Month: September 2013

A Shutdown With A Silver Lining?

Beutler reckons that a shutdown could break the GOP’s fever:

Whether you’re Boehner or Harry Reid or President Obama, the argument for allowing a shutdown looks about the same. It’s perhaps the only way to persuade monomaniacal House Republicans that there’s a difference between negotiation and extortion — that if their extreme demands touch off a visible crisis like a government shutdown, everyone will know who’s at fault. That’d be great for Democrats for obvious reasons.

Bernstein throws cold water:

“Break the fever” was a bad idea when Barack Obama believed in it (or perhaps he just claimed to believe in it); it’s a bad idea now. The isn’t some easily-shattered illusion. It’s a very successful enterprise. It’s not something that a clever strategy can solve; it’s just part of what politicians have to work around and muddle through.

Walking The Digital Beat

As local police departments expand their reach on social media, companies are developing new data-mining tools to help them:

For instance, consider BlueJay, the “Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner,” which provides real-time, geo-fenced access to every single public tweet so that local police can keep tabs on #gunfire, #meth, and #protest (yes, those are real examples) in their communities. …

Criminals do just come right out and tweet about their crimes, but BlueJay appears to be more useful as a way to “listen in” on people who would not ordinarily be talking to police. Used well, such tools should make police departments more aware of both local problems and complaints about their own work. Used less than well, it can be a bit creepy, sort of on par with having a kid’s uncle listen outside her bedroom during a slumber party. And used badly, it can make a nice tool for keeping an eye on critics/dissenters.

The Money Fueling The Shutdown

Bouie looks at how Obamacare defunders are squeezing money out of the GOP base:

If there were no money involved, I’d call this a misguided bid for relevance. As it stands, the effort to defund Obamacare is a lucrative business. Which is why it continues to go forward, even as the odds for success dip to the quantum level. For the lawmakers and groups spearheading this movement, Tea Party voters aren’t dedicated citizens as much as they are gullible customers; ripe targets for their brand commercialized outrage.

Pareene’s view:

Some annoyed Republicans are accusing shutdown-pushers like Ted Cruz of “not dealing in reality,” but Cruz is decidedly reality-based. He’s just selling unreality to his constituents — not just Texas voters, but the entire nationwide network of pissed-off and increasingly delusional conservatives who fund the great right-wing money carousel. He becomes a star, and they get to feel like they’re an integral part of an existential fight for America’s future.

Chart Of The Day

Household Income

Neil Irwin passes along a depressing one:

This chart shows real median household income over the past 25 years; that is, the money earned, in inflation-adjusted dollars, by the family at the exact middle of the income distribution. … In 1989, the median American household made $51,681 in current dollars (the 2012 number, again, was $51,017). That means that 24 years ago, a middle class American family was making more than the a middle class family was making one year ago.

Rapprochement With Rouhani? Ctd

Jasmin Ramsey reports on the good vibes stemming from letters exchanged between Obama and Rouhani recently:

That both leaders have publicly acknowledged such rare contact is an important development in and of itself, according to Robert E. Hunter, who served on the National Security Council staff throughout the Jimmy Carter administration. “This is an effort as much as anything to test the waters in domestic American politics regarding direct talks, regarding the possibility of seeing whether something more productive can be done than in the past. And except out of Israel, I haven’t seen a lot of powerful protest,” Hunter told IPS.

Suzanne Maloney remains cautious about engagement:

[T]he presumption that Rouhani will drive an easier bargain may be overly optimistic. The Europeans who sat across the table from him during his time as Iran’s nuclear negotiator remember him as a tough customer. And his recent track record underscores the difficulty of expecting too much from Rouhani on the nuclear issue. The only recent progress on this issue came in 2009, with a tentative agreement to export much of Iran’s enriched uranium in exchange for Western-supplied fuel rods for its medical research reactor.

Ironically, the primary Iranian proponent of this arrangement was Ahmadinejad, whereas Rouhani played a vocal role in scuttling the deal, which he described as “illegal,” a “mistake,” and a Western attempt to deprive Iran of its uranium stockpile. These criticisms helped persuade Khamenei to back away from an initial acceptance of the agreement, sending Iran further down a path of international isolation and pressure.

Hossein Mousavian adds:

There remains a possible dealbreaker. Obama’s understanding of how to approach Tehran can be encapsulated as follows: “My view is that if you have both a credible threat of force, combined with a rigorous diplomatic effort, that, in fact, you can strike a deal”. Although the use of force and bullying is part of US foreign policy, the grand civilisation and culture of Iran has made the Iranian nation attach great importance to respect and honour, resisting any form of coercion and humiliation.

