This poll is made of straw

All presidential straw polls are stupid because they are not real polls (that is, they are not a valid sample of the electorate), but the CPAC straw poll is not only a dumb by its straw polledness, it also has a terrible predictive record. It has never successfully predicted the next President of the United States. Admittedly that is because CPAC started in 2006 and Republicans have not won a presidential election since then.

But it also has a pretty mixed record for even predicting the GOP nominee. In 2006, George Allen won the CPAC straw poll for the 2008 presidential election. Who the fuck is George Allen? Oh right, he's that macaca dude. The next two years (2007 and 2008, both directed at the 2008 election) went to Mitt Romney. Mittens, as you may recall, did not get the nomination in 2008. Indeed, he announced he was dropping out of the race during his CPAC speech, just after he won the straw poll predicting that he would be the nominee. Romney won the poll again in 2009 and 2012, the only times that the poll actually indicated who the next GOP presidential nominee would be. In 2010 and 2011, Ron Paul won.

This year, Rand Paul got it. Which I calculate gives him +0 on his chances of becoming president. I guess a win in the CPAC poll gets a candidate a headline. But it's not like Rand Paul had any problem getting them before.

Barelyrecognized Quasistateistan

It occurs to me that the Black Sea basin is the region of the world with the most barely-recognized quasi-states. That region includes Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, and maybe soon Crimea. Maybe you can even argue Northern Cyprus is close enough to the Black Sea to count.

Aside from maybe Palestine, it's hard to come up with any other separatist territory that has been recognized by one or more universally recognized countries, but not the majority of the world, in any other region of the globe. Can anyone think of any others?

Against oversimplifying foreign policy questions.

This is basically accurate:

Consider the different American views of recent bids for independence.

Chechnya? No.

East Timor? Yes.

Abkhazia? No.

South Sudan? Yes.

Palestine? It’s complicated.

It is an acutely delicate subject in the West, where Britain wants to keep Scotland and Spain wants to keep Catalonia. The United States, after all, was born in revolution, breaking away from London without consent of the national government — something that the Obama administration insists Crimea must have. The young American union later fought a civil war to keep the South from breaking away. Even today, there is occasional fringe talk of secession in Texas.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the U.S., Britain, or any other Western power is being a hypocrite. It would be incredibly foolish for a country to have a policy that it always approves of a secessionist effort, or always disapproves of it. Assuming a country is going to take any position at all on whether a portion of a foreign country should split off (and you can certainly argue that the best policy would be to take no position. But this post is for those who don't subscribe to the "no position" position), it only makes sense to make a case by case call based on the history and circumstances of the situation.

That is not to say that I agree with the U.S. position on each of the above secessionist efforts. But I at least understand how the U.S. could decide to be against Chechen independence in the late-90s/early 00s (when the U.S. was trying to bolster Russia after it's post-cold war economic collapse and avoid a chaotic breakup of that massive country), for East Timoran independence (to stop a bloody anti-insurgent campaign and to reverse Indonesia's 1975 invasion and annexation of East Timor, which the U.S. never recognized), against Abkhazian independence from Georgia (when Georgia was actively wooing the West and becoming one of the most pro-American countries in the Caucasus), and for South Sudan (to end another long-running civil war, to appease American Christians who had made South Sudanese Christian's resistance from domination by the Muslims in Khartoum one of their pet causes, and because it had little love for the Islamist government of Sudan).

In each case, the American position come from weighing many different factors. Even if you don't agree with the ultimate conclusion, it's pure folly to say that the U.S. (or any other country) should not view problems in their proper context. Taking context into account means that it is not always going to come to the same conclusion on the issue of secession. East Timor and Abkhazia are very different places. It is not hypocrisy to look at each case, take their unique factors into account, and come to different conclusions.

Academia hates Bush

Rutgers University has invited Condoleezza Rice to be its commencement speaker, spawning protests by faculty and students. Juan Williams assumes the protests are driven by liberal hatred of black conservatives. But why assume that? As far as I can tell, just about every time an official from the George W. Bush Administration visits a college campus there are people protesting. It's not a black-white thing, It's a George Bush thing. Both Bush himself and the people associated with him are hated by the academic community. That's true even when (like Rice and John Yoo) the Bush official in question is an academic. But it doesn't seem correlated with race.

