coleman concedes

not only does minnesota finally get a second senator, franken also officially beat me in our own little race.

and that's bad because?

olympia snow on why she would rather not have a public option right away:

If you establish a public option at the forefront that goes head-to-head and competes with the private health insurance market ... the public option will have significant price advantages.

what a strange world senator snowe must inhabit where bringing down health care costs is viewed as a flaw not a feature. if reducing costs isn't the point, what exactly does she think health reform is for?

drinking liberally

yeah, i'll be there, as i am just about every week. that is, until i start the chapter in aktobe.

national sovereignty day

tomorrow has got to be the third or fourth time that someone celebrated the restoration of iraqi sovereignty since the beginning of the iraq war. does anyone remember this anymore:


whenever any country has to say, "we're sovereign!" this many times, you gotta start wondering.

but this time it's not really about "sovereignty", it's really about the withdrawal of american forces to their bases, which is the first phase of the eventual american pullout. this also seems to be the first sovereignty holiday that ordinary iraqis actually seem to be celebrating.

what i'm waiting for

i keep reading about how quickly american society is becoming more tolerant of gay people. and they're right. just a few years ago, being anti-gay marriage was a political no-brainer. now state legislatures are legalizing it on their own and polls show that a growing plurality/maybe majority doesn't mind at all.

but i won't believe that our society has reached full acceptance until my gay film festival programs stop arriving in the mail wrapped in paper like a porn magazine.

the clock is ticking

am i right in remembering that the minnesota supreme court was expected to rule on the franken-coleman case "in june"? they're really leaving this to the last minute.

(unless i'm remembering wrong. in that case, never mind)

bir tawil

strange maps looks at the bir tawil triangle. i "discovered" the region when i was in egypt, looked at a map, and tried to figure out what the deal was with that triangle in the southeast corner of egypt.

it was actually the hala’ib triangle that caught my eye. the map in my guidebook made it look like it was both egyptian and sudanese, which is what made it so curious. when i was in aswan, i briefly considered trying to go to hala'ib town. but my inquiries revealed that it would be difficult, expensive and would suck up the time i wanted to spend along the nile. to pay all that for little more than the bragging rights for having visited a disputed territory that no one has heard of didn't seem worth it.

anyway, i knew even less about the bir tawil triangle, which only seems to be called a "triangle" because it's linked to the hala'ib territory. the hala'ib region really is a triangle, bir tawil is more like a trapezoid. there's at least a town in hala'ib. bir tawil really does seem to be a small patch of nothing. but the idea of visiting the least wanted space on earthis kind of appealing.

nawi and the q-fest

the new york times profiles ezra nawi. i saw citizen nawi, the documentary about mr. nawi, at last year at the philadelphia international gay and lesbian film festival. after reading the profile, i went through my archives hoping to jog my memory about the film by rereading my review. apparently i didn't write one. oh well.

speaking of which, this year's gay and lesbian film festival is coming up fast. they've renamed it the philadelphia Q fest. (the name changes has something to do with the FFS-TLA breakup that i blogged about earlier this year) anyway, the list of features is up. as always, i'm open to suggestions.

i did a quick pass through the list and very little jumped out at me. i'll probably try to see this, though the show time isn't that good for me. i really liked XXY when i saw it two years ago, this is by the same director, so that's a possibility as well. and other then that? um, this sounds like it could be fun. can anyone out there recommend anything else?

jedi mind trick

link

A former mayor found sitting naked and holding a beer at a Rabun County campsite told police he wasn’t the same naked man seen walking around earlier.

michael jackson look what you've done

jesus christ, i realize he was famous, but there really is no escaping him.

any death is a tragedy and i grew up singing the songs in the thriller era, but i still don't understand why his death has dominated the news this much. why do people care so much about celebrities? the entire celebrity news industry confuses me. i'm completely uninterested in the personal lives of even the people whose work i admire. death is a bigger deal than most tabloid fodder, but the amount of attention MJ is getting right now really seems over the top to me.

deleted scenes

i wrote a post yesterday, but decided not to publish it. if you want to see it, you'll have to wait for the extras on the rubber hose DVD.

no time to demonstrate, i want to see if they ever get to that volcano

a sign of desperation? that only buys them nine hours, what will they do after that?

