The Washington Post National Weekly - November 19, 2017

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2017

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HOUSTON’S LONG RECOVERY QUIETLY HEADS INSIDE The city is rebuilding and adjusting to its new normal after Harvey. PAGE 12

Politics Sheriffs side with Trump 4

Nation Many jobs, but for little pay 9

5 Myths Female veterans 23

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WONKBLOG

Give thanks (but cut it short) BY

C HRISTOPHER I NGRAHAM

ISTOCK

I

n the wake of last year’s bitterly contested presidential election, “politically divided” families cut their Thanksgiving celebrations short by an average of 20 to 30 minutes. Republican voters were more likely to bail on Democratic families than vice versa.

And reductions in family time were steeper in areas that saw more political ads.

Those are among the conclusions of a new working paper by M. Keith Chen of UCLA and Ryne Rohla of Washington State University. The paper matches location data from 10 million smartphones to precinct-level voting data for the 2016 election, painting a detailed portrait of how people from predominantly Democratic and Republican areas spent their 2016 Thanksgiving holiday.

In recent years, Thanksgiving has become a politically fraught time, often pitting family members with diametrically opposed political beliefs against each other over plates of turkey and mashed potatoes. Last year, for instance, news outlets across the country published stories on how to navigate political discussion with Trump-supporting uncles and socialist nephews. A majority of Americans said they hoped to avoid Thanksgiving politics completely.

Surveys and anecdotes are great, but Chen and Rohla wanted to know if people actually altered their behavior on Thanksgiving as a result of the divisive election. Specifically, they wanted to know whether Thanksgiving dinners in politically divided households were cut short relative to Thanksgiving dinners among politically homogeneous families.

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Smartphone data could answer part of the question. That data came from a service called Safegraph, which collected over 17 trillion location markers from 10 million smartphones in November 2016. Chen and Rohla used this data to identify individuals’ home locations, which they defined as the places people were most often located between 1 and 4 a.m.

They also looked at where these people were located between the hours of 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. If that location differed from the “home” location, you’d reasonably infer that a person traveled to spend Thanksgiving with friends or family. Even better, the cellphone data shows you exactly when those travelers arrived at a Thanksgiving location and when they left.

To capture political leanings, Chen and Rohla collected 2016 presidential voting data at the level of voting precinct, the most finely grained level of spatial detail attainable. For the purposes of their paper, they assume that people from precincts voting for Clinton are Democrats, while those from Trump precincts are Republican.

It’s important to note that this represents an approximation of political beliefs — there are, after all, Democrats living in places that tend to vote Republican, and vice versa. So for a sanity check, they tested the party preferences they assigned to their cellphone users against the aggregate two-party vote shares at both the state and national level.

“At a national level the data add up to a Democratic vote share of 50.3%, compared to the actual share of 51.1%,” they found. Not perfect, of course, but good enough for social science research.

From there, the analysis is pretty straight-

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. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 6

forward: Do Democrats spend less time at Thanksgiving dinners in Republican households than in Democratic ones, and vice versa? The top-line answer is “yes”: Even when controlling for things like travel distance and various demographic characteristics “families that were likely to have voted differently spent between 20 and 30 fewer minutes with each other,” Chen and Rohla found.

But these differences were asymmetric. Relative to 2015, Democratic voters were about 5 percent less likely than Republicans to travel for Thanksgiving in 2016. However, while Republicans were more likely to show up to a distant Thanksgiving dinner, they were also more likely to bail early: “Travelers from Democratic precincts do not significantly shorten their visits to Republican hosts, while Republican- precinct travelers shortened their visits by over 40 minutes,” the paper found.

Chen and Rohla also found the volume of political advertising in a precinct affected these numbers. “Thanksgiving dinners are further shortened by around 1.5 minutes for every thousand political advertisements aired in the traveler’s home media market,” they found. In a heavily saturated state like Florida, that resulted in a 1.2-hour reduction in Thanksgiving time for politically divided families.

Overall, Chen and Rohla write, “our results suggest partisan differences cost American families 62 million person-hours of Thanksgiving time, 56.8% from individuals living in Democratic precincts and 43.2% from Republican precincts.”

That’s a pretty staggering number, indicative of the extent to which fierce partisan divisions are undermining family and social ties in the United States. And that’s just on one day in the year . n

©The Washington Post

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

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ON THE COVER Drucilla Bolden, 64, checks on repairs at her home in Houston. She is waiting on money from the federal government. “The whole system is broke,” she said. Photograph by ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Sheriffs raise their voices for Trump T IM C RAIG Titusville, Fla. BY

S

heriff Wayne Ivey was so anxious on election night last year that he secluded himself in his house and hooked up his iPad to a projection screen showing the electoral map.

When a state was called for Donald Trump, Ivey shouted with relief. And by the end of the night, it had all sunk in: Voters not only elected Trump, they also had endorsed Ivey’s own brash, politically incorrect brand of conservative politics.

“He doesn’t back down,” said Ivey, the sheriff for Brevard County, home to Cape Canaveral and middle-class beach destinations along Florida’s east coast. “He is not afraid to take a stance, and that is what we need right now.”

With his red “Make America Great Again” hat prominently displayed in his office here in Titusville, Ivey is part of a wave of county sheriffs who feel emboldened by President Trump and his agenda, becoming vocal foot soldiers in the nation’s testy political and culture wars.

From deep-blue states such as Massachusetts and New York to traditionally conservative strongholds in the South and the Midwest, locally elected sheriffs have emerged as some of the president’s biggest defenders. They echo Trump’s narrative on everything from serious policy debates such as immigration to fleeting political dust-ups with NFL players who kneel during the national anthem.

With Trump dominating the national conversation through tweets, sheriffs are mimicking his antagonistic political style, alarming progressives and some legal observers who fear an increasingly undisciplined justice system.

Some have even gone to battle with Democratic officials, bucking their “politically correct” policies and using rhetoric that puts some residents on edge.

“Members of law enforcement and sheriffs seem to be more comfortable articulating controversial, pro-incarceration views than

WILLIE J. ALLEN JR. FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Tough-talking county law officers’ rhetoric puts some on edge in recent years,” said Daniel Medwed, a law and criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. “When you have a president who feels comfortable saying things that people would not have said in previous regimes, it emboldens other people to say those things.”

Over the past nine months, various elected sheriffs have been filmed saying that they would call Immigration and Customs Enforcement on undocumented residents, have threatened to bar sex offenders from hurricane shelters, and have proposed sending inmates to help build Trump’s planned Mexican border wall.

Last month, a sheriff in Louisiana even suggested “good” inmates need to be kept in jail so

they can cook, clean and wash vehicles.

In Titusville, Ivey is calling on all of his constituents to arm themselves as a countywide militia. He and many other sheriffs are producing controversial, at times jarring, videos designed to show toughness, including images of deputies beating in doors.

In an interview, Ivey said he sees it as his duty to be supportive of the president. His personal Facebook page even features a photograph of Trump along with the phrase “Leave Our President Alone.”

“The voice of the sheriffs is to help the president and help our attorney general be aware of what is taking place, the crisis and trends taking place, and be able to

Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey swears in deputies in his office in Titusville, Fla. President Trump “is not afraid to take a stance, and that is what we need right now,” Ivey says.

put laws in place,” said Ivey, who represents a county Trump won by nearly 20 points.

Trump has cultivated a strong alliance with the nation’s law enforcement officials. One week after his inauguration, he signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to deputize local officers to enforce federal immigration laws, reviving a policy that President Barack Obama had curtailed. In early February, Trump invited a dozen sheriffs to a White House meeting, during which he vowed to crack down on gang violence in Chicago and build his proposed border wall.

Before leaving the White House, the sheriffs gave Trump a small statue of a cowboy-hat-

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POLITICS wearing sheriff. It was the first time, they said, that the National Sheriffs Association had ever given the statue to a non-sheriff.

The following day, Trump addressed the Major County Sheriffs Association and Major Cities Chiefs Association.

“I would like to begin my remarks with a declaration to you, and delivered to every member of the law enforcement community across the United States, you have a true, true friend in the White House,” Trump said.

From the earliest days of domestic law enforcement, conservative, outspoken sheriffs have been interwoven into the culture and political history. During the Obama administration, both Joe Arpaio in Phoenix and David Clarke in Milwaukee became wellknown for their controversial views. (In August, Arpaio was pardoned by Trump for a contemptof-court charge and Clarke resigned from his position.)

But legal analysts and other observers are surprised that the breadth and political clout of conservative sheriffs appear to be growing stronger, reflecting the coarsening of debate in the United States.

“The president is dividing this country, and it spills over into how some police officers are now doing their jobs,” said Isaiah Rumlin, chairman of the NAACP in Florida’s Duval County.

Within weeks of Trump’s inauguration, sheriffs across the country reported having productive meetings with Department of Homeland Security officials about ways they can work together to advance the president’s agenda, including on immigration.

In South Carolina’s Beaufort County, Sheriff P.J. Tanner quickly began working to restart the program that would allow several of his deputies to work alongside immigration agents to search for undocumented residents.

“We feel we now have a president who has the interests that we have at heart, and that is to protect the citizens of the United States,” Tanner said in an interview, adding that his deputies can be “the boots on the ground” for federal agents.

In Oklahoma, the administration’s skepticism of changes to drug laws and sentencing policies has also invigorated local sheriffs.

After Attorney General Jeff Ses-

WILLIE J. ALLEN JR. FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

sions spoke to the Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association last month, the group vowed to redouble efforts to roll back an initiative approved by state voters last year that made minor drug possession a misdemeanor.

Ray McNair, the executive director of the Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association, said law enforcement and the administration can work together to refine all levels of the criminal justice system.

Other sheriffs have backed up Trump’s agenda in more subtle ways, becoming local validators for his message. In Geauga County, Ohio, the sheriff barred deputies from working security at Cleveland Browns games after Trump stoked his dispute with the NFL. With more than 3,000 sheriffs nationwide, almost all elected, the group is far from monolithic.

Sheriffs in urban areas still tend to be Democrats, and many hold progressive views about sentencing reform, drug policy and immigration. Rumlin, for example, was heartened when several sheriffs, including Jacksonville’s, spoke against Trump’s comment this summer that law enforcement should be rougher while transporting prisoners.

But the growing clout of conservative sheriffs can be traced to the fact there are just far more of them, said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.

Even in politically moderate communities, some local sheriffs have become vocal advocates for Trump and his agenda.

In a suburban Philadelphia county that Trump lost by nine percentage points, Chester County Sheriff Carolyn B. Welsh has been battling critics over her unwavering support for Trump. And in Buffalo, some Democrats have called on Erie County Sheriff Tim Howard to resign after he appeared in uniform at a pro-Trump rally this spring.

Howard has also publicly defied an order from New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) instructing state law enforcement officials to refrain from asking individuals about their immigration status.

“As sheriff, part of my job is enforcing our constitution and the law, regardless of what cheap political points Albany politicians are looking to score,” Howard said in a statement.

Ryan Lenz, an investigator with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said recent actions by conservative sheriffs reflect broader trends that suggest law enforcement officials in many parts of the country are tacking even further to the right.

