newrepublic--2020-12-17--“No Choice
but to Do It”: Why Women Go to Prison

Though Tanisha remained terrified of Patrick , she was also liberated .
“ I started having joy in my life , ” she told me .
She thought Snyder and Speary would protect her , and that a prosecutor would recognize her courage and commitment to justice .
“ Why did you think that ?
” I asked .
“ Because this is America.… I thought if I was just honest , the truth was going to set me free based off American values.
” Speary interviewed witnesses widely and collected evidence .
Then , on June 22 , 2009 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his girlfriend , a 44-year-old nurse named Debra Kukla , was unconscious in the garage .
When police arrived , they found Kukla bludgeoned to death .
Tanisha told me that Speary had called her days before Kukla ’ s death ; on the call , Speary asked for Tanisha ’ s permission to tell Patrick that she had been speaking with police .
Petrified , Tanisha refused .
She theorized that police had nonetheless confronted Patrick , and that “ he thought [ Kukla ] was the one who talked.
” Tanisha @ @ @ @ @ @ @ She recalled that Speary called her that morning “ in a panic , ” saying , “ he did it again , ” and advising her to find a safe place , because police didn ’ t know where Patrick was .
( According to Tanisha , no one working for the state offered to provide her with security . )
“ I feel if I had never entered the agreement , Deb would be alive , ” Tanisha told me .
“ Every year at my birthday I think about her , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Speary , now retired , didn ’ t respond to requests for an interview .
Tanisha also believed that her incarceration was related to the fact that Kukla was white .
“ They were like , ‘ We have to get him off the streets by any means , ’ ” she told me .
“ I believe they conjured up they moves , and I was the casualty.
” The attorney general ’ s office could not provide me with the exact date it took the case .
But the office ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ September 2009—nearly seven years after Kevin ’ s killing , but only months after Kukla ’ s .
On September 11 , 2009 , Patrick was arrested by an off-duty police officer who said he had witnessed him robbing a 7-Eleven .
In March 2010 , Tanisha was arrested at her job at a golf course .
She was charged with first-degree murder and booked into Saginaw County Jail .
Hon ’ Esty , then four years old , went to stay with relatives .
“ She just was always looking for me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told me .
“ She would sit at her desk at school writing me letters.
” The court appointed William White , a private attorney with a county contract , as Tanisha ’ s defender .
According to a letter that White later wrote to the judge , he was constrained by a “ $ 1,000 cap ” on his legal work for Tanisha .
He billed for 36.5 hours , which means that , unless he was granted a fee extension , he was paid $ 27.40 per hour—a rate that diminished @ @ @ @ @ @ @ case , according to Moran , of the Michigan Innocence Clinic , “ is the legal equivalent of performing brain surgery .
It ’ s complex and requires a great deal of skill to be able to do it right.
” A 2008 National Legal Aid & Defender Association report on Michigan ’ s indigent defense systems studied sample counties and found that none of their public defender services were constitutionally adequate .
The fixed-rate system , which also exists across the United States , created “ a conflict of interests between a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ defend each and every client and her financial self-interests that require her to invest the least amount of time possible in each case to maximize profit , ” according to the report .
Since 2011 , legislative efforts have led to indigent defense reform in Michigan , and in 2019 Saginaw opened its first public defender ’ s office .
Steve Fenner , a former prosecutor who heads the new office , told me that $ 1,000 to work a homicide was “ insane , ” and that the previous system meant that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ major cases .
But Fenner didn ’ t understand why Tanisha needed an attorney at all .
“ Why was she charged though ?
I don ’ t get it .
That part is real baffling .
She cooperated to solve a cold case , then the attorney general ’ s office turns on her ?
I ’ m virtually speechless.
” Tanisha had little interaction with White , her attorney .
One day , White brought Sanders , Tanisha ’ s former stepmother , to a courthouse meeting .
Sanders told me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ believed was a hearing and was surprised to be taken aside by White , who asked that she convince Tanisha to testify at Patrick and Terrance ’ s trial .
Deputies brought Tanisha , in an orange jumpsuit , into the room .
Sanders started to cry .
“ I say , ‘ This has been going on for a long time , and it need to come to an end … release all of us from all of this ... whatever it is that they seeking , you need to give it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the legal system and was caring for one of Tanisha ’ s daughters .
She told me that she believed she was helping Tanisha and knew nothing about a plea deal .
“ I thought they was gon na let her come home … because she had gave them what they wanted.
” Tanisha , after two hours of Sanders ’ s exhortations and nine months in jail , agreed to testify in exchange for a second-degree murder plea that she originally believed was 20 years flat , not 20 to 40 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ cause I was sick of being in there , hearing my momma beg me , ” she told me .
White did not respond to a request for comment .
In January 2011 , Tanisha testified for the prosecution .
For the attorney general ’ s purposes , Tanisha needed to inhabit contradictory roles : moral and credible enough for a jury to trust , but blameworthy and sufficiently deplorable to exist as an extension of the man who killed Kevin and to therefore merit her own conviction .
Doug Baker , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ others as “ jackals.
” Baker questioned Tanisha as a key witness over two days , using her testimony as a basis for a larger narrative .
Then in his closing arguments , Baker alternately diminished and commended Tanisha .
He told the jury that when Tanisha met Patrick , at 20 , she was living “ a wasted life … she is prostituting herself .
She has children that she ’ s not living with.
” Tanisha was “ not a very reflective or thoughtful person.
” But she “ had some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tanisha had acted under duress , he said , but “ that ’ s not a defense to homicide.… The law says , no , you can ’ t do that .
You ’ ve got to resist .
You ’ ve got to—you ’ ve got to take your chances.
” In Michigan and many other states , the reason duress can not be used as a defense for homicide is based on British common law , as summarized by Matthew Hale , a Puritan jurist , who wrote in an influential @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if a man be desperately assaulted , and in peril of death … he ought rather to die himself , than kill an innocent.
” Hale also put forth other enduring writings and decisions .
In one , he sentenced women to death for sorcery , one precedent used to justify the Salem witch trials .
In another , Hale stated that by signing a marriage contract , “ a wife hath given herself in this kind unto her husband , which she can not retract.
” A marital exception to rape law @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work , existed in England and Wales until 1991 and in North Carolina until 1993 .
The criminal legal system still treats spousal rape with leniency .
“ [ Tanisha ’ s ] choice was she should die , ” Jacobsen , of the Michigan Women ’ s Justice & Clemency Project , told me .
“ Or prison .
That ’ s it .
It doesn ’ t matter that he ’ s going to kill you ... .
You let that happen.
” “ Black women can be disposed as an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the system works , ” Alisa Bierria , an assistant professor of African American studies at the University of California , Riverside , and a co-founder of Survived & Punished , an organization that supports incarcerated survivors of gender-based violence , told me .
“ This is what the system does , that ’ s what it is : It has to perform justice in order to have good copy , but it performs that on the backs of Black women all the time because nobody is interested in the full dimensionality @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” “ Surviving all of that shit , I can ’ t even believe this is my life for real , ” Tanisha told me .
“ I really be like , ‘ God , what ’ s up ?
What is all of this about ?
’ I love taking care of the earth , I love kids ...
I got so much suffering and I never did nothing.
” The authorities , she said , “ didn ’ t and don ’ t care what happened to me .
No one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lived.… They got me in here and really don ’ t know what that man did to me that night.
” In October , Patrick Martin called me from Kinross Correctional Facility in northern Michigan , where he is serving life for armed robbery and two murders .
( He pleaded no contest to killing Debra Kukla after a jury convicted him of killing Kevin Amos . )
Patrick said that he had bipolar disorder with psychotic features , was “ a full-blown alcoholic , ” and had been institutionalized in 2007 and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ madness , ” and told me that his 2009 arrest was “ almost a relief.
” Patrick could not express why his mental illness and alcoholism manifested in lethal violence , including toward women , but he could speak clearly to why Tanisha and his cousin Terrance had participated in Kevin Amos ’ s murder .
“ I made them do that , ” he said .
Would he have killed Tanisha , I asked , if she hadn ’ t obeyed ?
“ I always had them guns and stuff.… My own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time , [ Tanisha ] was terrified ... .
I told them , ‘ If you don ’ t do it , I ’ ma do you.
’ So they did it , but it was out of fear .
They wasn ’ t with the plan.
” Eight days later , I called Doug Baker , the prosecutor in Tanisha ’ s case , now chief of criminal enforcement and quality of life for the city of Detroit .
We spoke at length about his reasons for charging and sentencing Tanisha to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she played in the actual crime and in helping authorities .
Baker explained that when a witness has accepted a lengthy sentence , it can benefit the prosecutor who puts her on the stand .
“ Part of what goes into making a witness like [ Tanisha ] credible is that she ’ s paying for what she did , ” Baker said .
“ And the jury hears that .
If a jury takes somebody that gets … probation or whatever , that ’ s argued to the hilt by the other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anything to get this sentence.
” This suggests that a prosecutor , who has nearly total discretion in charging decisions , may be incentivized to seek the most serious charges that ultimately carry extensive sentences .
Baker also argued that Tanisha ’ s sentence was a form of justice for Kevin and his family .
Tanisha , he said , was “ the one that actually in that sense literally took the life .
She made sure that he wasn ’ t going to get those last breaths.
” At the 2011 trial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ died of asphyxiation , because there was duct tape on his mouth and liquid in his lungs .
He also testified that two quarters were found in Kevin ’ s stomach and a bag of powder was found in his mouth , and that a dead person can not swallow—so Kevin was alive when the quarters were put into his mouth .
Since her first interview with Speary in 2009 , Tanisha has denied any knowledge of the bag or coins .
At trial , a confidential informant for the state , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stopped by the apartment on the night of the attack and saw Kevin bound on the floor .
Within days , he helped dispose of Kevin ’ s body .
In August 2003 , eight months after the murder , the informant was in jail , looking to cut a deal to get out two months early .
He told authorities about Kevin ’ s killing , and in order to prove that he was reliable , offered a detail that “ nobody else would know except for somebody that had firsthand information @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was that Patrick “ said that he put 50 cents in [ Kevin ’ s ] mouth to make it look like a drug transaction.
” When I spoke with Patrick , he didn ’ t recall anything about the coins .
Still , it seemed possible that Patrick may have removed and replaced the tape over Kevin ’ s mouth , the final act that killed him .
( Terrance Shepard , serving a life sentence in a southern Michigan prison , declined to comment for this story . )
At trial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It ’ s 20 to 40 years out of her life .
She—at least 20 .
It could be more.
” On the phone , after we had discussed Tanisha ’ s story , Baker said , “ I think that she would be a good subject for being paroled.
” At Tanisha ’ s March 2011 sentencing , Baker provided her with a letter on attorney general ’ s office letterhead .
He wrote that she had participated in the homicide “ after being threatened.
” “ I can attest to Ms. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and remorse for her role in the crime , ” Baker wrote .
“ There is no question that Ms. Williams , as a Prosecution witness , was of invaluable assistance in bringing the other Defendants to justice.… We believe that Ms. Williams can be rehabilitated and someday live a law-abiding life.
” However , just before her arrest in 2010 , Tanisha was stable and productive .
She was sober , raising her daughter , and working three conventional jobs .
“ I was a proud , tax-paying citizen , ” she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a positive path.
” I read Baker his 2011 letter .
I asked him what Tanisha ’ s lengthy sentence was supposed to accomplish .
“ It has a deterrent value , as well as a punishment value , as well as a rehabilitative value , ” he said .
But neither Tanisha ’ s nor Patrick ’ s incarceration seemed to produce any constructive change in their closest circles .
The cycle of gender-based violence and mental illness has continued .
Patrick ’ s son , Patrick Allen Martin Jr. , was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a young man , he was sent to prison .
“ He was different when he came home , ” his sister would later testify .
He lived in a facility for people with mental health issues .
In 2019 , Patrick Jr. , then 27 , shot MoeNeisha Simmons-Ross , Tanisha ’ s 26-year-old niece and a mother of three who was also pregnant with Patrick Jr. ’ s child .
MoeNeisha and the baby died .
Her brother told local media that MoeNeisha ’ s other children “ were in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ The system is a freaking violence-producing factory , ” Bierria , the Survived & Punished co-founder , told me .
“ Relentless.
” A theme emerged in my research : As in Tanisha ’ s case , incarcerated women , before their involvement in the legal system , were regularly disregarded or damaged by state systems , from Child Protective Services to schools to police .
Families and individuals in desperate situations did not have access to quality services , or to sustained services—and were often scared of seeking outside help .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t go to the cops , ” Tanisha told me .
“ You just solve your own shit .
And then with a crime , the code is you never talk , don ’ t ever talk , and I see why.
” Sandra Brown , a Black woman in Illinois , wrote of years of terror , beginning in childhood .
She was beaten , spit on , and bullied at school .
When she fought back , she was expelled , labeled “ aggressive ” and “ dangerous.
” At @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she explained why she had welts on her legs to a trusted teacher , she says she “ paid terribly for it.
” Sandra was later a victim of domestic violence and rape .
As a young mother , she was arrested for killing a woman in what she says was an act of self-defense .
She was sentenced to 22 years in prison .
“ The tragedies we suffered as little girls and young women in a sense ‘ groomed and doomed ’ us to this current state of modernized slavery , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have been the recipient of acts of violence since I was a child , and the law was virtually nowhere to be found .
But the one time I fight back because I am afraid for my life , I am now a ‘ violent ’ offender.
” Bierria observed that stories of gender-based criminalization were the result of the legal system ’ s design and function .
“ It ’ s not , ‘ Oh what a sad story , the prosecutor didn ’ t care , the defense was bad , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ things animate the system we have.… What you see are formalized acts of profound , life-ending violence.
” What was the alternative , particularly for women ?
“ We have to build it , ” Bierria said .
Across the country , she said , people have long been engaging in concentrated , community-based anti-violence and transformative justice work , training , and education .
“ There ’ s no magic answer that will get us where we need to go .
All we have is us.… I think people are on it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a chance.
” The respondents to my survey offered various solutions , including childhood intervention , decriminalizing poverty , treating mental illness and addiction , effective protection for sexual and domestic violence victims , changing incentives for police and prosecutors , engaging offenders and victims in restorative justice processes , and capping sentence lengths .
One woman suggested that people be permitted to tour prisons and jails : “ Allow the public to see who is in their prisons.
” Tanisha , for her part , wanted to be seen—as a way to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ asked her why she responded to my letter in the first place .
“ I know everything I ’ ve been through , ” she said .
“ This matters for women.… I felt that every little bit helps.
” Tanisha understood that at each turn she had been failed : as an abused child , homeless teenager , traumatized young mother , and perhaps most significantly by a state apparatus that reduced and exploited her story and good-faith efforts to bring closure to Kevin and his family .
But she remained hopeful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conditions at Huron Valley , with its endemic black mold , repeated scabies outbreaks , and waves of Covid .
She meditates , does yoga in the mornings , pores over legal papers , and works disinfecting the facility at night .
I asked Tanisha how she remained so persistently optimistic .
“ It ’ s some favor , ” she said .
“ Something in my spirit that sustains me.
” She thought of her efforts to shine a light on injustice in biblical terms : as a mustard seed .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ smallest of seeds , but , when sown , becomes a tree , its branches filled with birds .
“ As long as we got a mustard seed , we can make it grow.
” This story was produced in partnership with The Appeal , and was supported by the Pulitzer Center .

