sweet sixteen

sixteen years ago today, mrs. noz and i got married. happy us!

i used to bring up my wedding anniversary every year. i put up the post late 2010 because i had to flee kazakhstan on short notice. then i ended up being 350 miles away from mrs. noz on the actual anniversary date, and spent it instead sitting naked in a hot room with strangers while getting slapped on the back with some wet leaves. then i totally blew it in 2012, which was CaTHY's fault.

in any case, the tradition is back on! don't take 2010 or 2012 as any sign of lack of appreciation of my marriage. marrying mrs. noz is still one of the best things i have ever done.

(for history buffs: 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7...)

"meteoric rise"

that phrase really bugs me. if there's one thing a meteor never does it's rise.

west xylophone

i heard the alphabet of nations for the millionth time today. but for the first time it occurred to me that they might be giants doesn't recognize western sahara either.

reception and hospitality in the new syria

this is what happens when you keep taking these brief grandstanding trips to combat zones that you barely understand.

not that i think the photo proves that much, other than making john mccain look like an ass. i don't think the fact that he was photographed next to possible kidnappers means that he approves of kidnapping religious pilgrims (on the other hand, i wouldn't be surprised if he does approve of seizing members of the iranian revolutionary guard, which is what the kidnappers claimed the kidnappees were). this attention to last year's kidnapping does, however, muddy mccain's message that the rebels are clear good guys who deserve american aid.

(via memeorandum)

alas

aliens are probably not going to find us.

the crack factor

the sample size isn't that big, but it looks like if you're a big city mayor, being caught on video smoking crack might not be bad for your approval ratings.

marion barry famously got more popular after his crack smoking video came out. once he served his time in prison, he won back the mayoral office and is currently DC's highest rated politician.

it's a little early to tell what this scandal will do to rob ford, but the initial polling seems to indicate that he is just as unpopular now as he was before the current crack smoking allegations came out. and who knows? maybe he can pull a barry--use his crack tape as the basis for a story of redemption to launch a political comeback. if rob ford manages to profit from the scandal maybe we'll start seeing other mayors filming lighting up the old crack pipe on video on purpose!

if you are targeted on the basis of partisanship, you are a partisan

vixen strangely makes a very clever point: tea party groups claim they were targeted for partisan reasons. they couldn't have been targeted for partisan reasons unless they themselves are partisan. if they are partisan groups, they don't deserve the tax exemption they don't deserve the tax exemption they applied for and deserve greater scrutiny.

i don't think that logic dispels the entire controversy. the bottom line is that a lot of overtly partisan groups apply for a tax exemption that is not supposed to go to partisan organizations. groups on all sides of the political spectrum do that, and so in a perfect world they all would get greater scrutiny. it is a problem for the government to selectively apply scrutiny to some groups instead of others for political reasons. however, the remedy for that problem would be for the IRS to scrutinize every group applying for the exemption (or maybe more of a random sample of everyone), not that it lay off everyone as the conservatives seem to be saying.

send in the clown

with chavez gone and ahmadinejad on his way out, i was getting concerned that the american public wouldn't have a clownish foreign leader to be elevated as the next hitler. but no need to worry, it looks like help is on its way.

hezbalkhataa'

i have a hard time imagining how hezbollah's gamble can pay off. it's open assistance of the syrian government is just going to make it easier for other outside groups and states to support the rebels. (maybe it already has?). if assad loses, hezbollah has bet on the wrong horse and forever damaged its reputation with the overall arab world, making its future funding sources a lot more iffy.

while it might still be possible for assad to survive this (i'm still betting against it), i don't think it's likely that he will ever be as in control as he was two years ago. in fact, one of the scenarios for assad's survival involves syria splitting up, with assad or his successor controlling damascus, the coast, and a narrow swath of land between them running northwest from damascus. if that happens, hezbollah will find itself as the sponsor of a rump state with little international legitimacy, and without the arms smuggling corridor from iran.