He pointed to the growing influence of the “constitutional sheriffs,” a self-identifier that began in the 1970s but became far more visible in recent years amid concerns in rural America over Obama’s policies. Under the

Ivey shows off his tattoo of the preamble of the Constitution. He produces a weekly Facebook video called the “Wheel of Fugitive,” featuring spinning faces of wanted people.

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movement, sheriffs vow not to enforce federal laws that they view as infringing on the constitutional rights of constituents.

Richard Mack, the executive director of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, said his organization has trained 450 sheriffs.

Traditionally, Lenz said, the constitutional sheriff movement would be waning with an administration in power that it views as less hostile.

“We are not seeing that. . . . And that is really what the 2016 election did,” said Lenz, whose organization identifies groups it views as extreme. “Across the radical right, extremist ideologies that existed along the peripheral of American politics suddenly got a boost in legitimacy, too.”

Many Titusville residents consider Ivey — with his folksy humor and relentless glad-handing — to be fairly mainstream in this traditionally conservative county. But the sheriff doesn’t shy away from stating that he, too, considers himself a constitutional sheriff.

Three years ago, Ivey even got a tattoo on his left arm displaying the preamble of the Constitution, and he refers to himself as the “most politically incorrect sheriff” in the country.

After he was first elected in 2012, Ivey instituted what he calls the only “prison chain gang” in Florida. And he boasts that the Brevard County jail spends as little as is nutritionally possible on inmate meals — about 99 cents per day per inmate.

And here in northeastern Florida, some advocates worry that Trump’s agenda, combined with a sheriff’s historical reputation for law and order, will only worsen historical tensions between law enforcement agencies and some community members.

In suburban Jacksonville, many immigrants fled from one town in Clay County, Fla., this year after that county’s newly elected Republican sheriff, Darryl Daniels, reversed policy and announced that his deputies would also work closely with ICE, according to Indy Moran, a local social worker.

Ivey said critics are overlooking the central message of the 2016 election.

Be it the president or their sheriff, he said, many Americans want leaders who “speak their mind.” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Trump mostly quiet on human rights

BY D AVID N AKAMURA AND E MILY R AUHALA

Manila

A

s his first official trip to Asia neared its end Monday, President Trump had yet to utter a word about the military campaign against the Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority in Burma, which the United Nations’ top human rights official has called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Earlier, in Vietnam, Trump embraced the communist nation’s leaders during a state visit to Hanoi without publicly raising an ongoing crackdown on political speech and independent journalists. In Beijing, he praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who oversees an authoritarian system that sharply limits press freedoms, as “a very special man.”

And in Manila, human rights issues were barely discussed — if at all — in Trump’s first meeting with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who has garnered worldwide condemnation for waging a bloody, extrajudicial drug war that has killed thousands, shot either in police raids or targeted by hit men, often after being named by police. Some of the victims have been children.

Throughout his 12-day, fivenation trip in Asia, Trump focused primarily on tough talk about trade, terrorism and North Korea’s nuclear program, while saying little about chronic human rights abuses in a region that is home to some of the world’s most brutal authoritarian regimes. The theme is a familiar one for Trump, who declared during a May speech in front of leaders in the Middle East that “we are not here to lecture” but to “offer partnership.”

Unlike President Barack Obama — who canceled a bilateral meeting with Duterte last year — Trump joined the Philippine strongman in raising glasses in a toast at the start of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Manila last weekend.

The two men appeared at ease as they posed for photographs with

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

During his 12-day trip to Asia, Duterte’s drug war and plight of Rohingya didn’t come up publicly other leaders wearing traditional Barong Tagalog shirts.

“We’ve had a great relationship,” Trump told reporters as he sat with Duterte at the start of the gathering. “This has been very successful.”

Duterte at one point called reporters “spies,” prompting Trump to laugh.

A spokesman for Duterte said after the meeting that human rights did not come up, although the Philippine leader did talk about his efforts against the “drug menace.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said human rights came up briefly in the context of the Philippines’ drug war; she did not elaborate. On two occasions, Trump declined to answer shouted questions from reporters about whether he had pressed Duterte on human rights.

“I have a sense that he is not going to address human rights, largely because he is trying to build a relationship with Duterte,”

said James Zarsadiaz, director of the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. “This 10-day trip is about building alliances in response to North Korea.”

White House aides said Trump routinely brings up human rights in his private conversations with world leaders, and in a couple of notable instances he has addressed the matter in public on his Asia trip.

In a speech to the South Korean parliament, Trump called North Korea “a hell no person deserves,” and he laid out in sometimes gruesome detail the abuses Pyongyang has perpetrated — including purportedly killing babies and carting the bodies away in buckets.

In Tokyo, Trump met with the families of Japanese citizens who were abducted by North Korean agents four decades earlier. Other presidents, including Obama and George W. Bush, also have met with the families.

“We’ll work together and see if

President Trump shakes hands with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit dinner Nov. 12 in Manila. Duterte has been widely condemned for waging an extrajudicial drug war that has killed thousands.

we can do something, now the spotlight is on,” Trump said at a news conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Trump called the abductions a “very, very sad thing.”

In Beijing, Trump personally asked Xi to help resolve the case of three UCLA men’s basketball players who were arrested for allegedly shoplifting while in Hangzhou for a tournament, according to people familiar with the situation.

Although the Obama administration promised a “pivot” to Asia, in part structured on human rights and U.S. values diplomacy, there has long been a sense that U.S. influence in the Asia-Pacific region is waning while China’s is on the rise.

Over the past decade, China has stepped up trade, investment and tourism in Southeast Asia, becoming a major economic player with close ties to political and military elites.

All 10 ASEAN member states joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a Chinese-led multilateral financial institution that is issuing billions in loans.

China has not tied human rights reforms or worker protections to its economic largesse.

Trump aides, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, said the president believes it is more effective to discuss human rights issues in private; Trump has helped gain the release of a number of Americans who had been detained in Asia and the Middle East. The president railed about North Korea’s mistreatment of American college student Otto Warmbier, who died shortly after being released from 17 months of captivity.

Across both East and Southeast Asia, U.S. allies are uncertain about what Trump stands for and nervous about what he will do, said Richard Heydarian, a security analyst and author of “The Rise of Duterte.”

“They see a total collapse of American soft power, largely because of Trump, and also American structural decline, especially relative to China,” he said. n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

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Silent anger at Moore may aid Jones BY

P AUL K ANE

S

enate Republicans have been agonizing over the possible scenarios of dealing with Roy Moore. They are hoping the Alabama Republican will voluntarily withdraw his controversial candidacy. If Moore refuses, GOP leaders are threatening expulsion hearings once he gets to the Senate.

One scenario is not receiving enough contemplation: Sen. Doug Jones.

It is becoming increasingly plausible that the former U.S. attorney will overcome steep odds and become the first Democrat elected to the Senate by Alabama voters in 25 years.

What had been a fairly comfortable lead for Moore has been upended since The Washington Post’s report about allegations the former judge pursued teenage girls when he was a 30something local prosecutor, as well as a second accusation of inappropriate sexual contact.

It may take until after Thanksgiving for polling to truly capture the state of the race, but a Fox News poll released Thursday — the first conducted since the allegations came out — had Jones leading Moore by 8 points.

Much of the national media focus, however, has been on Moore’s very staunch defenders and their invocations of odd religious comparisons to explain away the accusations. This has helped create an assumption that there is a backlash in Alabama against the national media, boosting the Republican nominee.

So have most voters in Alabama been racing to defend Moore?

“Maybe they’re not,” said Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), a 31-year veteran of the Senate and his state’s elder political statesman. Shelby suggested Tuesday that there were probably many voters that are “just as concerned” with Moore’s alleged behavior as there are staunch defenders of the former judge.

But Shelby said Republicans who believe the allegations are, for now, staying quiet.

In this regard, Shelby fears there is a silent majority opposed to Moore that will show up at the polls and soundly defeat him.

The next three weeks are sure to be filled with more whipsaw moments, possibly new allegations and continued GOP efforts to get Moore to withdraw from the race.

But the one certainty is that, as long as Moore stays in the race, the contest is going to continue to be a referendum on his behavior and the allegations against him — and not a referendum on the state’s traditional conservative posture and the leftward lurch of Democrats at the national level.

In essence, the more this campaign takes on the tone of a gubernatorial race, the better Jones’s chances are of winning. Those contests, in the Deep South and other conserva-

BRYNN ANDERSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

tive-leaning states, have often been at least a little more favorable for Democrats than Senate races.

That’s because the issue set is not so focused on national party platforms and more about the individual candidates and local issues.

That is what happened in Louisiana’s governor’s race two years ago, when Democrat John Bel Edwards faced off against then-Sen. David Vitter (R).

That contest focused on Vitter’s personal behavior from decade-old allegations of connections to prostitute rings in Washington and New Orleans — Vitter had given only a vague apology for this in 2007 but never fully explained the situation to his constituents.

Many expected Vitter to overcome that controversy because the state is so conservative — Republican Mitt Romney won it by 17 percentage points in 2012, and President Trump won by 20 percentage points last year.

But in November 2015, Louisiana voters rejected Vitter and handed Edwards an easy victory despite the state’s normal deeply Republican voting patterns. Soon after, his political career in ruins, Vitter announced he would not seek reelection to the Senate in 2016.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), aware of the potential loss, said Tuesday that Moore’s campaign was “collapsing.”

While some have theorized that McConnell is willing to lose the seat — rather than deal with the political tumult Moore could cause in the Senate, under an almost-certain ethics in-

Doug Jones could be the first Democrat elected to the Senate by Alabama voters in 25 years.

vestigation — the GOP leader is always most obsessed with winning and keeping the majority.

That’s why he went from having his allies and advisers whispering about the idea of Attorney General Jeff Sessions returning to Alabama to run a write-in campaign for the seat, to openly endorsing the idea at a Wall Street Journal event this past week.

“The Alabamian who would fit that standard would be the attorney general,” McConnell said.

But that step — which Sessions has declined to comment on — still requires Moore to voluntarily ask to withdraw from the campaign, at which point state officials would no longer count any of his votes. It would also probably require Moore to voluntarily and publicly endorse Sessions, telling his voters that they should write in their former senator.

As of now, Moore has shown no such willingness and is instead digging in.

The question is whether he can ever refocus the race on Democratic values — Jones supports abortion rights and some restrictions on gun rights — or if the race continues to center on a debate over his own behavior.

Alabama is even a touch more conservative than Louisiana, having favored Romney by 22 percentage points and Trump by more than 25 percentage points.

But circumstances like Moore’s, when a candidate’s personal behavior is under fire, can throw races up in the air and also make turnout projections useless.

In 2012, after Republicans nominated Todd Akin, the conservative congressman from Missouri said during his Senate campaign that women rarely became pregnant from a “legitimate rape” in explaining his antiabortion stance in all circumstances.

Akin also refused to abandon the race, in part believing the state’s conservative tilt would bring him home to victory even after all the GOP committees had abandoned him.

Romney went on to win Missouri by more than 10 percentage points — but Akin lost to Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) by more than 15 percentage points.

One key reason was a huge drop-off of almost 150,000 ballots from those who voted for the two major-party candidates in the presidential race and in the Senate race. Some of those votes, in the Senate contest, went to a third-party candidate who was on the ballot, and some just did not vote in the race.

