The Washington Post National Weekly - Oct. 18, 2015

Worst Week Lincoln Chafee 3

Politics Ryan’s balancing act 4

Nation Putting preschool online 8

Pets Where do cat & dog lovers live? 17

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2015

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

unintended effects

California’s Proposition 47 has reduced prison crowding, but courts have become clogged with repeat offenders PAGE 12

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WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Lincoln Chafee

by Chris Cillizza

“I

have been a block of granite,” Lincoln Chafee insisted Tuesday night in his opening remarks at the first Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas. His performance over the next 21/2 hours proved he was anything but.

The former Rhode Island governor and senator came into the debate with extremely low expectations — the result of his showing of less than 1 percent in most state and national polls — and managed to underperform even them.

His worst moment — and one of the worst moments I have ever witnessed in a debate — came when CNN moderator Anderson Cooper asked Chafee to defend his 1999 vote for legislation that loosened regulations on big banks and followed up to ask whether he’d really known what he was voting for.

“I’d just arrived at the Senate,” Chafee appeared to concede. “My dad had died. I’d been appointed by the governor. It was the first vote, and it was 90­5.”

But, Chafee wasn’t done! Asked about his vote in support of the USA Patriot Act, he came up with this doozy of an explanation: “That was another 99­to­1 vote.”

One thing we do know for sure: If everyone jumped off a bridge, Chafee would, too.

No, Chafee wasn’t winning the Democratic nomination before this debate, and he isn’t winning it afterward. But, long­shot candidates can still help or

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JOHN LOCHER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

harm themselves based on how they perform when the bright lights come on. Chafee hurt himself, badly.

Lincoln Chafee, for crumbling under pressure, 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 2, No. 1

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY HISTORY BOOKS OPINION CHECKPOINT

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER A California law intended to reduce prison crowding and provide compassion for lowlevel criminals has become a “virtual get-out-of-jail-free” card, according to one police chief.

Photograph by ISTOCKPHOTO

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POLITICS

At home, Ryan walks a fine line A MY G OLDSTEIN Janesville, Wis. BY

W

hen he leaves Washington on Friday afternoons, Paul Ryan, the Republican representing Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, flies to Milwaukee and picks up the Chevy Suburban he parks at the airport. He drives the 70 miles southwest to his home town and, not infrequently, picks up dinner for his family at the drive-through window of the Italian House.

Tortellini, salad and garlic cheese bread are his favorites, according to the restaurant’s owner, who has known Ryan since he was a teenager. The Italian House has a wall, painted to look like red bricks, and graduates of Joseph A. Craig High School, just around the corner, are allowed to chalk their name. “Paul Ryan ’88” is scrawled on a brick about halfway up the wall. His older brother, “Toby Ryan ’83,” is near the top.

The stately Greek Revival that Ryan shares with his wife, Janna, and their three young children is separated by nothing more than a small patch of woods from the house where he grew up. His daughter and two sons attend St. John Vianney Catholic School, attached to the stone-walled church where he was an altar boy during his childhood and where he still attends Mass many weekends.

As the nation’s most powerful Republicans lean on the conservative, wonkish Ryan to run for House speaker, his hesitance, in his own portrayal, lies in an inner conflict between the demands of the role and his devotion to his family life back home. Ryan’s attachment to Janesville has been central to his political narrative since he was first elected to Congress at age 28, but there is also an ideological tension that courses through his relationship with his home town.

As Janesville’s most famous native son, Ryan is widely admired as a good guy, a smart man, a caring father and a member of a sprawling and prominent family. But many in town dislike his politics.

He is a rigorous fiscal and social

ANDY MANIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

What wins friends in Janesville, Wis., may complicate bid for speaker conservative in an old union town.

The mismatch has taken on a sharper edge at times, since thousands of the jobs that gave the town its blue-collar hue faded away with the closing seven years ago of a General Motors plant that had been turning out Chevrolets since 1923.

Ryan has always been aware of that political misalignment, and he has walked a fine line, being a committed conservative thinker while avoiding any role as an ideological movement leader. He has sought to build his conservative chops on tax and entitlement policies, budgetary acumen and, more recently, a right-leaning take on easing poverty.

Agree with his politics or not, people in his home town understand this about Ryan, leading some to guess that he will decide not to seek the speaker’s role.

“A policy wonk is the antithesis of what is needed for the speaker’s job,” Janice Pierce, 61, said last Sunday as she came out of Citrus Cafe, a Main Street breakfast spot.

Although she is a liberal Democrat who disagrees with almost everything Ryan represents politically, she said she finds him affable and congenial. She predicted that if he became speaker, “he’d be a casualty within three months.” Hardline conservatives in the House, she said, “don’t want affable. They want a fighter.”

Paul Ryan (striped shirt) is seen in 1987 in high school in Janesville, Wis. Some there doubt he has the combative mentality to be House speaker.

The 1st District stretches far enough north into solid Republican turf that in his eight reelection bids there has never been much doubt about his victories. It is not a swing district by any measure, but the tensions are evident. A few years ago, hecklers tailed Ryan as he walked down Main Street with his family at an annual Labor Fest parade. And on Election Day 2012, when his name appeared on ballots here twice — as the Republican vice presidential nominee, as well as for reelection to the House — Janesville and even his own ward voted against him for both.

Ryan has not mentioned these home-front dynamics as a factor in his deliberations about wheth-

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2015

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POLITICS er to run for speaker. Just before he flew to Wisconsin at the end of the other week, he said that he would talk things over with his wife and colleagues and that he was eager to get home for dinner.

But the reality is that if Ryan seeksthespeaker’sgavel,thispolitician who has been too conservative for his home town will face the opposite challenge in Washington: suspicion from a rebellious faction within the House GOP that he is not conservative enough.

Here in Janesville, Ryan and people he runs into, doing normalguy-at-home things around town, have a method of bridging the ideological gaps. They tend to avoid talk of politics, an option not viable on Capitol Hill if he were to become speaker.

He has been stopping in for years at Hunt ’n Gear, along the Milton Avenue commercial strip that runs north from downtown.

He gets his Mathews bow tuned up for hunting season. He has outfitted his daughter, Liza, and his older son, Charlie, with youth bows. A few weeks ago, he picked up a gift for friends with whom he had been camping, getting a shirt by a bow manufacturer called Hoyt for a kid named Hoyt.

Carrie Hookstead, who owns the shop with her husband, Russ, and was two years ahead of Ryan in high school, said that the only time she has broached politics with him was to mention that a cousin, a conservative recent college graduate, was working in Washington. “You’ve got another one out there,” Hookstead remembers telling him.

On Saturday nights, Ryan and his family — or he and Janna and another couple or two — frequently drive out to the Buckhorn. He has called it his favorite restaurant in the world. One of a breed of revered, old-fashioned Wisconsin eateries known as supper clubs, the Buckhorn features megawatt sunsets over Lake Koshkonong, and prime rib and lobster tail that Ryan adores.

Chico Pope, who has owned the restaurant with his wife for 19 years, happens to agree with Ryan politically but can recall only one time he mentioned a political concern. Two days before Christmas in 2013, the congressman called Pope and asked whether he could come over to get advice on preparing a holiday prime rib for his wife’s family. While selling Ryan

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

“A policy wonk is the antithesis of what is needed for the speaker’s job.”

Janice Pierce, resident of Janesville, Wis. MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

a small amount of meat rub and au jus,Popeaskedaquestionrelatedto immigration on behalf of a friend.

Edmund Halabi, who has owned the Italian House for 28 years, said, “I’m sure that [politics] is the last thing he wants to hear when he gets home.” At the carry-out window, Halabi said, he simply tells Ryan: “Welcome back.

Enjoy your meal.”

Inevitably, politics will bubble up sometimes. On the Saturday morning in August 2012 when GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney announced Ryan as his running mate, Halabi was at the restaurant, so he called his wife and asked her to post something on its Facebook page. “Congratulations to Paul Ryan!!!” they

wrote. “We are proud to have someone from Janesville, Wisconsin to represent the USA . . . he is a big fan of the Italian House.”

As a small-business owner, with customers of all political stripes, Halabi knows that it’s best to stay neutral. He thought he and his wife were just praising a loyal customer.

So, after a day off that Sunday, when he reopened the restaurant Monday morning, he was astonished. “All day long, we were getting nothing but hate calls, people saying, ‘We will never step in your restaurant again.’ ” Ryan may be out of sync with the prevailing politics, but his roots here are deep. He likes to say that he is a fifth-generation Janesville resident. He comes from an

Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), seen at top this month at the Capitol and above with his family during the 2012 Republican National Convention, is being pushed by some Republicans to run for House speaker.

KLMNO WEEKLY

arm of one of three local families known here, collectively, as the Irish mafia for their outsize roles in construction trades going back more than a century.

His family’s home on Courthouse Hill, with its Victorians on a bluff rising above the river and Main Street, belonged to a scion of the founder of the Parker Pen Co., which opened downtown in the late 19th century and kept going until its last vestiges in town moved to Mexico five years ago. And his father put himself through law school on summertime wages from the GM assembly line.

These longtime industries, with workers handing down coveted union jobs one generation to the next, created many families like the Ryans, with aunts and uncles and cousins all around. That has made it hard for many to leave Janesville.

It is “his refuge, his heart,” Janna Ryan told the local newspaper, the Janesville Gazette, late in the summer, before House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) announced that he would be leaving Congress, before Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) stepped up to run for speaker and then abruptly stepped down, and before calls crescendoed the other week throughout the GOP for Ryan to fill the startling vacuum at the chamber’s helm.

“It’s his oxygen to be here and be with his family,” his wife said.

Over the recent holiday weekend, his only public appearance was at a Columbus Day event elsewhere in his district. At other times, he has spoken about the hometown tug. In spring 2013, he gave the keynote talk at the annual dinner of Forward Janesville, the main business association. It was about homesickness on the vice presidential campaign trail and the pleasures of coming home.

“There’s a reason,” he said that night, “why people come from around the country, from around the world . . . and then become addicted to this town and then stay . . . and plant roots . . . and then their kids stay in this town.

“There’s a reason; you can’t put your finger on it. But if there’s anything that Janna and I learned during this campaign, in this town, a Democratic town and, believe me, I’m a Republican, I know this . . . it’s the absolute warmth, the hospitality, the community, the togetherness. . . . That’s what makes it home.” n

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POLITICS

Marco Rubio paces himself P HILIP R UCKER Las Vegas BY

A

fter watching Marco Rubio deliver his uplifting stump speech at a retirement community here recently, Howard Dickerson, 80, turned to his wife, Alice, and said, “He’s the one.”

“He’s got the whole package,” Dickerson said. “He leaves you feeling like you’re in good hands. I am sold on him, I’ll tell you.”

