Letter: Effects of Sequestration

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

To the Editor:

"Stories of Struggle and Creativity as Sequestration Cuts Hit Home" (front page, May 6) brought to mind the famous 1970s headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead." Now the same message is being sent to many Americans throughout the country.

PETER DIAMOND
Lexington, Mass., May 7, 2013

The writer is emeritus professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a 2010 Nobel laureate in economics.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Letters: For the Elderly, Is Managed Care a Good Option?

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

"Advocates Say Managed-Care Plans Shun the Most Disabled Medicaid Users" (front page, May 1) unfairly suggests that managed long-term care plans are inappropriately denying services. Previously, enrollees received hours of care that did not match their need for services.

Health plans develop person-centered plans of care based on patient-specific assessments. Plans have matched care to individual needs, reducing excessive use, improving quality and saving taxpayer dollars.

The article also suggests that plans target enrollment of healthier individuals. However, payments are proportional to each member's level of care need.

Plans receive higher payments for sicker enrollees and lower payments for healthier enrollees. This payment method is explicitly intended to reduce incentives for selective enrollment. Since January 2012, 46,000 people have joined managed long-term care plans. While no system is perfect, most people have moved smoothly to managed care.

If enrollees disagree with their proposed plan of care, an independent appeals process protects members. Managed long-term care plans have improved care management and quality while reducing costs.

PAUL F. MACIELAK
President and Chief Executive
New York Health Plan Association
Albany, May 2, 2013

To the Editor:

This article and other recent articles offer the public a much-needed understanding of the problems that arise when a new government program is rolled out in haste.

Advocates have repeatedly argued that the implementation of New York's new Medicaid managed long-term care program is being rushed and have called for a delay. The shameful stories of greed and deception as described in your articles point to the imperative for the state to halt implementation.

State officials must work with advocates and providers to ensure that thoughtful and transparent operations are in place before the plan is foisted upon the vulnerable elderly and the disabled who rely upon it for their health care.

AMY PAUL
New York, May 2, 2013

The writer is chairwoman of the Health Committee of the Women's City Club of New York.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Letters: Applying Lessons of the Past to Syria

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Re "Syria Is Not Iraq," by Bill Keller (column, May 6):

Syria is not Iraq, but we should heed the lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Vietnam. The case for intervention in Syria underestimates the almost certain repercussions.

A United States air campaign to create a no-fly zone in Syria would have to suppress its air defense structure. American pilots would risk death or capture. Damage to Syrian infrastructure and to civilians would make enemies, not friends, of the Syrian people.

There is no support for deployment of American ground forces in Syria. Rightly so, for that effort would escalate into another Iraq. As for proposals to secure chemical warfare stocks, that would require tens of thousands of troops on the ground. Do we really want that?

That said, it may be time for the United States to make the difficult choice of which rebels against President Bashar al-Assad to support with weapons, and take what measures we can to assure that those weapons don't end up in the wrong hands.

We have tried elsewhere in the region to find democratic, Western-oriented forces that can prevail. Success has been elusive. Can we do better in Syria? I doubt it.

HAROLD BROWN
Washington, May 7, 2013

The writer, secretary of defense in the Carter administration, is a counselor and trustee for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

To the Editor:

Bill Keller is surely right that the United States has a genuine national interest in Syria, but we should not put aside the caution that past American interventions in the Middle East have instilled in us.

As we draw lessons from the past, Americans should look not just to Iraq but to the 1982-84 American effort to rebuild the Lebanese state after years of civil war. The effort foundered on the fractured nature of Lebanese society, a society nearly identical to the one in Syria.

I served on the staff of the United States Embassy in Beirut in that period, and along with my colleagues met with all contending factions in a vain attempt to gain agreement for the reconstructed Lebanese Army to assume responsibility for security in areas under control of the factional militias. Syrian factional leaders will be similarly reluctant to trust their safety to a re-established Syrian state, but unless they do so, the process of fragmentation and radicalization will continue. Judging by our Lebanon experience, the hardest task in Syria will be diplomatic, not military.

If after cleareyed consideration Americans decide that our interests require action in Syria, we should proceed, but we should have no illusion about the difficulty and be prepared to see it through to the end. Even if our actions save lives, we can expect no rose petals for our efforts.

STEPHEN ENGELKEN
Bethesda, Md., May 6, 2013

To the Editor:

President Obama fiddles while Syria burns. President Bashar al-Assad has repeatedly rejected all attempts at negotiation and has paid no heavy price. The military cadre and aides around the dictator have no intention of cutting a deal. To hand out another fig leaf is just wasting precious time.

Syria is not Iraq; it is Libya. We should create a no-fly zone with NATO allies, drop in undercover military advisers and arm the rebel factions. Mr. Assad and his government will never agree to peace or surrender but will fight on to the bitter end.

Worrying about extremist jihadist fighters within the rebel factions is no longer an option. Not to enter the sectarian civil war when the die is already cast is to abdicate all leverage over the eventual transitional government. Other oppressive states will see us as the paper tiger, withdrawing after our wounds in Iraq and Afghanistan.

LAURENCE C. DAY
St.
Louis, May 6, 2013

To the Editor:

Much as I respect Bill Keller, I am not convinced that Syria is not Iraq. The neocons could have said, with equal conviction and similar logic, that Iraq was not Vietnam. Certainly the "danger to America's interests and ideals" that Mr. Keller cites was just as clear — and just as fallacious — in the case of Vietnam. President Obama's so-called foot-dragging is the best hope we have of avoiding another mindless, endless military adventure.

FREDERICK VAN VEEN
Kennebunkport, Me., May 6, 2013

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Serious Investigations, or Partisan Ploys?

Republicans have said the House hearings on Benghazi, which began on Wednesday, will reveal malfeasance worse than Watergate. But Democrats say Republicans are simply trying to embarrass the Obama administration and falsely blame the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who could be a candidate for the presidential nomination in 2016.

Have Congressional hearings become mere political devices?

Read the Discussion »

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator: In Data We Trust

Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.

Tags:

American Crossroads, Conservative Victory Project, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, Erickson, Erick, Political Action Committees, Priebus, Reince R, Republican National Committee, Republican Party, Rove, Karl, Tea Party Movement

The announcement on May 1 by the Republican National Committee that it had awarded a multi-million dollar contract for data management and collection services to Liberty Works, a firm run by Richard Boyce, an associate of Karl Rove, has driven a new wedge between establishment and conservative forces battling for control of the party.

The extensive involvement of Rove, not only with Liberty Works, but with all aspects of Republican efforts to build a technologically advanced, integrated voter list has provoked new charges that Rove is acquiring unprecedented control over the Republican electioneering machine: over the aggregation of tactically valuable data and of sharing it; over fundraising; over candidate selection; over voter mobilization; and finally over issue prioritization.

Rove and Reince Priebus, the chairman of the R.N.C., have angered the right wing of the Republican Party, which sees them as focused on marginalizing the Tea Party movement. Centrist Republicans like Rove and Priebus see the hard right as having cost the party 5 Senate seats over the past two elections. They are determined to put an end to the dominant role of the Tea Party and its supporters in primary contests.

Rove's ally, Boyce, is a partner in TPG Capital, a private equity firm based in Fort Worth and San Francisco. He is also a major Republican donor. During the 2011-12 election cycle, Boyce contributed $300,000 to Mitt Romney's "super PAC," Restore Our Future, and $100,000 to Rove's super PAC, American Crossroads. According to both his own aides and the R.N.C, Rove does not have a financial stake in Liberty Works.

The burst of criticism among hard-core conservatives was sparked by a Politico story headlined "Karl Rove-linked Company Gets GOP Data Deal." The mere fact of Rove's association with Boyce produced a strong negative reaction in the conservative blogosphere, reflecting the volatility of ideological tensions between the right and center factions of the Republican Party.

Rove's fingerprints are all over the Liberty Works voter list project, which is estimated to cost $20 million.

A company created by the R.N.C., Data Trust, will exercise control of the list. Mike Duncan, who was the chairman of the R.N.C. at the end of George W. Bush's second term, will be the trust's chairman. Duncan is now the chairman of Rove's super PAC, American Crossroads.

Throughout the presidency of George W. Bush, liberals and progressives saw Rove as the incarnation of evil. Now many on the conservative right describe him in similar terms.

People who commented on the Liberty Works contract at the conservative website FreeRepublic voiced their disapproval of Rove with their customary vehemence:

"Rove is making the moves to be the Big Political Machine Boss," wrote "yongin," who, in turn, provoked this reply from "fieldmarshaldj": "Anybody that trusts anything that Tokyo Rove does is an imbecile." Not to be outdone, "Cringing Negativism Network" wrote: "Rove is wrong for America. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Everything about Rove is wrong."

