Month: February 2011

Robert Mackey is compiling an impressive collection of clips and news reports. The above video shows the scale of the demonstrations. He narrates another scene:

In his televised address on Tuesday, Bahrain's king asserted that his citizens had a right to peaceful demonstrations, as long as they were in accordance with the state's laws. Despite that statement, several video clips posted on YouTube in the past two days seem to show Bahrain's security forces attacking peaceful protesters. [One] video, uploaded to the Web on Monday, shows one such attack, even as protesters can be heard chanting "peaceful, peaceful," an echo of the refrain heard at demonstrations in Egypt.

View that video here. Mackey goes on to chronicle more disturbing images:

Late Monday night, Maryam Alkhawaja of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, posted a link on Twitter to a very distressing and graphic photograph of what she said was the father of the man killed during Monday's protests, embracing the dead body of his son, apparently in a hospital.

Equally distressing video of what appears to be the same scene was also posted on YouTube by a video blogger using the screen name StopTortureBH. The same channel also includes what appear to be interviews with wounded protesters in the hospital.

On Tuesday, BahrainRights Twitter feed reported that a second protester, Fadhel Ali AlMatrook, was "killed by bird shot used by police this morning at the funeral of the first martyr." In another update, which included the warning "GRAPHIC CONTENT," the rights group posted a link to a graphic photograph of the dead body of the second man showing what it called "Evidence of close range shooting" by the security forces.

Ed Bott says that display ads may be rendered useless thanks to Microsoft:

The more closely I look at the new Tracking Protection feature in Internet Explorer 9, the more astonished I am that it came from one of the world’s largest corporations.

If Internet Explorer 9 becomes widely adopted and if Tracking Protection is widely used—and those are two tricky assumptions—it has the potential to seriously disrupt the online advertising business. Microsoft made this feature widely available last week in the Release Candidate build of IE9 (if you missed it, here’s my review of the IE9 RC). Using the RC, it takes exactly two clicks to download a Tracking Protection List (TPL) and begin blocking third-party cookies, tracking pixels, web beacons, hit counters, analytics scripts, and other tools of the modern web designed to assemble a profile of your movements and activities on the web.

Oh, and it blocks ads, too.

James Joyner reacts:

Right now, some power users already block various ads and scripts to speed up their downloads and avoid the clutter of advertising. Additionally, some companies do the same thing, mostly as a security measure. If blocking of ads and tracking becomes the default mode of surfing the Web, though, the entire business model on which it’s currently built will collapse.

A reader writes:

I am fan of your writing and of how you usually approach public policy and political issues.  I have to say that I am really surprised that you seem to have blown your stack about the Obama budget.  A couple of things that I wanted to highlight:

1.  I find it pretty funny that you are taking Daniels so seriously considering that he was the Bush budget director under whom the Medicare part D passed and who was part of the cabal who put the wars off the books.  How is it possible to overlook that lack of seriousness regarding the federal budget?

2. It seems completely unlikely that if Obama had put out a plan in the budget for addressing entitlements that he would get anywhere at all.  He does not have credible partners on the other side of the aisle and does not have critical support from his own side.  What's the use of making those types of proposals if there is no chance for them to even be seriously debated by the body who needs to implement them? 

Obama is not a dumb man, and his closest ally in the Senate, Dick Durbin, has been charged to sit at the table with some Senators to see what might be possible to do in terms of addressing long term entitlement issues.  This seems to me to be completely consistent with Obama's way and with his strategic thinking.  Inserting himself in the discussion at this time basically makes it impossible for Congress to do anything serious.  That is just a fact.

I think that you are overreacting. I understand why that's the case and I feel very strongly that something needs to be done around entitlements in the long-run.  I would however refrain from calling the President names (weak, etc…).  I think that it makes you seem irrational and temperamental.

I would much rather you offer a plausible way forward where something could PRACTICALLY be accomplished on this topic that you so obviously care very much about.  What is the political reality and how do we get from here to where you want to be? That seems a more constructive use of valuable space on your blog.

Another writes:

I am similarly disappointed in the president’s lack of courage here, but I would have been SHOCKED if Obama had truly taken the axe to defense and entitlements. Republicans would have pounced ("weak on defense" "wants to kill your grandmother") and Democrats would have wailed and gnashed their teeth. It would have likely been the end of his presidency. We’ve seen how harsh truth-telling is rewarded in America (see Carter, James.)

Could he have done it anyway and been regarded as a hero by .1% of Americans espousing intellectually honest fiscal conservatism? Sure. And gotten his brains beaten in and seen his hard work undone by a Republican in 2012-16. If we’ve learned nothing else about Obama, it’s that, like it or not, he gets things done half-measure by half-measure. You are often the one to remind us of this.

This is still the most responsible budget in 10 years, despite its relative hollowness. One cannot turn an aircraft carrier around in a day, and one cannot slash and burn budgets, Tory-style, in American politics.

