Independence Day Weekend Reading

By John Ballard

Weekend blogging is always a low traffic time and holiday weekends are worst of all. So for that handful of readers looking for something to read here are a few items that caught my attention over the last day or so.

?You Can't Be Raped If You're A Bad Girl, But You Can Walk If You're Rich
If you haven't read Steve's post about the double standards overlaying the DSK story, go read it now. Not only did the so-called "defense" appear to abandon ship, the NY Times, AP and the rest of the media treated the story like the breaking of a bottle of champagne, forgetting, it seems, that although

...the woman may have lied on a number of matters does not mean she may have lied on sexual assault. Moreover,there's no indication in the NYT story that Strauss-Kahn is also not a credible witness, one who initially denied being anywhere near the place at the time, then said he was having lunch with his daughter and finally sorta-kinda admitting that there was sexual contact after all. That is, his defense lawyers are not now contesting the results of the rape kit which found his DNA in bodily fluids on the woman's body.

?Waves of boats sailing to Gaza
And other reports of Freedom Flotilla 2.  Joseph Dana's Twitter feed and formal reporting via +972 are all you can find at the moment about the US participation in this historic repeat of last year's maritime demonstration. The US ship remains in the port of Athens, Greece,  it's captain detained by authorities under pressure from the US and Israel.
For this detention two of the world's most powerful economies close ranks to use one of the world's most troubled economies as their proxy.

Photo -- The memorial at Gaza port marks the Israeli massacre of the Freedom Flotilla in May 2010.

?�The squeeze on Assad,� by the Economist
Josh Landis is on vacation until July 7, but he links his contribution to the Economist at his blog.
Syria's second-generation Assad tyranny seems about to fall but no one knows what the outcome will be. Unlike other countries being politically reconstructed by the Arab Spring, Syria's social, political and sectarian matrix is more complicated.

Will Syria end like Egypt and Tunisia? It seems unlikely, at least in the short run. In those countries the army sided with the protesters, whereas in Syria it has not. Might Syria follow Libya�s example? So far, there are no signs of a regional split. What about Iran, which brutally and successfully crushed a revolt in 2009 and which is a close Syrian ally? Even that is different. Iran is run by an elected government (though the poll was rigged), not a single family. It has endless oil reserves; its sectarian divide is minor and its security forces more sophisticated. Syria�s have so far killed 1,500 people, ten times as many as in Iran. Most significantly, the Assad regime�half a dozen family members call the shots�has acted erratically. Bashar, the president, swings between brutal crackdowns and vacuous concessions. That does not bode well for a dictator under pressure.

?Europe Taking Lead on Speculations Tax -- Why is Europe leaving the United States behind on applying a small tax on financial transactions?
The most painless and rational tax proposal of our lifetime is beginning to catch on.
Read and learn about it so that when the GOP starts trashing it you can at least be informed.

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?Mountainous Harmony and Everlasting Peace
Greg Bottoms writing in Killing the Buddah composes a moving tribute to Clarence Schmidt (1897-1978), a one-of-a-kind individual whom most most of us will never know except through the writing of others.

On January 6th, 1968, Schmidt�s seven-story mansion, large parts of which he had covered in his highly flammable tar mixture, burned to the ground after a windstorm blew a large maple branch onto his amateur wiring. �Everything shot up in flames,� he later said. �It created an aurora borealis that you could see for miles and miles.� Because of the tar, the varnish, and the self-taught wiring scheme, the property burned for days. It melted into ashes and rubble.

Schmidt moved for a short time into a Woodstock hotel, presumably on charity. He moved back to Ohayo that spring, living in a broken-down station wagon. Quickly, however, he began to use the car, a Studebaker, and another large tree as the beginning of a second house, which he called Mark II. He built rooms around and above the car with wood and scrap already around the edges of his property, and he began to live there. He covered the outside of his new home with silver-painted and foil-wrapped branches, beads, doll heads, and aluminum foil. It resembled a giant, silver sea urchin. The Studebaker became invisible from the outside, and he called it his new office, a place to think, dream, design.

?�Some Will Call Me a Torturer�: CIA Man Reveals Secret Jail
Spencer Ackereman interviews Glenn Carle about his book  in Wired, pretty much confirming what you already know.

Admitting that �some will call me a torturer� is a surefire way to cut yourself off from anyone�s sympathy. But Glenn Carle, a former CIA operative, isn�t sure whether he�s the hero or the villain of his own story.

Distilled, that story, told in Carle�s new memoir The Interrogator, is this: In the months after 9/11, the CIA kidnaps a suspected senior member of al-Qaida and takes him to a Mideast country for interrogation. It assigns Carle � like nearly all his colleagues then, an inexperienced interrogator � to pry information out of him. Uneasy with the CIA�s new, relaxed rules for questioning, which allow him to torture, Carle instead tries to build a rapport with the man he calls CAPTUS.

But CAPTUS doesn�t divulge the al-Qaida plans the CIA suspects him of knowing. So the agency sends him to �Hotel California� � an unacknowledged prison, beyond the reach of the Red Cross or international law.

?The Clintons� long shadow (a brief review of Paul Starr�s Remedy and Reaction)
Paul Starr's Social Transformation of Healthcare in America (1982) is the Grey's Anatomy of healthcare reform, as indispensable as a dictionary.  (Yes, Virginia, there are still a few ways that books are better than the Internets)  I got a second-hand paperback copy and have referred to it many times while covering HCR debates and  political developments. (H/T Ezra Klein)

A few snips from Remedy and Reaction can be read at the link. This is what the reviewer says about Starr's new book:

Do yourself a favor. Though it isn�t due out until early October, pre-order Paul Starr�s Remedy and Reaction right now (here). You�ll thank me later because it is good. In fact, it�s the best summary and political analysis of health care reform I�ve read.* I say that for two reasons: (1) At about 280 pages (excluding end notes), it is relatively concise for the subject and span covered (the political history of U.S. health reform, with principal focus on developments from the 1970s through April 2011); And (2), Starr nails every nuance while taking the analysis one level deeper than any other treatment I�ve read.