Leopoldo López murder charges were dropped. Via @cnn http://t.co/1BS5rLhY4J
— Caracas Chronicles (@CaracasChron) February 21, 2014
The Caracas Chronicles calls itself “the place for opposition-leaning-but-not-insane analysis of the Venezuelan political scene since 2002.” The Dish linked to it several times yesterday. The site has a useful primer on the current protests.
Adam Martin summarizes that latest news from Ukraine:
Ukranian President Viktor Yanukovych signed a deal with protest leaders in Kiev on Friday, agreeing to early presidential elections, a coalition government, and a constitutional reduction of presidential powers. The deal, brokered by European Union and Russian mediators, restores the 2004 Ukranian constitution “with a rebalancing of powers towards a parliamentary republic,” Yanukovych said. The Ukranian parliament approved the reversion to the old constitution on Friday evening.
Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, made the case for compromise to the opposition with characteristic bluntness:
Some good news for the former president, Yulia Tymoshenko:
#Tymoshenko can be free in about 10 days, with zero criminal record. welcome her to the presidential candidates’ club #Ukraine
— Katya Gorchinskaya (@kgorchinskaya) February 21, 2014
Yulia Tymoshenko is being released, made a martyr by Yanukovich. She wasn't always My profile of her from 2010. http://t.co/X6GTRb76Xn
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) February 21, 2014
Hayes Brown wonders if the protesters will abide by the agreement:
Despite the leadership’s willingness to sign onto the agreement, it is unclear whether the protesters in the Maidan will follow their lead and clear the square they have held for months on end.
According to the Kyiv Post, when opposition leader Oleh Tiahynbook addressed the crowd asking “Do we agree to this?”, referring to Yanukovych remaining in office, “the thousands of people assembled overwhelmingly shouted ‘no’ in response.” Kyiv Post’s CEO Jakub Parusinksi tweet out “If deal info true, #EU just exchanged minor diplomatic victory for the safety of #Ukrainian people.”
Demonstrators may continue to make demands, specifically Yanukovych’s immediate exit, feeling they come from a position of strength at the moment. On Friday a group of police officers from the city of Lviv, which has been a secondary hotbed of anti-Yanukovych sentiment, joined protesters in Kyiv, providing the opposition with a morale boost.
Max Boot chimes in:
It would be good if the accord sticks, in order to prevent further fighting, but at this point it is far from clear that it will do so. It was only on Wednesday, after all, that a previous truce had been announced, and then just as promptly broken. It is clear, however, that at least for now Yanukovych has temporarily disappointed his backers in the Kremlin by refusing to declare “emergency powers” and call in the army to clear out demonstrators from central Kiev after his police force failed to get the job done.
A small glimmer of hope.
(Photo: Tributes are placed at the spot where an anti-Government protestor was shot by a sniper near to Independence square, on February 21, 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine. Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych is thought to have reached a deal with the opposition to end the crisis, after all-night talks in Ukraine mediated by EU foreign ministers. By Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
We all know there are plenty of kooks out there – on both sides – who say repulsive, racist or bigoted things all the time. The Internet has given every vice a voice. And I also hate stupid guilt-by-association smears that merely try to discredit politicians or writers on the basis of views they do not share and supporters they have not chosen. But I simply cannot get Ted Nugent’s rant about the president as a “sub-human mongrel” out of my head. And I cannot believe that a major political party in this country would not just refuse to repudiate it, but actively embrace Nugent as an ally in campaigns.
And yet they are. Just for the record, here is the full quote from Nugent – which is no exception to his usual fare:
I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame enough Americans to be ever vigilant not to let a Chicago communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America.
This is the rhetoric of racist neo-fascism. It’s not legitimate criticism; it is an expression of white supremacy and the alleged evils of race-mixing. The fact that the GOP candidate for governor of Texas would seek to have Nugent join him on the campaign trail only weeks after these remarks were uttered should rightly disqualify him from holding any public office in this country. And yet Greg Abbott refuses even to address his endorsement of a white supremacist like Nugent.
The fact that Sarah Palin, a former candidate for the vice-presidency, would openly celebrate Nugent as her arbiter of what is good and true in politics, is equally horrifying even as it is completely unsurprising.
The fact that the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, did not respond to this disgusting comment by condemning it immediately, but by reflexively deflecting the question back to Democratic extremists, is also appalling. The Republicans’ favorite rock star has called the president an animal. What would it take for a Republican to say he or she is horrified by that language and to defend the dignity and basic humanity of the president of the United States? Do they not hear the eliminationist racism in that phrase? Do they not even begin to imagine what it connotes for millions of Americans?
