Month: January 2013

Gordon Adams criticizes America’s escalating involvement in Africa, shifting “from a focus on governance, health, and development to a deepening military engagement”:

Algeria and Mali, and the desperate-looking, one-dimensional focus on terrorists in the Maghreb, combined with the expanding appetite of U.S. Special Operators, suggest that we are entering another generation of misguided efforts to strengthen militaries and their security cousins at the expense of governance capacity and economic development in Africa. Each new “partner” with whom we are “building capacity” draws us more deeply into the internal politics of these countries, becoming a commitment, first with money and equipment, then training, then co-operation, then implicit political support.

And it’s all done through executive branch unilateralism. Meanwhile, news of a new US drone base in Niger is making the rounds:

[The base would] send a clear signal that the U.S. now considers North Africa to be a theater in the never-ending, non-declared war on terror (with lowercase letters).

Continue reading Neo-Imperial Creep Watch

Is it just me or are more people surprised by the snowballing impact of Obama’s re-election?

It’s not just the return to Clinton tax rates for the very wealthy; it’s a real cultural shift as well. In the last week, we have seen the Boy Scouts back off a national policy of excluding openly gay scouts and scout-masters (which means the Mormon hierarchy must have not made too big a fuss);we have Tom Tancredo almost smoking a joint in public (don’t make a bet with him on anything in the future); we have Sean Hannity’s ratings plummeting; we see gay couples included in the president’s comprehensive immigration reform; we have Limbaugh edging ever-so-slightly toward Rubio on immigration; and we have this somewhat astounding “favorable/unfavorable” chart for the president:

The ABC/Post poll has him at 60 percent favorable. Meanwhile, a plurality of Texans want an assault weapons ban. The ban on women in combat has been lifted, with little fuss. And here’s the latest poll of polls on Obamacare:

That’s the narrowest gap since 2009. A majority of Americans, moreover, now favor a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants – and a plurality of Republicans also agree. The forces against marriage equality are struggling to stay financially afloat; the NRA and AIPAC, two of the most toxic lobbies in Washington, have been off their game after the Newtown massacre and the Hagel nomination.

I’m sure the usual backlash is coming. I’m just as sure that honeymoons don’t last. But this doesn’t feel like a honeymoon; it seems to me that the size and composition of the electorate last November has shifted the mood and direction of the country – durably. The GOP now has to grapple with reality; and the president has to avoid any hint of hubris if he is to cement what is increasingly a lasting legacy.

Meep meep.

http://mediamatters.org/video/2013/01/29/limbaugh-backs-marco-rubios-immigration-plan-de/192443

When Rush agrees with Rubio on immigration reform … with extreme reluctance, cognitive dissonance, and obvious discomfort, it’s worth noting. Weigel writes up the exchange. It’s a rare example of reality-acceptance, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high. Allahpundit is impressed:

Can [Rubio] convince the most deeply skeptical members of his own party to at least keep an open mind about the sort of bill that made McCain’s “Maverick” label a curse word among conservatives? He’s doing pretty well so far, no? The real target audience here, I think, isn’t Rush’s audience but centrist Republicans and media types who are desperate to make the base more open to centrist policy ideas but completely confounded as to how to do it. Rubio’s message: I can do it. And maybe he’s right. Maybe each side’s ideological principles are basically only as sturdy as the support they get from charismatic leaders at the top.

Pareene thinks immigration reform is a long-shot:

I’m still pretty sure Republicans will play along on reform for a month or two before scuttling the entire deal over some exaggerated bit of Democratic “overreach.” Republicans want to be seen as supporting immigration reform more than they want actual immigration reform. If the end result here is that they get no immigration reform, but they do get points for trying, they will consider that a success.

But that won’t stop it being a failure. Do they realize just how completely Obama is wiping the floor with them right now? Or has Limbaugh absorbed this and adjusted a little? If he has, then, well, yes, we have a liberal Reagan on our hands, don’t we?

Suzy Khimm reviews the numbers:

[E]ven though the 2007 immigration bill ultimately failed, we’ve nevertheless hit nearly all of the targets that it established for increased border security—except for achieving absolute “operational control” of the border and mandatory detention of all border-crossers who’ve been apprehended. The 2007 bill sought to increase the number of Border Patrol agents to 20,000; in FY 2011, we hit 21,444 agents.

Bouie adds:

[T]here isn’t much more the administration can do with regards to border security. Far from more security, what we need is for Republicans to acknowledge the degree to which the administration has dedicated itself to protecting the border and ensuring safety for towns and cities that neighbor Mexico. If Republicans are going to make immigration reform contingent on the security of the border, we won’t be able to reach a compromise if they are unwilling to judge the current state of border security in a reality-based way. And the reality is that we don’t have a border security problem.

This aspect of Obama’s first term is under-reported, because the liberals are queasy about it and the conservatives cannot psychologically handle any conservative reform – like the individual mandate or healthcare insurance exchanges or tax cuts – that Obama has endorsed and implemented. But not only has Obama more than doubled border enforcers since the middle of the Bush years, we’re still hearing from the right that we need border security before any amnesty. We have about as much border security as we need right now – and the huge burdens required of legal immigrants with high skills remain a self-defeating national scandal. Then this actual piece of reality:

Although President Obama supports setting a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants, his administration deported a record 1.5 million of them in his first term. In addition, the latest data released by the government in recent days show that an unprecedented 409,849 people were deported for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

I wonder if the vast new numbers of border agents and the huge increase in deportations under Obama have ever been reported on Fox News.

(Chart from (pdf) cbp.gov)

“If Israel goes much further down the road I think it’s on and becomes more of a theocratic, totalitarian-style state, how could the liberal-minded American Jew support that?” – Jeffrey Goldberg, in a new profile of the writer by Paul Starobin.

Except maybe Conor Friedersdorf, who criticizes San Francisco’s impending ban on public nudity:

Talk to someone who has been to a nude beach, or read the Yelp reviews for spas where people are naked together, and you’ll keep coming across comments like this one:

Odd as it may sound, it’s really refreshing to spend an hour being naked amongst other naked women. I don’t spend a lot of time looking at nude female bodies aside from my own, so it’s a nice reminder that we’re all essentially the same, yet unique. By the time I leave, I’ve seen so much variety that I don’t even care that I have a mole on my butt.

Americans are bombarded with images of semi-clothed people all the time. It just happens that they’re all beautiful actors and actresses, magazine cover girls, television underwear models, and porn stars. The average person sees lots of naked bodies, but very little real variety. While that may be more aesthetically pleasant, it skewers our notion of what a normal human body looks like.

What’s funny about this to me is how quickly you can adjust. In Germany, for example, nude sunbathing in public parks is perfectly acceptable (on the three or four days a year the sun shines). When I first stumbled upon it, I was a little startled. Then almost immediately I was bored. Maybe it’s because I’m gay and am used to seeing other dudes naked and not getting all Saudi about it. But nude women? After a few, er unfamiliar sights, I went along with the general crowd and forgot about it soon enough.

One thing I love about America is that you can go shopping in San Francisco starkers and can’t get a drink in some rural counties. Anyone who wants to homogenize this country even a little more than is inevitable in the great American churn … has too much time on their hands. Leave the wangs alone. And learn to look elsewhere.

(Photo by Flickr user Torbakhopper)

A brief insight into one of Lindsey Graham’s greatest achievements: the Kafkaesque mockery of due process and judicial fairness that is now the trial of al Qaeda terror suspects. The judge does not even control the microphones: