Climategate II - The Yawning

By BJ Bjornson

I was going to do up a post on the release of more of the hacked emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, but I think I�ll just outsource this one to Brendan DeMelle, who has a thorough round-up of the coverage and what you need to know about this latest dumping of additional documents from the original hack.

In the end, it appears to be a poorly disguised attempt to derail the upcoming UN climate summit. (Though given the certainty of a complete lack of action from the U.S. and the likely attempts at outright sabotage from countries like Canada, why even bother at this point?)

More interesting to me is the apparent lack of effort by the UK police to track down the hackers themselves.

WTF?

By BJ Bjornson

I don�t know what kind of self-induced coma Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen have been in these last few years, but it must have been caused by some pretty heavy stuff.

When Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson accepted the reality that they could not effectively govern the nation if they sought re-election to the White House, both men took the moral high ground and decided against running for a new term as president. President Obama is facing a similar reality�and he must reach the same conclusion.

He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president's accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Now, I happen to think Hillary would make an excellent president and all, but it�s the reason these two think Hillary should take over that left my mouth hanging open.

But this is about more than electoral politics. Not only is Mrs. Clinton better positioned to win in 2012 than Mr. Obama, but she is better positioned to govern if she does. Given her strong public support, she has the ability to step above partisan politics, reach out to Republicans, change the dialogue, and break the gridlock in Washington.

Yep. As they see it, and even say further up the column, the problem with Obama has been his insistence on traveling down his overly partisan road, causing all of that nasty gridlock and fighting in Congress. If only they could find someone who could reach out to the Republicans and change the dialogue.

That they�ve completely missed the point of Republican obstructionism and Obama�s attempts to reach out and change the dialogue since he was elected, claiming he�s done the opposite, is bad enough. That they think that Hillary will somehow be the one to overcome the lockstep obstructionism on the Republican side just leaves me beyond words.

Seriously, what are these guys on?

The ink fumes may be getting to him

By BJ Bjornson

I can�t help but read this, without thinking about this, not to mention this. Someone should tell old Mr. Miller that those well-oiled young men he so loves to write about are just as much part of the 99% as the rest of the �pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, ... fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness.�

"To see ourselves as others see us..." Part Two: The ice cream chronicles

By Steve Hynd

The Washington Post, always willing to bang the "perfidious Persians" drum, has this piece today:

Iran�s rich eat ice cream covered in gold as poor struggle to survive

By Thomas Erdbrink, Friday, August 5, 2:02 PM

TEHRAN � Gold-flecked ice cream wasn�t part of the picture that Shiite Muslim clerics painted during the Iranian Revolution, when they promised to lift the poor by distributing the country�s vast oil income equally across society.

But more than three decades later, record oil profits have brought in billions, and some people here are enjoying that decadent dessert. The trouble is, it�s just a small group of wealthy Iranians. Despite the promises of the revolution, many here say the gap between rich and poor has never seemed bigger�.

Over at the conservative blog Outside The Beltway, Doug Mataconis observes "These are the kinds of disparities that caused revolution in countries like Egypt."

Umm, yeah:

The Frozen Haute Chocolate, (right) made by New York City eatery, Serendipity 3 and priced at a mind-blowing $25,000 has claimed a spot in the Guiness World Records as The World�s Most Expensive Dessert.

Made from a blend of 28 cocoas from across the world, this decadent delicacy is infused with five grams of edible 23-karat gold and served in a goblet lined with edible gold. Serendipity 3 teamed up with jeweler Euphoria New York to create this amazing dessert.

Topped with whipped cream, more gold and a side of La Madeline au Truffle from Knipschildt Chocolatier, which sells for $2,600 a pound, the dessert comes with an 18K gold bracelet with a carat�s worth of diamonds that rests at the base of the goblet and a gold spoon set with white and chocolate-colored diamonds.

 

I'm looking forward to Doug and other conservatives taking up their banners and marching on Tahir Times Square to demand a return to democracy and the ousting of the undemocratic, rich, oligarchic 1% who now claim 25% of the nation's income and 33% of the nation's wealth. Or at least call for those oligarchs' tax rates to be raised.

But I won't hold my breath, cyanotic blue isn't a good color for me.

The Rhetorical Infrastructure of Violent Hate

By Steve Hynd

The Norwegian rightwing terrorist Anders Breivik is insane, according to his lawyer. This should hardly need saying. Walking calmly among teenagers shooting them by the score is not the action of a sane person. That's something that has been stressed again and again by "counterjihad" and rightwing authors over the last few days as they run to distance themselves from Breivik's fandom for their writings, revealed in his 1,500 page manifesto.

They do have a bit of a point, for once. As Slate's William Saletan puts it:

The vindictive part of me wants to blame [Pamela] Geller and her ilk for what happened in Oslo. But then I remember something Abdul Rauf said: "The Quran explicitly states that no soul shall be responsible for the sins of another. Terrorism, which targets innocents who had no part in a crime, fundamentally violates this Quranic commandment." That principle---that no one should be held responsible for another person's sins---is the moral core of the struggle against terrorism. It's the reason I can't pin the slaughter in Norway on bloggers who never advocated sectarian violence. I just wish those bloggers, and the politicians who echo them, would show Muslims the same courtesy.