I suspect Obama, compared with other presidents, is almost uniquely capable of doing just that. What the Iranians crave is respect and honor. We should have no illusions that Rouhani is some kind of Western liberal. We should have no illusions that he, rather than Khamenei, is calling the shots. But since the regime insists it doesn’t want and hasn’t built a nuclear weapon, and since the sanctions on the country have indeed been crippling (with inflation now accelerating fast), and since the regime still has only tenuous public support, largely outside the main urban centers, it makes sense for Rouhani to explore the chances of a deal that would end Iran’s diplomatic and economic isolation in return for adherence to non-proliferation, guaranteed by international inspectors.

That’s why, although I remain deeply skeptical of the Tehran regime, this seems to me to be well worth exploring, and for a second-term president to be prepared to risk a great deal for a legacy-making agreement.

Know hope.

The Booze Of The Bourgeoisie

Afshin Molavi sizes up Johnnie Walker’s bid to become the whisky of the global middle class:

It’s uncanny, the ubiquity of the striding Scot and his blended whisky (no “e” for the Scottish 6a00d83451c45669e2015438653bb3970c-550wikind). It’s everywhere, particularly among the upper end of the middle classes that the world’s corporations are chasing. In Thailand, businessmen place a bottle of Black Label on the table before a closing negotiation. In Japan, bottles have become an essential part of the ritualized gift-giving culture. In India, one of Bollywood’s most famous comedians even took the name Johnny Walker. It’s such a status symbol in Asia that Johnnie Walker knockoffs aren’t hard to find. You probably wouldn’t want to serve guests the counterfeit liquor, but the bottle looks good on the mantle.

And in Africa, the newest gold mine of emerging markets, [parent company] Diageo is cultivating a fresh generation of whisky drinkers. In downtown Nairobi, a 20-story billboard of the Striding Man towers alongside a skyscraper. African musicians and athletes have been named “brand ambassadors,” and premium magazines are running a series of print ads that say simply: “Step Up.” As in, step up to a better life, step up to the middle class, step up from that stale beer to a higher state of being: Become a whisky drinker.

Yep, someone we all know must be smiling somewhere.

(Photo by Karin Cooper/Getty Images)

Roger Ailes’ Smithers, Ctd

Last night, I noted how much Mike Allen’s exclusive on Fox News fall line-up sounded like a press release from the organization itself. Now we have the Fox release, we can compare and contrast. Guess which sentences were written by Fox and which by Politico:

1. Chief News Anchor and Managing Editor Shepard Smith will be available throughout to insert the latest breaking news into the new programming schedule via the FOX News Deck.<> on November 28, 2012 in Washington, DC.

2. Chief News Anchor and Managing Editor Shepard Smith will be available throughout to insert the latest breaking news via the FOX News Deck.

3. The evening’s new entrant, “The Kelly File” will focus on late-breaking news stories and in-depth investigative reporting. The show will air in a live format, embrace a stronger social media presence, and will capitalize on Kelly’s skills as a former litigator.

4. As the newest edition to the line-up, The Kelly File (9-10PM/ET) will focus on late-breaking stories in a live format as well as in-depth investigative reports interspersed with newsmaker interviews. While embracing a stronger social media presence, the new program will capitalize on Kelly’s skills as a former litigator, and create a unique platform for developing angles as events unfold.

5. Immediately following On the Record, The O’Reilly Factor (8-9PM/ET) will continue uncovering news items from the established wisdom, operating against the grain of more traditional interview style programs.  The number one cable news program since 2001, O’Reilly’s signature No Spin Zone cuts through the rhetoric as he challenges the players who make the story newsworthy.

6. Immediately following “On the Record,” “The O’Reilly Factor” will continue to air at 8 p.m., uncovering news items from the established wisdom, operating against the grain of more traditional interview style programs. O’Reilly has had the number one cable news program since 2001.

Answers after the jump:

1. Fox. 2. Mike Allen. 3. Fox. 4. Mike Allen. 5. Mike Allen. 6. Fox.

Allen’s write-up of the line-up is effectively stenography from Fox’s own press release. Except that Fox edited its version down to a newsier, simpler story, while Allen embellished his at length – always with laudatory adjectives and cringe-inducing suck-ups. The other major difference is that Fox News’s p.r. hacks can write English grammatically. Allen not so much, as this reader points out:

“Now live at 7PM/ET weeknights, On the Record will showcase the news Americans care about and explore how they impact our everyday lives.”

Who is “they” in this sentence? The news?!

“Immediately following On the Record, The O’Reilly Factor (8-9PM/ET) will continue uncovering news items from the established wisdom, operating against the grain of more traditional interview style programs.”

“Uncovering news items from the established wisdom”? Does he mean “uncovering news items that contradict the established wisdom”?