The influential right-wing blogger Erick Erickson wrote on May 2 that "the GOP motto for fixing itself seems to be 'incest is best'."  Erickson warned that strengthening the Rove-Priebus wing of the party further empowers the Republican establishment in its battle against far-right insurgents:

They'll plant stories about you in the New York Times, make sure the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal attacks you, threaten donors and demand they withhold money from you, take away your committee positions, shut down all your legislative initiatives, etc. That's why the GOP should not put data in Karl Rove's hands. The establishment has a worse track record on candidates that those who'd side with Rush Limbaugh. They have an even worse track record on policy (how'd steel tariffs in Pennsylvania work out?). And if you do not toe their line that often loses, they will punish you in ways Rush Limbaugh never would or even could.

Erickson is right to be worried. Brian Fung of the National Journal makes a strong point:

Here's why data ownership is a big deal. To paraphrase the geographer Halford Mackinder: Who controls the data controls the candidates; who controls the candidates controls the party.

The conflict between Rove and the hard right has deep roots. During the 2000 campaign, many traditional conservatives were critical of Rove's strategy of presenting George W. Bush as a "compassionate conservative." They viewed compassionate conservatism as a stalking horse for big government Republicanism.

The concerns on the far right were magnified by the Bush administration initiative that created a new, expensive entitlement: partial federal coverage of prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients.

Perhaps most important, conservatives attacked Bush and Rove for failing to control the growth of government, allowing federal red ink to grow exponentially: from a surplus of $86.4 billion in 2000, and a modest $32.4 billion deficit in 2001, to a $434.2 billion deficit in 2006 (and that was before the financial collapse of 2008).

Since the 2012 election, which was a major setback for the Republican Party, two developments have resulted in an intensification of intra-party conflict.

The first was the announcement on Feb. 3 that Rove planned to raise millions of dollars to finance a new organization, the Conservative Victory Project. The clear purpose of the project is to undermine extremely conservative candidates in Republican primaries who, if nominated, stand little chance of winning a general election. The Republican right immediately recognized the C.V.P. as an effort by the party establishment to weed out Tea Party candidates.

The second development was the release on March 18 of the 97-page RNC analysis of the problems facing the party, the Growth and Opportunity Project Report, better known as the Priebus report. The report accused the party of ideological rigidity, of preferring the rich over workers, of alienating minorities, and of scaring off young voters, gay and straight, with its opposition to same-sex marriage.

Much of the more radical right saw the Priebus report as a direct assault on traditional values. Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, for example, said, "If the RNC abandons marriage, evangelicals will either sit the elections out completely — or move to create a third party." Either development, Perkins warned, would put "Republicans on the path to a permanent minority."

A factor further exacerbating the center-right Republican controversy over Liberty Works is the lack of transparency in the $20 million development of the new more sophisticated national voter file.

Priebus and the R.N.C., according to sources in the party who insisted on anonymity in order to speak freely, are determined to maintain control over voter lists. But their desire is complicated because the addition of commercial data to party files requires an information technology infrastructure — and expertise — beyond the scope of a party budget constrained by campaign-finance laws.

Because Data Trust, under campaign finance law, must ostensibly have an arms-length relationship with the R.N.C., the R.N.C. cannot publicly reveal that it has created the Data Trust, even though, in fact, it did, according to a high-level official of the R.N.C. who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

The opaque nature of the relationship the R.N.C., Data Trust, and Liberty Works is reflected in the fact that it was the R.N.C. that announced the awarding of the contract to Liberty Works, even though the contract is technically between Data Trust and Liberty Works.

Asked if the award was granted on the basis of competitive bidding, Sean Spicer, communications director for the R.N.C., said, "I am not going to discuss that," and referred questions to Chad Kolton, who handles public relations for Data Trust.

I asked a number of people involved in the project a series of questions by email:

Could you explain to me what Data Trust is? Is it a profit-making corporation? Was it created by the RNC? Who are the board members? Who is the president or CEO? Does it have a web site? Is there someone who can speak for the trust? What is the relationship between the trust and the RNC? If it is independent, why did the RNC announce the contract award to Liberty Works to Roll Call? Is there a dollar figure for the award to Liberty Works? What does it mean that Liberty Works will create the "platform" for Data Trust? Did Data Trust award the contract to Liberty Works on a competitive basis? Were there competitors?

It took more than two days of repeated emails and phone calls to get even the most elliptical and fragmentary answers, and all the replies were given on a background or off-the-record basis.  One source, for example replied in an email:

Background, no quotes. Data Trust is third party group that will manage the open platform that will be built using RNC data. Data Trust manages RNC data and Liberty Works builds the platform.  Liberty Works is data trust vendor. I think you've talked to Chad Kolton – he's with Data Trust. We are one of three entities in the agreement: RNC, Data Trust, Liberty Works. The project will cost 10-20 million. One of the Growth and Opportunity Project recommendations was more access and more innovation. This is redesigned to give more people access to our data and have more people feeding in.

Two highly placed sources at the R.N.C. said they did not know the address of Data Trust. No mailing or Internet address for Data Trust could be found through a web search. Another highly knowledgeable source familiar with the company, however, was willing to say on background that Data Trust subleases space from a Republican polling firm on Capitol Hill.

Chad Kolton, spokesman for Data Trust, did not reply to repeated email and phone requests for detailed information about Data Trust, except for the following email:

DT (Data Trust) headed by former RNC chair Mike Duncan.  Spokesman is yours truly @ this email.  Website is done but hasn't been made public yet…which probably doesn't help you.

Kolton adds another Rove connection to the project. He held a variety of public relations jobs during the Bush administration, including press spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget and director of public affairs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In Bush's first campaign, Kolton was deputy communications director for the R.N.C.'s Victory 2000 program.

Rove is crucial to the drive to steer the Republican Party back to majority status – a position it enjoyed for much of the period from 1969 to 2006. His role since the 1970s cannot be overstated. In the 2011-12 election cycle, for example, the single largest R.N.C. vendor at $42.7 million was FLS Connect, a 350-employee firm specializing in fundraising, voter and constituent contact and data management. FLS was founded by Tony Feather, a Rove protégé who first met his mentor  in 1974 as a student in a course on campaign management that Rove taught. Rove picked Feather to be political director of the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign.  The Romney campaign paid FLS another $20.3 million.  Another FLS founder, Jeff Larson, served as chief of staff at the RNC in 2011 and 2012.

I sent an email to Rove to see if he would explain what his current relationship to the Republican Party is:

All the fuss over the award of the contract to Liberty Works, the creation of the Conservative Victory Project, etc. has, as you know, provoked a lot of debate over your agenda and the role you want to play in the Republican Party. Could you describe what your ambitions and goals are?

Rove declined my request. But looking at his role in creating American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS and the Conservative Victory Project, at the selection of his allies to run Data Trust, and at the award of the recent data management contract to Liberty Works, it is self-evident that as "yongin," the commenter on the Free Republic website, noted, "Rove is making the moves to be the Big Political Machine Boss."

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Letter: Election Reform in Florida

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

"Florida Lawmakers Approve Overhaul of State's Problem-Ridden Voting Process" (news article, May 4) paints a sunny picture of Florida's elections bill. But this legislation falls woefully short of achieving the kind of election reform that Florida citizens need.

It fails to reach the bare minimum of reversing the damage caused by Florida's 2011 law, which cut early voting nearly in half. Rather than fully restore the mandatory 14 days of early voting that Florida citizens enjoyed before 2011, it allows elections supervisors to offer 8 to 14 days at their discretion.

The full early voting period is too important to leave as a choice for individual counties — especially when hundreds of thousands of black and Latino voters were forced to wait for many hours to vote last year, or walk away without casting their ballots.

The legislation also does nothing about polling place resources. A formula based on anticipated turnout would lead to shorter lines by ensuring adequate poll workers, machines and translators per polling place; yet the bill does not take this common-sense step. It's no wonder then that every member of the Florida Legislative Black Caucus in the Senate voted against it.

Last year's outrageously long lines required bold reforms, not tinkering around the edges. The disappointing bill only underscores the need for a state law guaranteeing the fundamental right to vote, so that every citizen can vote in elections that are free, fair and accessible.

JUDITH BROWNE DIANIS
Washington, May 7, 2013

The writer is co-director of the Advancement Project, which works on civil rights and justice issues.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Letter: Exporting Electronic Waste

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

"Where Do Old Cellphones Go to Die?," by Leyla Acaroglu (Sunday Review, May 5), called attention to the dire impacts that e-waste exports have on the environment and human health in developing countries.

In addition, it's important to understand that as the United States exports its e-waste, we are also exporting tens of thousands of jobs. A recent study found that restricting exports of untested, nonworking electronics would create up to 42,000 American jobs with an annual payroll of up to $1 billion.

