All posts by Jay Pinho

About Jay Pinho

Jay is a data journalist and political junkie. He currently writes about domestic politics, foreign affairs, and journalism and continues to make painstakingly slow progress in amateur photography. He would very much like you to check out SCOTUSMap.com and SCOTUSSearch.com if you have the chance.

Belieber

Humor, Media, Miscellaneous, , , , , ,

The New Yorker, following up on pop star Justin Bieber’s awkward attempt at memorializing Anne Frank, has a little fun re-imagining history:

Göring: You see, mein Führer, being a Belieber isn’t just about music. It’s about love and trust, about being sweet but still complicated, cocky but non-threatening, sexy but not precisely sexual—whether you’re commanding the Wehrmacht or hiding in an attic somewhere in the Netherlands. Sure, it’s easy to sit here and talk about making a Fascist Bieber, but chances are we would all just end up Bieber-Fascists. Look, Himmler’s already doing the slide-glide thing.

(Hitler turns to see Himmler doing Bieber’s signature dance move across the room. Hitler sighs heavily, realizing it’s useless.)

Hitler: Well, in that case, I suppose we ought to surrender.

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The public safety exception

Politics, , , , ,

Breaking news from The New York Times:

The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings told F.B.I. interrogators that, as he and his brother plotted their deadly assault, they considered suicide attacks and striking on the Fourth of July, according to a law enforcement official…

The brothers finished building the bombs in Tamerlan’s apartment in Cambridge, Mass., faster than they anticipated and so decided to accelerate their attack to the Boston Marathon on April 15, Patriots Day in Massachusetts, from July, according to the account that Dzhokhar provided authorities. They picked the finish line of the marathon after driving around the Boston area looking for alternative sites, according to this account.

In addition, Mr. Dzhokhar told authorities that he and his brother viewed the Internet sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American cleric who moved to Yemen and was killed in September 2011 by an American drone strike. There is no indication that the brothers communicated with Mr. Awlaki before his death.

How do we know all this new information, you ask? Why, under the public safety exception to the Miranda Rule. In other words, authorities questioned Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and discovered all of this information prior to reading him his Miranda rights.

And yes, in case you were wondering, you are forgiven for thinking that none of that information is even remotely related to protecting the public from imminent danger. But don’t let it happen again.

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Who are the 7%?

Miscellaneous, Politics, , ,

From today’s Washington Post:

A large majority of Americans support the death penalty for the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing should he be convicted in federal court, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Overall, 70 percent of those surveyed say they support the death penalty for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. While most Democrats and Republicans alike say they would support the death penalty for Tsarnaev, there are deep racial divisions on the matter, reflecting a common gap in public views of the death penalty itself.

And from a Gallup press release on January 9th:

Americans’ support for the death penalty as punishment for murder has plateaued in the low 60s in recent years, after several years in which support was diminishing. Sixty-three percent now favor the death penalty as the punishment for murder, similar to 61% in 2011 and 64% in 2010.

So 63% support for the death penalty, but 70% if it’s Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Assuming that the national sentiment on the death penalty hasn’t substantively changed since January, this means that 7% of Americans allow their feelings to be changed by a massive police overreaction and overblown media coverage of an attack that took fewer lives than your run-of-the-mill school shooting.

It makes you wonder how many more of us are so easily manipulated on issues other than the death penalty as well. And it certainly helps explain the need for critics like Glenn Greenwald.

On the other hand, this may just be an extension of the futility of poll-watching, as is hopefully evidenced by a recent survey which found that 42% of Americans didn’t know Obamacare was still in effect.

Note to future self: write post about the nonsensicality of polling (replete with a brief digression in which I nevertheless praise Nate Silver for his innovation).

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After Episode 12, Sam Lim and I take “The Oath” never to watch The Americans again

Film/TV,

Screen Shot 2013-04-29 at 3.29.18 PM

Sam: A couple of unexpecteds happened this week, but I think this show lost me so long ago that it didn’t even interest me. (I suppose my overall negativity toward this show doesn’t spruce up the conversation much, does it?)

First, I forgot to mention last week that the developments with Clark/Phil and Martha are entertaining in a terrible way. I feel horrible for her, since she’s getting completely duped. But it is funny to watch Phil in these moments.

