graham twice even though documents in his military personnel file reveal that he did little or no work. Later, the Pentagon gave the military lawyer a job assignment in the Air Force Reserve that he highlighted in his biography for several years but never performed.

After he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1994, Graham was designated by the Air Force Reserve as a “key federal employee,” a category for a small number of lawmakers and senior government officials.

Over the next 10 years, he rarely put on his uniform. According to his personnel file, between January 1995 and January 2005 he received credit for a total of 108 hours of training — the equivalent of less than a day and a half per year.

During that span the Air Force kept awarding him promotions. In 1998, he attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Six years later, he was promoted to colonel by President George W. Bush.

In interviews with The Washington Post, Graham called that period the “wilderness years” of his military service. He said he

STAFF SGT. TRAMEL GARRETT/U.S. ARMY

While serving on Hill, Sen. Graham was promoted by the Air Force twice despite little military activity struggled to find a useful niche in the reserve and that his legislative duties left him little time to devote to his military career.

“At one time I almost thought about getting out because I felt like, ‘Okay, what am I doing here?’ ” he said.

He added, “I didn’t feel guilty because I wasn’t getting any money.” As a key federal employee, he could earn points for a military pension but was ineligible for a service paycheck.

Even so, Graham said his promotions to lieutenant colonel and colonel were warranted. He said he earned them primarily based on his work as a junior officer, before he became a politician, when he served as a full-time military prosecutor and defense counsel.

“I think when it came to being Colonel Graham that they looked

at my entire record, and I’ll put it up against anybody who’s ever served,” he said. “I don’t mean to pat myself on the back, but I was one hell of a judge advocate.

“Yeah, I think I deserved promotion.”

The arrangement benefited both sides. Graham emphasized his ongoing military service in his political campaigns, while the Air Force was grateful to have an influential lawmaker in its ranks.

“They wanted to hang onto me and I didn’t want to leave,” Graham said.

The Air Force referred questions totheAirReservePersonnelCenter.

Col. Robert Palmer, a spokesman for the center, said that “selection forpromotionisbasedonthewhole person concept, which includes performance, professional qualities, leadership, depth and breadth

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), second from right, is seen with Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), second from left, at a detention facility in Afghanistan in 2013.

of experience, specific achievements, academic education, and developmental education.”

Jack L. Rives, a retired Air Force judge advocate general who oversaw Graham’s assignments for several years, said he was an accomplished lawyer who took his reserve duties seriously.

Asked if Graham’s standing in Congress influenced the Air Force’s decision to promote him to colonel, Rives replied: “Your question is a good one and a natural one. But I can say from having served on [promotion] boards, you do score the record and you take an oath to do that. People are warned specifically you can’t show favoritism.”

After he became a colonel, Graham began to dedicate more hours to the reserve. He deployed for brief stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, visits timed to overlap with his travels there as a senator.

For nearly a decade, however, Graham gave inaccurate public descriptions of his job assignment, records show.

From 2006 until the start of this year, Graham’s official biographies stated that he worked as a senior instructor at the Judge Advocate General’s School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., the training hub for the service’s legal corps. That description has been cited in virtually all news coverage of Graham’s military career.

In fact, Air Force officials said they had no record of Graham teaching any courses on behalf of the school or even visiting it during that period.

Other uniformed lawyers said Graham’s assignment was widely perceived as a no-show job granted to a politician with whom the brass was eager to curry favor.

“It was kind of an open joke among people, that he was supposed to be a senior instructor here but he never taught any classes,” said an active-duty lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “Clearly, the rules didn’t apply to him.”

In his interviews with The Post, Graham acknowledged that he “never went” to Maxwell Air Force Base and didn’t serve as an instructor for the school. “I actually did

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POLITICS zero,” he said with a chuckle. “I don’t know why they picked that title.”

He clarified that the Air Force did assign him to the school but said that he persuaded his superiors to allow him to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan instead so he could work with a Defense Department task force on detention policy.

Graham said he kept the inaccurate job description in his biographies because he didn’t want to draw attention to his war-zone missions. Although many of his trips to Afghanistan and Iraq were documented by the news media and publicized by the Defense Department, Graham said he tried to minimize coverage for fear that the Pentagon would view his desire to serve there as a political stunt.

It is not the first time Graham has faced questions about distortions of his military record.

In 1998, he received criticism for indicating he had served in the Persian Gulf War, referring to himself in his Senate biography as “an Operation Desert Storm and Desert Shield veteran.”

Although Graham was called to active duty with the National Guard, he was never deployed overseas during that conflict.

In the Republican presidential contest, Graham is trading on his reputation as a foreign-policy expert. “I have more experience with our national security than any other candidate,” he declared at his campaign kickoff.

Last year, the Army awarded Graham a Bronze Star for serving on the detention task force. All told, he deployed overseas 19 times while in Congress, serving a total of 142 days, according to his personnel file.

Under Air Force regulations, Graham had to retire by age 60. He will receive a monthly pension of $2,773. In June, the Air Force held a private retirement ceremony for Graham at the National Guard Memorial Museum in Washington. Among the attendees were Vice President Biden, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and David H. Petraeus, the former CIA director and military commander in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I think Colonel Graham did a pretty good job, quite frankly, given the constraints of my day job, my ability in terms of time,” Graham told The Post. “I’ll let people who served with me say whether or not I helped. I think I did.” n

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Iran nuclear deal puts focus on undecided Democrats BY

M IKE D E B ONIS

B

efore he served as a U.S. senator, before he ran Delaware’s largest county, Christopher A. Coons was a corporate lawyer, reviewing contracts and business proposals for W.L. Gore & Associates.

The eye he once brought to sales agreements for Gore-Tex he is bringing — a decade later — to the United States’ most scrutinized diplomatic accord in a generation: the Iran nuclear deal.

“Your training and your role as a lawyer is not to be the weddingday guy but to be the divorce-day guy,” Coons, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said . “Your job is to read it through as closely as you can . . . because no one ever pulls that document out unless there’s a problem.”

The Democrat’s lawyerly conclusion: “I will tell you, my gut response at several places has been grave concern.”

Congress is not scheduled to weigh in on the Iran agreement for at least five more weeks, but its fate lies in the hands of undecided lawmakers such as Coons who have assumed a studious, serious posture in coming to a decision.

And, uncomfortably for President Obama and his negotiating team, they are almost exclusively Democrats.

Their reviews of the agreement stand to leave the outcome of a congressional vote uncertain for weeks — into the summer congressional recess, when advocates on both sides are expected to mount targeted efforts to pressure those who are undecided.

Most notably, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee formed a lobbying group whose board is packed with former lawmakers, including former vicepresidential candidate and senator Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.).

Backers of the group, Citizens for a Nuclear-Free Iran, have pledged to raise as much as $40 million.

Meanwhile, Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer has met with more

than 50 members of Congress to warn against the deal.

On the other side, the liberal pro-Israel group J Street has said it plans to raise millions of dollars to support the deal, and the White House has promised to remain engaged throughout the twomonth review process.

That included a White House lobbying session for dozens of lawmakers recently and personal phone calls from Obama to skeptical Democrats.

Sen. Christopher A. Coons (DDel.) says he’s been learning as much about the deal as possible.

In the House, 150 Democrats signed a letter last month supporting the concept of an Iran deal. If all were to vote in favor of the deal, it would be enough to sustain an Obama veto. But opponents think they will be able to pick off supporters as they publicize weaknesses — in particular, the lack of “anywhere, anytime” inspections, the prospect of lifting a conventional arms embargo, and uncertainty about private agreements between international nuclear arms monitors and the Iranian regime.

In the Senate, as in the House, there is little doubt that a majority opposes the deal. Of 54 Republican senators, only Jeff Flake (RAriz.) has signaled that he might support it.

The more important calculation centers around whether at least 60 senators will oppose the deal. If not, it would spare Obama the necessity of a veto and the drama of

a subsequent override vote.

One Democratic senator, Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), has been sharply critical of the negotiations and is expected to oppose the deal.

A handful of other Democratic senators have been critical, if less sharply so, and as many as a dozen senators have taken pains to remain undecided.

They include Michael F. Bennet (Colo.), whose 2016 reelection bid is being heavily targeted by Republicans, and centrists such as Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Mark R. Warner (Va.).

And perhaps no decision is being more closely watched than that of Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), who is caught between his role as the chamber’s Democratic leader-inwaiting and his long-standing alliance with pro-Israel groups. He has responded tersely in recent weeks.

