Month: August 2009

by Chris Bodenner

Mike Crowley spoke with Mitchell Reiss, a former NoKo negotiator under Bush and Clinton:

Reiss argued that the U.S. debate about North Korea ignores a fundamental truth: That Kim Jong Il's regime exists, in large part, in opposition to the United States, and thrives on a cycle of provocation of America followed by our humiliation in the form of appeasement (Bill Clinton's visit, photos of which were triumphally splashed all over North Korean media, is just the latest example.) Normalized relations, and a concession on the scale of dismantling the nuclear program, would run so fundamentally against the regime's identity that it could no longer exist.

[…] Reiss's analysis seems depressingly plausible. And if he's right, our best hope–short of a supremely ill-advised military confrontation–might be a coup from within.

by Patrick Appel

Yglesias responds to Frum:

But if health care reform is popular over the long run, the policy win will be more important than the immediate glee of watching "Obamacare" go down in flames.

by Chris Bodenner

The LA Times reports that the transparently false confessions of protesters are backfiring on the Iranian regime:

Not only has the government failed to silence the opposition or quell protests, including  one that erupted outside the court building as the proceedings were underway Saturday, analysts said, but it appears to be seriously damaging the international credibility of the Iranian judiciary and political system. […]

The West also allegedly provided "rioters" with Twitter, Facebook, Persian-language translation software and access to "advanced software" that enabled people to watch Internet videos despite low bandwidth, according to the indictment. But the awkward confessions by defendants, some held for weeks without access to counsel in solitary confinement wings of Iranian prisons, lacked specifics about such a plot.

Tehran Bureau's Muhammad Sahimi takes a closer look at the trials staged this weekend.

by Chris Bodenner

NSA Jim Jones cranks up the volume for the three American hikers who recently strayed into Iranian territory:

"We have sent strong messages that we would like these three young people released as soon as possible, and also others that they have in their custody as well," Jones told NBC's "Meet the Press." The Iranian government acknowledged on Sunday that it had the three Americans in its custody, he said. "These are innocent people. We want their families reunited, and we would like to have it done as quickly as possible," Jones said.

Like Josh and TPM, I now have only vague memories of the beginning of the Daily Dish. It began some time in the spring of 2000. I remember following the Condit affair with some passion and then the Gore-Bush party conventions. So I am now officially in my tenth year of daily blogging. The pace then was a dawdle compared to today, and although I now have two of the sharpest webster minds out there helping me – Chris and Patrick – it's grueling month after month being responsible for up to 300 posts a week. In the first few years, I always took all of August off in European fashion. Then I gave in to commercial and competitive pressure and went at it all year with only short breaks. The result, I'm afraid, is a risk of burn-out, as so many other bloggers have discovered.

I have every intention of burning on, not out, so while the Dish will continue aggressively covering the world with guest-bloggers and Chris and Patrick, and I'll be contributing some photo-blogging from the Cape and maybe a few notes from the books I'm reading, I'm taking the rest of August off to go off-grid entirely. I'll be checking personal emails, but I'm honestly trying not to read the web till Labor Day. God knows how successful I'll be, but living all the time in this stream of media consciousness is something human beings haven't much experience with. A little break is only prudent. No computer algorithm fills this blog. It all starts out somewhere and at some point is filtered through my frontal cortex, and that cortex can begin to feel like a bit in a drill after a while.

Here's my dream: I'll read books – books on paper, books I have been wanting to read (or re-read) for a long time and have been unable to absorb because of constant daily bloggery; and I'll sleep and nap; and spend time with my neglected husband and beagles; and try to get a little more perspective on the last couple of years. The spiritual life also suffers from living so much in the world so constantly. A little emptiness is what I yearn for.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining, and I'm not as down as I was a couple of weeks' back.

In this economy, a rewarding lucrative job is a miracle. And the evolving, dynamic media revolution at a time of global transformation has made my "work", in a word, exhilarating. We have great plans for the Dish ahead, and this year so far has broken every previous record for readership. But if you want to stay human, you need to take a breather at least once a year.

Tomorrow morning, Bob Wright will be back alongside Chris and Patrick. Bob's book just leapt up the NYT Bestseller list. And there will be more star guest-bloggers in the month ahead. The Dish will be very much al dente all August, so don't adjust your set.

See you soon. And have a beautiful summer. It has turned spectacular here on the Cape. The light has returned, along with warmth. We only have so many summers in our lives – and I've now had more than I ever expected. Which makes every one a little more precious. Carpe.

Problem for west is that after Iraq and various prisons they can not take high ground against Iran torture. – Oxfordgirl.

My thoughts here.

A shopping mall in Colorado Springs now features the Catholic Center, complete with Mass and Confessional.

"To take a Republican-sponsored healthcare provision that rather innocently and uncontroversially extends insurance coverage to those that want to create their own living wills and turn it into a declaration that the government will decide every five years whether or not you should be euthanized is something out of the Protocols, or out of Saddam's Iraq, or a mimicry of the worst and most stupid and most absurd of North Korean propaganda towards their own citizens. Likewise, the explicit instruction to protestors not to debate, but to aggressively attempt to shut down the meetings entirely — not normal…

It is, in short, a movement made up of the enfranchised and enabled; people who have gained every benefit from the politics of America and yet who feel in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones, the ones who have nothing left to lose, so rapidly is America falling away from them. It is rare to run across any movement so deeply angry — or more to the point, a movement which explicitly celebrates anger as the primary mission of their activism. They are not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs in whatever dark conspiracies have been peddled to them; they have in fact made it their publicly proclaimed mission to block any such explanations from even being attempted.

That seems the operative element of discourse, of late. It is angry beyond any objective rationale. It is actively hostile to fact. It finds the mere premise of debating a political argument to be deeply offensive.

And as a movement, it is large," – Hunter, Daily Kos.

(Hat tip: URLesque)