This week took it to a whole new level though. Granny playing his mom and Elizabeth playing his sister? Martha’s mom’s comment that “I can see the family resemblance!” just made it that much better. I laughed, not because it was funny, but it was just so…laughable.

I did not think Nina would get out alive whenever Arkady and team found out she was the mole, but the way it happened when it actually did just saved her for Season Two, I think. Somewhat lame, but better than perhaps the cliché “she’s gonna get shot” story. I now shift my money to Granny getting axed in the last episode. (On a side note: we still haven’t seen that scene of her and Arkady in the car shot by SIPA, have we?)

The Paige-Matthew dynamic was somewhat predictable, and honestly, I’m not sure how much it actually adds to the story as a whole, except that Paige can talk to Elizabeth about her relationship problems. Not so interesting.

Overall, I just can’t wait until this season is over, so we can go back to reviewing some actual good shows. Your thoughts? Continue reading After Episode 12, Sam Lim and I take “The Oath” never to watch The Americans again →

How we are all unwitting terrorists

Media, Politics, , , , , , , ,

twitter

There’s been a lot of speculation in the past week or so about the Twitter feeds of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Here are a few representative samples from The New York Times alone. First up is columnist Charles Blow:

On Friday, BuzzFeed and CNN claimed to verify Dzhokhar’s Twitter account. The tweets posted on that account give a window into a bifurcated mind — on one level, a middle-of-the-road 19-year-old boy, but on another, a person with a mind leaning toward darkness.

…

He was a proud Muslim who tweeted about going to mosque and enjoying talking — and even arguing — about religion with others. But he seemed to believe that different faiths were in competition with one another. On Nov. 29, he tweeted: “I kind of like religious debates, just hearing what other people believe is interesting and then crushing their beliefs with facts is fun.”

…

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had strong views on the Middle East, tweeting on Nov. 28, “Free Palestine.” Later that day he tweeted, “I was going to make a joke about Hamas but it Israeli inappropriate.”

Toward the end of last year, the presence of dark tweets seemed to grow — tweets that in retrospect might have raised some concerns.

He tweeted about crime. On Dec. 28 he tweeted about what sounds like a hit-and-run: “Just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching my car into reverse and driving away from the accident.” And on Feb. 6 he tweeted, “Everything in life can be free if you run fast enough.”

He posted other tweets that could be taken as particularly ominous.

Oct. 22: “i won’t run i’ll just gun you all out #thugliving.”

Jan. 5: “I don’t like when people ask unnecessary questions like how are you? Why so sad? Why do you need cyanide pills?”

Jan. 16: “Breaking Bad taught me how to dispose of a corpse.”

Then yesterday, the Times‘ head book reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, delved in a little further:

Given the layers of irony, sarcasm and joking often employed on Twitter, it can be difficult to parse the messages of a stranger. Yet some of them can seem menacing or portentous, given what we now suspect: “a decade in america already, I want out,” “Never underestimate the rebel with a cause” or, drawing from lyrics from a Kendrick Lamar song, “No one is really violent until they’re with the homies.” But others suggest a more Holden Caulfield-like adolescent alienation: “some people are just misunderstood by the world thus the increase of suicide rates.” Sometimes, Dzhokhar sounds downright sentimental (unless, of course, he is being ironic): “There are enough worms for all the birds stop killing each other for ‘em.”

Parts of Dzhokhar’s VKontakte page are harsher and more serious. Under personal priority, it says “Career and money.” Under worldview, it says “Islam.” There is a link to a video indicating outrage at the violence in Syria, and a link to an Islamic Web site that says “And do good, for Allah loves those who do good.” Another video features a blind boy talking to an older man, saying he believes his blindness will be absolved on Judgment Day; the man starts to cry, and wonders how many people who have their sight are as committed to the study of the Koran as the boy.

To her credit, she at least had the self-awareness to observe the obvious:

These posts instantly became dots that people began trying to connect. Some details ratified the views of those former friends and neighbors who said they were utterly shocked at the brothers’ possible involvement in such a horrifying crime. Other posts pointed to Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s growing interest in Islamic radicalism and possibly a dark subtext to the friendly, boy-next-door affect of Dzhokhar.

At the same time, they were reminders of the complexities of online identity — of the ways in which people strike poses and don masks on the Web (which can sometimes turn into self-fulfilling prophecies), and the ways in which the Web can magnify or accelerate users’ interests and preoccupations.