(via Memeorandum)

The Big Winners in the Crimeans Crisis

Fluent Russian speakers in former Soviet Republics who want to emigrate to Russia. And there are a lot of them. The Central Asia and the Caucus republics are filled with fluent Russian former Soviet citizens who would love to become citizens of the more affluent Russia.

This could also resolve the almost 23 year old problem of ethnic Russians in the Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Baltic states won't give ethnic Russians citizenship unless they can prove fluency in the national language. Many Russians who settled there during the Soviet period (in some cases, forcibly sent there) and their children never learned the local language and are now effectively stateless. The country where they live (in some cases, lived their whole lives) won't recognize them as citizens and, until now, Russia would not grant them citizenship either. The Russian official position was that the Baltic Republics' refusal to grant them local citizenship constituted discrimination against their Russian minority. If Russia gave them citizenship, it would amount to a de facto recognition that they do not belong where they live, the position of the Baltic Republics governments. And so millions of Russians had been trapped in a stateless netherworld which causes endless bureaucratic hassles.

(Years ago, I was friends with a Russian woman from Estonia. She showed me her passport, which was issued by the Estonian government, but was titled "Alien Passport" in big letters on the cover. The inside of her passport--where most passports a statement that says something like: "The bearer of this passport has the protection of the government of [insert name of issuing country], so let him/her pass"--it said something along the lines of: "This person is not entitled to any rights of a citizen of Estonia and will not be protected by that government. But let her pass if you want." (I don't remember the exact words, I saw the passport in 1999) Needless to say, the "Alien Passport" was a hit at the Science Fiction convention where I met her).

So it looks like Moscow's new-found sympathy for Russians in the "near abroad" in Crimea is going to help a lot of people across the former Soviet empire. I guess that counts as a real silver lining.

Endgame

Helena Yakovlev Golani and Nadiya Kravets lay out the case that allowing Ukraine to keep Crimea is the scenario that is most in Russia's interests.

They could be right or they could be wrong. (Their analysis seems convincing to me). But one thing is clear, what they conclude is best case scenario for Russia is the one that, I think, is least likely to happen. Returning Crimea to Ukraine would require such a major about-face for Russia, I just don't think that Putin has it in him.

Maybe all he has is his "base"

Well, he's the clear favorite among Sunday talk show booking agents.

False Equivalence Alert

This morning I read this:

In Moscow, especially in the not-so-good old days, the question almost always asked is kto vinovat: “Who is to blame?” The American capital now finds itself engaged in that very Russian exercise ever since President Vladimir V. Putin’s troops entered Ukraine.

Many on the right maintain that Moscow’s land grab is President Obama’s fault for pursuing a foreign policy of weakness. Some on the left contend that it is former President George W. Bush’s fault for invading Iraq and providing a precedent.

 "Wait," thunked I, " who on the left contends that the Crimean crisis is President Bush's fault?" I follow politics rather closely and while I have seen a lot of people on the right claiming that Obama somehow allowed Russia to move into Crimea, I have not seen anyone (and I mean anyone) claim that Russia's actions were caused by President Bush. I read on in the article to find out.

It explains that in the "blame Obama" corner are Senator John McCain, Senator Mitch McConnell, Senator Lindsay Graham, Congressman Howard McKeon, and Congressman/rocket scientist Paul Ryan,

In the "blame Bush" corner, the article cites TV personality Rachel Maddow, TV personality Chris Matthews, and Congressman Adam Smith.

See the problem? Prominent Republican members of Congress are claiming that Obama's actions as president caused Putin to seize the Crimea. The only people on the left that the reporter could find saying that Bush caused Putin to seize the Crimea were two television personalities and one member of Congress that few have ever heard of (although they might mistake him for someone else).

