Month: December 2009

The view from Pakistan: what Taliban?

by Andrew Sprung

As Dish readers know, Joe Klein recently spotlighted the extreme nature of Pakistani mistrust of India and its importance in U.S. strategic calculus. Klein suggested that the key to regional stability may be "the diplomatic efforts to lower the temperature between Pakistan and India."

The depth Pakistani paranoia about India was on evidence last week in the wake of a series of terrorist bombings in Pakistan.  Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited Lahore after the bombings there and came out with this:

India's involvement in terror attacks in Pak 'regrettable': Nawaz

Lahore, Dec.9 (ANI): Demanding the government to table proof regarding India’s involvement in terror activities in the country, Pakistan Muslim League- Nawaz (PML-N) Nawaz Sharif has said that it is ‘regrettable’ if New Delhi is fanning extremisms inside the country.

Interacting with media persons after visiting the people injured in Monday’s bomb blast at the Moon market here, Sharif said Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has told him about India’s hand in terror attacks in Balochistan and other parts of Pakistan. 

“If India is involved, the government should make public proof of its involvement,” Sharif

The Christian Science Monitor adds some perspective:

According to security analyst Hassan Askari-Rizvi, the idea that India may be behind the terror attacks is "a very widely shared perception, but there's hardly any evidence to substantiate that. They [the militants] have attacked civilians in the past. I think the government consciously creates that confusion."

 "It is easy to communicate [this idea to] people who are already somehow convinced because of religious arguments that everyone is against Pakistan because we're the only Muslim nuclear power," says Mr. Askari-Rizvi. "This is a faith-based argument, not an argument based on reason."

That view is shared by Badar Alam, a senior editor at Herald magazine, a leading Pakistani monthly.

Both the intelligentsia and the government are behind the latest trend [of blaming India] because it absolves them of responsibility of doing anything to stop it," he says.

The Monitor further explores the range of Pakistani suspicions:

"What can one say about these people? May God guide them and show them the true path. Suicide bombings are not lslamic," says Zarina Ali, a housewife. But, she adds, India or America may be funding the militants.

Others go further still, like Ghulam Mustafa, a banker, who suggests that the Taliban "don't really exist" and that the bombers are "Indians in disguise."

All Due to Two Teens Having Sex

by Conor Friedersdorf

The Ann Arbor News reports on a young man's travails after being put on a sex offender registry for having sex at age seventeen with his fifteen year old girlfriend. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ordeal is ruining his life. Insofar as it caused him to miss graduating from high school and to have trouble getting a job, it also makes it more likely that he'll be a burden on society in the future. Unlike me, however, some of you may be unsympathetic to stories like this one. As one reader said in the comments of the newspaper story, "He's having problems because every step of the way he knew the rules and chose to not live by them." Said another, "Why are we now supposed to buy his sob story."

I'd ask these folks to turn there attention to the other victims of this man being on Michigan's sex offender registry: his neighbors. As the story notes, "The registry lists the charge for which someone was convicted, but doesn’t give background on a case." One mother in this young man's neighborhood found out about his conviction for "fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct with force or coercion," a charge that is misleading in itself since everyone stipulates that all acts with his girlfriend were consensual: the "coercion" was that she fell below the age of consent.

On learning there was a sex offender in her neighborhood, the woman became alarmed and contacted police.

She wrote that a sex offender of a “child under the age of 13” was living in front of the school.

“I can’t let my children play at this school anymore because he is always outside playing basketball, watching the kids that are playing,” she wrote. “How creepy, how disgusting…please help us get rid of him.”

So right there, you've got an anxious mother who is needlessly frightened for the safety of her children — it is unclear why she thought a 13 year old was involved — and the woman's kids, who are no longer allowed to play outside. It isn't unreasonable to imagine that this woman told a friend or the parents' of her children's playmates or her own parents about her concerns, but let's stick to what we know: that a woman and her two children are made worse off by the absurd way that Michigan runs its database of so-called sex offenders.

One wonders how many other concerned parents are similarly made worse off by this state of affairs.

Joe, A Fickle Lover

by Chris Bodenner

Evan McMorris-Santoro reports on Lieberman's tryst with the tea-partiers:

[They] arrived in Washington yesterday morning fired up about Lieberman, the man they thought might fulfill all their "kill the bill" fantasies with his refusal to sign on to the Democratic reform package as long as it contained a public option and other "socialist" programs. But by the afternoon, Lieberman was praising the Democratic bill and one tea partier had literally put an X through the "Stand With Joe" written on the sign he waved. … "That's just Joe taking care of Joe," Tom said of Lieberman's decision to stand with Democratic leaders in the Senate in favor of the reform bill. "He's just up here for himself."