Coons said the constituent input he has gotten through phone calls, e-mails and personal appeals has beenalmostequallydivided.Hehas been more focused, he said, on gathering as much information about the deal as possible — classified briefings from technical experts,talkswithforeignnegotiating partners and dozens of conversations with administration officials — including Vice President Biden, whose Senate seat Coons holds.

Coons’s serious approach to reviewing the deal has won him the attention and respect of advocates on both sides. Many lawmakers are just now taking “Iran 101,” one senior Israeli official said, but “he’s in the Iran Advanced Placement 707 seminar.”

That is not to say politics is far from Coons’s mind. But with his next election five years away, he is more concerned with the possibility that — as with the ill-fated 1994 North Korean nuclear agreement — the real fallout might not be apparent for years to come.

“There’s a reasonable chance that I may be here long enough,” he said,“thatthelonger-termoutcome of this is a real consequence.” n

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NATION

A lesson in loopholes for teachers BY

E MMA B ROWN

A

ll Anna Johnson-Smith wanted was some time each afternoon to pump breast milk for her infant.

But when she returned to work as a kindergarten teacher in Marlin, Tex., her principal denied her request, putting her in the position of choosing between her child and her career.

Two weeks into the school year, she quit. Since then, she has joined the ranks of current and former teachers in multiple states — including Texas, Virginia, Florida, Nebraska and Utah — who are advocating for the right to pump at work, seeking to close a loophole that leaves teachers and other salaried workers unprotected under federal law.

“A 15-minute break was all I was asking for,” said Johnson-Smith, now a stay-at-home mother and the owner of a photography studio.

“We’ve come so far in our society in so many ways, and here in 2015, we’re still fighting for the right to provide breast milk for our babies.”

Breast-feeding rates are on the rise in the United States, perhaps at least partly because of the federal government’s efforts to educate the public about the health benefits of breast milk.

With more than half of the nation’s mothers with infants working outside the home, that advice has led many women to try to pump on the job.

While pumping at work is a hassle for many women, for teachers, it can feel nearly impossible.

Privacy is scant in a school building full of children, and classroom schedules are busy and inflexible.

It is difficult to find a spare moment to run to the restroom, let alone enough time to pump.

Some teachers lean on colleagues or aides who are willing to cover their classrooms while they take refuge in a supply closet or an empty office. Some teachers pump at their desks during planning periods or lunchtimes, hoping that students and staff members observe the do-not-disturb sign on the door. Some work for

REZA A. MARVASHTI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Unprotected workers who breast-feed their infants find it difficult to pump on the job principals who do their best to make the logistics easy.

Others, like Johnson-Smith, who resigned in fall 2012 after the May birth of her daughter, end up with a choice: Quit their jobs to keep breast-feeding their babies, or quit breast-feeding to keep working.

“In many school districts, it comes down to how supportive the principal is,” said Ann Seacrest, a lactation consultant and executive director of MilkWorks, a nonprofit breast-feeding center in Nebraska.

Women who don’t remove milk from their breasts often enough risk painful engorgement or plugged ducts and infection, according to lactation experts. Perhaps more important, failing to pump frequently enough can cause a drop in milk supply that makes it frustratingly difficult — or impossible — to provide a baby with enough nutrition through breast milk alone.

Monica Howell, a high school

teacher in Miami, said that when she returned to work last year, her assistant principal denied her request for a 20-minute break to pump toward the end of her first two-hour class of the day. The principal reversed that decision, allowing Howell the time she needed.

Her students worked on written assignments while she pumped.

“You’re not always going to have a principal like mine, who was trying to help me,” she said.

Even with his support, there were days when there was no adult to cover her classroom. Her breasts became painfully full, and she worried she would leak noticeably.

Howell brought the issue to her union, the United Teachers of Dade. The Miami-Dade County teachers’ contract signed in 2014 included a provision guaranteeing the right to private space and “reasonable” time to pump.

Of the approximately 3.5 million public schoolteachers in the

Sarah AnzelmoSteele, with daughter Emmeline, is a schoolteacher in Richmond. She struggled to pump at work, even though Virginia has a law requiring accommodations for breast-feeding teachers.

United States, about three-quarters are women.

The federal Affordable Care Act protects mothers who are hourly workers by requiring their employers to provide time and space for pumping, part of the Obama administration’s broader effort to encourage breast-feeding. But the law does nothing to protect teachers or other women who work in salaried positions.

A growing number of states passed laws to pick up the slack.

Virginia passed a law in 2014 specifically aimed at protecting teachers who pump; Louisiana did the same in 2013.

This year, Texas and Utah passed laws that require public employers, including schools, to provide nursing mothers with time and space to pump. Nebraska also passed a measure this year that requires any employer with more than 15 workers to allow pumping breaks unless doing so would cause undue hardship.

“There’s a recognition that this needs to be in legislation to protect teachers,” said Diana West, spokeswoman for La Leche League International.

Even in states where they are legally protected, teachers say the realities of working in a school make it tough.

Shelly Steely teaches social studies in San Diego, in a state where employers have been required to provide time and space for nursing mothers for more than a decade.

“Technically, you’re supposed to be able to take the breaks when you need them, but there’s not enough coverage at any school site to leave your classroom,” said Steely, who went back to work in November, when her daughter was 8 weeks old. “It’s unrealistic to have someone teaching half of one of my classes.”

Steely pumped at her desk during her planning period and lunchtime with a sign on her door that was disregarded more than once by students and custodians.

“I don’t know if you have ever talked to a teenager about nursing,” she said. “It’s kind of awkward.” n

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Suing the suburbs over slain sons T OM R OWLEY Chicago BY

O

n the grounds of St. Sabina church on Chicago’s South Side, there is an enormous wooden board, the sort that might normally display parish notices.

Instead, this one bears row upon row of portraits, largely of teens and young adults. Some of them smiling for the camera at graduation ceremonies; others posed in sports uniforms. Sometime later, all were shot dead.

“You are not forgotten,” a notice reads.

Two members of the congregation scarcely need the reminder.

Pam Bosley and Annette NanceHolt both lost teenage sons to gun violence on the streets near the church. Almost a decade later, Bosley still screams when she visits the cemetery, and NanceHolt still cannot bear to move anything in her son’s bedroom.

Now they have hit upon a novel approach to try to stem the violence plaguing this neighborhood.

In an unusual lawsuit filed in July, Bosley and Nance-Holt claim their civil rights have been violated by three suburban governments that they say do not adequately regulate gun shops near the Chicago border. The suit argues that weapons sold at these stores are responsible for too much of the violence that disproportionately afflicts this poor, black corner of Chicago.

Critics say the two mothers are stretching the definition of civil rights too far and are urging the court to dismiss the case. Either way, the suit is timely: Although Chicago recorded the fewest killings in nearly 50 years in 2013, the homicide rate has since been on the rise, darting up 20 percent in the first half of this year.

More people are getting shot in other cities, as well. Police departments in New York, Washington and Milwaukee, among others, are dealing with more killings this year than last. Criminologists caution against a national explanation, especially because homicide rates have decreased in some

JOSHUA LOTT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Gun shops beyond Chicago’s borders are not regulated adequately, say victims’ mothers cities, including Los Angeles.

They say local factors, such as shifting gang dynamics and changes in police stop-and-frisk tactics, probably are a factor.

Still, these spikes — along with high-profile mass shootings in Chattanooga, Tenn., and Lafayette, La. — are pushing the gun debate higher on the national agenda.

Chicago has long been at the center of this debate. It is the country’s murder capital in absolute terms, although it is lower down in the rankings when population is considered. The city attracts even more attention because it is President Obama’s home town, and because Rahm Emanuel (D), Obama’s former chief of staff, serves as mayor.

So, although Garry McCarthy, the city’s superintendent of police, does not know the full details of the lawsuit, he welcomes its intent.

“If we were to get gun dealers to be much more stringent in their sales, it would help us enormously,” he said, adding that

“short-term fluctuations” in the homicide rate are inevitable until the number of guns coming into the city decreases.

After her son, Terrell, was killed in 2006, Bosley gave up her job as a bank administrator and twice tried to commit suicide.

Then she met Nance-Holt, a battalion chief in the fire department, whose son, Blair, was killed in 2007, and both decided to fight.

Together, they blame the three villages, Lyons, Lincolnwood and Riverdale, for what they call a “flood” of guns into the city. On average, police have recovered a gun sold at Chuck’s Gun Shop in Riverdale every day for the past 10 years, McCarthy said.

The villages must clamp down on their shops, the mothers say, by insisting on security cameras, employee background checks and training staff to detect people buying guns for third parties.