But it gets worse. The quotes from McCain, McConnell, and Ryan actually drew a causal connection between the President's policy "projecting weakness" and Russia's action in Crimea. The quotes from Maddow, Matthews, and Smith do not make the claim that anything that Bush did while he was president caused the current crisis. Maddow only made the point that because the U.S. invaded Iraq on a false pretense, it makes it "awkward" for the U.S. to currently criticize Russia. (An accurate point, IMHO). Matthews made a similar point, that "the same people" who supported the Iraq war are now complaining when Russia "did something a little bit like it." Representative Smith made a different point; he rebuts the Republican claim that the current cuts to the U.S. military budget encouraged Russian actions in Crimea by pointing out that our Bush-era budget did nothing to deter Russia from intervening in Georgia.

So the article doesn't quote a single person on the left who claims that former President Bush or the Republicans are "to blame" for the current crisis in Crimean. Which undermines the article's "both sides do it" framing of the "who is to blame?" question.

Linguistic Bias

I'm having a hard time taking the People's Militia of Donbass seriously.

Putin Seized the Crimea Because President Obama Is Still Mulling Whether to Approve a Pipeline in North America

More evidence that Paul Ryan is not much of a thinker.

The Crimea-Afghanistan connection

I wonder what the new even-frostier relationship with Russia means for the northern supply route for NATO forces in Afghanistan. Because the southern route still doesn't look all that great.

Sounds like the perfect candidate!

The front runner in the upcoming Egyptian presidential elections:

Almost nothing is known of Field Marshal Sisi’s views on any other matters of public policy, including the make-or-break question of how to revive and restructure Egypt’s dysfunctional economy.

 

If you don't count the cases where modern medicine has cured disease, modern medicine has done nothing to alleviate illness

I must admit I'm stunned by what a total clown Paul Ryan is when it comes to budgetary issues. I guess that's more of an indictment of the American political press more than Ryan himself. There are a lot of Congress Critters who say stupid things. Ryan didn't have to be deemed a wonk by anybody.

He's getting a lot of pushback about this in left-leaning places. I doubt if even something as blatant as Ryan's footnote will blunt his reputation as a very serious policymaker.

How goes Kitay?

Since the Crimean crisis started, I have been wondering how China would react to Russia's action. Chinese foreign policy is guided by the principle that countries should not interfere in the affairs of other countries. (Which is basically the same principle that guides Russian foreign policy in every part of the world except for the lands of the former Soviet Empire (the "near abroad")).

So how would China see the Russian incursion into Crimea? Would it view that as Russian invasion/intervention into the affairs of Ukraine that violate China's non-interference principle? Or would China view Crimea as essentially Russian land, and thus the peninsula would be a "wayward province" of Russia, like Taiwan is to China?

It looks like the latter. Which means that Russia has at least one important ally on this adventure. It might be their only one. Even the former Soviet Republics who have a close relationship with Russia are being a lot more hesitant on this one.

(via Memorandum)

Again with Czechoslovakia

This made me wonder, once again, why does this always happen with Czechoslovakia?

There are other countries that have split apart over the past few decades. But we don't seem to have nearly as much trouble remembering that any of those other splits occurred.

Actually, as I look at this map again, I can see that it recognizes the breakup of Yugoslavia. That is, although the countries are not labeled, I can see the international border between Croatia and Serbia, just South of Hungary. Croatia and Serbia's split occurred on October 8, 1991. "Czechoslovakia" dissolved into the Czech and Slovak Republics effective January 1, 1993. Which means the map on the imgur post was only good for a 451 day period--a period that took place over twenty years ago.

Make it Ukraine

If the IMF and EU really want to help the new government in Kiev, they would give the country a generous aid package right now. I'm not talking about loaning the country money, or giving it loan guarantees. I mean effectively giving them money, without any ridiculous strings attached to imposing those austerity measures that they are so in love with these days.

But I bet they won't have it in them. (and if they did, I wonder how that would make the Greeks feel)

Does this mean that Ukraine gets its nuclear weapons back?

In 1994, Russia, Ukraine, the U.S. and the U.K. signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. In that treaty, Ukraine agreed to give the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union to Russia. In return, Russia agreed to respect the borders of Ukraine and to not threaten or use force against that country (and also Belarus and Kazakhstan, two other countries that gave up their Soviet nukes).