That's why the Responsible Electronics Recycling Act, which will be reintroduced in Congress in the near future, is about more than protecting the environment. It's about promoting investment in our domestic industry so we can manage the e-waste we generate within our own borders — and create jobs for Americans.

WENDY NEU
New York, May 6, 2013

The writer, executive vice president of Hugo Neu, a recycling company, is on the steering committee of the Coalition for American Electronics Recycling.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Letters: Children and Guns

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Re "Girl's Death by Gunshot Is Rejected as Symbol" (news article, May 6):

I find it abhorrent that the people of Burkesville, Ky., are not willing to learn a lesson from the tragic shooting of a 2-year-old girl by her 5-year-old brother.

I am not judging their lifestyle of introducing guns to children at a young age, but I do feel that it's irresponsible not to practice basic safety with anything potentially lethal — guns, knives, fire and so on. How can anyone justify leaving guns lying around, unlocked and possibly loaded, in a home with two young children?

I wish the family of the victim comfort during this difficult time, but to dismiss this as a simple accident leaves open the potential for many more such "accidents" to occur. I hope this doesn't have to happen several more times for legislators to realize that something needs to be changed.

EMILY LOUBATON
Brooklyn, May 6, 2013

To the Editor:

Is there any thoughtful, well-reasoned case for the existence of a child-sized rifle?

This is not a rhetorical question. I simply want to know the answer.

ANNIE BERROL
Kingston, N.Y., May 6, 2013

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Letter: Theft of iPhones

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

To the Editor:

Re "Theft of an iPhone Sets Off a Cinematic High-Speed Chase," by Michael Wilson (Crime Scene column, May 4):

Perhaps if today's youth simply put the smartphone in a pocket or purse, the theft rate would decrease.

It is truly amazing to watch people trying to navigate life with a phone constantly in hand, as if it were surgically attached.

PAUL LOURD
Wilton, Conn., May 4, 2013

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Columnist: America’s Military Injustice

Along with a boosted Buick LeSabre, another incident listed on a crime report Sunday in Arlington County, Va., was a creepy attack by a man on a woman.

"On May 5 at 12:35 a.m., a drunken male subject approached a female victim in a parking lot and grabbed her breasts and buttocks," the report read. "The victim fought the suspect off as he attempted to touch her again and alerted police. Jeffrey Krusinski, 41, of Arlington, Va., was arrested and charged with sexual battery."

Krusinksi's mug shot, showing scarlet scratches on his face, is a portrait in misery.

He knew his arrest on charges of groping a stranger would send the capital reeling and his career at the nearby Pentagon spiraling. The Air Force lieutenant colonel charged with sexual battery was the officer in charge of sexual assault prevention programs for the Air Force. (He had just finished his sexual assault victim training.)

There was a fox-in-the-henhouse echo of Clarence Thomas, who Anita Hill said sexually harassed her when he was the nation's top enforcer of laws against workplace sexual harassment.

Senator Jay Rockefeller issued a white-hot statement, calling Krusinski's arrest "further evidence that the military isn't taking the issue of sexual assault seriously," and "a stain on the military" that "should shake us to our core."

President Obama was also lacerating on the subject of the Krusinski arrest and the cases of two Air Force lieutenant generals who set aside sexual assault convictions after jury trials.

He said training and awareness programs masking indifference will no longer stand: "If we find out somebody's engaging in this stuff, they've got to be held accountable, prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged — period."

It has been a bad week for the hidebound defenders of a hopelessly antiquated military justice system that views prosecution decisions in all cases, including rape and sexual assault, as the private preserve of commanders rather than lawyers.

"They are dying a thousand deaths," said Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School. CAAFlog, the leading military justice blog, called it "the death knell" for the current system, at least for sexual assault cases.

During the Thomas-Hill hearings, many powerful men here — even ones defending Hill publicly — privately assumed that she was somehow complicit in encouraging Thomas's vulgar behavior. Feminists ranted "they just don't get it" so often that it became a grating cliché.

Yet, 22 years later, during another Senate hearing on Tuesday where the topic of sexual transgression flared, it became clear that, as the California Congresswoman Jackie Speier told me afterward, "people in authority just don't get it."

Gen. Mark Welsh, the chief of staff for the Air Force, shocked the women on the Senate Armed Services Committee when he testified that part of the problem in combatting "The Invisible War," as the Oscar-nominated documentary feature on the epidemic of rape in the military was titled, is that young women who enter the military have been raised in a society with a "hook-up mentality."

"We have got to change the culture once they arrive," the general said.

Hook-ups may be stupid, but they are consensual.

"To dismiss violent rapes as part of the hook-up culture shows a complete lack of understanding," a fiery Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York told me. "We're not talking about a date gone badly. We're talking about criminal behavior by predators who often stalk their victims in advance."

The hook-up comparison was especially jarring in light of the release of a stunning Pentagon study estimating that 26,000 men and women in the military were sexually assaulted in the 2012 fiscal year, a 37 percent increase from the same period the year before. Only a small number of incidents — 3,374 — were reported, showing that victims are still afraid of payback or perverted justice. And a mere 238 assailants were convicted.

Wired.com reported that troops at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina were issued a brochure advising potential victims of sexual assault that it may be more "advisable to submit than resist."

It was the sort of rare confluence of events that can actually lead to change here, especially because it's a nonpartisan issue and because the Senate looks very different than it did during the Thomas-Hill hearings. Three of the six Senate Armed Services subcommittees are now led by women.

Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a former prosecutor who is one of seven women (five of them lawyers) on the Armed Services Committee, has held up the nomination of Lt. Gen. Susan Helms to be vice commander of the Air Force's Space Command until she investigates why Helms overturned a conviction in a sexual assault case.

"You don't get to decide who's telling the truth and supplant the judgment of the jury you handpicked if you weren't in the courtroom observing the witnesses," Senator McCaskill said. "You've got to put systems in place where you catch these cowards committing crimes and you put them in prison."

The military brass cossetting predators are on notice. The women of Congress are on the case.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Letter: An Educational Hybrid

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Re "Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden" (front page, "Virtual U." series, April 30):

It is heartening to see that massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which would be expected to reinforce the discredited idea that students learn best from a great professor "standing and delivering," may actually be helping to finally rid us of that notion.

For two to three decades the evidence has grown that active student engagement with material, not brilliant lecture presentations, is the key to learning. It seems that San Jose State's blended version of a MOOC, weaving material from online classes into instruction, supports that conclusion.

As your article correctly points out, it may not be the MOOC itself that produced a 91 percent pass rate in the blended circuits course, but rather the intensive in-person workshops and 24/7 availability of online mentors. Let's hope that the results at San Jose State will be replicated with a scaling up in class size, and let's be sure we take away the right lesson.

The MOOCs' key role may be in enabling a more engaging structure for courses, and if so, MOOCs have done higher education a great service.

DANIEL E. LEMONS
New York, April 30, 2013

The writer is a professor of biology at City College of New York, CUNY.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Columnist: Beyond the Fence

The opponents of immigration reform have many small complaints, but they really have one core concern. It's about control. America doesn't control its borders. Past reform efforts have not established control. Current proposals wouldn't establish effective control.

But the opponents rarely say what exactly it is they are trying to control. They talk about border security and various mechanisms to achieve that, but they rarely go into detail about what we should be so vigilant about restricting. I thought I would spell it out.

First, immigration opponents are effectively trying to restrict the flow of conservatives into this country. In survey after survey, immigrants are found to have more traditional ideas about family structure and community than comparable Americans. They have lower incarceration rates. They place higher emphasis on career success. They have stronger work ethics. Immigrants go into poor neighborhoods and infuse them with traditional values.

When immigrant areas go bad, it's not because they have infected America with bad values. It's because America has infected them with bad values already present. So the first thing conservative opponents of reform are trying to restrict is social conservatism.

Second, immigration opponents are trying to restrict assimilation. The evidence about this is clear, too. Current immigrants enter this country because they want to realize the same dreams that inspired past waves. Study after study shows current Hispanic immigrants are picking up English at an impressive clip, roughly as quickly as earlier immigrant groups. They are making steady gains in homeownership rates, job status and social identity. By second generation, according to a Pew Research Center study released earlier this year, 61 percent of immigrants think of themselves as "typical Americans."

Third, immigration opponents are trying to restrict love affairs. Far from segregating themselves into their own alien subculture, today's immigrant groups seem eager to marry into mainstream American society. Among all newlyweds in 2010, 9 percent of whites married outside of their racial or ethnic group, as did 17 percent of blacks. But an astonishing 26 percent of Hispanics and 28 percent of Asians married outside their groups. They are blending into America in the most intimate way.

Fourth, immigration opponents are trying to restrict social mobility. Generation after generation, the children of immigrants are gradually better educated and more affluent than their parents.

