Month: February 2010

From Cohn's health care summit thumb-sucker:

Republicans seem to believe these problems are fundamentally unsolvable, at least in any manner they would find acceptable. And this explains the message Republicans delivered over and over again on Thursday: Rip up the bill and start over. That's not a plea for compromise. That's a demand for capitulation. And it frames the choice for Democrats pretty clearly. Either they will act alone, or they will not act at all.

Karen Tumulty's analysis is similar.

Yep, almost everyone hates it. But almost everyone hates every redesign ever done at first. I don’t like the shift in fonts from text to blockquote (font consistency is a bug of mine) or the decision to remove the latest posts from the various bloggers, or the free floating header which once had a clean boundary. Many of you agree:

I’m all for change but there’s too many different fonts in your new format. My head is usually spinning from your content, please don’t add to it w/ your layout.

Amen. The most common criticism:

I sadly miss the box where the latest post of each correspondent was shown, with the time of said post.  Having to go to each person’s site to see what they’ve written lately is cumbersome!!

I’m sure it will hurt their traffic too. But one core point of the redesign seems to be to drive as much traffic as possible to the Atlantic Wire. The old group-of-bloggers model seems to have been commercially junked. I don’t have any say in this, of course. Not everyone’s a grouch:

Great redesign! Not as great as an actual iPhone version (one can dream!), but a vast improvement on the previous version.

There is an iPhone app. The Dish is even on it. The rest of the site, according to the readers, is a little wobbly this morning:

Okay, you are not responsible (I’m not accusing, honest!), but the whole of the Atlantic website is broken. I’m only writing to you because you’re usually pretty bullish on technical bloggy mishaps, and I thought your righteous anger could be well used.

Links are broken, archives misplaced, the Dish has gone from revolution green to an uncharacteristically-sedate blue, the “keepers” are outdated, etc etc. I know it’s a redesign, but didn’t the tech people test out the new goods first?

Most of the glitches are now fixed. It’s hard to get everything right at once.

Scott Horton addresses yesterday's NYT editorial on the OPR report:

[T]he Times zeroes in on what strikes me as the fishiest part of the whole DOJ ethics escapade: the “disappearance” of John Yoo’s and Patrick Philbin’s emails. Emails at an institution like the Justice Department don’t just “disappear.” Someone deleted them. Moreover, for a deletion to be effective enough to avoid an investigation, extraordinary steps have to be taken. In a criminal investigation (as should have taken place), this would have been an act of criminal obstruction. What’s out there that they don’t want us to see?

He also attended today's Senate hearing. Yoo's and Philbin's emails could have been recovered, as Goldsmith's were. So why weren't they?

At a minimum, it appears that the Justice Department did not exert itself in any way to retrieve these emails. Is this because seniors at Justice, like Mukasey, Filip, and Margolis, disapproved of the OPR investigation and wanted to hamper it? It may well be that OPR was left to its own resources and collected emails only to the extent that lawyers within the department elected to cooperate with it. We know that Attorney General Ashcroft set a benchmark within the Department by refusing such cooperation, for instance. It may all really be a question of political will, not technological ability.

Daphne Eviatar was there as well.

Factcheck.org does its job.

Santiago, Chile, 3.58 pm

Jonathan replies. Read it yourself. My fundamental point was that he had an intellectual responsibility to account for the many factual untruths and wildly unsupported accusations in a rant he called "persuasive." He baldly refuses to do so:

Andrew asks me to go through Leon’s piece point by point. I’m not going to go through every line. I do think that the criticisms of his Middle East views, in general, were trenchant.

I did not ask him to go through the piece line by line. I asked him to go through it lie by lie. Look: I sympathize with his inability to do this. I didn't exactly expect Jon to refute Leon Wieseltier's demonstrated untruths in TNR. I worked there, after all. I know the limits of intellectual honesty at that place. It's just sad to see Chait kowtow so openly to them.

He also reiterates something untrue. He says that I favored "an American invasion of Israel followed by a NATO occupation of the border." No I didn't. Here's what I wrote:

My own view is moving toward supporting a direct American military imposition of a two-state solution, with NATO troops on the borders of the new states of Palestine and Israel. I'm sick of having a great power like the US being dictated to in the conduct of its own foreign policy by an ally that provides almost no real benefit to the US, and more and more costs.

