Author: Andrew Sullivan

The Digital Black Market Goes Dark

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The founder of the Internet drug marketplace Silk Road has been arrested and the website seized:

According to the indictment, Silk Road was bigger than anyone had suspected: It boasted over $1.6 billion in sales from 2011-2013, which resulted in $80 million in commissions. (Researchers had previously estimated that Silk Road was doing about $22 million in total sales per year.)

Though Silk Road was a massive part of the Bitcoin marketplace, which is now fluctuating wildly, Kristin Salyer thinks the marketplace’s demise could benefit the currency:

Bitcoin no longer needs Silk Road. For one thing, there are other online marketplaces where Bitcoin could be used illegally. Perhaps more important, as Reuters reported yesterday, in the three months ended in June, Bitcoin startups raised almost $12 million from venture capital investors. Bitcoin may still be high-risk, but a customer base of legit startups and fewer drug lords probably bodes well.

Felix Salmon agrees that, if “Silk Road is now shut down and if no one else manages to enter the vacuum caused by its disappearance, then the FBI will at a stroke have managed to remove the single skeeviest aspect of bitcoin, and the main reason why people like Chuck Schumer are so suspicious of it.” However, he still thinks Bitcoin interest will eventually fade regardless:

Bitcoins are a fad, and they’re a fad which will pass, a bit like Beanie Babies. There was no one thing which caused the market in Beanie Babies to implode, it was more that people just moved on to other things. Bitcoin’s the same: newer, shinier virtual currencies will arrive, the techno-utopians will latch onto something else, and eventually the people holding bitcoins will understand that if an asset doesn’t throw off any cashflow, the only way to make money from it is to sell it at a higher price than you bought it. In other words, bitcoin is the ultimate speculative vehicle, one which you might be able to trade in and out of, but one which has no value at all as a buy-and-hold investment. Which is something to bear in mind when you read the next big Bloomberg article on bitcoins as an asset class.

A Safety Net For Starving Artists

That’s one way Alyssa sees Obamacare:

[T]he Affordable Care Act matters to artists–just as it matters to a lot of entrepreneurs–because it makes it easier to take chances and carve out the time that makes it possible to pursue an artistic career. These aren’t folks who are demanding instant success, or a lot of money for their art, or even consistent rather than seasonal or contract employment. Instead, they’re people who want to lower their overall level of risk, and are more than willing to pay to afford to do so.

… If you can buy yourself a safety net, it’s much easier to go out on the road as a musician and accept that your level of income is going to be fairly low, or quit your job to finish writing the novel your publisher has purchased from you and take the chance that it’ll do well enough for you to get the next contract. In other words, the Affordable Care Act is offering artists, musicians, and writers–and a whole lot of other people–an opportunity to be economically mobile. It makes it easier to be brave, and take risks, not just in the art that you’re creating, but in deciding to make art at all.

What Will Fuel The Future GOP?

Waldman ponders national politics after the GOP has learned to live with Obamacare:

The question is, if eventually they have no choice but to accept that the argument over the ACA is settled, what on earth will Republicans do with themselves? Because over the last four years, opposition to Obamacare has taken on such an extraordinary power within the movement that all other issues have paled before it.

Sure, they could revert to the old standbys—Cut taxes! Cut regulations! Strong defense! But those are just positions you can take. Obamacare was a war to be fought. And nothing galvanizes, energizes, and defines us like our wars. That’s particularly true of the zealots who are driving the Republican party and form such a key part of its base. And if they aren’t fighting Obamacare, who will they be?

Kilgore doesn’t accept Waldman’s premise:

I think Waldman is wrong to assume that Republicans will “forget” a lost war or totally concede defeat. Conservatives “lost” on Social Security and Medicare, after all, but that hasn’t kept them from continuing to make rearguard efforts to “reform” or otherwise radically change these programs, as they continue to do today.

Dedicated To The Desperate

In today’s video from After Tiller‘s Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, they explain how the political backgrounds of the doctors are much more diverse than you might think:

Martha and Lana also note how, much like the readers who contributed to our “It’s So Personal” series, the patients who agreed to participate in After Tiller did so in the hope that sharing their ordeal could help others facing the same situation:

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The film is now playing in New York, and will open tomorrow in Los Angeles and Toronto as well, followed by many more cities across the country. Trailer here. Martha and Lana’s previous videos are here.

The GOP Just Took The Pressure Off Iran

Rogin and Lake point out that, with the shutdown underway, the offices that enforce our sanctions on Iran are empty:

Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said Iran could capitalize on the lack of monitoring and sanctions enforcement to replenish its coffers and advance its nuclear program while no one is looking.

“If the lights are not on, then the Iranians will engage in massive sanctions busting to try to replenish their dwindling foreign exchange reserves,” he said. “If you don’t have the resources to investigate, identify, and designate the tens of billions of dollars of Iranian regime assets, then you’ve extended the economic runway of the Iranian regime and increased the likelihood that they could reach nuclear breakout sooner rather than later.”