A few years ago, the great political scientist Samuel Huntington asserted that Hispanic immigrants were not succeeding as previous immigrants had. James P. Smith of the RAND Corporation conducted the most prominent investigation into this claim and concluded: "The concern that educational generational progress among Latino immigrants has lagged behind other immigrant groups is largely unfounded."

Some intelligent skeptics say that mobility is fine through the second generation but stalls by the third. It is indeed harder to rise in a more chaotic and fragmented society. But one of the country's leading immigration researchers, Richard Alba of the City University of New York, calls the third generation stall "a statistical illusion."

Much of the research that shows the effect compares today's third-generation immigrants with today's second-generation group. But the third-generation families originally came to the U.S. decades ago, at a time when segregation was prevalent, discrimination was high and immigrants were harshly treated. You'd expect those families to progress more slowly than families that came to more welcoming conditions a generation later.

Fifth, immigration opponents are trying to restrict skills. Current reform proposals would increase high-skill immigration. Opponents of reform are trying to restrict an infusion of people most likely to start businesses and invent things.

Alba points out that, over the next decades, the retirement of the baby-boomer generation will open up a large number of positions, especially atop the labor force. He points out that the fastest-growing ethnic groups are already rising to fill these slots. Whites occupy 80 percent of the top-paying jobs among older workers. But, among younger workers, whites occupy only 67 percent of the top jobs. The work force is already more diverse the younger you go.

Finally, opponents of reform are trying to hold back the inevitable. Whether immigration reform passes or not, the United States is going to become a much more cosmopolitan country than it is now. The country will look more like the faces you see at college commencement exercises and less like the faces you see in senior citizen homes.

One crucial question is whether America will be better off in that future with today's dysfunctional immigration laws or something else? Another interesting question is whether a major political party is going to consign itself to permanent irrelevance. If conservatives defeat immigration reform, the Republicans will definitely lose control of one thing for years to come: political power.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Taking Note: Stunning Error in Mississippi Death Penalty Case

Mississippi is scheduled to execute Willie Manning on Tuesday for his 1994 conviction for two murders. Mr. Manning is seeking DNA testing of hair, fingernail scrapings and other evidence connected to the crimes. His lawyers argue that no physical evidence links him to the crimes and that DNA testing could prove him innocent and identify another killer.

But last week, by 5-4, the Mississippi Supreme Court approved the state's motion to proceed with the execution, having denied Mr. Manning's motion for DNA testing last month by the same vote.

Since 1989 in the United States, there have been 306 people exonerated by DNA evidence after they were convicted, 18 on death row. In seven previous cases, DNA testing has exonerated men convicted and imprisoned in Mississippi. In each case, the killer left DNA at the crime scene.

Last week, the Justice Department provided extraordinary grounds for the state to allow DNA testing in the Manning case. In a letter to the prosecution and defense, the department said that testimony of an F.B.I. analyst who was a key prosecution witness "exceeded the limits of the science and was, therefore, invalid."

That analyst testified that he could match a hair found at the crime scene to an individual with "a relatively high degree of certainty" and that the hair fragments collected from a victim's car "came from an individual of the black race." The Justice Department concluded that it was "error for an examiner to testify that he can determine that the questioned hairs were from an individual of a particular racial group."

The F.B.I. has now offered to do the DNA testing requested by Mr. Manning, who is black.  One dissenting opinion from the Mississippi Supreme Court said, "In asking the jury to convict Manning, an African American, of the murder of two white students, the prosecution seems to have placed great emphasis on the fact that hair samples, originating from an African American" were found in the car. The prosecution, however, did not connect the hair to Mr. Manning. Clearly, the Justice Department's letter makes the emphasis placed on the hair samples deeply problematic.

Mr. Manning's lawyers went back to the Mississippi Supreme Court on Monday  to ask that the court stay his execution and set aside his convictions based on the Justice Department's acknowledgment that the F.B.I. analyst's testimony was false. That new evidence is crucial and stunning. The court should stay the execution and let the DNA testing go forward, but if it does not, then Gov. Phil Bryant must do that.

The whole case underscores the often racially discriminatory application of the death penalty in cases where the victims are white and the defendants are black, one of many reasons that capital punishment should be abolished.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Columnist: The Chancellor’s Lament

But you won't find a lot of people giving Thorp, 48, a pat on the back. For the last three years, North Carolina was mired in an athletic scandal. And the fact that it took place on Thorp's watch overshadows everything else he did.

Though it started out as an N.C.A.A. rules-violation investigation, it morphed into an academic scandal when it was discovered that the chairman of the African and Afro-American Studies Department had long allowed students — athletes very much included — to take no-show classes.

For a university that had long held itself out as one of the "good schools" athletically, the scandal has been humiliating. The N.C.A.A. meted out penalties to the football team. The football coach, Butch Davis, was fired. The athletic director resigned. Even the college accrediting agency got involved.

By his own admission, Thorp was shellshocked by the experience of dealing with the scandal. As a lifelong North Carolina partisan, he had bought into the myth of the university as a place that harvested genuine student-athletes. The scandal showed him a reality he never before had to face.

It also engulfed him. If you are a college chancellor or president, you can't delegate when there is a problem in the athletic department. "The governing board, the newspaper, the fans, the faculty, they all expect you to sort it out," he said. He was spending, literally, half his time dealing with the football team. Yet he had no real experience with the business of college athletics — nor, for that matter, do most college presidents.

He found himself buffeted this way and that. At first, he supported his coach, but then he finally felt he had to fire him. He did so at the worst possible moment: on the eve of a new season. His press conferences dealing with the scandal were, by his own admission, "terrible." He was, to be blunt, in over his head.

And as he departs U.N.C., his message is that virtually all college presidents are in over their heads when it comes to their athletic departments. They have no background, no experience, that would prepare them for overseeing the $6 billion entertainment complex that big-time college sports has become. In he early 1990s, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics issued a series of reports saying that college presidents needed to regain control of their athletic departments and restore "integrity." The N.C.A.A. adopted this position.

But today, notwithstanding this supposed reform, the system is as morally corrupt as ever — and far more awash in money. It's conference presidents, not college presidents and chancellors, who run college sports. The prototypical modern athletic director is David Brandon at the University of Michigan. His previous job — are you sitting down? — was chairman and chief executive of Domino's Pizza. He is an unabashed revenue maximizer. Compared with the hard-nosed businessmen who control college sports, the presidents and chancellors are babes in the woods. The main thing they offer everyone else in the system is cover.

Not surprisingly, Thorp's comments have not exactly been embraced. At U.N.C., there is still a lot of indignation, some deserved, at the way Thorp handled the scandal. Some people think he is trying to shuck his responsibility.

People associated with the Knight commission are also upset. Hodding Carter III, a former president of the Knight Foundation, which finances the commission, was quoted as saying that Thorp was "wrong on every count." But he's not. Even the Knight commission has begun to examine whether the system is so broken that it can't be reformed.

That is what Thorp now thinks. He is not ready to go as far as I do, namely, end the hypocrisy and start calling "student-athletes" what they really are: employees who deserve to earn a paycheck for their labors. But he does believe athletes should be allowed to attend school after their playing days are over. And, he said, "the concept of amateurism" — the current bedrock of college athletics — "needs to be examined." For a college chancellor, those are radical words.

Thorp himself will soon move to Washington University in St. Louis, a first-rate academic institution that no one will ever mistake for the University of North Carolina athletically. It is in Division III, meaning, among other things, it doesn't offer athletic scholarships.

Not long ago, when he was being taken around the Washington University campus, Thorp remarked, "I hear that the football stadium seats 3,500."

"Yes," came the response, "but it's never been tested."

"I'm looking forward to Division III," Thorp told me.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: More Medicaid, More Health?

A study comparing low-income people in Oregon who received access to Medicaid over the past two years with those who did not, found that those on Medicaid visited doctors and hospitals more often, suffered less from depression and were more financially secure. That said, the Medicaid recipients saw little average improvement in blood pressure, blood sugar and other measures.

Some have said the study demonstrates that by focusing on routine care, such health insurance provides meager results at great cost. Should health insurance, particularly government programs, provide only catastrophic coverage?

Read the Discussion »

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | The Great Divide: How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment

It's easy to believe the worst is over in the economic downturn. But for African-Americans, the pain continues — over 13 percent of black workers are unemployed, nearly twice the national average. And that's not a new development: regardless of the economy, job prospects for African-Americans have long been significantly worse than for the country as a whole.

The most obvious explanation for this entrenched disparity is racial discrimination. But in my research I have found a somewhat different culprit: favoritism. Getting an inside edge by using help from family and friends is a powerful, hidden force driving inequality in the United States.

Such favoritism has a strong racial component. Through such seemingly innocuous networking, white Americans tend to help other whites, because social resources are concentrated among whites. If African-Americans are not part of the same networks, they will have a harder time finding decent jobs.