(via cg)

a way with words

i still don't care about this sanford thing. i really wish the press spent as much time on policy as they did on the sex lives of politicians. but damn, did sanford really say "I spent the last five days of my life crying in Argentina" without trying to be funny? maybe he was trying to quell rumors that he was having a homosexual affair by making it clear that he doesn't know his show tunes?

this was just a few hours after he told the press that he went to argentina instead of hiking the appalachian trail because he "wanted to do something exotic"--not the best choice of words if you're caught sneaking off to see your foreign mistress.

paper tiger

for months conservatives have threatened to filibuster the nomination of harold koh as legal advisor to the state department. the arguments i saw against koh were so stupid they bordered on comedy, but that didn't stop senate republicans from making the filibuster threat.

after months of delay, harry reid moved it to cloture and it passed 65-31. they weren't even close to blocking the vote.

the only question is why reid put off the vote for this long. senate republicans' bluster is worse than their bite.

holy shit

sanford

i haven't felt the need to comment about governor sanford's disappearance. but it just gets weirder and weirder. first, he's disappeared and no one claimed to know where he was, including his wife. then his staffers said that he was hiking the appalachian trail, which hardly narrows down where the governor might be. (they might as well have said "he's somewhere on the eastern seaboard") apparently, these staffers continued to insist he was hiking even after reports that his car was spotted in the parking lot at the atlanta airport. now it turns out he was in argentina, which explains the car at the airport, but not the thing about the appalachian trail or the not telling his wife.

why did he go to south america? i really don't care. the only thing that makes this noteworthy at all is the way that sanford and his staff handled the questions. i expect more political hay will be made out of this and, quite possibly, sanford's prospects as a possible presidential candidate in 2012 won't last much longer.

so very tired

it's been days, DAYS i tell you, since last i posted here. i'd like to say i've been busy (BUSY), but really i haven't been. well sort of. i mean i've been busy, just not BUSY, what with the sesame greg-mel-owen, the NYC, the met, the father's day brunch, the work, the BSG, the allentown, the borrowed car, the drinking liberally, the home alone, et cetera. i've certainly weathered more busy with posts before. this time i just did the weather without the posts.

and still i got atriosed. blog neglect actually pays, if this blog actually payed. which it doesn't. i'm ad free. which is how i want it. but it's funny still and i'm tired.

so very tired.

trendybus

going north on trendybus. how can some bus lines escape the class anxiety that comes with other bus companies? especially considering that bolt bus is owned by the much less hip greyhound and peter pan?

shiny new buses, online booking system, free wifi, and power outlets don't hurt. mrs. noz thinks not going to the greyhound station helps. which is a little odd. as grimy as those places are, at least they are sheltered from the elements. you'd think the station would be better than standing in the pouring rain for a half hour across the street from a gutted post office.

گوگل به زبان فارسی

i'm glad that google translate is adding farsi to its repertoire.

but i would also advise caution. google translate for arabic can sometimes be really bad. i've been slowly working on as post for the past few weeks about google translate-arabic. i cooked up a test for the service to see how it does translating arabic to english. i don't want to spoil the ending of that post, but let's just say that it has done really poorly. because arabic isn't written with short vowels and thus a lot of words can only be assigned meaning by context, it 's particularly difficult for a machine to translate. farsi is written with a modified version of the arabic alphabet, but beyond that i have no idea if it has the same problems.

UPDATE: mark liberman from language log does a preliminary test.

UPDATE2: another test, this time by cyrus farivar.

more howl than argument

jonathan chait asks a question, but i'm afraid that's too much to ask from the modern conservative movement.

it's extremely hard to find a conservative argument that actually addresses the argument on the other side these days. that's why so many conservatives seem so detached from reality. i honestly don't know if krauthammer or wolfowitz (or any number of people criticizing obama's approach to the iran protests) have even a passing familiarity with the other side's reasoning. they don't seem to know that stuff for a lot of issues.

how will it end?

i read the tony karon piece listing the four possible end game scenarios for the iran crisis yesterday. the more i think about it, the more i am convinced that the first scenario--the one where iran's islamic republic is overthrown--is probably the least likely to happen even though its the one that most people are rooting for over here. also, there should also be a scenario number five: the protest loses steam and dies down, returning things back to the status quo, with ahmadinejad as president and khamenei as supreme leader.

