Don't tell Ted Cruz

Not that this should surprise anyone, but when my CLE seminar got to the Affordable Care Act, the speaker opened by saying "I don't care what you see politicians saying in the news, the Affordable Care Act will not be stopped by Congress and will go into effect next week."

It's worth noting that both the speakers and the crowd at this two day employment law conference are extremely Republican. At lunch the same speaker told me that the EEOC won't "go back to normal until Hillary loses in 2016."

Why don't more developing countries go waive the visa requirements for tourist from developed countries?

I don't understand why countries like Kazakhstan don't make travel from all richer countries visa free. Why just extend visa-free travel to EU members? Why not make it easier for tourists from the U.S., Canada, Japan, South Korea, etc? If the Kazakhstanis are afraid of foreigners coming distort their job market, they can limit the visa-waivers to short-term tourism-related stays (which is what the U.S. does), but I don't think they are particularly worried about Americans coming to Kazakhstan to take jobs from their nationals. That concern is reserved for Uzbekistanis and Kyrgyzstanis, who ironically do not need a visa to enter Kazakhstan.

(I realize I am biased from my experience. The fact that our visas expired every 3-6 months during our year in Kazakhstan was a major pain in the ass for both Mrs. Noz and I during our Kazakhstan year. See e.g. these posts from those days of yore.)

Sochi

So why exactly is Russia holding the winter Olympics in Sochi? I mean, as opposed to somewhere else in its country. Russia his huge, almost all of it has winter weather, and Sochi is actually pretty far South--at least for Russia. It also happens to be next to the Caucasus, where Chechnya, Dagestan, Ossetia, and Ingushetia, all of which have had violent insurgencies and/or terrorism issues. So why not put the Olympics somewhere else? I guess you need mountains, and Sochi has the Caucasus Mountains. But Russia has other mountains. Surely there are resorts in the Urals, the Altai, or all those others I have never heard of before. If they don't have a resort yet, surely the Russians could have built one. Sochi was awarded the 2014 Olympics in 2007, and the city must have applied some point before that. Russia had plenty of time to build a world-class facility somewhere else that didn't pose such a security risk.

The only reason for choosing Sochi instead of another Russian city is to show off how well Russia as pacified the Caucasus rebellions.  But that has a real danger of backfiring. A lot can happen in the years between the announcement of an Olympic site and the games themselves. But I guess if you're overconfident of your own victory that means you're overconfident.

Trends

I've been going to employment-law related CLE classes for more than a decade. This year, for the first time, the lecturer paid significant attention to issues related to the Fair Labor Standards Act and volunteers/interns. Actually, I believe this is the first time the issue was raised at all. I guess all the recent press about unpaid internships is starting to pay off.

The Answer is September 23, 2013

The question is here.

I am spending all day today and tomorrow piling up continuing legal education credits. Yes, I am very proud of the fact that I will finish my annual CLE requirement 99 days before the deadline. This really is unprecedented for me.

Yoots

It's interesting to see the contrasting spin about the Nairobi Westgate Mall attack: does it show al-Shabab's resilience or its desperation? I tend to see it as the latter. I guess it could be both.

Brendan's Upworthy Rant

It went up a few days ago, but I didn't have a chance to watch it until now. Yay Brendan!

It's a scam

Jonathan Bernstein has the best explanation for that creepy gynecological anti-ObamaCare video. You can't explain it except as a scam on conservatives. Watch the ad:



It's a sure-fire candidate for a viral video. It's got a ton of stuff that would lead to viralness (virility?): It's creepy, but tongue-in-cheek. It's about women's sexual organs. It's a clear twist on the Democrat's war on women and those state laws requiring a vaginal ultra-sound. Let's fact it, it seems designed to push a bunch of buttons and outrage liberal groups. So then the video will get passed around the internet with people commenting about how outrageous the ad is. Conservatives are sure to notice that reaction, so they will conclude that the video pisses off liberals, which they will assume means that they are effective. So then some of those conservatives will send a check to Generation Opportunity, the mysterious group that produced the ad and is behind the "opt out" campaign.

So it works really well as a scam on conservatives. What it doesn't work as is a campaign against the Affordable Care Act. The patient in the video has "signed up for ObamaCare" except there is no insurance policy called "ObamaCare." By advocating that people "opt out of ObamaCare" after telling them that there is an insurance policy called "ObamaCare," the video is giving the viewer the wrong information needed to actually opt out.

For example, let's imagine a viewer sees the video and is totally sold by its message. When the Affordable Care Act goes into effect, she may go and buy a policy through the health insurance exchange that covers her state. If her income is low enough, maybe she will qualify for a tax break that subsidizes the amount she pays. The policy isn't called "ObamaCare" or "Government Insurance", it's called "Blue Cross/Blue Shield" or some other private health insurance company. And under the policy she gets to go to a private doctor, not a government worker. I can imagine her telling her friends "I didn't get ObamaCare, I bought my own private insurance policy on the exchange and got a tax credit that covered most of the costs too! Thank God, I didn't end up with government health care!!!"

Except she didn't opt out of ObamaCare at all. Buying a private insurance policy from the exchanges are what the Affordable Care Act is all about. Because the ads mislead the viewers about the nature of ObamaCare, they can't possibly be intended to actually get people to opt out of getting health insurance offered under the ACA.

As a strategy to undermine the ACA, the ads make no sense. As a strategy to make it seem like Generation Opportunity is effectively fighting the implementation of ObamaCare to get conservatives to send it money, it makes perfect sense.

(post expanded from a comment left here)

Can't... avert... my... eyes

As near as I can tell, the current House GOP train wreck is about making sure that Ted Cruz, Republican up-and-comer and possible-2016-presidential candidate, rather than House Republicans take the blame when their badly-thought-out strategy of threatening to ruin the U.S. economy unless the President defunds his own signature accomplishment inevitably fails. "Cruz should have banged his staff and thundered 'let my people go!'" they'll say when this bullshit finally all comes crashing down.

It's either that of the House GOPers are too stupid to realize that their strategy has no chance of succeeding. I guess I still can't rule that one out. But I still find it hard to believe they are that dumb and/or crazy. I mean, if you've lost Bill O'Reilly...

The GOP just isn't capable of pulling something off like that

It's been pretty obvious that comprehensive immigration reform is effectively dead and will stay on the back-burner until the next time that the GOP gets its ass kicked on election day because Hispanics hate them. Which means we can all go back to ignoring this issue until possibly late 2014, but more likely late 2016. The Republicans just have more important stuff to do, like endlessly passing meaningless repeals of Obamacare and attacking each other in pursuit of a doomed self-destructive legislative strategy.

Related: I'm beginning to agree that even if the ACA does not "work" in the sense of improving the health care system, it still will have been worth it just by giving the Republican Party the opportunity to completely lose their shit and tear themselves apart.

Spam Spam Spam Spam

In the past month or so there has been a noticeable increase in comment spam here. It's not that big of a deal. But just about every morning, I wake up to one or two spam comments that I have to clear out. Not that long ago, I almost never got comment spam. That's why I never have turned on the CAPCHA feature. I find those things to be pretty annoying, and I didn't seem to need it because comment spam was so rare.