The Corner is having a heated debate on spending (yay!):

I know you know that the name of the game is entitlement reform, and the rules are simple: save the entitlements, save the world. Ignore them, and we’re Greece with better plumbing. But the president’s jokey budget does the latter, and the Republican response has been, if possible, even more disheartening… some of the selfsame tea-party heroes who raised hell over what amounts to one percent of the budget, are hemming and hawing on the Roadmap and entitlement reform in general — non-committal at best and cowardly at worst.

That's Dan Foster. And here's Ramesh Ponnuru, defending entitlement madness:

Did I miss the meeting where pronouncing the latest version of Ryan’s plan divinely inspired became a litmus test for conservatism? The notion that cutting entitlements is only slightly harder than cutting discretionary spending ignores polling, political history, and the practical judgment of most of the people who would actually pay the political costs. I’m not sure on what basis you could reach your conclusion. And finally, I doubt that trashing people for the politically difficult spending cuts they are trying to make is a way to encourage them to make more.

Foster's reply is what wins the debate:

Your bet is then that the Republicans can win a fight on discretionary spending against the Democrats and the manifold of constituencies who'll feel the impact of these cuts, and have enough amperage left to create a Republican victory in 2012 complete with a mandate to fix entitlements. My bet is that the chances of getting the full $100 billion in cuts into a joint CR, and the benefits that would accrue from doing so, are both sufficiently low that there is nothing recommending doing them instead of entitlement reform. Indeed, the real worry is that the Republicans will pass the $100 billion after a bloody battle and be even less inclined to take on entitlements. Having declared a hollow victory, they'll turn out a dead-letter 2012 budget that rolls back spending to 2008 or even 2006 levels but says just as much — that is, as little — as the president did today on the real deficit drivers. You bet that the Republicans can turn this mutual inaction into a winner in 2012. I'm skeptical.

I'm just depressed. But good for Foster.

Marc Lynch gave the president high marks, while Niall Ferguson failed him for reasons I find as baffling and solipsistic as Goldblog. Blake Hounshell's evaluation is mixed:

On the whole, the best we can say for the Obama team is that it didn't screw up too badly. Until it became obvious to all that Mubarak was going down, the United States looked as if it was still trying to thread the needle, balancing its strategic ties to the regime with its genuine desire to see the Egyptian people's aspirations fulfilled. In the end, those positions proved impossible to reconcile.

But that's how foreign policy works. There is no template; there is just prudence and timing. I think the real test is now: how can the US quietly help the Egyptian military and civil society organize successful elections? And I mean: quietly.

"Fiscal policy needs a hypothetical stress test, just like bank capital. Let's be optimistic and suppose that the deficit projections do hold, and that a debt ratio of 80% can be comfortably supported at full employment. What happens when we enter the next recession with debt at that level? Assume another really serious downturn, and another 30-odd percentage points of debt. Worried yet? That's why the problem won't wait another ten years, and why sort-of-stabilising at 80% won't do," – Clive Crook, who believes, as I do, that being president means occasionally leading the country away from a fiscal abyss.

Because our families will defend us. Because they know us:

The speech she mentions is seen here.

The House renewed controverial parts of The Patriot Act yesterday. On whether these provisions ought to have been approved, unsurprisingly, Julian Sanchez eviscerates the folks at Heritage – who defended these powers:

What evidence do the authors have that any of the three expiring authorities were "vital" in any of those cases? There just isn't any. Even if it were true, the authors would have no basis in the public record for the assertion. The evidence we do have, however, suggests just the opposite. Lone Wolf has never been used, so it certainly wasn't vital. FISA roving authority has been granted an average of 22 times per year since Patriot, and in many of those cases, investigators found they didn't end up needing to use it. And none of the reports I can recall reading on apprehended wannabe-terrorists suggested that they were practicing sophisticated countersurveillance tactics.

As Sanchez notes, "it's telling just how poorly the case against reform stands up to scrutiny in the rare instances when the law's defenders feel obliged to make an argument more sustained than 'Boo! Terrorists!'"

In his words:

Deriding the media's coverage of the budget, the president disputed the idea that the deficit commission's recommendations had been shelved, saying that "it still provides a framework for conversation." "You guys are pretty impatient," he told reporters. "The assumption is if it doesn't happen today, it's not going to happen."

I'd be happy if there were any signs of any plans to do it ever. But he insists he is not the one to make the first move:

“If you look at history of how these deals get done, typically it’s not because there’s an Obama plan out there. It's because Democrats and Republican are serious about dealing with [these issues] in a serious way. This is not a matter of you go first or I go first,” he said before describing a goal of “everybody … ultimately getting in that boat at the same time so it doesn’t tip over.”

Well, we'll see, won't we? From Gerry Seib:

That omission [of real debt reduction] is by design. Jacob Lew, Mr. Obama's budget director, said such proposals had a better chance in closed-doors talks with Republicans.