And now we have Ted Cruz also refusing to say, minutes after he just watched the full Nugent diatribe, that he would not have Ted Nugent on the campaign trail with him in the future. Money quote from the interview with Dana Bash, who asks Cruz his response to the Nugent rant:
CRUZ: “I think it is a little curious that — to be questioning political folks about rock stars. I got to tell you, listen. I’m not cool enough to hang out with any rock stars. Jay-Z doesn’t come over to my house. I don’t hang out with Ted Nugent.”
BASH: “Jay-Z doesn’t call the president a subhuman mongrel. Is this an appropriate thing to say?”
CRUZ: “I would be willing to bet that the president’s Hollywood friends have said some pretty extreme things.”
BASH: “The reason I played that for you is this week in Texas, he was invited to campaign with the man who may be your next governor in your party.”
CRUZ: “Those sentiments there, of course I don’t agree with them. You’ve never heard me say such a thing, nor would I.”
He then defended Nugent as a passionate fighter for Second Amendment rights, as if that required any assistance in an era with the most expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court in history and unprecedented levels of gun sales.
Look: there’s lots of crazy out there. The far left described George W. Bush as a chimp, and much worse, for Pete’s sake. But the phrase “subhuman mongrel” used against the first mixed-race president of the United States is an obscenity that should give every American pause. As Wolf Blitzer has pointed out, it reeks of Nazi terminology. But its origins are much closer to home, in the architecture of anti-miscegenation laws that came down to us from the era of slavery and Jim Crow. It’s the rhetoric of white supremacy deployed against the first African-American president.
Is that what the GOP now represents? Is that what it’s really come to?
(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama and his daughters Malia and Sasha walk across the South Lawn of the White House after arriving by Marine One January 5, 2014 in Washington, DC. By Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images.)
Look at #euromaidan – before and now (photo via KievWatch) #EPPKrakow pic.twitter.com/u0UeXdENKF
— Róża Thun (@rozathun) February 20, 2014
Alexander Motyl doubts the government will allow it to happen:
Personally, I have no doubt that Ukraine without its southeast would be much stronger, more stable, and more prosperous than Ukraine with its southeast. The southeast’s rust-belt economy needs either to be shut down entirely or to be refitted at the cost of trillions of dollars of non-existent investments. Moreover, the statistics plainly show that Kyiv subsidizes the Donbas, and not vice versa.
The southeast also has a low birth rate, a high death rate, low life expectancy, high energy consumption, and high AIDS and crime rates. Last but not least, the southeast is home to the ruling Party of Regions and the Communist Party. Remove the southeast and Ukraine’s treasury experiences an immediate boon; its demographics, energy consumption, and health improve; and its politics automatically become more democratic and less corrupt.
Although lopping off the Donbas would benefit the rest of Ukraine, Yanukovych’s mafia regime desperately needs Ukraine to be whole. If Luhansk and Donetsk were to split away, their rust-belt economy would collapse without Kyiv’s financial support and the Regionnaires, trapped in their polluted bailiwick, would have nothing to steal.
Brian Whitmore asks Motyl about the country breaking apart:
[Q] with the crisis escalating and becoming increasingly violent, do you think Ukraine is heading toward partition?
[A] No, not really. I think the country is headed toward [President Viktor] Yanukovych’s collapse though. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of days, weeks, or months. But in cracking down he’s essentially signed his own death warrant.
(Hat tip: Totten)
“The Lord is a warrior and in Revelation 19 is says when he comes back, he’s coming back as what? A warrior. A might warrior leading a mighty army, riding a white horse with a blood-stained white robe … I believe that blood on that robe is the blood of his enemies ’cause he’s 
coming back as a warrior carrying a sword.
And I believe now – I’ve checked this out – I believe that sword he’ll be carrying when he comes back is an AR-15.
Now I want you to think about this: where did the Second Amendment come from? … From the Founding Fathers, it’s in the Constitution. Well, yeah, I know that. But where did the whole concept come from? It came from Jesus when he said to his disciples ‘now, if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.’
I know, everybody says that was a metaphor. IT WAS NOT A METAPHOR,” – Jerry Boykin, Family Research Council.
Reflecting on his experience in the child welfare system, Tomas Rios discusses the Midwest Study (pdf), which is “as close as anyone has come to a comprehensive, longitudinal, and methodologically-sound statement on the outcomes of youth who age out” of foster care:
Even a cursory glance at the data makes it clear that our “go figure it out” solution for youth who go unadopted and without family reunification is plainly inhumane.
At the age of 26, 31 percent of responding participants had either couch surfed or been homeless since their last interview (which are typically every two years), while 46.8 percent were currently unemployed. By comparison, the general population rate for unemployment stands at 6.7 percent. As for homelessness, while different methodological measures abound, the general sense is that the homeless make up less than one percent of the population at any given time. The study also includes data on four-year college graduation rates (2.5 percent), annual income (79.4 percent report a total income of less than $25,000) and, perhaps most depressing of all, social support networks.