About 230,000 women and girls are incarcerated, an increase of more than 700 percent since 1980. The female prison population is dwarfed by the larger population of more than two million men, on whom conversations about mass incarceration center. For most people in prison, the criminal legal system has stripped away context and circumstance, leaving only a conviction on record.
Women must also navigate gendered binaries in a system designed by and for men: Offenders are violent, victims are docile; offenders kill, victims die. Female victims should fit a paradigm of innocence: a petite, heterosexual white woman with a clean record. Tanisha does not conform, though she has been unyieldingly victimized. But even women who do square with the paradigm struggle because they survived. “Lawyers say the only correct battered woman when talking about self-defense is a dead one,” Sue Osthoff, co-founder of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, told me. By engaging in violence in order to live, a woman cannot be a victim. Her survival itself becomes reason to condemn her.
In January 2019, I interviewed Rachel White-Domain, a post-conviction attorney for incarcerated survivors of domestic violence in Illinois. I pressed her, as I had others, for data on women in prison for defending themselves. White-Domain did not know the statistics. “If you’re so interested, you could just ask the women directly,” she said. That comment was the seed from which this work has grown.
In consultation with Thania Sanchez, then an assistant professor of political science at Yale University, I designed 16 questions to assess the abuse and trauma backgrounds and unique pathways of women into U.S. prisons. (Sanchez now works in the ACLU’s data and analytics department.)
My two-page survey asked for demographic information—age, race, and sentence length—and posed qualitative questions. Those who speak of abuse are subject to doubt and skepticism; in a courtroom or a prison, they are often accused of trying to avoid consequences by making “the abuse excuse.” To reduce any appearance of dishonesty, I did not ask “priming” questions about domestic abuse, sexual violence, or self-defense. Instead, my queries concerned the respondent’s relationship to the person they were convicted of killing; the days leading up to the event; factors they believed contributed to their conviction.
I contacted the media liaison or public information officer at the departments of corrections in the majority of states and requested a list of all women incarcerated on murder and manslaughter charges. Some officials denied my request, but many sent names: more than 1,000 in Florida, just 11 in Maine. Once I had the lists, I filled in each salutation by hand.
As in any data collection effort, the majority of recipients did not respond. People in prison face particular hurdles in corresponding: censorial mailroom staff, fear of retribution from staff and administration, distrust of media, legal concerns, and constraints that include count times, chow calls, and lockdowns. Incarcerated respondents had to pay for a 55-cent stamp despite working jobs that were unpaid or, in some states, began at less than 4 cents an hour.
Mental illness, which affects nearly half of those in prison, was another hurdle: “Every prosecutor describes women convicted of murder as cunning, diabolical, monster, and evil,” Kwaneta Harris wrote from Texas. “I’ve yet to encounter these ‘monsters.’ Although I’ve met plenty of women with mental illness, untreated and undiagnosed … the ones who you really need to talk to are too mentally damaged to talk to you.”
Still, 604 cisgender women, one transgender woman, and three transgender men replied. They said that they wanted their stories told: sometimes anonymously, sometimes with their identities central. Many wanted to make known their own experiences and those of others. One woman serving life in prison, who had transferred between state and federal facilities for 17 years, repeated a common sentiment: “I have lived amongst thousands of different women prisoners from different countries, ethnicities, and cultures. I have probably come across six of these women whom I would even think were murderers. Many of us were defending ourselves, with the wrong people at the wrong time, taking cases for someone else, or not guilty completely.”
The racial breakdown of responses roughly mirrored that of the larger female prison population, which is majority white but disproportionately women of color. My respondents were 53.7 percent white; 32.7 percent Black; 8.8 percent Hispanic; 3 percent American Indian and Alaska Native; 1 percent mixed race; and 0.8 percent Asian. Their ages spanned 18 to 83. The median age was 43, which skews older than the median age, 36, for all incarcerated people. Nearly 30 percent were serving life sentences, including life without the possibility of parole. Overall, the average sentence, including life sentences (weighted at 100 years) was 55 years.
Seventy-two percent of respondents had been represented by state-appointed defenders, meaning they most likely qualified as indigent. A 2015 Prison Policy Initiative analysis found that the median annual income for a woman prior to her incarceration was $13,890, 58 percent of the income of a woman who was not incarcerated and 34 percent of the income of a man who was not incarcerated. “No money for attorneys, unfamiliar with the legal system,” one respondent summarized. Another woman wrote that her case was her lawyer’s first-ever murder trial. One wrote that the judge fell asleep and her attorneys “said it was okay.”
Sixty percent of respondents reported experiencing abuse—physical, sexual, emotional, or some combination of the three—before entering prison, much of it during childhood, while only 9 percent reported no abuse. (Thirty-one percent did not give enough information for a determination.) The fact that a majority of respondents had been abused suggests a nexus between abuse and incarceration for women. Abuse is also most likely underreported.
“I have yet to meet a person who hasn’t been sexually or physically abused,” wrote Kwaneta from Texas. Later, Kwaneta told me that she had been kidnapped and gang-raped as a child, and the perpetrators were never charged. (Her mother confirmed this.) Kwaneta is incarcerated for killing a boyfriend who, she told me, abused her. Her attorney, she said, didn’t want her to “disparage” the dead at trial. She did not push back. “The stigma and shame of allowing myself to continually accept abusive behavior is stronger than the shame of being a convicted murderer.”
Having a female body had opened the respondents up to harm long before they were considered to have harmed others. They reported being raped at gunpoint, raped while being driven home from babysitting, raped by fathers, stepfathers, brothers, grandfathers, cousins, uncles, foster relatives, and sometimes sisters and mothers. “Raised for sex,” wrote one woman. “Ruined before I had a chance,” wrote another. “Not sure how I got off the beaten path, but I was molested by a sheriff from age 7 to about 9 years old, think that pretty much did it.”
“It was supposed to be me,” one woman wrote. “I never thought I would be the survivor and he ‘the victim.’”
They wrote, too, of enduring physical violence: forced to kneel “on uncooked grits until my knees were bloody,” kicked “with steel-toed boots,” hit in the head with “a tire wrench.” They wrote of crushing poverty and upheaval: One woman had used “the bathroom outside for years, shower[ing] in the water hose.” Another said that when she was 19, she lived with her drug-addicted mother in a “condemned house” in the days leading up to the killing she committed when she fought off an attempted rape.
A confluence of life factors usually converged—many beyond a person’s control. I received a letter in purple crayon from a 32-year-old Black woman who wrote that “the judge … gave me to [sic] much time and I was 11 when I did the murder.” I looked up her story, which was public record: As a child, she had been raped, abandoned, neglected, cycled through abusive foster homes, and diagnosed as mentally ill and developmentally disabled. Before her twelfth birthday, she stabbed a stranger in the heart with a kitchen knife. For nearly two years, she lived in an isolated cell in an adult jail before being sent to a facility for children with mental illnesses. When she turned 18, a judge sentenced her to 18 to 40 years.
Childhood abuse and neglect rippled out into adulthood. More than 40 years of research and multiple studies show that abuse begets abuse, and that sexual victimization in childhood raises the risk of sexual victimization in adulthood. Children who have been objectified and betrayed can have issues with trust, and find it difficult to navigate adult relationships. My survey found that people abused as children were more than twice as likely to report abuse as adults: Nearly 75 percent reported revictimization, versus 33 percent among those who didn’t report abuse as children—meaning that those with abuse histories are more than twice as likely to be victimized in their later years.
Forty-three percent reported experiencing intimate partner violence, nearly double the rate of the general populace. Of those, 41 percent—nearly 18 percent of all respondents—said they were in prison for killing a romantic partner. They wrote that they had killed men who had broken their ribs, backs, knees, skulls—men on whom 911 had been called (in one instance 300+ times). Men who had knocked them awake and said, “I feel like beating a bitch up.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly half of female homicide victims in the United States are killed by a current or former male partner.
“That morning he said, ‘One of us is going to die today,’” wrote a woman who had been brutalized for decades. “I just snapped.”
Respondents found it hard to prove that they had been abused, because domestic violence and rape are private violations, usually without witnesses. But even if they had evidence, they faced another problem: There was a dead body, and it wasn’t theirs.