if i had to rank the karon + my additional scenarios in order of likelihood this is how it would go, with (a) being what i think is most likely and (e) being the least:

(a) scenario five (protests dying down, ahmadinejad as president)

(b) scenario two (bloody crackdown by the governnment)

(c) scenario four (the zimbabwe option)

(d) scenario three (khamenei backing off, some sort of "adjustment" of the vote tallies and/or a revote)

(e) scenario one (iranian revolution 2.0, the islamic republic being replaced by something else)

it also possible that more than one of the above happens. a crackdown (scenario two), for example, could lead to any of the other four. but for now, i'm only willing to predict one scenario ahead.

just to be clear: this is what i think is likely to happen, not what i want to happen. if i had to rank them in that order, it would be scenario one, three, four, five, two--almost the opposite of how i rank their likelihood. so what do you think? am i too pessimistic?

3.0

i upgraded to iphone 3.0 last night. so far, it's pretty great, no bugs at all. at least i haven't found any yet. i was a little concerned that it would be slow on my old skool iphone, especially since the new iphone 3G-S has a faster processor. but, if anything, my phone seems a little zippier after the install.

but most importantly, the iphone now has cut-and-paste and arabic support, thus wiping out my last two gripes about the thing. i'm sure i'll find something new to bitch about. but for now, it's all good.

dueling headlines

there's a new NYT/CBS poll out. check out the headlines put out by each of the poll sponsors:

NYT: "Obama Poll Sees Doubt on Budget and Health Care"

CBS: "Poll: No Dent In Obama's Popularity"

pretty different spins, eh? actually, when i look at actual poll numbers (pdf), i think the NYT headline is the most misleading. obama's approval ratings are higher than his disapproval on health care and the economy. it's just that the approval numbers for those specific issues are not quite as high as his overall approval rating of 63%.

there are two places where the public does not seem to be behind obama. the CBS article's subheading really hits the nail on the head: "CBS/NY Times Survey Finds Approval Stays At 63%; High Marks On Economy, Foreign Policy, Though Not Auto Industry Or Deficit."

the butterfly effect

my life in the second half of 2009 depends upon whether some dude in kazakhstan signs a piece of paper today or whether it waits until after he gets back from his forty day vacation.

emergency meeting

this is potentially a big deal. buried in the huffpo iran updates thread:

There are very interesting things that are taking place right now. Some of my sources in Iran have told me that Ayatollah Rafsanjani, who is the head of the Assembly of Experts -- the eighty-six member clerical body that decides who will be the next Supreme Leader, and is, by the way, the only group that is empowered to remove the Supreme Leader from power -- that they have issued an emergency meeting in Qom.

Now, Anderson, I have to tell you, there's only one reason for the Assembly of Experts to meet at this point, and that is to actually talk about what to do about Khamenei. So, this is what I'm saying, is that we're talking about the very legitimacy, the very foundation of the Islamic Republic is up in the air right now. It's hard to say what this is going to go.

i (kind of) disagree with the idea that "the very legitimacy, the very foundation of the Islamic Republic is up in the air right now." i think this meeting is probably the opposite. khamenei was never on solid footing with the rest of the clerical elite and so rafasanjani is using the unrest over the elections to try to unseat khamenei. that is all happening within the normal framework of the islamic republic constitution. to remove khamenei would be an unusual unprecedented step, but it would be a step well within the governing structure of the iranian system. just as the threatened impeachment and resignation of richard nixon, while unprecedented, did not represent the end of the u.s. constitutional order, if the assembly of experts removes khamenei it doesn't mean the end of the islamic republic. on the contrary, it may be the system's best hope in preserving itself.

this may also be related to grand ayatollah hossein ali montazeri condemnation of the election results yesterday. booman has a good post explaining where montazeri fits into all of this.

does she have eyelash implants?

i don't mean to make fun of her, but i really can't read this without thinking about amber dempsey.

don't look at that door back there!

obama is pushing the public option for health care, which is good. i like the public option because i hope that it will eventually evolve into a single payer system.

obama is specifically ruling out having a single payer system, which is fine. i understand the political realities in this country. while ideally i want our political leadership pushing for single payer outright, i understand the political perils of that route and don't mind a back-door approach if it will eventually get us to single payer.

but opponents are starting to call the public option a "back door approach to single payer." and they're right. that's what it is. or at least that's what i hope it will be.

so what i'm afraid of now is to mollify critics, the democrats will put stuff in the health care reform bill that makes sure that a system with a public option won't eventually evolve into a single payer system. if that's in the bill, then i'm back to preferring we just push for single payer outright.

the danger of relying on a back-door approach is that the other side might notice the back door.