Central to their case is the claim that the weapons these stores sell wreak more havoc in

A woman in a prayer circle looks up after balloons were released last month in memory of Dillan Harris, 13 months, who was killed in Chicago.

black communities than in white ones. Tom Geoghegan, their attorney, cites a national study published last year by academics at Columbia University and Jacobi Medical Center in New York concluding that African Americans were more than twice as likely to die in shootings as white people in the decade before 2010.

The stores have remained silent, either declining or not responding to requests for comment. The National Rifle Association calls the suit “an abuse of the legal system.”

Nance-Holt, 57, is unmoved by critics. When she asked students at Blair’s high school how many teenagers they knew who had a gun, she says almost everybody’s hand went up. “We have so many guns in the African American community, it’s unbelievable.”

The Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor at St. Sabina, is joining the mothers in their suit and stands by the civil rights claim. Pfleger said the same level of violence “wouldn’t be tolerated” if it were directed against middle-class white people.

Residents live in a state of constant stress, Pfleger said, with police tape and impromptu shrines as common a sight on the sidewalks as discarded soda cans.

There is “nowhere to run,” said Nance-Holt, no guarantee that teenagers will escape shootings even if they stay out of gangs.

Even walking to a Walgreens pharmacy a block away can be treacherous, Bosley said.

Consider their sons: Blair Holt was shot shielding a friend on a bus. Terrell Bosley was struck while unloading musical instruments outside a church.

According to Harold Pollack, co-director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, about a fifth of teenage victims are not the intended target. Instead, they get caught in crossfire, are killed in a crowd or are hit by a stray bullet.

Whoever shot Bosley’s son took the music from her life.

“I have no desire to sing anymore,” she said. “My new life is trying to change this world and save other mothers.” n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

No phones. No Internet. One road.

T IM C RAIG Shimshal Valley, Pakistan BY

F

or centuries, this tiny village in the far northern tip of Pakistan has been known as the home of some of central Asia’s toughest inhabitants.

From this rugged, 10,000-foot plateau in the Karakorum Mountains, residents used to have to walk for up to a week to reach another settlement. The journey, which involved crossing an icy river dozens of times, was so grueling that monarchs banished prisoners to live here — assuming they survived the walk.

About a decade ago, the opening of a one-lane road — after 18 years of construction — brought comforts such as factory-made blankets and water filtration systems over the mountains, as well as some concern that the route that freed the village from isolation would doom it as younger residents left in search of jobs and Internet access.

“We need mobile systems and we need the Internet,” said Perviz Armin, 26, who said he wants to move to a Pakistani city. “Nowadays, the Internet is important. But to use it, I have to book a car and drive” to a city three hours away.

For now, the 2,800 villagers who live here in the Shimshal Valley remain, arguably, the toughest residents of Pakistan, as well as some of theworld’sbestmountainclimbers.

They have to be. Electricity arrived in the late 1990s but only works sporadically, and still there are no phones. There is no police force. Winter is so severe that most residents keep two years’ worth of food stocks, knowing that help is not nearby.

The dirt and gravel road connecting the valley to the Karakorum Highway in Pakistan’s GilgitBaltisan area has been referred to as one of the world’s most dangerous — and beautiful — drives.

Carved into the sides of mountains, the route is so narrow a jeep’s tires roll inches from the edge while passing through breathtaking gorges, axle-busting rock fields and next to a multi-

MIAN KHURSHEED FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Pakistan village is so remote that kings once banished prisoners here. But times are changing. story glacier.

In the valley, tiny stone houses are clustered at the base of barren mountains that resemble giant bags of crumbly brown sugar. But irrigation ditches have made the valley floor lush in the summer, and wheat grows up to the doorstep of most homes.

For generations, residents relied on that wheat and a herd of about 5,000 goats and yaks to survive. Villagers take the animals into upper reaches of the valley, where the elevation rises to about 14,000 feet, to graze each summer.

“Climbing is in our nature, so you have to do it,” said Jaffar Ullah, 18. “It’s not till later in life, when you grow up, that you learn about other things such as the Internet and television.”

That is how local Samina Baig, 24, became a celebrity in Pakistan — and the first Pakistani woman to summit Mt. Everest. As a child, she began climbing into the moun-

tains with her mother to collect firewood, said her father, Muhammad Baig, 69. As she grew older, Samina Baig’s older brother began telling her that one day they would make it to the top.

“It was during nightly storytelling mode that he used to tell her, ‘We are going to climb the mountains like the foreigners do,’ ” Muhammad Baig said.

In 2010, Samina Baig became the first person to summit Chaskin Sar, a 19,600-foot mountain near the Shimshal Valley.

Over the next four years, after lining up better equipment and some sponsorships, Baig became the first Pakistani woman to climb the tallest mountain in each of the seven continents, including Mt. Everest in 2013.

Pakistani media reported that she was injured in an avalanche in late July while trying to summit K2, the world’s second-highest mountain.

A man walks in Shimshal Valley. The 2,800 villagers who live here remain, arguably, the toughest residents of Pakistan.

Daulet Amin, 75, a retired teacher and the local historian, said the known history of the village dates back about 900 years. At the time, the ancient Kingdom of Hunza was governed by a royal family.

One of the king’s brothers discovered the valley while hunting on a distant mountain and decided to trek there with his wife and a goat, Amin said. In the centuries that followed, Hunza’s royal family exiled prisoners to live there.

“It wasn’t because Shimshal was such a bad place to live,” Amin said. “It was to punish them on their walk there.”

Like many village elders, Amin knows that walk well.

“We had to take off our trousers and carry them on our backs because we had to cross the river so many times,” he said.

Villagers who never left the valley finally saw their first mechanical vehicle in the late 1990s, when a Pakistan Army helicopter dropped off a tractor. Even today, however, residents rely on cows to crush wheat with their hooves, then they throw it into the air so wind can separate kernels from beards.

But life here is changing.

“We can now get livestock from other places, like chickens,” said one of Samina Baig’s brothers, Zulfiqar Ali Baig, 35. “Before we had to slaughter our own livestock, like yaks and goats, so we didn’t eat meat as much.”

As more young adults leave, residents question whether the next generation will stay. Each year since the road opened, villagers say, fewer people have been sleeping up in the pasture with the herd.

“Now, everyone is going to other places for education and, if they don’t have jobs, they do come back but they don’t stay for long,” said Yahya Baig, 42.

Still, other residents remain optimistic that their bucolic way of life will live on — whether or not phones and Internet arrive.

“At least now with the road, we feel part of [the] global village,” Amin said. “And we are thankful that people are starting to recognize our genetic toughness.” n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Beyond the horizon W

hen you’re hanging out at the beach and you gaze at the horizon, do you know what is across the ocean from you? In ancient times, many people thought that the world simply ended at the horizon, perhaps after a ring of dangerous dragons or sea monsters. Today we know better — but perhaps not that much better. This map, inspired by the work of map enthusiast Eric Odenheimer, shows countries that are at the same latitude across the ocean in the Western Hemisphere. n — Weiyi Cai and Ana Swanson

From the Western Hemisphere, the countries across the Pacific Ocean colored by continents

The countries and continents across the Atlantic Ocean

BY DAVID A. FAHRENTHOLD

Donald Trump wants to make America great again. This is how he wants to do it: ¶ If Trump were elected president, he says, he would launch the U.S. government into a massive building project — and a massive manhunt — both at once. ¶ On the U.S.­Mexico border, Trump would build a long, impenetrable wall. In the rest of the country, he would pressure the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants to “self­deport” — and, if they don't, round them up to deport en masse. Later, Trump says, “the good ones” could come back.¶ He also wants to go on a building spree. ¶ Modern new VA hospitals. Better bridges, highways, railroads. A new floor at LaGuardia Airport, to replace that shabby terrazzo Trump hates. And, to pay for it all, Trump would not raise taxes. He’d lower them. ¶ Instead, Trump would get other countries to start paying the United States large new sums of money — and agree to receive nothing in return. China, for instance, would pay for new tariffs. Mexico would even pay for America’s new border wall. ¶ “They’re not going to pay for the wall,” Fox News host Bill O’Reilly told Trump this summer. ¶ “You have to let me handle that, okay?” Trump said. ¶ Trump, a billionaire real­estate developer and reality­TV star, has surged to the lead in the Republican presidential nominating contest using a showman’s flair and anti­immigrant and anti­Washington rhetoric.¶ But, so far, he’s missing something basic: a policy platform. A formal list of Trump’s ideas for America. ¶ “They’re all

Who needs a plan? done,” Corey Lewandowski, his campaign manager, said in a recent radio interview. Not that they’re going to share them or anything. “They’re done and we’re waiting, you know, for our schedule,” Lewandowski said. ¶ Nonetheless, Trump has already explained pieces of his vision — in this year’s speeches and interviews, and in “Time to Get Tough,” a political book he wrote four years ago. ¶ At times, those ideas make Trump sound like a conservative Republican.