The next day, a similar reaction: “He speaks from the heart — and it’s smooth, without the hems and haws how most Americans speak,” Marcia Friedman, an artist and writer, said after seeing Rubio campaign at a Cuban restaurant here. “He just exudes a trustworthiness.”

As Republicans harp on the vulnerabilities of their leading presidential candidates — Jeb Bush’s dynastic pedigree and campaign-trail mishaps, for instance, or Donald Trump’s and Ben Carson’s preparedness to be commander in chief — they are beginning to give Rubio a serious look.

The crowds at Rubio’s events are bigger and more enthusiastic than before. His debate performances were widely acclaimed. He is ticking up in the polls ever so slightly. To Republicans in search of an electable standard-bearer to win back the White House, Rubio represents a basket of potential — the GOP’s great Barack Obamalike hope.

Yet Rubio is largely untested on the national stage. He has not faced the intense media scrutiny that front-runners attract. His rivals are only beginning to attack: Trump called him “a lightweight,” while Bush belittled his leadership experience and spotty Senate attendance record.

Perhaps the biggest obstacles for Rubio are his parallels with Obama. It has become Republican gospel that Obama is in over his head as president, so it remains to be determined whether the party would nominate in 2016 its own charismatic, first-term senator without executive experience.

DAVID BECKER/REUTERS

The GOP senator is gaining momentum, but can he go the distance?

Unlike some of his opponents, Rubio has no natural base of support, nor has he settled on a particular state that he sees as ripe for an early win. Rubio is raising significantly less money than Bush and some other candidates — and though his campaign boasts of its frugality, the downside is his organization on the ground is more shallow.

The question this fall, then, is whether Rubio can go the distance.

Will his momentum, as ephemeral as it may seem today, eventually grow into a durable and lasting movement? Can Rubio fulfill his promise, as encapsulated by Time magazine’s 2013 cover anointing him “The Republican Savior”?

“Marco Rubio is in position to be the Republican nominee,” said Steve Schmidt, a strategist on the

George W. Bush and John McCain presidential campaigns. “The challenge is to be prepared for the moment in time where his numbers climb rapidly, which is in my view almost certain to happen.”

To break out from the big GOP pack, many candidates have chased headlines — rushing to the aid of imprisoned Kentucky clerk Kim Davis or to disavow birthright citizenship.

Not Rubio. This 44-year-old son of Cuban immigrants is a storyteller and believes in the persuasive power of his personal narrative.

His campaign has been cautious, with each potential move weighed as to whether it serves his own story.

“You can go after the latest shining object or stay focused and execute your plan,” said Nevada

Marco Rubio, a Republican presidential candidate and senator from Florida, greets supporters after speaking in Las Vegas this month.

Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison, Rubio’s state campaign chairman. “He needs to stay focused.”

On a recent Thursday night in Summerlin, a master-planned community on the outskirts of Las Vegas, Rubio cast himself as an agent of change. “If we keep electing the same kind of people, the next person in line, the person they tell us we’ve got to vote for, nothing is going to change,” he said.

If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. On the stump in October, Rubio gives nearly the same speech he gave in downtown Miami when he first announced his presidential campaign in April.

One might call this boring or robotic, but the Rubio team sees it as consistent and disciplined. He is trying not to peak now. Rubio’s

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POLITICS strategy is to become the momentum candidate at just the right moment: Not in October, not in November, but right around New Year’s, before Republicans start caucusing and voting on Feb. 1.

A talented communicator, Rubio can sweep audiences off their feet. During a recent luncheon speech, for example, a chef and server came out from the kitchen to listen and record videos of him.

But his allies see a risk in overexposure, concerned that the chills his crowds feel might wear off if he is in the spotlight month after month.

“Timing is an underappreciated virtue in presidential campaigns,” Schmidt said. “The issue for the ultimate nominee of the party is not about getting to the top of the polls; it’s maintaining your position at the top of the polls when that moment comes.”

Rubio’s performances are rehearsed orations of policy pronouncements and personal anecdotes. He peppers his talks with catchy, relatable examples.

Jeff Hartson, 54, a handyman, said, “I like just about everything he stands for. I’m really optimistic about Marco. . . . He doesn’t come from wealth or privilege. He understands why the United States was founded and why it’s the greatest country on Earth.”

Rubio was speaking from inside the gates of the Canyon Gate Country Club. From his podium, he could look out to the perfectly manicured and well-watered golf course. Red tile-roofed McMansions were sprinkled all around and, off in the distance, rose the mountains of Red Rock Canyon.

It was a heady scene for a candidate who, as he told this crowd, spent part of his childhood in a different Las Vegas. His mother cleaned rooms at the old Imperial Palace and his father tended bar at Sam’s Town, a low-end casino off the Strip.

“For me, the journey from behind that bar to the life I live today — that is the essence of the American Dream,” Rubio said. “That journey is what makes America different and special, and it also is what unifies us.”

When Rubio opened up the room for questions, the first came from a man in the back.

“Mr. President,” he began.

The crowd laughed, and Rubio corrected him.

“Marco,” he said, “for now.” n

CAMPAIGN

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2016 THE FIX

Debate winners, losers BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

T

he five Democrats running for president debated for the first time Tuesday night, a surprisingly spirited affair despite its lack of Donald Trump. This is some of the best and the worst from the Las Vegas Strip.

WINNERS Hillary Rodham Clinton: This was the best two hours of her candidacy to date. Clinton was confident, relaxed and good-natured. She was aggressive from the start and savaged Sanders on his past votes on guns.

She also got some help from Sanders — most notably on the controversy surrounding her e-mail server. Sanders said he didn’t care about the issue, voters didn’t care about the issue and no one wanted to talk about it. Clinton couldn’t have said it better herself. And when Lincoln Chafee tried to go back at Clinton on e-mails, she scored the moment of the debate when she curtly responded “no” when asked if she wanted to respond to his comments.

She also smartly turned at least three questions into broad-scale attacks on Republicans, effectively playing the uniter role for the party — and winning a ton of applause in the process. Not everything Clinton did was pitch perfect. Her “I represented Wall Street” line will probably be used in an ad against her, and her inability to cite anything other than her gender to differentiate her presidency from that of Obama was not so good. Still, Clinton was head and shoulders above everyone else on the stage as a debater.

And it wasn’t close.

Bernie Sanders: If you were a Democrat who wanted to learn more about the Vermont socialist via the debate, he gave you plenty to like. Sanders is a true believer in liberal ideas, and you can feel his passion when you watch him.

His “I don’t want to hear anymore about your damn e-mails” line to Clinton was, probably, the biggest applause line of the night and was probably replayed roughly 1 billion times over the next 24 to 48 hours. In terms of pure interest — as it relates to what people were searching for during the debate — there’s no question this was a good night for Sanders.

At the same time, Sanders showed that he is a somewhat limited candidate. He looked totally lost on foreign policy — even when moderator Anderson Cooper teed him up a question on Russia and Vladimir Putin. Sanders is great when he is talking about economic inequality and climate change.

When he is talking about anything else, he’s sort of eh.

Barack Obama: Not only did he get a chance to address the crowd — by video! — at the start of the debate, but there was almost zero attempt by any of the five candidates to distance themselves from Obama — at all. Clinton, who was being closely watched to see where and how she put distance between herself and her former boss, did almost none of that during the debate.

Her answer on why she wouldn’t be a third term for Obama began with her pledge to continue many of his policies.

Denmark: The Danes were mentioned constantly in the first half hour of the debate. Take that, Norway and Sweden!

Five-candidate debates: Less is more when it comes to candidates on a debate stage. The five people on stage Tuesday night each had a chance to outline their basic vision for the country and to litigate out the disagreements they have. Contrast that with the 11-person Republican debate from last month where chaos reigned. If you were a Republican without a rooting interest in the current field, you had to think that the sooner your field thins, the better.

LOSERS Martin O’Malley: The former governor of Maryland needed a moment in this debate to break out of the 1 percent crowd. He didn’t get one. Oddly, O’Malley sounded the most like a politician of anyone on the stage even though he is the only one who has never spent any time in office in the nation’s capital. O’Malley seemed overly low-key in the first hour of the debate. He never really seemed committed to attacking Clinton, even over his past comments about the presidency not being a crown handed back and forth between two families. It was a “blah” performance for someone who needed a lot more than that.

Joe Biden: If the vice president was hoping for a stumble out of Clinton as he contemplates the race, he didn’t get one. And I think it’s reasonable to ask whether, by not announcing before the debate, Biden may have missed his moment to strike when Clinton was at her weakest.

Lincoln Chafee: Holy cow. I had low expectations for the former Rhode Island governor going into the debate, but he managed to underperform even those. His explanation for his vote in favor of Glass-Steagall — it was right when he came to the Senate and every one deserves a “takeover” — is one of the five worst debate answers I have ever heard. Chafee’s explanation of his vote for the Patriot Act — basically, everyone voted for it — would have been terrible if he hadn’t already bombed the Glass-Steagall question. A genuinely awful performance.

Countdown clocks: Look, CNN. If you are going to have a clock that counts down the days, hours and minutes until the debate starts, then stick to the actual start time. n

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NATION

In Utah, preschool without the school Online program aims to provide cheap education and to reach children in rural areas

BY

E MMA B ROWN

C

an 4-year-olds learn what they need to know for kindergarten by sitting in front of a computer for 15 minutes a day?

Utah is betting they can. This year, more than 6,600 children across the state are learning by logging on to laptops at home in a taxpayer-funded online preschool program that is unlike any other.

This is preschool without circle time on the carpet, free play with friends and real, live teachers. In online preschool, children navigate through a series of lessons, games and songs with the help of a computer mouse and two animated raccoons named Rusty and Rosy.

The Obama administration last year awarded an $11.5 million grant to expand the online program into rural communities to study how well it prepares children for kindergarten. Schools in South Carolina are testing it, and Idaho lawmakers are considering a pilot program.

It’s a sign of the growing interest among educators in using technology to customize learning, even for the youngest children. It also gives children who might otherwise not get any preparation for elementary school a chance to experience an academic program. But it’s also missing some ingredients — especially social and emotional learning — that many experts and parents consider central to the education of young children.

Utah’s approach, which is far cheaper than traditional preschool programs and can reach students in the state’s most remote areas, is to some critics an example of a common problem: Lawmakers want to harness the oft-touted benefits of early-childhood education without investing enough to ensure quality.

“It’s wishful thinking by state legislatures,” said Steven Barnett, the director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

“We want preschool, we want to get these great results, but we don’t actually want to spend the money.”