Until recently, that is. The other day I tried to look into it. I started tracing back the referring links for the IP addresses for my comment spammers. Yesterday, I found this (pdf). It's basically a manual for comment spammers. On page 21, it suggests leaving spam comments on this site. It also says this blog is "page rank 6", whatever the fuck that means. How the hell did I get on that list? Anyway, not that I would have been fooled by it anyway, but any comment I find that was inspired by that manual is an automatic flagged as spam deleted comment. The whole thing is so stupid. I mean, does any legitimate commenter here ever use a signature file? Having an unrelated link like that at the bottom is like having a sign saying "spammer."

I also found this. The forum is in Indonesian. Google translate makes it almost comprehensible. But again, the question is: how the fuck did I get on that list?

I invite any spammer to leave a comment to this post explaining why they are wasting their time leaving comments on a blog with so few readers, none of whom are stupid enough to click on their spam link. Leave out your "signature line" or link to whatever url you are trying to hawk. But if you're willing to take a break from spammitude and have a real conversation about this, you are welcome to comment. Otherwise just leave me the fuck alone.

The Suits Pull Out the Big Guns

U.S. Chamber of Commerce tells House Republicans: no shut down, no government default.

What the CoC wants, the CoC usually gets, especially with Republican-controlled chambers in Congress. Can the Teatards top that?

To iOS 7 or Not to iOS 7

The Noz household has an iPhone 5, an iPhone 4S, and an iPad 2. Although they don't get all the new features, all can handle the new operating system. Should we upgrade or not?

I'm the decider for the iPad and iPhone 5, and I'm inclined to upgrade... eventually at least. The fact that the iPad 2 just barely makes the system requirements (the original iPad does not) makes me a little concerned that my iPad will get slow and annoying if I upgrade. So I might just do it on my phone until I read other iPad 2 user's experience. And I'll probably wait a week or so to do the iPhone, just to see if there are any major gripes. I'd be more adventuresome if I was sure that downgrading back to iOS 6 were possible. but I'm not sure that it is.

As for Mrs. Noz and her iPhone 4S, she's still running iOS 5 and will probably stick with it unless her favorite apps stop working.

Leverage

Here's the thing: it's only really "leverage" if the President doesn't want the U.S. to default and the Republicans don't mind if it happens. That difference is what gives one side leverage over the other.

If, on the other hand, both the President and the Republicans don't want default, then neither side has more leverage over the other. In that case it's just a game of chicken, with both sides bluffing and then trying to see who blinks first.

Except that the President is not bluffing. He's saying straight up, that he doesn't want a default, neither do the Republicans and so he won't negotiate over it. The President has caved before, but if he manages to stick to his guns now (like he did on the last debt limit showdown, but not the one before that), then the Republicans will ultimately crumble because they really are bluffing. They don't really want a default. They are just betting that the President will prove to be as weak kneed as he was prior to his reelection.

Which means that really the leverage is all on the President's side. All he has to do to exercise it is to not be Captain Caveman anymore.

Teatards vs. the Suits

The current crackup in the house GOP is really a symptom of the larger civil war between the Tea Party people and the business people. The two used to be closely allied. In fact, much of the Tea Party "movement" was bankrolled by business front groups. Rhetorically at least, the Tea Partiers had a bit of an anti-corporate thread. Even as they  pushed for policies and tax schemes that favored the interests over large corporations, they still were supposedly for regular people and anti-bailout. Still the corporate base didn't care that much because they were calling the shots.

Until recently. Now it seems that Dr. Frankenstein can't control his monster anymore. After years of screaming that Obamacare is the destruction of America as we know it, they are pushing their representatives to do everything possible to try to stop it, even if pushes the U.S. into default and ruins the economy. But ruining the economy makes Corporate America sad (it should make everyone sad, even the Teatards, but they're not thinking straight enough to see it). So Corporate America is starting to yank on the leash.

I'm not sure if it will work. Just last year, I was convinced that that Suits were still really calling the shots and would pull their strings to make sure a default would not happen. But now I really don't know. I guess if I had to bet, I would still say the Suits will find a way to avoid default no matter how much the Teatards scream. But it has also become clear that Tea Party reps in the house are the real deal. They're not just empty suits adopting tea party rhetoric to get elected while bathing in corporate cash. Some of those Congress Critters themselves are true believers. Zealotry like that can't be counted on to cut a pragmatic deal.

categorical imperative

I don't think you can make it work in this case.

I pick A

Jonathan Cohn lists three theories why GOP House members are forcing a strategy that can't possibly work and is highly likely to backfire. I'm going with the first one ("They are delusional") because it fits right into my pet theory that the primary victims of the right-wing media bubble are right-wingers.

Because in the end we're all just looking for validation of our own preexisting theories.

(via Memeorandum)

Benghazi is the worstest worst that ever worsted!

Posted by friend on Facebook:

But actually...

Military Force Isn't That Effective Either

It doesn't really bother me that the Russian plan for Syria probably won't work. The plan to bomb Syria to punish it for chemical weapon use almost certainly won't work either. Neither option will solve the problem of Syria's chemical weapon stockpiles.

Because of our over-optimistic estimation of what military force is able to accomplish, we don't seem to evaluate American strikes on those terms. When we must DO SOMETHING, it is presumed that SOMETHING means military force and that military force by definition gets the job done. All other options other than military force have the burden of proving that will solve the entire problem. For military strikes, that is just presumed to be the case.

Story time

Either in my first or second year of law school the U.S. News law school rankings came out and my school had fallen significantly in the rankings from the prior year. The student body was outraged. Many people had chosen the law school based, at least in part, on the school's rankings. The fact that the school was suddenly "less prestigious" meant that their choice may have been a mistake. Chronic fears that most law students have, that they will emerge with their law degree deep in debt but unable to get a high paying job, took over. Certain students all but accused the administration of pulling a bait and switch (as if the administrators had personally pumped up the rankings the year before and then sunk them after we signed on to be students).

The school's administration sprung into action. We all got a letter explaining why that year's rankings were flawed and that the school *really* had a better reputation than the rankings reflected. The dean of the law school and other high-ranking administrators flew to Washington D.C. to speak with the U.S. News staff and to lobby for a better ranking the next year.

It worked. The next year our rankings improved. The outrage abated. But from my perspective all that showed was that the school rankings themselves were a total crock. There was little noticeable difference between the education offered by the school from one year to the next. And yet, we had a significant improvement in the rankings (after a significant decrease). If the rankings could be affected by lobbying, then they really had no meaning at all.

That's why I thought that the U.S. News and World Report rankings (as well as all other school rankings) are just a load of horseshit, even before I read this.

Chemical weapons and the U.S.

George Monbiot:

In 1997 the US agreed to decommission the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other agents it possessed within 10 years. In 2007 it requested the maximum extension of the deadline permitted by the Chemical Weapons Convention – five years. Again it failed to keep its promise, and in 2012 it claimed they would be gone by 2021. Russia yesterday urged Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control. Perhaps it should press the US to do the same.