And James Joyner, in a fine round-up of various op-eds on this subject, writes:

As Foust notes, the Internet is full of bad ideas, including a great deal of hate speech. Decent people should condemn it. And to the extent intelligent people with large followings are spreading the false message that the world's 1.5 billion Muslims are somehow responsible for the crimes of a handful of their brethren, other intelligent people with large followings should speak up against that notion.

There's a fine line, though, between arguing against bad ideas and calling for civility in our discourse and chilling honest and vigorous debate. There is legitimate reason to talk about things like immigration policy, militant Islam, and national cultural identity. To shut down that discourse because the likes of Anders Behring Breivik might commit outrageous acts of violence would not be "cost-free," either.

But, and here's the rub, writers like Geller, Robert Spencer and the rest don't not advocate sectarian violence either. There's no hint of Ghandi or King style non-violent protest in their writings. Instead their rhetoric, as Marc Sageman says, is the rhetoric of violence.

Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer and a consultant on terrorism, said it would be unfair to attribute Mr. Breivik�s violence to the writers who helped shape his world view. But at the same time, he said the counterjihad writers do argue that the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam �is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged. Well, they and their writings are the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.�

�This rhetoric,� he added, �is not cost-free.�

If you call your "counterjihadist" blog Gates of Vienna- so named because "At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war"; if you write about Muslim immigration in terms of it being a deliberate "invasion" of Europe by Islam; if the very basis of your argument is couched in terms of a "clash" of civilizations - then you're simply not being an advocate of nonviolence. Only one of the counterjihadist bloggers has the guts to say "It is clear that Anders Behring Breivik is one of us."

His opinions are virtually identical to my own and those of most people in the Counterjihad movement. He accesses the same websites and information sources that most of us do, and he has exactly the same concerns about the Islamification of Europe.

Of course, that same blogger then goes on to put the real blame on the political left:

It is the left-wing that is responsible for this outrage, not the right-wing. This act of violence is the consequence of a deranged political elite attempting to demographic re-engineer an entire continent against the wishes of its people; exploiting imperfections in the democratic system so that the people are never allowed a real choice; passing laws to criminalise free speech so that honest discussion is scarcely possible any more; and a media conspiracy (embodied in laws or informal agreements like the NUJ Guidelines on Race Reporting) to systematically suppress information about the negative consequences mass third-world immigration, and particularly the Muslim component of it, is having on Europe.

And, of course, if you describe "a postnational, postpatriotic European Union governed by a benevolent ruling elite" as if democracy just didn't enter into it; if you describe Norwegian teens as like the "Hitler Youth"; or if you write, baldly, that "Breivik may be right" then you're playing into that conspiracy mindset and your rhetoric will provide the infrastructure for violence when there's no call to eschew violence in sight.

Alex Pareene at Salon:

Opposition to Islam was the killer's stated motivation. He targeted other white Scandinavians because he considered them race traitors. He wrote all of this down, too, so we don't even have to make guesses about it! He blamed liberals for enabling jihad by supporting "multiculturalism." (Funnily enough, that is also exactly what Mark Steyn thinks.)

Breivik's own lawyer confirmed that today.

�He believes that he is in a war and in a war you can do things like that,� Mr. Lippestad said. ...Asked if the rampage was aimed at the Labor Party, or at Muslim immigrants, Mr. Lippestad said, �This was an attack on the Labor Party.�

Contrary to Frontpage Magazine's apologia today, folk like Roberts Spencer don't have to make explicit "calls for anyone to commit acts of terrorism", they just have to refrain from calling on their readers not to commit those violent acts.  Their rhetorical framework uses the language of violence and hate, they should not pretend they are surprised when violence is the result.

My colleague B.J. put it well in a comment yesterday.

Blaming all Muslims for the actions of a few is wrong, but there are those in the Muslim community whose rhetoric and actions place them in a far more blame-worthy position for the violence.

By the same token, I wouldn�t blame all Christians for the actions of the terrorist few like Breivik, but there are those whose rhetoric and actions inspire and inform such actions, and while they may not be directly responsible, neither are they totally blameless.

There is a chain of causality here that cannot be parsed away or sidestepped. It's something everyone involved in the debate - especially conservatives - is just going to have to deal with.

Counterjihad - Not A "Religion Of Peace?"

By Steve Hynd

Apparently the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik was a big fan of that strain of wingnut bloggers who call themselves "counterjihadists".

His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.

...The revelations about Mr. Breivik�s American influences exploded on the blogs over the weekend, putting Mr. Spencer and other self-described �counterjihad� activists on the defensive, as their critics suggested that their portrayal of Islam as a threat to the West indirectly fostered the crimes in Norway.

Mr. Spencer wrote on his Web site, jihadwatch.org, that �the blame game� had begun, �as if killing a lot of children aids the defense against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, or has anything remotely to do with anything we have ever advocated.� He did not mention Mr. Breivik�s voluminous quotations from his writings.

Adam Serwer, writing for the Plum Line blog at the New York Times, hits one out of the park:

American anti-Islam bloggers aren�t to blame for the Norway Massacre. But their response to the attacks is nonetheless revealing, in that they are now demanding the kind of nuanced analysis of the Norway shootings that they�ve always failed to offer when implicating jihadism or all Muslims for terror attacks.