State Sen. Howard A. Stephen-

ISTOCKPHOTO

$11.5 million

Grant awarded by the Obama administration last year to expand the online program into rural communities to study how well it prepares children for kindergarten.

son (R), who sponsored the bill that created the Utah program, sees it differently. Utah is one of 10 states that lack a state-funded traditional preschool program. In its K-12 schools, Utah spends just $6,252 per student, which is less than any other state and twothirds of the national average.

“We want to reach the greatest number of children with the resources that we have,” Stephenson said. “I don’t think we’re being cheap at all. We’re being smart.”

CalledUpstart—orUtahPreparingStudentsTodayforaRewarding Tomorrow — the program has grown quickly since its inception in 2008, bolstered by external evaluations that have shown early literacy gains among children who use it. It is a program of the Waterford Institute, a Utah-based nonprofit center that has long sold instructional software to K-12 schools.

Upstart will cost about $5.3 million this year, or about $800 per student. That is about half the cost of Arizona’s state-funded traditional preschool program, which is the least-expensive in the country, and a fraction of Washington, D.C.’s universal preschool program, which costs $15,000 per student, according to Barnett’s early

education research center at Rutgers.

Waterford provides participating families with software and parent training sessions and, if need be, laptops and Internet access. The nonprofit also has installed solar panels for several students whose homes do not have electricity.

Public preschool programs have been expanding nationwide as policymakers have come to see earlychildhood education as key to closing persistent achievement gaps between children from poor and affluent families.

Research shows that at-risk children who attend high-quality preschools are more likely to have positive life outcomes than their counterparts who do not attend preschool. They are more likely to graduate from high school and less likely to get into trouble with the law or to go to jail.

But Barnett and other earlyeducation experts said that those powerful effects stemnotonlyfrom the academic boost that preschools can provide but also from the social and emotional skills — such as selfcontrol — that young children learn when they play and negotiate with their peers in person.

It is not clear whether or how an online learning program can teach those kinds of skills; evaluations of Upstart have not measured what children learn in that realm.

Claudia Miner, a Waterford vice president, said Upstart officials teach parents how they can bolster their children’s social skills. But she said that lawmakers are most interested in the program’s potential effect on literacy.

“You don’t measure social skills in third grade; you measure reading skills,” she said in an e-mail.

Miner added that some parents simply are not ready to send their 4-year-olds to school, but they also want help to prepare them for kindergarten. And other families, particularly in Utah, live in such far-flung places that sending their children to a traditional preschool is not realistic or affordable.

“In some of the most rural parts of Utah and the country, there simply isn’t a bricks-and-mortar option or, if there is, it involves a long travel time,” Miner said.

About half of the children who participated in Upstart during the 2014-2015schoolyearwereenrolled in another preschool program.

Mark Innocenti, a professor at Utah State University, was skeptical about using scarce state funds to pay for an educational model with unproven results for lowincome students. But after evaluating whether the program is effective when used in home day care and district-run preschool programs, his thinking has changed.

Innocenti said he has been convinced that combining online learning with traditional preschool is a valid approach that gives children the best of both worlds. But he said he remains concerned about relying on an inhome computer program to serve the poorest children, especially those whose parents work or speak English as a second language.

Stephenson said the cost of traditional preschool limits how many of the state’s 50,000 4-yearolds can be served.

“We can cover a lot more children with the same dollars with Upstart,” he said. n

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NATION

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The man behind the hidden camera BY

S ANDHYA S OMASHEKHAR

T

he slim young man with the Clark Kent glasses mingled easily at the conference of abortion providers. By day, he sat quietly in his company’s booth, under a sign festooned with a burbling lab flask.

By night, he schmoozed with presenters at the swanky hotel bar.

If people noticed that he seemed a bit stiff, they tended to write it off as an odd physical tic. In fact, David Daleiden was probably trying to keep his hidden camera straight.

Daleiden, 26, is the antiabortion activist who masterminded the recent undercover campaign aimed at proving that Planned Parenthood illegally sells what he calls aborted “baby body parts.” He captured intimate details of the famously guarded organization, hobnobbing at conferences so secretive that they require background checks and talking his way into a back laboratory at a Colorado clinic where he picked through the remains of aborted fetuses and displayed them luridly for the camera.

Daleiden’s videos landed like a bomb in Washington this summer, providing fodder for a crowded field of Republican presidential contenders and energizing social conservatives on Capitol Hill.

They also shed harsh new light on the venerable women’s health organization, capturing officials sipping wine while joking about abortion and appearing to haggle over the price of fetal tissue.

This past week, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards announced that the group would continue to donate tissue for medical research but would no longer accept compensation for storing and delivering the specimens. She said the organization has done nothing wrong but decided to take this step to disarm its critics.

Daleiden saw things in darker tones. “It’s pretty much an admission of guilt,” he said.

Before emerging as the biggest star in the antiabortion firmament, Daleiden had long been a bit player. A Catholic and Southern California native who drives a

CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

David Daleiden, 26, set up an elaborate ruse to infiltrate the guarded world of abortion providers Honda hybrid, Daleiden calls himself an investigative journalist and credits his California public school education with fomenting in him a passion for human rights.

At the conservative Values Voter Summit in Washington late last month, Daleiden wore his signature dark blazer and skinny black tie and a pair of “Nightmare Before Christmas” socks. During a break, he described himself as the result of a “crisis pregnancy,” born while his parents were in their junior year of college.

“I always grew up with the understanding that some people have kids in less than fully intended situations and there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said.

At 15, he said, he Googled images of aborted fetuses — an exploration that cemented his antiabortion views. While studying at Claremont McKenna College, he began fixating on Planned Parenthood. He got a job with Live Action, an antiabortion nonprofit group led by a fellow millennial

that made its name by mounting undercover “stings” against Planned Parenthood. In 2009, Daleiden was kicked off the neighboring Pomona College campus after aggressively questioning a Planned Parenthood official who had been invited to speak.

And something else happened in college: While on assignment for a professor, Daleiden wound up at a conference on stem cell research where a presenter mentioned that the results of her work had been drawn from the brains of aborted fetuses.

“I thought, wait, did I hear that right?” he recalled.

His horror stuck with him for years, as did what he sees as a cruel paradox — that when it comes to a fetus, “its humanity isn’t considered valid, yet it’s precisely that same humanity that makes it valuable for experimentation.”

He soon began to hatch an audacious plan to infiltrate Planned Parenthood to its very senior reaches. He pulled the trigger in

Antiabortion activist David Daleiden’s series of undercover videos has put Planned Parenthood on the defensive.

2013. Daleiden developed an elaborate ruse. He posed as Robert Daoud Sarkis, an employee of Biomax Procurement Services LLC, a fake company he concocted to serve as a front for the operation. He registered the company with the California secretary of state, set up a mock Web site and even created Facebook pages for his fake employees.

With $120,000 raised from about 20 donors, whom Daleiden refuses to name, Daleiden spent nearly 30 months living his Sarkis persona. He and six paid actors visited clinics in Texas and Colorado; attended Planned Parenthood and National Abortion Federation conferences, signing nondisclosure agreements he would later disregard; and lunched with top Planned Parenthood officials. Daleiden even managed to speak briefly, camera running, with Richards, the group’s president.

Daleiden developed an indepth knowledge of fetal-tissue research. On the videos, he can be heard breezily questioning whether the eyeballs in a petri dish are sufficiently developed to be useful for researchers and praising the intactness of a tiny liver.

A lawsuit later filed by the National Abortion Federation seeks to have 500 hours of footage shot at two conferences turned over to the abortion federation on grounds that Daleiden signed a confidentiality agreement. A California judge has granted the organization a preliminary injunction, which for now prevents Daleiden from releasing those videos.

Daleiden estimates that about a third of his footage is now in legal limbo. But someone is watching it — the House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed the footage as part of its investigation into Planned Parenthood.

Whatever the outcome, Daleiden’s project has already exceeded the wildest expectations of antiabortion activists. He has released 10 videos from clinic visits, Planned Parenthood meetings and lunches with executives, and put the abortion issue back on the front burner in Washington and on the campaign trail. n

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In Europe, a revival of borders S TEVE H ENDRIX Salzburg, Austria BY

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n this alpine border town, the suspension of trains into neighboring Germany has been a boon to taxi drivers. Taha, who asked to use only his first name lest localtaxcollectorshoundhimabout his earnings, makes 300 euros every time he drives a stranded traveler the roughly 90 miles to Munich.

Since Germany stopped trains here in mid-September as a way to slow the tide of refugees pouring northward, Taha has made 18 such trips.

“Normally in a month I would go to Munich one time,” he said recently at the taxi stand outside Salzburg Station. “People don’t know what to do without the trains. Some of them will spend anything.”

Meanwhile, grocery stores on the German side said their business has been halved as Austrian shoppers have been cut off. The local university lifted restrictions on handicapped parking to accommodate all the professors who commuted by train. For drivers, the frontier is a one-way valve: Getting to work isn’t so bad, but coming home can mean a twohour delay at the road crossing, where Germany has implemented new passport checks.

Salzburgers say it’s as though a border that had largely melted away has suddenly risen up like one of the stone walls that once surrounded this medieval city. The free flow of people across national lines is a core ideal of the European Union’s grand effort at unification. But here, and in other parts of the European Union where cross-border trains have been halted, moving back and forth has taken on an Old Europe feel.

“For all intents and purposes, there really was no border until a few weeks ago,” said Reinhard Heinisch, head of the Political Science Department at the University of Salzburg. “It’s like we’ve stepped back a bit.”

Austria also has occasionally stopped trains from Hungary as it tried to control the masses of migrants moving north. Denmark

ARIS MESSINIS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Residents struggle with travel between countries as migrant crisis disrupts some train service stopped train ferries from Germany, a busy commerce and tourist route that became flooded with refugees trying to reach Sweden.

In Britain and France, the migrant crisis continues to disrupt rail services on the Channel tunnel, a 30-mile undersea rail route that links the two countries. Passenger and freight services were suspended Oct. 10 after 200 migrants broke through fences and clashed with police at the Eurotunnel’s French terminal. The delays have disrupted travel and caused thousands of pounds of stranded produce to spoil.

None of the train and border disruptions have had a widespread economic impact, observers said, because the restrictions are limited to a few crossings. And at those, the borders have not been completely sealed. Drivers are enduring the waits or going out of their way to find alternate crossings.

“You have to find a work-

around,” said a railway ticket agent in Salzburg station. He has handed out dozens of photocopied instructions on how two local buses will deposit them at Freilassing, the closest station on the German side of the border.

Migrants, too, continue to get through. An unknown number have crossed by foot or in hired vans and taxis at border points that remain unpatrolled. And about 2,000 a day are allowed to cross on special trains sent by the German government.

But locally, the train stoppage has stung, shaking residents’ image of Salzburg as the center of a bi-national region that draws workers, shoppers and students almost without distinction from both sides of the line on the map.

