Month: June 2010

A useful reminder of the damage that BP's negligence has done. And here's a computer model of what your summer could look like if you live on the East coast:

I'm on Bill Maher's Real Time tonight on HBO.

To read Charles Krauthammer today is to enter a twilight zone of an alternate reality. A country permanently occupying and colonizing a neighboring region, and treating its original inhabitants as dangerous interlopers, is the victim. An elite commando unit attacking a ship carrying toys and wheelchairs in the hours before dawn are those we should feel pity for. A country with 150 nuclear warheads and the strongest military in its region, the victor in every conventional war it has always fought, is somehow also always fighting for its very existence. A country backed by the sole superpower, supplied with aid by huge majorities in the US Congress, is facing extinction. Self-defense requires not civilly disabling and inspecting the cargo of an unarmed ship but raiding it at dawn and killing nine and injuring dozens. Basic human revulsion at a military that can kill over a thousand people – including scores of women and children in a trapped, impoverished enclave – can only be a function of anti-Semitism. A territory that is being systematically populated with Israelis in illegal settlements in contravention of the Geneva Conventions is merely a "buffer zone". You need to colonize buffer zones?

Invasion and occupation of neighboring countries is "forward defense". And asking that a two-state solution be moved forward by freezing illegal settlement construction and allowing a blockade that, while interdicting arms, doesn't seek to kill civilians and restrict the import of basic necessities is to deprive a country with 150 nuclear warheads of any legitimate form of self-defense.

This is a form of derangement, or of such a passionate commitment to a foreign country that any and all normal moral rules or even basic fairness are jettisoned. And you will notice one thing as well: no regret whatsoever for the loss of human life, just as the hideous murder of so many civilians in the Gaza war had to be the responsibility of the victims, not the attackers. There is no sense of the human here; just the tribe.

Something has been wrong here for a very long time, and now it is inescapable. Until the discourse is rescued from the victims of Israel Derangement Syndrome, Israel and America will slowly be drawn into wars they cannot ultimately win, lose every other ally they ever had, and embolden and fortify the very Islamist forces we are seeking to defuse and defeat. 

Iran's Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, the ultraconservative spiritual adviser to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seems to be angling to replace Khamenei.

Rob Young doubts it:

The EPA directly questioned the proposed berm’s effectiveness, suggesting there is no evidence that the project will stop oil from entering the marshes and estuaries because it is constructed only in front of the barrier islands and will not block the inlets and deepwater passes. In addition, EPA questioned whether a project that will take at least 6 to 9 months to build would be completed in time to have any impact on the spill.

As a coastal geologist who studies coastal storm impacts, it is clear to me that this berm, located just offshore of the barrier islands, will also be extremely susceptible to erosion. Indeed, it will begin to erode immediately upon completion. Even a simple understanding of coastal processes leads one to conclude that this sandy berm could disappear within a few months.

Is this just Jindal posturing? Or a desperate attempt to do something?

Pro-Israel fanatic and torture supporter Alan Dershowitz coins a new term for unarmed 19 year-olds with four bullets fired at close range into his skull. Djerejian also notes the following about the pre-dawn raid and the use of "paint-ball" bullets – they are usually designed, per the FT, "to bruise and mark suspects for later arrest”.

Why else suck up to the likely next governor of Iowa?

Ambinder mediates on the difficulty of reporting the truth:

If you assume that you know everything, nothing will satisfy you. When a journalist makes a judgment based on experience and on seeking out as many different sources of information as possible, if you are predisposed to agree with the outcome, then you will not complain of bias. If you disagree with the judgment, you will find some way to attribute it to blatant bias, or to a pack mentality, or to a savvy village, or whatever.

Earlier in the day, he answered those readers who charge him with stenography:

I've found that I enjoy trying to figure out the difference between what the Obama administration is saying about what it is doing and why it is actually doing what it is doing. So I often write posts that explain what the powers that be are trying to accomplish even if — especially if — they're presenting a different face to the public. For this I am often accused of stenography. If pointing out complicated motivations and explaining policy choices is automatically assumed by the reader to be a validation of said explanations and policies, then, well, I'm one hell of a stenographer. Occasionally, my prose trips me up, but more often than not, the small minority of readers who don't get it simply don't get it. They're the ones who will e-mail, write and comment, so they're the ones I try to engage with, usually fruitlessly.

TNC looks at the lessons drawn from Davis losing the black vote to a white opponent:

The point isn't that black voters are never tribal, it's that they are no more tribal than any other group of voters. Indeed, by necessity, they are often less tribal. Everyone remembers Barack Obama sweeping up the black vote against Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary. No one remembers John Kerry doing the same to Al Sharpton in 2004.

He later reflects on Davis's announcement that he's leaving politics for good.

Leonhardt passes judgment. He digs further into the details here. Felix Salmon eyes the unemployment rate:

Expect unemployment to remain over 9% through the midterm elections — compared to a rate of just 6.9% in November 2008, when Obama was elected. It’s that number, rather than anything going on right now in the Gulf of Mexico, which is really “Obama’s Katrina”.

Calculated Risk provides the graph above. On how to read it:

Notice that the 1990 and 2001 recessions were followed by jobless recoveries – and the eventual job recovery was gradual. In earlier recessions the recovery was somewhat similar and a little faster than the decline (somewhat symmetrical).

The dotted line shows the impact of Census hiring. In May, there were 564,000 temporary 2010 Census workers on the payroll. Starting in June, the number of Census workers will decline – and the two red lines will meet later this year.