اقتصادنا

i was listening to last friday's planet money podcast in which they discussed the origins of modern shia economic theory. it all centered on mohammad baqir al-sadr's book iqtisaduna. i was intrigued, so i bought it on a whim.

i highly doubt that i can get through a dense text on economic theory with my level of arabic. this whim-enabling iphone is a dangerous thing. luckily, they never mentioned sadr's other book. it seems like that would be even more up my alley, and even harder for me to understand in arabic.

act

in case you're not familiar with the parlance of certain members of the hawkish right, "to act" is defined as "to bomb the shit out of." not bombing the shit out of a country is what they call "inaction."

it's a pretty simple-minded way of looking at the world, where 99% of what countries do to one another counts as absolutely nothing and where the only thing that is valued is killing people. when mccain talks like this, it just reminds me how incredibly lucky we are that he will never be president.

a speech falls in the woods

netanyahu's big speech has been almost completely overshadowed by the post-election strife in iran.

i'm not sure whether bibi would prefer it that way.

some thoughts on the iranian election

my initial thoughts about the results (or maybe "results") of the iranian election are as follows:

(a) we'll never know for sure whether the election was stolen or not.

(b) i think it was probably stolen.

(c) regardless of whatever really happened, this election will be remembered in the west as a stolen election.

this post by gordon robinson is pretty interesting. before i read it, when i thought "stolen election" i was assuming that meant the supreme leader of iran and his council (i.e. what is often referred to as "the mullahs") intervened to fudge the numbers to make ahmedinejad the winner. that's what robinson calls scenario number one. i hadn't thought of scenario number two, where ahmedinejad's administration stole the election as part of a move to consolidate power over the entire iranian system, including the mullahs. it's a fascinating possibility. in essence, the difference between #1 and #2 is that #2 moves the mullahs from perpetrators to victims of the fraud. #2 would also mean that (assuming the coup withstands the current backlash) iran's weird hybrid system of democracy and theocracy is effectively over. #2 puts iran in the category of run-of-the-mill dictatorship.

running in the background of all of this is the islamic republic's two decade long record of running fairly above-the-board elections. even though the mullahs out rank the president in the iranian system, they seem to have respected the results of presidential elections (at least until now). in past elections, even when the candidate they don't favor wins the mullah's have still declared the one with the most votes the winner. the mullahs weren't rooting for mohammed khatami in 1997 or 2001, and yet he won both elections and served both terms as president. the mullah's also favored akbar rafsanjani over mahmoud ahmedinejad in the 2005 election, but ahmedinejad was still permitted to win. true, all candidates in every presidential race has to be pre-screened by the mullahs before they even get on the ballot, but the general rule seemed to be that the mullahs would permit any candidate who cleared the screening and got the most votes to take office.

until maybe now. before i read the robinson piece, i was wondering why this election was different. why would the mullah's steal the election this time when they let the electorate choose people who weren't their first choice other times? my best guess is that iran's unusually animated election campaign unleashed public dissatisfaction to an extent that frightened the mullahs. if the mullah's had stolen the election, it wasn't because they feared mir-hossein mousavi as much as it feared his electorate. it was that feat that caused the mullahs to intervene now when they hadn't before.

that was basically the theory i was operating under until i read robinson's scenario number 2. now that i've read it, i'm not sure what to think.