...Most of Geller and Spencer�s blogging consists of attempts to tar all Muslims with the responsibility for terrorism. At CPAC last year, Geller and Spencer drew a large crowd for their documentary referring to the proposed community center near Ground Zero as �the second wave of the 9/11 attacks.� Yet they�re now pleading for the world not to do what they�ve spent their careers doing � assigning collective blame for an act of terror through guilt-by-association. What�s clear is that they understand that the principle of collective responsibility is a monstrous wrong in the abstract, or at least when it�s applied to them. They are now begging for the kind of tolerance and understanding they cheerfully refuse to grant to American Muslims.

These bloggers are not directly responsible for the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. But make no mistake: Their school of analysis, which puts the blame on all Muslims for acts of terrorism perpetrated by Islamic extremists, has been fully discredited � by their own reaction to the Oslo attacks. While it�s obvious that few if any of them will take this lesson to heart, the rest of us should � terrorist acts are committed by individuals, and it is those individuals who should be held responsible.

Or. as the immortal Scottish bard might put it: "O would some Power the gift to give us, To see ourselves as others see us!"

Ignorant American Wingnuts Miss The Euro-Point

By Steve Hynd

I see from Memeorandum that several American rightwing bloggers are making a big deal out of the heavy electoral defeat for Spain's socialist party in elections there.

Of course - and as usual given their parochial world view - they don't have a blessed clue what they are on about. Take for example Doug Powers at Malkin's place, who writes that "Socialist politicians in Spain, or plenty of other places for that matter, are being run off because people are angry at their failure to deliver on undeliverable promises", or William Teach who thinks that Spain's socialist loss is a lesson for America's socialists in power (no, really he does).

But the thing is, the real world doesn't accord well with their ignorant punditry. In Europe, every nation except Germany is suffering greatly in the aftermath of the worldwide economic collapse brought about by conservative lack of oversight on banks and speculators. All because they, except for Germany, went for deeply unpopular austerity measures pushed by the fiscal conservatives at the World Bank and the IMF which haven't made anything better and have probably made everything worse. Every single government party which was incumbent when the recession hit is taking a polls bashing, no matter where they sit on the political spectrum. Even Germany's center-right government is expected to take a bashing at the next elections, Sarkozy is toast and a socialist will be the next French president, the conservatives in the UK will struggle to see out a full term in office even after Labour took their own electoral hit for being in charge when the economic shit hit the fan. In fact, more right-leaning governments, in charge of larger nations, are likely to feel the electoral heat than socialist ones. 

The AP notes:

Despite the likely losses for the Socialists, throughout the country there is also a clear sense that Spaniards are disillusioned with the opposition conservative Popular Party.

"Politicians like the ones here in Madrid that go around spending money on official cars only seem to care about their own careers and about going one better than the opposition," said salesman Joaquin Ribes, 28. Madrid has been ruled by the Popular Party since 1995.

Oops. Go back to your wittering about stuff you know an iota about, wingnut bloggers. You know - writing self-referential tosh about how God hates gays, loves guns and thinks Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Obama's birth certificate.

Inside the Overton Window

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Daniels Move Stirs Concerns About Field of Republicans

So why won't Mitch Daniels run?  The Republican base has become so crazy that if you want to win the Republican nomination you have to talk crazy even if you are not.

Now many of us have recognized just how crazy the Republican party has become but even the mainstream media is talking about it.

Fantasy Island

At a press conference last week, someone asked Chris Christie for his views on evolution vs. creationism. "That's none of your business," the New Jersey governor barked in response.

.....

Christie is not part of the natural constituency for Darwin-denial. He's an intelligent man, a lawyer, a fiscal rather than a social conservative. But Christie is also someone who might want to run for president someday, or be selected as someone's running mate. For those purposes, he must constantly ask himself the question: Am I about to say something to which a white, evangelical, socially conservative, gun-owning, Obama-despising, pro-Tea Party, GOP primary voter in rural South Carolina might object? By this standard, simple acceptance of the theory of evolution becomes a risky stance. To lie or to duck? Christie chose the option of ducking while signaling his annoyance at being put in this ridiculous predicament.

 

Moments like this point to a growing asymmetry in our politics. One party, the Democrats, suffers from the usual range of institutional blind spots, historical foibles, and constituency-driven evasions. The other, the Republicans, has moved to a mental Shangri-La, where unwanted problems (climate change, the need to pay the costs of running the government) can be wished away, prejudice trumps fact (Obama might just be Kenyan-born or a Muslim), expertise is evidence of error, and reality itself comes to be regarded as some kind of elitist plot.

It's not just Christie but the entire party:

Reality-denial is not limited to the Republican inability to utter words like evolution and revenue. The long-range forecasts in the Paul Ryan plan, which show spending falling to 3 percent of GDP to allow for additional tax cuts, express an impossible libertarian fantasy. So too does the current Republican effort to bring this utopia about by refusing to raise the federal government's credit card limit. It is not a matter of conjecture, but something closer to a universal understanding among economists, that failing to raise the debt ceiling could cause another global economic crash. The plutocratic populist Donald Trump recently answered this objection on behalf of the party. "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart."