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

Not this guy.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

Trump was asked whether — in the course of his campaign — he had encountered any issue where the situation was more complicated than he’d first believed.

The answer seemed to be no.

SCOTT HEPPELL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

from previous page

He wants to repeal “Obamacare.” He has called global warming “bull----.” He wants to end the Common Core education program and renegotiate the nuclear deal with Iran. But, at other times, he sounds more like a Democrat: Trump, for instance, rejects GOP plans to overhaul Medicare.

In other areas, Trump’s ideas seem to defy both parties’ orthodoxies. And sometimes, to defy logic.

To square the circles in his vision — to explain how he will do things that seem implausible — Trump’s answer is usually himself. That is the heart of Trump-ism, the glue that holds the agenda together — the man’s own sky-high self-confidence.

President Trump’s vision would work because Trump would be president.

“Trump is like your Uncle George at Thanksgiving dinner, saying he knows how to solve all the problems. It’s not that he’s always wrong.

It’s just that he’s an auto mechanic, not a policy guy,” said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which calls for reduced immigration.

Krikorian actually agrees with Trump that illegal immigration is a major problem. But he’s frustrated by Trump’s ideas to fix it — such as a suggestion to charge Mexico $100,000 for “every person they send over” across the U.S. border.

“Charging them, how? For what?” Krikorian said. “It’s just Uncle George at Thanksgiving, kind of holding forth.”

In a phone call about a week ago, Trump rejected arguments that his ideas — particularly those about building bigger projects on

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG MEWS

lower taxes — were implausible.

“It’s not implausible, because we’re going to make the economy sing,” he said. Trump said that under his leadership, more jobs and more growth would make up for lower tax rates.

He was asked whether — in the course of his campaign — he had encountered any issue where the situation was more complicated than he’d first believed. The answer seemed to be no.

“Life is complicated. But this is not complicated, believe me,” he said. He assured a reporter that he would like America under Trump: “You’ll be happy, believe me. You’ll be happy.”

The candidate was in Scotland the other week, visiting one of his golf courses. In his phone call with The Washington Post, Trump was asked about a question raised by conservatives.

If he became president, were there any major parts of the federal government he wanted to cut?

Trump said he would cut portions of the Education Department — where he wants to eliminate Common Core — and parts of the Environmental Protection Agency. He cited clean-air enforcement as an area where regulators have become too burdensome.

For now, Trump’s lack of a detailed campaign platform hasn’t stopped his campaign.

He leads the Republican field by at least six percentage points in poll averages. That was enough to put him at center stage for the first presidential debate this past Thursday night.

“It’s not so much what I like about him. It’s what I dislike about everything else in Washington,” explained Skip Houston, 51, an airline

MATTHEW BUSCH/GETTY IMAGES

pilot from Georgia and a Trump supporter.

Houston said he admired Trump’s raw approach and his ridicule of Washington’s culture of fundraising and favors.

But what about Trump’s policy ideas? “He hasn’t really gotten that in-depth yet,” Houston said.

Did that bother him? “It’s too early” Houston said. “There’s over a year to go.”

One thing is clear: Trump has reversed several positions from his past.

In 1999, contemplating a possible presidential run, Trump said he supported abortion rights. Today, he is against abortion. He previously praised the idea of a national, single-payer health-care system. Today, while aiming his fire at the president’s health-care law, he doesn’t.

Trump also seems to have backed off another unusual idea: a one-time mega-tax on the nation’s very wealthy. In 2000, Trump advocated a 14.25 percent tax on people with a net worth over $10 million, which he estimated would raise $5.7 trillion and pay off the national debt in one swoop.

“It’s a win-win for the American people but an idea that no conventional politician would have the guts to put forward,” Trump wrote in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve.”

Trump doesn’t mention that idea now.

“The numbers no longer work,” because the national debt is higher, said one longtime friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to talk about Trump’s thinking without authorization from his campaign. “It was a good idea at the time. We should’ve done it. We’d be out of debt now. Or maybe not.”

Today, when Trump talks about taxes, he usually talks about lowering them.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

15

COVER STORY

KLMNO WEEKLY

In Trump’s plan, the thing that makes it all work is . . .

Trump. This confidence is not new. Back in 2000, Trump wrote that — if elected president — he would appoint a new U.S. trade representative. Guess who.

JIM YOUNG/REUTERS

He has called for eliminating the estate tax.

Lowering personal income taxes. Other Republicans say the same. But Trump has gone much further in one respect. In his 2011 policy book, “Time to Get Tough,” Trump called for eliminating the income tax on corporations entirely: “A zero percent corporate tax would create an unprecedented jobs boom,” he wrote.

But it would also open a sinkhole in the federal budget. About 9 percent of all government revenue would vanish.

At the same time, Trump has contemplated expensive new plans. To fight the Islamic State, for instance, he has advocated a military campaign aimed at removing the oil out from under the militants’ territory.

“Take back their wealth. Take back the oil. . . . You bomb the hell out of them and then you encircle it, and then you go in” with an oil company, Trump has said. “Once you take that oil, they have nothing left. And it’s so simple.”

Oil-industry experts expressed skepticism about this plan. Skepticism, in fact, may not be a strong-enough word. They noted, for instance, the difficulty of finding a company willing to get oil out of an active war zone, and that depleting the area’s relatively minor oil fields might still take decades.

“That is sheer lunacy on so many counts, it’s hard to start,” said David Goldwyn, a former State Department special envoy for energy in the Obama administration.

At the same time, Trump — a real-estate developer now imagining himself in charge of the largest property owner in the country — has a lot of ideas for things to build at home.

Highways. A fortified border. Better VA hospitals to replace what Trump called “outdated

DANNY JOHNSTON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

JEFF J. MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES

dumps.”

“When he comes up against a problem, his reflexive answer is that we’ll do something to fix it that’s going to cost more money,” said Michael Tanner, of the libertarian Cato Institute.

He said Trump had not explained enough about how these big projects would be paid for as tax revenue declined. “You can’t spend more and collect less. That’s kind of basic math,” Tanner said. “You can argue about how the math adds up in the other people’s plans. But there’s math there. This, there’s just no math.”

That’s where the other countries come in.

In his 2011 book, for instance, Trump called for a 25 percent tariff on all goods imported from China if China wouldn’t stop unfair trade practices. Trump has also called for increased tariffs on imports from Mexico in order to pay for his wall.

He would also threaten American companies with tariffs if those companies wanted to shift U.S. jobs overseas.

“I would call up the head of Ford, who I know. If I was president, I’d say, ‘Congratulations. I understand that you’re building a nice $2.5 billion car factory in Mexico and that you’re going to take your cars and sell them to the United States, zero tax,’ ” Trump said during his campaign announcement. “So I would say, ‘Congratulations. That’s the good news.

Let me give you the bad news . . . we’re going to charge you a 35 percent tax.’ ” But these plans would not be easy. Even for President Trump.

Even if Trump could get Congress to approve new tariff increases, for instance, they would probably violate existing trade agreements.

And they would hit Americans in the pocket-

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

book by making imported goods more expensive. And, probably, they would trigger retaliations from other countries, which would raise their own tariffs and hurt U.S. exports.

“If you thought this had a ghost of a chance — which it doesn’t — you would sell all your stocks,” because of the damage that a trade war would do to the U.S. economy, said Gary Hufbauer, of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Hufbauer said that the United States has spent decades trying to lower tariffs worldwide. “This would be the U.S. kind of going into the insane asylum,” he said. “It would be blowing up the system which we have created since the Second World War.” In Trump’s plan, the thing that makes it all work is . . . Trump. This confidence is not new.

Back in 2000, Trump wrote that — if elected president — he would appoint a new U.S. trade representative.

Guess who.

“My lawyers have checked, and the president has this authority,” Trump wrote then.

“Our trading partners would have to sit across the table from Donald Trump.”

This year, Trump said he believed those same deal-making skills could also improve U.S. relations with an unpredictable rival: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“I would be willing to bet I would have a great relationship with Putin. It’s about leadership,” he told Fox’s O’Reilly.

“Based on what?” O’Reilly asked. “You’re two macho guys?”

“Based on a feel.”

“Just a feel?”