Where Will The Push For Prison Reform Come From?, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

In response to Ross's point, which you seem to agree with, why the hell is his reason for pursuing prison reform couched in a purely politically calculated motive?  Why not change our policies because it's simply the right thing to do.  For a party that seems to love moralizing, it's infuriating that the vast majority of Republicans seem to have little problem with the morality of mass incarceration and its diffuse social and economic fallout.  The fact is that blacks and other racial minorities (and the poor, generally) are imprisoned at much higher rates per crime committed than are white and more upper-class citizens.  If all demographics of this nation were being consistently and equivalently punished for our legal infractions, we would not even be having this conversation.

I grew up in a small town in Georgia.  Many – at least half a dozen – of my (white, upper-middle class) friends got into trouble with the law during high school or college.  Alcohol and other drug charges, DUI, assault, vandalism; you know, the kind of stupid shit that young men often do.  For example, one of my friends got caught by the highway patrol with multiple doses of LSD and ecstasy; he's now an anesthesiologist.  These kids almost always got off with minimal punishment after a few crucial phone calls were placed.  It was a huge corruption of the legal system, and I've wondered since just how widespread the problem is, especially in small towns.  It was funny how these Republican parents were all about law and order until their children got into trouble.  See, they knew their child was really a good kid who had just temporarily gone astray.  The ultimate message was that prison time was for "the other."

It should happen simply because it is the right thing to do but is unlikely to happen until both parties see prison reform as in their political interest.

The Bill He Wanted

by Patrick Appel

Greenwald targets the President again, this time over health care reform:

Let's repeat that: [Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), said]  "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place."  Indeed it does.  There are rational, practical reasons why that might be so.  If you're interested in preserving and expanding political power, then, all other things being equal, it's better to have the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry on your side than opposed to you.  Or perhaps they calculated from the start that this was the best bill they could get.  The wisdom of that rationale can be debated, but depicting Obama as the impotent progressive victim here of recalcitrant, corrupt centrists is really too much to bear.

Greenwald then cites the White House threatening to not help House freshmen with re-election if they voted against the supplemental war spending bill to prove what the "White House can do when they actually care about pressuring someone to vote the way they want." This is false equivalency. The White House denies that they pressured freshmen on this issue, which is to be expected, but assuming that the Obama Administration did pressure freshmen congressmen in this manner, it doesn't prove that the Obama administration could have forced the Liebermans and Nelsons of the world to bend to its will. Freshman congressmen need to stay in the good graces of the White House and DNC much more than multi-term centrist senators. The White House might have calculated from the start that "this was the best bill they could get," but a large part of that calculation hinged upon how much they could strong arm centrist senators. That said, I don't doubt that this was a consideration:

The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party — rather than the GOP – will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

“One Of Texas’ Best Kept Secrets,” Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I'm a native Houstonian who recently moved to San Francisco for work (in the process, changing my Congressional representative from Ron Paul to Nancy Pelosi.) I grew up around NASA, went to school at Rice, and worked in downtown Houston, so I was looking forward to the new environment. Northern California! The hotbed of debate, and open-mindedness, and live-and-let-live mindsets!

Having spent about year here — in my experience, San Francisco is a gorgeous, historic, exciting city. But it is not an open-minded one.

For all the yuppie/hippie tension, there's really only one mindset, and you wear it like a uniform. Lighting up a cigarette at a party is frowned up. Suggesting that hey, maybe the free market can do things better than the federal government is heresy. And the insularity is shocking: New Yorkers love their city because they think it's the greatest in the world; people in San Francisco seem to love their city because they think everywhere else sucks.

This is not to rag on San Francisco — I really enjoy it overall — but I think I'd  undervalued how flexible Houstonians can be with their values. It wasn't that unusual that two of my best friends were a staunch Republican oil-baby and a gay hipster. Not that everyone in Houston agrees on everything — God, no — but paternalism and condescension were rarely part of the conversation the way it is here. Maybe it's a "Middle America" thing, or maybe for some reason living in a smoggy, flat city just teaches you cultural humility. Either way I'll enjoy spending my 20s here, but when it comes time to raise my kids, I'm definitely buying a house back in Houston.

Deal Or No Deal

by Patrick Appel

Bruce Bartlett makes an offer:

I think we should simply give up trying to redistribute income on the tax side and accept that it can only be done meaningfully on the spending side. This would require both the right and left to give up some of their pet ideas. The left would accept that the only purpose of the tax system is to raise revenue and the right would accept that a fairly extensive social welfare state is here to stay. In essence, conservatives would rise the revenue and liberals would spend it. That's more or less the way it works in Europe, where conservatives accepted the welfare state in return for having it financed conservatively through a value-added tax. Liberals accepted this regressive form of taxation in return for conservatives accepting the legitimacy and permanence of the welfare state.

Over the years, I have asked a number of liberal friends if they would take this deal. They would get a pot of net new government spending of some amount–say 1% of GDP–to spend any way they like to help the poor. But in return, they would have to let me have a low-rate, consumption-based tax system and I would agree to raise taxes enough to pay for the additional spending. It seems like a free lunch to me, but I've never found a liberal willing to even consider the deal. They are too wedded to maintaining steeply progressive tax rates on income as a matter of equity.