“The number one cable news program since 2001, O’Reilly’s signature No Spin Zone cuts through the rhetoric as he challenges the players who make the story newsworthy …”

So O’Reilly is inviting on “the players who make the story newsworthy,” and then challenging them in his interview? Or O’Reilly’s interview is what makes the story newsworthy? Or O’Reilly is cutting through the rhetoric that creates the illusion that something is newsworthy, when it, in fact, is not?

Go figure. Allen cannot write English in a hurry and reprints sycophantic press releases as a news story. Welcome to Politico.

Update from a reader:

All have to say is who the hell at Politico let “As the newest edition to the line-up” go through???

(Photo: Politico Chief White House Correspondent Mike Allen arrives at a Politico Playbook Breakfast November 28, 2012 at the Newseum in Washington, DC. By Alex Wong/Getty.)

Inside Iran’s War In Syria

Above is a fascinating video presumably filmed to be part of a documentary for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards or for the Iranian public. Mackey has run it down and it looks legit. If you are in any doubt that Iran is critical in supporting Assad’s disgusting dictatorship, just watch for a few minutes. What strikes me is the religious nature of their motivation. This is about Shia Islam fighting evil, i.e. Sunni Islam. We keep under-estimating the power of this long, bloody struggle between the two largest traditions in Islam – and therefore the resilience and fanaticism of the participants. Jeff Weintraub noticed this statement by the Iranian commander, which also hit home for me:

“The front we’re fighting at now is not a front where the Syrian army is at war with the people. [….] The current war in Syria is that of Islam versus the nonbelievers. Good versus evil. We are ‘good’ because Iran’s supreme leader is on our side. The front is supported by Hezbollah. The fighters are Iranian, Hezbollah, the Iraqi and Afghan mujahadeen and others. The opponents are Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, funded by the Emirates. Plus America, England, France and Europe.”

Notice that the West and Israel are now identified as Sunni-supporters, even though the US lost lives and trillions and soft and hard power delivering Iraq from the Sunnis to the Shi’a. You can never win with these fanatics. But more fascinatingly, as Jeff also spies, is an insight into the contempt the Shia feel for the Sunnis (which is reciprocated in spades). It’s at 4:19:

After much talk about how they treat their Syrian allies with respect, one Iranian says, while driving through a village:

“When we came, there was no human being. They deserted the village.”

To which another Iranian replies: “There are still no humans now, only Arabs.”

Complicated, isn’t it? And so nasty and ugly and unending. If we can find a way to keep our distance from this lose-lose region so much the better.

Were Matthew Shepard’s Murderers Equally Culpable?

In today’s video from Stephen Jimenez, author of The Book Of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard, he shares his thoughts on what role Russell Henderson played in the murder of Shepard and why he thinks Russell might have gotten a different sentence than Aaron McKinney if Henderson had not been pressured to accept a plea bargain:

A reader writes:

Thanks for your coverage of the new Matthew Shepard book.  I only wish my uncle had lived to see its publication.  A gay man, he grew up in Wyoming, and was outraged by the media circus that arose in response to the killing. As he wrote in a 1999 piece for Reason magazine, in his view the death of Matthew Shepard was hijacked for political purposes , and Wyoming was slimmed in the process. My sense is that you and he saw eye-to-eye on many issues.

From that article by Robert O. Blanchard, “The ‘Hate State’ Myth“:

With the Shepard case, the Wild West setting of the murder augmented the standard media narrative: Of course, the coverage implied, Wyoming’s macho, frontier culture is closed-minded, bigoted, and homophobic–what else could it be? As an NBC reporter put it while standing outside a Laramie drinking joint, “At Wild Willies Cowboy Bar today, patrons said hate is easy to find here.” Never mind that Wyoming was the first state to grant women the right not only to vote but to own property and to hold office; that it elected the nation’s first female governor in 1924; that it ratified the Equal Rights Amendment in 1973; that it was at the forefront of a trend in the 1970s to repeal sodomy laws; and that in the 1990s, more than 70 percent of its voters rejected anti-abortion initiatives. For the media, Wyoming was a natural setting for such a bestial crime. As The New York Times editorial page intoned the day following Shepard’s death: “Laramie, the home seat of [Wyoming’s] university, is a small town with a masculine culture… [Shepard] died in a coma yesterday, in a state without a hate-crimes law.”

As a Wyoming native (now living in Texas) and a gay man, I find such geographical stereotyping to be more than simply inaccurate and irresponsible. The coverage of the Shepard case delivers a damning lesson about the gross inability of the hate crime news formula to explain complex social situations–and it demonstrates that when the media and advocacy groups are faced with the choice of responding to reality or simply sticking with their scripts, they almost invariably choose the latter.

The Book Of Matt comes out next week (pre-order it here). A summary of the book here. Byliner subscribers can read an excerpt here. Steve’s previous Dish videos are here.