Ever since I first hear about the fact that the U.S. has a chemical weapons stockpile, I've wondered why it keeps them. I mean, it costs money to maintain them. They are also a huge security risk--they can be stolen or just blown up where they are, spreading a deadly gas over whatever unlucky part of the country they happen to be hidden in. Which means there also has to be a some significant costs to guard them. They are also essentially unusable as weapons. Any benefit to be gained on the battlefield will be vastly outweighed by the adverse affects on American interests if it uses a weapon like that. The U.S. has a massive nuclear arsenal, which unlike chemical weapons, it can legally keep under international law (provided that the U.S. is officially committed to disarmament at some later date in the hazy future). And maintaining chemical weapons also undermines American credibility when it confronts other regimes which have them.

What's the point? Why keep asking for an extension? Why not just decommission them now, save us all some money and the fears that they could fall into the wrong hands? Why not neutralize the hypocrisy argument (at least that one small particular hypocrisy argument. There are still plenty of others)?

Not wanting to blow shit up in other countries is not "Isolationism"!!!!

Hulk Smash!

Part of a continuing series.

The piano guys now control my life

Does Compulsory Voting Deliver More Substantive Elections?

I've long been curious about how the political dynamics in a democracy that requires every qualified voter to vote, like Australia, work. So much of American electoral strategy is about turnout. And I'm not just talking about the various thinly-disguised efforts to suppress the votes of the other side, or the GOTV efforts for the supporters on your own side. What politicians say during a campaign and the news coverage itself is slanted because of turnout.

There is little point in doing things like ranting about how the president is a socialist secret Muslim pretender unless you're trying to energize the people that don't like the president to be enthusiastic enough to show up on election day. Those type of things are not going to change any minds. Unless you already hate the subject of the rants, they aren't all that convincing. It's just preaching to the choir. But that's still useful because of the choir is riled up enough, they will be motivated to show up at the polls. That's the whole point of talk radio. That also is the primary media strategy of a certain former Australian media mogul.

But if everyone is going to vote and turn out is no longer a factor, then, in theory, the campaigns should be more about changing minds than bringing out the minds that already agree with you. So much of American political analysis assumes that people's minds are basically fixed. You get the minorities or young people to vote, the Dems get a boost. If you get "white working class" people to vote, the Repubs get a boost. If all those groups must vote, then the campaign and its allies in the punditry world would have to focus on convincing people who would not otherwise vote for X to change their mind and do it anyway.

At least that's the theory. I wonder if that is how things actually work in Australia. I haven't seen anyone look at the recent Australian election through the lense of its compulsory voting rules.

Buzzfeed's Lame Gotcha

This is pretty stupid.

I mean, I was and am against both the Iraq war and intervention in Syria. But they are different. With Syria, no one is talking about an invasion with ground forces to occupy the country and impose a new government, as they were in Iraq. The differences between the proposal to intervene in Iraq in 2002 and early 2003, and the proposed intervention in Syria are pretty significant. There's no inconsistency to being against the Iraq war but for bombing Syria. You can try to glaze over those differences by describing them both as "a war of choice in the Middle East," but that doesn't make them exactly the same.

(via Memeorandum)

Israel's take on the Syrian debate in the U.S.

Link:

Israeli officials have consistently made the case that enforcing Mr. Obama’s narrow “red line” on Syria is essential to halting the nuclear ambitions of Israel’s archenemy, Iran.

I just don't see how that makes sense at all. I mean, chemical weapons are not the same as nuclear weapons. The Iranians are a strong supporters of the ban on CWs, having been a country that was the victim of Saddam's chemical weapon attack in the 1980s (Just as the Japanese are strongly in favor of global nuclear disarmament, having been the one country to be nuked).

I guess the logic is that if the U.S. enforces this "red line" by force, then it is more likely to strike Iran if it crosses that other "red line" of gaining nuclear weapons. But does anyone actually believe that? Whether a country gets attacked depends on a whole lot of factors. North Korea crossed the nuclear finish line without an attack, largely because a strike on NoKo could trigger a nuclear response. In fact, Israel constantly beating the anti-Iranian drum is the biggest incentive to Iran to get the bomb as fast as it can. Any country in Iran's situation, with both the regional power and the world's superpower openly debating an attack in the world media, would be seeking some way to deter such a strike.

The fact that Israel wants the U.S. to attack Syria should be another reason to oppose the plan. One of the criticisms of a strike is that it might drag Iran into a conflict with the U.S. But that's something that Israel wants. I don't actually think that a Syrian strike would lead to a U.S.-Iranian war, but I could be wrong. And the fact that Israel is itching for the U.S. to hit Syria makes me think that they think a widened conflict is more of a possibility.

NLRB iOS App

I felt that I had to download the new National Labor Relations Board app that lunched 6 days ago (in time for Labor Day, I guess). As someone who deals with that agency just about every day I have to say that the app is really disappointing.

The NLRB web site is actually quite good. There are a lot of useful things on the site both for someone who isn't familiar with the agency and someone like me who has regularly practiced before the agency for more than a decade. I was hoping some of the statutes, regulations, or case handling manuals that are on that site would be in the app. But they are not. Instead of the actual law there is a general summary employers', employees', and unions' rights, so general that it's hard to imagine it would be useful for any of the people who might be inclined to download the app. Most people don't know anything about the NLRB. The people who are going to bother to get the app are the rare folks who already know a bit about what the NLRB is and want to be able to carry around some of its resources on their phone. None of the kind of people who would install a NLRB app need the introductory summary the app offers. The people who do not know that stuff are never going to search out and install an NLRB app on their device. It looks like the NLRB didn't think through who its likely audience will be for the app.

The only useful feature on the app is a regional office locator, that gives you the contact information for the closest regional office. That isn't all that useful for me because I am in pretty regular contact with those offices. But at least it might be handy for some people.

The one thing I did learn was the three closest NLRB offices to my office are Region 4 (Philadelphia, no surprise there, it's 2.5 blocks from here), Region 22 (Newark), and Region 29 (Brooklyn). I would have thought that Region 5 (Baltimore) or Region 2 (Manhattan) would have been closer than the Brooklyn office. Okay, now I've learned it. So why do I still need this app on my phone?

Not enough war for McCain

Here's a military intervention that Bloody John opposes: military intervention that isn't bloody enough.

This is news?

Do you blame them? I mean what would any organization do if drones were periodically zooming out of the sky and blowing up your leaders?

I'm not defending al-Qaeda here (nor am I applauding the use of drones). It's just kinda obvious that if your organization was plagued with death from above you would try to find some way to make it stop.

ASIDE: Why do so many articles about drones use a photo of a B-2 bomber which is not a drone? I'm not one of those bloggers who pretends to be a military expert. The B-2 is probably the only military aircraft I can identify by sight just because it looks so odd. And they definitely look different than drones, which look more like this.

Baby's first ethnic slur

Thanks to MatthewB and a children's book about the life of Ronald Reagan that he gave our son a few months ago, Noz Jr. has started calling people "fat little dutchman."

The book is by Susan Allen, former first lady of Virginia and wife of George "Macaca" Allen. Which is strangely appropriate.

Short attention span theater

Pokerappgate is not really the kind of thing I would ordinarily post about here. But McCain's excuse that it was a three hour hearing is too ridiculous for me to bear. I'm looking at you too, Andrea Mitchell!