NOTE: i edited the post. originally, my three points at the beginning were numbered (1), (2) and (3). i've change the post to mark them with letters (a), (b) and (c). upon second reading of this post, i realized that the list of three things at the beginning of the post could get confused with what i later call "scenario one" and "scenario two." the scenarios actually refer to the first two scenarios outlined in the gordon robinson post. i don't know if i caught it before it confused anybody, but i apologize for the confusion if it did.

finding palau

this article is pretty sad. apparently, the rightwing shitstorm about scary gitmo detainees has managed to spook the people of palau, the uighurs in question were not enemy combatants even according to the bush administration. and yet, after the recent fear mongering about the detainees, ordinary palauians (palauis?) are voicing their doubts.

the best part of the article is not the article itself, but rather the map on the lower right margin of the web page. presumably it's there to help people--most of whom probably never heard of palau before this week--figure out where the island nation is. check it out:

that should clear that up.

bibi will accept the road map, except the part about what israel has to do

it looks like bibi's big speech will include an acceptance of the road map for peace, but a rejection of the settlement freeze. the problem is that the road map requires israel to freeze its settlements (pdf) (see bottom of page 4. "GOI" = "government of israel")

it looks like what netanyahu really wants is not the road map for peace, but rather the bush administration's policies in pursuing the road map. that is, he wants to blame the palestinians whenever they fail to live up to their obligations under the road map plan, but let israel have a pass when it fails to live up to its obligations under that same plan. then he'll be shocked and appalled when the palestinians don't find a you-do-everything-we-do-nothing deal acceptable.

swine flu 2: this time it's personal

it's funny how, after weeks of over-the-top coverage of the H1N1 virus (f/k/a swine flu), the story has all but disappeared, at least it's off the front page. maybe this will bring it back.

i can't help thinking that there's got to be a happy medium. surely the media can report about the dangers of an epidemic and the tracking of the disease's progress without slipping into total flip-out mode.

speaking of that iranian election...

although the president doesn't really run the country in the way that our president does, i find this whole race to be completely fascinating. if nothing else, just watching how iranian society is reacting to the race, and watching the west not react.

as for predictions, i predict a run-off. there don't seem to be any official polls, but a bunch of people have been talking about a moussavi surge that may deliver him an outright majority. but i've seen enough union elections (where there also are no polls) to know that this fuzzy "sense of a surge" is often completely wrong. people tend to talk with people who are voting the way they want to vote. without a scientific poll, your perspective on any pre-election situation is always going to be skewed in favor of what you want to happen. plus, this is a four-way race. while it's pretty clear that moussavi will get the bulk of the anti-ahmadinejad vote, that vote will still be split with two other candidates. it would have to be a total blowout for anyone to get over 50% in the first round.

objectively pro-ahmadinejad

hey, does anyone remember when daniel pipes went around accusing anyone who disagreed with him of secretly, or not so secretly, being "objectively pro-" terrorism, fascism, saddam, american enemy-of-the-week?

probably not pipes.

not necessarily the safest place to keep it

d'oh!

abandoning the uighurs

i'm old enough to remember when the republican party championed the uighur cause. back then, they were in on it because the uighurs were resisting "communist china." some of the uighurs went to afghanistan to get military training, and were picked up by american forces in the post-9/11 sweeps. the u.s. moved them to guantanamo but quickly determined that the uighurs had no interest in fighting the u.s. the bush administration classified them as non-enemy combatants, which meant that they no longer should be imprisoned.

meanwhile, after 9/11 the chinese government claimed the ETIM, the uighur separatist group, was an al qaeda affiliate. the group had enjoyed some american support before 2001, but china used the 9/11 attacks to get the u.s. to turn against the group. it worked, in 2004, in exchange for chinese support of the iraq war, the u.s. designated the ETIM as a "terrorist organization" based entirely upon chinese-supplied information about the group.

so where did that leave the uighurs? the bush administration had already ruled them non-enemy combatants who posed no threat to the u.s. they sought to return them to china, but couldn't because the chinese government threatened to execute them. in 2006, albania agreed to take five uighur detainees. but chinese objections precluded them from accepting more. for the next two years, the bush administration searched the world for a place to repatriate them, while china threatened would-be recipients with retaliation if they did take them. and the 17 uighurs who were not resettled in albania languished in gitmo.

in 2008, because they weren't even enemy combatants and because the u.s. couldn't find any other country for them, a federal court ruled that the uighurs had to be released in the u.s. last february, the court of appeals blocked that order, ruling that the president and not the courts, could decide who was admitted to the u.s. president obama could have (and should have) simply admitted them to the u.s. but he didn't. instead, he continued the bush era policy of holding people found to be no threat in a prison until he could convince another country to take them.

it looks like the obama administration has finally found a country that may take them. predictably, a bunch of rightwing bloggers are outraged. admittedly, most seem to be focusing on the amount the u.s. paid palau to take them, but the bush administration also paid albania for taking uighurs three years ago. in fact, the bloggers crying foul seem to be completely unaware of the entire albanian experience, or the fact that those other five uighurs were released and have lived quietly for a few years.

one thing is clear, the republican tradition of championing uighur rights is officially over. that pretty much ended when newt gingrich echoed chinese propaganda about the uighurs in an op-ed piece last month. once again, defending the mistakes of the war on terror (even mistakes that the bush administration admitted to!) is worth jettisoning the republican parties' formerly principled stand.