“Based on feel,” Trump replied. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

16

KLMNO WEEKLY

ENTERTAINMENT

Stewart leaves friends & foes BY

E MILY Y AHR

J

on Stewart, who signed off on Thursday night after 16 years on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” is famous for many things. But one legacy will certainly be his takedowns. It quickly became clear after Stewart took over as host: You didn’t want to be on his bad side.

However, as scathing as Stewart could be, he also had some people he genuinely enjoyed. Here’s a look back at some of his well­known friends, enemies and frenemies through the years.

FRIENDS l Stephen Colbert These BFFs bonded long ago when Colbert was a “Daily Show” correspondent — Stewart was giddy whenever his pal took a break from “The Colbert Report” to stop by. And Stewart seems thrilled to watch his friend thrive and land his next job.

“There’s no greater joy than seeing a genuinely good man who works as hard as he can every day and deserves all the success in the world actually get that success,” Stewart said when CBS announced that Colbert would take over for David Letterman.

Brian Williams As the Huffington Post wrote (when wondering how Stewart would cover the story of the embattled NBC News anchor this past winter), “Williams and Stewart have, over the course of many interviews, developed something of a collegial relationship — if not an outright bromance.”

Williams was a frequent “Daily Show” guest, and Stewart was one of the first people to appear on Williams’s ill-fated show “Rock Center.” l

President Obama They did have those White House meetings! But really, Stewart always enjoyed it when Obama stopped by the show, dating back to his first appearance in 2005. l

Malala Yousafzai The teenage Nobel Peace Prize winner and education advocate rendered Stewart speechless the first time she stopped by at age 16.

“I know your father is backstage, and he’s very proud of you, but would he be mad if I adopted you?” Stewart asked her. l

l Denis Leary/Louis C.K./Colin Quinn Asked recently about his favorite guests, he rattled off these three, because they’re his pals.

Those interviews don’t even qualify as work, he says.

ENEMIES l Jim Cramer One of Stewart’s most famous takedowns after the 2008 economic crisis was when Stewart devoted multiple shows to calling out CNBC for irresponsible financial reporting. Later, Jim Cramer appeared on his show for a highly touted smackdown. “I understand you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a [expletive] game,” Stewart told him.

ASTRID RIECKEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

“attacks that were levied on me had no foothold in the facts.”

“Your distortions and lack-offact footholds against mine!”

Stewart said, adding that he compiled 50 of the network’s lies in one six-second Vine clip.

“Crossfire” Stewart always thought CNN’s show was bad, but as he clarified to hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala when he stopped by in 2004, “It’s not so much that it’s bad as it’s hurting America.” He called the show painful to watch, accusing them of partisan hackery.

“You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably,” he said. When Carlson and Begala shot back that “The Daily Show” could use work, too, Stewart uttered his now-famous zinger: “You’re on CNN! The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?” l

Rick Sanchez Stewart made fun of CNN’s Rick Sanchez for years. Sanchez lashed out in response on a radio show, calling Stewart a “bigot” and mocking the idea that Jewish people could be a minority when “everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart.”

He was fired by CNN a day later.

Yousafzai

Sanchez

FRENEMIES: l Bill O’Reilly These guys. Despite being on opposite sides of the spectrum, their many arguments and the “Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium,” each talk show host has genuine respect for the other.

Seth MacFarlane After the “Family Guy” creator publicly criticized Stewart for continuing his show during the Hollywood writers’ strike, Stewart called MacFarlane and “ripped” him for an hour.

MacFarlane later recounted the details and seemed a bit shellshocked from the incident. But he’s been on Stewart’s show several times since, so all seems okay. n l

l

Sean Hannity/Glenn Beck/Fox News How do you even count the number of times that Stewart has skewered Fox News? It might actually be impossible. For just one example, Stewart recently challenged Fox News to a “lie off” after Megyn Kelly said a lot of Stewart’s l

Judy Miller Stewart reached peak anger level when former New York Times reporter Judy Smith came on the show to talk about her new book, and he took her to task for reporting on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

“I believe that you helped the administration take us to the most devastating mistake in foreign policy that we’ve made in 100 years,” Stewart said, though he added that she seemed like a “lovely” person. l

MacFarlane TOP: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert hold a rally in 2010 in Washington.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

17

SCIENCE

KLMNO WEEKLY

You are what you ... tweet Caloric balance as reported on Twitter

Source: The Lexicocalorimeter: Gauging public health through caloric input and output on social media THE WASHINGTON POST

BY

A LESZU B AJAK

W

hat does Twitter say about your diet? According to an analysis of 50 million tweets, Mississippi loves cake, Virginia can’t get enough bacon, and Colorado likes chocolate bars. And how do we burn off those calories?

Judging by those same tweets, Colorado runs a lot, Virginia swims a bit, and Mississippi likes to dance.

A new online, interactive instrument built by researchers at the University of Vermont is using Twitter to count how many calories Americans consume and expend. Their tool, dubbed the Lexicocalorimeter, looks through tweets for food and exercise-related words, like doughnut and treadmill, and runs them through a basic algorithm that ranks the words by their frequency and caloric implications.

The algorithm then uses a simple ratio of calories consumed to

calories burned to calculate each state’s caloric balance. Based on tweets made from the continental states during 2011 and 2012, the researchers found that Mississippi expended the fewest calories, with Colorado burning the most.

“In many of the states where obesity rates are the highest, the calories being consumed is a lot higher than the calories being burned,” says Chris Danforth, an applied mathematician and assistant professor at UVM. But while the algorithm’s results are in line with public health data, Danforth acknowledges that Twitter represents a limited sample size — so the Lexicocalorimeter is no replacement for public health surveillance. Rather, it’s a tool that complements more traditional measures of health.

“We certainly don’t know how long they’re running or how many hot dogs they’re eating, but from a higher level looking down on Earth you can see what’s going on with people’s health,” Danforth says. He

likens the Lexicocalorimeter to early versions of Google Flu Trends, a service from Google that estimates influenza activity based on Google searches of terms like “flu” “cold” and “sick.” Google Flu Trends, while nowhere close to predicting influenza outbreaks, has drawn interest from public health authorities in many countries.

Like Google Flu Trends, the Lexicocalorimeter’s algorithm has been calibrated to eliminate false positives. The word apple, for example, can mean more than just the food.

“If it’s a food usage, we assign a calorie for it. If it’s the company we don’t,” explains Danforth, who together with Peter Sheridan Dodds and an interdisciplinary team published an early (and not yet peer reviewed) version of a study explaining the Lexicocalorimeter on the scientific preprint site arXiv. “Twitter is really useful for learning what people are talking about, and what people are doing,” says Mark Dredze, a researcher at

Twitter can tell which states love jogging and which would rather just eat cake

Johns Hopkins who studies social media and health who was not involved in the study.

“Exploring that is the first stage,” Dredze says. “The second stage is developing better algorithms for the types of questions being asked in public health and determining who in public health will benefit from this information.”

Fine-tuning these algorithms is key to improving large-scale analysis of social media, whether the goal is to measure the caloric content of a tweet or to find the next developing news story. These technologies represent new ways of finding and understanding the conversations we’re having as a country — chatter that is increasingly moving online.

And developing tools like the Lexicocalorimeter is just plain fun. “We can make maps of the U.S. based on how often people talk about rock climbing or eating kale or bacon,” Danforth says. “It’s a way to explore our culture.” n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

One town and two killer tornadoes N ON-FICTION

A

THE MERCY OF THE SKY The Story of a Tornado

By Holly Bailey Viking. 306 pp. $27.95

l

REVIEWED BY

S ETH S HULMAN

s a massive tornado approached their Oklahoma house in 2013, an elderly couple named Jerrie and Hemant Bhondem had little time to prepare. Hemant’s osteoporosis prevented him from making it down into a storm shelter, so the two of them cowered together in the shower stall of their first-floor bathroom until, before Jerrie’s eyes, the tornado pulled her husband to his death, right from her grasp. As Holly Bailey recounts in “The Mercy of the Sky,” Jerrie “barely had time to look at his face one last time before her husband disappeared into the sky.”

In her new book, Bailey explores the terrifying power of tornadoes and their wrenching toll through a portrait of Moore, Okla.

This community, 10 miles south of Oklahoma City, earns the dubious distinction of having experienced two of the world’s largest and most devastating tornadoes — in 1999 and again in 2013.

The story is personal for Bailey, who grew up in Moore and went on to a career as a journalist and White House correspondent. Her aunt lost her house in the May 3, 1999, twister — the strongest tornado ever recorded — which killed 36 people and caused $1 billion in damage. And Bailey’s family also survived the May 20, 2013, tornado, notorious for being the most costly ever, with damages totaling $2 billion, and for unleashing wind with speeds of 302 mph, the highest ever recorded at the Earth’s surface.