Another series of Republican fictions relates to climate change. This starts, at one extreme, with the outright denial of Michele Bachmann, progressing through the various "not-man-made" and "the jury's-still-out" dodges offered by the likes of Sarah Palin and John Thune. Christie handled this issue in the same evasive way he did the evolution question, albeit with less aggression, shortly after being elected. "I'm skeptical�I'm skeptical," he said. "And you know, I think at the end of this, I think we're going to need more science to prove something one way or the other." The conservative press has gone after Newt Gingrich merely for saying the country must do something to address climate change. But if you're one of the conservatives who had the misfortune to accept science during the pre-Tea Party era, don't worry�you can still escape extinction by expressing doubt about any possible solution. This describes the position of Mitch Daniels; Mitt Romney; and Tim Pawlenty, who once supported cap-and-trade but has simply reversed himself, offering a self-flagellating apology and confession ("it was stupid").

John Quiggen observes that the above piece and some others he mentions are significant not because they are true but because at least some in the MSM are actually talking about the insanity that is today's Republican party.

The fact that, with no observable exceptions, the Republican Party relies on delusional beliefs for most of its claims about economics, science and history has been obvious for some years. But, until recently it�s been outside the Overton Window.

NY Magazine has an article on FOX's Roger Ailes today that indicates even he sees that the monster he created threatens the Republican party.

FYI: Overton Window

 

 

Oh Jeebus, But The Wingnuts Are Morons

By Steve Hynd

Obama's released his long-form birth certificate. It exists, he's American. Are any of you suprised? Want to bet the wingnuts either don't accept it as genuine or start new conspiracy theories about "why did it take so long?" And they expect to convince voters to let them run the country.

That's all I'm going to write about this entire episode of paranoid wingnut stupidity.

There's far, far more at Memeorandum - if you care.

Still not dead yet

By Dave Anderson:

Moqutada Sadr is still neither dead nor irrelevant despite the hundreds of bleats from warbloggers that he and more importantly the socio-political movement of poor urban Shi'ites would be destroyed by one more large military sweep.  Instead, the Sadrists control a significant portion of the Iraqi internal security forces as well as still holding chokeholds on the economy.  They were and are a critical swing bloc and have been courted as such. 

And now Sadr is back from Iran with higher legitimacy than he had before:

The return of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr comes as Iraq's new government is just getting its footing and at a time when U.S. forces are preparing to withdraw from the country....

Al-Sadr is the son of a revered Shiite religious figure, but his own road to power was unorthodox. He emerged as a political and religious figure in the wake of the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, but al-Sadr was dismissed by most establishment leaders in Iraq as someone with little religious standing.

Iraq's government indicted him in connection with the killing of a rival Shiite leader in 2003. It is not clear how the government will handle that. Sumaida'ie said it will be a decision for Iraq's judiciary.

Al-Sadr went on to win the backing of thousands of poor Shiites.

His time in Iraq was spent to build his religious standing.  His movement achieved its primary goal, forcing the United States out of Iraq and also achieved a secondary goal of cementing Shi'ite dominance in the country in such a manner that the poor urban Shi'ites hold significant power. 

Later on in USA Today, an American analyst overpersonalizes Sadr's return by saying an avowed enemy of the US is a threat to American interests --- Sadr only became an avowed enemy when his country was invaded for no good reason --- he was an accidental guerrilla and interested in local to him matters only, and his actions, as well as those of his militia, the JAM, continue to be those of people and groups who are interested in local matters. 

Of Wikileaks, Secrecy, Crimes and Punishment

By Steve Hynd

Yesterday, conservative blogger Doug Ross linked to my last post on the new Wikileaks document dump, saying "the Statists can't seem to find much to criticize the despicable crackpot leaker and Julian Asshatter for". It's a bit rich, linking to a post where I was trying to set out an overview of the leaks themselves and staying entirely away from what I find to be rather tedious and circular arguments over blame and punishment among the blogeratti, but there you have it. I suppose I should write something about where I stand on the whole "Assange is a terr'ist!" thing.

Let's start of by stating, as a matter of self-evident truth, that if this latest leak had been of cables from another nation's diplomats - say Britain's - there would have been a round of back-smacking that American "very serious persons" hadn't been caught flat-footed like the hapless Brits, some analysis by foreign policy types and a great yawn of indifference from everyone else. The information contained in the cables, gleaned from diplomats talking to their opposite numbers in other countries, could have been pretty much the same. Few in America would care because in general Americans don't care anything like as much about foreign policy as they do about domestic politics. The fuss is almost entirely because the leaks were of American secrets, not because of the secrets themselves.

Much of the rest of the fuss, especially from conservative-leaning voices, is because the leaks came from Assange and the Wikileaks team on the heals of two other large document dumps from the U.S. I keep seeing tweets from right-leaning American national security types lamenting "why don't Wikileaks dump documents from another country? They hate America."