UPDATE: see also glenn greenwald.

hissy fit

the issues that a senator is willing to go to the mat for can be really revealing.

how many other pieces of legislation have they disagreed with, maybe spoke out and voted against, but didn't throw a hissy fit and threaten to shut down the senate when they didn't get their way?

soggy liberally

the rain and thunder won't keep me away:

triumph brewing company
117 chestnut street, philadelphia, PA
6 p.m. until everyone leaves.

[insert gratuitous amy-harassment here]

swedish pirates elected to EU parliament

go pirate party!

the gazan horse

someone's been reading their virgil!

unfair

it says a lot about our political system that delivering health care without excessive costs is considered be be unfair.

yglesias asks: "unfair to whom?" why it's unfair to the health insurance industry, the same industry that is presiding over the ongoing collapse of the health care system in this country. in the end, this may be a zero-sum game. whatever solution we come up with to the problem of the ballooning costs of health insurance and the ballooning ranks of the uninsured is going to either primarily benefit the health insurance industry at the expense of those who have trouble paying, or it will primarily benefit those who can't afford health coverage at the expense of the insurance industry. of course, if it turns out to be the former, it really isn't much of a "solution", is it?

now it can be told

two weeks ago, reporter/blogger will bunch criticized his boss, brian tierney, for hiring john yoo and rick santorum as columnists for the philadelphia inquirer. tierney and editorial page editor harold jackson responded by claiming that they needed conservative voices on the editorial page to counter charges that the inky had a liberal bias. that prompted bunch to note that the perception, if it existed, wasn't accurate as there really aren't any strong liberal columnists on the editorial page to balance yoo and santorum. tierney said he was open to suggestions for a strong liberal voice and bunch floated some suggestions on his blog.

the second comment to that post by spin dentist suggested brendan. brendan wrote an open letter to tierney asking for the job. i endorsed the idea in my own post.

within a day of publishing my post, brendan sent me an email saying that he had been offered a gig as columnist for the philadelphia weekly, but he asked me to keep it quiet until his first column was published.

the first column is up today. congratulations brendan! everyone go read what he has to say.

14 beats 8

i didn't think they'd pull it off. it probably doesn't won't change much in terms of seats. but it is a symbolic victory.

lebanon is such a weird country. for a place with so many problems, more factions and shifting alliances than anyone can possibly keep track of, and a long history of civil war, the country's relative wealth and ability to pull of democratic elections really is remarkable.

the shit list

it looks like the obama administration is continuing the long american tradition of maintaining a sham list of countries that support terrorism.

the state department is required by law to maintain such a list. i don't have a problem with such a list in principle. but if there is one, countries should enter the list if they are shown to support terrorism and come off the list when they are shown to no longer support support terrorism. being on or off the list shouldn't be a bargaining chip in negotiations over other issues, like a nuclear program. nor should the administration use listing or delisting to signal approval or disapproval of another country's non-terrorism supporting policies. but that, unfortunately, is how the list has been used for the last few decades. rather than actually being a list of state supporters of terrorism, the list has just become a list of countries currently on the outs with washington. it's really just an official american shit list.

i made this same criticism last year when bush was still president. it seems to apply just as much today as it did then.

two dollars

"better off dead", not as great as i remember it being.

nostalgia is a funny thing.

a secret oral agreement is not worth the paper it's written on

i don't get why everyone is making a big deal about this alleged secret oral agreement between the bush administration and israel that supposedly gave the israelis permissions to expand existing settlements. it's not clear that such a thing even existed, but let's assume that it did. so what? it wasn't a treaty ratified by congress. at best this was an executive agreement, which doesn't have the force of law and can be changed by the executive at any time.