Salzburgers use Munich as their home airport. When the morning trains arrived from Freilassing, they are filled with hundreds of Germans enrolled in the university. A third of Heinish’s faculty

Iraqi refugees Ahmad, 27; Alia, 26; and their 4-monthold baby, Adam, arrive by taxi in Vienna on Sept. 2.

Despite the shutdown of some cross-border trains, an unknown number of migrants have crossed by foot or in hired vans and taxis at border points that remain unpatrolled.

members live on the German side, where housing costs are lower.

Many have been riding bicycles across the border, a practice that won’t last much longer as autumn begins to chill the Alps.

Europeans have grown accustomed to an easy glide across national frontiers, especially since 1995, when the Schengen Agreement eliminated border checks at most crossings between E.U. member states. Train and car passengers have been largely able to roam between 26 countries and more than 1.6 million square miles without flashing a passport.

“Open borders have huge psychological and political meaning for Europeans,” said Judy Dempsey, a researcher and editor at Carnegie Europe in Berlin. “In some ways, what is happening now is a very good reminder for people of what they took for granted and how easily it could be undone.”

No one is willing to predict how long the refugee crisis will continue to effect European border points. On Oct. 4, when Germany was expected to resume normal rail service, hundreds of migrants were gathered at the Salzburg train station, only to learn that trains would not run until at least mid-October.

Aymar Shakr, 53, had traveled almost a month from Damascus and risked his life in an unstable raft crossing from Turkey to Greece. Now, he was just minutes from the Germany he had worked so hard to reach, but unsure how he would get there.

“I think a group of us may be taken over in a bus they said, maybe tomorrow,” said Shakr, an electrical engineer who wants to settle in Hamburg. “There is a lot of mystery in the process.”

The government decides how many trains to run, Deutsche Bahn spokesman Holger Bajohra said. And it will be the government that decides when normal trains will run again, allowing passengers to feel connected across borders they had largely forgotten.

“We are attempting to keep the effects to a minimum for our guests,” Bajohra said. n

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Afghanistan’s steely sentries P ETER H OLLEY Kabul BY

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tanding beside a trafficchoked roadway on the city’s industrial edge, the air heavy with diesel fumes and jittery unease, Matiullah Ibrahimkhel looks strangely relaxed performing the most dangerous job in Kabul.

A potbellied 31-year-old commander in the Afghan National Police with a big smile and welcoming air, he oversees the outermost post in the “Ring of Steel,” a series of fortified checkpoints designed to separate the nation’s government from those who wish to destroy it — individuals with suicide vests and murderous intentions who take refuge among Taliban sympathizers just outside Kabul’s porous city limits.

While Kabul remains firmly in government hands, the threat overhanging the system has been on full display since hundreds of Taliban fighters last month overran the city of Kunduz, which lies only about 150 miles to the north.

There has been no such concerted assault on the capital, but two years ago Ibrahimkhel survived a suicide bombing, walking away from a battle with insurgents at a popular shopping mall with chunks of shrapnel in his arm and leg, as well as the respect of his colleagues.

His is the most perilous post the Afghan National Police has to offer, one that pays about $200 per month. When he’s not inspecting vehicles or arguing with Pakistani truckers, he can be found taking a break on a bench outside a rusty shipping container turned into a convenience store, from which flows an endless supply of cold Mountain Dew — his beverage of choice. The air is hot, the anxiety high and the conditions harsh, but Ibrahimkhel claims he wouldn’t trade his days for a dull post patrolling a quiet neighborhood in the city.

“I like hardship, and this is a hard job,” he said. “Personally, I am not scared, but my family is calling my phone three or four times a shift to check on me.”

PETER HOLLEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Kabul’s checkpoint officers, the most perilous job in the police force, keep would-be bombers at bay A few miles east of Ibrahimkhel’s post lies a rough neighborhood with a reputation for violence. A hundred yards west, a sprawling compound housing foreign contractors and known as the Green Village beckons wouldbe bombers behind concrete blast walls. Because of its history of suicide blasts, the area is known as the “Valley of Death.”

Sandwiched in between, Ibrahimkhel and his five-man squad spend their days with assault weapons at the ready, peering into passing vehicles stuffed with fruit, farm animals and nervous passengers bound for the city. They keep an eye out for missing license plates, tinted windows and suspicious signs that they cannot exactly put into words.

In a single day, thousands of vehicles will roll past them, each one a potential threat that must be sized up in seconds. Most drivers are merely traveling in and out of the city for work, but the officers must remain on guard. Theirs is a job as exhausting as it is frightful. But at checkpoints

across the city, officers said they are ready to give their lives to keep bombers at bay.

“A nurse can treat one person. A doctor can treat one person. But if we die stopping a suicide attacker, we can save many lives,” said Nasratullah Mohammadi, a police deputy.

To that, Ibrahimkhel added: “This country is like my parents, like my mother, like my father. I work for the safety of this nation like I work for my parents.”

It has never been easy to be an Afghan police officer. While commanders are quick to say morale is high, in the past the ranks have been diminished as recruits returned to their home towns rather than endure low pay, long hours and brutal working conditions. In addition to worrying about the Taliban, they must also worry about gaining the trust of a wary public.

And yet, security experts said, since the ring was established in 2009 by the European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan, there has never been a more precarious

Afghan National Police officers patrol in Kabul. In a single day, officers at a checkpoint protecting the capital will see thousands of vehicles roll past, each a potential threat that must be sized up in seconds.

time to be an officer patrolling the streets of Kabul than the present.

As Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s new government struggles to gain a foothold and the nation’s security situation worsens, so too, does the pressure on police.

“If Kabul was a house, its walls would be surrounded on all four sides by enemies right now,” said Atiqullah Amarkhel, a security and military analyst. “The problem for police is that there are holes in the walls.”

In recent months, those holes have allowed a wave of major suicide bombings, including a blast in late August that killed 12 people and wounded 67 others.

Weeks earlier, the city saw its deadliest day on record when a series of attacks killed 65 people and wounded hundreds more.

Dozens of the victims were police cadets who were killed when a suicide bomber disguised as a police officer detonated explosives among them as they were returning from a lunch break.

Ibrahimkhel’s men — and more than 800 others at dozens of Ring of Steel checkpoints across Kabul — are the first line of defense in a city under siege, making them the first targets as well.

For the fragile Afghan government, each suicide bombing reverberates beyond its blast zone, chipping away at the people’s diminishing trust in their leaders.

Stopping a bomber means preserving the precious public support that remains, said Sediq Sediqqi, spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

Ibrahimkhel said the secret to leaving fear behind is his Muslim faith. He prays five times a day on a small prayer rug beside the shipping container. With prayer, he has learned to embrace the idea of spending his days on the fringe, where his abilities are regularly tested and his fate feels unwritten.

A bit of bravado, never in short supply among a group of gun-toting Afghan men, doesn’t hurt.

“When a person puts on this uniform,” he said, taking a swig of Mountain Dew, “we look and feel like lions.” n

UNWINDING THE DRUG WAR

The California law to reduce prison crowding keeps one addict out of jail but not out of trouble.

BY ELI SASLOW in San Diego

T

hey gathered outside the courthouse in November for a celebration on Election Day, dozens of people wearing fake handcuffs and carrying handwritten signs. “End mass incarceration!” read one. “Justice not jail,” read another.

California voters had just approved a historic measure that would reduce punishments for more than 1 million nonvio­ lent offenders, most of whom had been arrested on drug charges. “No more drug war,” people chanted that night, as the vote became official. ¶ The new law, called Proposition 47, was intended to reduce crowding in the state’s overwhelmed prisons, save money and treat low­level criminals with more compassion, and inside the courthouse that day was one of its first tests: James Lewis Rabenberg, 36, a homeless resident of San Diego. He had been found in possession of a small amount of methamphetamine at a local park, a crime that had been considered a felony on the morning of his Nov. 4 sentencing hearing but by nightfall would be reclassified to a misdemeanor. Instead of facing more than a year in jail or in a residential drug treatment program, Rabenberg delayed his sentencing so he would be looking at the prospect of a small fine, some probation and his immediate release.

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COVER STORY “The ideal example of a Prop 47 case,” a public defender had written in a motion to delay sentencing, because Rabenberg had no history of violence and had never been convicted of selling drugs. He had moved to California a decade earlier from Illinois, lost his job in construction, become addicted to meth, lost his house and then been caught several times with drugs. He was sick and sometimes trying to get better, and a few months earlier he had posted a message on his Facebook page. “Saving money, working, going to meetings, clean over 100 days and feeling good,” he had written. “Time for James to do James.”

The new consensus in California and beyond was that it was the role of the criminal justice system to give him that chance.

“This is about putting compassion first,” San Diego’s recently retired police chief said when Prop 47 passed. “We cannot solve crime by warehousing people.”

“Releasing some nonviolent offenders is the smart thing to do,” said Newt Gingrich, a 2012 GOP presidential candidate, explaining the conservative perspective.

“We cannot incarcerate our way out of a drug problem,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), explaining the libertarian perspective.

“It is abundantly clear that America needs a new strategy,” President Obama had said, in a speech about the failures of mass incarceration, and now California was beginning the country’s largest experiment yet as the judge decided Rabenberg’s sentence.

A $700 fine and three years probation, the judge announced at Rabenberg’s rescheduled hearing in early December.

“You’re free to go, Mr. Rabenberg,” he said.

“Please consider this an opportunity. Good luck. I hope we don’t see each other again.”

O

ff came the county-issued jumpsuit, off came the handcuffs and out Rabenberg went into a state where so many other people were being granted new opportunities, too. In the 11 months since the passage of Prop 47, more than 4,300 state prisoners have been resentenced and then released. Drug arrests in Los Angeles County have dropped by a third. Jail bookings are down by a quarter.

Hundreds of thousands of ex-felons have applied to get their previous drug convictions revised or erased.

But along with the successes have come other consequences, which police departments and prosecutors refer to as the “unintended effects”: Robberies up 23 percent in San Francisco. Property theft up 11 percent in Los Angeles. Certain categories of crime rising 20 percent in Lake Tahoe, 36 percent in La Mirada, 22 percent in Chico and 68 percent in Desert Hot Springs.

It’s too early to know how much crime can be attributed to Prop 47, police chiefs caution, but what they do know is that instead of arresting criminals and removing them from the streets, their officers have been dealing with the same offenders again and again.

Caught in possession of drugs? That usually

JAMES RABENBERG’S ARRESTS Since being released under Proposition 47.

