Month: September 2013

The line between Syria’s moderate and extremist rebels is becoming increasingly blurry. Rania Abouzeid digests the news:

Western and Arab capitals are all looking for friends among the so-called moderate elements. And yet the Free Syrian Army command is only as strong as its international backers allow it to be. Within the rebellion, strength comes from receiving weapons and ammunition that can be distributed to the men on the ground, to build credibility and leverage. But the current situation has emerged because the supplies either never came or were inconsistent and small, prompting fighters to buy weapons inside Syria, smuggle them from abroad, or manufacture their own.

They also turned to more hardcore Islamist elements, who—with their superior funding, supplies, and discipline—have been pivotal in securing many rebel victories. This contributed to a vicious circle: the United States has long expressed fears that any weapons it might send to Syria’s rebels will end up in the hands of extremists; the lack of weapons shipments has made the extremists stronger.

Fisher wonders whether arming Syrian moderates is now futile:

One line you often read, in stories articulating the United States’s many unattractive options in Syria, is that there may or may not have been a window for a Libya-style intervention early on in the conflict, but that we’ll never really know. We may now be at a similar point with the window for championing a branch of the opposition.

Larison weighs in:

Because the U.S. won’t and indeed legally cannot arm members of this “Islamist Alliance” on account of the involvement of Jabhat al-Nusra, that leaves the administration with the option of arming the weakest part of the weaker side in a civil war. That would seem to serve no purpose except to add more weapons to the mix, and there is no guarantee that any U.S.-provided weapons would not be lost to other groups that the U.S. has no wish to arm. That has always been true, but now it is impossible for anyone to miss.

A reader quotes me:

Nonetheless, we shouldn’t get carried away and argue that the debt ceiling has never been used as political blackmail.  In fact, the Democrats were the first to play this game against against Nixon.

I strongly disagree with that statement. I don’t know if you are missing the point of today’s showdown or are intentionally trying to make a limited, although irrelevant, point that past debt ceiling fights have occurred.  But nothing like what Republicans are proposing now has ever happened before, and it is dangerous for folks to try to equivocate and obscure this new, extremely dangerous threat.

Yes, there have been isolated examples where an opposing party that controlled both houses of Congress have attempted to actually pass and attach bills to a debt ceiling increase to pressure a president not to veto such legislation (like the Nixon example or another example involving gasoline taxes under Carter), or where a majority Congressional party tried to rein in future spending as a condition of increasing the debt ceiling (such as Republicans refusing to provide the votes needed to raise the debt ceiling under Republican Eisenhower).

While I don’t agree with those past examples of using the debt ceiling as leverage, they do at least involve an inter-branch power struggle between the Legislative branch (both House and Senate) and the Executive branch on a limited issue, and where the recalcitrant Congressional party had the votes to pass its demand through Congress.

What Republicans propose now differs wildly in kind, not degree.

Republicans today cannot attach to a debt ceiling increase a bill that passed both the House and Senate. Indeed, Republicans have not even shown that most of their demands could even pass the Republican House.  And Republicans can’t claim that their votes alone are necessary to pass a debt ceiling bill. Rather, absent a Republican Senate filibuster and a faux Republican “majority of the majority” House rule, a clean debt ceiling would pass easily.

Instead, what we have here today is a new concept that a rump minority – using pure obstruction alone – can force enactment of its own agenda through a threat of catastrophic economic retaliation.  Also, with a $16 trillion debt, this would be an annual extortion threat that far surpasses the value of majority electoral success.  As Matt Yglesias aptly puts it: “Republicans are essentially asking for an end to constitutional government in the United States and its replacement by a wholly novel system.”

In short, contrary to your statement, we have never before seen a minority party openly and aggressively threatening to destroy the full faith and credit of the U.S. unless its agenda was enacted – much less right after that specific agenda was defeated in a national election.

(Cartoon via Canimation)

Not long after Jon Hamm’s beard, we present Critique My Dick Pic. It is, as Katie J.M. Baker puts it, “exactly what it sounds like” – so don’t click if you’re worried about nannying corporate overlords. My main objection, to be honest, is using “critique” as a verb. From the mission statement:

this is a tumblr with a simple premise: send me your dick pics, & i’ll critique them with love.