It may be true, but it's beside the point. I submit that the real reason Wikileaks haven't managed to leak secrets from other nations on this scale is that they take better care of their secrets. That is a key part of the proximate cause of all the trouble, but most American pundits are doing their level best to ignore the fact.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. intelligence community was faced by two conflicting pressures. The first, which is the perennial problem of intelligence work, is the tendency to classify stuff that shouldn't be secret and to classify higher actual secret stuff that shouldn't be. The second, which became a pressure only after it was concluded that compartimentalization of data helped 9/11 happen because various agencies weren't sharing their part of the picture, was to a pressure to disseminate classified data as widely as possible to cleared individuals. Thus we arrived at monstrosities like the network from which the current cable dump was stolen - a vast repository of over 2 million somewhat-secret documents accessed by over 2.5 million individuals ranked all the way down to private. I'd like to quote my friend and one-time intelligence insider Ron Beasley here (emphasis mine):

The real embarrassment here is just how arrogant and incompetent the US government is. When I worked for the DIA long before PCs and the internet we used to joke that Confidential meant it was Time Magazine last week - Secret meant it would be in Time Magazine next week. You are right, a data base that 2 million people have access to is eventually going to be leaked.

When looking for blame to apportion, start there.

If U.S. diplomacy and U.S. prestige have taken a hit from these leaks, that's tough. This is the real world, not a fairytale. The U.S. created the conditions for the leaks - it must needs, as my Texan wife would put it, "pull up its big-girl panties and deal". It cannot play Ollie to Assange's Stan Laurel, claiming "Now look what you made me do".

That said, the actual thief must bear a great deal of the blame as the other necessary part of the proximate cause. While such a trove was a leak in waiting, it still needed an actual leaker. We've some notion of who that person might be, but no certainty other than that he or she was an American with access - not Assange or anyone else at Wikileaks. That person will doubtless be found guilty in a court of law of espionage, perhaps even treason, and must take whatever punishment the court decides.

Assange and Wikileaks, however, are at worst in the position of recieving stolen goods and distributing them (without payment). Assange is not a U.S. citizen and Wikileaks is not a U.S.-based organisation - nor did they do the actual thieving. If they have committed a crime, it is a far lesser one.

Just as a thought experimement, imagine the actual thief of the data had gone direct to the UK's Guardian or Germany's Der Spiegel newspapers rather than to Wikileaks, who then brokered the data. Do you imagine for one moment that either newspaper wouldn't have published such a scoop? Would quite so many people be calling a newspaper a "terrorist organisation", calling for the use of force, accusing the paper of espionage? No, it would just be journalism as usually practised in places where the media are not entirely the loyal lapdogs of the government. Glenn Greenwald has more on that theme.

And remember:

 "U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone's death."

The problem is too many people vote [snark]

By Dave Anderson:

     I was driving back from a soccer game last night, and I needed to get this morning's weather report.  I flipped the radio to a local talk station (KDKA) which has weather on every ten minutes with eight minutes of wingnuts in between.  The local wingnut host was talking school reform with a Teabagger, and they had a very interesting solution to resolving all problems with public education in America.  Their plan would improve test scores, lower costs, and keep the undesirables out of the lily white rural and exurban districts both live in.

The solution was not vouchers.  It was not privatization.  It was not high stakes testing and zero-tolerance discipline policies.  Those are old hat.

Instead, the new solution was to ban any teachers and union officials, as well as their spouses, direct blood relatives, and their paperboys from voting in or running for any local school boards. 

Municipal elections are usually a contest between different real estate development interests and a few interested and highly motivated groups that benefit from a variety of public policy decisions.  Removing any teachers and their families and their union representatives from the democratic process means the uniosn can be crushed and the "right" people can make decisions that benefit only their property values. 

Amazing!

The Constitution as a Sacred Document

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The Conservatives and now the Tea Party have turned the Constitution into a sacred document - US Democracy a religion.  Over at the Lexington Blog at The Economist we are reminded that one of the guiding principles of the tea-party movement is based on a myth.

WOULDN�T it be splendid if the solutions to America�s problems could be
written down in a slim book no bigger than a passport that you could
slip into your breast pocket? That, more or less, is the big idea of the
tea-party movement, the grassroots mutiny against big government that
has mounted an internal takeover of the Republican Party and changed the
face of American politics.

Now a majority of the Tea Partiers have probably never read the constitution or the history of that document.  Here is the reality check.

When history is turned into scripture and men into deities, truth is the
victim. The framers were giants, visionaries and polymaths. But they
were also aristocrats, creatures of their time fearful of what they
considered the excessive democracy taking hold in the states in the
1780s. They did not believe that poor men, or any women, let alone
slaves, should have the vote. Many of their decisions, such as giving
every state two senators regardless of population, were the product not
of Olympian sagacity but of grubby power-struggles and
compromises�exactly the sort of backroom dealmaking, in fact, in which
today�s Congress excels and which is now so much out of favour with the
tea-partiers.

That back room dealing made the Constitution a less than perfect document 200 years ago.  In fact Jefferson didn't think it would survive for 50 years much less 200.  And of course there was no way the founders could anticipate the issues facing the country today - that's right, they weren't dieties.

Zakaria Says The Unsayable

By Steve Hynd

Oh, the right wing of Blogtopia is piiiissseeeddd. Fareed Zakaria, in what James Joyner rightly says is a "linkbaiting column", writes that "It's clear we over-reacted to 9/11".

Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden�s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda�s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.

I do not minimize Al Qaeda�s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities.

Joyner's post is the most thoughtful right-of-center response you'll read today. But despite the hyperventilating from those further right than James, Zakaria is correct. Yet he's touched the Third rail of US national security debate.