The mechanism that reproduces inequality, in other words, may be inclusion more than exclusion. And while exclusion or discrimination is illegal, inclusion or favoritism is not — meaning it can be more insidious and largely immune to legal challenges.

Favoritism is almost universal in today's job market. In interviews with hundreds of people on this topic, I found that all but a handful used the help of family and friends to find 70 percent of the jobs they held over their lifetimes; they all used personal networks and insider information if it was available to them.

In this context of widespread networking, the idea that there is a job "market" based solely on skills, qualifications and merit is false. Whenever possible, Americans seeking jobs try to avoid market competition: they look for unequal rather than equal opportunity. In fact, the last thing job seekers want to face is equal opportunity; they want an advantage. They want to find ways to cut in line and get ahead.

You don't usually need a strong social network to land a low-wage job at a fast-food restaurant or retail store. But trying to land a coveted position that offers a good salary and benefits is a different story. To gain an edge, job seekers actively work connections with friends and family members in pursuit of these opportunities.

Help is not given to just anyone, nor is it available from everyone. Inequality reproduces itself because help is typically reserved for people who are "like me": the people who live in my neighborhood, those who attend my church or school or those with whom I have worked in the past. It is only natural that when there are jobs to be had, people who know about them will tell the people who are close to them, those with whom they identify, and those who at some point can reciprocate the favor.

Because we still live largely segregated lives, such networking fosters categorical inequality: whites help other whites, especially when unemployment is high. Although people from every background may try to help their own, whites are more likely to hold the sorts of jobs that are protected from market competition, that pay a living wage and that have the potential to teach skills and allow for job training and advancement. So, just as opportunities are unequally distributed, they are also unequally redistributed.

All of this may make sense intuitively, but most people are unaware of the way racial ties affect their job prospects.

When I asked my interviewees what most contributed to their level of career success, they usually discussed how hard they had worked and how uncertain were the outcomes — not the help they had received throughout their lives to gain most of their jobs. In fact, only 14 percent mentioned that they had received help of any kind from others. Seeing contemporary labor-market politics through the lens of favoritism, rather than discrimination alone, is revealing. It explains, for example, why even though the majority of all Americans, including whites, support civil rights in principle, there is widespread opposition on the part of many whites to affirmative action policies — despite complaints about "reverse discrimination," my research demonstrated that the real complaint is that affirmative action undermines long-established patterns of favoritism.

The interviewees in my study who were most angry about affirmative action were those who had relatively fewer marketable skills — and were therefore most dependent on getting an inside edge for the best jobs. Whites who felt entitled to these positions believed that affirmative action was unfair because it blocked their own privileged access.

But interviewees' feelings about such policies betrayed the reality of their experience of them. I found these attitudes evident among my interviewees — even though, among the 1,463 jobs they discussed with me, there were only two cases in which someone might have been passed over for a job because of affirmative action policies benefiting African-Americans. These data are consistent with other research on affirmative action.

There's no question that discrimination is still a problem in the American economy. But whites helping other whites is not the same as discrimination, and it is not illegal. Yet it may have a powerful effect on the access that African-Americans and other minorities have to good jobs, or even to the job market itself.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Letter: Beloved Children’s Books

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Re "Memories of a Bedtime Book Club," by Dwight Garner (Critic's Notebook, April 25):

A loved and memorable children's book carries you and your child's DNA, so to speak; it is your literary inheritance.

No one ever outgrows a great children's book because inside every adult is a child. Let the attic be home to other things, but not to these very alive and shared stories and memories. Mr. Garner's own reverie while packing the books into boxes is proof enough.

As children navigate the sometimes turbulent world of adolescence and young adulthood, let these stories show them who they were and who they might become. Why not begin again the habit of reading aloud to your children?

Reading the written word and sharing thoughts offer rewards that should not have any imposed statute of limitations.

DIANE W. FRANKENSTEIN
San Francisco, April 25, 2013

The writer is the author of "Reading Together: Everything You Need to Know to Raise a Child Who Loves to Read."

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Letter: A ‘Silent Majority’ on Guns

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

To the Editor:

Re "New Poll Finds Unity on Gun Laws and Immigration, but a Split on Leadership" (news article, May 2):

The one big reason never mentioned about why the background-check vote failed is that on that particular issue we as a country have reverted to being the silent majority.

Sadly, I don't see any indication that the voters will respond to this travesty with one iota of courage in the midterm election.

WES EUSTICE
Lakeland, Fla., May 2, 2013

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator: How Colonoscopies Are Like Home Renovations

IT'S a law of nature: Everyone who undertakes major home renovations ends up loathing their contractor. When I was recently redoing my kitchen and bathroom, I finally figured out why. It has nothing to do with the contractor's honesty, quality of work, punctuality or the mess they make. It's about behavioral economics and human psychology — in particular, the unusual way that we assess pain.

In the early '90s, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues did a series of experiments that revealed how people remembered the pain of a situation. In one experiment, participants held a hand in an ice-water bath (of 14 degrees Celsius) for 60 seconds — a pretty painful experience. To be precise: an 8.3 on a 10-point pain scale. In a second experiment they held their hand in the same ice-water bath for 60 seconds and then for another 30 seconds, during which the water was warmed just 1 degree.

This small increase had a big effect: afterward, when people were asked which experiment they would prefer to have repeated (for money), two-thirds preferred the second — the experiment that lasted longer and, therefore, had more overall pain.

Dr. Kahneman's conclusion was that people don't evaluate the pain of an experience by summing up the overall total. Instead, they remember the pain at the very end — and whether it got better or worse.

This was confirmed in 2003 by another experiment by Dr. Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in 2002, and his fellow researchers, concerning the pain associated with colonoscopy. The patients in the study underwent the usual procedure, but one group experienced a slight change at the end. How to put it delicately? After everything was finished, the tip of the colonoscope was left resting in the rectum for up to three minutes before being removed.

Afterward, when all the medications wore off, patients evaluated the pain of the procedure. Surprisingly, those who had the colonoscope in longer on average remembered less total pain. And this just wasn't a matter of self-reporting: over the next five years, they were also 18 percent more likely to return for a repeat colonoscopy — increasing the opportunity to reduce deaths from colon cancer.

Besides the fact that remodeling can often feel like putting your hands in an ice-water bath, what do these experiments have to do with one another?

The end of a remodeling job is always a terrible experience. A lot of little things need to be taken care of — some outlet doesn't work, the countertop wobbles just a little, the door doesn't lock. In my case, the three problems were a towel warmer that lacked an on-off switch, a shower that didn't work properly and a loose piece of molding.

Repairing these types of minor problems is costly for the contractor. Sending out an electrician for one outlet or the plumber to fix one faucet is unplanned for and inefficient, and really eats into the profits. Consequently, contractors balk at doing the repairs, waiting to aggregate a bunch before fixing one. For the homeowner who has just spent what seems like a fortune on the remodeling job, each problem and delay is enormously annoying. (Indeed, my molding is still loose.)

As Dr. Kahneman's experiments show, the pain at the end — whether it is getting better or worse — plays a disproportionately large role in determining how we remember an experience. So the fact that this game of glitch, procrastination and evasion comes at the end of the remodeling job means that we all end up hating our contractor, even if most of the job has gone smoothly.

So what should contractors do? They could promptly repair every problem the moment a homeowner identifies it. But that would be costly and seems unlikely. Perhaps instead they should consider picking something the homeowner really cares about and exceeding expectations on that one repair — but only at the very, very end. One friend told me that her contractor gave her an espresso machine when the job was finished. Even if she ultimately paid for the gift, her memories of the experience were sweeter than mine.

The good thing is that, like a colonoscopy, once the remodeling is over, you won't need another one for years.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Columnist: Sexism and the Single Murderess

"SEX game gone wrong," "sex game gone awry," "sex-mad flatmate," "sex-crazed killer."

That's from just the first three minutes of the ABC News special on Amanda Knox last week, a veritable drumbeat of sexual shaming that leaves no doubt about what elevated a college student accused of murder into an object of international fascination, titillation and scorn.

It wasn't the crime itself. It was the supposed conspiracy of her libido, cast as proof that she was out of control, up to no good, lost, wicked, dangerous. A girl this intent on randy fun was a girl who couldn't be trusted and got what was coming to her, even if it was prison and even if there was plenty of reason — as the eventual reversal of her initial conviction made clear — to believe that she might not belong there.

"Knox knew, it seemed, no boundaries, leaving a vibrator in a transparent washbag and enjoying one-night stands," wrote Tobias Jones in a 2011 article in the British newspaper The Observer. One-night stands? How could she?!? Of course if a guy has one of those, it's a triumph: all the pleasure, none of the commitment. And boys, after all, will be boys.

We'll never know precisely what happened on the night in Perugia, Italy, in 2007 when Meredith Kercher, 21, was killed. Knox, her housemate, was found guilty, then acquitted and will soon, despite the profoundly flawed case against her, face another trial. The Italian judicial system works about as smoothly as the Italian government.