On Dec. 12, as of now, there are just two names on the ballot: Moore and Jones.

If Shelby’s fears prove true, a lot of Republican voters will simply stay home and allow Jones to score a victory. n

© The Washington Post

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NATION

New York becomes hub for fentanyl Record seizures of the deadly, highly lucrative drug show alarming trend

N ICK M IROFF New York BY

Heroin and fentanyl seizures in pounds

T

Fentanyl is increasingly replacing heroin on the streets. This year, narcotics agents in New York City have seized more than 375 pounds of pure fentanyl, a tenfold increase over 2016, while heroin is down.

Heroin, or heroin spiked with fentanyl 685

he middle-aged couple in the station wagon went shopping at a New Jersey Walmart on a warm night in August. They stopped for dinner at an IHOP on the way home.

And when they arrived at their apartment building in a quiet residential section of Queens, the narcotics agents following them got a warrant to go inside.

They found several suitcases loaded with brick-shaped bundles of what appeared to be heroin. But lab tests determined that most of it — 141 pounds — was pure fentanyl, a synthetic and supremely dangerous opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin.

It was the largest fentanyl seizure in U.S. history. There was enough inside the apartment to kill 32 million people, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The married couple who were arrested, Rogelio AlvaradoRobles, 55, and Blanca FloresSolis, 52, had no criminal record in the United States. They had flown to New York a few weeks earlier with Mexican passports.

They had no weapons.

But they were drug cartel emissaries, investigators said, sent to broker the sale of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of narcotics, like pharmaceutical executives on a business trip.

DEA agents say recent arrests reflect an emerging pattern, as Mexican trafficking groups attempt to turn New York City into their Northeast distribution hub. They operate with quasicorporate sophistication and an inconspicuous, transient presence, sending sales teams to deliver staggering quantities of drugs and then quietly disappear.

This year, narcotics agents have seized close to 375 pounds of pure fentanyl in New York City, 10 times as much as they did in 2016.

A calculated business decision appears to be behind the boom.

“The cartels realize that fentanyl is much more profitable than heroin,” said James Hunt, head of

500

Pure fentanyl 375

140 24 0

2012

2017

Note: 2017 figure is through October.

Source: Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor of New York City, New York City health department THE WASHINGTON POST

the DEA’s New York Division.

Unlike heroin, whose raw opium base must be collected from poppy growers in remote mountain valleys, fentanyl can be made in clandestine labs using relatively inexpensive chemicals. And because it is so much more potent, it can be diluted with cutting agents to make exponentially more street-level doses, whether in powder form or ersatz pills pressed to resemble brands such as OxyContin and Percocet.

“These guys are evil businessmen, but they are still businessmen,” Hunt said. “I don’t know of any other product where you could invest $3,000 and make millions.”

More than 60,000 people died from overdoses in the United States last year, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and deaths from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl increased fivefold.

According to DEA intelligence gleaned from wiretaps, about 80 percent of the fentanyl seized in the New York area appears to be linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.

The organization remains North America’s dominant trafficking

group, even as its leader, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, awaits trial in a maximum-security jail in Lower Manhattan.

Sinaloa’s smuggling machine has carried on without Guzman, meaning his legal defense may be funded in part with profits from fentanyl sales made just a few miles from his cell.

The Sinaloa group does not bother with retail-level commerce, according to the DEA. It uses New York to deliver large wholesale shipments to middlemen, typically local Dominican traffickers. Those groups distribute to markets in New England, Pennsylvania, Baltimore and other places where the opioid crisis is raging.

Late last month, as President Trump declared opioid addiction a public health emergency, Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to a mail inspection facility at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to praise the customs agents who have intercepted fentanyl shipments arriving from China.

“With synthetic drugs flooding our streets, drugs are now more powerful, more addictive and more dangerous than ever,” Ses-

sions said.

“Fentanyl is the number one killer drug in America,” he said.

“And as deadly as it is, you can go online and order it through the mail.”

But Mexican traffickers are sending fentanyl through the U.S. interstate highway system, not the postal service, and in quantities that dwarf the amounts arriving in envelopes.

They smuggle it across the border in fake vehicle panels or commercial loads of produce, furniture, auto parts and other cargo, driving it across the country from California and Arizona.

The loads arrive at industrial parks in New Jersey, where cartel emissaries are sent to meet the shipments and oversee wholesale transactions. Then they must figure out what to do with bricks of cash that are even bulkier than the drugs.

The Bronx and northern Manhattan are choice locations for the traffickers, agents say, because their proximity to major bridges and highways offers the same logistical advantages sought by any commercial distributor.

Last month, narcotics agents arrested a Mexican driver in an industrial area of the Bronx with 37 pounds of fentanyl in the back of a delivery truck. The location was not far from a hotel where, in June, they seized 40 pounds of the drug stashed in a duffel bag.

Like the couple in Queens, traffickers appear to be avoiding high-crime neighborhoods where they might be at greater risk of being robbed or detected. DEA agents in August found 20 pounds of fentanyl and heroin at a $4,000-a-month apartment overlooking Central Park.

Inside, a Dominican drug gang was blending fentanyl and heroin in coffee grinders and stamping the drug packages with labels such as “Pray for Death,” “Uber” and “Gilligan’s Island.”

“Two years ago, any one of these seizures would have been huge,” Bridget Brennan, New York City’s special narcotics prosecutor, said in an interview. “But we’ve never seen volumes like

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NATION what we’re seeing now,” she said.

“Not even close.”

The couple arrested in Queens face major drug trafficking charges. An attorney for Flores-Solis said she was not aware of any illegal activities that her husband, Alvarado-Robles, may have been involved in. His attorney declined to comment.

New York City’s homicide rate soared in the 1980s, when Colombian traffickers dominated the cocaine trade, setting up extensive distribution networks and defending them with lethal force.

The Mexican traffickers flooding the city with fentanyl and other drugs are different. They largely eschew violence, and they don’t carry guns.

“They’re smart,” said Jimmy Arroyo, a DEA special agent who leads the team that in recent months has made several large busts linked to the Mexican traffickers. “They know that if they kill people, they will attract attention.”

Last year, amid an unprecedented surge of opioids into New York City, the number of homicides decreased to 335, the lowest total since 1963.

This is not to say the cartels are not violent, only that they are strategic. In Mexico, where they kill easily and with near-total impunity, the homicide rate is at a 20-year high.

Although the opioid boom hasn’t led to more violence in New York, it has produced a staggering amount of death. The city had nearly 1,400 fatal overdoses last year, a 46 percent increase from 2015. Fentanyl showed up in 44 percent of autopsies.

Prosecutors say there are signs that the Mexican trafficking groups have started taking steps to dilute their fentanyl shipments before delivery, apparently worried that the surge in overdose deaths could harm sales.

“The cartels have their own self-interest at heart, and if they do nothing but put out fentanyl, they will kill their customer base,” said Brennan, the special narcotics prosecutor. “From a business perspective, it’s good to send a small, compact load, but if the person receiving it is not familiar with how to dilute it, you will kill too many people and draw more law enforcement attention.” n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Fastest-growing jobs in U.S. pay about $22,000 per year BY

10 fastest growing occupations (Projected 20162026) Personal care aides l Home health aides l Developers of software, applications l Nurse practitioners l Physician assistants l Physical therapist assistants l Statisticians l Solar photovoltaic installers l Wind turbine service technicians l Mathematicians l

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

D ANIELLE P AQUETTE

T

he largest two categories of America’s fastestgrowing jobs offer some of the country’s lowest wages and weakest benefits.

Over the next 10 years, analysts expect to see 1.2 million more jobs for home health and personal care aides, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s more positions than the projected job creation in the eight other most rapidly growing fields combined.

By 2026, the home health aide industry will add 425,600 positions, an increase of 46.7 percent, the government estimates show.

The occupation’s median annual wage today is $22,600.

The numbers of personal care aides, who handle mostly domestic tasks, meanwhile, is expected to climb by 754,000 jobs or 37.6 percent. They typically make about $21,000 per year.

Solar and wind jobs, which come with larger paychecks, are projected to grow by 105 percent and 96 percent respectively, but the tiny fields will add just 17,400 new positions in the next decade, researchers predict.

Roughly 9 in 10 of these aide positions are held by female caretakers. Nearly half identify as black or Hispanic.

Workers in these roles share one central mission: They care for people who struggle to care for themselves. But many live in poverty, and most have little to no paid days off.

“They’re typically the breadwinners in low-income households,” said Ariane Hegewisch, a labor economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research who co-wrote a study last year about low-wage jobs filled by women.

“But what they earn makes it hard for them to pay the rent, or get an education to move into better paying jobs, or look after their children.”

Fifty-five percent of home health aides subsist on incomes

ISTOCK

below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, her research found.

They tend to rely on public benefits, she said, and lack the resources to set their kids on an economically better path.

Hegewisch said policymakers need to pay attention to this growing group of workers.

“If these jobs work well, the overall health system and social care system can save a lot of money,” she said.

Hegewisch has proposed using Medicare dollars to supplement caregivers’ wages, arguing it would reduce turnover and save the government money by keeping the elderly and the sick out of nursing homes. Nursing homes tend to be much costlier drains on the health system than home care.

Demetra Nightingale, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a think tank in the District, said demand for home health and personal care aides will continue to skyrocket as the population ages.

“We have a lot of these low-

wage jobs, and we’re going to need a lot of these low-wage jobs in the future,” she said.

President Trump has said he aims to expand apprenticeships in the United States, and Nightingale said she hopes to see similar opportunities for domestic caretakers. Los Angeles and Seattle both have robust — and replicable — paid training programs, she said.

“We need to provide career ladders for people who can meet the growing demand,” Nightingale said.

Advocates for these workers also push for raising the minimum wage and a national paid parental leave plan, so that aides can afford to take time off to care for a sick child or recover after a birth.

Ivanka Trump, adviser to the president, has proposed opening paid leave to low-income workers through the nation’s unemployment insurance system, but the idea hasn’t gained traction on Capitol Hill. n © The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

When climate rhetoric meets reality

BY E D G RIFF W ITTE AND L UISA B ECK

Immerath, Germany

T

he hospital is gone. So are most of the houses, with more being knocked down daily. Not even the bodies remain in the tree-shaded cemetery, where centuries-old bones were recently dug up and moved.

There is far more digging to come — enough to extinguish any trace that Immerath, a oncequaint farming village in the fertile western Germany countryside, ever existed. Because beneath the rich soil lies a substance even more valuable: coal.

The demolition of Immerath — making way for the expansion of megamines that will produce billions of tons of carbon emissions in the coming decades and leave a deep gash where villages dating to Roman times once stood — represents the dark underside of Germany’s efforts to address climate change.

The growth of German coal mines at a time when the fuel is being rapidly phased out elsewhere also shows how difficult it can be for countries, even ones that aggressively commit to cleaner technologies, to actually make the switch.

For Germany, the gap between its bright-green rhetoric and coalsmudged reality has never been more vivid.

In the former West German capital of Bonn, the country is hosting a U.N. climate conference this month that is seen as critical to global efforts to fulfill pledges made two years ago in Paris. To slow the climate’s potentially catastrophic warming, experts say the governments represented in Bonn will need to accelerate their embrace of renewable energy.