…

The social media droppings the Tsarnaev brothers left behind not only attest to their own immersion in the interactive, electronic world, but they have also provided everyone else with plenty of digital data from which to try to extract patterns and possible meaning — fulfilling that very human need to try to make narrative sense of the tragic and the overwhelming.

And, unsurprisingly, BuzzFeed and New York Magazine, among others, joined in on the Twitter-parsing/stalking fun as well.

You may see where I’m going with this. Yes, it increasingly looks like Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev bought into a radical fringe of Islam prior to bombing the Boston Marathon. And so it is theoretically possible that breadcrumbs from their evolving radicalization are discoverable by sifting through tweets and Russian social networking sites.

But it is much, much more likely that these tweets are simply being scrutinized with that 20/20 hindsight so familiar to tragic events: everything always looks clearer in the rear-view mirror. Even the most “menacing” of Dzhokhar’s tweets pointed out by the mainstream media reveal less “a “bifurcated mind…leaning toward darkness” and more the typical musings of a 19-year-old college student.

This voyeuristic, retrospective fine-combing of the younger Tsarnaev’s Twitter profile is not only useless. It is counterproductive and dangerous too: reading too deeply into the abbreviated, 140-character-length thoughts of a suspected bomber promotes the notion that such heinous acts could have been stopped if only we had been able to access more information earlier on — if only we had been watching earlier on.

There are signs of this mindset already. Take this article from today’s Boston Globe:

House Speaker John Boehner this morning said he was concerned that federal agencies hadn’t learned their lessons from the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and he vowed to hold agency heads responsible if they didn’t do enough to stop the Boston bombings.

The response in Washington is increasingly focused on potential intelligence failures, and a lack of sharing information among territorial federal agencies – a problem that was supposed to be fixed after the attacks nearly 12 years ago.

“I have concerns about what agencies knew what — and the fact that it wasn’t shared,” Boehner said at a press conference. “You know if the information is good enough for one agency of the government, why shouldn’t it be appropriate for other agencies of the government? We’re going to get to the bottom of it.”

It’s the same story in The New York Times:

Emerging from a closed two-hour hearing with three senior law enforcement and intelligence officials, several members of the Senate Intelligence Committee raised new questions about how the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security apparently handled information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, the suspect who was killed in a shootout with the police on Friday.

“I’m very concerned that there still seem to be serious problems with sharing information, including critical investigative information,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, told reporters. “That is troubling to me that this many years after the attacks on our country in 2001, that we still seem to have stovepipes that prevent information from being shared effectively, not only among agencies but also within the same agency, in one case.”

The problems with these interpretations are twofold. First, they assume that some form of Omniscience Lite is actually achievable. Well, it’s not. There is no such thing as perfect intelligence nor perfect crime prevention (sorry, Minority Report aficionados). Terrorism will happen from time to time. Maybe instead of freaking out, we can actually try to (gasp) get a little more used to it and, therefore, manage to return to normalcy more quickly.

Secondly, the implications of this type of thinking can be quite terrifying. If, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now perfectly see the seeds of radicalism sprouting on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Twitter feed, then it follows that we can discover — and halt — someone’s budding radicalization taking place right now, in real-time. Many are already advocating for increased surveillance, more CCTV cameras, and so on. But even beyond the installation of more virtual eyes over our urban areas, the impulse to counter terrorism with an even bigger Big Brother is just one more step in the wrong direction for a country that’s already all too willing to surrender its civil liberties in the service of an unconvincing “security.”

Which brings me to the headline of this post. Take a look at the below tweets of mine, and then try to imagine reading them after I’ve been accused of a hypothetical bombing:

http://twitter.com/jaypinho/status/1637073148710912

http://twitter.com/jaypinho/status/45353903868485632

http://twitter.com/jaypinho/status/89339781535899648

http://twitter.com/jaypinho/status/94878752827375616

http://twitter.com/jaypinho/status/125352426701209601

http://twitter.com/jaypinho/status/226286900388966400

http://twitter.com/jaypinho/status/260104243510407168

http://twitter.com/jaypinho/status/270555250694426624

http://twitter.com/jaypinho/status/279597722326147073

http://twitter.com/jaypinho/status/281503668493246465

http://twitter.com/jaypinho/status/327061292244418560

Do you see the problem here? It took me all of about ten minutes to select these tweets out of nearly 5,000 I’ve written. So yes, there are plenty of dots and data points in a Twitter feed. But connecting them arbitrarily after the fact to create a portrayal of something sinister does nothing to help prevent terrorism. And it may do a lot to help push us just a little bit closer to 1984.

