Month: December 2011

A wave of suicide bombings hit goverment installations in Damascus earlier today, which the regime blamed on an alliance between al-Qaeda and the "Zio-American conspiracy." Maysaloon, after dimissing the daft official explanation, can't decide if the responsible culprit is one of Assad's cronies or an opposition group. Robin Yassin-Kassab is inclined towards the former view. Daniel Serwer looks to the consequences:

I share the natural inclination to disbelieve the regime, which has established for itself a clear and consistent record of lying about everything.  But it may not matter:  these bombings represent an enormous escalation of the level and kind of violence in Syria.  It will encourage both regime and protesters to ratchet up their rhetoric and intensify the physical conflict. While I might hope that will cause massive defections from the Syrian army, I think it far more likely it will reduce the numbers of people willing to go to the streets and improve the regime’s chances of repressing the demonstrations.  The regime will target Sunni Islamists.  Some of the Sunnis will respond by targeting Allawites, Christians and other regime loyalists.  From here it is easy to go in the direction of sectarian civil war, no matter who was responsible for this morning’s bombings.

Adding to Serwer's worries, human rights organization Avaaz has come out with a new, significantly higher death toll estimate of 6,200, about 10% of the murdered dying after being tortured. Mitchell Prothero examines how Assad may be spreading the horrror to Lebanon. These Homs residents chant for help from the security council:

This man's eyes were gouged out by Assad thugs:

What happened to this man appears to be equally brutal:

In the recent string of “Ask Andrew Anythings”, I’ve been wearing a t-shirt with a three-legged dog on it. You can’t see the three legs in most of the shots, but the dog is one I knew. He’s name was “Tiny Tim”, a pit-bull rescue saved by the designer John Bartlett. Aaron and I got to know him in Ptown. All of which is to say that John set up a charity in Tiny Tim’s name. Over to John:

TINY TIM RESCUE FUND from j bartlettny on Vimeo.

Jay Ulfelder explains:

It’s tempting to look at the distortion of Iraq’s first democratic experiment and conclude that the country’s sectarian divisions doom it to dictatorship and violence. In fact, the path Iraq has followed under al-Maliki’s leadership is utterly conventional. As I’ve noted before on this blog, most attempts at democracy are ended by a reassertion of authoritarian rule; in the past half-century, very few countries have managed to make democracy stick on their first try. Since the end of the Cold War, the most common path back to autocracy has been the creeping executive coup, whereby the incumbent party uses the levers of state authority to ensure its continuation in office. The winners of the elections that mark the start of a democratic episode usually don’t try to consolidate their advantage right away, however. Instead, these authoritarian tendencies usually creep in as new elections approach and threaten the incumbents with a loss of power. Comparatively speaking, then, Iraq’s first democratic experiment may have been a bit shorter than most, but the path it followed and end it met were utterly predictable from the start, and that predictability has nothing to do with Iraq’s long history of sectarian rivalry.

Irena L. Sargsyan examines the power of Shi'a sectarianism in the post-American Iraq. What we are seeing is further proof of the utopian insanity of a war I backed.

Another reader asks:

If all the GOP candidates are bigots, why pick one? I don’t think anyone is “picking Ron Paul as the core bigot” and arguing that we are, is lazy debating. The question is would I support someone who published those newsletters under his name? And the answer is no. I wouldn’t. And I won’t. Because I don’t have to.

I explained my philosophy on endorsements in my endorsement:

I try to make a decision – because it’s easy to pontificate, debate, counter and riff off the various eddies in the campaign, but in the end, it comes to a choice for all voters in the booth. Why should a blogger avoid that responsibility?

I could have spared myself a lot of trouble by not endorsing anyone. But I think that’s a cop-out. And notice what taking a stand does: it helps clarify matters by creating a fixed point around which debate can take place. And I hope we’ve been punctilious in airing every serious criticism and point as well as my own stance. But there’s another disconnect I see in the countless emails. An endorsement is not an eternal document of pure values; it’s a personal, prudential, and contingent assessment of various imperfect choices. I have to say that your pushback has been sobering and helpful and important. But it hasn’t changed my mind.

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

Ezra Klein wonders what will happen in 60 days when the payroll tax cut is set to expire again:

One possibility is that the Republicans decide that fighting the payroll tax cut is simply too much trouble. If that's their conclusion, then the next extension might pass easily. But another possibility is that House Republicans are furious at having been forced to buckle this time, and their takeaway is that, next time, they need a better strategy, and they need to make sure Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are on the same page. In that case, the next extension will be an even heavier lift.

By the same token, the lessons the Democrats' took matters, too. And that one seems easier to predict: don't spend too much time negotiating with Republicans. 

Henry Blodget:

[A]ll that resulted from the last month of bickering is that we agreed to waste another another two months of government time on absurd posturing and positioning and sound-biting… when we already know the outcome and when there are dozens of other more critical issues and problems for our government to deal with and solve.