It should be pointed out that a "major attack on high-value targets" does not include Madrid 2004 or London 2005 despite the terrible loss of life in those attacks. They simply didn't create enough of an economic shock or enough awe at the choice of target in the way 9/11 did. It would, however, include the IRA bombings of the City of London in 1993 and 1994. Yet neither of those - nor any of the dozens of other attacks by groups like the IRA and ETA over the decades - occasioned a world-wide over-reaction like 9/11 did.

Nowadays, despite the ravings of the US right, Al Qaida is not who we are fighting in Afghanistan (unless you're willing to believe it takes 130,000 NATO troops to fight 50 Al Qaeda supermen) and was only ever a particularly virulent fraction of who we were fighting in Iraq. Yet as Zakaria points out, fear of Osama has fuelled a "homeland security" industry worth tens of billions of deficit dollars every year, a defense industry spending nearly a trillion every year, and has directly caused hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths. Not to mention the poisonous legacy of Abu Graib, Gitmo, torture and illegal rendition. Then there's the proliferation of intelligence agencies tripping over each other to provide reports no-one reads.

Zakaria writes:

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority, and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is a war without end. When do we declare victory? When do the emergency powers cease?

Conservatives are worried about the growing power of the state. Surely this usurpation is more worrisome than a few federal stimulus programs. When James Madison pondered this issue, he came to a simple conclusion: ..."No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war.�

The response has costs, in lives and in dollars and in impact upon free, civil, society that utterly outweigh the costs of the original "causus belli". How can we not call that an over-reaction?

The Right's strawman counter-argument is that there have been no more high value attacks because of all this. But it's a strawman because, as one of Joyner's commenters points out, "You can argue that you shouldn�t have been using a machine gun to kill a fly without disputing that the fly is indeed dead."

Somali TFG in more trouble

By Dave Anderson:

The Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Somalia is in more trouble than it normally is

Its baseline state is that it is a hollow joke with international recognition.  In Mogadishu, the capital, the TFG controls the Presidential palace, a couple of blocks around that building, and a few roads to the airport and the seaport in Mogadishu.  It maintains control of these areas on the basis of the guns and tanks of foreigners, as the African Union has deployed a couple of brigades of infantry to support the TFG.  The only thing that the TFG has going for it is the United Nations, the US and the rest of the West is willing to recognize it as the legitimate government of more than a few square miles in Mogadishu and thus they are willing to send some cash every now and then.  Beyond that, it has minimal local legitimacy as it is only able to stick around due to foreign soldiers, it has no turf, and it has minimal credibility with anyone who matters. 

And that is the TFG's baseline state.

One of the TFG's primary opponents is the Al-Shahab militia which is the radical wing of the Islamic Courts Union which once was able to be a de facto government and proto-state in Somalia under the Ethiopians invaded in 2006 at the urging of the US.  Al-Shahab has radicalized and has adapted some Al Quaeda franchise marks including the increased use of suicide bombers and medium enemy strikes such as the twin bombings in Uganda this summer.  

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Al-Shahab is on the offensive to further isolate, concentrate and then smash the TFG. 

A suicide strike by two bombers suspected to have belonged to an Al
Qaeda-linked group in Somalia killed
at least 32 people Tuesday, including six legislators from the
country's Western-funded parliament...

Tuesday's attack came the day after Al Shabab warned of a massive war
against "invaders" in Somalia, which appeared to be a reference to the
6,300 African Union (AU) peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi who are
protecting the government from collapse.

Al-Shahab's attacks mean TFG elites will either 'govern' from a comfortable hotel overseas, thus decreasing legitimacy even more, or bunker down in increasingly harder targets, sucking up more AU soldiers for personal security while also increasing their distance from the day to day street life of the capital.  Either one is a win for Al-Shahab. 

The TFG is a bad joke without a punchline.  Once they are either overthrown or more likely reduced to a side-show act at the Mogadishu airport, the United States and the rest of the West will need to come up with a strategy to deal with Al-Shahab. 

Supporting another Ethiopian invasion is a dumb idea as the Ethiopians don't want to destabilize Somalia any more at this time.  Continuing to recognize the TFG and sending in the Marines and the 82nd Airborne to seize Mogadishu is politically impossible and strategically counter-productive.  Coming to some type of arrangement with Al-Shahab and other anti-TFG groups on areas of common interest such as piracy suppression is a realistic and minimalist goal.  The US, and more importantly, the Obama administration won't do that for fear of a Freeper led gnashing of teeth and Fox News attacks, so we'll embrace an ineffective and hollow fiction instead. 

Pay-offs of bigotry

By Dave Anderson:

Eric Martin at Obsidian Wings notes the increasing spread of protests against the establishment of any mosque or Muslim community center in the United States. He correctly points out that the Republican Party (and some Democrats scared of shadows) are engaged in a systemic campaign of religious bigotry that is counter-productive if one assumes that a shared goal of all relevant political actors in the United States is to reduce the risk and harm of a far enemy terrorist strike. 

There is something bigger than that.  Something very ugly
spreading in this country - an anti-Muslim
bias
that is likely gaining succor from the anxiety that arises in tough
economic times.  But that is not all.  

The Republican Party.. aided by its major media apparatus, is
actively and deliberately whipping up bigotry, hate and anger - pitting
Americans against Americans - for little more than electoral gain...