But just an hour’s drive away is Immerath, which in its dying days has become an emblem of Germany’s struggle to break its heavy addiction to brown coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels.

“There’s no bigger impact on the environment than brown coal mining, and we’re the world champion,” said Dirk Jansen, a leader of

FILIP SINGER/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Even as Germany pushes renewable energy, coal still proves irresistible as a cheap energy source the local chapter of Friends of the Earth in Germany’s coal heartland of North Rhine-Westphalia. “If we want to stop climate change, we have to start here.”

The ingredients for that start would seem to exist. Germany is led by Angela Merkel, who is known as the “Climate Chancellor” for her global leadership on the issue even as the Trump-led United States has abandoned it.

After fall elections, Merkel’s conservatives are now negotiating to govern in a coalition with the Greens party, which has long advocated an end to German coal.

Opinion surveys show wide majorities of the German public favor getting out of the coal business, and the government has already committed to largely decarbonizing the economy by the middle of the century, with renewables filling the void.

But Germany is also on course to badly miss its emission-reduction targets for 2020. Leading politicians — Merkel included — have staunchly resisted taking steps

that activists say could help the country get back on track, including quickly shutting down the dirtiest coal-fired plants and setting a firm deadline for phasing out coal altogether.

The reasons are varied, but they all come down to this: Germany’s ambitious vision for “energiewende,” or energy transformation, has proved far more difficult to execute than it was to plan.

“It’s not just a technical shift. It’s a societal shift,” said Rebecca Bertram, an energy expert with the Greens party-aligned Heinrich Böll Foundation. “There are so many vested interests in keeping the old structures, and people will cling to them as long as they can.”

The Greens are pushing Merkel to agree in coalition talks to an end for German coal by 2030. It’s a deadline, party co-chair Simone Peter said, that would “show Europe, but also the rest of the world, that industrial countries are taking responsibility. We can’t leave that up to developing countries.

We have to show that we have

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, center, and Katrin Göring-Eckardt of the Greens party attend governing coalition talks in Berlin. The Greens are pushing Merkel to agree to an end for German coal by 2030, though some say that is unrealistic.

better technologies than coal.”

But Bertram said that, given the politics involved, 2030 is looking unlikely. “It would be more realistic to think about 2040 or 2045,” she said.

Pushing the coal phaseout back that far could doom German chances of hitting its ambitious emission-reduction targets not only in 2020 but far beyond. Environmental advocates say it would also mean potentially irreversible damage to the planet at a time when governments such as Germany’s need to be moving faster to pivot to cleaner sources of energy.

But the Greens’ likely coalition partners insist that the country has little choice than to keep burning coal — at least for now.

Germany is already getting out of the nuclear energy business.

After Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster, Merkel decided to close all nuclear plants by 2022.

Simultaneously leaving behind coal, say critics of a quick exit, would leave the country without the necessary resources to ensure it has the energy it needs.

“We don’t want to exit coal energy nationally only to import coal or nuclear-energy from other countries,” said Hermann Otto Solms, point person for the probusiness Free Democrats, the party that is likely to join the Greens and Merkel’s conservatives in the next German government.

Renewables are the future, Solms said. But the country needs to build the networks needed to transport that power. Right now, much of German renewable capacity is in the north, while the energy-intensive industries are concentrated in the south.

Meanwhile, brown coal is plentiful and cheap. Mined in giant open pits, it is easier to access but dirtier to burn than hard coal. And in parts of western Germany, it’s ubiquitous.

“This is a region where just about everyone depends on the brown coal industry in some way or another,” said Norbert Mattern, a 50-year-old who has been working for the mines since he was an apprentice in high school. n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Villagers recount Rohingya violence A NNIE G OWEN Sittwe, Burma BY

T

he Hindu woman wept as she vowed never to return home, where she said Rohingya militants slaughtered her son, daughter-in-law and three granddaughters in August.

“They killed my family,” Halu Bar Hla, 70, said through tears, at a camp for internally displaced people in western Burma. “I will not go back. I will die if I go back to my village. They will slit my throat.”

Hla’s account illustrates the complexity of the Rohingya crisis, in which Buddhists and minorities such as Hindus claim militant Rohingya have carried out atrocities against them even as a brutal military “clearance operation” has sent 600,000 Rohingya Muslims across the border into Bangladesh. The United Nations human rights chief has called the Burmese military’s crackdown a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” and Burma’s democratically elected government and its de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, have been widely condemned during the exodus.

The Burmese military issued an internal report this past week that exonerated its soldiers of any wrongdoing.

Interviews with monks, politicians and refugees in this port city demonstrate how difficult it will be for Burmese and Bangladeshi officials to hammer out a plan for the Rohingya to return to Rakhine state. Leaders from the Buddhist community and Suu Kyi’s government deny atrocities against Rohingya have taken place at all, saying that the refugees fled in fear after Rohingya militants attacked police posts in late August.

“The extremists incited villagers to go away saying the Burma Army would come and kill them.

They killed Hindus and other ethnic minorities. We could not find the death of any Muslim,” said Win Htein, a top adviser to Suu Kyi. “There is no genocide or ethnic cleansing.”

Sittwe is about as close as journalists can freely get to northern

PHOTOS BY ANNIE GOWEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Amid the Muslim exodus from Burma, others are also fleeing and recounting killings by insurgents Rakhine state, now sealed by the military, where the militants attacked on Aug. 25. Behind the military cordon, the violence has ebbed. Villagers and aid workers allowed entry to that area describe ghostly scenes of burned Rohingya villages, largely devoid of people. Estimates vary, but between 100,000 to 200,000 Rohingya remain, with food and medical supplies running low.

“Even with the destruction, you can see a bicycle that’s just left. It’s a very strange feeling, as if life has stopped. The sense of emptiness is quite striking,” said Fabrizio Carboni, the head of the Burma delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Red Cross groups — so far the only outside aid workers permitted to enter — have distributed food and cash assistance to 86,000 since late August.

A Rohingya grocer in the town of Maungdaw said by telephone that security is tight and the Roh-

ingya are not permitted to travel.

“We’re trapped and surrounded by military,” said Ko Hla Win, 34.

They are surviving because some Buddhists are secretly selling them food, he said.

Elsewhere, state workers began harvesting 70,000 acres of rice paddies the Rohingya left behind, a spokesman said. They are also preparing two camps to house returning refugees.

It’s been more than two months since the August attacks triggered a crackdown that left more than 280 villages burned — according to a Human Rights Watch analysis of satellite photos — and scores dead. Survivors have alleged widespread human rights violations by the military, including rapes and mass executions. Witness accounts have been difficult to verify because the government has denied access to the area to United Nations human rights investigators and others.

The exodus has riveted interna-

In Sittwe, Burma, monks and public officials deny that the military has committed atrocities, and refugees tell of killings by Rohingya militants. Above, Maung Oo Than Tin, 25, a Buddhist, says a former Rohingya friend messaged to say, “We are going to kill you.”

tional attention on the plight of more than 1 million Rohingya Muslims long denied citizenship and other basic rights in Burma, the majority Buddhist nation in Southeast Asia of 51 million people that is also known as Myanmar.

The country held largely democratic elections in 2015, but the military still controls security, key ministries and lucrative stateowned enterprises.

At the same time the Rohingya fled, more than 30,000 Hindus, Buddhists and ethnic minorities were also displaced, with some fleeing south to Sittwe to take refuge in monasteries. In interviews, they said they were afraid to return home because they feared the Rohingya insurgents whose attacks on police posts in their villages precipitated the crisis.

In 2012, the rape of a Buddhist woman by Rohingya men triggered widespread communal violence after which more than 100,000 Rohingya were confined to detention camps. At the same time, a movement of hard-line Buddhist nationalism gathered steam, led by radical monks.

Shortly thereafter, a group of Saudi-based Rohingya expatriates formed the militant Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, according to a December report from the International Crisis Group. Its leaders eventually traveled to the area to recruit and surreptitiously train villagers in guerrilla war tactics, the report said.

Maung Oo Than Tin, 25, a Buddhist college student, recalled that one of his best school friends, a Rohingya, stopped speaking to him after the 2012 violence and later left the country. About three months ago, the former friend texted him ominously on Facebook, “We are going to kill you.”

More than 500 Hindus, including Halu Bar Hla, remain camped in squalid conditions under the bleachers in Sittwe’s soccer stadium. The government has not provided food rations since Nov. 2, they say, and they are surviving on rice donations from monks and other well-wishers in town. n ©The Washington Post

COVER STORY

HOUSTON RECOVERY

Trying to find normal

BY SCOTT WILSON in Houston

W

hen Hurricane Harvey hit and hovered for days above this city, a half-dozen school district employees manning pumps stayed at Kolter Elementary School in the flood-prone Meyerland neighborhood. Eventually, they had to be rescued from the roof.

The flooded school is now full with construction crews, its students miles away in a cramped campus to which they arrive on charter buses, the deluxe kind fitted out with video screens.

“To them, it’s like they’re going to the Grammys every day,” said Julianne Dickinson, the school’s principal.

For Dickinson, the novelty of displacement has worn off. Like many here, she feels fortu-

nate that her ruined school has a new home, even if the campus is holding 200 more students than it was ever meant to. Improvisation has become an art, as it has for many in the country’s fourth-largest city.

The school halls bear the familiar crayon-andconstruction-paper decor of student drawings.

Kids in costume lined up one recent morning for the Parade of Book Characters, a literary twist on Halloween unique to Kolter Elementary.

But it is not the same place. Two specialneeds classes have been taken in by an undamaged school with more room. Pallets of donated copier paper and printer cartridges line the already tight hallways. The small cafeteria holds only one class at a time, so lunch hour runs all day. The entire staff shares an office, and at home, Dickinson has taken in a fourthgrade teacher whose house was destroyed in the flood.

ILANA PANICH-LINSMANFOR THE WASHINTON POST

“We’re only eight kids short of what we anticipated,” Dickinson said, noting that, despite it all, just a few families moved out of the district after the flood. “It’s pretty wonderful, and it says something about us and all these people wanting to stick it out.”

Nearly three months after the historic storm, a very public disaster has become a largely private one.

To the eye, the city has returned to a semblance of normalcy. Schools are open. The power is on. The International Quilt Festival packed in visitors on a recent weekend in the downtown convention center where thousands sought shelter during Harvey.

Much of this has happened ahead of schedule. The federal government has paid out about $1.4 billion in emergency housing and other assistance to people in Houston and the other counties designated disaster areas, mon-

ey to fund the immediate repairs needed to make homes livable as quickly as possible.

But the challenges, which will take years to solve and will redraw this city’s geography in doing so, have moved inside homes and classrooms and government offices.

Debris piles have mostly disappeared. They have been replaced by contractor trucks parked in the driveways of thousands of Houston homes, the pounding of hammers and buzzing of saws coming from inside.

More than 9,000 city residents are adjusting to life in hotel rooms. The steady soundtrack of radio ads offering cash for damaged homes is evidence of the private money that is turning once-stable, now gutted neighborhoods into a speculator’s paradise.