 

back to work!

i was away. now i am not.

what could possibly go wrong?

senator vitter is brilliant! how could anyone be against making people with a history of violent crime choose between starvation or returning to crime.
(via Brendan on FB)

the usual chambliss antics

it's amusing to see that the president's speech, in which he effectively declared victory in the "war on terrorism" and called for an official acknowledgment of that reality by repealing the 2001 authorization for the use of military force, is being condemned by saxby chambliss as a "victory for terrorists." it makes me wonder if chambliss thinks we can ever finish that conflict without it being a terrorists' victory. if so, wouldn't the u.s. be destined to lose the war on terror?

actually what chambliss said was that the president's speech "will be viewed by terrorists as a victory." why should we base our policy decisions on how terrorists view them?

pull that nuclear trigger

just do it. if mcconnell is going to be a dick about it, harry reid really has nothing to lose. (assuming reid has the votes, which i guess is a big "if")

map of north american english dialects

the thing that i find most striking about this map, is the wide geography of the "canada" dialect. it goes from ontario all the way to british columbia. the only other dialect with that much territory is "the west", but the western dialect seems more compact than the sprawling dialect that spreadsacross almost all the anglophone areas of southern and western canada.

compare that with the packed northeast of the country. i live roughly in the middle of "the atlantic midland" and i can't drive more than an hour in any direction without crossing over into a place with a different dialect. how did canadian dialect stay so homogeneous? and why do dialects tend to have a larger area the farther west and south you go from new england?

coburned

i think booman is right. if tom coburn supported no-strings disaster relief after the oklahoma tornadoes, he probably would have probably taken as much heat for hypocrisy as he will for insisting on offsets. so even though it looks like he is dicking over his own constituents this time, going the other way wasn't a necessarily a better choice for him.

that's assuming that coburn only cares about political calculus and doesn't give two shits about actual people.

filibusted

i almost wrote a post last week arguing that harry reid should use the nuclear option immediately because the democrats have little to lose. it's called the "nuclear option" because of the expected retaliation from the senate minority if the senate majority eliminated the filibuster. the idea is that if the majority took away the filibuster from the minority, the minority would grind senate business to a halt using every means at its disposal to make sure that nothing got done. because it is assumed that no one in the senate wants the senate to do nothing, eliminating the filibuster with a majority vote was called the "nuclear option," evoking cold war deterrence to assure that a drastic move like the end of the filibuster never happens.

the problem is the assumption that no one in the senate wants that body to grind to a halt is incorrect. the republicans are doing that already. what can they do to retaliate to the end of the filibuster that they haven't done already? in fact, eliminating the filibuster would at least remove one of the things the republicans already use to obstruct legislation and nominations. so in that sense using the nuclear option would help unstuck the senate.

anyway, the reason i started thinking about that post i never got around to writing last week, was this back and forth about the consequences of the nuclear option. jonathan bernstein specifically rejects the conclusion i reached that the republicans are already at maximum obstruction, but he still thinks eliminating the filibuster is worth it because the GOP might not follow through with their threat.

i actually think that the biggest reason that senate democrats have not gone nuclear yet is not the threat of retaliation by republicans. it's the notion that they might some day be back in the minority and they want to preserve the filibuster for themselves.

(via memeorandum)

the world we live in

in a sane world, this would be a national outrage, and congress would quickly pass a fix to assure that big companies don't evade taxes to such a great degree.

but we all know that won't happen.

myanmar is also unraveling

okay, iraq is unraveling, but why is it assumed that makes it obama's problem?

will we ever get to the point when iraq is just another foreign country and not a place that everyone assumes is a ward of the united states?