In “The Mercy of the Sky,” Bailey sets out to portray not just tornadoes and their aftermath, but the type of people she grew up with: “resilient survivors, stubborn in their refusal to let nature get the best of them.” In Moore, she notes, folks refer to their searing experiences with Mother Nature by date — “May 3rd” and “May 20th ” — much as New Yorkers and other Americans might talk about 9/11.

Bailey is a solid reporter, and her

RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST

Robert Riley picks through debris in Moore, Okla., after a devastating tornado struck in May 2013.

material is vivid and powerful.

First, there is the terrifyingly fickle behavior of the tornadoes themselves. The book is peppered with examples such as that of the Bhondems. Bailey writes of one house in Moore that was completely obliterated except for its chimney and an adjacentclosetinwhichclothesstill hungundisturbedontheirhangers.

Asshereports,“Theonlysignsomething was amiss was a few spots of mud, spit out by the storm and splattered on a jacket sleeve as innocuously as dots of tomato sauce after a spaghetti dinner.”

Or take the story of 74-year-old Barbara Garcia, who also stayed above ground during the 2013 storm. Her house was demolished, but somehow she managed to survive unhurt. In the commotion, though, she became separated from her beloved dog, Bowser. Miraculously, after the storm passed, he soon wandered back to her through the rubble unscathed.

Up-to-date Doppler radar equipment affords area residents a 16-minute warning as a tornado

approaches, and the heart of the book offers a minute-by-minute account of the lead-up to the 2013 storm. The core narrative centers on the heroism of Amy Simpson and Jennifer Doan, respectively the principal and a third-grade teacher at the Plaza Towers Elementary School, who try valiantly (but ultimately not totally successfully) to protect the children in their care from the impending cataclysm. Their harrowing experiences are well drawn and as riveting and moving as the best page-turning fiction.

But as poignant and wellreported as many of the central stories are, the book is uneven.

Bailey is a first-time author, and her narrative choices don’t hold together as well as they might. The story jumps around in time and location, perhaps in an effort to relate a kind of kaleidoscopic view as the storm arrives. But the result is often to dissipate the drama.

Also, some stories work much better than others.

Bailey has a good feel for the

heroism and strength of her central characters and a journalist’s eye for color. But this reader would have greatly benefited from much more context and science. For all the drama and resilience of the residents of Moore, we want to know more about the how and why — what is known about the science of tornadoes, how many strike annually worldwide and why this part of Oklahoma is so prone to them. To be sure, much remains unknown, but Bailey misses a chance to inform readers with gleanings from the latest research.

Another missed opportunity is the book’s treatment of tornadoes’ relation to climate change — a central question for the residents of Moore and for other citizens of Oklahoma. Bailey takes a pass on the whole subject, dismissing it early and never returning to it. n Shulman, editorial director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, writes the syndicated monthly column “Got Science?” He is the author of six books.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Returning to lives of extravagance

A witch hunt in day-care centers

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

D

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REVIEWED BY

W ENDY S MITH

o we really need to read more about Sara and Gerald Murphy, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s real-life models for the glamorous protagonists of “Tender Is the Night”? There have already been three excellent nonfiction portraits, each of them emphasizing their extended house party on the Riviera for the Lost Generation.

Yet it turns out we can profitably read more. In Liza Klaussmann’s skilled and sensitive new novel, “Villa America,” the Murphys’ famous sociability becomes intriguingly fraught, the expression of a loving, complicated marriage whose intricacies she investigates with the same emotional acumen displayed in her 2012 debut novel, “Tigers in Red Weather.”

“The only life I want is the one we invent for ourselves,” Gerald tells Sara. He’s fleeing a cold, loveless childhood; she’s stifled by parents who want to keep her home.

Early chapters show them both responding intensely to the preWorld War I avant-garde as emblems of the freer, more authentic, more wonderful life they crave.

Once they settle in Cap d’Antibes with their three young children in 1923, Klaussmann paints an attractive picture of their elegantly bohemian existence.

Themed dinners at the home they christen Villa America, bespoke clothes they design themselves, furniture painted unusual colors and arranged like a stage set, cocktails handcrafted by Gerald from “the juices of a few flowers” — for the Murphys, these aesthetic choices are statements about who they are. This selfcreated identity also requires that they be constantly surrounded by their talented friends.

Klaussmann renders palpable the gracious charm that made the Murphys beloved by a veritable Who’s Who of 1920s culture. She employs actor Monty Woolley to pinpoint the Murphys’ central fault line when he tells Gerald: “It doesn’t have to be one thing or the

other. . . . I understand what you have here [with Sara], but you’re also allowed to have something for yourself also. Not like Cole, perhaps.”

Cole Porter unabashedly pursues men while his wife, Linda, seethes; Gerald is more conflicted and confused. Biographers have noted his ambiguous sexuality, but Klaussmann imagines an actual love affair. His passionate romance with Owen Chambers (an invented character) deepens our understanding of the Murphys’ marriage as rooted in shared values as much as their physical relationship. That affair also allows Klaussmann to give us a more skeptical view of those values.

Klaussmann gently acknowledges that the Murphys’ dedication to the art of living has a theatrical aspect: The world they’ve invented is most real to them when they have an audience.

Yet their devotion to each other and their children is no performance; when their son Patrick is diagnosed with tuberculosis, Sara and Gerald’s courage becomes wrenchingly apparent.

Readers of the various Murphy biographies will know that Patrick’s terminal illness was not the only horror visited on his parents, and that they endured, harrowed and quieter, for many decades beyond their heyday on the Riviera.

But Klaussmann closes with a final glimpse of that fragile heyday: a treasure hunt for the children that pulls back the veil of enchantment the Murphys created to reveal the hard work that went into making everyday existence as marvelous as their dreams. Their stylish ways led some to dismiss them as dilettantes, but this empathetic, beautifully written novel contends that style pursued with that level of commitment has a moral substance of its own. n Smith is the author of “Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 19311940.”

T vILLA AMERICA

By Liza Klaussmann Little, Brown. 432 pp. $26

WE BELIEVE THE CHILDREN A Moral Panic in the 1980s

By Richard Beck PublicAffairs. 323 pp. $26.99

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REVIEWED BY

M AURA C ASEY

V news was no friend to those of us who had small children in the 1980s. Allegations of child sexual abuse in day-care centers swept the nation, with high-profile cases in California, North Carolina, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Minnesota and other states, leading to empty playgrounds, hyper-vigilant parents and the implication that behind every tree lurked a pedophile waiting to snatch our children.

Sexual abuse is an awful crime, but the perpetrators are usually relatives or family friends, and less than 1 percent of cases take place in day-care centers. Nonetheless, 30 years ago America was described as experiencing an “epidemic” of sexual abuse in day care.

Richard Beck, an editor at N+1, does a herculean job of investigating why this happened in his absorbing book “We Believe the Children.” Beck makes the case that the sexual abuse trials of the 1980s yoked numerous undercurrents in American society: fear of crime; the decline of respect for traditional authority; homophobia (their homosexuality helped send some day-care workers to prison); the conservative backlash against feminism, which had encouraged women to work outside the home (with its resultant need for day care); and the reality that the patriarchal nuclear family had not just changed, it had become “incoherent.” Many conservative evangelicals believed that “porn, gays, and women had run amok.”

This is quite a list, but Beck does a good job of marshaling the evidence. Throw in, for good measure, journalists who were slow to question allegations that emerged not only of sexual abuse, but also of Satanic rituals and even human sacrifice, particularly in the McMartin Preschool case in Manhattan Beach, Calif., which dragged on for more than six years. The allegations persisted despite the fact that there were no missing people, no bodies and virtually no evidence to bolster the claims.

“We believe the children” became both the unofficial motto of advocates for the prosecution and a catch-all response to those few who asked whether the accusers had completely lost their minds. The approach was based largely on the work of psychiatrist Roland Summit, who claimed that, of every 1,000 children who say they were sexually abused, only two or three are guiltyofinventing or exaggerating. He also said it was normal for children who had been sexually abused to retract their claims and say they made it all up. The upshot: No matter what children said, they were sexually abused, and if you didn’t believe them, something was wrong with you.

Yet “believing the children” glossed over the fact that, often, adults believed only what they wanted to hear. In the McMartin case, social workers interrogated (not too strong a word) the children repeatedly, becoming more bullying with each session.

Police were often no better. In one instance, when a child said “I don’t know” to a question about sexual games, the policeman said: “Did he take your underpants off?