A three hour hearing!!! Take it from someone who does hearings for a living, a three hour hearing is short. In my racket, most hearings run from between a couple of hours to the entire work day (i.e. 2-9 hours), often with no break for lunch, because no one wants to have to come back for the dreaded second day. And every once in a while I have a case which involves a multi-day hearing (I second chaired a three day trial in January). I realize that I don't have the same kind of hearings that other lawyers and lawmakers have, but from what I can tell a three hour congressional hearing isn't all that unusual. Quite a few of the hearings that make the news are multi-day affairs.

I'm a pretty avid iPhone game player (not poker, but still games), but I don't ever play when I'm in a hearing. That's because it's my fucking job to pay attention to what is going on at those things. If I were unable to resist playing a game on my phone during a hearing, I would not be able to do my job competently. In my hearings the biggest thing that might be at stake is someone's job. They are not over whether a whole bunch of people are going to be incinerated in a bomb attack, like they are in Senator McCain's. Even with my comparatively low stakes, it is patently offensive for me to even consider goofing around when there is a serious matter like someone's livelihood is at issue. If McCain doesn't think the issue whether to launch a military strike on a foreign nation is important enough to get his undivided attention, maybe he should get another job.

Suddenly it's all about Kanye

It's remarkable how a little thing like this can totally overwhelm my google news feed, rendering my Kazakhstan news alerts almost unreadable.

Tit-for-Tat

I'm kind of curious how Putin will retaliate for this. I predict Obama's meeting with LGBT activists will piss off Putin and he will want retaliate the next time he visits our country. He seems to be a retaliatin' kinda guy. Who will Putin meet when he's next in the U.S. to try to piss off Obama?

Does anyone have a guess? I can't come up with any group that Putin would see as comparable.

Bloody John

Since he entered Congress, has John McCain ever not been in favor of American military intervention any time it has been proposed anywhere in the world?

I'm not just being rhetorical. I'm seriously trying to find a scenario where McCain would not be in favor of the U.S. going into a situation with guns blazing. Does anyone have a single example of an American military intervention that he opposed?

He has jumped on board with every military adventure in recent years (even stuff that other members of his party were leery of, like Kosovo, Libya, and Syria). And whenever a president does not want to consider military force, McCain gets on the teevee and demands that that president start killing foreigners to avoid making some terrible mistake. The dude seems to think that the answer to every foreign policy question is to kill someone. Can anyone think of a counter-example?

The Daily Mail Thinks This Matters

This picture will matter about as much as this picture did in 2003, or this picture did when McCain was beating the war drums in 2011.

I realize the Daily Mail isn't exactly catering to a thinking audience, but these "gotcha" photos don't work, and frankly, shouldn't work. I was against American military involvement in Iraq, Libya, and now Syria and I still don't think those picture should matter. I believe U.S. officials should meet with pretty much any foreign leader who is willing to talk to them. And the fact that they have dinner with someone or shake their hand shouldn't make them unable to have a different relationship later on. Things change. Politicians should be allowed to alter their judgments when new shit comes to light. That's not hypocrisy, that's being a thinking individual.

You can argue that the politician's change of heart isn't justified by the new shit, or that the new shit is actually pretty similar to old shit we already knew about. On that basis, you might be able to prove the charge of hypocrisy. But that's an argument. It's not a photo. The photo itself doesn't mean much at all. You need to make the argument. I don't think the fine folks at the Daily Mail are capable of doing that.

(via Memeorandum)

"history defying"

It has always seemed pretty evident to me that the original idea behind Article I, Section 8, Clause 10 was that while the President gets to command the armed forces, Congress decides the countries in which the U.S. initiates hostilities. So while all modern Presidents (including Obama himself when he ordered interventions in Libya) have endorsed a more expansive "The President Can Order the Slaughter of People in Any Foreign Nation Whenever He Wants, So Fuck You Congress" theory of presidential power, asking Congress to endorse a military adventure in Syria seems much more consistent with the history and language of the Constitution than people are giving him credit for now.

It's not about the legal justification for bombing Syria, Obama's decision is more about providing political cover for what is increasingly looking like an unpopular choice. Which is a good thing. Congress should be asked to endorse every new military adventure, no matter how limited. Presidents have avoided doing so because they don't want to have their hands tied on the international stage, and Congress has largely let presidents get away with it because they don't want to take on the responsibility. But it is supposed to be Congresses responsibility. Whatever selfish reasons Obama has for throwing this to Congress, I'm glad he's doing it.

I also hope it creates a real precedent. Maybe just maybe the Iraq debacle has changed the politics of this country enough so that presidents will be wary of the blame for things that go wrong and not just anxious to hog the credit for what they assume will be a glorious victory. Or maybe not. But it would be nice if at least one good thing could come out of that disaster.

(via Memeorandum)

"Support slipping"

"Support", as in the support that the administration is concerned about when it slips, is the support of people in other countries, and not the American people.

Fog

What makes us omniscient? Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe we should ever apply that economic, political, or military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there! None of our allies supported us; not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning.

It looks like it's time to reexamine our reasoning.

Indict him

I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen anyone talking about referring Bashar Assad (or whoever else people might think is responsible for the recent chemical weapons attack) to the International Criminal Court.

Because of its dysfunctional domestic politics, the U.S. has never ratified the Rome Statute that created the ICC, but America has cooperated with the court in the past (e.g. the Darfur case). Obama only pledged to "change [his] calculus" if Syria used chemical weapons. He didn't promise to bomb Syria (even though that seems to be what everyone assumed he meant). Sure, the GOP would flip its lid because they hate the ICC for their usual paranoid anti-world government reasons. But let's face it, the GOP has been continuously flipping its lid for a while now. One more flip wouldn't make that much of a difference.They're already screaming that the president is an anti-American socialist incompetent criminal who should be impeached. Frankly, there's not much more they can scream if Obama does something else they find offensive. If anything, another lid flipping will just further demonstrate how ineffective a strategy taking every issue to 11 is.

Meanwhile, I'm really surprised that the ICC wasn't floated as an option in yesterday's parliamentary debate in Britain. The UK has ratified the Rome Statute and thus is a full participating member state in the court.

I am still a little skeptical that there is real proof that Assad ordered the attack, although admittedly less so now that the U.S. claims it has intercepted communications proving it came from his regime. But if they have the goods on him, present the evidence in court. Isn't this just what the Court was created to do? The ICC would have jurisdiction if the UN Security Council referred the case to the ICC. There's no reason that the "something" in "we must do something" has to be a military strike.

Here we go again

By an overwhelming margin, the American public does not want the U.S. to take military action in Syria. The British public is also opposed. So is the Arab League. So is the Arab public.

Who is for a U.S. strike? A bunch of people who were totally wrong about Iraq.

Which means it is going to happen.

Credibility

That's all that this is really about. The administration feels that it is boxed in because:

1. Obama called the use of chemical weapons in Syria a "red line" that cannot be crossed without "changing [the President's] calculus' which was widely interpreted as a threat to use military force.
2. The administration has now publicly stated that the chemical weapon attack last week was perpetrated by the Assad regime.