In addition to the emergency housing aid, the federal government, strained by competing disasters in South Florida and Puerto Rico,

has paid out more than $4.2 billion in flood insurance claims associated with Harvey. But some, particularly those who have the least, complain about weeks-long delays and backed-up bills.

The government’s bills lie ahead. Houston schools opened within a month of the storm, a recovery that far exceeded expectations after more than 200 of the district’s 287 campuses were damaged. But the repair costs will be exorbitant, probably exceeding $200 million, including the likely need to rebuild at least four schools from the ground up.

The weakened state of the city is working against the district’s ability to raise the money.

Houston public schools are funded by property tax revenue, and those are projected to plummet in the years ahead because of the extensive storm damage. continues on next page

Opposite page: Students board chartered buses at an elementary school in the Meyerland area of Houston that many students are temporarily attending while Kolter Elementary, above, is repaired after the flooding from Hurricane Harvey.

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COVER STORY

“It’s like a wheel. . . .

We’re moving at lightning speed.

We simply want the others to do the same.”

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner on the pace of recovery in his city

from previous page

“I’m very, very pleased with the speed of the recovery and how the city is bouncing back,” Mayor Sylvester Turner (D) said in a recent interview. “That is not to say that there are not tremendous needs. There are tremendous needs, so let me be clear about that. But I don’t think any other city could have responded more quickly than this city has.”

Rush to normal, then waiting Harvey dumped more than four feet of rain on Houston over a few days in late August, and even as boat rescues continued in residential neighborhoods, Turner began to look ahead to recovery. His early priority, after ensuring public safety following a storm that killed scores and left tens of thousands homeless, was to make the city feel as normal as possible.

He turned to baseball. His office helped coordinate an appeal to the New York Mets, who agreed to keep their doubleheader date with the now-world-champion Astros in downtown Minute Maid Park before the storm had even cleared the city. The Astros won both games, including a win against Mets starting pitcher Matt Harvey.

He called Janet Jackson.

The singer had a concert planned for the Toyota Center the following weekend, and she considered canceling, given the state of the city. Turner talked her out of it, and she visited

the nearby George R. Brown Convention Center beforehand to spend time with the more than 1,000 Houstonians sheltered there. All emergency shelters have closed. Many people have returned to patched-up homes or moved in with families. More than 50,000 others statewide are living in hotel rooms.

Now Turner is looking at the long-term costs of the storm and the way the aftermath will determine how and where Houston, which has flooded each of the past three years, is rebuilt.

Local officials have identified 65 neighborhoods, comprising roughly 3,300 homes, that have flooded repeatedly. Turner said the city and county governments will look to buy out hundreds of homeowners — on a voluntary basis — before they rebuild in those high-risk areas that lie at least two feet below the flood plain.

Future development will also come under closer scrutiny. Earlier this month, Turner used his prerogative to pull consideration of a new housing development off the city council’s agenda to allow for more study.

Reservoirs will have to be built to protect the city’s vulnerable west side. The poor and the elderly, who suffered severely in a storm that generally did not discriminate by class, will need long-term assistance to regain purchase on disrupted lives.

“We are living in the post-Harvey world, and

Hurricane Harvey filled Jim Dubbert’s home with 44 inches of water. The semiretired consultant, 72, is working to repair the home while he and his wife sleep in an RV out back. It’s the second time in as many years that the house has flooded, and he wants to sell.

so we just have to be mindful of the impact of what we do,” Turner said. “But we are still the same city. We are still developing.”

Congress approved $15 billion for Harvey assistance, and Texas has given another $50 million to Houston so far. Turner believes the recovery cost for the region may run as high as $180 billion, and his city and the counties around it need money quickly.

He has lobbied the state for additional funding. So far Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has declined requests to open the rainy-day fund for emergency relief, saying Houston has enough money so far. Abbott has said he would reconsider his position as the recovery progresses, and Turner believes he will eventually send more money when the costs become clearer.

“It’s like we we’re just waiting on the dollars to come down from D.C. so we can get into these homes and put them in better shape,” Turner said. “It’s like a wheel. We are moving, and we’re moving at lightning speed. We simply want the others to do the same.”

Recovering on credit In the Gulf Meadows neighborhood southeast of Houston’s downtown, Drucilla Bolden is one of those waiting.

She is 64 years old, a retired schoolteacher, and her sister and housemate, Vera, is 70. The two were among 200 women evacuated by

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COVER STORY

KLMNO WEEKLY

PHOTOS BY ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN FOR THE WASHINTON POST

“Vera always tells me to ‘pack my patience.’

My patience is done.”

Drucilla Bolden, referring to her sister, who was also evacuated from her home

fishing boat from the suburb of small, singlestory houses as Harvey poured down. Her home for the past 25 years suffered severe water damage, and on a recent day, a contractor sawed through moldy drywall in the effort make it livable again.

Bolden does not have any money to pay him.

She received a $40,000 advance against her federal flood insurance claim from the government, but the money only paid for supplies and a bit of labor.

The contractor has been working on credit for weeks. During Bolden’s frequent trips to Lowe’s, she hears from many others in her neighborhood lingering in the same financial limbo.

The sisters have been staying with another sister not far away. But Bolden said she feels like a burden with no money to contribute for the emergency hospitality.

“Vera always tells me to ‘pack my patience,’ ” Bolden said. “My patience is done.”

‘It’s going to take time’ In the city’s low southwest side sits Meyerland, a comfortable upper-middle-class neighborhood whose design ethic has been shaped by successive floods.

New multi-floor homes — raised four to five feet off the ground — loom next to the neighborhood’s initial single-story ranchers and architectural originals. The new houses iden-

Above left, Margaret Flippen’s house weathered Harvey without flooding, thanks to its height.

Her previous house was destroyed by a flood in 2015.

Above right, Drucilla Bolden, 64, says her insurance money has been slow to come in, and her contractor has worked on credit for weeks.

tify those who rebuilt after the Memorial Day flood of 2015, including the Flippen family.

Margaret Flippen said the family’s original home was destroyed in that flood and only after long consideration did she and her husband, an energy executive, decide to rebuild in the same spot.

The mother of three said the decision was based in large part on keeping the children in Kolter Elementary, which she called “the heart of the neighborhood,” just up her oak-lined street. She used to walk her children there, as did most of her neighbors. Now her husband drives them to the new campus a few miles to the north.

The Flippens moved into their new home in December. A set of steep stairs leads to their porch and front door. As Harvey began, three families in older, lower homes arrived, filling the spacious house with 10 kids under the age of 7 to wait out the storm.

Soon, boats began patrolling what was the street outside. The water rose, all the way to the top step of the porch, prompting the families to move all the furniture upstairs. But the house remained dry, although many on Flippen’s street filled with water.

“It’s going to take time — more time than the last time — to recover, but I feel like there are sections of the neighborhood that already have momentum,” she said. “People are reinvesting. But whether to stay is a very personal

decision.”

A few streets away, Jim Dubbert has made the decision to leave, only he cannot. His original midcentury modern home, built in 1961, is a complete loss. It flooded two years ago with 18 inches of water; Harvey filled it with 44 inches.

He and his wife, Mary-Dodd, would have moved the last time if he could have sold the house for enough to pay off the mortgage.

Instead, he began making the renovations himself, unable to hire a contractor for the work, because the home itself does not meet city code.

The back of the house is all glass, making it impossible to raise. A semiretired consultant, Dubbert worked on the renovations against the clock, knowing another flood was inevitable, but he was unable to finish in time to sell before it came.

He has begun again, the TV news on in the background, his dog Auggie nearby. Out back is an RV, which he and Mary-Dodd call “Harvey,” lent to them by friends so they do not have to sleep inside the musty house.

“If you don’t have friends, you have no chance at a time like this, no way to do it by yourself,” said Dubbert, who is 72. “But if we flood again, sorry, the bulldozer starts on that end of the house and pushes all the way to that end.” n © The Washington Post

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FAITH

Examining presidents and their faith BY

R ACHEL S IEGEL

debating with God over the issue of slavery and had made a vow that if the Confederates were driven back, “I would crown the result with the declaration of freedom for the slaves.” The Emancipation Proclamation soon followed.

The Lincoln Bible survives as one of the most tangible examples of Lincoln’s faith. Used at his first inaugural in 1861, the Lincoln Bible was not used by a president again until Barack Obama in 2009 and 2013. It was also used by President Trump and is housed at the Library of Congress.

T

homas Jefferson had a complicated relationship with the Bible.

By the time he was elected the nation’s third president in 1801, the Founding Father had become a champion of separation of church and state. His Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, a precursor to First Amendment safeguards on religious freedom in the Constitution, passed the state’s general assembly in January 1786.

Jefferson kept his own religious views private. But he always wrestled with the veracity of the New Testament. That’s when his penknife came in handy.

Jefferson believed that to glean the most from the New Testament, Jesus’ moral teachings needed to be separated from the miracles in the Gospels that he found suspect.

He ordered six volumes and took a blade to their thin pages, rearranging Jesus’ teachings in chronological order and cutting out what he saw as embellishments that he didn’t believe. He felt those core teachings provided “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”

Jefferson pasted his preserved passages on blank sheets of paper and sent the scrapbook off to a book binder. In 1820, when Jefferson was 77, the small, red volume of roughly 80 pages was complete.

Titled “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” Jefferson leaned on its lessons in the last years of his life. Harry Rubenstein, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, described the book, known as the “Jefferson Bible,” as well-worn and riddled with dog-eared pages.

Visitors to Washington, D.C.’s new Museum of the Bible, which opened this weekend, will have to walk over to the American History Museum to see the Jefferson Bible.

But the new museum includes an exhibit on the founder’s views on religion and the Bible, which has long played in the lives of U.S. presidents. Nearly all have taken their oath of office with their hand

Jimmy Carter, the first bornagain president, used the Bible to inform his political agenda.

FROM LEFT: HUGH TALMAN/NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY; MLADEN ANTONOV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

on a Bible, and many quote passages from it in their inaugural addresses. Here are a few more notable stories about presidents and the Bible: John Quincy Adams, president of the American Bible Society, took the oath of office without one.

John Quincy Adams was reared in a liberal strand of the Congregational Church. But like his father, President John Adams, he migrated over to a more conservative tradition and toward Unitarianism. Though his views on religion constantly evolved, he wrote of his “veneration” of the Bible. “So strong is my belief, that when duly read and meditated on, it is of all books in the world, that which contributes most to making men good, wise and happy.”

While serving as secretary of state, Adams accepted the presidency of the American Bible Society. Yet upon his inauguration in 1825, Adams chose not to take the oath of office on a Bible, instead placing his hand on a U.S. law tome. He wanted to recognize the nation’s legal distinction between church and state and show that he placed the law above religion.

(Theodore Roosevelt also did not

New Bible Museum shares the role of religion for those in White House The Jefferson Bible is seen next to a bust of President Thomas Jefferson. The 80page book that Jefferson pieced together from Jesus’ teachings is in the American History Museum, but the newly opened Bible Museum has an exhibit on the relationship between presidents and the Bible.

swear on a Bible at his first inauguration in 1902.)

Abraham Lincoln grappled with his faith over slavery.