But we know this: the double standard concerning men's versus women's sexuality not only survives but thrives, manifest in the enduring notoriety of "Foxy Knoxy," whose memoir was published on the same day last week that the ABC News special aired. Keep the rest of her story the same but make her a man in the midst of erotic escapades abroad. Are we still gawking? Is ABC trumpeting Diane Sawyer's exclusive sit-down with the lascivious pilgrim?

Similar questions can be asked about Jodi Arias, 32, whose murder trial in Arizona was winding down last week. The Arias case hasn't made quite the leap from the tabloids into the mainstream that Knox's did. But HLN, the cable network on which Nancy Grace fulminates, has enjoyed a ratings bonanza with its saturation coverage of the courtroom proceedings.

Arias has admitted to stabbing, shooting and slashing the throat of a former lover: an act of self-defense, she unpersuasively claims. And while his death was certainly grisly enough to explain a baseline of media interest, the amount of attention it has received stems from the courtroom juxtaposition of the defendant, outfitted in nerdy eyeglasses and a frumpy hairstyle, and evidence of what a steamy, pliable playmate she was. It stems from pictures of her genitalia that she let her lover take, audiotapes of the phone sex that the two of them had — and that she recorded. It stems from the shock and censure of such potent female desire.

Knox and Arias aren't just women accused of murder. They're minxes accused of murder, sitting in their courtroom seats with scarlet letters emblazoned on their chests, no jury needed to pronounce them guilty of wantonness at the very least. For men, lust is a tripwire. For women, it's a noose.

I've heard quite a bit lately about David Petraeus's road to redemption. I've heard less about Paula Broadwell's. Yes, he's the more public figure, but the disparity also reflects the way their affair was often portrayed in the first place. He strayed; she preyed. He was weak; she was wily. He was the fly, she the spider.

Let's bring a few other recent news stories into this. Let's indulge in a few hypotheticals.

WHAT if it had been Antonia Weiner who took to Twitter and there had been a different architecture to the image she tweeted? Would she be able even to entertain the idea of a political comeback? And would the spouse standing dutifully by her be seen as a brave and magnanimous stalwart, the way Huma Abedin is viewed in some quarters, or dismissed by one and all as a pitiable pushover?

Had a Southern governor named Marcia Sanford been entangled with a Latin lover when reputedly hiking the Appalachian Trail, would she today be her party's nominee for an open Congressional seat? We know the answer, and we know that Wilhelmina Clinton and Newtina Gingrich wouldn't have rebounded from their infidelities as robustly as Bill and Newt did.

Men get passes, women get reputations, and real, lasting humiliation travels only one way. The size and scope of that mortification, despite many decades of happy talk about dawning gender equality, are suggested by recent news stories of one teenage girl in California and another in Nova Scotia who hanged themselves after tales or cellphone pictures of their sexual violation circulated among peers. It's impossible not to wonder if shame drove them to suicide, and it's impossible not to ask what sort of world allows the victims of such assaults to feel more irredeemably branded — more eternally damned — than their accused assailants by all appearances do.

I'll tell you what sort: a world in which there's a cornucopia of synonyms for whore and slut and no comparably pejorative vocabulary for promiscuous or sexually rapacious men. A world in which Knox's vibrator and the lingerie she was said to have bought in a Perugia store were presented not just as newsworthy but as germane to the charge of murder against her: referendums on her character, glimmers of her depravity, clues to precisely how a good girl went bad. A world in which her erotic appetite made her a "man eater," as the Italian press wrote and as the rest of the world more or less parroted. A world in which her tally, scribbled on a sheet of paper in her prison cell, of seven sexual partners in all of her life was seen as sensational. A similar count for a guy in his early 20s would provoke not derision but disagreement: swordsman or slacker?

When we chart and lament the persistence of sexism in society, we look to the United States Congress, where women are still woefully underrepresented. We look to corporate boardrooms, where the glass ceiling hasn't really shattered. But we needn't look any further than how perversely censorious of women's sex lives we remain, and how short the path from siren to slut and from angel to she-devil can be.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Columnist: What Health Insurance Doesn’t Do

IN one of the most famous studies of health insurance, conducted across the 1970s, thousands of participants were divided into five groups, with each receiving a different amount of insurance coverage. The study, run by the RAND Corporation, tracked the medical care each group sought out, and not surprisingly found that people with more comprehensive coverage tended to make use of it, visiting the doctor and checking into the hospital more often than people with less generous insurance.

But the study also tracked the health outcomes of each group, and there the results were more surprising: With a few modest exceptions, the level of insurance had no significant effect on the participants' actual wellness.

Needless to say, experts have been arguing about what the RAND results mean ever since. But the basic finding — that more expensive health insurance doesn't necessarily lead to better health — just received a major boost. The state of Oregon expanded its Medicaid program via lottery a few years ago, and researchers released the latest data on how health outcomes for the new Medicaid users differed from those for the uninsured. The answer: They didn't differ much. Being on Medicaid helped people avoid huge medical bills, and it reduced depression rates. But the program's insurance guarantee seemed to have little or no impact on common medical conditions like hypertension and diabetes.

As liberals have been extremely quick to point out, these findings do not necessarily make a case against the new health care law, which includes a big Medicaid expansion as well as subsidies for private insurance. After all, the first purpose of insurance is economic protection, and the Oregon data shows that expanding coverage does indeed protect people from ruinous medical expenses. The links between insurance, medicine and health may be impressively mysterious, but staving off medical bankruptcies among low-income Americans is not a small policy achievement.

This is true. But it's also true that the health care law was sold, in part, with the promise (made by judicious wonks as well as overreaching politicians) that it would save tens of thousands of American lives each year. There was so much moral fervor on the issue, so much crusading liberal zeal, precisely because this was not supposed to be just a big redistribution program: it was supposed to be a matter of life and death.

But if it turns out that health insurance is useful mostly because it averts financial catastrophe — which seems to be the consensus liberal position since the Oregon data came out — then the new health care law looks vulnerable to two interconnected critiques.

First, if the benefit of health insurance is mostly or exclusively financial, then shouldn't health insurance policies work more like normal insurance? Fire, flood and car insurance exist to protect people against actual disasters, after all, not to pay for ordinary repairs. If the best evidence suggests that health insurance is most helpful in protecting people's pocketbooks from similar disasters, and that more comprehensive coverage often just pays for doctor visits that don't improve people's actual health, then shouldn't we be promoting catastrophic health coverage, rather than expanding Medicaid?

Liberals don't like catastrophic plans because, by definition, they're stingier than the coverage many Americans now enjoy. But this is where the second critique comes in: If the marginal dollar of health care coverage doesn't deliver better health, isn't this a place where policy makers should be stingy, while looking for more direct ways to improve the prospects of the working poor? Some kind of expanded health security is clearly a good thing — but if we want to promote economic mobility as well, does it really make sense to pour about a trillion dollars into a health care system that everyone agrees is deeply dysfunctional, when some of that money could be returned to Americans' paychecks instead?

There are a variety of ways this could be accomplished — a bigger child tax credit for struggling families, a payroll tax cut to boost workers, an expanded earned-income tax credit to raise wages at the bottom, health savings accounts that roll over money left unspent. In each case, the goal would be to help people rise by giving them more money and more options for what to do with it, rather than just expanding 1960s-vintage programs that pay medical bills and only medical bills.

It's to the Republican Party's great discredit that these policies and goals don't have enough conservative champions at the moment. But it's to liberals' discredit that they remain wedded to the dream of a health care bureaucracy that pays and pays and pays, when in all likelihood we could be spending much less with similar results, and finding better ways to help the poor.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Guest Columnist: Beyond the Code of the Streets

ONE evening last week, I joined some friends for recreational beverages after work. These friends were all natives of a certain tribe — black men raised in the crack-era inner cities, now thriving in some other America. They were all college graduates (except me) and upstanding citizens of virtuous reputation. And like me, they were haunted by codes that aided their rise in the old world but might stunt their growth in the new.

We were in Chicago. The warm spring night had drawn out the merrymakers. Nate Robinson, whose Bulls had just buried the Brooklyn Nets, had made everyone giddy. But I was on guard. Back in my native Baltimore we called this fighting weather; in those first warm days of spring, you kept your clique close, your book bag closer and your head on swivel. My friends and I were winding down the night on State Street, downtown, when two drunk dudes confronted us. They were barely coherent, but the message got through: fighting weather.

I have all the repressed rage of a kid who was bullied — except now I have some size to match. At that moment, violent fantasies, wholly unmentionable, were dancing in my head. Contributing to those fantasies was a simple maxim inherited from childhood: "Thou shalt never be found a punk."