That's it, that's the entire reason that American weapons will kill Syrians in the near future. The administration has made some statements that seem to logically require an attack and there's no way to not kill someone without looking bad.

It's not about actually stopping any chemical weapons use (except maybe under a vague deterrence theory that if the U.S. does not act, Assad and others will feel empowered to use chemical weapons in the future. Never mind that an ineffective attack, which is what we are probably looking at, would too.).

It's not about "protecting civilians" because  bombing a foreign country will result in more civilian deaths, not less.

It's not even about overthrowing Assad.

It's about killing people to avoid embarrassment.


ADDING: what Atrios just posted.

Firewall blues

Apparently the WaPo paywall applies to the blogs it hosts. I hit my 20 article monthly allotment this week on this computer (but not on the other computers I use, nor my iPad or iPhone). The paywall is easy to get around. I can just copy the url of the article I want to read and paste it into another browser. Or I can open feedly and read it via the site's RSS feed. Hidemyass.com also works, which means other free proxy sites probably do too. (I am loyal to HMA for its help evading the not-so-great-firewall-of-Kazakhstan) None of those workarounds are that hard, but they are enough of a pain in the ass that I am thinking twice before I click on the Plum Line or Wonkblog (listed as "Ezra Klein" on my blogroll) these days. Which means I visit them less often.

What I haven't considered is paying the Washington Post for access. I mean, why should I? I have a bunch of free workarounds! Also, I already pay for the NYT and I don't want to pay for two newspaper subscriptions. And if I was willing to pay for a second one, I don't think that the WaPa would be it.

I understand why newspapers are putting up paywalls. And if they are going to paywall their site, I do think that a leaky paywall is the way to go.  So I'm not really anti-the WaPo paywall. Maybe it's the one that will work for that publication. I'm just noting that despite all my understanding and lack of hostility to the idea, I just don't think it's working on me and I wonder how typical people like me are.

Obscene

Well that's embarrassing, especially today.

(As for Syria, I'm still with Booman on this one.)

(first link via Memeorandum)

Anti-democratic with a small "d"

I'm fascinated by some of the arguments Republicans have been making to justify amending the voting laws to make it harder to vote. For a while, they were basically make an anti-fraud argument. But once they started imposing restrictions beyond voter ID, that argument couldn't be used to explain all of the changes. How would reducing the amount of time that the polls are open stop identity fraud?

The new argument seems to be: we're not trying to disenfranchise black people, we are trying to disenfranchise democrats. That's actually the State of Texas' official position in their federal lawsuit, and Phyllis Schlafly made essentially the same argument to justify the recently passed North Carolina law. Because the Voting Rights Act only prohibits race-based discrimination, it makes some sense in the legal context. But outside of that context, how is that possibly justified? When the party in power changes the law to make it harder for its political opponents to vote, that's banana republic territory. Sure, it might not be racial discrimination, but it does suggest a hostility to democracy and the fear that the powers that be don't believe they can win a fair election where everyone votes.

The Do Something Caucus

What Booman said.

That's basically what I was trying to say the other day. Even if we could prove that the chemical attack came from Assad, that doesn't mean that doing something would be better than doing nothing.

...I guess there's the argument that if we do nothing after a confirmed chemical weapons attack against civilians, that would embolden every other awful leader with chemical weapons to think they can get away with using them in the future. But all of the likely scenarios for American intervention that I can see will make the situation there worse, not better. So what kind of precedent would a disastrous intervention be for future would-be chemical gassers? Would a Syrian mess really be a deterrent? I'm not sure if would work on that level either.

Pinning the blame

This makes no sense:

The official, in a written statement, said that “based on the reported number of victims, reported symptoms of those who were killed or injured, witness accounts and other facts gathered by open sources, the U.S. intelligence community, and international partners, there is very little doubt at this point that a chemical weapon was used by the Syrian regime against civilians in this incident.”

The number of victims and their symptoms cannot tell you who is responsible for an attack. Witness accounts might, but there haven't been any witness accounts in the news other than statements by rebel forces who (obviously) have a clear interest in having the blame go to the Assad regime rather than to the rebels themselves. Maybe there are other witness accounts, but those accounts have not been reported. So lets see them before the Obama administration goes off and does something rash.

I also don't know what to make of "other facts gathered by open sources" so maybe the unnamed official could let us know. But I bet if they had a smoking gun, we would be hearing about that smoking gun. The fact that they are being vague, sounds like it's just a bullshit catchall when they really don't have much else.

Nothing is better than a bad something

Just don't do it.

 I have two main objections to intervention. First, we don't know which side is responsible for the chemical weapon attack, we will probably never know, and the rebels have every reason to do it themselves and then blame the Assad regime.

Second, there is no reason to think that an armed American response is going to make things any better in the country and there is a high risk that it will make things worse.

I know that chemical weapon attacks on civilians are horrible, It's totally understandable that people would hear about this and think "we must do something." But the "something" has got to be something that will likely make the situation better. It's better to do nothing than something that makes Syria more of a mess.

Bat 2013

This story won't make as much sense unless you remember our experience with the bat wars of ought-nine. Go here and here and here and here to get the background (optional background reading: here, although that one is about flying squirrel infestation that occurred roughly 3 weeks after we finally got rid of all 72 bats that were living in our house. While technically that was a separate conflict, in our heads it is all wrapped up in our minds as part of the same traumatic series of incidents)

So anyway, last night Mrs. Noz and Noz Jr. were both asleep and I was sitting in bed streaming a movie to my ipad. At about 11:30, I had to pee. So I got up and walked across our hallway to the bathroom. I didn't bother turning on any lights. It's my house, I know the way. On the way back, I felt this weird blast of air on my upper chest/lower neck. At first, I thought that maybe a stream of air conditioned air was shooting out of a crack in Noz Jr's door (I happened to be right in front of that door when I felt it). But I took a step back, and could not replicate the feeling. It didn't really make sense, but I wanted to get back to my movie before it got too late for me to finish. And so I went back to bed and started streaming again.

But as I watched that mysterious air current was really bugging me. What was it? I started thinking that maybe it was a critter. Once that idea got in my head, I couldn't concentrate on the film. So I stopped the video, opened the door to my bedroom and flicked on the hall light. A bat flew right at me. I hit the light off, jumped back in my room, closed the door, and woke up Mrs. Noz.

Why I turned off the hall light I'm not sure. Because we quickly realized that we needed to light up the house to find the bat and get it out. We grabbed things that we could use to whack the bat, and then crept out into the hallway together and flicked on the light.

There was nothing there. Mr. Noz stayed watch on the second floor, as I crept up to the stairs and slowly walked down. There it was, fluttering wildly around our first floor, back and forth across the bottom of the stairs. I dashed across it's path and opened the front door, hoping that it would just fly out. The mechanism to lock the screen door in the open position wasn't working, so I had to stay by the door and hold the screen open with my hand. As the bat kept diving at me, I was too scared to look at it. I just concentrated on keeping the door open.

Then it was gone. Mrs. Noz was still on the second floor so she didn't see whether it went out the door. And I had my head down and didn't see either. Eventually, we both calmed down. We knew it hadn't flown up to the second floor (Mrs. Noz would have seen it if it did). So I turned on all the lights and did a walk through of the first floor. I didn't see it anywhere. So we guessed that it had flown out of the house when I wasn't looking.

