Month: December 2010

Fallows' tribute here.

It appears the Obama administration has thrown in the towel in trying to get Netanyahu to agree to a new moratorium on settlements in the West Bank. That presumably means none of the promised goodies either. Now what? Clinton is due to speak at Brookings on Friday, when the next step may be announced.

I favor an end to aid for Israel because a) Israel doesn't need it and b) we need the money and c) it doesn't seem sensible to me to keep rewarding an ally that refuses to offer minimal cooperation. I also favor the US laying out its own preferred solution, perhaps as a way to recognize a Palestinian state in the UN, whatever Netanyahu wants. He has had his chance to frame a deal. Now it's time for the US to assert its own interests and goals.

A reader writes:

Dude, you're killing me!  Keep it coming with the dog videos. I wrote you over 2 years ago when I was deployed, and as I write this, I find myself in Iraq yet again. I log-on to The Dish this morning at 4am (our time) and what do I see?  More cool/heartwarming/badass videos of dogs.  I love it … motivational as hell.  Totally made my day, man.

Take care.  And keep rocking the beard – I live vicariously through you, since we military guys can't have them!

In Israel, a disturbing new sign of radicalization:

A number of leading rabbis who signed on to a religious ruling to forbid renting homes to gentiles – a move particularly aimed against Arabs – defended their decision on Tuesday with the declaration that the land of Israel belongs to the Jews. Dozens of Israel's municipal chief rabbis signed on to the ruling, which comes just months after the chief rabbi of Safed initiated a call urging Jews to refrain from renting or selling apartments to non-Jews.

There is, mercifully, plenty of blowback from the Israeli left and center, including Netanyahu. But the logic of fundamentalism is as powerful within Judaism as it is within Christianity and Islam. And it's taking over in a way that makes politics and diplomacy impossible and religious war a theological necessity.

David Kurtz calls Obama's press conference today "a turning point if not in his Presidency then in how we understand and perceive him and his approach to politics":

What we saw and what I think we'll see borne out by subsequent events is Obama revealing in a very public way the choice he has made between the two political personas he has simultaneously inhabited throughout his candidacy and his presidency. He has tried to be both pragmatist and progressive savior. And even when he stopped trying to be the savior after he was elected, he was at a certain level content to let supporters continue to project that persona on to him.

Today, he very clearly and loudly said: that savior persona is not me. I am the pragmatist. And you know what, I don't have a whole lot of patience for the idealists. I share their ideals, but I don't share their approach and I'm not going to get bogged down in recriminations over not living up to some abstract ideal.

A reader writes:

Can you help me with this? The most hawkish, Christianist Republicans support Israel militarily. And they're the same people who are against DADT being repealed. Meanwhile, gays can serve openly in the Israeli military. So we're sending however many gazillion dollars to a country whose military (a) seems to be generally considered one of the better functioning in the known universe and (b) has gays/lesbians serving side-by-side with heterosexuals. Do I have that right?

I imagine you've covered this before, but I wanted to make sure. I'd love to hear one of the pro-DADT "pro-Israel" militarists explain themselves on this.

They don't because they can't.

James Joyner explains the charges:

[Julian] Assange had consensual sex with two women, unbeknownst to one another, who were friends. They had hurt feelings afterwards and confided to a female police officer that Assange had engaged in sex with one of them without a condom, having worn a condom the night before. In the case of the second woman, Assange’s condom broke but he continued to climax, anyway.

Jill Filipovic, a lawyer at Feministe, provides context:

Withdrawal of consent should be grounds for a rape charge (and it is, in Sweden) — if you consent to having sex with someone and part of the way through you say to stop and the person you’re having sex with continues to have sex with you against your wishes, that’s rape. That may not sound entirely familiar to Americans, since the United States has relatively regressive rape laws; in most states, there’s a requirement of force in order to prove rape, rather than just demonstrating lack of consent. Consent is more often used as a defense to a rape charge, and it’s hard to convict someone of rape based solely on non-consent. Some states, like New York, have rape laws on the books which include “no means no” provisions for intercourse — basically, if a reasonable person would have understood that the sex was not consensual, then that’s rape. It seems obvious enough, but those laws are not used nearly as often as forcible-rape laws; they aren’t on the books in many states, and they’re difficult to enforce even where they are.

Jill also sparked a vigorous debate in the comments section over the sexual politics surrounding the case and the media's reaction to it. Amy Davidson's two cents:

The amount I value WikiLeaks’s work (quite a bit) is not a factor in what I may come to think, when all is said and done, about the credibility of two women in Sweden—they are separate issues. Assange has denied the charges, and the story is, to say the least, complicated. But I’ll confess that I bristle (perhaps reflexively) when people talk about “real” as opposed to supposedly non-real rape. One’s politics, film-making abilities, or the sports team one plays for should not be a factor in deciding if one is innocent of sex-crime charges. Or in deciding that one is guilty: If the Swedish prosecution is distorted by politics or American pressure, that is very bad, too. But Assange doesn’t get a pass just for being Assange.

The Guardian is live-blogging. Money quote in reaction to Palin's latest tweet:

To be fair, Palin did say that Assange should be "pursued with the same urgency" as [Osama bin Laden]. So if she meant Assange should be "fruitlessly hunted for nine years without success," then yes, Assange did misquote her.

Ahem:

Federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations without getting a court order, a new document released under a government sunshine request shows.

The document, obtained by security researcher Christopher Soghoian, explains how so-called “Hotwatch” orders allow for real-time tracking of individuals in a criminal investigation via credit card companies, rental car agencies, calling cards, and even grocery store loyalty programs. The revelation sheds a little more light on the Justice Department’s increasing power and willingness to surveil Americans with little to no judicial or Congressional oversight.

A digital artist's ad reel from 2010, set to Empire Of The Sun's "Standing on the Shore":

Plenty™ Reel 2010 from Plenty on Vimeo.

Scott Horton interviews C. Bradley Thompson about his book, Neoconservatism: An Obiturary for an Idea. Thompson:

The single greatest threat to America, according to many neocons, is not communism or radical Islam but nihilism, and they see nihilism as the inevitable outcome of Enlightenment liberalism and America’s founding principles. The real problem with liberal-capitalist society for Strauss, Kristol, and Brooks is that individuals do not sacrifice themselves to anything higher than themselves and their petty self-interest. What America needs, therefore, is a two-step antidote for its cultural malaise: the inculcation of public virtue and the promotion of nationalism. The neocons seek to restore a public philosophy that promotes sacrifice as the great moral ideal and patriotism as the great political ideal.