More than 17 percent report having no one to loan them money, and 9.1 percent report having no one to help them meet their goals. This isn’t just sad, it’s a bulletproof indictment of a system we are all obligated to help pay for.
Derek Mead parses a new study that details the cursing habits of Twitter users:
While it should come as no surprise that “fuck” is the star of the show, I didn’t expect that it would represent more than a third of all swear words said. And the swearing is really concentrated. According to the paper, “the top seven curse words – fuck, shit, ass, bitch, nigga, hell and whore cover 90.55% of all the curse word occurrences.” What, no love for damn or crap?
Mario Aguilar highlights another interesting finding:
We all know that we swear when we’re angry or frustrated, but the study interestingly points out that in the real-world, people also tend to swear in more relaxed environments because they’re less likely to be called out by people around them. This remains true online, but the disparity between relaxed environments and places where people tend to be more buttoned up barely registers. According to the study’s conclusion:
We find that users do curse more in relaxed environments, but the differences across different environments are very small, partly due to the fact that Twitter messages are posted in virtual digital world.
In other words, you could say that Twitter turns everywhere into your living room. Is that why I can’t stop cursing online? That’s for you to fucking decide.
Hanna Rosin’s son Jacob was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome four months before it was expunged from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Rosin reflects on what gaining, and subsequently losing, a label for her son’s condition has meant:
[A]lmost the minute we got the diagnosis, my resistance to labeling melted, and so did my husband’s. We walked willingly into another world, with its own language, rituals, and worldview. This was our version of the transformative experience [John Elder] Robison had described in his memoir. “It did fit me. Completely,” he wrote of the diagnosis, which he received at the age of 40. “The realization was staggering. There are other people like me. So many, in fact, that they have a name for us.” We found a summer day camp for Jacob specifically designed for people like him. This fall we moved him from public school, where he was struggling, to a private-school program that has the word Asperger’s in its name and a curriculum that integrates social and emotional learning into every lesson—that caters, in other words, to a population that technically no longer exists.
But she found the label less useful over time:
Asperger’s is a term I find myself still using a lot—more than I otherwise might, in fact, precisely because the category is now officially obsolete. I’m relieved to feel it’s not a well-bounded identity that sums up my son perfectly and in perpetuity. His program’s director, who always worried that the Asperger’s shorthand minimized the challenges the kids face, is happily contemplating a name change. Jacob, I’m glad to say, couldn’t care less about the new label in his life, which is lucky, because who knows what will ultimately become of it.
Scott Meslow ponders the Beltway’s infatuation with House Of Cards:
Why would a town so careful about presentation so gleefully embrace a show that treats politicians as either imbecilic or deeply corrupt, and treats most established journalists as cynical, selfishly motivated and malleable? For a time, the popularity of House of Cards in the District was something of an open secret; a BuzzFeed article published two weeks’ after the show’s first-season premiere reported that “aides who gushed about the show off the record subsequently refused to be interviewed […] fearing it might reflect poorly on their bosses or themselves.” Mike Long, the press secretary for real-life House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, took to Twitter to clarify that his boss had nothing in common with Frank Underwood.
Since then, Hill staffers, journalists and politicians alike all seemed to finish watching the first season and something began to change. The less salient aspects of the show collapsed under the weight of a simple truth: House of Cards makes Washington and its two wonkiest industries—journalism and politics—look really cool, even as it implicitly attacks them at their very roots.
The problem Weigel has with the show:
Should the show be truer to Washington? No, that’s a dull ask. Nobody wants to hear Washingtonians or journalists complain that this-or-that metro station should have more stairs. The problem is Underwood’s enemies don’t seem to understand politics.
Jonathan Rauch remembers George Washington Plunkitt, “a factotum of New York’s renowned Tammany Hall political machine during the late 19th and early 20th centuries”:
His greatest insight was the distinction between honest and dishonest graft.
“There’s the biggest kind of a difference between political looters and politicians who make a fortune out of politics by keepin’ their eyes wide open,” Plunkitt said. “The looter goes in for himself alone without considerin’ his organization or his city. The politician looks after his own interests, the organization’s interests, and the city’s interests all at the same time.” Dirty graft is parasitic, mere larceny, whereas honest graft helps knit together a patronage network that ensures leaders can lead and followers will follow. Reformers who failed to understand this crucial distinction, Plunkitt said, courted anarchy.
Rauch’s bottom line:
Earnest campaigns to take the politics out of politics can make governing more difficult, with results that serve no one very well. The next time you see some new reform scheme touted in the name of stopping corruption, pause to recall the wisdom of another old-school pol, the late Representative Jimmy Burke, of Massachusetts: “The trouble with some people is that they think this place is on the level.”
The Dish 