I closed up the door, turned off all the lights, we both went back to our bedroom, and closed the door. The adrenaline wore off and we started talking about how we hoped this was just a single bat invasion and not the first sign of another infestation.

Then we heard a sound in the hallway. Why had I turned off all the lights? I went back out, turning on lights as I went and found it flying back and forth on the first floor again. This time Mr. Noz held the door open and I stood on the stairs and swatted at it if it tried to fly to the second floor. We weren't getting anywhere. The bat kept flying past the open door without trying to leave. So we decided to do what worked on our first bat incident, we called campus security.

Bad idea. Only one security guard showed up (last time it was two) and he was more scared of the bat than we were. We spent about an hour and a half with him in which he talked about how nice it would be if we had a net, left for about 20 minutes to look for a net, knocking over our curtains, threw Noz Jr's nerf football at the bat as it hung on our window sill, and missed. At one point the guard tried to trap it in a box, but instead, that just got it started on another series of dives at us as we cowered, held the door open, and hoped it would notice the way out. It didn't. It landed instead on another window sill and hung there for a while. When Mrs. Noz mentioned that a neighbor called animal control when they had a bat last year, the guard gave us the number for the local police. However, he told us that the police would not help if they saw the campus security vehicle in front of our house. So the plan was that we would call the police, he would leave, he would loop back and pretend to happen upon the police at our house after they arrived, and then he would offer to assist. Whatever, the dude was useless. I was anxious to get someone who could really help.

As we discussed how it would go (the bat folded up and hanging quietly above our living room window), I heard "daddy?" I looked up, and Noz Jr. was looking down at me from the second floor hall. Mrs. Noz went upstairs, took him, and barricaded themselves into our bedroom, I called the police, and the campus security guy left. Then I was alone with the bat. Just staring at it as it hung there and I waited for the police to arrive. It was about 2am. It probably took about 5 minutes before police car arrived, but it seemed like much longer. During those five minutes I was utterly terrified. It wasn't because I thought the bat would hurt me. It's like when you're watching a movie, expecting someone to jump out on the screen. You know it's going to happen, you know when it does it will startle you, and you know that you are in no danger of actually being hurt. And yet there is still all this tension in the air. It was like that. I stared at the bat hanging by the window, hoping that the cops arrived before launched itself into flight and startled me.

And she did arrive before that happened. It was a single policewoman, barely five feet tall. She was utterly fearless. I felt like a total wuss explaining why we called the police for something as stupid as a bat in the house. She asked for a towel, but took a blanket instead. Then she walked over to the bat, covered it with the blanket, wrapped it up, took it outside, and let it go. I closed the door and all the windows. And it was over. Just like that. I was exhausted. It was almost three hours after it started. All over a stupid bat.

Noz Jr. was so excited. Not because of the bat, but because a real police car came to our house (he was watching upstairs from the window). He wanted us to call the fire department next. He was also completely wide awake. None of us got to sleep until about 4:30.

Now the question is: was this just a run of the mill bat wandering into our house, or is it the first sign of another infestation? If 2009 had not happened, this would not have been that big of a deal, just one bad night where we proved completely unable to remove a single harmless bat from our house before getting help from someone who could. But 2009 did happen. So now what?

Bad Boehner Poll

Yeah but what is Boehner's popularity in his home district? That's really all that matters. John Boehner represents his district, not the whole state and only the people in his district can vote him out of office. In that sense, Boehner's popularity in the parts of his home state that are not his district is just as relevant as his popularity in Massachusetts. If you're not surveying his constituents, you're not surveying his constituents. So who cares if they happen to be from the same state as the speaker?

(Okay, I realize that unlike a poll of Boehner's popularity in MA, a poll of OH would include some of his constituents. But unless the polling firm tells us how his numbers stack up just in his home district,  it's not going to tell us anything useful.)

Look at the bright side

Stuff like this doesn't look so bad anymore.

34 years of protests

This map is mesmerizing.

Does anyone know what that blinking light in Siberia (just North of Mongolia) is? It blinks consistently over the entire 34 years.

(Also does anyone know how to grab the embed code for the map? Some FP links require a FP account, which is free, but annoying for someone who doesn't have an account and wants to click on the above link. So I'm not sure how hard it is for some of my readers to see what I'm talking about)

Erik Erickson is Four and a-Half

I once mentioned to Noz Jr. that sometimes people who are boys go to a doctor and change into girls and vice-versa. Noz Jr. thought the idea was hilarious. He's still getting used to the idea that the people in the world are divided into male and female and as far as he thought everyone fell into one category or the other without any crossover. The notion of trans people transgressed the rule he had learned, which made the whole idea seem silly. So he laughed. He's almost four and a half years old.

I'm sure it won't always seem silly to him. Maybe he has forgotten our earlier conversation and whenever it comes up again it will seem silly again. Or maybe he will remember. Regardless, eventually he will get used to the idea, his world will get a little bigger and more complex, and it won't be funny anymore.

That's called growing up.

Whodunnit

As I said before, any accusation that someone used chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war is going to hard to verify. I'm sure the white coats can verify that chemical weapons were used, but who is responsible for the attack is going to be pretty hard to prove.

And so you have hundreds of people dead, with suggestions that they died in a chemical attack. Syrian rebels claim that the Assad regime did it, and the regime denies it and suggests that any attack came from the rebels. Countries that already sided with the rebels are inclined to believe the rebels, and countries that back Assad are inclined to believe him. How is the rest of the world ever going to figure it out? I doubt it ever will. But people will still see what they want to see.

The pro-Assad side does have one point: It was a pretty senseless attack (with no real military value to anyone), and came on the same day that the Assad regime allowed a U.N. team to arrive in Syria to investigate a prior chemical weapons use allegation. From where I sit, it looks like the Syrian rebels, desperate for international aid and trying very hard to show the world what a monster Assad is, have more of an incentive to wage an attack like this than Assad. If the Syrian government is behind this latest attack, it would be an incredibly stupid move. Then again, it's not exactly unheard of for a political leader under fire (literally or figuratively) to make a stupid move.

They lied to us

Damn you, Nabisco!!!!!

al-Jazeera America

Sorry Ms. Beale, I'm skeptical of the new al-Jazeera America channel. Not because it's al-Jazeera. The company has it's problems (especially recently), but it's not the terrorism-loving news outlets that American conservatives assume it to be. I actually think that al-Jazeera English is a solid news channel, better than all three of the American 24 hour news channels.¹ Americans speak English, there already is an English language al-Jazeera channel serving the entire English speaking world, why do we need an American-specific channel?

What I suspect is that they will dumb it down for the American audience. That's what CNN does. CNN International is much better than American CNN. But the only time I can watch CNN International is when I'm outside the country because CNN America is what is offered here. It's not just CNN that sells a dumbed down version of their international news operation to the American public. Other news outlets do the same thing. That seems to be the point to having an American edition as opposed to a global English language edition.