Jema Donahue wrote from Missouri, asking me to contact her mother, who shared legal files with me. The files showed that in 1999, Jema, then 13, was raped by a 20-year-old man. Jema’s family was devastated by their attempts at seeking justice. The man’s mother was the town mayor, and police and prosecutors, Jema said, resisted investigating and prosecuting. The perpetrator eventually pleaded guilty to statutory rape, though Jema said he had used force, and experienced bleeding and physical pain for days. The rapist’s friends harassed the family. Jema was bullied and switched schools. Later, Jema fell into abusive relationships. Her husband physically, sexually, and psychologically terrorized her for eight years—attacks that she sometimes reported to authorities. In 2017, Jema’s mother took out an order of protection. Within two weeks, Jema’s husband broke into the family home and attacked Jema. Jema shot him. A judge sentenced her to 10 years, noting that “everybody stayed in the relationship” and “somebody died.”
“It was supposed to be me,” Jema wrote to me. “I never thought I would be the survivor and he ‘the victim.’”
Of my respondents, 30 percent reported that they, like Jema, were in prison for trying to protect themselves or loved ones from physical or sexual violence. If my findings are representative of the population incarcerated for murder and manslaughter in all U.S. women’s detention facilities, they suggest that, conservatively, more than 4,400 women and girls are serving lengthy sentences for acts of survival, and that there are most likely others in similar circumstances serving time on lesser charges. While many claimed straightforward self-defense against a romantic partner, others wrote of trying to survive in ways that exist outside the typical ideas of gender-based violence.
“In a lot of cases, the women are not blameless,” Carol Jacobsen, director of the Michigan Women’s Justice & Clemency Project, told me. “They played some part, many times under terrible duress. Many times, they didn’t have a whole lot of choices.”A woman was often convicted for a man’s actions or for her involvement with a man who had committed a crime. Thirty-three percent of respondents said that they had been convicted of committing their crime with a male partner, and 13 percent said that they had been convicted of committing their crime with their abuser—often, like Tanisha, under duress.
“I should get prison time, but not 50 years,” wrote a woman who had driven a car for her abusive boyfriend after he’d killed a man during a burglary. “Fifty years for driving a car under duress … with the threat always there to kill me and take away my kids for talking or leaving him.”
Motherhood figured prominently in a woman’s decisions; 64 percent of my respondents said they were parents, 22 percent said they were not, and 14 percent did not answer the question. “One topic … affects the majority of female prisoners: Our children,” wrote Kwaneta in Texas. “We care about our children. Bars and razor-wire don’t erase motherhood.”
Some women said they were in prison for trying to protect a child. A white woman was serving 40 years in the South for shooting the man she said had beaten her daughter and raped her toddler grandson, and a Black woman was serving life in a mid-Atlantic state for shooting a man she witnessed molesting her five-year-old son.
Other women were convicted because they had not protected a child. In Michigan in 2010, Corrine Baker, a 25-year-old survivor of childhood sexual abuse, threw her body in front of her four-year-old son in an attempt to bear the brunt of her boyfriend’s attack. Corrine and her son were hospitalized after the beating. The boy died, and Corrine gave an interview to a local TV station; in the video, she has two black eyes and wounds dotting her face. She is serving 13 to 30 years for her failure to save her child.
In Florida, Mary Rice wrote that she was forced to accompany a man on a multistate killing spree, during which she was starved, drugged, and raped. She never tried to escape, she told me, because her kidnapper knew where her mother and three children lived. In the end, he shot himself in the head, and police took Mary, who had injuries across her face and body, into custody. Mary was prosecuted. The assistant state attorney told the jury “she wanted a bad boy and she got one.” Mary was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. “I just lived through it,” Mary wrote to me. “The state needed to blame someone. I was the person they blamed.”
Mary went to trial, but about half of respondents pleaded guilty—often because they were marginalized or did not trust their lawyer. I received a response from an indigenous woman in the Northwest, who said she had pleaded guilty to murder, despite acting in self-defense against a man who was “abusive physically, emotionally, verbally, and mentally,” had raped her daily, and threatened to keep her child if she left. I called her public defender. He told me the woman had a weak case and added that in court, women often played the victim. “Women get a lot of fuckin’ benefit of the doubt,” he said.
“I see a lot of pleas,” White-Domain, the Illinois attorney for incarcerated domestic violence survivors, told me. “People who have lived their whole lives not being believed— if they are women, people of color, maybe also a sex worker, maybe a drug user—think they won’t be believed by a jury. And they are correct.” In my data set, those who went to trial received a sentence nearly two times higher than those who did not, and were approximately five times more likely to receive a life sentence. Black women, whether they went to trial or took a plea, received a sentence length that was roughly 10 percent higher than all others.
Tanisha, for her part, pleaded guilty in 2010 to second-degree murder while held in Saginaw County Jail, a situation she found herself in largely because she had tried to make amends for Kevin’s death. “I was ignorant to the system and its workings and it worked against me on every facet,” she told me. “The rules weren’t articulated for a person with zero understanding to understand.”
In late December 2002, Patrick wrapped Kevin in a blanket and put him in a closet. Within days, aided by two associates, he removed the body and dropped it down an embankment on the outskirts of town, above a river. About three months later, on March 23, 2003, during the spring thaw, two fishermen came upon Kevin’s corpse. On March 24, Kevin’s family was informed. Police made no arrests. The case went cold.
Two weeks after the killing, Tanisha and Patrick moved to a more isolated apartment. Tanisha had no car and no money. She slept during the day, when Patrick was gone, and kept a gutting knife tucked in her waistband. “Something was gonna happen bad for someone,” she told me. “Most likely me.” Within two months of Kevin’s death, Tanisha gathered some $200 and four outfits and fled to a roadside motel.
“I sat on that ugly bed,” Tanisha said. “I had to make a decision.” She was 20, without a home or anyone she trusted enough to talk to. She had been involved in a murder with a known drug dealer who threatened to kill her and knew where her family lived. Tanisha decided her only chance was to stay moving, and be quiet. “I pushed what happen to me to the deepest depths of consciousness,” she recalled. For the next two years, she fell into a cycle of sex work, drug use, and dealing. She lived on the run, involved with men who hurt her.
“I didn’t dream,” she said. “It was just darkness.”
But in 2005, Tanisha was pregnant and determined to get clean and make a change. In November, she gave birth to her third daughter, whom she named Hon’Esty. As Tanisha raised Hon’Esty, she began to see a man around town who bore an unnerving resemblance to Kevin. She thought constantly of Kevin’s mom. She feared intensely for her daughter’s safety, concerned that by having a fixed address, they were a target. Each time Tanisha entered her home at night, she left her child locked in the car, on speakerphone with her sister, as she swept the place with her gun cocked. Only once it was clear would she carry Hon’Esty inside. Later, two people testified at trial that Patrick said he was thinking about killing Tanisha; he worried that she would talk to police and had unsuccessfully attempted to convince her to meet up with him several times.
Tanisha made a New Year’s resolution for 2009: She would tell the truth. That February, she called an attorney she’d heard of named Steven Snyder. Tanisha told Snyder that she wanted to talk to police but needed immunity. Snyder called Lisa Speary, a Michigan State Police detective who had been handed the cold case in 2006. On February 17, 2009, Snyder, Tanisha, and a Saginaw County prosecutor signed a proffer, a written agreement that allows a person to speak of a crime with the assurance that their words won’t be used against them in criminal proceedings. After an initial proffer, a client typically provides a piece of evidence that allows authorities to determine their value; then a better deal is negotiated. But Tanisha signed a single agreement that offered her no protection from charges. Then she gave Speary a two-hour interview, the first time she had ever spoken of the crime.
I showed the proffer letter to David Moran, co-founder of the Michigan Innocence Clinic. He characterized it as “lousy.” I asked Moran if it was unusual for an attorney to allow a client to give a full statement to police without discussing the content beforehand. “The lawyer would want to hear the client’s story before having her tell it in a proffer,” he said. (Snyder, who no longer practices law, did not respond to my interview request.)
Over the next months, Tanisha worked with Speary. They met in person at least five times, Tanisha underwent two polygraph exams, and she led Speary through the crime scene. She told Speary that Patrick “had this rage … he frightened me ... he was more dangerous than the average guy that I have been involved in ... he was dangerous without maybe knowin’ it.” And she told Speary that following the killing, she had “spiraled like super down.” Tanisha explained that she was coming forward to give closure to Kevin’s family—and to get closure for herself. “I just wanna apologize to the family … for even takin’ this long to get the strength to tell ’em what happened.”