My friends, being like me, and doubtlessly pumped up by the presence of other males, felt the same. There were four of us and two of them. But against all our instincts, we let it pass.

Afterward, we sat around stewing in our anger. Collectively we were a doctor, a filmmaker, an executive vice president at a health care company and a writer. All of us are in our late 30s. Our places in life no longer allowed for barroom brawls. We may well have had the numbers, but we also had our new and invented selves.

For black men like us, the feeling of having something to lose, beyond honor and face, is foreign. We grew up in communities — New York, Baltimore, Chicago — where the Code of the Streets was the first code we learned. Respect and reputation are everything there. These values are often denigrated by people who have never been punched in the face. But when you live around violence there is no opting out. A reputation for meeting violence with violence is a shield. That protection increases when you are part of a crew with that same mind-set. This is obviously not a public health solution, but within its context, the Code is logical.

Outside of its context, the Code is ridiculous. Some years ago, I attended a reading by a black male author. There was a large crowd who'd come to hear him. A rowdy group in the back refused to give him their attention. He asked for it, quite nicely, a few times, but they paid him no heed. I could see the anger rising in his face, as the old laws worked on him. He was being disrespected. Again. Finally the author said loudly and menacingly, "Don't let the suit fool you." But it was the streets that had fooled him. Most tough guys don't live long enough for memoirs.

Outside of its context, the Code is suicidal. The violence committed by and against black men — regardless of class — is not weighed like the violence of other males. In America, the presence of melanin itself is too often a mark of criminality. I like to think that I've built myself up into something. I'm a writer. I've won some awards. I live in a nice neighborhood in New York. If I shaved more often, I might actually qualify for my local chapter of the black bourgeoisie. But had we gotten into a fight that night, every one of us knew how the police would have seen us, and what they would have done. Violence is wrong. Violence done by black men is more wrong.

The Code of the Streets, a term popularized by the hip-hop duo Gang Starr and the sociologist Elijah Anderson, is the code of men who have come to feel that they have nothing to lose. Much of the struggle with young black boys and teenagers today lies in getting them to see all that violence endangers. At 13, I could imagine not going to jail, not getting shot, being a responsible father. I could not envision much more. I could name careers and other paths, but I had no real sense that it was possible for me to get there, or how. Somehow I got there. And on arrival, I found myself in the company of others like me: an entire fraternity founded on the need to comprehend the folkways of a world we had never been sure we'd see.

Some people come up expecting to win. We came up hoping not to lose. Even in victory, the distance between expectation and results is dizzying for both. The old code remains a part of you, and with it comes a particular strain of impostor syndrome. You have learned another language, but your accent betrays you. And there are times when you wonder if the real you is not here among the professionals, but out there in the streets.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinion: Where Do Old Cellphones Go to Die?

Jane Hahn/European Pressphoto Agency

Computer parts line the ground at a dump site in Agbogbloshie, a suburb of Accra, Ghana.

AMERICANS replace their cellphones every 22 months, junking some 150 million old phones in 2010 alone. Ever wondered what happens to all these old phones? The answer isn't pretty.

In far-flung, mostly impoverished places like Agbogbloshie, Ghana; Delhi, India; and Guiyu, China, children pile e-waste into giant mountains and burn it so they can extract the metals — copper wires, gold and silver threads — inside, which they sell to recycling merchants for only a few dollars. In India, young boys smash computer batteries with mallets to recover cadmium, toxic flecks of which cover their hands and feet as they work. Women spend their days bent over baths of hot lead, "cooking" circuit boards so they can remove slivers of gold inside. Greenpeace, the Basel Action Network and others have posted YouTube videos of young children inhaling the smoke that rises from burned phone casings as they identify and separate different kinds of plastics for recyclers. It is hard to imagine that good health is a by-product of their unregulated industry.

Indeed, most scientists agree that exposure poses serious health risks, especially to pregnant women and children. The World Health Organization reports that even a low level of exposure to lead, cadmium and mercury (all of which can be found in old phones) can cause irreversible neurological damage and threaten the development of a child.

The growing toxic nightmare that is e-waste is not confined to third world outposts. It also poses health problems in the United States where, for several years, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has kept inmates busy processing e-waste. There are concrete steps the government, manufacturers and consumers could take to better dispose of electronic trash and to help prevent the pileup of more e-waste and the hazards e-waste processing poses.

The United States, for example, remains the only industrialized country that has not ratified the Basel Convention, an international treaty that makes it illegal to export or traffic in toxic e-waste. Fully implementing the treaty would be a step toward joining global efforts to contain toxic waste troubles.

The Responsible Electronics Recycling Act, introduced in Congress in 2011, would have made it illegal to export toxic waste from the United States to countries that don't belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The aim was to stop dumping e-waste on the world's poorest nations and thus to provide an incentive for safer waste management in our own country. The bill had bipartisan support but was never put to a vote.

The European Union provides a model for industrial regulation that would shift the burden of safe product disposal back to the manufacturers that produce electronic goods. Its Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive requires electronic sellers to accept, free of charge, any of their used products brought in by customers for recycling. The goal is to have properly recycled 85 percent of the European Union's e-waste by 2019. Similarly, Japan requires its electronic manufacturers to establish their own recycling facilities or commission third parties to recycle a range of products, from computers and cellphones to TVs and air-conditioners.

Government or consumer pressure on manufacturers to design electronics with end-of-product-life issues in mind could be enormously helpful. Most cellphones, for example, are deliberately designed to make disassembly difficult. Changes in the way manufacturers glue, screw and solder components together would make it easier to dismantle discarded phones and thus reduce the risks posed by crude recycling techniques like those deployed by Ghanaian children.

THERE are alternative phone service business models that could be beneficial to producers, users and the rest of us. For example, manufacturers could sell products complete with prearranged recycling service or subscriptions that made it possible, for example, for phone user to exchange old units for new ones rather than throwing them away. Under a product service system model, companies recycle old units and repurpose core components. Xerox uses a similar model for its photocopiers, without impact on sales or profits.

In the absence of government regulation or industry initiative, consumers could play a role in determining what happens to products that have outlived their usefulness. Most phones and small electronics are designed with obsolescence in mind. But what if we held on to our gadgets longer and repaired, rather than replaced them? We could recycle the ones we no longer use through certified recycling services like e-Stewards, a nonprofit organization that runs certification programs for e-waste recyclers, ensuring that goods are not improperly exported.

As consumers we need to demand better end-of-life options for our high-tech trash; if manufacturers and government fall down on the job, we, the millions of Americans who own cellphones, should press for safe recycling.

Leyla Acaroglu is a sustainability strategist based in Melbourne, Australia.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Contributor: Put An End to Malaysia’s Race-Baiting Politics

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

MALAYSIANS are going to the polls Sunday for the most important election in our history. The opposition stands a real chance of winning, for the first time since independence from Britain in 1957. Recent polls show the People's Alliance, the opposition coalition led by Anwar Ibrahim, running neck and neck with the governing National Front, led by Prime Minister Najib Razak.

The National Front, the direct successor to the Alliance Party of the 1950s, has been one of the world's longest-governing parties, outside of authoritarian regimes like China, North Korea and Cuba. For half a century, until 2008, it had a two-thirds parliamentary majority, which allowed it to amend Malaysia's Constitution at will.

Since the 1980s, the governing party has resorted to stoking fears among the country's many ethnic communities — Malays, Chinese, Indians and many non-Malay indigenous peoples — to keep them beholden to its rule. It has abused affirmative action policies, intended to help impoverished ethnic Malays, in order to enrich its members and their cronies.

Malaysia's outdated model of governance — a system of racially exclusive parties that deliver patronage to captive racial voter blocs — is no longer sustainable.

The National Front's brand of racial politics is the disease to which it pretends to be the cure. And it is the reason genuine reform is not possible without a change of government.

Malaysia is a multiethnic, middle-income country. Just over half of its 28 million people are of Malay origin, a quarter are of Chinese descent, 11 percent belong to other indigenous groups and 7 percent are of Indian descent. Malaysian politics since independence have been shaped by issues of race and identity and dominated by the National Front's majority coalition partner, the United Malays National Organization and its successor, the more racially chauvinistic party, Umno Baru. After race riots in 1969, the "New Economic Policy" was launched to reduce inequality and increase the share of the economy held by Malays. This policy provides preferential treatment to Malays in business, jobs, education, scholarships and access to loans, assisted saving and housing. Although it was originally intended to end in 1990, it has since become permanent as part of the ruling party's doctrine of Malay supremacy over and against "immigrant races." In the name of advancing ethnic and religious interests, the National Front divides the Malaysian people and plays us against each other.

Today, after more than six decades in power, the lines between the assets of the state, the ruling party and its leaders are blurred. Corruption and deceit are now endemic to the system. Bridget Welsh, a political scientist at Singapore Management University, has estimated that Malaysia's prime minister, Mr. Najib, in power since 2009, has spent close to $20 billion on populist election-related incentives over the four years of his administration.