Jan. 2 Possession of meth Feb. 6 Possession of drug paraphernalia Feb. 19 Drug charge March 1 Drug charge March 8 Drug charge April 1 Drug charge April 26 Drug and weapon charges May 29 Possession of meth July 4 Drug charge July 29 Drug charge Aug. 9 Drug charge Aug. 14 Failure to appear in court Aug. 28 Possession of meth Sept. 19 Did not show up to court

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means a misdemeanor citation under Prop 47, or essentially a ticket. Caught stealing something worth less than $950? That means a ticket, too. Caught using some of that $950 to buy more drugs? Another citation.

“It’s a slap on the wrist the first time and the third time and the 30th time, so it’s a virtual get-out-of-jail-free card,” said Shelley Zimmerman, who became San Diego’s police chief in March 2014. “We’re catching and releasing the same people over and over.”

Officers have begun calling those people “frequent fliers,” offenders who knew the specifics of Prop 47 and how to use it to their advantage. There was the thief in San Bernardino County who had been caught shoplifting with his calculator, which he said he used to make sure he never stole the equivalent of $950 or more. There was the “Hoover Heister” in Riverside, who was arrested for stealing vacuum cleaners and other appliances 13 different times over the course of three months, each misdemeanor charge followed by his quick release.

There was also the known gang member near Palm Springs who had been caught with a stolen gun valued at $625 and then reacted incredulously when the arresting officer explained that he would not be taken to jail but instead written a citation. “But I had a gun.

What is wrong with this country?” the offender said, according to the police report.

And then, in San Diego, there was Rabenberg, who just weeks after being released because of Prop 47 was caught breaking the law again.

He was arrested for possession of meth on Jan. 2 and released from jail Jan. 3.

He was arrested for having drug paraphernalia on Feb. 6 and issued a citation.

He was arrested again for having drugs on Feb. 19. And then again on March 1. And then again on March 8. And then again on April 1.

By April 26, he had been arrested for six misdemeanors in less than four months and been released all six times, so he was free to occupy a table outside Starbucks when a man named Kevin Zempko arrived to have coffee with his wife. Zempko sat at a table next to Rabenberg, who was picking apart the seams of his coat and dumping the contents of his pockets onto the table: some nickels, two $1 bills, a few scraps of paper, a dingy plastic cup and a lighter. Zempko watched for a few seconds and concluded that Rabenberg was probably a vagrant and an addict. “I just felt bad for him,” he said.

Rabenberg noticed Zempko looking his way and began to stare back, mumbling, gesturing, standing up and now pulling something new from the pocket of his coat. It was a small wooden steak knife. Rabenberg slammed it down on the table. He picked it up again, jabbed at the air and started moving with the knife toward Zempko, who stood up and placed a chair between them.

Zempko had been in the Marine Corps for 11 years, trained to recognize a threat, and he continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

escaped into the Starbucks and warned other customers. The manager called the police.

Another Starbucks employee tried to pacify Rabenberg with a free cup of coffee. By the time two police officers arrived, Rabenberg seemed mostly confused and tired. “Disoriented” was how a police report described him. The officers handcuffed Rabenberg and placed him in the back of their police car.

“What will happen to him?” Zempko asked, because now the threat had passed and what he felt most was concern for Rabenberg, even guilt.

“He needs help,” Zempko told the officers, and they asked for his phone number and said they would call as part of their investigation.

For a few days, Zempko waited and wondered: If they asked him to testify, would he push for leniency or a strict sentence? Which would be better for the city? Which would be better for Rabenberg?

But the police never called. The arrest had been for possession of drugs and brandishing a deadly weapon — now misdemeanors under Prop 47. Rabenberg was booked into jail and released three days later.

“W

hat are we supposed to do here?” asked Jan Goldsmith, the San Diego city attorney. “How do we end

this cycle?”

He was sitting at the conference table in his downtown office, trying to solve the problem that had been troubling him for months. His staff was in charge of prosecuting all misdemeanors in San Diego, and now it was dealing with dozens of people like Rabenberg, frequent fliers who no longer overcrowded the prison but whose cases continued to clog the courts. “How can we change behavior when they know there’s no real threat of punishment, no incentive?” Goldsmith wondered.

He had liked many of the theories behind Prop 47: a system designed to be merciful, with more emphasis on treatment and fewer jail sentences. These were ideas he had once pursued himself.

He had served as a judge before becoming the city’s top prosecutor, and for a while he had presided over San Diego’s alternative drug court. That was a system that seemed intuitive to him — a logic he could easily explain to addicts from the bench. Get caught with drugs once and maybe you would only get charged with a misdemeanor. But by the second time, or certainly the third, the charge became a felony and most offenders were faced with a choice: Go to state prison or participate in drug court, which usually meant at least 18 months of mandatory drug testing, treatment and supervision under the constant threat of prison time. Many chose drug court and entered into treatment. Sixty percent of those who enrolled graduated. Seventy percent of graduates stayed out of trouble for at least three years.

“I don’t know many addicts who magically wake up and say, ‘Hey, I want help,’ ” Goldsmith said. “They have a terrible, horrible disease.

PHOTOS BY JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

TOP Kevin Zempko was sitting near James Rabenberg outside this Starbucks on April 26 when the homeless man became agitated, pulled a small knife from his pocket and started moving toward Zempko, who was able to avert the threat. After police arrested a “disoriented” Rabenberg, he was booked into jail and released three days later. ABOVE San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith’s office is in charge of prosecuting all misdemeanors in the city, including Proposition 47 cases.

They’re addicted to drugs. Often times, they’re stealing to buy those drugs. You need consequences. They don’t get better on the honor system. You need to nudge them, shove them, kick them in the door.”

But now more addicts were declining drug court, because spending a few days in jail on a misdemeanor charge was easier than 18 months of intensive rehab. Without the threat of a felony, there was little incentive to get treatment. Drug court programs had closed in Fresno and Riverside. Enrollments had dipped by more than a quarter in many places across the state. Rabenberg had been offered drug court three times and always declined, choosing instead to plead guilty to a misdemeanor.

California had promised to use some of the savings generated by Prop 47 for drug treatment. But that money wouldn’t be available until 2016, which to Goldsmith seemed like a long time to wait.

Rabenberg was arrested again May 29 with meth while panhandling near Balboa Park.

“Frustrating, frustrating,” said Zimmerman, the police chief, speaking not just about Rabenberg but all frequent fliers. “Just sending our officers to deal with problems that never get solved.”

He was arrested again for drugs July 4.

“We are enabling this kind of behavior,” said Bonnie Dumanis, the district attorney for San Diego County.

He was arrested again July 29 and Aug. 9.

“Aren’t we lulling him into a sense of security?” Goldsmith said. “How does it end?

There’s no more incremental punishment. We let the behavior continue. We let the problems get worse. And all we can do is wait until he does something terrible, until he stabs somebody or kills somebody, and then we can finally take him off the street.”

T

here was another possible outcome for Rabenberg, too — one that was sending his mother, Denise Klemz, to visit a psychiatrist each month in Joliet, Ill., prompting her to hire a private investigator, compelling her to look up phone numbers in San Diego for the police station, shelters, hospitals and the morgue. “Is he dead?” she would sometimes ask people about her son, whom she had been trying to locate for more than three years.

“A bighearted, free-spirited type person” was how she sometimes described him in those phone calls to San Diego, because for a while after high school his life had been going pretty well. He had gone backpacking through Yellowstone National Park, moved in with a girlfriend and taken a job at the Illinois Tollway. Then he had crashed his car after a party and sent one of his passengers through the windshield. The passenger had survived, barely, but Rabenberg was never the same. He had started regularly using cocaine, Klemz said, and then he caught hepatitis C by sharing needles in Chicago.

She had sent him to live with her brother in California in the late 1990s, and that was the

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COVER STORY last time she had seen him. Her brother had kicked Rabenberg out when he started using meth, and for the past dozen years, Klemz suspected that her son had been mostly homeless. He had called her one time, after his grandmother died, asking her to send money for a bus ticket home. She had offered to send him the bus ticket instead, because she didn’t trust him with money. “Don’t bother,” he had told her, and they hadn’t spoken since.

She had an old cellphone number for him, and even though she knew the phone had been shut off, she still sent him a text message every few days, just in case. “Please come home,” she wrote. “I’m sorry.” “Are you safe?” “Starting to get cold here. Is it cold there?”

The private investigator had taught her how to type Rabenberg’s name into the San Diego jail database to see whether he was in custody. A few times she had seen his name in the arrest logs and felt some measure of relief. Maybe he would be forced to detox. Maybe he would get help. She had called the jail once to inquire about visiting him, or writing a letter, but by the time she reached a receptionist, she was told that Rabenberg had been released. He had not left an address or a phone number, so she sent another message to the number she already had.

“What’s happening to you?” she had written.

N

o one knew, and under Prop 47, nobody had a compelling reason to find out. The reality was that no one was really looking for Rabenberg at all, except for three nonprofit workers who had recently begun driving loops through the sprawling parks and homeless encampments of San Diego.

Their salaries were being funded in part by a downtown business association to address problems created by the homeless population, which had increased noticeably since the passage of Prop 47. More than 1,200 fewer people were in the local jail each night. Meanwhile the number of unsheltered homeless people in downtown San Diego had grown 24 percent based on the city’s latest count, and more than 8,000 homeless people stayed in the city on any given night. The city estimated that a third of those people were chronic substance abusers. Emergency room visits for drug overdoses had begun to tick up. Assaults on police officers had risen by more than half in precincts with high homeless populations. So local businesses had pooled together $50,000 to hire three outreach workers, all formerly homeless themselves, to deal with the problems of frequent fliers in a system that no longer could.

They patrolled the neighborhood in a van painted with the slogan “Where Miracles Happen” and moved drug users away from businesses and back into the hidden canyons of Balboa Park. They offered rides and free food to addicts who were loitering or harassing customers outside the 7-Eleven.

“We used to call the police, but they don’t want to waste all their time writing tickets,” said Larissa Wimberly, one of the outreach

BELOW The view from a van carrying three outreach workers as it passes several homeless people on a corner in San Diego. Local businesses pooled $50,000 to hire the three workers to deal with issues concerning the homeless population, which has grown since the passage of Proposition 47.

BOTTOM Larissa Wimberly, one of the outreach workers, fills out a form for Paul Gaston. “All we can do is deal with people who want our help or people who are causing problems,” she says.

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workers. “We just try to handle it.”

They had built relationships with many of the homeless people, and they knew about Rabenberg, too. He had filled out one of their enrollment forms a while back, asking for help, and he had even checked himself into a treatment facility once before bailing after three days. Now they sometimes saw him straggling around the Hillcrest neighborhood, always in the same jeans and sweatshirt, or staying in a tent behind the manicured lawn bowling facility in Balboa Park. “A regular,” they called him, and on this day they saw many of their regulars, who they referred to by nicknames.