newrepublic--2020-12-17--What America Needs Now Is a President Who Will Go Nuclear on the Justice Department

Biden could always offer some perfunctory excuse for firing Wray , but that would undercut his no-malarkey public image .
It ’ s better to be honest with the American people about his reasoning , perhaps in an interview with NBC ’ s Lester Holt .
Media critics might shudder if Biden complains that an inquiry into wrongdoing by his family or his political allies is a “ coup ” or a “ witch hunt , ” or insists that those conducting it are “ corrupt ” or guilty of treason .
But Biden , unlike all those Beltway elites @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as politicians , hasn ’ t lost his straightforward way of talking to the American people .
They ’ ll get it , don ’ t worry .
Firing Wray would send a strong signal that Biden won ’ t tolerate any scrutiny from federal law-enforcement agencies , for normal , non-suspicious reasons .
But he shouldn ’ t stop there .
Biden has the absolute right to do whatever he wants with the Justice Department , and his choice for attorney general should agree .
Ideally , whoever he chooses wouldn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Biden ’ s personal and political interests first .
But sometimes even the most loyal attorneys general have to be nudged from time to time to keep the boss happy .
And if they cite things like “ Justice Department ethics rules ” or “ a general fidelity to the American rule of law , ” Biden can spend the next two years viciously denouncing his attorney general , then oust them less than a day after the 2022 midterms .
Unfortunately , the Justice Department is far larger than just the attorney @ @ @ @ @ @ @ small army of lawyers who work there might not be so easily subdued .
But there are ways around this as well .
Biden , acting on his own and through intermediaries , can work to hinder and undermine the investigations themselves .
What if the special counsel wants him to answer questions ?
Biden can profess his desire to do so while his lawyers relentlessly push back .
What if federal prosecutors try to flip people in Biden ’ s inner circle ?
He could publicly praise witnesses who don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ‘ deal ’ ” while his lawyer pointedly notes on the same day that Biden won ’ t hand out any pardons until the investigation is over .
The witnesses will get the message , and it definitely won ’ t look like bribery .
This should be enough to hinder even the most experienced prosecution teams .
If Biden feels particularly volcanic , he can threaten to fire the special counsels themselves , or instruct his subordinates to pressure the attorney general into doing it .
Some self-professed “ legal experts ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ obstruction of justice ” or “ witness tampering ” to describe an overt campaign to sabotage a DOJ investigation .
But the Constitution ’ s Framers made their intent clear : Biden can ’ t be indicted while in office , nor can he be impeached for acts that advance their political interests , and they have the absolute right to pardon themselves before their term ends .
If the president does it , in other words , that means it ’ s not a crime .

Unfortunately, the Justice Department is far larger than just the attorney general’s office, and the small army of lawyers who work there might not be so easily subdued. But there are ways around this, as well. Biden, acting on his own and through intermediaries, can work to hinder and undermine the investigations themselves. What if the special counsel wants him to answer questions? Biden can profess his desire to do so while his lawyers relentlessly push back. What if federal prosecutors try to flip people in Biden’s inner circle? He could publicly praise witnesses who don’t “make up stories to get a ‘deal,’” while his lawyer pointedly notes on the same day that Biden won’t hand out any pardons until the investigation is over. The witnesses will get the message, and it definitely won’t look like bribery.
This should be enough to hinder even the most experienced prosecution teams. If Biden feels particularly volcanic, he can threaten to fire the special counsels themselves or instruct his subordinates to pressure the attorney general into doing it. Some self-professed “legal experts” might use obscure legal terms like “obstruction of justice” or “witness tampering” to describe an overt campaign to sabotage a DOJ investigation. But the Constitution’s Framers made their intent clear: Biden can’t be indicted while in office, nor can he be impeached for acts that advance his political interests, and he has the absolute right to pardon himself before his term ends. If the president does it, in other words, that means it’s not a crime.
This strategy isn’t without its risks. A hard-edged approach might thrill Biden’s die-hard base of supporters but alienate the rest of the country. His political opponents and media critics will complain that he’s undermining the rule of law and important American institutions for personal gain. But those complaints lose sight of what really matters here, which is the effect on Biden himself. The investigations could sabotage Biden’s presidency by forcing him to spend every waking hour focusing on the investigations. And if Biden ultimately spends his entire first term fighting those battles, he could tell Americans that his first two years in office were “stollen [sic]” from him. He could even humbly request a third term in office to make up for it.


newrepublic--2020-12-17--Republicans Will Never Accept the Election Results

Speaking to outgoing Republican Senator Lamar Alexander on Sunday ’ s Meet the Press , Chuck Todd asked a question that has featured prominently ever since it became clear that Joe Biden had won the presidency .
“ It ’ s been 37 days since the election was called , six days since we know that enough pledged electors have been certified for the election , ” he said .
“ And yet , on Wednesday , the president of the United States tweeted ‘ # overturn.
’ Is it about time for this to stop ?
” Alexander was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ should stop , ” he said .
The Electoral College was meeting and would cement what had been obvious for nearly six weeks , and had only been strengthened by demands for recounts and failed court challenges .
“ It ’ s very hard to say that Joe Biden ’ s not validly elected after Monday , ” he added .
Monday has come and gone .
The Electoral College did meet and Joe Biden was declared the winner for seemingly the millionth time .
A day later , one domino did fall @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that , come January 20 , the United States would have a new president .
“ The Electoral College has spoken , ” McConnell said from the Senate floor .
“ So today , I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden .
”

The volume of challenges brought on behalf of the Trump campaign has given the 2020 election a Groundhog Day feel. Every time Biden clears another frivolous hurdle, it’s as if he won the election again. The Trump campaign has lost 59 court challenges and won only one—a minor, technical suit in Pennsylvania that had no bearing on the state’s election result. Efforts to sway state legislatures into replacing their state’s electors have similarly failed. Trump’s long-standing backup plan—challenge the election all the way to the Supreme Court, which he believes is loyal to him—has been a nonstarter.
There has been hope, as each of these milestones has been cleared, that Republicans will see the light. For the press, this would also be a sign that the Republican Party was finally moving on from Donald Trump. If congressional Republicans “want to be taken seriously—including by the new president—they need to stop giving aid and comfort to Trump’s delusions about a rigged election,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board earlier this week. Once Joe Biden is acknowledged as the legitimate president of the U.S., the Republican Party—and, by extension, American politics—can, at long last, begin its arduous path back to normalcy.
Instead, Trump and the majority of Republicans have moved the goalposts. First, we were told that Trump would be declared the winner after recounts and legal challenges were completed. Then, after the Electoral College stepped in to straighten out a crooked election. Now the plan is for Congress to step in and challenge the results. When that fails, attention will turn to January 20, when Biden is inaugurated. After Biden is inaugurated, Trump and congressional Republicans will continue to insist he won—and demand that action be taken to reverse the outcome, whether via special prosecutor or other means.