First, using bigotry for electoral gain is an acceptable
practice. See, also, The Southern Strategy and Gay Marriage.

Conservatives gain electorally when the voting public believes that they are under threat and pressure.  Conservative candidates and parties gain vote share when problems are zero-sum; "I've got mine, and fuck you " or "freedom or death." Terror Management Theory predicts that people who believe that they are under siege will seek leaders who reinforce in-group cultural and political norms. That is a fancy way of saying conservative leadership. 

Ginnying up fear and bigotry is a political winner as a base mobilizer and environment shaper for conservative politicians and leadership.  It creates a group of nattering nabobs of dirty fucking hippies who are defending the constitution at the perceived cost of sacrificing lives of 'good Americans' and it increases the probability of non-assimilation of the targeted group, which marginally increases the long run probability of a successful strike.  A successful terrorist strike by brown people (as white people who shoot MDs are God-fearing Christians or just crazy people with a political message) reinforces the assault narrative. 

In a framework of purely electoral calculations, bigotry in the short/intermediate term is a winner for the Republican Party and its Whurlitzer. 

Long run taxes and growth BS

By Dave Anderson:

I am grabbing the following two images from Brad Delong, and he is getting the data from the Congressional Budget Office's fifty year fiscal projection.

The first image assumes that Congress behaves itself and actually follows current policy

 

Brad notes where the change is coming from:

These are the numbers if from now foreward the U.S. Congress sticks to
PAYGO: if everything that increases the deficit, either by boosting
spending or cutting taxes, is paid-for by savings elsewhere in the
budget. The estimated extended-baseline 50-year fiscal gap last summer
was 2.6% of GDP. Today it is 0.8% of GDP. That is a big swing to see in a
year....

Last, another piece of the PPACA: the excise tax on high-cost health
plans to make it painful and costly for insurance companies not to worry
about containing costs. This raises a lot of money by 2050 in CBOs
projection.

And now the Bad Congress estimate where reality be damned and nothing that is ever lobbied for is made to pay or lose their subsidy:

What is in this forecast?

Basically, all of the cost-saving and revenue-raising provisions of
the PPACA--of the Obama health care reform. The CBO's alternative fiscal
scenario assumes that all of these come to an end in 2020: that they
are then repealed or loophole-riddled so much that thereafter the growth
of federal medical spending resumes growing rapidly at the same rate
that they forecast last year.

In short, CBO is now saying to the Congress: we know you passed these
provisions--the Medicare reimbursement provision, the tax on high-cost
health insurance plans, the constraints on the growth of the subsidy
pool for working- and lower-middle-class Americans. We don't think that
they are going to last.

But in the good scenario, the size of government is 2 points of GDP smaller than in business as usual, and to paraphrase Friedman, the expenditure side of the balance sheet is the relevant metric for long term taxation expectations as eventually expenditures will equal taxation unless there is a massive default or inflation, which is just as bad or worse from the point of view of current decision making.

Arguments that businesses are not spending, and consumers, especially rich consumers, are not spending because they fear higher tax rates in the future due to Obama's domestic policies are bullshit.  Those policies dramatically reduced projected federal expenditures over the intermediate to long term.  And using a logic of perfect rationality, those policies 'should' marginally encourage spending today.  I don't buy perfect rationality as an operating assumption, but the models that the pundits are 'using' to make the claim that spending is depressed because of concern over higher taxes in thirty year incorporate that assumption with a rather low discount rate. 

Pro Business VS Pro Market

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I have always thought that the grassroots conservative/Tea Party movement was as great a threat to the DC establishment Republicans as it was to the Democrats.  It's beginning to look like I might have been right.  This from uber wingnut Dan Riehl:

Why The GOP Hates The Grassroots And Conservative Movement

Herein lies the dirty little secret of why the GOP is slow to actually empower the grassroots and conservative movement. It's also why, in some measure, we can no longer rely on the so called Beltway conservative establishment. Just like Republicans, they've come to rely on corporate money, allowing them to drive a large part of their agenda.

.........

The grassroots and conservative movement are genuine free marketers and capitalists. The beltway establish, GOP and otherwise, is corporatist. This is also one reason why you have so called Reagan Democrats. There are other factors, too. But as long as Republicans so often side with corporations over the working man and small businesses to some extent, Right-leaning more people-powered movements will distrust them. And it is all about the money for the GOP in the end.

He was responding to this by Timothy P. Carney in the Washington Examiner:

Republicans on energy: More pro-business than pro-market

Ethanol subsidies, oil drilling incentives, government insurance and loan guarantees for nuclear energy, natural gas subsidies: These proposals tend to have as many or more Republican advocates as Democratic advocates. Even worse, self-described free-market conservatives often rally for energy subsidies and claim it�s not a deviation from their principles.

Today, at the liberal environmentalist website Grist, blogger Dave Roberts takes to task Newt Gingrich.[Newt Gingrich isn�t pro-market, he�s pro-business] Roberts, with whom I often spar on the Interwebs, has a great (and depressing) argument and analysis of Gingrich�s defense of current energy subsidies and proposal for even more energy subsidies. This is the heart of the argument:

Gingrich and his acolyte defend these subsidies. Why? Says Gingrich, �a low-cost energy regime is essential to our country.�� Fossil-fuel subsidies don�t reduce costs, they shift costs. The burden is moved from energy companies to the public. The result is what we have today: energy that looks cheap because most of its costs are hidden from view.