8 days into my no-caffeine month and i'm already thinking of iftar

what is the best chocolate? who makes it? where can i order it? etc.

if you have any opinion leave it in the comments.

things fall apart

that's what it looks like to me. i believed the IRS scandal could be a big deal when it first broke a few days ago. but as ezra says, the more we learn the less bad it looks for the administration.

not that i expect the mere lack of any facts to back up their wild accusations will get the republicans to stop scandal mongering. after all, looks what benghazigate is doing to hillary's approval numbers!

acting IRS chief out

sometimes heads must roll, even if they are not the right heads. the commissioner of the IRS in august 2011, when the alleged greater scrutiny of tea party groups happened, was douglas shulman. shulman was a bush appointee  (which casts a bit of doubt on the idea that the scrutiny came from the top) who left office in november 2012 when his term ended. after shulman left, steven miller became acting commissioner. now he is the one who is taking the fall for the scandal.

ADDING: see also what the wonks say.

"the real IRS scandal" has no solution

it is pretty ridiculous that we give tax exemptions to political advocacy groups posing as charities. i just don't know how we could change the policy to make it better while still preserving tax breaks for real charities. any line between "political advocacy groups" and a "charitable organization" is going to be fuzzy, and if the IRS got more zealous in investigating those organization, it just opens the IRS up to charges that it is politically motivated.

geoguessr

an exciting new way to waste a ton of time!

it's also pretty addictive. help me obiwan...

(via MatthewB on FB)

most everyone knows

i frankly don't understand why so many people want to declare hillary clinton to be the 2016 democratic nominee for president at this point. i personally can't say i have a preference for clinton or anyone else because i don't know the field i'm choosing from yet. is there any point to declaring her the front runner at this point? why discourage other people from throwing their hat in the ring?

not that i am against hillary clinton. it just seems really early to start talking like this about anyone.

true story

sometime in or around 1994, while i was a law student, i visited some friends in southern california. one day we all went to disneyland. fairly early in the day, we saw a kid being pushed by in a wheelchair by his father. this was only a few years after my sign language phase and i had not yet forgotten all my signs. after i saw the kid signing to his dad, i signed "hi" and the next thing you know we had made a new friend and we all wandered around the park together for most of the day.

which turned out to be an added bonus. before that day i was not aware people in wheelchairs (as well as everyone with them) get to bypass the lines for rides and go right to the front through a special handicapped entrance.

it was great! in some box somewhere i have one of those overpriced photos of me and the kid screaming our heads off as we went down a water flume.

so when i read this today i thought: "damn, maybe we should have paid him."

i'm not blogging, i'm engaged in the act of blogging!

with all this parsing between "terrorism" and "act of terror" going on, i'm looking forward to the day when conservatives go back and review the speeches of george bush to find out all the times that he didn't call an attack "terrorism." for example, remember when the golden mosque of samarra was destroyed and president bush said,"The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act of terror"? it turns out, bush was covering up the fact that is was terrorism. i guess we all missed that scandal back when it happened.

booman gives this the treatment it deserves.

real abuse of power

this is an actual scandal. after all the fake ones, i kinda forgot what one looks like.

wow

i want a figurine of me trapped in carbonite!

RIP UNDOF?

after another kidnapping of UNDOF peacekeepers patrolling the golan heights, the philippines is looking to pull out from the peacekeeping mission. croatia withdrew from the UNDOF earlier this year. if the philippines does withdraw, that would leave only three countries observing the israeli-syria border: austria, india, and japan. [update 5/11/13: japan had already announced a pullout last year. so that leaves only two participating countries -thanks rdc!]

as i said in the update to this post in march, i really question the long-term viability of the UNDOF mission. and i wonder what israel will do if it does end just when the border is more dangerous than it has been since 1973.

a la carte cable

wow, john mccain is actually supporting a policy i agree with.

actually, i'm not sure i would support the bill. i don't understand cable tv regulations enough to know how this would work exactly. but as a policy, finding a way to get cable companies to let me pay for only the 2-3 channels that i might actually watch, and not all those other ones that i don't care about is definitely something i could get behind. i'm just not sure what would be the best way to do that.

unfortunately, i doubt anything like a la carte cable will ever actually happen. entrenched interests in the telecom industry will never let it pass. the best chance for it is probably not legislation, but rather cable subscriptions being replaced by web-based services that are not bundled. but i'm not even sure if the telecoms will let that happen either.