newrepublic--2020-12-17--How The New Yorker Fell Into the “Weird Japan” Trap

It ’ s a crazy story that falls squarely into the Weird Japan genre , showcasing an extreme form of alienation , in which people are compelled to hire perfect strangers to stand in for their closest relatives .
Single women hire husbands to appease their “ marriage-obsessed ” parents .
The elderly recruit grandchildren to stave off loneliness .
Adulterous wives pay men to stand in as their lovers to apologize to their wrathful husbands .
Fakeries abound : fake bosses , fake weddings , fake families .
Many of these stories are sourced to Yuichi Ishii , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who says he has played a fake husband to a hundred women and organized two to three fake weddings a year .
The picture of Japan that emerges is steeped in stereotypes of a childlike country that is so superficial , so emotionally repressed , so cowed by an overbearing society that its people would rather outsource the work of confronting their parents or reaching out to an estranged daughter—the work of being a human being .
The article concludes with a wild story about Reiko , a single mother who has rented @ @ @ @ @ @ @ For nine years , this girl has believed that this fake father , Inaba , is her real one .
The deception has done wonders for the girl ’ s well-being , and Reiko admits that she sometimes wishes Inaba would actually marry her .
As Batuman is interviewing Reiko in a Tokyo tearoom , drinking “ sweetened yuzu infusions , ” Inaba walks in .
“ Inaba-san !
” Reiko cries .
Ah , but it turns out that Inaba is really Yuichi Ishii !
“ Have you wondered about Inaba-san ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ does in the rest of his life ?
” Batuman asks Reiko .
No , she hasn ’ t .
The story takes a surreally dramatic turn , as Batuman tries to wrap her mind around these two people who behave like a couple but aren ’ t a couple .
“ Her eyes met mine , and I beamed back at her , ” Batuman writes .
“ I wasn ’ t faking—it was a real smile .
But what was I smiling at ?
” A con , as it turns @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after the article was published , when a Japanese magazine reported that an employee of Family Romance had pretended to be a client of the company in a documentary produced by the giant Japanese broadcaster NHK .
NHK confirmed that Ishii had told his staffers to carry out the ruse .
The New Yorker then began its own investigation , culminating in the stunning admissions that were published this week : that “ Kazushige Nishida , ” the lonely widower , was in fact married and did not provide his real name ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lonely single mother , was in fact married and did not provide her real name ; and that , craziest of all , Reiko and Yuichi Ishii are married to each other .
Despite these elaborate deceptions , they all insisted that their stories were otherwise true .
This is real hall-of-mirrors stuff , to the point that it is impossible to fully separate fact from fiction .
( To read Batuman ’ s account of her meeting Reiko and Yuichi with the new knowledge that they are performing a high-wire subterfuge is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ queasy . )
What we know is that the New Yorker article and others like it spurred immense interest in the alleged family-rental craze .
NHK produced its documentary .
Werner Herzog made a movie about Yuichi Ishii that premiered at Cannes and featured Ishii playing a fake father to a girl .
Conan O ’ Brien did a painful , Borat-like bit where he showed up at Ishii ’ s office and requested a fake family .

Batuman’s article, in typical feature article fashion, heightens those mysteries at the outset to invoke the reader’s awe, before demystifying them in a way that is meant to leave the reader with a more enlightened sense of wonder. “Two years ago,” Batuman begins, “Kazushige Nishida, a Tokyo salaryman in his sixties, started renting a part-time wife and daughter.” Nishida, a widower alienated from his real daughter, turned to a company called Family Romance for this service. The rental wife and daughter had dinner at his home, watched television with him, kept him company. Eventually, the surrogate daughter helped Nishida reconcile with his real daughter, the first glimpse of the story’s heartwarming theme: that the difference between a fake family and a real family is not as stark as we might think.
It’s a crazy story that falls squarely into the Weird Japan genre, showcasing an extreme form of alienation, in which people are compelled to hire perfect strangers to stand in for their closest relatives. Single women hire husbands to appease their “marriage-obsessed” parents. The elderly recruit grandchildren to stave off loneliness. Adulterous wives pay men to stand in as their lovers to apologize to their wrathful husbands. Fakeries abound: fake bosses, fake weddings, fake families. Many of these stories are sourced to Yuichi Ishii, the founder and proprietor of Family Romance, who says he has played a fake husband to a hundred women and organized two to three fake weddings a year. The picture of Japan that emerges is steeped in stereotypes of a childlike country that is so superficial, so emotionally repressed, so cowed by an overbearing society that its people would rather outsource the work of confronting their parents or reaching out to an estranged daughter—the work of being a human being.
The article concludes with a wild story about Reiko, a single mother who has rented a part-time father for her daughter. For nine years, this girl has believed that this fake father, Inaba, is her real one. The deception has done wonders for the girl’s well-being, and Reiko admits that she sometimes wishes Inaba would actually marry her. As Batuman is interviewing Reiko in a Tokyo tearoom, drinking “sweetened yuzu infusions,” Inaba walks in. “Inaba-san!” Reiko cries. Ah, but it turns out that Inaba is really Yuichi Ishii! “Have you wondered about Inaba-san’s real name, and what he does in the rest of his life?” Batuman asks Reiko. No, she hasn’t. The story takes a surreally dramatic turn, as Batuman tries to wrap her mind around these two people who behave like a couple but aren’t a couple. “Her eyes met mine, and I beamed back at her,” Batuman writes. “I wasn’t faking—it was a real smile. But what was I smiling at?”


newrepublic--2020-12-17--Nicole Krauss’s Difficult Men

Nicole Krauss’s Difficult Men

The protagonist of Nicole Krauss ’ s “ Switzerland , ” the first short story in her new collection , To Be a Man , is a 13-year-old girl shipped by her parents to a private school in Geneva , placed under the lax supervision of a substitute English teacher , and free to spend her afternoons roaming the city on her own .
Fans of Krauss ’ s earlier work may be disappointed to learn that this unnamed ingénue does not take advantage of her newfound freedom to seek out adventure ; she does not follow a trail of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ solve a far-fetched mystery ; nor does she charm the gruff but tenderhearted grown-ups she befriends with her whimsical banter .
Staring childlike into the window of a chocolate shop , she gets a nasty shock .
“ I could break you in two with one hand , ” a strange man who has crept up behind her whispers calmly .
She escapes unscathed , but the older teenage girls living in her boardinghouse treat her to further lessons in the hazards posed by male desire .
She listens to their stories of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The author of four previous novels , Krauss has been accused of using postmodern narrative devices for sentimental purposes , of contriving extravagant story arcs that bend too pliantly toward affirmation of the essential beauty and wonder of earthly life .
Her 2005 novel The History of Love , James Wood testily concluded , “ is not a grown-up book for grown-up readers.
” The complaint is not that she avoids serious topics : Victims and survivors of the Holocaust figure largely in the families she imagines .
It ’ s that her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shallow ; her fantastical embellishments serve to evade rather than to illuminate reality .
Though she ’ s shed some of her youthful idealism over the years , even her recent Forest Dark ( 2017 ) reads , according to Christian Lorentzen , “ like self-help , ” with Franz Kafka incongruously enlisted to serve as a kind of inspirational life coach for the novel ’ s protagonist , a successful author named Nicole struggling to overcome writer ’ s block .
To Be a Man , a collection of short stories Krauss @ @ @ @ @ @ @ career , features a cast of characters similar to those in her novels , most of them well-educated , cosmopolitan Jews , frequent flyers between New York City and Tel Aviv .
But the tone , particularly in the more recent stories , such as “ Switzerland ” and “ To Be a Man , ” is decidedly more jaded , and the collection as a whole might be read as a rejoinder to the earlier criticisms , proof that she has put away childish things and is ready to grapple with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of adult life .
To be a man , the book suggests , is to be capable of terrifying violence .
What Lorentzen describes as her “ cuddly portraits of aging men ” have been replaced by figures considerably more sinister .

Perversely, it is the forceful personalities of these men, their latent or outward aggressiveness, that the women seem to find desirable. About the German boxer, the protagonist of “To Be a Man” remarks, “If someone had asked her in that moment … whether she liked being made to feel physically small next to a man, she would have had to answer yes.” In depicting these situations, Krauss is notably dispassionate, reticent to moralize about the men who force women into positions of submission. In a Guardian interview, she hints at what she hopes To Be a Man might contribute to conversations about gender relations:
I wanted to find in this book a kind of perspective on masculinity that I haven’t found in the past years in the shadow of the #MeToo movement. Trying to think about the aspects of manhood that that movement couldn’t address because it had so many other things to address. The vulnerability of men and the complexity of what is asked of them in terms of strength both by their societies and personally.
One thing her collection seems keen to emphasize is the role the women’s desires play in exposing them to the subjugating force of men, desires that would appear to render them complicit in their own victimization.
If these characters seem unperturbed, even willing participants in situations that are injurious to them, it may just be a form of emotional survival.
And yet the women Krauss describes are drawn into these relationships by anything other than an urge to be subordinated. Soraya puts her life at risk, the narrator conjectures, not out of a yearning to be hurt by a man, but out of a “refusal to comply with the vulnerabilities one is born into.” She is seeking to prove her strength, her imperviousness to his brutality. Repeatedly throughout the collection, women regard sexual intimacy with aggressive men as a strategy for appropriating their power; they long to get as close as they can, not because they want to be with, but because they want to be these men. The protagonist of the titular story would like her lover to believe that “whatever was explosive in him was also explosive in her.” To Be a Man: The title announces the fantasy that almost all the women in the book harbor. What might it be like to get to be so callous, so cruel, so selfish, so reckless, so unconstrained, so free? Tamar, the protagonist of “The Husband,” calls what she covets “expansiveness.” Considering a house sitter who has transitioned, she briefly imagines doing the same, “if such a thing were actually possible without extreme hardship, and every form of pain.”


newrepublic--2020-12-18--Biden Isn’t a Lost Cause for the Left

Biden Isn’t a Lost Cause for the Left

That there would be alignment on a Department of Interior pick between green and Native groups might seem self-evident at this point , but was hardly inevitable .
U.S. conservation groups have a long and ugly history on the subject of indigenous rights .
“ Protecting ” nature—including for national parks—often came at the exclusion of tribes that had managed the same land for generations .
The solidarity between indigenous organizers and more mainstream green groups that bore fruit in the Interior Department selection was forged in large part through years of struggles against fossil fuel pipelines , led by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Haaland herself , as Noisecat pointed out in a recent Politico piece , cooked food for those that joined the encampment at Standing Rock when she traveled there in 2016 , while she was running the New Mexico Democratic Party .
Standing Rock was a pivotal moment in what turned into convergence of indigenous and environmental interests .
It drew veterans from the American Indian Movement , and who had waged fights for sovereignty at Pine Ridge and on Alcatraz Island .
Since then , calls to give back stolen land have crossed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rock drew attention to the vast network of fossil fuel infrastructure criss-crossing North America .
Climate advocates were in many ways newcomers to demands to halt extraction and restore sovereignty voiced in battles against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines .
Those fights then brought a fresh generation of young people into a climate movement newly willing—after years of difficult , ongoing conversations—to put issues of justice and corporate excess front and center .
Haaland ’ s selection comes weeks into a largely uninspiring month of transition news .
Though it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s transition-period embrace of longtime deficit hawks and Wall Street faithfuls , it ’ d be hard to argue that Biden ’ s is a broadly progressive cabinet .
His foreign policy team is flanked by people that have cashed checks from defense contractors and egged on conflicts abroad .
Tom Vilsack—the former Agriculture Secretary Biden picked to take his old job , after years as a lobbyist for Big Ag—won out over Marcia Fudge , to whom Biden bizarrely handed the Department of Housing and Urban Development .
South Bend , Indiana @ @ @ @ @ @ @ progressive ’ s first choice to head the Department of Interior .
Blackrock executives will take top spots , too .