Amen. Later on, Roberts sounds like me:

[Gingrich] is pro-business, or more precisely, pro-some-businesses, which is very different � the opposite, even � of pro-market. If you want to make sense of his various words and actions, no ideological or economic principle will help. It�s pure instrumentalism: the exercise of political influence in service of protecting energy incumbents.

Are they finally starting to recognize that what we have is not free market capitalism but plutocratic monopoly capitalism?  But do they recognize that it was the deregulation and gutting the antitrust laws by St. Ronnie Reagan that started this descent into plutocracy? Probably not yet.

Perspective

By Dave Anderson:

Let me steal most of a post on perspective from Thoreau.  He writes about the alleged Russian spy ring that was just broken up:

I can, however, note that these people were charged with crimes in a court of law. Now, charging people with crimes in an open court of law is perfectly fine if we�re merely talking about people accused of acting at the behest of a nuclear power with a global intelligence network, a navy and airforce, oil, natural resources with which they play politics with neighbors, and a $1.2 trillion GDP. Sure, they may have some resources behind them, but at least the threat is manageable. On the other hand, if we�re talking about a small network of guerrilla fighters whose leader lives in caves and whose fighters are armed with at best shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, well, you simply cannot charge them in an open court. The risks are far too great.

100 or fewer guys hiding in caves on the back-end of nowhere is not an existential threat. They should not be able to dictate American foreign and domestic policy unless we allow them to by collectively losing our shit together and refusing to get it back together.

Before the COINdinistas Start Spinning the UN Report...

By Derrick Crowe

You're going to hear a lot of crowing about the
reduction in NATO-caused civilian casualties in Afghanistan during the
last few months compared to the same time last year. (Read the full
report here
in PDF format.) This reduction took place in the context of a
massive spike in overall violence and a continually degrading security
environment in that country. Before the supporters of the
president's brutal, costly counterinsurgency strategy (referred to
without affection as "COINdinistas") get started this week, I want to
reiterate a
point I made a couple of months ago when the last round of silly,
disingenuous pro-counterinsurgency celebrations took place:

Selective Interpretation

COIN doctrine as interpreted by [COINdinistas] with the aid of the
stats [they] used asserts something like this: McChrystal and friends
reduce by 28 percent the number of civilians they kill, while the
Taliban increase the number they kill. The local population's animosity
builds toward the Taliban, triggering a shift in political support to
the U.S. and allies, a withdrawal of support for the Taliban and an
influx of intelligence to the counter-insurgents.

This interpretation, however, is a very academic exercise with major
blind spots as to the actual dynamic in Afghanistan and [and it's a
gross distortion of] the actual COIN doctrine described in the U.S.
Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual:

"Progress in building support for the [host nation]
government requires protecting the local populace. People who do now
believe they are secure from insurgent intimidation, coercion, and
reprisals will not risk overtly supporting COIN efforts. The populace
decides when it feels secure enough to support COIN efforts. (p. 179)"

"During any period of instability, people's primary interest is
physical security for themselves and their families. When [host nation]
forces fail to provide security or threaten the security of civilians,
the population is likely to seek security guarantees from insurgents,
militias, or other armed groups. This situation can feed support for an
insurgency. (p 98)"

"Counterinsurgents should not expect people to willingly provide
information if insurgents have the ability to violently intimidate
sources. (p. 120)"

Here's
Stanley McChrystal explicitly stating that COIN doctrine requires you
to protect the population from the insurgents.

Note that all of these statements deal with the importance not just
of the protection of civilians from killings by counterinsurgents, but the
protection of the people in general. Counterinsurgency doctrine
says that people aren't going to switch to your side if they think
they'll get killed for it, no matter how low you drop the rate at which
you cause civilian deaths. In other words, a drop in casualties caused
by U.S. and allied groups is not sufficient for the hoped-for dynamic
to take hold, according to COIN doctrine. It must be paired with an
increase in security from insurgent violence as well.

...

So, even if ... McChrystal and Co. were killing fewer civilians,
they still hadn't managed to increase security for civilians in
Afghanistan as measured by the total civilian deaths caused by the
parties to the conflict. ...Even if McChrystal proved he could drive
down civilian casualties when he puts his mind to it, he's also managed
to prove over the last year that he can't protect the population.

People who claim to actually believe in the efficacy of and the
necessity for actual counterinsurgency in Afghanistan need to start
screaming, right now, about what's going on in Afghanistan under General
McChrystal because their credibility is now unambiguously on the line.
...The problem is, though, that an honest reading of counterinsurgency
doctrine should have indicated that the system was already blinking red
in 2009, but for whatever reason people continued to sing the praises of
Saint Stanley McChrystal and took up gross distortions of COIN doctrine
to do so. Numerous prerequisites for success as articulated by COIN
doctrine remained absent and/or further degraded over 2009, including
host nation government legitimacy and security for the local population,
yet many writers focused on one particular statistic
(casualties caused by pro-government forces) because it let them tell
the story they wanted to tell.

If you see a person crowing about how the new U.N. reports shows
the "strategy is working" and we're on our way to victory, know that
you're looking at a disingenuous snake-oil salesman who's hoping you
can't read.