(via memeorandum)

benghazi forever!

i really think that unless you're comfortably within the rightwing media bubble, the benghazi scandal makes no sense at all. i've been trying to make sense of it, even asking rightwing friends point-blank for them to explain it to me. some of what i get are along the lines of "obama watched the attack live in the situation room!" a theory that was floated early on but just doesn't hold up to the actual timeline.

then there's the "cover-up" which largely centers on whether the administration said the attack was triggered by demonstrations against that youtube video as opposed to a "terrorist attack." which also makes no sense because even if the attack was inspired by a youtube video, it still is a terrorist attack. so even if the administration did state the wrong inspiration for the attack, that doesn't mean it wasn't terrorism. oh and also the guy responsible for the attack stated that the attack grew out of the protest against the video. so it doesn't even look like the administration was wrong about the attacker's motives after all.

so now there's a retaliatory demotion charge. which could actually be true. i guess it's too easy to tell for sure. but overlooked in all of this is that gregory hick's testimony about the attack itself didn't reveal anything all that damning for the obama administration.

and yet, it won't matter. fox news et. al. will continue to treat this as the second coming of watergate no matter what happens in these hearings. and the people watching fox news are going to be convinced that there must be something shady going on here, even if they can't articulate what that is to anyone who is not already on board. so we will be hearing "benghazi" at least until the obama administration leaves office, and at least 4 years after that if clinton wins in 2016.

cable news channels are a joke

too funny.

southpark beat the spread against middlepark!!!

the first congressional district leans republican by 11 points. elizabeth colbert bush lost by only 9 points. so hiking the appalachian trail on the taxpayers' dime and being accused of trespassing in your ex-wife's home is worth exactly two percentage points in that part of south carolina.

the fuzzy red line

assad's regime used chemical weapons! the regime denies it of course. but wait, the rebels used them too! or maybe they didn't. who the fuck knows?

it's becoming pretty clear that chemical weapons use is not a very clear red line. in a convoluted war like the syrian civil war, i don't see how you can ever get past chain of custody issues. and each side has plenty of incentive to make it look like the other side did it. if you're looking for a clear trip wire for some policy change, this isn't a good one to use.

sirota was at least half right

representative peter king:

It’s very difficult to believe that these two [the tsarnaev brothers] could have carried out this level of attack with this level of sophistication and precision acting by themselves, either without training from overseas or having at least facilitators here at home.

why is that so difficult to believe? the only sophisticated thing about the boston marathon bombing was the bomb itself, which they seem to have made by following instructions posted on the internet. everything else about their operation was pretty inept.

during that period after the bombing but before we knew who did it, david sirota wrote a column titled "Let's hope the Boston bomber is a white American." sirota's point was that brown muslim attackers are always assumed to be part of some larger conspiracy whereas "white Americans" are assumed to be acting alone. sirota has been mocked both before and after we learned that tamerlan and dzhokhar tsarnaev were the perps.

putting aside the issue of whether a muslim from the caucasus is "white", it's become pretty clear to me that david sirota was right. a lot of people keep insisting there is some larger plot here when all the actual evidence points to two guys acting alone, although perhaps inspired by people they met or read on the internet. the difference between how those two are being portrayed and, say timothy mcvey, is really striking.

peter king happens to be one of the bigger clowns in congress (especially when we're talking about issues that involve muslims). but he's hardly the only figure on the right claiming that the two brothers must have been plugged into a larger al qaeda-like conspiracy.

i guess we will never know how the country would have reacted if the perpetrator ended up being a non-muslim american who was born in this country and had a name that didn't look strange. so i guess this only shows that sirota was half right. that is, half right and the other half indeterminate, with no points in the wrong column by my count. the people currently mocking him are saying more about the own prejudices than anything else.