Dave Weigel:

[Republicans] get one of their demands, and another chance. They'll have to eat some "Republicans in disarray" headlines for a few days, but reporters are heading home and offline, too. Democrats won the immediate fight. Republicans didn't lose too much in the war.

Major Garrett:

House Republicans have horrible politics squared. Now and two months from now — unless they figure out a way to balance the desire of taxpayers for a continuation of their payroll-tax cut against their desire to reduce the size and scope of government. That failed once and visibly so. Unless House Republicans reverse that trend, February could look like Groundhog Day. Except it won't be nearly as funny as Bill Murray's version.

Charles Krauthammer:

The minimal time horizon for business is the quarter — three months. What genius came up with two? U.S. businesses would have to budget for two-thirds of a one-quarter tax-holiday extension. As if this government has not already heaped enough regulatory impediments and mindless uncertainties upon business.

Stan Collender:

[T]he hypocrisy of Krauthammer and others about the value of a two-month extension is astounding. He took no such position when the House GOP insisted on short-term continuing resolutions that funded the government for weeks rather than months at a time, something that has to be extremely unsettling for any company working with the government and whose project depends on continuing appropriations. Krauthammer also didn't complain earlier this year when congressional Republicans insisted that the federal debt ceiling be raised in small amounts rather than at once, something that to this day makes the bond market nervous.

Jonathan Chait:

There is a debate about whether it is actually possible for a congressional party writ large to actually turn the public against it. Some research suggests that the public, except for strong partisans, pays little attention to politics and holds the president responsible for everything, so Republican misgovernance is liable to hurt Obama at least as much as it hurts Republicans. (This seemed to happen during the debt ceiling crisis, when both Obama and the congressional GOP lost public support.) Others suggest it isn’t so obvious this will hold up – that the Republicans have flouted public opinion more brazenly and dangerously than any previous congressional party.

Jim Fallows:

Who knows what this episode of overreach by the House Republicans means — for the political balance, and for press coverage. Right at this moment it feels at least slightly similar to Newt Gingrich's overreach and miscalculation with the government shutdown in 1995. 

Slightly. My own view is that perception of Obama has gone from his being weak to his being steady. One should never forget the emotional temperature. The president looks like an adult, and has the temperament to back it up. The House GOP – and the GOP candidates – look like moody adolescents, throwing hissy fits, and seemingly indifferent to real-life questions. In a period of great uncertainty, steadiness matters. And if the GOP continues on this course, the case for Obama as a stabilizer in this system becomes more appealing to independents.

A reader writes:

The thing is that Paul does in fact truck in neo-Confederate historical revisionism, and often directs people to the work of Thomas DiLorenzo, agreeing with his Lincoln-as-tyrant view of history. He discusses this with Tim Russert in the 2007 interview above. 

The assertion is plainly ridiculous. The idea of purchasing the slaves' freedom had been discussed for decades, and rejected. Also, seven states had already seceded by the time Lincoln took office so I don't know how any of that works.

Paul has insisted that the Civil Rights Act made race relations worse which is an absurdity of grand proportions. He voted against renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 2006. I realize he has ideological reasons for this, but none of that changes the fact that after Florida 2000 (and Ohio 2004 even if unrelated to the Voting Rights Act), and continuing voter suppression tactics, this is harmful to minorities. His being against the drug war is purely on federalist grounds. That he has recognized a narrative there to paint this positively from a race relations standpoint is fine. It's good politics. But it doesn't mean he has a lick of consideration for minority issues.

He was also a co-sponsor of the Marriage Protection Act. He is on record being against a constitutional amendment defining marriage, but he's all for protecting a clearly unconstitutional law from judicial review. A trick he's tried to pull with his Orwellian We the People Act (which is my real problem with his candidacy):

The Supreme Court of the United States and each Federal court– (1) shall not adjudicate– (A) any claim involving the laws, regulations, or policies of any State or unit of local government relating to the free exercise or establishment of religion; (B) any claim based upon the right of privacy, including any such claim related to any issue of sexual practices, orientation, or reproduction; or (C) any claim based upon equal protection of the laws to the extent such claim is based upon the right to marry without regard to sex or sexual orientation; and (2) shall not rely on any judicial decision involving any issue referred to in paragraph (1).

This in effect would allow individual states to violate the Establishment Clause, reinstate sodomy laws in spite of Lawrence v. Texas (against which Paul wrote an essay on Lewrockwell.com, complete with "gay rights" derisively in quotation marks ), and outlaw abortion. Paul is on record as not believing that the Bill of Rights applies to state laws, or that there is in fact a Constitutional right to privacy. (His opposition to the Patriot Act and FISA are based on the 4th and 5th Amendment.) While the racial stuff concerns me, it is this rejection of incorporation doctrine that frightens me. In a time where we can plainly see state legislatures going mad in passing anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-voting rights laws, to remove the redundancy of the federal court system from the equation is to allow the possibility of localized tyranny. And the fact that he himself may be against racial profiling is of no comfort. (I'd also point out that his criticism of opposition to Park51 was made purely on property rights grounds.)