A promotional video for the Bible Museum shows a silhouette of President Lincoln reading the Bible before the camera pans to a Civil War battle scene. During his years as a struggling Illinois politician, Lincoln had been attacked as a nonbeliever, which Lincoln disputed, saying he couldn’t support a politician, “I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.”

At his inauguration in March 1861, Lincoln’s family Bible was still en route from Springfield, Ill., along with the rest of his belongings. So he borrowed a copy provided by a Supreme Court clerk.

Upon giving the oath of office, Lincoln spoke of the nation’s reliance on God, a theme he would reference again when the United States splintered during the Civil War. In one private writing known as the “Meditation on the Divine Will,” Lincoln did not claim that God favored the Union cause but instead “wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.”

Just days after the Union victory at Antietam, Lincoln gathered his Cabinet to share that he had been

On his first day in office, Jimmy Carter met with his vice president, Walter Mondale. As Mondale would later tell the story, Carter surprised him by saying that one of his priorities would be to bring peace to the Middle East. The issue had not played a major role in Carter or Mondale’s campaign, says Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth and the author of “God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency From John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush.” Carter’s reason for doing so, Balmer, said, “was quite clearly to bring peace to a land that was part of the Bible, the Holy Land.”

Balmer described Carter as a president who uniquely “fashioned his life in accordance with biblical principles.” While other presidents invoked Bible verses in speeches or “used the Bible as a prop,” Balmer said, Carter’s bornagain, evangelical faith fully informed his presidential agenda.

The timing of Carter’s election was no coincidence either, he says.

Rather, in the wake of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, voters urgently looked to their leaders as moral examples and keepers of biblical literacy.

“Before Nixon, those questions were simply not part of the political conversation,” Balmer said. “Then we were faced with Nixon, and all of a sudden voters said, we need to have a moral compass, so let’s begin asking those questions.” n ©The Washington Post

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These giant crabs actually hunt birds BY

A VI S ELK

T

here’s a theory that giant crabs overwhelmed Amelia Earhart, dismembered her and carried her bones underground.

Sounds crazy, but so has almost every other horrifying rumor about coconut crabs — until science inevitably proves them true.

They grow to the size of dogs.

They climb trees, and tear through solid matter with claws nearly as strong as a lion’s jaws.

And now, finally, we have video evidence that the crabs — thousands strong on one island — can scale trees and hunt full-grown birds in their nests.

“It would at first be thought quite impossible for a crab to open a strong cocoa-nut,” Charles Darwin once wrote, as that father of evolutionary biology recounted stories of a “monstrous” arthropod said to roam an island in the Indian Ocean.

“The crab begins by tearing the husk, fibre by fibre, and always from that end under which the three eye-holes are situated,” Darwin wrote. “When this is completed, the crab commences hammering with its heavy claws on one of the eye-holes till an opening is made.”

But Darwin would go no further than that. The genius who championed life’s endless forms gave no credence to reports that these fierce giant crabs could also climb trees.

In the decades to come, coconut crabs would be photographed not only climbing trees but hanging from them like enormous hard-shell spiders. Researchers in our own century once left them a small pig carcass to see what would happen, Smithsonian Magazine wrote.

The crabs quickly made the pig disappear.

Now we know they are the largest invertebrate to walk the Earth — more than three feet long, pincer to pincer, with claws so strong that a researcher once tried to measure the force, and described it as “eternal hell” after

MARK LAIDRE

A biologist’s video finally proves rumors that had circulated for years a coconut crab caught his hand.

But what, wondered Mark Laidre, do they eat?

“Few studies of this remarkable animal’s behavior have been undertaken since Darwin’s Beagle voyage,” the Dartmouth College biologist wrote in a paper published this month.

That they ate coconuts had been established long ago, of course. And like other crabs, Laidre wrote, they were known to scavenge off corpses.

But what else did they eat?

Laidre was fascinated by a story from the Chagos Archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean told to him by a witness in 2014.

“An adult red-footed booby had landed near the entrance to a coconut crab’s burrow,” Laidre recounted. “As the bird stood there, the crab slowly emerged from its underground lair, approaching the bird from behind.

The crab then grabbed the bird by one leg and dragged it, struggling, back into its burrow.”

The witness never saw the bird again.

In all his years of research, Laidre wrote, he had never seen a crab prey on any animal besides — rarely — another crab. So two years after the reported disappearance of the bird, the biologist set off for the Chagos to find out if giant crabs really stalked birds.

The archipelago’s largest island is ring-shaped, and three smaller uninhabited islands sit in its mouth. Laidre carefully sur-

veyed each one.

Dozens of birds took flight the moment he stepped onto one of the smaller islands, he wrote, and “continued circling overhead as I undertook my transect along the island’s length.”

Nests and eggs covered the rocky beach of this island — and there was not a single giant crab in sight. But on the other two small islands, Laidre wrote, he saw dozens of coconut crabs and few nests. He wrote in his paper of an evolutionary theory called “landscapes of fear” — that few animals will dare make homes in places dominated by predators.

When he surveyed the fourth island, Laidre wondered if the crabs simply ruled it.

“I counted over 1,000 coconut crabs in single [9-mile] transects but did not observe even one ground-nesting bird,” Laidre wrote. All the nests were high up in the trees, and cracked coconuts littered the ground.

After about a month on the island, in February of 2016, he investigated a giant crab’s underground lair.

“Deep inside the crab’s burrow was the carcass of a nearly fullgrown red-footed booby,” he wrote.

This was Laidre’s first sign that the stories might be true, that giant crabs really were hunting birds.

He had his proof a month later.

“In the middle of the night,” Laidre wrote, “I observed a coco-

A coconut crab attacks an adult redfooted booby in a video taken by Dartmouth College biologist Mark Laidre.

nut crab attack and kill an adult red-footed booby.”

“The booby had been sleeping on a low-lying branch, less than a meter up the tree,” he wrote. “The crab slowly climbed up.”

He watched the crab take the bird’s wing in its great claws. He watched it break the bones beneath the feathers.

The bird fell to the ground, Laidre wrote, and the crab descended in pursuit.

About 90 seconds of what happened next is documented in the researcher’s video.

“Five more coconut crabs came to the site within 20 minutes, likely cueing in on the blood,” Laidre wrote. They tore it to pieces and took it away, and now one more thing is known about the giant coconut crabs of the Indian and Pacific oceans.

That the crabs cannot swim well, Laidre wrote, may be why one of the four islands still belonged to the birds.

But the biologist wondered what would happen if just one crab were taken there, in the interests of science.

A juvenile would probably be overwhelmed and eaten by birds, he wrote. But “an adult crab may wreak havoc.”

“Further research could experimentally test these ideas, although important ethical considerations would obviously arise,” Laidre wrote. “The birds would need to be protected.” n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

A peaceful, palatable version of Islam N ONFICTION

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WHAT THE QUR’AN MEANT And Why It Matters

By Garry Wills Viking.

226 pp. $25

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REVIEWED BY

S HADI H AMID

mericans are obsessed with Islam as an idea, as a mystery and as an existential threat to the West. As a result, our debates over Islam and Muslims aren’t really about “them” as much as they are about “us” — and the supposed battle between the two. In his new book, “What the Qur’an Meant: And Why It Matters,” historian Garry Wills shows how some Americans use Muslims as a way to define who they are and what they stand for, and to sharpen their definition of Western civilization.

The 2016 presidential race was a case in point. As Wills writes, “The crowded field of Republican candidates sounded, at times, as if they were running against Islam, not against Democrats.” Wills, the author of “Why I Am a Catholic” and “Why Priests?,” comes at Islam as a sympathetic outsider or, more precisely, an outsider who wants to be as sympathetic as he can be.

Like many well-meaning observers, Wills hopes to educate readers about Islam in an effort to defuse Islamophobia. His book is directed at those who know little about the religion beyond what they glean from unsavory headlines. His premise is noble enough: that ignorance can be fought with knowledge. If only more people became more informed about the Koran, they might not believe those who insist that Islam is a dangerous religion. So it’s hard to fault Wills for some cliched reassurances. For example, he writes of al-Qaeda and the soldiers of the Islamic State: “The minority fanatics seem to be unaware of their own traditions.”

Here, Wills shows that his knowledge of the Islamic State’s theology is sometimes limited.

The problem isn’t that Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is unaware of more broad-minded interpretations of the Koran; it’s that he thinks they’re wrong. As Yale University’s Mara Revkin has shown, the Islamic State was built

DINUKA LIYANAWATTE/REUTERS

on a complex legal structure and could have been worked out only by people intimately familiar with Islamic legal precepts (however extreme and idiosyncratic their understanding of them).

The Islamic State’s Salafi-jihadist rendering of Islam — a kind of originalist approach to the canonical texts — is appealing to its followers precisely because it distrusts accumulated tradition that has helped Muslims adapt Islamic law for changing times. For the Islamic State’s ideologues, modernity has bent Islam to its will, and their job is to reverse that process.

Wills sometimes seeks to present Islam as something it never was. For instance, he claims that a “mountain of evidence” demonstrates that “Islam favors peace over violence.” But Islam is not a pacifist religion. For centuries, Muslim jurists developed a body of law on the waging of war, including how to treat prisoners and civilians caught in conflict and the definition of what properly qualifies as jihad. Wills leaves an intriguing question unanswered:

Why should Islam be pacifist in the first place? Since religions are more than just private belief systems, they inevitably must account not only for the ideal of peace but for the reality of war.

The Koran was revealed to a prophet and a people engaged in battle, so Islam would necessarily have to address questions of violence and the conquest of territory by force.

Wills makes other claims that are simply misleading, as when he asserts that “there are no ‘portions’ of the Qur’an that discuss Shari’ah.” In support of his argument, he says that only about 500 of the Koran’s 6,235 verses deal with legal matters. The Koran is not a legal manual, but 8 percent of a book isn’t exactly nothing, either. The holy book is one of the major sources for interpreting sharia. Wills’s presumption appears to be that a religion having something to say about law is a negative thing and must therefore be played down.

I have mixed feelings about emphasizing these faults. This is not a

book by a scholar of Islam, so it shouldn’t be judged for its lack of originality. It is a book for people who know little about the religion.

But if the millions of Americans who found themselves suspicious of Muslims weren’t already reassured by George W. Bush’s pronouncements of Islam as a religion of peace, it’s unclear why Wills would do much better.

I also worry about the unintended effects of trying to soften Islam’s image or dilute its content.

Trying to make Islam digestible to non-Muslims by making it peaceful and legally ambivalent may only inspire more confusion. What happens when, after reading about this palatable, peaceful and unthreatening religion, Americans are confronted by a version of it that is unapologetically assertive and uncompromising? n Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author of “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World” and the co-editor of “Rethinking Political Islam.”

This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

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Novel feels like an inside look at CIA

Believe me, this is the best parody

F ICTION

S ATIRE

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REVIEWED BY

R ICHARD L IPEZ

o anyone who has ever said that prizewinning Washington Post columnist and popular spy novelist David Ignatius is too much of an apologist for the CIA, his new book is a dramatic rebuttal. “The Quantum Spy” is a fascinating, beautifully textured thriller in which the CIA comes across as a racist, sexist institution whose biases play right into the hands of hostile foreign powers.

