Month: April 2011

Mark Thompson reports that a government shutdown could impact pay for the troops:

Can you imagine being a young soldier some 7,000 miles from home, and being told by a top official of the U.S. government that your next paycheck is going to be short? Even tougher to imagine is making that phone call home to the spouse to share the news. "This is going to hurt my family really bad," one wife posted on Facebook. "My husband due to deploy next week, we wont be able to pay our bills properly cause of this."

Does the Tea Party fully understand the consequences of their brinkmanship?

Steve Myers retraces the steps from a fringe pastor burning a Koran to international outcry and violence:

It took just one college student to defeat a media blackout and move a story halfway around the globe within 24 hours. And yet it took another 11 days and two dozen bodies for the story to return to the community where it happened.

His battle with the religious doctrine of Grover Norquist gives me some hope for the fiscal future.

Christopher Pramuk bears witness to the struggle:

In Christian and Catholic circles, a strange kind of silence, an existential and theological loneliness, surrounds these more hidden deaths. Some silences are good, healthy and holy, pregnant with hope and expectation. Something new, something beautiful waits to be born here. The silence following our miscarriages, however, was nothing like this. It felt like loneliness, death, crucifixion. It seemed to mock my wife and me and our desire for life, our trust in its elemental goodness.

(Photo: Leon Neal/Getty.)

A very hefty amount of our reliance on foreign oil is due to Americans' attachment to cars. Apart from domestic drilling, and investment in electric cars and biofuels, there is little the American president can do to affect the price of gas, except propose a big increase in gas taxes, which makes a ton of sense but which the Congress plainly won't contemplate. But obviously what Americans can do by themselves is to buy more efficient cars, cut down on unnecessary travel, relocate to areas with good public transportation, and so on. The president was candid about this in public. And he gets this reaction:

High gas prices aren’t a bug, they’re a feature.

As if that's a bad thing.

This weak: a NBC/WSJ poll on the GOP 2012 nomination finds Donald Trump tied for second. Allahpundit is slightly befuddled:

I already wrote the “surprisingly strong showing by Trump!” post yesterday vis-a-vis New Hampshire so I’m not sure what’s left to say about this. It’s a national poll this time but the key elements are all the same. He does especially well among tea partiers, which may be due to his Birtherism, his name recognition, and/or his “Beltway outsider” status. And he leads everyone except Romney, which is as strong a signal as the base can send that they’re not real thrilled with their choices thus far.

Imagine a nominee who is a full-fledged birther. Then think of the Independent vote.

Scott Lucas calls this a “telling” exchange:

SEC. GATES: We had a very good meeting [with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia]. We met for about an hour and a half, one-on-one. It was an extremely cordial warm meeting. I think the relationship is in a good place. We talked about developments all over the region. We obviously talked about Iran…. Q. Did you talk about the Saudi troops in Bahrain? Did you raise that as an issue? SEC. GATES: No.

The inconsistency caused by Americans’ dependence on Saudi oil is intensifying. The more worrying possibility is that sucking up to the Saudis and acquiescing in the brutal Bahrainan crackdown on the majority Shiite population will put the US more squarely in the Sunni, rather than Shiite, camp. That has already caused major distress among Shiites, especially in Iraq (an upside of which may be Sadr’s insistence on getting rid of all American troops by the agreed-upon timeline). A recent update of the Bahraini crackdown:

Medecins sans Frontieres has criticised Bahrain’s security forces for “targeting of health facilities and workers”, turned the country’s largest health centre, the Salmaniya Medical Centre, into an “occupied hospital”. MSF claims, “Wounds are used to identify demonstrators, restricted access to health care is being used to deter people from protesting, and those who dare to seek treatment in health facilities are being arrested.

The NYT zooms out:

With Saudi troops now in the country to support King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, Bahrain has taken on the likeness of a police state. There have been mass arrests, mass firings of government workers, reports of torture and, on Sunday, the forced resignation of the top editor of the nation’s one independent newspaper.

Emergency laws give the security forces the right to search houses at will without a warrant and dissolve any organization, including legal political parties, deemed a danger to the state. Even two members of the national soccer team were arrested this week, despite apologizing on television for attending antigovernment rallies last month.

Dave Weigel explains the looming government shutdown and why for both Democrats and Republicans "there's no point in compromising before the very last second":

Democrats did not pass a budget in 2010, and this impasse would have been avoided if they had. It's also true that Democrats have blinked on enough spending measures that, as one GOP aide told me, there's a real path to an agreement. All that Republicans need to do is abandon some policy riders, like the bans on funding for Planned Parenthood and NPR, and voila—Democrats will cave. And that's where things look like they're headed, so it's important for Republicans to go into a deal sounding like the victims.

Talk of a shutdown gives new relevance to a Onion classic, "Cat Congress Mired In Sunbeam."

Michelle Goldberg thinks Bristol's abstinence campaign is backfiring:

A U.S. government report from last year found that a fifth of sexually active girls actually welcomed a pregnancy. Some girls, seeking love and a purpose in life, are getting pregnant.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Teenagers from poor families see that they have little besides parenthood to look forward to. Meanwhile, America has come to fetishize pregnancy to an unprecedented degree. Magazines obsessively track celebrity baby bumps. Paparazzi stalk famous toddlers. Reproduction has turned nobodies like Kate Gosselin and the girls on MTV’s Teen Mom into stars.

Palin is the apotheosis of this phenomenon. She might say that pregnancy is something to be avoided, but the story of her life speaks louder. If you’re cute and lucky, it says, getting pregnant can be a way to get paid lots of money for doing nothing at all.

(Photo illustration from The Daily Beast.)

George Will rightly diagnoses what is so terribly misguided about the Libya intervention. Nonetheless his attempt to equate Odyssey Dawn with the Carter administration's bid to rescue hostages in Iran seems absurdly far-fetched and nakedly partisan (although he's priceless in calling McCain and Butters Don Quixote and Sancho Panza respectively). Odyssey Dawn achieved its first objective – preventing a grotesque massacre in Benghazi – almost instantly. The real test came next. Since the rebels seem to be a truly hapless lot, and since Qaddafi is using all the leverage of asymmetric warfare to fight back – taking the fight to city streets where civilians could get killed by NATO forces trying to save civilians, using identical trucks as the rebels – it's perfectly possible Qaddafi will regain control of the entire country before too long.

Then what?