Paul has also been one of several Congressmen to introduce the Sanctity of Life Act, which is essentially the federal version of the Mississippi personhood amendment that was on the ballot in November.

Yglesias likewise takes Paul to task for Civil War revisionism:

The policy [of buying all the slaves to avoid civil war that] Paul suggests was in fact the policy of the Lincoln administration. Abolitionists didn't like it because, precisely as Zenilman suggests, it seems morally wrong to financially reward slaveowners for participation in a gross moral crime. But this was the position of the initially dominant moderate wing of the Republican Party. It didn't happen because southerners rejected it. And southerners rejected it because — to play Captain Obvious for a minute — slavery was in part about naked financial self-interest but also in large part about an ideological commitment to racism and white supremacy.

Another reader makes related points about Paul's language on race:

You and others have claimed that Ron Paul has never said anything racist in public along the lines of the racist doggerel he published under his name in his infamous newsletter. You've noted the "absence of anything out of his own mouth that echoes them [the newsletter]."

I happened to come across the following Ron Paul quote:

In the Speaker’s Lobby, Paul describes the federal airline security system as an extra-constitutional affront to civil liberties, and thinks security should be handled by the private sector. Then he takes a rather un-presidential jab at the appearance of many TSA screeners, a workforce heavily populated by minorities and immigrants. “We quadrupled the TSA, you know, and hired more people who look more suspicious to me than most Americans who are getting checked,” he says. “Most of them are, well, you know, they just don’t look very American to me. If I’d have been looking, they look suspicious … I mean, a lot of them can’t even speak English, hardly. Not that I’m accusing them of anything, but it’s sort of ironic.”

Would you care to explain how this utterance does not "echo" the racist sentiment of his newsletters? It seems to me that if I can come across something like this very casually, that others are going to find plenty of things that are directly attributable to Paul that are, at the least, very dubious. I am very puzzled by your willingness to give Paul fairly deferential treatment on this point, particularly since it seems fairly probable that he has said plenty of things publicly that echo the racism of the newsletters.

Relatedly, TNR has rounded-up some of the most damning passages from the newsletters. You need to take all of this into consideration, when assessing a candidate. It seems clear to me that Paul has associated with people with some vile views, and profited from it. At best, that is reckless negligence. At worst, it is a blind eye to real ugliness. Neither interpretation flatters Paul. Against that, you have to weigh his character as it has revealed itself over three presidential campaigns, his opponents (whose extremism and bigotry do not need to be ferreted out), and his argument: that domestic liberty requires a drastic re-callibration of our military-industrial complex and an end to the drug war. Voting is not some kind of purist abstraction. Every candidate is flawed. The moment and the argument matter. Viewing it all together, I would not have a problem supporting Paul if I were caucusing in Iowa. And I think a victory will help enormously in reorienting the GOP away from its dangerous foreign policy belligerence.

One final thing: libertarianism, because it is about allowing people to do things, is easily conflated with the things it allows people to do. In that sense, it is always vulnerable to being regarded as indifferent to injustice – not because it is inherently indifferent to injustice (although it may often, in practice, be), but because it puts freedom first.

Much of the left and a great deal of the right has no interest in putting liberty before justice. But I do not believe that that philosophical position renders one a bigot.

 Frontrunners beware.

Alan I. Abramowitz says it's a myth:

When one party suffers a large number of incumbent defeats, the opposing party typically loses very few incumbents. Thus, there were eight elections between 1954 and 2010 in which at least 10 Democratic House incumbents were defeated. In those eight elections, 219 Democratic incumbents lost their seats. In those same elections, however, only 24 Republican incumbents lost their seats. Similarly, there were eight elections between 1954 and 2010 in which at least 10 Republican House incumbents were defeated. In those eight elections, 204 Republican incumbents lost their seats. In those same elections, however, only 19 Democratic incumbents lost their seats.

Joshuah Bearman reveals how the owner of the Baghdad Country Club, a bar in Baghdad's Green Zone, stocked the joint:

James himself often braved the deadly Route Irish to pick up shipments of spirits from Ahmed, a businessmen out at the airport who supplied him with most of his liquor. The road was a target for snipers and car bombs, resulting in trigger-happy U.S. military personnel and mercenaries. A typical private security detail cost basis, with a heavily armored airport pickup of one passenger, was five grand. James had done many such contracted Baghdad Airport trips himself. Now he was routinely making the drive in an unarmored vehicle, often alone. 

Spencer Ackerman interviews Bearman about what happened to the bar.