‘with love’ is an important addendum. i’m never going to shame you about the size of your dick or what it looks like; i’m not about that life. i will, however, be ruthlessly honest when it comes to things like angles, lighting & general tone. i’m trying to help you improve, because in all likelihood your dick pics are artless & dull.

We really are in the age of the selfie. After just two days in existence, there’s a backlog of eight weeks’ worth of dicks. Anthony Weiner was just an early adopter. For future politicians and public figures, acknowledging their youthful selfies will, I suspect, be a little like boomers admitting they once smoked pot. My fave critique of a somewhat ambitious dude:

it’s clear that you had one goal in mind when taking this picture and that was to demonstrate that your dick is roughly the size of an empty v bottle. congratulations, i guess, because you achieved that. you achieved very little else.

From the critique of a submitter who labeled his own pic “Lol real small”:

i like the fact that you are holding your dick in this picture. too often dick pics are clinical affairs with the sole aim of showcasing size, and this comes at the expense of eroticism. when you hold your dick in your picture, you do two things:

you obscure some of it, which is sexy; and
you remind me that your dick is a sexual organ, and that touching it makes you feel good.

i’m also feeling the fact that you’ve left your boxer shorts on in this pic; it adds a bit of subtlety and dick pics could always use that.

thank you for being the inaugural dick pic of critiquemydickpic.tumblr.com. your dick pic gets a B.

I want to see an F.

The summary for the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report can be read here (pdf). Richard Schiffman asked various experts for a headline that captures the new report:

Ted Scambos, a glaciologist and head scientist of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) based in Boulder would lead with: “IPCC 2013, Similar Forecasts, Better Certainty.” While the report, which is issued every six to seven years, offers no radically new or alarming news, Scambos told me, it puts an exclamation point on what we already know, and refines our evolving understanding of global warming. …

It is now 95 percent likely that human spewed heat-trapping gases — rather than natural variability — are the main cause of climate change, according to today’s report. In 2007 the IPCC’s confidence level was 90 percent, and in 2001 it was 66 percent, and just over 50 percent in 1995.

Eric Holtaus explains why the IPCC report is significant:

What makes the IPCC so important is simple: They are required to agree. Last night, the group pulled an all-nighter to ensure that representatives from all 195 member countries agreed on every single word of the 36-page “summary for policymakers” (pdf). That instantly makes the report the world’s scientific and political authority on what is happening to the climate, what will happen in the future, and what needs to be done to avoid the worst impacts.

Chris Mooney digs into the report’s details:

The IPCC has added considerable clarification to the most controversial part of the report, where it notes that the rate of surface temperature increase over the last 15 years ago is somewhat less than it had been previously. After an earlier draft of the report leaked in August, this section was widely cited by climate skeptics to cast doubt on global warming. Now, the IPCC clarifies that short-term trends of this kind “are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends.” The report says the recent reduction in the rate of warming is caused, in roughly equal parts, by natural climate variability (possibly including heat going deeper into the oceans) and a temporary decline of solar radiation reaching the planet, thanks to volcanic eruptions and the solar cycle itself.

Scott K. Johnson examines the emissions estimates:

In order to keep warming below the oft-referenced target of 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures, the total amount of carbon humans have emitted cannot exceed about 800 gigatons, the report says. As of 2011, about 531 gigatons had been emitted. The two middle scenarios involve the emission of 595-1250 gigatons between now and the end of the century.

The report also emphasizes the need to consider the long-term ramifications of carbon dioxide emissions. “Depending on the scenario, about 15 to 40 percent of emitted CO₂ will remain in the atmosphere longer than 1,000 years.”

Brad Plumer, meanwhile, thinks it’s time the IPCC begins rethinking its mission:

[M]any experts have begun urging the IPCC to rethink its whole mission. Do we really need hundreds and thousands of scientists devoting years of their lives to an encyclopedic synthesis that is getting a bit repetitive? Would it be more useful for the IPCC to produce more frequent, nimble reports on important sub-topics, as it did in 2012 when it released a smaller “special report” on extreme weather?

It’s a topic the IPCC has even begun asking itself.