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The power of the bully pulpit

Media, Politics, , , , ,

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Obama’s (non-)use of the bully pulpit in pressing his agenda, especially in the wake of his administration’s embarrassing defeat on gun control. Maureen Dowd kicked things off on Sunday:

How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.

It’s unbelievable that with 90 percent of Americans on his side, he could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him.

Even House Republicans who had no intention of voting for the gun bill marveled privately that the president could not muster 60 votes in a Senate that his party controls.

That got the ball rolling. Yesterday, The New York Times Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker reported on the same theme:

Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, asked President Obama’s administration for a little favor last month. Send your new interior secretary this spring to discuss a long-simmering dispute over construction of a road through a wildlife refuge, Mr. Begich asked in a letter. The administration said yes.

Four weeks later, Mr. Begich, who faces re-election next year, ignored Mr. Obama’s pleas on a landmark bill intended to reduce gun violence and instead voted against a measure to expand background checks. Mr. Obama denounced the defeat of gun control steps on Wednesday as “a shameful day.”

But Mr. Begich’s defiance and that of other Democrats who voted against Mr. Obama appear to have come with little cost. Sally Jewell, the interior secretary, is still planning a trip to Alaska — to let Mr. Begich show his constituents that he is pushing the government to approve the road.

The trip will also reinforce for Mr. Begich and his colleagues a truth about Mr. Obama: After more than four years in the Oval Office, the president has rarely demonstrated an appetite for ruthless politics that instills fear in lawmakers. That raises a broader question: If he cannot translate the support of 90 percent of the public for background checks into a victory on Capitol Hill, what can he expect to accomplish legislatively for his remaining three and a half years in office?

But Jonathan Chait isn’t having any of it:

During Bill Clinton’s first two terms, a Democratic senator from a red state (Richard Shelby of Alabama) defected on key votes. Clinton tried the “ruthless” approach of punishing Shelby by denying him these sorts of discretionary executive branch perks — first limiting his tickets to a ceremony honoring the Alabama football team, then threatening to move some NASA jobs out of his state. The tactic was universally seen to have backfired.

Did it really backfire? Probably not. Shelby voted the way he did because he assessed his own beliefs and interests. But that is the beauty of ignoring structural factors for stories about people: You can always tell a new one. If the president was nice, he should have been mean. If he was mean, he should have been nice. (Unless he prevailed, in which case his shrewd politicking saved the day!)

…

Obama faces a House controlled by far-right Republicans, and a Senate majority not sufficient to break what has become a routine supermajority requirement. And note that despite his national majority, Obama carried only 48 percent of House districts and 52 percent of the states, short of the threshold for passing laws in either chamber, which suggests that even a perfect effort to apply his popularity to any given issue is insufficient to pass a law.

Chait has a point. But I think there are two questions at play here simultaneously. One relates to Obama’s seeming unwillingness to get his hands dirty and shake some senators down, LBJ-style. The other is essentially a structural problem: when the vast majority of Americans support a legislative measure and it fails to succeed, one must ask whether our system is designed correctly for modern governance.

The answer to that question is almost assuredly no. The very fact that many news organizations now refer to votes that fail to obtain a supermajority in the same way they report on ones that don’t even receive a simple majority — as if the two scenarios equally demonstrate the bill’s unpopularity — is proof that the grinding inefficiency of Congress has permeated all aspects of our political activity. Broken institutions are so commonplace we don’t even notice them anymore.

This part is not Obama’s fault. But ironically enough, what the president’s team excelled at during his presidential campaign — setting the tone of the conversation early and defining his opponent before he had a chance to introduce himself to the broader public — his administration has abjectly failed at now. Virtually every major proposal Obama has introduced since he took office has been exaggerated, demonized, castigated, and lied about incessantly — only now and then provoking long-overdue and (by that point) completely ineffective responses in defense. So there is something to the bully pulpit theory. But it has less to do with what Obama should do today, now that gun control has lost anyway, and more to do with what he should have done years ago.

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