There was Dead Leg limping up the sidewalk, and Cry Baby complaining about the heat, and Dollar Man panhandling at the Starbucks. The van stopped at a major intersection where some homeless men were pushing along shopping carts in the middle of busy roads. “You can’t be doing this stuff right here,” Wimberly told them, suspecting that they were high. After that, the workers responded to a call about an “aggressive panhandler” at a local craft market. “You’re scaring these people,” Wimberly told the man.

They drove seven loops through downtown until it started to get dark. They saw dozens of tents scattered in the unincorporated canyons, too far from any road to approach. They passed an encampment of 200 people near the freeway, a group so notorious for theft and drug use that police had warned outreach workers not to visit. Some people didn’t want help, Wimberly said. Others were beyond it. They drove back downtown as their shift ended.

“All we can do is deal with people who want our help or people who are causing problems,” Wimberly said, and on this day, at least, Rabenberg was neither of those.

O

n Aug. 14, he was arrested for failing to appear in court on two drug charges. He was released Aug. 18.

On Aug. 28, he was arrested for possession of meth and then released Sept. 1.

On Sept. 19, he was due to appear in court for a hearing on three of his cases. A note on his file read, “Enough!” because Rabenberg had now been arrested 13 times.

He had failed to appear in court seven times.

He had threatened the public safety. He had endangered his own health. “Who exactly is benefiting here?” said Goldsmith, the city attorney, who hoped that the judge would compile Rabenberg’s misdemeanors into one sentence and force him into an extended jail term or at least drug treatment.

Now the clerk called the courtroom to order.

Lawyers wheeled in carts of alphabetized files.

The judge announced the beginning of another busy docket in the era of Prop 47.

“Mr. Rabenberg,” the judge said, calling out the next case.

“Mr. Rabenberg,” he said again.

“Where is Mr. Rabenberg?” the judge asked, finally, but wherever Rabenberg was, he wasn’t here. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2015

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HISTORY

A scientific discovery at U-Va. BY

S USAN S VRLUGA

I

t took an architect lying on the floor, sticking his head into a hole and looking up to realize: There was something there.

The something initially was nothing — an empty space. But an empty space in the Rotunda that Thomas Jefferson designed at the University of Virginia is something. It’s one of the most-studied buildings in the country, said Brian Hogg, senior historic preservation planner in the Office of the Architect for the University, so renowned that it is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

They don’t expect surprises.

And so the discovery led the workers to keep tapping, keep opening up the wall, ultimately finding something remarkable.

Hidden back there was an elaborate chemical hearth designed for laboratory experiments. It was complex, with vents and multiple sources and means of controlling heat.

The hearth offers a window into the way that science was taught during Jefferson’s time and an unexpected connection to his founding vision for the university.

It had been hidden away, no longer needed and sealed into a wall in the mid-1800s, and thus protected from the fire that destroyed most of the inside of the historic building in 1895.

A Rotunda renovation project, expected to be mostly finished by the middle of next summer, was necessitated by crumbling columns and leaks. But it has led to some wonderful surprises, Hogg said, that help them better understand how the building was used.

The hearth may be the nation’s oldest surviving example of chemistry education, he said.

“It’s exciting,” said Jody Lahendro, a supervisory historic preservation architect for U-Va. Reading letters exchanged between Jefferson and John Emmet, a professor of natural history — as they emphasized the then-unusual idea of students taking part in experiments rather than just observing — “really brought me back to that time,” he said. It also personal-

DAN ADDISON/UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

Hearth may be U.S.’s oldest surviving example of chemistry teaching ized the university’s history.

Jefferson designed the architecture of the university in Charlottesville to fit his vision for the education there. The 10 pavilions along the Lawn were to be centers of learning where professors both taught and lived with their families, for example.

But that model didn’t work quite so well for a science class needing a lab.

So space for experiments was built into the domed building at the head of the Lawn. It was symbolic that he chose to put a library in the Rotunda, rather than a chapel as at other universities, Lahendro said. And it is notable that one level was set aside for chemistry classes.

“It really is the beginning of the teaching of science” as one of the defining principles of a university rather than religion, he said. “The Enlightenment, changing the viewpoint of the world.”

Chemistry was a popular

course of study at U-Va. At times, nearly a third of the student body was enrolled, and members of the public also came to lectures.

It was dangerous, too. Emmet, the natural history professor who started teaching at the university in 1825, suffered greatly from mishaps with chemicals — like the time his assistant forgot to properly cork a bottle of sulfuric acid and spilled it all over him, causing serious burns.

A draft report prepared for John G. Waite Associates, Architects, by Diana S. Waite cited a biography of the professor written soon after he died in his 40s: “Dr. Emmet encountered a full share of these hazards. He met with several accidents, some of which were near proving fatal, and one of them laid him up for eight or nine weeks. On his person he bore the marks of these perils of the laboratory; but they were little heeded by him, and, when adverted to, always afforded him the occasion of some

The chemical hearth, sealed behind a wall in the mid-1800s when it was no longer needed, was used for laboratory experiments in the Rotunda, a University of Virginia building designed by Thomas Jefferson.

good-humoured pleasantry. His wardrobe paid dearly for the powerful agents with which it was too heedlessly brought into contact, and not unfrequently his attire wore the appearance of the sails of a ship that had just been in action.”

The university will have the hearth on display for visitors and students, with the history of the site and some of the people involved — including, as with so much that Jefferson did, the enslaved people who tended to the hearth and the classroom.

The restoration also will open up classroom space for current students, just across the hall from the chemical hearth, bringing the building back to Jefferson’s original intentions as an active center of student learning.

But there won’t be chemistry labs this time.

“You wouldn’t want to see what the Rotunda would look like with modern fume hoods,” Lahendro said. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2015

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PETS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Where the dog and cat lovers are Every five years, the American Veterinary Medical Association releases figures on the demographics of pet ownership in the United States. The latest survey, published in 2012, offers some answers to such burning questions as: Are dog and cat people really that different? n

Top 10 states for cat owners by percent of households Vermont, 49.5%

Top 10 states for dog owners by percent of households 1

Maine, 46.4% Oregon, 40.2%

Arkansas, 47.9%

2

New Mexico, 46%

3

Kentucky, 45.9%

South Dakota, 39.1%

4

Missouri, 45.9%

Washington, 39%

5

West Virginia, 45.8%

West Virginia, 38.1%

6

Kentucky, 36.8%

7

Mississippi, 45.2% Alabama, 44.1%

Idaho, 34.6%

8

Tennessee, 44.1%

Indiana, 34.4%

9

Texas, 44%

New Hampshire, 34.2%

10

Oklahoma, 43.2%

Bottom five states Georgia, 27.3% Illinois, 26.3%

46

Utah, 29.4%

47

Rhode Island, 29.3%

Louisiana, 25.9%

48

New York, 29%

New Jersey, 25.3%

49

Connecticut, 28.3%

50

Massachusetts, 23.6%

Utah, 24.6% SOURCE: THE AMERICAN VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION; PHOTO BY ISTOCKPHOTO

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Weaponizing weird ideas N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

D INA T EMPLE- R ASTON

S THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency

By Annie Jacobsen Little, Brown. 552 pp. $30

everal years ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began looking into a new medical procedure called transcranial direct-current stimulation, or tDCS. To the outsider, the experiments looked more Mary Shelley than cutting-edge neurology. Scientists taped sponges laced with metal to various parts of a patient’s scalp and then hooked them up to a small 9-volt battery — just like the ones that go in smoke detectors or old transistor radios. Then the scientists sent a small electrical pulse to the brain and watched to see what would happen.

What they discovered was extraordinary: Stroke patients improved their motor skills, chronic pain sufferers appeared to find relief, and the stimulation seemed to help some patients with learning. It was this last revelation that interested DARPA most. The agency gave scientists at the University of New Mexico a grant to see whether tDCS could be used to help soldiers train faster.

Entertaining the idea of a better military through the judicious use of a 9-volt battery goes a long way toward explaining why the mere mention of DARPA often is accompanied by a full caseload of moral judgments. The agency has long had a habit of eschewing political correctness and shrugging off what people might say or think so it can put science first. It has never worried about how unconventional research might look on the front page of, say, The Washington Post.

That attitude has led to notable successes but also some troubling outcomes. DARPA is responsible for stealth technology, tank simulators and the M-16 rifle on the one side of the ledger, but on the other side data-mining programs such as Total Information Awareness and the research that led to harsh interrogation techniques used on prisoners after 9/11.

Annie Jacobsen explores that tension in her fascinating new book, “The Pentagon’s Brain,”

DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY

The Atlas robot was built by Boston Dynamics for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, in which teams from around the world competed.

which she presents as the first comprehensive history of an agency many Americans may not even know exists. Jacobsen tracks DARPA’s beginnings as an informal gathering of scientists struggling with problems of the Cold War and allows readers to see its transformation into what it is today: a high-tech incubator that introduces the newest technologies, for good or ill, to soldiers on the battlefield.

According to Jacobsen, many of DARPA’s original members were working in the Southern California offices of the Rand Corp. think tank in the 1950s. At the time, they were churning out reports about nuclear weaponry and doomsday scenarios. Jacobsen writes that “competition was valued and encouraged at RAND, with scientists and analysts always working to

outdo one another.” And nowhere was that competitive spirit more apparent than at lunchtime, when the scientists began playing Kriegspiel, a chess variant once favored by the German military. With maps of the world spread across lunch tables, the great minds of the Cold War era would spend hours on the game.

It wasn’t until Congress formally created DARPA in 1958 that its key advisers moved from the lunch tables at Rand and other think tanks and took on a more conventional shape. What were once brainstorming sessions at summer homes on the Cape became official meetings at the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington.

Fast-forward to today: With its $3 billion annual budget and its advanced technologies and pro-

grams, DARPA is the force behind some of the world’s coolest gizmos. These run the gamut from the Global Positioning System to prosthetic hands that may give amputees a sense of touch.

To produce the book, Jacobsen conducted dozens of interviews with former DARPA members.

She clearly has plenty of material to work with, but sometimes it is difficult to know how she feels about it all — she seems conflicted.

An organization that works under the credo “anything imagined can be tried” clearly makes Jacobsen uncomfortable, and she suggests time and again that while the agency’s descent to the dark side isn’t inevitable, it is something to keep watch over. DARPA, Jacobsen writes, was responsible not only for early research into brainwashing and Agent Orange, but also the hearts and minds campaign in Vietnam and post-9/11 data-mining programs that seemed, at a minimum, to dance along the edge of our civil liberties.

Even in the area of brain science, there is reason to be both hopeful and worried. DARPA researchers are looking for treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder by adapting transcranial direct-current stimulation. In some cases, they are surgically implanting multiple electrodes in various parts of the brain. It’s the electroshock therapy of old — but by remote control.