de facto recognition

isn't that setting a pretty low bar for recognition of a country:

Google is de facto recognizing a state of Palestine. Google spokesman Nathan Tyler said on Friday that Google had decided to change the name of the Palestinian Territories to just "Palestine" in its products.

so all you need to get international recognition is to get google to use the name on its map? google maps also uses the term "northern cyprus." does that mean it grants that country some sort of official recognition? i thought it was "recognized only by turkey!"

google maps even has the republic of molossia. i guess google is resolving all kinds of world conflicts, both real and imaginary!

and this is a guy who fancies himself a foreign policy expert on those sunday talk shows

john mccain wants to amend the immigration bill to ban or limit immigrants from "countries with radical islamic extremism." what countries are those? there are probably "radical islamic extremists" in every country, including this one. what level of radical islamic extremism is the threshold for the limit? are we going to go with percentages or gross numbers of people? and how do we know radical islamic extremist data is legit? quite a lot of countries call anyone in the opposition a radical islamic extremist.

it's even stupider because mccain is saying this stuff in reaction to the boston bombing and specifically yesterday's revelation that two kazakh friends of dzhokhar tsarnaev were arrested for disposing of evidence. kazakhstan is hardly a country known for much radical islamic extremism. (see, for example, these charts taken from the pew survey of muslim views in different countries around the world). dzhokhar tsarnaev is a naturalized u.s. citizen, but previously he had russian citizenship. is mccain talking about barring people from st. petersburg from coming to the u.s.? i don't think he is. mccain also seems to believe that dagestan and chechnya are countries.

the end of birtherism

i doubt if ted cruz will actually run. but if he does and if he somehow gets the nomination, i predict the birthers won't have any problem with supporting cruz's candidacy.

ted, y'see was born in calgary, alberta. while that's the texas of canada, it's still canada. which means it's not the united states. and ted doesn't even have a born in hawaii cover story like the kenyan usurper. nevertheless, if cruz is the GOP candidate, i don't think orly taitz will be filing any lawsuits to knock him off the ballot.

"isolationist streak"

the NYT wanders again into one of my pet peeves.

not being in favor of invading any country that a pollster thinks to ask about is not "isolationism." i don't understand why the political philosophy that advocates disengagement from the rest of the world is now a short-hand for anyone who is not on board with killing foreigners in some new ill-considered adventure.

almost no one is an isolationist in the u.s. anymore. i never hear anyone talking about ending all trade agreements with foreign nations, withdrawing the u.s. from all international bodies, and eliminating every u.s. military base on foreign soil. i occasionally see people advocate for some of that stuff (like maybe they want out of NAFTA or the UN) but i never see anyone who is for all of those things. when it was a viable political force in this country, isolationism wasn't just about not invading other countries. if that is all it has come to mean then we are all isolationists because i can probably eventually name a country that you are not in favor of invading.

the kazakhstan connection

two of the three additional suspects arrested this morning in the boston bombing case are from kazakhstan. it wouldn't surprise me at all if dzhokhar tsarnaev hung around with other people from the former soviet union. the kazakhs i have met in the u.s. tend to be plugged into a larger community of russian speaking people from across the former USSR. despite their ethnic and religious diversity, people from the ex-soviet space tend to view each other as being from a common culture when they are in a far away place like this country.

if this minor detail of a story makes it to the big time i can't wait to watch the usual bobblehead "terrorism experts" discuss a country i spent most of a year in.

UPDATE: it looks like they were tsarnaev's roomates and are being charged with obstruction of justice for taking stuff out of his room rather than some charge that would tie them directly to the bombing.

m'aidez

welcome to my annual complain about a problem of my own making! my once a year month-without caffeine starts today. actually, it starts one week from today when i go cold turkey. today i just stop drinking caffeinated coffee. but it's not too soon to start bitching about how tired and headachy i feel!

you know the drill, i whine about this every year.. there's really nothing you can do but sit back and enjoy the show.