If al-Jazeera was really intent to bring the same level of quality as al-Jazeera English to the U.S., it would just bring al-Jazeera English to the U.S. instead of creating a new U.S.-only channel.

I realize that al-J English has not been very successful in getting picked up by American cable companies. But I don't see why al-J America is going to have any better luck. Which is why I suspect, like all the international news companies, al-Jazeera's marketing department has come to the conclusion that Americans need a dumber more sensationalist version of the channel, even if they are trying to market themselves as the opposite. If they really meant it, they wouldn't need to create a new channel. Just stick with a-Jazeera English.

--------------------------
1- Okay longtime Rubber Hose readers (yes, both of you) will recall that I originally predicted that al-Jazeera English would fail. What can I say, I was totally wrong. But you two will also recall that I already copped to that a couple of years ago. And none of that changes my point that having an al-Jazeera America is dumb when it already has an al-Jazeera English.

Makes sense

Under the new regime, shooting protesters isn't a crime.

eBooks

I'm always reading a book but I sometimes feel like I'm one of the last active book readers who hasn't switched to electronic format. It's not that I'm a Luddite, and I see the advantages of electronic books--those advantages are hard to ignore, people are talking about them all the time. What I find strange is that few people talk about their disadvantages. Here's my list in no particular order:

1. Ebook readers chain you to a particular book vendor. If you have a Kindle, you can only buy books through Amazon. If you have a Nook, you are stuck with Barnes and Noble. That means you can't shop around for books (not a big deal right now when ebooks are comparatively cheap, but it might be later when they completely kill physical books and ebook sellers can take more advantage of their monopolistic powers), and the fate of your book collection is tied to a particular company (if BN goes under, for example). You can mitigate this problem a little bit by using the Kindle or Nook app on an ipad or android tablet, but it's still a problem.


2. Ebook readers can't get wet. Forget about reading in a bath tub or bringing a book on a boat trip.


3. You don't really own ebooks. When you "buy" an ebook, you are really just purchasing a license to use the code for a while. The books you think you own can be taken away from you under the contract you accepted at one point but haven't read and probably don't know the terms. So stuff like this and this can happen.


4. Ebook readers need to be charged. I spend so much fucking time swapping various devices in and out of their charging cables. I just don't want another device with a battery that I have to pay attention to.


5. If you buy a book as an ebook, you lose access to the secondary market. That is, you can't buy it used, or sell it when you're done with it. For that matter the potential resale value of your books means that physical books are necessarily that much more expensive than the ebook version.


6. You can't get an ebook autographed by the author.


7. You can't really give ebooks as a gift. I mean, you can. It just seems really lame. Giving someone an ebooks feels like you're not really giving them a gift. That may change eventually. But right now that's how it is.

I'm not trying to criticize anyone else's decision to switch to ebooks. And I do recognize the advantages of the electronic format (less weight to haul around, the ability to buy books instantly, a built-in reading light, etc) I just wish the issue was presented as more of a cost-benefit analysis than "ebooks are awesome for all these reasons!"

Drinking Liberally: I'm Baaaaaaaaaaack

Or at least I will be soon.

For the first time in over a year, I will show up at the the Center City Philadelphia Drinking Liberally tomorrow (Tuesday, August 20th). Everyone is invited:

Jose Pistola's
263 North 15th Street (upstairs bar)
Philadelphia, PA
6pm until you get tired and leave

I'm trying to drum up some old timey peeps and maybe on new timey one. But whatever kind of peep you are, you can join us too.

Blogpartisanship

Right blogistan is excited by the idea that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity might moderate the GOP primary debates in the 2016 election. So is left blogistan.

This will remain true up until the time that right blogistan realizes that the left is not upset at the idea, at which point they will hunt around for something else that they think will "piss off liberals." Note: there's a fairly good chance that time will never come as right blogistan does not pay that much attention to left blogistan and they prefer to dwell on the stuff they imagine pisses off the left rather than going through the trouble of reading actual arguments from the other side. (That's a lot of generalizations but I think it is generally true)

Call a coup a coup

I agree with David Remnick. Sure, suspending aid to Egypt will screw a lot of things up. But the Egyptian military has not only seized power without an election, it has also slaughtered hundreds of protesters. If that isn't enough to justify a cut-off, is there anything that would be?

Put another way, the Foreign Assistance Act requires that aid be automatically cut off if there is a coup d'etat "in which the military plays a decisive role." The purpose of that law was to deter foreign militaries from overthrowing an elected government. By making the suspension of aid automatic, it is the foreign military's action that causes aid to stop flowing. American law puts the cut off trigger in the would-be coup plotter's own hand. That means the coup-plotter must take the expected pain from an aid cut-off in deciding whether to go ahead with a coup. That's where the law's deterrent effect lies.

But if the suspension does not depend upon coup leader's actions, but rather whether the American President decides to label a change in government a "coup", it changes that dynamic. The trigger is no longer in the coup-plotters hands, it's in the President's and there is no real reason to deter would-be coup plotters anymore. Rather than having to balance the benefits of political power with the damage from a suspension in aid that will happen automatically, the coup-plotter knows that he might be able to have his cake and eat it too. What if he can seize power and talk the U.S. into leaving that aid in place? Any coup-plotter is a risk taker, so who wouldn't take that deal?

It's now also clear that the Egyptian military was privately assured by both Israel and the UAE that it could slaughter people on its streets without losing its aid. So fuck al-Sisi, fuck Israel and fuck the UAE. Obama should come out now and call it a "coup." The Egyptians can try to retaliate and make the transit of American military vehicles through Egyptian territory more inconvenient. I'm sure the U.S. will find some way to deal with that. And because the aid package was a bribe to keep Egypt abiding by the Camp David Accords, it might lead to changes in the Egyptian-Israeli relationship if the aid package is suspended long term, and Israel will probably take a serious economic hit if Egypt stops supplying it with natural gas. But if we want the aid to pay for influence, the U.S. needs to use its influence or else it won't have any and then what exactly are we paying for?

Once again, we are talking about a package that is almost entirely military aid. ($1.3 billion in military aid vs. 250 million of non-military aid) The money is not primarily going to feed starving children. It's paying for the weapons to shoot those kids' parents. I'm enough of a realist to think that sometimes it makes sense for the U.S. to spend money to buy influence. But unless the U.S. actually follows its own laws and is willing to cut off aid when recipients do something this egregious, it hasn't got what it paid for.

Egyptian-American Symbiosis

One of those points that I seem to harp on a lot here is the enormous influence that the U.S. has over the Egyptian military because it is funded by American aid. But the NY Times drew my attention to the flip side of this influence, Egypt's influence over the U.S.:

Most nations, including many close allies of the United States, require up to a week’s notice before American warplanes are allowed to cross their territory. Not Egypt, which offers near-automatic approval for military overflights, to resupply the war effort in Afghanistan or to carry out counterterrorism operations in the Middle East, Southwest Asia or the Horn of Africa. 

Losing that route could significantly increase flight times to the region.

American warships are also allowed to cut to the front of the line through the Suez Canal in times of crisis, even when oil tankers are stacked up like cars on an interstate highway at rush hour. Without Egypt’s cooperation, military missions could take days longer.