Can you say yes? Say yes.”

Predictably, many children subjected to repeat interviews “confessed” that the abuse happened.

Journalists began to question this by around 1990. It helped that a jury found the McMartin defendants not guilty on 52 counts and deadlocked on 13 others.

Some have drawn parallels between the Salem witch trials of 1692 and the false accusations of sexual abuse that swept America in the 1980s. The difference is this: Those falsely accused in Salem got public apologies from their accusers and reparations. No such luck for the dozens of day-care workers and others who were falsely accused and imprisoned in modernday America. We should be ashamed. n Casey is a former editorial writer for the New York Times.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

What Obama doesn’t get: Iran won’t give up Syria JACKSON DIEHL is deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post. He is an editorial writer specializing in foreign affairs.

With the Iran nuclear deal in hand, President Obama appears ready to focus more of his attention on stemming the wars, mass atrocities and humanitarian catastrophes that have spread across the Middle East during his presidency. He has articulated several big goals he wants to reach before the next president takes office: to put the United States and its allies “on track to defeat” the Islamic State; to “have jump­started a process to resolve the civil war in Syria”; and to defend Israel and other U.S. allies from aggression mounted by Iran and its proxies.

Here’s the problem: The last two of those goals are, as the president conceives them, directly in conflict with each other.

At his post-deal news conference last month, Obama conceded that Iran might use some of the billions it will soon receive to supply the Lebanese Hezbollah militia with fresh weapons, and he vowed to do his best to stop it. “It is in the national security interest of the United States to prevent Iran from sending weapons to Hezbollah,” he said.

At the same time, Obama described the solution to the Syrian war as requiring an “agreement among the major powers that are interested in Syria.” He added, “Iran is one of those players, and I think that it’s important for them to be part of that conversation.”

That remark signaled a reverse of Obama’s previous policy of excluding Iran from Syrian peace talks. At U.S. insistence, Tehran was left out of the two conferences held in Geneva in 2012 and 2014. More important, conceding an Iranian say on Syria contradicted Obama’s goal of stopping its support for Hezbollah. That’s because Iran’s deep and so far unwavering support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad is driven almost entirely by its use of Syria as a land bridge to the Shiite militia.

Hezbollah “is Iran’s aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean,” says Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Syria. The militia deploys tens of thousands of missiles in southern Lebanon aimed at Israel, and it ensures that no government in Lebanon can be formed without Tehran’s consent. Thousands of its fighters are keeping the Assad regime standing in Damascus — not because of any love for Assad’s Alawite sect but to preserve this link to Iran.

Lacking reliable sea access to Lebanon, Iran needs control over the Damascus airport and the border between Syria and Lebanon to ensure Hezbollah’s resupply. That’s why, as it loses ground to rebels in the north and south, the Assad regime’s army — itself now largely an Iranian proxy — has begun to concentrate on defending a narrow strip of territory between Damascus and the border.

Ford and other experts on Syria say Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will never accept a settlement of the Syrian war that strands Hezbollah. To do so would be to surrender Iran’s regional ambitions, including its ability to

ABDALRHMAN ISMAIL FOR REUTERS

Residents sit on a couch on a balcony of a damaged building in Aleppo’s al-Shaar neighborhood in Syria on Aug. 1.

threaten Israel. “Iran’s overall policy . . . is focused rigidly (in Syria) on Hezbollah,” former State Department adviser Frederic Hof, now with the Atlantic Council, wrote me.

So how to agree with Khamenei on Syria’s future?

“What are we supposed to do?” asks Hof. “Help find an alternative to [Assad] who would work with Iran to keep rockets and missiles pointed at Tel Aviv?”

To be sure, Obama’s description of the prospects for diplomacy on Syria start not with Iran but with Russia, the regime’s other principal backer. U.S. officials say the president has had promising conversations with Vladimir Putin on Syria in recent weeks. It’s at least possible to imagine the form a joint U.S.Russian settlement formula might take: Assad would be removed, allowing the nonjihadist opposition to join with a new government in war against the Islamic State.

The problem, as Hof points out, is that Russia lacks the leverage to bring about a change

in the Syrian leadership. The Assad regime is propped up almost entirely at this point by money, weapons and fighters supplied by Iran. And Tehran, says Ford, “is not ready to give up on Assad.” From the Iranian point of view, there is no reason to abandon the regime unless it proves unable to hold Damascus and the border zone. In the rest of the country, Shiite Iran is content — even happy — to watch the Sunni Islamic State and Sunni Syrian rebel forces fight to the death.

The bottom line is that a serious effort to end Syria’s war will require Obama to choose between challenging Iran’s Syrian land bridge to Hezbollah through more vigorous support for anti-Assad forces, or accepting a settlement that tacitly sanctions a continued Iranian proxy army on Israel’s border. Considering his investment in the nuclear deal, it wouldn’t be surprising if he shrinks from both options — and hands a Syrian nightmare to his successor. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

The minimum-wage madness ROBERT J. SAMUELSON writes a weekly column on economics for The washington Post.

Awhile back — in January 1997, to be precise — I wrote a column on the euro, which was to be introduced in 1999. I didn’t find much to like.

It was a “lunatic idea.” A single currency worked in the United States, “because wages are flexible and workers are mobile.” Europe lacked these advantages. Countries would also give up individual movable exchange rates, which compensate for national differences. The potential tragedy was that “the single currency would backfire politically.” Designed to promote European unity, it would do the opposite as countries blamed one another for the failure to achieve unrealistic goals.

Today, this prediction looks pretty good. I return to it not to brag (okay, just a bit) but to highlight the euro’s larger lesson.

Politics and economics routinely operate on different timetables.

What’s politically appealing in the short run can be economically disastrous in the long run.

Certainly, this applies to the euro. Initially, it was immensely popular. As late as 2008, the European Commission issued a report hailing the euro as “a resounding success.” With hindsight, we know that this apparent success was built on unrealistically low interest rates and dubious lending. The longterm economic consequences took time to emerge.

The same perverse cycle has afflicted the United States.

Consider the 1960s. Economists convinced themselves — and the public — that, through government budgets and interest rates, they could minimize recessions and sustain “full employment.” Early success was astounding. By late 1968, unemployment was 3.4 percent.

But this was simply an inflationary boom, not a sophisticated advance in economic management.

Double-digit price increases soon surfaced. We spent 15 years (and four recessions) combating inflation.

All this is relevant now. The obvious parallel is the populist crusade for a $15-an-hour minimum wage. With differing implementation dates, municipal leaders in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle have

approved $15 minimums; the New York Fast Food Wage Board recommends a $15 minimum.

Congressional legislation has been proposed for $12 and $15 minimums.

Let’s be clear. Some increase in the federal minimum is justified.

It’s been at $7.25 since 2009.

Inflation has eroded its value 10 percent since then and 24 percent since its peak year of 1968, says the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. But raising it to $15 (a doubling), or even $12 (a twothirds increase), would be a radical act that front-loads the benefits and back-loads the costs.

In 2014, about 3 million workers were paid the minimum or less; that’s 2 percent of 146 million workers. If the minimum had been set at $15 — and including workers just over the new minimum whose wages employers would probably raise — the number of affected workers would have been 59 million, or 40 percent. The immediate political benefits are clear. But is the federal government smart enough to set wages for two-fifths of workers? Can it recognize the circumstances of individual industries and firms? I doubt it.

With time, job losses would mount. Some companies would become unprofitable and shrink or close. Others would automate.

Some start-ups would be scrapped. How many jobs would be lost is guesswork. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a $10.10 minimum (President Obama’s proposal) would cut employment by about 500,000. The American Action Forum, a right-leaning think tank that says it followed CBO’s methodology, calculates that a $12 minimum would cost 1.3 million jobs and a $15 minimum would cost 3.3 million.

A central problem of modern democracies is to reconcile politics and economics. Politics has a short-term bias. Future dangers are discounted because they are usually distant and hypothetical. Meanwhile, the present’s rewards are immediate and tangible. But economic logic ultimately imposes its own reality.

What history shows is that undoing past mistakes is hard. In the United States, the crushing of inflationary expectations was wrenching — unemployment in the 1981-1982 recession peaked at 10.8 percent. As for the euro, it’s entrenched in Europe’s political culture and financial institutions, even if it’s a drag on the economy.

We should hope the plans to improve minimum wages do not lead us to a similar blunder and that common sense triumphs over expediency. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

The GOP’s man of the moment DAN BALZ is chief correspondent at The Washington Post.

CLEVELAND — The first Republican debate of the 2016 campaign appeared to leave the nomination contest just as it was before.