The MacGuffin here is the competition between the United States and China to develop a quantum computer that will crack codes and perform other spy work millions of times faster than conventional machines. A Seattle firm seems to be close enough to making a key breakthrough that the agency forces it to hide its work from public view even as its owner, super-geek Jason Schmidt, wants all the world to benefit from the technology. A running argument among several characters throughout the novel is over hightech openness vs. secrecy.

Ignatius’s likable protagonist is Harris Chang, a rising star at the CIA. He grew up in Flagstaff, Ariz., and is a patriot through and through; he served bravely and successfully as an Army officer in Iraq before being recruited to be a spy. Chang reads stories of political intrigue in 19th-century Trollope to understand the ways of present-day Washington, which he finds unnerving. He’s also puzzled and hurt by the notion among some colleagues and at the FBI that there’s something about being Chinese American that makes one susceptible to becoming a traitor for Beijing.

This misguided notion is shared by Li Zian, head of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, who tries to recruit Chang through a mole the MSS has planted in the agency. Chang’s boss, snarky, culturally clueless John Vandel, develops a plan to catch the mole and disrupt the MSS, which is also under siege from the intelligence

branch of the Chinese military. It all gets plausibly ultra-complicated, what with the internecine squabbles and double- and triplecrosses on both sides of the Pacific.

Ignatius even makes the scientific information on quantum computers comprehensible to the lay reader. We take the word of the CIA director that quantum computing “is a paradigm shift. It’s like Galileo and Newton.” And beating the Chinese in the quantum computer race is “like completing the Manhattan Project and catching the Rosenbergs, all at once.”

“The Quantum Spy” honors the conventions of a good spy novel, including vivid depictions of colorful locales, such as Singapore, Beijing, Mexico City and Amsterdam. It’s like a Jason Bourne thriller, except brainy and believable.

As entertaining as this novel is, it’s also disturbing in its depiction of racial and gender prejudice in a place where these attitudes aren’t simply unjust; they get in the way of the institution’s worthy mission. A security specialist named Kate Sturm talks about how “she loved the agency, but she hated the way women got shunted off into marginal areas, where they were glorified ‘reports officers,’ serving the male ‘case officers.’ ” Another female agent is treated so badly that she gets even in an especially nasty way.

As a spy novelist, there are some things Ignatius isn’t. He doesn’t write the beautiful sentences of John le Carré, and his narrative lacks the perfectly poised architecture of Charles McCarry’s CIA novels. But for inside dope on the day-to-day work and personal lives among America’s espionage personnel, Ignatius is unbeatable.

On the acknowledgments page, he says the book is entirely fictional, but that’s the one thing in the book I had trouble believing. n Lipez writes the Don Strachey PI novels under the name Richard Stevenson.

This was written for The Washington Post.

C THE QUANTUM SPY A Thriller

By David Ignatius W.W. Norton. 323 pp. $25.95

YOU CAN’T SPELL AMERICA WITHOUT ME The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump (A So-Called Parody)

By Alec Baldwin and Kurt Andersen Penguin Press. 246 pp. $29

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REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

an anyone really satirize the self-satirized antics of Donald Trump?

Alec Baldwin and Kurt Andersen rise to that yuuuge challenge in their new book, “You Can’t Spell America Without Me.” They’re the perfect authors — “the best people, the smartest people” — for this lavish parody, billed as a memoir by President Trump about his “really tremendous” first year in the White House. Baldwin, of course, has raised Trump parody to a fine art on “Saturday Night Live,” and Andersen has been mocking “the short-fingered vulgarian” since he co-founded Spy magazine back in the late 1980s.

“I consider myself the world’s greatest above-average Trump impersonator,” Baldwin says by phone from New York. Although he gets top billing on the book jacket, he’s quick to acknowledge his partner’s contribution: “Kurt did all the writing, and I did all the laughing.”

Their process wasn’t quite that simple, but Baldwin clearly admires Andersen’s satiric skill.

“To get inside the mind of Trump for 200 and something pages — that’s not easy to do,” Baldwin says. “And where Trump becomes more and more unraveled and becomes more and more loopy as the thing goes on, you’ve got to make those shifts, and you’ve got to make those turns very precisely and very specifically, and I think that’s Kurt’s greatest gift.”

“You Can’t Spell America Without Me” is a wacky narrative written in the voice of a boastful reality TV star who becomes president without any idea how government works. In between mad gushes of self-praise, Trump — as imagined by Baldwin and Andersen — excoriates his enemies, mocks his staff and praises his “very respectful” Filipino servant, Rodrigo. (Trump’s weird fixation on everyone’s racial and ethnic identity is one of the book’s many running gags.)

Some moments in the book are clearly ridiculous, such as Trump’s

plan to sing “We Are the Champions” at his inauguration (“Mike Pence literally pleaded with me not to do that, because it turns out that guy who sang it originally was gay.”)

But much of the absurd text hews so closely to Trump’s own speeches and interviews that the president might skip slander charges and just sue the authors for plagiarism.

“I was careful to not use any of his tweets raw,” he says with a laugh, “because I could imagine Donald Trump saying, ‘Oh, those are my copyrighted material.’ ” The trick, Andersen explains, was to find a comic middle ground between the actual president, who he says is “like an over-the-top fictional character,” and the “cartoonish” figure Baldwin portrays on “Saturday Night Live.”

“We wanted to keep it in the realm of possibility and have exactly that kind of confusion: ‘Wait — is this the real guy or a parody of him?’ ” Chapter after unhinged chapter, the president delivers his rambling monologue of feverish narcissism: “I’m going to have my White House lawyer look into whether or not we need a constitutional amendment so I can be president and chair­ man of the United States. I’m pretty sure we can just go ahead and do it by executive order, or maybe have Congress pass a bill to make it more official.”

Andersen says producing this parody required mastering the “palette of Trumpian linguistic tics” to create a “faithful reproduction at the molecular level.”

The task went far beyond just repeating “unbelievable” or “huge.”

He had to learn the president’s lexicon. He had to get a feel for the rhythm of those phrases.

“The sentences go on and on and go in all kinds of different directions,” he says, “and they can’t be parsed by anything I ever learned in English class.” n Charles is the editor of The Washington Post’s Book World and the host of TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.

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OPINIONS

At this asking price, what value does Goodell o≠er?

SALLY JENKINS is a sports columnist for The Washington Post.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell apparently thinks he should be paid twice as much as the chairman of Goldman Sachs. For what? What exactly does this NFL commissioner do, other than wrinkle the vast expanse of his forehead over the public relations disasters he creates, provoke fan rage and refuse to fly commercial? If Jerry Jones’s goal is to restore some fiscal sanity to his fellow owners, then well done. Someone has to try.

Goodell, according to ESPN, has made a bid to raise his salary to $49.5 million a year, which would pay him more than the CEOs of IBM, Time Warner, Hewlett-Packard, Disney, Nike, Oracle, Yahoo and JPMorgan Chase, among others. That is indecent. It is crazy. And it is irresponsible. Small wonder Jones threatened to sue the compensation committee and wants more transparency on Goodell’s contract. While the owners fight among themselves, the rest of us can only sit around slack- jawed with wonder at their total loss of good sense and perspective.

To restore that perspective: Goodell already makes $30 million, more than Steve Wynn, and the CEOs of AT&T, Microsoft, Exxon, Chevron, Johnson & Johnson, Aetna and Dow Chemical. Again, for what?

The NFL is courting audience disaffection with oversaturation, the concussion crisis drags on, and the fan perception is that the league has dug too relentlessly into their pockets. But go ahead, gentlemen, give the commissioner a deal that appears to be written by Marie Antoinette, while quibbling over settlements for your players’ head injuries.

Executive compensation is an emotionally charged subject: CEOs at the largest U.S. firms now make 271 times more than the average worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute,

and 74 percent of Americans believe they are overpaid, a conviction that cuts across party affiliations. But at least the CEOs referenced above can be said to have created some value for their companies or shareholders. Bob Iger acquired Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm for Disney, so the stomach doesn’t rebel quite as much at his $44 million package.

It is a serious question whether Goodell, who has no accomplishments and presides over tanking TV ratings, has earned a pay cut or even firing, rather than a raise. Jones has every right to demand consideration of this question, even if it means infuriating some of his more complacent fellow owners by dragging the NFL’s dealings into the light.

Jones is no different from any other upset major shareholder.

Does anyone seriously believe Goodell should make anything close to what Bob freaking Iger makes? The only reason the NFL is even contemplating such a thing is slackness by the compensation committee members, who are so used to dealing in huge sums that they have forgotten what a sensible scale looks like — and have lost their ear for what is offensive. In addition to a raise, Goodell reportedly has asked for a private jet in perpetuity, and lifetime health insurance for himself and his entire family. This, in a league in which NFL players have health

JULIE JACOBSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wants a raise to $49.5 million a year.

benefits for just five years, yet face lifetime neurological damage.

Goodell makes twice what Tom Brady makes. He makes 15 times more than the average NFL player. He makes more by millions than the CEOs of Ford, Prudential, General Electric, Morgan Stanley and Goodyear.

Again, for what? He’s never taken a hit or had an idea.

There is only one legitimate rationale for compensating an executive on this level: When he or she is a one-of-a-kind business talent who spearheads strategic acquisitions and drives sales, and can demonstrate some connection to the value of the company. Goodell’s hazy, vague role as NFL commissioner meets none of the criteria.

The mechanisms of the league’s revenue — the television deals that are its mainspring, the creative marketing initiatives, the sponsorships — are driven by the owners, the entrepreneurial dealmakers such as Jones and Bob Kraft. The NFL’s revenue is roughly $13 billion, and the main portion of this is a gift from the titanic TV packages negotiated back in 2004 and 2011 by the owners’ broadcast committee, which was chaired by the Denver Broncos’ Pat Bowlen. Bowlen was a unique talent and formidable dealmaker, as any TV exec who had to write the check will tell you. Ask the same execs what they think of Goodell. Ask Iger.

Goodell’s contract is

profoundly out of line with previous commissioners, who did far more for their money. Pete Rozelle was a superb promoter, but owners never let the financial relationship with him get this far out of whack. Rozelle presided over massive growth, and the advents of the Super Bowl and “Monday Night Football,” for which at his peak in 1974 the owners rewarded him with a handsome $200,000 a year, the equivalent to $1 million in today’s money. He never made more than the game’s greatest stars, the Joe Namaths and O.J. Simpsons.

Even Paul Tagliabue, under whom revenue grew to $6 billion in 2007, was paid just $10 million.

Jones recognizes all of this. His quarrel with the compensation committee and its chair Arthur Blank is based on a realization that they have slowly, unwittingly let the largesse and complacency of the past few years cloud their judgment. Jones represents a body of owners who have been growing uneasy for some time with Goodell’s judgment and the bloat and dysfunction in the Park Avenue executive office.

Sensible corporate leaders understand that when CEO pay gets too high, it impacts operations and morale, distorts judgment, and actually undermines leadership. They understand that it breeds suspicion of poor or careless governance. This is Jones’s concern, and it should be shared by every owner in the league. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Democrats, cut the cheer DAVID VON DREHLE writes a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post.