How is any of this an "invasion of Israel"? I am saying that at some point, if the two parties cannot and will not come to terms, and if the conflict keeps imperiling the rest of us by inflaming a global religious war, then NATO could be involved in enforcing a two-state solution, guaranteeing security for the two states, and policing the border. Like a marriage counselor, we could act as enforcers of a restraining order. Because our security is increasingly threatened by this conflict, and the last decade has reinforced that view. Maybe I'm wrong; but I fear this is the case and see Israel's intransigence as affecting the lives of Londoners and New Yorkers as well as the inhabitants of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem. Qom and Tehran.

I'm not the first one to propose this. It would be an attempt to protect US security. I do not believe that the pulverization and blockade of Gaza and the daily humiliations of Palestinians on the West Bank in the face of growing numbers of Israeli settlers have nothing to with Islamism's growth. You have to live in a TNR bubble not to see it.

One more thing: what universe is Chait living in when he claims that what chunks of Israel have endured lately is anything like the London Blitz?

43,000 Londoners alone were killed in that event in a few months – let alone the carnage in Coventry and the rest of the country. My own family lived in houses that were assailed from the skies – and a million homes were demolished. In one day, in the last assault, 1,364 people were killed and 1,616 were seriously injured. My own mother as a child was knocked unconscious; my great aunt was blinded; my grandfather was permanently disabled. Is Chait seriously suggesting that unaimed, largely useless Qassam rockets from Gaza that killed around a score of Israelis, however indefensible, are anything like the terror that Londoners faced in 1940? Or the human toll?

You begin to realize that the sense of deranged beleaguerment many Israelis and some supporters of Israel feel when you read a usually sober and sharp writer like Chait make such absurd comparisons. I understand the source of the unfathomable trauma, but decades later it has become so irrational, so out of proportion to reality in Israel, that having a rational debate about this is impossible. But I will keep trying. I hope Jon will too.

Natch. And has reassured Israelis that he has the power to cut Obama's balls off if he even tries to pressure Israel to the right thing. Just in case you were wondering who runs US foreign policy with respect to Israel. McCain and Lieberman do, although that totally legal, absolutely wonderful, deeply persuasive lobby group called AIPAC has something to do with the Congress as well, my anti-Semitic sources tell me.

James Surowiecki doesn't believe compromise is possible on health care:

For Republicans, the current health-insurance system works reasonably well — in their minds, it’s a key part of what they kept referring to as “the best health-care system in the world” — and therefore whatever changes need to be should be small. The Republicans kept using the word “incremental” to describe their proposed changes, but this is really a red herring, in the sense that it implies that their ultimate goal is to dramatically revamp the current health-insurance system, and that they simply want to do so more slowly than Democrats. That’s not accurate: the Republicans are reasonably satisfied with what’s currently in place. The fact that tens of millions of Americans don’t have health insurance is not, in their mind, an issue that government should be trying to solve—at least not if it will cost any real money.

I agree: except it's not about the public money. Look what they were prepared to spend on Medicare D. It's about the votes. They have shown they don't really care about the debt; what they care about is power. Republicanism today is not about the limiting of government power but the wielding of it in as concentrated and unitary a fashion as possible. To accrue more power.

A reader writes:

The reason you see no strategy in the Dubai assassination is that you have bought into the MSM coverage, which portrayed it as a poorly handled goof that left the Mossad wide open. Many commentators said the assassination was beneath the Mossad – as if the Mossad had somehow forgotten their expertise and flubbed up.

Do you seriously believe this is the case? Where you see no strategy, I see grand strategy. Think about what the Israelis have done.

They have waltzed into Dubai, allowed themselves to be videotaped every which way — including while putting on costumes and wigs — killed a man, and waltzed right back out. They did it in plain sight. And they did it using British passports.

What does this say to Hamas, and Arab nation onlookers? It says that wherever you are, whatever you are doing, however many video cameras you may have watching you, we will find you, and we will kill you. And you will know who we are, and yet you will never find us. And MOST importantly: we are going to do it in as brazen a manner as possible.

We are even going to swipe the passports of some innocent British citizens, daring the West to criticize us. But we don’t care. We are going to kill you in such a manner that you will immediately be able to track us down – but we’ll already be gone. The Israelis didn’t use fake passports not because they didn’t have the technical expertise or the brains, but because they wanted to pull off their assassination in the most brazen, flagrant manner possible, while still allowing themselves to get away with it.

And just because the British and American pundits didn’t pick up on this, doesn’t mean Hamas didn’t get the point.

And surely any message to Hamas is really also a message to Iran. Is Netanyahu willing and able to launch a new war that will engulf the West over the wishes of the US president? I think he’s telling us the answer to that question.

(Photo: Gail Tibbon/AFP/Getty)