Donald Trump brought the same sharp tongue and controversial style that has propelled him to the top of the polls in the Republican nomination contest. He was outspoken, bombastic and unapologetic.

He did exactly what he had been doing. From here forward, the others in the race might be forced to recalibrate their assessments of whether Trump is a comet flashing across the political skies or someone who eventually will have to be confronted directly in order to stop him.

Anyone who thought a calmer, cooler — yes, more presidential — Trump would show up in Cleveland on Thursday night was probably as surprised as they were earlier this summer when he left his rivals in the dust in poll after poll. Instead, Trump brought himself, although he seemed willing to test the potential limits of his appeal.

Trump refused to pledge to support the eventual nominee of the party (unless, he said, he is the nominee). Nor would he decline to pledge that, if he isn’t the nominee, he will not run an independent campaign.

He also challenged his Fox News questioners. At one point he seemed to cross a line when he sarcastically responded to Megyn Kelly. He later offered a tutorial to Chris Wallace about

business and bankruptcy laws.

The businessman and reality TV star was just one of 10 candidates on the stage. At times, he was a mere bystander to sharp exchanges and scintillating moments involving the others, including a tense and high-octane argument between New Jersey Gov. Christie and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky about the balance between national security and civil liberties.

That exchange was by far the most arresting moment of the night, and it allowed each candidate to position himself exactly as he wanted to be positioned. But even in less contentious moments, the debate revealed differences among the candidates that, as the primary season nears, will

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY DARRIN BELL FOR THE WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP

generate more heat, whether in ads or on stages.

Everyone on this stage came with something to prove, and many found moments to put their core message and rationale before the audience.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush defended his positions on immigration, which are at odds with the base of his party. Ohio Gov. John Kasich won applause with an impassioned statement about loving someone who is gay even while opposing same-sex marriage.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker made repeated appeals to the party base. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas charted his anti-Washington course with vigor. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida offered himself as the candidate for the future.

Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, was relegated to an earlier debate because of low poll numbers. As the only woman on either stage Thursday, Fiorina naturally stood out, but it was the way she handled herself that distinguished her from the others. In a more perfect world, Fiorina would have earned a place in Thursday’s prime-time debate after her performance in the warm-up session.

The opening debate of any campaign is nothing more than

that, a beginning — two hours of collective activity after months of testing messages before audiences a tiny fraction of the one that tuned in on Thursday night. Historically, these early debates have proven to be more helpful for candidates to introduce themselves than for voters to draw conclusions.

But every debate counts in some way, even if it is because it does not fundamentally change the dynamic of the race.

That appeared to be the case Thursday. Trump committed no major mistakes. If he was overbearing at times, well, that has been part of his appeal. If he was impolitic at other times — bragging about buying access to politicians or taking personal advantage of the bankruptcy laws — he has done that before.

How long Trump’s moment lasts is anybody’s guess. Those who hoped he would disappear quickly have been disappointed.

Those who think he will yet fade away or blow himself up might still be proved correct. Those who fear for the party the longer he is a candidate have more to worry about.

There are any number of candidates who wait and hope to rise if he falls. But for now, Trump remains a force to be reckoned with. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Dropping the atomic bomb BY

G REGG H ERKEN

Seventy years ago this past Thursday, on Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Another bomb fell 70 years ago today on Nagasaki. Decades later, controversy and misinformation still surround the decision to use nuclear weapons during World War II.

1

The bomb ended the war.

The notion that the atomic bombs caused the Japanese surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, has been, for many Americans and virtually all U.S. history textbooks, the default understanding of how and why the war ended. But minutes of the meetings of the Japanese government reveal a more complex story. The latest and best scholarship on the surrender, based on Japanese records, concludes that the Soviet Union’s unexpected entry into the war against Japan on Aug. 8 was probably an even greater shock to Tokyo than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima two days earlier. Until then, the Japanese had been hoping that the Russians — who had previously signed a nonaggression pact with Japan — might be intermediaries in negotiating an end to the war.

The two events together — plus the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Aug. 9 — were decisive in making the case for surrender.

2

The bomb saved half a million American lives.

In his postwar memoirs, former president Harry Truman recalled how military leaders had told him that a half-million Americans might be killed in an invasion of Japan. This figure has become canonical among those seeking to justify the bombing. But it is not supported by military estimates of the time. As Stanford historian Barton Bernstein has noted, the U.S.

Joint War Plans Committee predicted in mid-June 1945 that the invasion of Japan, set to begin Nov. 1, would result in 193,000 U.S. casualties, including 40,000 deaths.

3

The only alternative to the bomb was an invasion of Japan.

The decision to use nuclear weapons is usually presented as either/or: either drop the bomb or land on the beaches. But beyond simply continuing the conventional bombing and naval blockade of Japan, there were two other options recognized at the time.

The first was a demonstration of the atomic bomb prior to or instead of its military use: exploding the bomb on an uninhabited island or in the desert, in front of invited observers from Japan and other countries; or using it to blow the top off Mount Fuji, outside Tokyo. The demonstration option was rejected for practical reasons. There were only two bombs available in August 1945, and the demonstration bomb might turn out to be a dud.

The second alternative was accepting a conditional surrender by Japan. The United States knew from intercepted communications that the Japanese were most concerned that Emperor Hirohito not be treated as a war criminal. The “emperor clause” was the final obstacle to Japan’s capitulation.

Although the United States ultimately got Japan’s unconditional surrender, the emperor clause was, in effect, granted after the fact.

NAGASAKI ATOMIC BOMB MUSEUM VIA EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

A mushroom cloud forms after another atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945, three days after one exploded in Hiroshima, killing tens of thousands of people in seconds.

4

The Japanese were warned before the bomb was dropped.

The United States had dropped leaflets over many Japanese cities, urging civilians to flee, before hitting them with conventional bombs. After the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945, which called on the Japanese to surrender, leaflets warned of “prompt and utter destruction” unless Japan heeded that order. In a radio address, Truman also told of a coming “rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this Earth.” These actions have led many to believe that civilians were meaningfully warned of the pending nuclear attack.

But there was never any specific warning to the cities that had been chosen as targets for the atomic bomb prior to the weapon’s first use. The omission was deliberate: The United States feared that the Japanese, being forewarned, would shoot down the planes carrying the bombs.

5

The bomb was timed to gain a diplomatic advantage over Russia and proved a “master card” in early Cold War politics.

This claim argues that U.S. policymakers hoped the bomb might end the war against Japan before the Soviet entry into the conflict gave the Russians a significant role in a postwar peace settlement. Using the bomb would also impress the Russians. In reality, military planning dictated the timing of the attacks.

Truman’s secretary of state, James Byrnes, hoped that the bomb might prove to be a “master card” in subsequent diplomatic dealings with the Soviet Union — but was disappointed. In September 1945, Byrnes returned from the first postwar meeting of foreign ministers, lamenting that the Russians were “stubborn, obstinate, and they don’t scare.” n

Herken is an emeritus professor of U.S. diplomatic history at the University of California.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2015

24

Where else can you visit 33 wineries in just 3 hours?

At the Wenatchee Wine & Food Festival, you’ll have the opportunity to sample over 100 wines, plus craft beers, distilled spirits, amazing food and more.

It's the best ticket value in town.

ERRANT CELLARS • EAGLE CREEK WINERY • JONES OF WASHINGTON • BEAUMONT CELLARS • GINKGO FOREST VILLA MONACO WINERY • BRENDER CANYON VINEYARD • SILVARA VINEYARD • TUNNEL HILL WINERY • BENSON VINEYARDS SNOWGRASS WINERY • CRAYELLE CELLARS • LEGEND CELLARS • STEMILT CREEK WINERY • VIENTO RIDGE VIN DU LAC • MARTIN-SCOTT WINERY • CAVE B ESTATE WINERY • PLAIN CELLARS • GOOSE RIDGE ESTATE WINERY RYAN PATRICK VINEYARDS • MILBRANDT VINEYARDS • OKANOGAN ESTATE & VINEYARDS • KESTREL VINTNERS WINERY MALAGA SPRINGS WINERY • CHATEAU FAIRE LE PONT • TSILLAN CELLARS • WEDGE MOUNTAIN LOST RIVER WINERY • HORAN ESTATES WINERY • ESTHER BRICQUES WINERY • RIO VISTA WINES • VOILA WINERY

Saturday, August 22

6pm to 9pm

Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

Tickets $45 each Presented by

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G R E A T W I N E. G R E A T F O O D. G R E A T F U N. Callie Klein & Frank Verebi Financial Representatives