Month: October 2011

Brad Scharlot has an epiphany.

By vetoing a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the crackdown. Paul Pillar thinks some blame rests with the West:

Even if a NATO military intervention in Syria is unlikely, a similar bait-and-switch seems in the making with sanctions. The vetoed resolution hints at sanctions if the Syrian regime does not change its behavior, but Western leaders (including President Obama, after much hullaballoo on this subject in Washington) are talking about changing the regime, not just changing behavior. So the failure this week at the Security Council is partly a price Western governments are paying for two mistakes. One is a disingenuous resolution (and equally disingenuous rhetoric) about their intentions in Libya, and another is confusion about the purpose of sanctions (a topic I have addressed previously, with reference not only to Syria but to other target countries such as Iran).

Dan Drezner reminds us that, until recently, Syria was sanctioning itself:

Although the Assad regime has essentially declared war on much the Syrian population, there is one coveted demographic that they have yet to alienate — the business elites in Aleppo and Damascus.  By and large the anti-Assad movement has yet to penetrate Syria's two largest cities.  If sanctions could be designed to target those sectors of the population in particular, then the Syrian regime might feel its "selectorate" slipping away, undermining the regime even further.  As it turns out, these kind of sanctions were imposed on Syria for a short spell.  What's surprising is that it was the Syrian government that imposed them.

Mark Katz demands war rather than sanctions. Joe Lieberman is, unsurprisingly, the first senator to publicly concur, reminding one of this.

"Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age. A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination," – Russell Kirk, "The Essence of Conservatism."

No, not an autobiography, an alternative to sperm banks:

[T]he couple balked at the prices—at least $2,000 for the sperm alone—and the fact that most donors were anonymous; they wanted their child to have the option to one day know his or her father. So in the summer of 2010, at home with their two dogs and three cats, Beth and Nicole typed these words into a search engine: “free sperm donor.”

A few clicks later, the couple slid into an online underground, a mishmash of personal ads, open forums, and members-only websites for women seeking sperm—and men giving it away. Most donors pledge to verify their health and relinquish parental rights, much like regular sperm-bank donors. But unlike their mainstream counterparts, these men don’t get paid. They’re also willing to reveal their identities and allow any future offspring to contact them. Many of the men say they do it out of altruism, but some also talk unabashedly of kinky sex and spreading their gene pool.

J. Bryan Lowder fears these donors could get stuck with child support payments.

Joshua Goldstein is outraged by the proposed cuts:

These cuts are founded on three pillars of ignorance — misunderstanding of the amount of money, misunderstanding of the effects of the spending, and misunderstanding about the extent of poverty in the world and its impact.

Walter Russell Mead blames a disconnect between the public and policy elite. When you need to cut spending as deeply as we do, I truly don't see a problem in gutting foreign aid. It won't solve the problem; but it helps a teensy bit.

(Chart via Ezra.)

Mitchell Plitnick diagnoses it:

Sometimes, Americans follow Israel’s lead. Sometimes we don’t. It’s part of a dynamic many Israeli friends of mine, across the political spectrum, have expressed exasperation about: Americans being more “Israeli” than Israelis. It’s a grossly fetishistic exercise, one that says more about projecting American religious-political desires onto Israelis, than it does, necessarily, about what Israelis might want and think, by themselves.

It is, from an outsider's perspective, a strange phenomenon. It took a while in America for me to grasp why the media and political world was fixated on a tiny country with almost 8 million people. No conspiracy – just a fervent ethnic and religious solidarity that sometimes borders on self-parody. The US Congress is integral to this lop-sided near-fusion of the US and an increasingly problematic ally in a fast-changing region. Plitnick notes the following from the NYT:

The Republicans also attach conditions on aid to Pakistan, Egypt and the Palestinians, suspending the latter entirely if the Palestinians succeed in winning recognition of statehood at the United Nations. However, one of the largest portions of foreign aid — more than $3 billion for Israel — is left untouched in both the House and Senate versions, showing that, even in times of austerity, some spending is inviolable.

You can slash Medicare but not $3 billion in aid to a wealthy ally. Plitnick calls it like it is:

Does anyone believe that most Americans think that the country that is always near the top of the list of recipients of US foreign aid, year after year, which is a regional superpower, has a Western standard of living, which is among the countries least affected by the global downturn, should get the lion’s share of American aid money? What about other deserving countries, in worse economic circumstances than Israel? What about unemployed Americans losing their social assistance benefits?