Given the year they’ve had, Democrats are understandably euphoric about their wins in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere this month. A man dragging himself across a desert will be deliriously happy to find a bottle of water. But he shouldn’t assume that one bottle means there’s a river over the next dune — nor should the Democrats be overly optimistic about what lies ahead.

I say this not just because a year is an eternity in today’s politics, although it is. Donald Trump went from novelty candidate to president-elect in the year between November 2015 and November 2016, and in the 12 months after that, the Republican Party went from a historic highwater mark to a shambolic mess.

Only a fool or a political pundit would predict what will happen over the next 365 days. Still, I feel safe in forecasting that it will be a lot.

I could also warn Democrats to heed what might be the only ironclad rule of contemporary American politics: Conventional wisdom is always wrong.

More substantial reasons for Democrats to remain cautious are found in a deeply researched paper published Nov. 1 by the liberal Center for American Progress. Political scientists Rob Griffin, Ruy Texeira and John

Halpin set out after the 2016 election to determine who voted — by race, age and education — and in what proportions. Their months-long project drew strands from a wide range of data sources and wove them into a picture quite different from the one painted by the imperfect art of Election Day exit polling.

“Voter Trends in 2016: A Final Examination” suggests that the coalition of college-educated progressives and people of color on which Democrats have staked their identity may be weaker than most party strategists believed.

And as they continue their crawl through the political wilderness, they may find that efforts to strengthen the coalition prove counterproductive, as they did against Trump.

I was struck by two sets of data from this rich trove of findings that may add up to a cautionary tale. First, the white electorate is

larger and less educated than exit polls would have us believe. The pollsters calculated that 71 percent of voters in 2016 were white and that more than half of them had four or more years of college. But the CAP team came to a very different conclusion: The turnout was nearly 74 percent white (a significant difference in a razor-thin election), and only about two out of five of these voters had a college degree.

Overall, 45 percent of voters in 2016 — by far the largest segment — were whites who either did not attend or did not complete college. This was not entirely a Trump-driven phenomenon. The authors found that exit polls greatly underestimated the voting power of non-college-educated whites in 2012, too.

Second, whatever strength Democrats have gained from identity politics appears to have reached a natural ceiling.

Candidate Trump built his campaign on his willingness to offend people. He bashed immigrants, linked Mexicans to violent crime, dog-whistled to white supremacists. Yet when the votes were counted, Trump outperformed 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney among African American voters and matched Romney among Latinos.

There’s no denying that a

significant source of the energy in the Democratic Party comes from people for whom identity politics are highly salient. But these findings suggest that further sharpening these issues will not gain Democrats much of anything. To the extent that some white voters are alienated by these issues, identity politics may backfire, driving votes away.

A lot of pixels have been devoted to the theory that Clinton would have won the election had she matched Barack Obama in African American turnout. The CAP study confirms that this is true. But the study also shows that she would have won had she matched Obama among whites without a degree.

Once the party of the working class, Democrats have lost their connection to the largest bloc of voters in America. Democrats had an edge in 1992 of more than five points over Republicans in the registration of white voters with only a high school diploma. By 2016, Republicans had flipped that advantage and widened it to more than 25 points.

Democrats will celebrate in 2018 and beyond only if they begin reconnecting with the white working class. How? By assuring them that their concerns matter — not more than, but as much as, anyone else’s. n

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OPINIONS

BY DANA SUMMERS

How to get the rich to pay up STEPHEN MOORE is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with Freedom Works. He served as a senior economic adviser to the Trump campaign. This was written for The Washington Post.

Democrats attacking the Trump tax cut have primarily voiced two objections: first, that it is a tax cut for the rich. And second, that it will blow a hole in the deficit.

If Republicans get smart, they can squash both of these arguments — and strike a blow for a much more ambitious, once-in-a-generation tax reform than the plans now on the table in the House and Senate.

To do so, they should revisit an idea that was central to the original Trump campaign plan that Larry Kudlow and I helped to craft. In every meeting, Donald Trump told us he didn’t want a tax cut “for rich people like me.”

So we solved this problem by putting a global cap of $150,000 on all deductions and credits.

Under this approach, no deductions (such as for home mortgage interest or charitable contributions) would be eliminated from the tax code.

But families whose write-offs exceeded the limit would have to pick and choose which to use.

For at least 95 percent of taxpayers, the cap would be so high as to be irrelevant — and, remember, because of the doubling of the standard deduction, fewer than 2 in 10 Americans would itemize deductions at all under the House GOP bill.

But for multimillionaires and, even more so, billionaires, such a cap would effectively end their deductions. This would raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year in tax collections and would end tax-avoidance schemes by those with armies of tax lawyers.

Internal Revenue Service statistics tell us that at least onethird of the cost to the Treasury from tax write-offs come from the tax returns of Americans in the top 1 percent of income.

In short, tax deductions are the playpens of the very rich.

We ran the numbers on what this buys you. The money raised could be used to cut the highest income-tax rate to 36 percent — without giving the top 1 percent a net tax cut — and help fund the tax cut for everyone else.

This would eliminate with one swipe almost all the thorny issues in the current tax bill. No longer would it be necessary to

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

eliminate state and local tax deductions (a tough vote for Northeastern Republicans) or place a lower cap on the mortgage deduction (anathema to the real estate agents’ and home builders’ lobbies). The middle class wouldn’t face any new limitation on deductions for medical expenses and student loan expenses.

Sure, the housing lobby and K Street will hate this idea. But let them explain to the American people why Warren Buffett, Taylor Swift and LeBron James need a mortgage deduction to pay for their mansions.

The idea offers something for Democrats, too: a much more progressive tax code. How could liberals such as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who argue the rich don’t pay their fair share, stand against this idea? They would look extremely hypocritical if they did.

Donald Trump told us he didn’t want a tax cut “for rich people like me.”

History shows that eliminating loopholes is a far more effective and less economically destructive way to raise money from the wealthy than raising tax rates. For example, in the 1980s, after tax rates came down from 70 percent to 28 percent but most loopholes were eliminated, the share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent nearly doubled from 19 percent to more than 35 percent.

Higher tax rates historically have been at best a disappointing revenue raiser — in part because they make loopholes even more valuable and thus more likely to proliferate. (At a 30 percent tax rate, a deduction saves you 30 cents on the dollar, while at a 50 percent rate, you save 50 cents.)

This was a point that Democrats such as former senators Bill Bradley and Sam Nunn and former House majority leader Richard A. Gephardt made persuasively in the 1980s.

Speaking of the 1980s, one of the enduring lessons of the last great bipartisan policy triumphs — the 1986 Tax Reform Act — is that sometimes the best way to roll over the special interests is to take them all on at once. My guess is that if the GOP adopted this tax code cleanup, public support would skyrocket across the political spectrum. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Female veterans BY

J ERRI B ELL

Works of fiction and nonfiction, memoirs (such as Mary Jennings He­ gar’s), documentaries (including “The Invisible War”) and dramas (such as “Blood Stripe”) have helped show stories of women in the armed forc­ es. Still, myths about female veterans endure. Here are some of the most persistent misconceptions.

MYTH NO. 1 There aren’t that many female veterans.

Congress established a regular women’s component in all branches of the armed forces in 1948 but capped women’s participation at 2 percent of the total force. This kept the numbers of female veterans proportionally low until the cap was lifted incrementally, beginning in 1973, to enable the creation of an allvolunteer force. Women now make up 20 percent of new recruits, 15 percent of the activeduty force and 18 percent of the reserve and National Guard.

Almost 280,000 women have served in Operations Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom and New Dawn. More than 2 million veterans — about 9 percent of the total veteran population of 21 million — are women.

MYTH NO. 2 American women began serving in combat recently.

It’s true that two provisions in the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948 prohibited Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps women from combat Air Force sorties and naval vessels (they were already barred from direct ground combat). In 1998, an ambiguous Defense Department rule closed noncombat positions to women if the risk of exposure to direct fire, combat or capture equaled or exceeded that experienced by combat units in the same theater of operations.

But women have fought for this country as long as it has existed.

In April 1775, a 35-year-old mother of six named Prudence Cummings Wright formed a

women’s militia in Pepperell, Mass. Dressed in men’s clothing and armed, the women captured a suspected British courier at the bridge over the Nashua River and delivered him and his documents to the rebellion. At the Battle of Fort Washington in 1776, Margaret Corbin took over her husband’s gun when he was killed. Disabled by grapeshot that nearly severed her arm, she was placed in the Continental Army’s Invalid Regiment at West Point, drew a lifetime military pension and was reinterred at West Point with full military honors in 1926.

In 1778, a Creole woman named Sally St. Clare fought disguised as a man and became the first woman to die in action in the service of America. And historians estimate that at least 200 women disguised themselves as men to fight on both sides in the Civil War. Since the establishment of the Army Nurse Corps in 1901, American women have served overseas, under fire and at the front lines in every major U.S. military conflict.

MYTH NO. 3 The Pentagon integrated women as a social experiment.

In fact, the activism of military women is what drove the expansion of their roles. Mary Edwards Walker, awarded the Medal of Honor in 1865 for her work as a military surgeon and spy, wrote in 1859 that women should serve as soldiers. Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers (R-Mass.), who served in the Red Cross in Europe during World War I, and Rep. Margaret Chase Smith (RMaine), who later joined the Air

SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

The 20th anniversary of the Women In Military Service For America Memorial was celebrated in October at Arlington National Cemetery.

Force, crafted the 1948 legislation establishing permanent women’s components in the armed forces.

Hundreds of women in uniform assigned to personnel commands lobbied quietly for incrementally greater opportunities. Navy electrician Yona Owens, Army helicopter pilot Mary Jennings Hegar and other military women even sued the U.S. government to open chances for women to serve legally on naval combatants and in direct ground combat.

MYTH NO. 4 Women are less able to meet the military’s demands.

The 1994 Defense Women’s Health Research Program, a $40 million initiative that funded research targeted at improving the health and performance of women in the armed forces, demonstrated more than a decade ago that women equal men in their ability to tolerate gravity forces, respond to stress and survive in extremes of heat and cold. A 2015 Army study found no reason to exclude women from any military occupational specialty as long as they measured up to newly established physical standards for their jobs. A few women have

already met the physical, academic and leadership standards for the Army’s demanding Ranger School and the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course.

MYTH NO. 5 The typical homeless veteran is a man.

In fact, the Department of Veterans Affairs has found that female veterans — including those with children — are the fastest-growing share of homeless veterans. Based on VA estimates, between 20,000 and 40,000 female veterans are homeless. But most of these women, especially those with kids or histories of trauma, don’t sleep on the streets or find shelter placements. They prefer to couch-surf with friends and relatives. Veterans advocate Lily Casura discovered in a survey that female veterans are two to four times as likely as their civilian counterparts to experience homelessness. n Bell, a retired naval officer, is a coauthor, with Tracy Crow, of “It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories From the American Revolution to Afghanistan.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2017

24

Foothills Magazine presents its 6th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine. Photos must have been shot during the 2017 calendar year. Entries will be judged in two categories — human subjects and landscapes.

Get all the details at photos.ncwfoothills.com Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2018

North Central Washington’s lifestyle magazine ncwfoothills.com