That there would be alignment on a Department of Interior pick between green and Native groups might seem self-evident at this point, but was hardly inevitable. U.S. conservation groups have a long and ugly history on the subject of indigenous rights. “Protecting” nature—including for national parks—often came at the exclusion of tribes that had managed the same land for generations. The solidarity between indigenous organizers and more mainstream green groups that bore fruit in the Interior Department selection was forged in large part through years of struggles against fossil fuel pipelines, led by tribes whose land those projects threatened. Haaland herself, as Noisecat pointed out in a recent Politico piece, cooked food for those who joined the encampment at Standing Rock when she traveled there in 2016, while she was running the New Mexico Democratic Party.
Standing Rock was a pivotal moment in what turned into a convergence of indigenous and environmental interests. It drew veterans from the American Indian Movement, and who had waged fights for sovereignty at Pine Ridge and on Alcatraz Island. Since then, calls to give back stolen land have crossed into the mainstream. Likewise, Standing Rock drew attention to the vast network of fossil fuel infrastructure crisscrossing North America. Climate advocates were in many ways newcomers to demands to halt extraction and restore sovereignty voiced in battles against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. Those fights then brought a fresh generation of young people into a climate movement newly willing—after years of difficult, ongoing conversations—to put issues of justice and corporate excess front and center.
Haaland’s selection comes weeks into a largely uninspiring month of transition news. Though it’s a far cry from Obama’s transition-period embrace of longtime deficit hawks and Wall Street faithfuls, it’d be hard to argue that Biden’s is a broadly progressive Cabinet. His foreign policy team is flanked by people who have cashed checks from defense contractors and egged on conflicts abroad. Tom Vilsack—the former agriculture secretary Biden picked to take his old job, after years as a lobbyist for Big Ag—won out over Marcia Fudge, to whom Biden bizarrely handed the Department of Housing and Urban Development. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg wasn’t any progressive’s first choice to head the Department of Transportation. Blackrock executives will take top spots, too.


newrepublic--2020-12-17--Give Joe Biden a Break

Give Joe Biden a Break

We have reached the stage in the unveiling of Joe Biden ’ s Cabinet and top White House staff when virtually every Democrat—with the possible exception of Kamala Harris—is upset by at least one pick and probably two or more .
Some of this is inevitable with the formation of any administration .
“ Every appointment creates nine enemies and an ingrate ” is a truism about the realities of governing that has been attributed to everyone from Louis XIV to former House Speaker Sam Rayburn .
And some of the current dissatisfaction flows from the suppression of political differences @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the shared passion to drive Donald Trump from the White House .
On Tuesday , Biden held a virtual meeting with civil rights leaders who pressed him for more diversity in the Cabinet .
And on Wednesday afternoon , Biden offered a hint of his exasperation at the unreasonable expectations surrounding his choices .
As he formally announced that he had tapped Pete Buttigieg for secretary of transportation , the president-elect felt the need to brag that he had already made “ eight precedent-busting appointments , ” before noting that Buttigieg was the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nominee for a Cabinet post .

Formal transition planning, which usually begins a day or two after the election with the cooperation of the outgoing administration, was delayed for three long weeks by the illegal refusal of the General Services Administration to acknowledge Biden’s victory. With Mitch McConnell, the king of obstruction, as the likely Senate majority leader, Biden will have to struggle to win approval of each Cabinet and subcabinet pick. Since there are more than 2,000 Senate-confirmed posts, Biden will be lucky to have most of his administration in place by Labor Day.
The slowness of confirmations in prior administrations gave rise to dozens of portrayals of lonely Cabinet secretaries starring in a governmental remake of Home Alone 2. But there was a big difference back then: The new president’s team could depend on the best and the brightest of the federal civil service to guide them in their early days in office. But after Trump’s reign of terror and error, the upper levels of the civil service have been hollowed out in key departments. Also, the only coherent policy of the retreating Trump forces is to leave behind as many time bombs for Biden as possible.
That’s why Biden and the Democrats cannot afford the kind of learning curve that afflicted the early months of Bill Clinton’s and Obama’s first terms. No president since the nineteenth century has taken office with a majority of the opposition party backing bogus legal claims about an illegitimate election. No incoming president has been judged, as Biden will, over handling a pandemic, or taken office with democracy itself on trial.


newrepublic--2020-12-17--The New Language of Forever War-Making

The New Language of Forever War-Making

You might say that the Quincy Institute , and the ascendant , skeptical attitude toward American power it represents , is living rent-free in FDD ’ s head .
The institute is mentioned at least a dozen times in the document .
In an aside , FDD ’ s CEO Mark Dubowitz and its senior vice president for research , Jonathan Schanzer , cavil that the institute is “ erroneously named for former President John Quincy Adams owing to a fundamental misreading of his thinking and its applicability to 21st-century superpower affairs.
” Dubowitz , who also railed against the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ advocating military restraint to isolationists , who then somehow are akin to Charles Lindbergh ’ s America First Committee .
Thus , by the analyst ’ s clumsy use of the transitive property , the Quincy Institute and its fellow travelers are Nazi sympathizers .
The more you read of “ Defending Forward , ” the less sense it makes .
For the hard-liners , Quincy Institute types are isolationists or appeasers .
For others , like H.R .
McMaster , another to the FDD report , they are “ retrenchers , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ softer in his language than some of the other writers , McMaster is no less concerned .
“ Retrenchers could also result in a failure to deter aggression and prevent a disastrous war , ” says McMaster .
Yes , if we ’ re not careful , we may end up in a 20-year war that devastates a nation .
A certain disastrous , interminable American war haunts these writers , but it ’ s not the one you ’ d think : Panetta and McMaster diagnose their skeptics with Vietnam syndrome , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to produce a dim view of American war-making .
This “ has saddled American strategic thinking for decades , ” Panetta laments .
McMaster attributes it to a “ simplistic but widely held belief ” that the Vietnam War “ had been unjustified and unwinnable.
” If only Vietnam syndrome were a real affliction , it might have saved us from two more protracted , unwinnable wars .
Hundreds of thousands of would not have been lost .
America ’ s true malady is quite the opposite : We don ’ t learn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Defending Forward , ” one can not help but fear that 20 years hence , the foreign policy elites of the day—safely ensconced in think tanks , newspaper op-ed boards , military contractors , Foggy Bottom , and the E-ring of the Pentagon—will still be making the case for forever war .
And they will accuse their critics of suffering from “ Afghanistan syndrome .
”

Panetta is right, in a sense: George W. Bush’s proclamation that we must fight terrorists “over there” so we don’t have to face them over here has long been the post-9/11 bipartisan consensus. Only in recent years have serious cracks formed in that consensus, as more conservatives join the left in their weariness with America’s forever wars.
The report seems to be a response to a recent package by Foreign Affairs titled “Come Home America,” and to the work of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a newish think tank that preaches for restraint in foreign policy and demilitarizing American diplomacy. They reflect a slow but important shift underway: Some members of the foreign policy establishment are beginning to question the moral and strategic failures of the war on terror—much to the horror of armchair hawks, national security officials, and holders of think tank sinecures subsidized by Gulf oil sheikhdoms and military contractors.
Panetta and his cohort are hoping a rhetorical show of force—defending forward in prose, if you will—might somehow stop this shift in its tracks. But it’s not clear whom the FDD report—which is rather pretentiously referred to as a “monograph”—aims to convince. At times, the authors seem to presume a like-minded readership, as terms like forever war and endless wars—both now in common usage—are derided with scare quotes. At others, they merely rename traditional empire-building and military interventionism: Decades-long overseas military deployments are referred to as “forward-positioned” engagements or part of a “forward defense” the country must maintain. And anyone who believes otherwise is simultaneously naïve and arrogant.