For the more than 300,000 Americans who the Department of Veterans Affairs believes returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with brain injuries, DARPA’s search for new remedies sounds like a noble enterprise. But it also gives pause, and this happens often when reading “The Pentagon’s Brain.” One can’t help feeling there is something faintly creepy about it all, which may be exactly what Jacobsen intended. n Temple-Raston is NPR’s counterterrorism correspondent and the author of four books.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2015

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Intertwining tales in artistic package

His aim is still true in witty memoir

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

P

l

REVIEWED BY

K EITH D ONOHUE

ick up “Bats of the Republic” and — even before you start reading — you’re instantly transfixed. The author, Zachary Thomas Dodson, is a book designer who co-founded Featherproof Books out of Chicago, and his debut novel is a glorious demonstration of what oldfashioned paper can still do in the hands of a creative genius.

Stuffed into this illuminated novel are books within books, including a facsimile of a 19th-century novel, complete with tissue-covered plates and a wormhole piercing every page. The dust jacket has two sides, the lining printed in reverse. The whole steampunk apparatus is chockablock with fold-out maps, torn telegrams, bits of newspaper articles, drawings of bats and other real and imagined creatures, diagrams of steammoats and other inventions, and most fun of all, an actual envelope with the cryptic instruction: “Do Not Open.” (Resist!) These beautifully designed elements not only add depth and detail to the story, but they also instruct the reader on how to move through the book.

In addition to all its visual excitement, “Bats of the Republic” tells two intertwined and echoing stories. One is set in 1843 in Chicago’s Museum of Flying. Young naturalist Zadock Thomas is in love with his boss’s daughter, Elswyth Gray. To win her hand, he must deliver a secret letter from his boss to a mysterious general in the Republic of Texas. Through a series of letters to his beloved, Zadock recounts his journey into a strange land that turns stranger with each step. Just as his situation is most dire, he stumbles across a cloud of bats and a vast cave that threatens his mission and provides an opportunity for him to make a name for himself. He decides he will create a field guide called “Bats of the Republic,” to impress his prospective father-in-law and help keep the rickety Museum of Flying aloft. Juxtaposed against his let-

ters home is a novel called “The Sisters Gray,” which purports to be a lightly fictionalized account of what is happening in Chicago while Zadock is on the trail.

The second story is drawn from a novel called “The City-State,” written by Elswyth’s mother. It’s set 300 years later in the new Republic of Texas, one of seven such walled districts left behind after an apocalypse. In this dystopian future, the government is watching, listening and recording everything. All written correspondence is forbidden. Documents from the past must be “carbon’d” and the copies sent to the Vault of Records. A character named Zeke Thomas has inherited a sealed envelope inscribed with the warning “Do Not Open” from his grandfather, a senator from Chicago-land.

Zeke’s wife, Eliza, who works in the Vault, fears the consequences of the illegal letter, and she sets in motion a series of events that leads to calamity. Spreading like an umbrella over both stories are letters from Eliza’s father, relating the true history from 1840s Texas to Eliza in the 2140s, until the “real” and the “fictional” merge.

Then things get complicated.

Like bat sonar, these stories echo in meaningful ways. Events that happen in one story are anticipated in others. Eventually, the method worms its way through.

Stories are told side-by-side on facing pages; transcribed conversations are run in parallel columns. The whole reading experience becomes disorienting and dizzying as the past and the future converge in a kind of infinite loop.

“Bats of the Republic” cumulatively becomes a book about the way books are made and the way stories work. Dodson has quite brilliantly exposed the gears and cogs whirring in the novelist’s imagination. It is a mad and beautiful thing. n Donohue is the author of four novels.

“The Boy Who Drew Monsters” comes out in paperback this month.

I BATS OF THE REPUBLIC

By Zachary Thomas Dodson Doubleday. 450 pp. $27.95

UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK

By Elvis Costello Blue Rider. 672 pp. $30

l

REVIEWED BY

G EOFF E DGERS

t’s 1979, and Elvis Costello, not yet 25, is on a creative roll.

With his Buddy Holly glasses and punk-rock sneer, he already has established himself as a masterful songwriter, whether crafting torchlight ballads (“Alison”), tortured kiss-offs (“Lipstick Vogue”) or biting protest songs (“Oliver’s Army”) as buttery as anything in ABBA’s catalogue.

Naturally, our hero is also a mess. He’s drinking too much, separated from his wife and embarking on a series of dysfunctional relationships. “I once referred to this process as ‘Messing up my life, so I could write stupid little songs about it,’ ” he says, “and I can’t improve on that description here, but then songs are never exactly taken from life.”

The paragraph, sprung midway through Costello’s sprawling memoir, gets to the heart of what makes “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” so fascinating. We get the artist when he’s old enough to have perspective but still young enough to remember every detail.

In a world littered with uneven (and largely ghosted) celebrity memoirs, “Unfaithful Music” is a beautifully written revelation. Dare I blaspheme by declaring I liked it even more than the excellent memoirs produced by Bob Dylan and Keith Richards? Costello embraces the basic qualities of good storytelling: the use of detail, tension and humor. At 672 pages, “Unfaithful Music” is actually a breeze.

The book is also a gold mine for Costello obsessives who have spent decades dissecting and analyzing his every lyrical zinger. But it’s not just for fans. “Unfaithful Music” is a lyrical tale that stretches across generations, geography and a century of popular song. The book serves as both musical and personal anthropology. Young Declan MacManus who, in 1963, squirrels away a napkin signed by the Beatles, becomes Elvis Costello, a man enlisted, a quarter-century later, to write songs with Paul McCartney.

Wisely, Costello busts the chro-

nology. His rich family history — much of it centered on his father, Ross, a singer and trumpet player of some prominence — is presented in the context of his creative life.

And for a songwriter who could fill the cargo hold of a Boeing 747 with clever puns, it won’t be surprising that Costello, the memoirist, has a gift for the punch line. He fails to score Rolling Stones tickets for a 1971 concert, declaring with teenaged snootiness, “They’re probably past it,” and decides to spend the cash he has saved on a record.

“All of which would be a good story if the record I purchased had been something more inspiring and enduring than ‘Volunteers’ by Jefferson Airplane.”

Regrets? Costello has had a few.

He also addresses his lowest public moment. In 1979, at a Holiday Inn during a tour stop, he gets into a drunken brawl with members of the Stephen Stills band, during which he refers to James Brown and Ray Charles with a racial slur.

Here, Costello offers a series of potential defenses, from his poor psychological state to his obvious record of collaboration and admiration for black artists, before conceding “never mind excuses, there are no excuses.”

That humility is important. It’s hard to imagine it coming from the wiry ’70s-era Costello, with the oily mullet, skronky Jazzmaster guitar and raised fists. This Costello is a grown-up, grateful for what he has (his boys; his wife, Diana Krall) and blessed by the musical places he has been able to go. The man who sang so harshly about the industrial radio complex when there actually was a viable radio network isn’t about to wallow in nostalgia.

“The danger of regarding any point in the past as the golden age is that you forget that there were just as many crooks, crackpots, and idiots around then, and just as many terrible records,” he writes.

“We only recall the ones we love.” n Edgers is a writer for The Post’s Style section.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2015

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OPINIONS

Chechnya is Putin’s model for success in Syria JACKSON DIEHL is deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post.

Western officials who pronounce themselves puzzled about Vladimir Putin’s intentions in Syria are missing some big clues. There is a clear model for the campaign Russia is pursuing on behalf of Syrian dictator Bashar al­ Assad, a legacy that is Putin’s pride: Chechnya.

The Muslim republic in the North Caucasus and the decade­long war that Putin launched there in September 1999 have mostly been forgotten by the outside world since the dictator installed there by Putin, Ramzan Kadyrov, consolidated control in the late 2000s. But the Kremlin regards it as a “good, unique example in history of [the] combat of terrorism,” as Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s prime minister, put it. Chechnya, Medvedev said last year, is “one of the business cards of Russia.”

What are the components of this winning formula? First, define all opposition to the prevailing regime as terrorist, indistinguishable from the most extreme jihadists. That enables a fundamental political aim: to eliminate alternatives. In Syria today, moderate and secular opposition forces arguably are getting harder to find. That wasn’t the case in Chechnya in 1999. The country’s nationalist president, Aslan Maskhadov, had won a democratic election, defeating an Islamist opponent by 59 to 23 percent. His predecessor, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was so secularized that he was unaware how many times a day Muslims pray.

Russia killed them both, along with every other moderate Chechen leader it could find, both at home and abroad. One was murdered in Vienna; another in Dubai. When Western leaders pressed Putin to negotiate with Maskhadov and other secular moderates, he invariably responded angrily.

“Would you invite Osama bin Laden to the White House . . . and let him dictate what he

wants?” he demanded of one group of Western visitors.

It should be no surprise that Russia’s first Syria bombings have been aimed at the remnants of the moderate opposition. It’s not just that they are backed by the United States; they represent a viable alternative to the Assad regime, and so, under Chechnya rules, must be eliminated. “He doesn’t distinguish between [the Islamic State] and a moderate Sunni opposition that wants to see Mr. Assad go,” President Obama said after meeting Putin at the United Nations. “From their perspective, they’re all terrorists.”

The first stages of the Russian military campaign in northern Syria have followed a familiar pattern. Heavy bombing and shelling of civilian areas preceded scorched-earth sweeps, just as in Chechnya. According to a report on Chechnya by the International Crisis Group, “war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by [Russian] troops” included “indiscriminate shelling and bombing, secret prisons, enforced disappearances, mass

POOL PHOTO BY ALEXEI NIKOLSKY/RIA NOVOSTI VIA AP

graves and death squads.” One common tactic, the report said, was “taking insurgents’ relatives as hostages, subjecting them to torture or summary execution and burning their homes.”

In short, Assad’s forces and their Lebanese and Iranian allies may have to step up their already-notorious brutality to match Putin’s tactics in Chechnya. But they may have expert help: Kadyrov has asked Putin to send his 20,000member personal army, known as the “kadyrovtsy,” to Syria. The state propaganda outlet Russia Today quoted him as saying he wanted “to go there and participate in special operations.”

Kadyrov and his relationship with Putin offer another lesson to those wondering whether Putin is prepared to dispose of Assad — a prospect that Obama has repeatedly bet on. The Chechen strongman is, if anything, more sinister than the soft-spoken Assad; Kadyrov is known to do his own killing and torturing on occasion. He has solidified a cult of personality in Chechnya, extorts tribute from every business and citizen, and brazenly orders hits on his critics, from journalists and human rights activists to Russian politicians. Many believe

him responsible for the murder of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, gunned down near Red Square last winter.