Shooting At The Capitol

More updates at the Guardian live-blog. Update: confirmation from Reuters regarding Twitter reports on the fate of the suspect:

A woman suspected of being involved in a car chase across central Washington was shot and killed by police outside the U.S. Capitol building on Thursday, a U.S. official said. The incident, which sparked a lockdown of Congress, began when the woman tried to ram through security barricades outside the White House. The official said a Capitol policeman was injured when the car driven by the suspect crashed outside the Capitol.

Where’s Boehner’s Backbone? Ctd

A reader tries to get into the Speaker’s head:

I believe Boehner is looking towards the debt-ceiling, which he recognizes as potentially catastrophic. He has said more than once that he “will not risk the full faith and credit of the federal government,” and I actually believe him.

Right now he is letting the cabal of far-right nuts slowly hang themselves while at the same time maintaining wacko-bird cred. When it comes time to either raise the debt ceiling or go over the brink, I predict that Boehner, having exposed the true insanity of the crazies, will suspend the Hastert Rule and let the debt ceiling be raised in a bill that includes the McConnell Rule as permanent law. This way he truly breaks the Tea Party fever, keeps his Speaker-ship via grateful Democrats and sane Republicans, and goes down as the hero of the whole debacle.

And then I woke up.

Netanyahu’s Move?

Benjamin Netanyahu Chairs Weekly Israeli Cabinet Meeting

The far right government of Bibi Netanyahu has found itself somewhat isolated recently as it demands not just a monopoly of nuclear weaponry and near-monopoly of chemical weapons in the Middle East, not just continued illegal settlement of the West Bank, not just military aid from the US, but also regime change and war against Iran for enriching any uranium at all. The demands are so out of line with the NPT and with the Obama administration the Israeli government must surely fear it is losing the initiative for another war in the Middle East.

This is particularly so, it seems to me, because the Syria chemical weapons episode revealed how difficult it would be to get any clear American support for a pre-emptive war against Iran over allegations of potential WMD development. The Congress was clearly about to veto any such war against Assad even after the use of chemical weapons and after the deaths of 100,000 civilians. What chance is there that Israel and its proxies could easily authorize a new war against merely alleged nuclear weapon development in a regime that has recently declared itself eager to cooperate with the West? AIPAC has a lot of influence, and fear-mongering about Iranians is a rich vein to mine in the American psyche, but the odds of a war against Iran must look lower to Netanyahu right now, as his desperate and utterly exhausted speech at the UN revealed.

So what to do? Launch a war and deny it. Openly assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists, assuming no one in the West will even call you out. And now, a new provocation:

Mojtaba Ahmadi, who served as commander of the Cyber War Headquarters, was found dead in a wooded area near the town of Karaj, north-west of the capital, Tehran.

Five Iranian nuclear scientists and the head of the country’s ballistic missile programme have been killed since 2007. The regime has accused Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad, of carrying out these assassinations.

Ahmadi was last seen leaving his home for work on Saturday. He was later found with two bullets in the heart, according to Alborz, a website linked to the Revolutionary Guard Corps. “I could see two bullet wounds on his body and the extent of his injuries indicated that he had been assassinated from a close range with a pistol,” an eyewitness told the website. The commander of the local police said that two people on a motorbike had been involved in the assassination.

It seems to me that the American president should forcefully condemn the assassination – and whoever ordered it. Governments that assassinate individuals in other countries are violating international law and setting a brutal precedent. If another country were to assassinate America’s head of cyber-warfare, would we regard it as something we should just ignore and move on from? Of course not. This is a blatant attempt to interfere with the diplomacy of the United States by using assassination as a provocation. Any government that acts in that way is no true ally of the United States.

(Photo by Abir Sultan – Pool/Getty Images.)

The President Sharpens His Tone

He’s finally starting to lose patience with House Republicans:

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David Corn encourages Obama to take the gloves off:

[I]magine this scenario: the president meets with congressional leaders, allows television cameras into the room for a brief press opportunity, and then on live television says, “John, can you explain to Americans why you and your fellow House Republicans think it is fair to shut down suicide prevention programs for our vets just because you don’t like a health care law that was passed by Congress and approved by the conservative-led Supreme Court?  Is this the decent thing to do?”

Of course, Rush Limbaugh would accuse the imposter-in-chief of sandbagging a dedicated public servant. But is there a way for Obama to disrupt the narrative that the shutdown is the product of Washington dysfunction and to position Boehner as a renegade outlier who is more extortionist and fabulist than legislator? That might be a task beyond anyone, even a president. But so far Obama, who has stuck to his will-not-negotiate-with-hostage-takers stance, has been playing by the rules of acceptable political discourse. Perhaps he needs to bend them.

My view is that his best line should be about jobs. How many jobs is the GOP risking today with the shutdown? How many jobs it is already jeopardizing by its threat of catastrophic default? This job-killing shutdown must end and the job-killing threat to default must end. We will not negotiate with economic terrorists. We will be happy to negotiate with Congressional partners. End the blackmail as an act of patriotism. And start the negotiations the day after.