newrepublic--2020-12-18--A Blueprint for a Trust-Busting
Biden Presidency

The recipients of all this big tech largesse naturally deny that these financial entanglements influence their findings in any way .
And , to be fair , they probably are totally unaware of how that happens , because crude quid pro quos wouldn ’ t work for them .
At the same time , of course , any defiance of big tech mandates in these rarefied policy circles would fly in the face of history , received wisdom , and human nature .
It ’ s no surprise , then , that American voters are already sounding the alarm on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with around 60 percent of respondents in a recent Data for Progress survey saying a Biden administration led chiefly by corporate CEOs and lobbyists would undermine the president ’ s campaign messaging—and 68 percent saying that nominees with such a monopoly-friendly résumé should be held up by the Senate .
Such sentiments again reflect the lived experience of many Americans over the past generation of steadily advancing corporate power .
While Obama stood still before this threat , the lead enablers of global monopoly did not .
They have been amassing political clout @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in our country , even during the Gilded Age .
Scott Morton , Shapiro , and others still aligned with the big market players clearly want to be back in the driver ’ s seat , but their corporate gigs should make them ineligible—to say nothing of their past failures to act .
As Shaoul Sussman , a plaintiffs-side antitrust lawyer ( and my former law school student ) , says , it would be “ like letting a pilot fly a plane after a crash—they blame the engines ( which might be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
You can ’ t let them into the cockpit again without first confronting and analyzing the reasons for their failure.
” The good news is that there are brilliant , experienced lawyers who are not entangled in the tentacles of monopoly money , or the tentacles of Obama-era rationalization .
FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra , Columbia Law professors Tim Wu and Lina Khan , and Brooklyn Law professor Frank Pasquale all have the background and expertise to lead in this moment .
Jonathan Kanter , a private attorney with decades of plaintiff-side @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hire .
So would Sally Hubbard , a nationally recognized antitrust expert who cut her teeth in the New York attorney general ’ s office .
Biden should put people from labor and small business into the policymaking apparatus , instead of letting industry-aligned economists and technocrats fall in line behind an agenda to shore up the unsustainable status quo .
The real reason Biden should act is not that it is good politics , or that he has the vast regulatory state suddenly at his disposal , but because the crisis of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mortal threat to a fair society and anything resembling a functioning democracy .
As FDR said in that speech , the “ new industrial dictatorship ” is incompatible with democracy , and when “ opportunity [ is ] limited by monopoly , ” private enterprise becomes “ privileged enterprise , not free enterprise.
” People are suffering because big pharma demands outrageous prices , big ag and big tech steal their wages , and their communities are hollowed out by the great sucking sound of Wall Street ’ s private equity combine .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ also getting shut out of the democracy that is supposed to stop this from happening .
Joe Biden has wanted to be president his entire life , and when he set out on this third journey to the presidency , he had a vision : restore the America he knows .
But he can ’ t .
There ’ s no going back to Kansas—or Scranton , as the case may be .
But there is a clear path to a more viable and equitable future—a unique chance not merely to build back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it , but to ensure that the American economy , like the government Biden is poised to lead , actually works for the American people .

Rather, monopoly is all of those problems—and more. It is constitutional, not epiphenomenal. It is the operating system of our economy, a Trump-level problem, an assault on the whole project of self-government. The four largest beef firms collectively control 85 percent of the market share in their sector—and the similarly top-heavy corn seed, soybean, and herbicide markets aren’t merely the popular winners in an evenly weighted contest for consumer allegiance. No, these companies control the men and women who depend on them. Farmers and farmworkers are abused serfs in the Tyson-Monsanto oligarchy, and they don’t like it. Farmers who are going bankrupt at the highest levels since the Great Recession and farmworkers who have been forced to wear diapers because they don’t have break times to pee aren’t living amid some outlying set of pathological conditions at the margins of otherwise fundamentally decent market competition and humane workplace regimes. Rather, they’re suffering at the hands of a pathological government that is designed to extract as much value as possible and leave the farmer only enough to survive—if that.
Monopoly is the operating system of our economy, a Trump-level problem, an assault on the whole project of self-government
When Google and Facebook dominate digital advertising and social media, it isn’t an “issue,” it’s a democratic crisis. Handing over de facto top-down management of the public sphere to Facebook and YouTube, with their hundreds of millions of American users, is frankly nuts. Who would choose Mark Zuckerberg as king of the truth? What kind of healthy democratic communications realm is run by a handful of people—let alone a group whose job is to maximize engagement by maximizing conflict among users and fomenting paranoid conspiracy theories for profit? What could be more important than going at the root cause of why workers’ wages are stuck in the mud while CEO wages soar, and tech monopolies such as Uber are consolidating their power to exploit workers and punish labor organizers?
It looks as if America might finally be on the verge of doing something about this problem. Last December, 46 state attorneys general, led by Letitia James in New York, filed a lawsuit designed to break up Facebook for illegally buying and burying competitors. And on October 6, 2020, the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law put out an astonishing product: a scorching, 450-page report that detailed in unstinting and precise prose exactly how the four largest tech giants—Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon—had built their extraordinary profits not just on ingenuity, but also on anti-competitive behavior. In the report’s foreword (composed jointly with New York Democratic Representative Jerrold Nadler), the subcommittee’s chair, Rhode Island Democratic Representative David Cicilline, did not mince words: “To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.” The Cicilline report did not just list a few problems together with a fistful of half-measures to create the appearance of official concern; it represented a profound split with 40 years of thinking on democracy and economics.


newrepublic--2020-12-18--How to Win Hearts and Minds in Climate Politics

British Columbia ’ s 2017 wildfire season set new records , burning more than 1.2 million hectares and displacing about 65,000 people .
2018 broke records again .
“ We typically spend our summers as a family going on big road trips around the province , ” Furstenau told me .
“ There were times where , literally , we had to turn around and drive away from an approaching fire.
” Observing the evacuations and trying not to breathe the smoke that now blankets the province during the summer , Furstenau started thinking about resilience and how to cultivate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or at an individual level , but “ ground-level resiliency , actual resiliency ” —the sort of preparedness that keeps people connected and safe during a crisis .
Furstenau ’ s resilient society , first , is one in which more communities and neighborhoods are equipped for the myriad disasters of climate crisis ( floods , wildfires , drought , etc . )
, not only with well-funded emergency services but with the sense of “ connectedness between the people that live around us ” that we sometimes neglect to cultivate .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ that social networks and community ties have a significant impact on emergency response .
In Los Angeles , for instance , public health officials have found that community resilience helps individuals more safely deal with a range of natural disasters .
And in 2018 , political scientists at both Northeastern University and Stanford University , working with Facebook , revealed that “ social ties , in particular the breadth of someone ’ s extended social network , have an effect on evacuation behavior leading up to hurricanes.
” When disaster strikes a community @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s critical to have a “ structure in place that ensures we know that everybody is going to be accounted for and , ideally , taken care of.
” The same logic should apply , she argues , to the role of government in a climate emergency .
A resilient society amid ecological breakdown , then , might be understood as a retooled welfare state : built on local community relationships as much as centralized administration , concerned as much with wellbeing here and now as with the conditions of human flourishing for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ counterpart , Annamie Paul , a human rights lawyer and the first Black woman to lead a major Canadian political party , Furstenau believes that climate change , inequality , and systemic racism can and must be addressed together .
During the October election debate , she seized attention with her frank and arresting response to a question about privilege : “ We ’ re not all equal .
I wish we were .
But we ’ re not.… I can ’ t imagine being a mother and imagining that my child , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the color of his skin.
” The three white politicians onstage , she said , herself included , “ can not reckon what that ’ s like .
”

In his 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells observed that climate change is making the world unknown and unfamiliar to us. Furstenau’s resilience agenda, underpinned by explicit appeals to nostalgia, could help us grapple with this feeling of estrangement. For even as it pledges a radically new future, it promises to restore familiar feelings and sensations lost, perhaps ones associated with childhood: security, community, neighborly care. During this dark and uncertain pandemic winter, it’s hard not to wonder if she’s on to something.
British Columbia’s 2017 wildfire season set new records, burning more than 1.2 million hectares and displacing about 65,000 people. 2018 broke records again. “We typically spend our summers as a family going on big road trips around the province,” Furstenau told me. “There were times where, literally, we had to turn around and drive away from an approaching fire.” Observing the evacuations and trying not to breathe the smoke that now blankets the province during the summer, Furstenau started thinking about resilience and how to cultivate it—not figuratively, she emphasized to me, or at an individual level, but “ground-level resiliency, actual resiliency”—the sort of preparedness that keeps people connected and safe during a crisis.
Furstenau’s resilient society, first, is one in which more communities and neighborhoods are equipped for the myriad disasters of climate crisis (floods, wildfires, drought, etc.), not only with well-funded emergency services but with the sense of “connectedness between the people that live around us” that we sometimes neglect to cultivate. Recent research, in fact, demonstrates that social networks and community ties have a significant impact on emergency response. In Los Angeles, for instance, public health officials have found that community resilience helps individuals more safely deal with a range of natural disasters. And in 2018, political scientists at both Northeastern University and Stanford University, working with Facebook, revealed that “social ties, in particular the breadth of someone’s extended social network, have an effect on evacuation behavior leading up to hurricanes.”


newrepublic--2020-12-18--Is Dolly Parton the Voice of America?

Is Dolly Parton the Voice of America?