The National Front controls the mainstream media and uses the machinery and resources of the government for partisan purposes. Electoral fraud is widespread and the election commission is believed to be partisan. Although international monitors will be present for Sunday's vote, and the government has set up an online portal for citizens to monitor the balloting, many citizens fear that cheating will determine the outcome due to allegations of widespread fraud.

Malaysia has a history of electoral manipulation. In one of the most brazen examples of manufacturing ethnic identity for political gain, Mahathir Mohamad, the prime minister from 1981 to 2003, imported about 700,000 Muslim immigrants from the southern Philippines into the Malaysian state of Sabah. They were secretly issued Malaysian citizenship in order to create a "Malay" Muslim vote base for Mr. Mahathir's party.

This scam altered the demographic composition of a state that previously had only 2 million inhabitants and a Christian rather than a Muslim majority. To this day, the government relies on what it calls its "fixed deposit" of votes from Sabah to stay in power. The National Front secured this deposit by trading citizenship for votes.

John Pang is chief executive of a research institute focused on economic integration in Southeast Asia.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: Jobs, Wages and the Sequester

The employment report released on Friday showed some economic resilience. Job growth for March was revised upward to 138,000 new jobs, while the tally for April, at 165,000 jobs, was stronger still.

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

But both tallies represent a big drop from February, which showed a healthy gain of 332,000 jobs. One interpretation is that the sequester-induced economic headwinds that began in March are hurting job growth, which might otherwise have taken off this year. Seen in that light, the April report portends elevated joblessness and low wages for at least as long as the sequester lasts, and possibly longer, depending on the extent of the economic damage from the self-inflicted austerity.

At the average pace of job growth this year, it would take more than five years to return to the prerecession unemployment rate of 5 percent. It is doubtful that even the current pace can be sustained. The length of the average workweek dropped in April, to 34.4 hours, a sign that there is less work in the economy. That measure very likely overstates the demand for workers, because it includes only private-sector workers and does not capture the reduction in work hours for government workers furloughed because of the sequester. Another sign of weak labor demand is the increase in April, by 278,000, of the number of part-time workers who want full-time work.

New jobs are being added in low-wage fields typically filled by women — in restaurants and bars, retailers, temporary help services and home health care. In manufacturing and construction, typically higher-paying jobs filled by men, there was either no job growth or job losses. The biggest losses were in generally stable and decent-paying government jobs, with 11,000 positions shed in April, a chunk of them related to the sequester. Over all, the numbers suggest continued deep strains on families, even those whose breadwinners are employed.

For the 11.7 million who are unemployed — and especially the 4.4 million who have been out of work for more than six months — the picture is even bleaker. So far, 18 states have made cuts under the sequester to federal unemployment benefits, taking $39 a week on average from the typical benefit of about $300. That hurts those directly affected, but it also reduces demand in the economy. The likely result from these and other sequester cuts is job and wage stagnation.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: Mayor Bloomberg on Stop-and-Frisk

Mayor Michael Bloomberg trotted out shopworn, discredited arguments this week while defending the constitutionally suspect police program under which hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers have been detained and questioned on the streets every year. His speech, at 1 Police Plaza, castigated civil rights lawyers who oppose what they say is the practice of stopping people based on race instead of reasonable suspicion; Democratic mayoral candidates who want to rein in the stop-and-frisk program; and the City Council, which is considering a perfectly reasonable bill that would create the position of Police Department inspector general, with broad powers to review department policies.

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Mr. Bloomberg denied that police officers stop people based on race, adding that members of minority groups were more likely to be stopped because minorities committed most of the crimes. But court documents in the three federal lawsuits that are moving through the judicial system tell another story entirely.

The data in the case of Floyd v. City of New York, a class action being heard in federal court in Manhattan, show that in tens of thousands of cases, officers reported stopping people based on "furtive movement," a meaningless term that cannot be legally used to justify a stop. Officers also reported that they had made stops in "high crime areas," when, in fact, some of those areas were not. In many cases, officers said that they had stopped people based on a "suspicious bulge" — suggesting a gun — in their clothing. Yet, according to court documents, officers found only one gun for every 69 stops in which they cited a "bulge." And guns were seized in only 0.15 percent of all stops.

In addition, only 5.4 percent of all stops resulted in an arrest, and about 6 percent led to a summons. This means that in nearly 90 percent of cases, the citizens who were stopped were doing nothing illegal. In some cases, prosecutors declined to automatically prosecute arrests made in connection with the program because they knew that the stops were illegal.

Mr. Bloomberg's suggestion that the program has been responsible for historic drops in crime is also implausible. Crime has declined all over the country, including in places that have not used New York's aggressively invasive techniques. Besides, if crime rates and street stops had a strong correlation, the murder rate would have gone up in 2012, when stops declined by about 20 percent. In fact, the murder rate fell in 2012 to an all-time low.

Mr. Bloomberg's implication that the program's critics are more interested in vexing City Hall than in keeping the streets clear of murderers was especially reprehensible. No one is opposed to using effective, constitutional means of fighting crime. The problem is that over the last decade the Police Department has shown utter contempt for Fourth Amendment guarantees of freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. And worse, these tactics have been used largely against young black and Hispanic men.

Mr. Bloomberg may never change his views. But his stubborn refusal to see the program's dangers has not stopped three civil rights lawsuits from going forward in federal court and the City Council from trying to curb the use of tactics that have alienated minority communities from the police and made law-abiding citizens feel like criminals in their own neighborhoods.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Columnist: A Letter to College Graduates

I'm scheduled to deliver the commencement address Friday at my alma mater, Grambling State University in Louisiana, so I've been giving quite a bit of thought to the America into which these students are graduating.

I must admit that finding hopeful, encouraging things to say has been exceedingly difficult, in part because the landscape at the moment — particularly for young adults — is so bleak.

Here are some of the facts that I'm up against rhetorically and that these students will be up against more literally.

1. Being a college graduate is becoming less exceptional. As the Pew Research Center pointed out in November, "Record shares of young adults are completing high school, going to college and finishing college." College graduation rates are growing even more in other countries. And Anya Kamenetz noted in The Atlantic magazine in December, "During the past three decades, the United States has slipped from first among nations to 10th in the percentage of people holding a college degree, even as the job market has eroded for Americans without one."

2. Graduates are emerging with staggering amounts of debt and entering a still-sluggish job market. This is causing them to delay major life decisions, like marriage or buying a home or even moving out of their parents' home.

A Pew report from February 2012 found that:

"Since 2010, the share of young adults ages 18 to 24 currently employed (54 percent) has been its lowest since the government began collecting these data in 1948. And the gap in employment between the young and all working-age adults — roughly 15 percentage points — is the widest in recorded history. In addition, young adults employed full time have experienced a greater drop in weekly earnings (down 6 percent) than any other age group over the past four years."

3. Emerging markets, like China and India, have become major competitors for exportable jobs.

4. Income inequality between top earners and the rest of America has risen. And the recovery since the Great Recession has essentially been a recovery of the rich. A recent study by Emmanuel Saez, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, found that:

"From 2009 to 2011, average real income per family grew modestly by 1.7 percent but the gains were very uneven. Top 1 percent incomes grew by 11.2 percent while bottom 99 percent incomes shrunk by 0.4 percent. Hence, the top 1 percent captured 121 percent of the income gains in the first two years of the recovery."

This was similar to a finding by the Pew Research Center last month:

"During the first two years of the nation's economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent."

5. At the same time, the cost of basic goods has soared. For example, when I graduated from college the average price of a gallon of gas was about $1 (adjusted for inflation, that would still be less than $2), and it's currently nearing $4. Some people now have to make desperate choices: a tank of gas, a bag of groceries or a bottle of medicine.

6. Our politics have become polarized to the point of paralysis. A Pew poll last June found that Americans' "values and basic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years."

What gives me hope is that despite this dire environment, young people remain more optimistic than anyone else. Some of that may simply be the intrinsic glow of youth, but I believe that with this generation, something more is afoot.

This is a generation of people who have come of age in an era of overlapping traumas — terrorism and wars and recession. They have also come of age in changing times, and are more tolerant and less punitive in their social view. They see this country, and the world, differently than we older folks do. Theirs is an America waiting to be made better, not one that is simply, and irreversibly, getting worse.

According to a CNN/ORC poll released last month, young adults (those 18 to 34) were the most likely to think that things were going well in this country.

I plan to tap into that optimism on Friday, and I hope to reflect some of it back at those beaming faces under square hats.

Dear college graduates, this is your moment and your America. Both need your vision and demand your efforts. Keep your head up and your hopes rising. Congratulations and good luck. You'll need it, and I'll be rooting for you. (Flip tassels.)

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More