 The Egyptian military's aid package dates back to the late 1970s. Which means that the U.S. has had almost 35 years to push its weight around with the Egyptian government to get special concessions and privileges. But then those concessions became the background assumptions for the U.S. government when it planned other things. Planning for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan assumed expedited passage through the Suez Canal, et cetera. As those assumptions are relied upon for more and more activities of the U.S. government, the threat that they may stop becomes more and more disruptive to the U.S. Which means that the Egyptian government ends up with some bargaining power over the U.S. What starts as a one-sided power relationship between superpower and client state, becomes more of a symbiotic relationship as those Egyptian favors get incorporated deeper and deeper into American plans, making it more and more difficult for Americans to imagine going without them.

I had not thought of that aspect to the relationship. As a practical matter, the U.S. has a lot less influence than I have been crediting them with. The influence might be there on paper--cutting off funding would be devastating to the Egyptian military, and the Egyptian military knows it.  But because of all those other things, the U.S. is not going to exercise that power, and the Egyptian military probably knows that too. Which means the U.S. really doesn't have that much influence after all.

Until Wednesday

Dumbing defying down

Is installing solar panels on the White House roof really "defying Reagan"? It's true that in 1986 Reagan removed the solar panels that Carter had installed on the roof in 1979. Reagan was probably making a point by taking them down, so maybe you could say that he was "defying Carter" by taking them out. But Ronnie didn't try to decree that the White House roof should be free from solar panels for all time. And the solar panels of today are different from the 1979 models, being much cheaper and more efficient. So whatever reasons Reagan had for removing the Carter panels might not apply to the new Obama ones.

Every time a new occupant comes into the White House, they make changes to the house. Michelle Obama's vegetable garden is on the South lawn of the White House grounds, which means she had to remove whatever was there before she created the garden. FDR had the entire South lawn redesigned by Frederick Olmsted in 1934. Did Michelle "defy FDR" when she created the garden? No more than FDR "defied" his cousin Theodore, who had altered the South lawn during the 1902 White House renovations. I don't see why the solar installation is any different. Why must people spin decisions like these into imaginary conflicts?

(via Memeorandum)

BFD

People are aflutter because the CIA has acknowledged the existence of Area 51. Area 51 in in the popular consciousness because virtually every UFO conspiracy theory involves the U.S. government hiding aliens, alien space crafts, or alien bodies in that secret base. The CIA is not acknowledging that it squirreled away any of that stuff in Area 51. They have just stopped redacting references to "Area 51" from their public archives concerning the U-2 spy plane program.

Which means the whole "revelation" isn't all that revealing. I mean, we all know the CIA does something that occupies physical space. So obviously that means there are "areas" in the world where the CIA has facilities. All they are saying now that they didn't before is the name of one of those areas, one that was already widely known enough for us to put it on the map. The only real question the name raises is if "Area 51" means that there are at least fifty more areas out there somewhere.

Map of Annual Coffee Consumption Per Country Per Capita

Click to embiggen. (link) (via)

If you know where it is, you can see quite clearly one of my problems when I was in Kazakhstan (not my only problem, or even close to my worst problem, but still a problem).

One of these things is not like the other

In Libya, armed militias have filled a void left by a revolution that felled a dictator. In Syria, a popular uprising has morphed into a civil war that has left more than 100,000 dead and provided a haven for Islamic extremists. In Tunisia, increasingly bitter political divisions have delayed the drafting of a new constitution.

And now in Egypt, often considered the trendsetter of the Arab world, the army and security forces, after having toppled the elected Islamist president, have killed hundreds of his supporters, declared a state of emergency and worsened a deep polarization.

The post revolutionary period in Tunisia has had its rocky bits, there has been some political violence.But it hasn't had anything like the scale of violence or the scope of chaos witnessed in Libya, Syria and Egypt. Tunisia, unlike the others, has a functioning democratic government. For all its flaws, the country has a semblance of normalcy and stability that the other three do not have.

That was fun while it lasted

The period that Egypt was not in a state of emergency since 1981 has ended. The total run time for the non-emergency state was about 14 months.

Yes we can! (But not necessarily that we should)

I gotta disagree with the Big A on this one. When it comes to influencing the actions of the military government there's a whole lot the U.S. can do. As I've pointed out several times before, the U.S. sends a huge foreign aid package to Egypt. The great majority of that aid is military aid, and the American aid package is a significant portion of the Egyptian military's budget (it's hard to say how much, but one calculation puts the U.S. as paying approximately one-third of Egypt's total). Which means the U.S. is paying a big hunk of the salaries of the people currently in charge of that country, not to mention the soldiers and equipment  currently used to clear camp of protesters.

Normally, you could argue that cutting off aid would require an act of Congress, because Congress is the body that appropriates the funds when it passes the foreign aid budget. But in this case, Congress has already authorized a cut-off of Egyptian aid. All the President has to do is call the removal of Morsi a "coup" and a lot of the Egyptian military's funding will dry up.

Just having the ability to pull that trigger gives the U.S. enormous influence with the people calling the shots in this particular crisis. So it's wrong to say "probably there isn't" anything we can do.

Of course, whether the U.S. should use its influence is a different question. My point is only that the influence is there, unlike other places, like, for example, Syria, where the U.S. can't do a lot to direct the situation without intervening militarily. Oh and for the record, I think intervening militarily in Syria (or Egypt) would be a terrible idea. Also, even though the U.S. has the ability to threaten an aid cut off to influence the Egyptian junta, I stand by my earlier point that a cut-off will not happen.

Reasonable expectations

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. constitution protects people in the U.S. against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Whether a search is deemed to be "unreasonable" depends on whether the court finds that the individual had a "reasonable expectation of privacy". So government agents opening a sealed letter is an unreasonable search, but agents reading a postcard is not because no one would reasonably expect that writing to be private when it is openly visible to anyone who handles the card as it passes through the mail.

I keep thinking about that legal standard when I hear each new allegation that the government is routinely collecting information on people. Thanks to the ridiculous majority of the current Supreme Court, there doesn't appear to be an avenue for challenging the constitutionality of government surveillance right now. But I'm an optimist. I think in the long run the courts will find a way to work around its ruling in Clapper v. Amnesty International. It was just a 5-4 decision, and as the revelations data collection mount, I think its likely that the Court will eventually acknowledge that someone has the right to challenge this behavior.

But what happens in the meantime? All these revelations are are going to change the public's expectations about what is private. Google current position is shocking now, because email to us feels as private as a sealed snail mail envelope. But after this stuff gets reported and it gets absorbed into the public's consciousness, people probably are going to start thinking differently about their electronic communication. Any message that passes through an external server will start feeling more like a message written on a postcard than a private letter. The public's change in its thinking about privacy is rational because it reflects the reality of what the government is doing without any meaningful check.

That's the problem with having the limits of a constitutional right defined by the collective expectations of society. Those expectations can change, which means the extent of constitutional protections will change with them. By violating the right and then having that violation publicized during a period that it cannot be challenged in court because of a technicality, the public will expect the violations to continue. Once they have that expectation, it won't be a violation anymore. By the time the Court finally finds it way around Clapper v. Amnesty International, I wonder if there will be any constitutional violation left to stop.