I can’t imagine that most Americans, Republican, Democrat or self-identified independents, would support such an idea. But … we now have a Congress that, due to political opportunism, shows more loyalty to the Israeli right than to the United States.

I think that is now indisputable. Just as indisputable as the Greater Israel lobby's success in protecting its accelerating colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Unless we can resolve this issue, America's influence in the Middle East and beyond will suffer irreparable damage.

(Photo: U.S. conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck hosts a rally near the Western Wall, on August 24, 2011 in Jerusalem's Old City, Israel. The event, under the slogan 'Restoring Courage', was attended by hundreds of his evangelical Christian supporters, whilst many who oppose his right-wing views protested outside. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

Over the last few days you’ve been posting a fair number of emails from people with opinions about the Occupy Wall Street protests, but nothing, so far as I can tell, from anyone who has been spending actual time there. I’m not any kind of authority, but I’ve been going down to Zucotti Park on lunch breaks and after work and during the evenings, whenever I can, and I wanted to respond to your reader who thinks the whole thing is a culture-jamming prank orchestrated by AdBusters.

First: yes, the idea came from AdBusters, but nobody who had actually been to Zucotti Park could ever think that AdBusters is orchestrating anything. This protest is being run by the people who are there. Its concerns emerge organically from those who participate at its general assembly, and as the protest has grown and grown—remember your reader who said this would all be forgotten in two weeks?—they’ve been taking more advice and assistance from experienced organizers. AdBusters hasn’t put its name on anything: no signs, no “brought to you by” messages, no nothing. If a reader wants to be enraged by a particular magazine, that’s his or her choice, but just because you’ve seen a few issues of a magazine doesn’t mean you get to pretend like you know what’s going on in lower Manhattan.

Second: the idea that nobody knows that these people are protesting about is willfully ignorant. The protesters are there because they believe that the financial institutions that comprise “Wall Street” exercise too much power in the country’s political and social life. That’s it. That’s what the message is. The reason this seems so obvious is because it is so obvious. “But where are their proposals?” I have heard people complain. “Do they want to put a tax on financial transactions, or do they just want to raise the income tax for wealthy people?” Are you kidding? Technocrats don’t make for good activists. Technocrats should be in Congress, or working at think tanks, or helping Congressmen to craft policy. Protests should do three things: they should express anger, through marches and targeted civil disobedience, at a particular political or social situation. They should give people the opportunity to see that other people, even people different from themselves, share that anger. And they should provide a vision of how life would be better if the world were different. Occupy Wall Street is doing all three of those things.

Finally: I’ve heard a lot of people complain that those currently occupying Zucotti Park are “white college kids” with “dreadlocks” or “safety pins through their noses,” and that this is alienating or disgusting to people who wear button-down shirts and work full-time jobs. Since I’m someone who wears button-down shirts and works a full-time job, this unease is something I’m familiar with. But you know what? You don’t pick protests like you pick restaurants or nightclubs. Nobody wants to read your Yelp review of Occupy Wall Street. The great thing about protest activism is that it becomes meaningful once you stop thinking of yourself as a consumer and start thinking of yourself as a participating citizen. So if you have a problem with all of the ripped jeans and Birkenstocks that you’ve been seeing wandering around Zucotti Park, get your buttoned-down ass on a train or subway, and go there yourself, and start talking to people. Invite your buttoned-down friends. You’ll find, first of all, that the protest begins to look more like something you’re comfortable with. And you’ll find, also, that those people who seem so foreign or naïve to you on television actually want the same things that you want, and that it’s easier to get those things once you get over yourself and start making noise about it.

Pivoting off of Maggie Haberman’s reporting, Ben Smith explains why Romney’s sinister attack on Perry’s immigration record is so politically risky for the GOP in the long-run:

I participated in a panel on the topic of the Hispanic vote … and was struck by two items in the remarks by the pollsters and Latino politics on the panel: That immigration isn’t the top issue for Hispanic voters (“I don’t care about immigration,” Univision executive Chiqui Cartagena announced), and that Hispanic voters are intensely sensitive to rhetoric — more, in the view of some, than policy — that comes off as bigoted or as playing to bigots.

Don’t worry. He’s faking it. He’ll be learning Spanish soon enough.