A cornerstone of Smarsh ’ s book is the tracing of Parton ’ s career alongside the victories and setbacks of the feminist movement .
Parton gained professional independence amid the women ’ s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’ 70s , and she has built her career on deftly navigating the mixed messages America sends to working women about sex and power .
Her 1968 song “ Just Because I ’ m a Woman ” sends up the sexual double standard ; “ Daddy Come and Get Me , ” released in 1970 , tells the story of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her institutionalized .
She doesn ’ t call herself a feminist—in fact she has publicly forsworn the label .
But in Smarsh ’ s reading , Parton ’ s feminism is implicit , embodied in her actions .
One obvious piece of evidence in favor of this reading is Parton ’ s role in the 1980 film 9 to 5 , in which three secretaries accidentally kidnap their harassing , chauvinist boss and play out revenge fantasies against him that skitter between the sinister and the slapstick .
Jane Fonda cast herself and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lead roles ; hearing Parton ’ s hit “ Two Doors Down ” on the radio inspired her to offer Parton the third .
Parton agreed to sign on , provided that she could write the theme song for the movie , and she joined the cast for her first acting job , playing Doralee Rhodes , a character who rejects the boss ’ s unwanted advances , only to find out he ’ s told everyone he is sleeping with her anyway .
For Smarsh , Parton ’ s acceptance of this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never leveraged her celebrity at feminist marches , ” she chose to play “ a character who lassoes her abusive boss and shoves a pistol in his face.
” The movie ’ s theme song—both radical and broadly relatable—has also encouraged people to think of Parton as a politically engaged figure .
“ 9 to 5 ” is the song that first made me love Dolly Parton , and made me curious about who she was , beyond the punch lines I remembered from my youth .
I ’ m not alone in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ became her first number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts : an official mark of her crossover .
With its quick , witty lyrics , the song presents a rare combination of clear-eyed class critiques and a cocky optimism , at a tempo “ so bouncy ” that , as one reviewer put it , “ its complaints become self-assertions.
” Is there a more succinct description of the worker under American capitalism , playing a rigged game in which the wealth gap grows and grows , even as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meritocracy , than her lyric : “ it ’ s a rich man ’ s game , no matter what they call it / and you spend your life putting money in his wallet ” ?
Yet “ 9 to 5 ” is an outlier in Parton ’ s oeuvre—it has a quality that is notably lacking from her self-presentation and musical storytelling : a sense of grievance .
Before “ 9 to 5 , ” Parton had written plenty about tragedy and hardship , but the message was always one of forgiveness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the B-side of the “ 9 to 5 ” single , “ Sing for the Common Man , ” which praises the workingman with a soaring melody that wouldn ’ t be out of place in a choir booth , and promises that “ with the sweat of his brow , ” he will survive .
If “ 9 to 5 ” is more direct and confrontational in its style , it may be the influence of the other cast members ’ strong activist sentiments .
Parton wrote the song on set , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she winnowed down with help from Fonda and Tomlin .
It makes sense that this piece , composed to match a story line that ’ s light on redemption and heavy on revenge , and written with input from the firebrand Fonda , engages with an angrier mode of politics .
Certainly it is part of Parton ’ s makeup , but it ’ s one streak in a much more complicated worldview .

Smarsh tells the story of Parton’s early life with a fan’s loving eye—and it’s easy to see why. Parton was born in a cabin in the mountains of east Tennessee, where her father was a sharecropper. Her parents married when they were 15 and 17, and she was one of 12 children. The family’s material struggles feature prominently in Parton’s understanding of herself. She likes to joke in her stage patter that “Mama always said we had running water—if we’d run and get it.” She always points out that growing up poor didn’t mean growing up sad. She writes in her 1994 memoir, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, that her family was “poor as Job’s turkey,” but her childhood memories are free and fond: singing into tin cans she imagined as microphones, running around in the woods with her siblings and dying themselves purple with berries, getting a warm feeling when her mother used a rock she brought in to make “stone soup.” Smarsh expresses a similar message, with a more feral edge, in Heartland: “If you’re wild enough to enjoy it, poverty can contain a sort of freedom … if there was a car that ran and a little bit of gas money, we could just leave.”
The act of leaving is a big part of Parton’s early life. After graduating from high school—she was the first in her family to do so—she left for Nashville on the Greyhound bus with her old guitar and her belongings in paper grocery sacks. (She called this “matching luggage.”) In her first years there, she was so broke that she would sometimes walk the hallways of a local hotel looking for scraps of food left on room-service trays. The gig that brought her to a wider audience was as the “girl singer” on the variety show hosted by Porter Wagoner, a singer-songwriter who had grown up the son of a southern Missouri farmer. He had made precisely the transformation that Parton envisioned for herself, down to the outfits: Having worked as a meatcutter in Missouri, Wagoner had left behind a gritty rural existence and embraced full-on glitz, with his signature whirl-of-blond pompadour and colorful, rhinestone-studded suits.
It’s hard to fathom, given her musical talent and her preternatural charm, but when Parton began appearing on Wagoner’s show in 1967, the audience greeted her coolly. She was replacing another girl singer, Norma Jean, who had been widely adored. But Dolly won them over. In an episode from 1970, the pair sings a duet—“we’ve had a lot of folks write in and ask us to do more of these,” Wagoner explains, maybe a little grudgingly. Parton has a little gap in her front teeth, an acoustic guitar with pink flowers painted on it, and a gravity-defying bouffant—both a monument to the power of Aqua Net and a sign of the habit she would develop in the future of not just embracing the symbols of femininity but blowing them up to fantastical proportions. She makes a self-deprecating comment about her guitar-picking skills, and Wagoner gives her a patronizing compliment, then rolls his eyes dramatically. Watching it, you can hardly wait for her to emerge from the chrysalis of these years, bold and self-possessed. “People always ask me how do you play the guitar with them long fingernails,” she’ll later joke. “And I always tell ’em—pretty good!”


newrepublic--2020-12-18--Jen O’Malley Dillon Fell Into Joe Biden’s Unity Trap

Jen O ’ Malley Dillon was always going to have to apologize .
In an interview with Glamour , Joe Biden ’ s 2020 campaign manager and the incoming White House deputy chief of staff called Republicans ( in general ) “ a bunch of fuckers ” and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ( specifically ) “ terrible.
” She was always going to have to apologize because this contradicts a central theme of Joe Biden ’ s campaign : that Republicans aren ’ t fuckers but , instead , good people in thrall to Donald Trump , who will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is in charge and ready to deal with them in good faith .
In fact , O ’ Malley Dillon was using these insults in the service of enunciating and defending this very campaign theme .
Republicans simply clawed the words “ fuckers ” and “ terrible ” from a longer paragraph and ginned up a tidy little outrage cycle .
In so doing , they undermined Biden ’ s central campaign premise a lot more thoroughly than O ’ Malley Dillon is said to have done .
Here are O ’ Malley @ @ @ @ @ @ @ context :

In the primary, people would mock him, like, “You think you can work with Republicans?” I’m not saying they’re not a bunch of fuckers. Mitch McConnell is terrible. But this sense that you couldn’t wish for that, you couldn’t wish for this bipartisan ideal? He rejected that. From start to finish, he set out with this idea that unity was possible, that together we are stronger, that we, as a country, need healing, and our politics needs that too.
Having gone over this a few times, I think this is clearly a defense of wishing for bipartisanship as a politically successful campaign strategy, even if savvy insiders like O’Malley Dillon are skeptical that it has a chance of succeeding with the actual Republicans that are on hand. In other words, Joe Biden was smart to—as centrist critics so frequently accuse their left-wing opponents of doing—promise the impossible. (This was a campaign, after all, that frequently promised, without caveats, to cure cancer.)
Whether that was what O’Malley Dillon meant or not, by the end of the week she had walked back her stark characterization of Republicans, declaring that she “used some words that I probably could have chosen better,” according to Politico. In clarifying what she meant, she pointed out again how many people were drawn to Biden’s “belief that we can get things done, and we can get them done if we come together.”


newrepublic--2020-12-18--Trump’s Most Vicious Cultists Aren’t Done With America

When spent nuclear fuel rods are removed from their reactor and cooled , they are typically surrounded in inert gas and sealed into thick steel and concrete casks that are intended to last for decades .
We do this because we know that the material taken out of the reactor core is a dangerous by-product of the material used to power the reactor , and it retains a vast destructive potential .
It doesn ’ t require a degree in nuclear physics to understand why such extreme measures are taken to safeguard this material : Everyone knows that you shouldn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lest it make its way to where it doesn ’ t belong .
And the same can be said for the fuel that has powered the Trump administration ’ s greatest misdeeds : its annihilation of the administrative state , its rollback of protections for immigrants and the environment , and the systematic razing of social protections and guarantees .
President Donald Trump may have been the figurehead behind all of this destruction , but we all know he wasn ’ t the person sitting at the Resolute Desk until the late hours @ @ @ @ @ @ @ industrial methane use or new asylum restrictions .
No , this activity was powered by people like White House adviser Stephen Miller , EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler , Attorney General Bill Barr , and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo .
Now that the Trump administration is getting ejected from the White House , these flunkies will probably spend some time cooling in the fuel pools of consulting , big law , and academia ; perhaps , in time , they will fade somewhat from the public eye and our memories .
But you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ harm is far from spent .
As America prepares to inaugurate a new president , it can be easy now to dismiss these bad actors with a lusty “ Good Riddance !
” or marvel at the depths of their debasement and sycophancy to an inane and temperamental leader .
Nevertheless , it ’ s worth remembering that to some of Trump ’ s underlings , the president was always more of a means to an end .
We can take satisfaction in the fact that they won ’ t be getting four @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if we ’ re not careful , they ’ ll be back , running for office themselves or glomming onto the campaigns of perhaps more competent despots .

Miller’s keen devotion to the Trumpian cause in these last few days of the administration demonstrates how dedicated he is to playing the long game. He knows that tossing a final Molotov cocktail into the system on his way out the door will serve to make it that much harder for Joe Biden to repair all the damage he helped to create. He further knows that there is a limited amount of decisive executive action that Biden will be willing to take and that immigration is one of those issues with a fickle constituency and a lot of annoying controversy. Most of all, he knows and expects that at least some of the mess he’ll leave behind will remain unresolved until he gets another chance to roam the halls of power and continue the work to which he’s dedicated his life. The thing to understand about Miller is that this was never merely a job; it was a vocation, and his extremist desires to reshape the immigration landscape is a white whale he’ll never stop chasing.
In a just world, all of this official malpractice, particularly on the immigration front, would be assiduously investigated and its perpetrators dragged before some tribunal. Unfortunately, Washington has made an art form out of transgression amnesia, as evidenced by the fact that war criminal par excellence Henry Kissinger continues to live his life unperturbed, his social calendar brimming with invitations to talks and social events. Not only have his horrendous crimes been whitewashed, his foreign policy ideas are still sought after at the highest levels, including by the prior Democratic nominee for president.
More recently, Miles Taylor, the former Homeland Security chief of staff who lately revealed himself to be the author of the infamous New York Times anonymous op-ed and a subsequent book in which he depicted himself as a member of the “resistance inside the White House,” has experienced a bit of a rehabilitation, despite the fact that his ostensibly principled stance within the administration doesn’t appear to have achieved anything at all. He was, however, a good soldier during the family separation crisis, and one of his concrete accomplishments was a thoroughgoing defense of Miller’s most heinous policies.