Putin’s response has been to offer Kadyrov not just tolerance but full protection. The Crisis Group reports that senior Russian security officials tried to undermine the Chechen by arresting his gunmen for the Nemtsov murder. Putin rebuffed them, awarding Kadyrov a medal immediately after the hit.

“Unless President Putin’s reputation is seriously damaged by his protégé, the rules of the game are unlikely to change,” concluded the report. The same rules will apply to Assad.

Obama’s principal response to Putin’s new offensive has been to predict that the result will be “a quagmire.” But Putin has heard that before. For years Western leaders warned him that the war in Chechnya was unwinnable, that the only solution was political. Putin nevertheless persisted through a decade and more of bloody fighting that cost Russia at least 6,000 military casualties and Chechnya uncounted tens of thousands.

The result was the pacification he now trumpets as a “calling card.” Don’t expect him to give up anytime soon on a similar result in Syria. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Clinton towers over debate rivals DANA MILBANK writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He joined The Post as a political reporter in 2000.

Hillary Clinton was a head shorter than her rivals when they lined up on stage for Sheryl Crow’s version of the national anthem at Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate. But after that moment, she towered over them.

Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley was preachy and self-righteous.

Former Virginia senator Jim Webb kept complaining that he wasn’t getting enough time to talk.

Former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee was more quirky spectator than participant.

And Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont shouted as if he were unaware that he had a microphone.

Then there was Clinton, fluid, steady and calm.

After Sanders and Chafee criticized her 2003 Iraq vote — reviving a rather old issue — Clinton replied: “Well, I recall very well being on a debate stage, I think, about 25 times with thenSenator Obama, debating this very issue. After the election, he asked me to become secretary of state.”

She parried with relative ease, refusing to allow moderator Anderson Cooper of CNN and her rivals to get under her skin. She scored points on most of the key

Democratic issues — paid sick and family leave, equal pay, gun control, Planned Parenthood, executive pay — and she deflected criticism of her changing views on trade and energy, and her response to the Benghazi attack.

She turned Cooper’s question about her e-mail into the highlight of the night.

While repeating that her private e-mail server was a “mistake,” she said the House committee that exposed the issue was “a partisan vehicle, as admitted by the House Republican majority leader, Mr. McCarthy, to drive down my poll numbers.” She added: “I am still standing.”

Sanders, invited to criticize Clinton, instead leaped to her defense. “I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails,” he said.

The Democratic partisans cheered. Clinton shook Sanders’s

hand and thanked him.

Chafee, undeterred, criticized Clinton’s “ethical standards.”

Clinton dispatched Chafee as if brushing lint from her sleeve.

Asked if she wanted to respond, she replied: “No.” She was, in short, a man among boys. And that’s why the debate was so important to Clinton. She may have had a rough time as the Democrats’ presidential front-runner, but her advantages in experience and composure were clear when she shared a stage with her rivals for the first time.

Vice President Biden, if he was still pondering a run while watching the debate on television, would find the rationale for his candidacy diminishing.

A month ago she was in “free fall” and “plunging” in the polls, giving those who watched her campaign collapse in 2008 a sense of déjà vu. Sanders was closing in, the draft-Biden movement was in full force, and Republicans were giddy with anticipation of her upcoming grilling by the House Benghazi committee.

But a mass shooting in Oregon put the gun-friendly Sanders on the defensive. The Obama administration’s completion of a Pacific trade deal, deeply

unpopular on the left, puts Biden on the wrong side of the Democratic electorate on an issue that should be prominent in the headlines over the coming months. And the House Benghazi panel has been discredited by Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s incautious admission that the committee was created to damage Clinton politically. Now polls show Clinton recovering and expanding her lead — and if the Tuesday debate is any indication, this will probably continue.

Sanders did not help himself by talking about the economic example of Denmark and proclaiming that he’s “going to win because we’re going to explain what Democratic socialism is.”

Replied Clinton: “We are not Denmark. . . . We are the United States of America. And it’s our job to rein in the excesses of capitalism so that it doesn’t run amok and doesn’t cause the kind of inequities we’re seeing in our economic system. But we would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in the history of the world.”

He defended socialism; she defended the middle class.

Sanders, and the other men on the stage, didn’t look presidential; she did. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY JOE HELLER FOR THE GREEN BAY PRESS-GAZETTE

Putting a price on nature MICHAEL GERSON is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Post.

In Africa, the average cost of an AK-47 is a little over $300. A single rhinoceros horn — reputed (falsely) in Asia to have cancer-healing properties — can bring $300,000 on the black market. So a criminal gang or a terrorist group knows what a dead rhino is worth: several hundred assault rifles (less the commission owed middlemen). AlShabab, the Somali terrorist group behind the Westgate mall attack in Kenya, uses poached ivory to fund its operations.

So what is a rhino worth to us?

At one level, we value rhinos because we want endangered species and wild places to exist, even if we never see them.

Respecting and preserving nature reflect an ethical impulse.

But determining the full value of a rhino is more difficult. In some countries, where preserving animals and habitats are keys to tourism, losing these things imposes a steep economic cost.

When terrorist groups trade in elephant tusks or rhino horns, the security costs can be very high.

The difficult task of conservation is to place a value on things that we thought were free.

Fresh water, the soil, pollinators, watersheds, rain forests — a certain kind of environmentalism views these as priceless. A less sentimental, more effective variety gives them a price to make them count in the calculations of

communities and nations.

The contrast between these approaches is found in the evolution of Conservation International, one of the main global conservation groups.

“When we started,” says its cofounder, Peter Seligmann, “we were just about biodiversity.” But then came what he calls an “epiphany.” “It is not about nature,” he says, “it is about people. Nature would figure out a way to survive, but would people?

Human development and progress can’t be successful unless conservation is a core issue, not a parallel track.”

Seligmann calls this a “radical shift in perception.” And when his shift came, about 20 percent of Conservation International’s staff responded by quitting. Since then, the organization has set out to put an accurate price on nature.

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY LISA BENSON

With the growth of world population, and the expansion of a resource-ravenous global middle class, environmental stresses are found everywhere, feeding economic insecurity, political instability and security challenges. Illegal logging causes deforestation and unfair economic competition. Access to fresh water is a growing issue in megacities such as Mexico City, which is sinking as it depletes its aquifer. Protests against air pollution have become common in China. Overfishing and pollution threaten ocean protein sources. As fisheries were wiped out near Somalia, desperate men turned to piracy.

A cuddly conservationism — finding some macaque or manatee to hug — can’t respond on a sufficient scale. Instead, Conservation International is providing struggling nations with scientific tools to measure ecological health, creating economic models to properly price natural assets, and building capacity to protect and secure forms of natural wealth. The goal is to bring not just conservation officials but also ministers of finance into the process — incorporating resource protection at the center of economic planning. This might involve anything from paying

landowners not to harvest forests, to imposing fishing limits, to passing carbon taxes, to building a disciplined, transparent response to poaching.

Seligmann has further offended some environmentalists by inviting multinational corporations into the conservation business. So WalMart is working toward a 20 percent reduction in the energy use of its stores. Disney is engaged in conservation efforts in Peru. Wes Bush, president of Northrop Grumman — a major defense contractor — is on Conservation International’s board and makes a strong case for the urgency of conservation from a security perspective.

This is what effective environmentalism will look like in the future. Rather than all-ornothing international regulatory schemes — which are more likely to be nothing — conservation is likely to proceed country by country, as the economic, political and security costs of a stressed environment become undeniable.

Businesses will need to be part of the solution. Encouraging creative conservation leadership from the U.S. government will require bipartisan support.

And all of us will need to consider the value of resources that only appear to be free. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2015

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

CHECKPOINT

My dad, Jim Webb, killed a man.

The reaction shows ignorance.

BY

J IM W EBB

I

f you watched the Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday night, you probably heard the closing comment by my father, Jim Webb. Without hesitation, he answered that the enemy he was “most proud of ” was the Vietnamese soldier who wounded him with a hand grenade. He then added that “. . . he isn’t around anymore.”

While there were those in the media and around the country who were a bit stunned, and perhaps even put off by this answer, my fellow veterans and I were not. If anything, his blunt (and perhaps a bit brutal) honesty was much appreciated and further endeared him to us as a candidate. We veterans are also more likely to have a fuller picture of my father’s record. He’s the man who gave us the post-9/11 GI Bill. We also know him as a highly decorated combat veteran who earned the Navy Cross for the entire episode surrounding that grenade, not just the snippet that has been focused on.

As a Marine infantryman myself, I have experienced the complex emotions of combat. On the one hand, you may not even see the face of an individual who fires a round so close to your head that your ears ring or blows up the improvised explosive device next to your vehicle that potentially kills or maims your friends. On the other, there’s an intensely personal reaction. After all, this isn’t a person who is besting you in a debate about gun control, or some other social policy, over a beer. This is a person whose intent is to end your life, and that is as clear cut an enemy as you can think of. Additionally, many, if not most, of the veterans I have talked to have read the Navy Cross citation that chronicles the incident surrounding my father. For those unfamiliar, it states: “Observing the grenade land dangerously close to his companion, First Lieutenant Webb simultaneously fired his weapon at the enemy, pushed the Marine away from the grenade, and shielded him from the explosion with his own body.”

We who know the complexities of combat understand the character displayed in the above sentence. When put into the proper context, it is clearly far more than the sound bite being dissected by political pundits.

JOHN LOCHER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

JIM R. WEBB

During Tuesday’s Democratic debate, at top, presidential candidate Jim Webb, referenced a Vietnamese soldier he killed. His son, Jim R. Webb, at right in the above photo with his father in Afghanistan, says the public shouldn’t ridicule someone’s willingness to sacrifice his life for others.

In fact, seeing the reaction to my father’s story in recent days has highlighted for me the almost stunning level of ignorance that the general public has about war. CNN introduced him as a “war hero,” and yet people were surprised and even uncomfortable

when they were given a glimpse of what that might have entailed.

Yes, the man who threw the grenade isn’t around anymore, but more importantly the man whom my father shielded with his own body lived to see another day. As a Marine and as a leader, that is the important part.

To me and many other veterans, we have a sea of presidential candidates who seemingly have only personal interests in mind. Yet, here is a leader who has not only endured war but demonstrated that he is willing to sacrifice his life for his people. Is that really something to be sneered at?

This country has been at war for almost 15 years, and as I think about the ridicule leveled at my father in the past 24 hours, I can’t help but imagine what these same people must think about the service of my own generation. In their eyes, did we simply spend some kind of twisted “semester abroad” in a place with plenty of sand but no ocean? Or conversely, do they ignorantly dismiss our experiences, as they have my father’s, as those of cold, callous killers? n Jim Webb served as a Marine infantryman from 2005 to 2010. He currently lives and works in Baltimore.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2015

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