so even if president bush had made a secret promise to the israelis, that promise isn't binding on president obama. it is simply irrelevant. in fact, all that obama is really doing is insisting that the israelis actually follow the bush administration's official policy. bush's "road map to peace" required a complete freeze on settlement expansion, including "natural growth". the israeli government adopted the road map and then ignored the bits they didn't like. the bush administration may have looked the other way when it came to israeli non-compliance with their own peace plan, but there's no reason the new administration has to. sure, it's a new approach. but that's why elections matter.

now it can be told

i'd like to work out, but i can't. i don't have a cat.

the lebanese elections

i've been reading a lot of consternation about the prospect that hezbollah will pick up some seats in tomorrow's lebanese election. it strikes me that the concern is misplaced. at best hezbollah will only end up with eleven or so seats (in an 128 seat parliament). it's true that the march 8th alliance (the coalition of political parties that hezbollah effectively leads) may collectively get a bare majority in parliament, but aside from simply assuming that anything good for hezbollah must be bad for those (like me) who don't like the group, few are considering whether a small win for hezbollah might ultimately be a good thing.

there is no plausible scenario for eliminating hezbollah. or even significantly weakening them, at least for the foreseeable future. like it or not, the group is going to be around for a while. but if hezbollah is part of the lebanese government and in a coalition with a narrow majority that includes a bunch of christian, sunni, druze, and secular parties, it will be forced to take those other (non-shia islamist) views into consideration if it wishes to stay in power. it's very easy to remain radical and doctrinaire if you're outside the political system. once they have a stake in the democratic process and rely on outside groups to maintain their influence, it forces moderation. because hezbollah is here to stay, moderation is the best possible outcome.

we've already seen the fruits of hezbollah's commitment to the lebanese political process. last winter, when israel launched its offensive against gaza, hezbollah largely refrained from attacking israel in the north. there's a lot of theories why they didn't launch any major attacks but the most plausible one in my mind is because they didn't want to trigger an israeli retaliation against lebanon and be blamed for the destruction at the polls. if hezbollah's leadership only cared about the views of its own radicals, it wouldn't have mostly held its fire.

really the biggest disadvantage to a narrow march 8th victory tomorrow is the potential freak out about an "iranian take-over of lebanon" by the paranoid sunni arab states, israel and the united states.

they just don't make high-tech lynchings like they used to

i don't understand why so many conservatives resort to racially charged language when they defend someone. i mean, the facts themselves don't seem to be at issue. two years ago, marcus epstein, an aid to tom tancredo and bay buchanan was walking drunk through georgetown encountered black woman. the epstein called her a "nigger" and then hit her in the head with a "karate chop." epstein was arrested and pled guilty. recently, the washington independent discovered the incident and published a short piece about it which was, by all accounts, completely factual. epstein had been accepted to university of virginia law school. however, he apparently did not disclose the criminal conviction on his application. after hearing about the incident, the law school appears to have rescinded its acceptance. (as law schools tend to do when you lie on the application)

somehow bay buchanan thinks that all of what happened to epstein is just like grabbing a human being because of the color of his skin, tying a rope around his neck and hanging him from a tree until he dies. it seems like a bit of a stretch to me, so much of a stretch, in fact, that i think the statement makes buchanan look like an unhinged lunatic. at the very least she either doesn't understand why murdering someone because of their skin color is so bad or she actually thinks that being publicly embarrassed and not going to the law school you wanted to attend is the same as being killed in cold blood. either way, you have to be pretty far gone to take the comparison very seriously.

but it's particularly ironic in this case because the "modern day lynching" line echoes what clarence thomas said during his confirmation battle. meanwhile, both bay buchanan and tom tancredo have been beating the racist drums in an attempt to defeat the current supreme court nominee.

ask judge sotomayor about this case

i realize that supreme court nominees aren't supposed to answer questions about specific cases they may have to decide as a justice. but let's face it, this case will never go that far. and the confirmation hearings would be a lot more fun if they included a highfalutin discussion of crunchberries.

and the winner is...

riding through southern new jersey this afternoon, i heard a lot of commentary about which groups will benefit from obama's speech in cairo. it occurs to me that the biggest unintentional beneficiary is probably china. the speech-related hubbub has taken the spotlight off a certain anniversary.

...on the other hand

if goldfarb is right that means i'm secretly fluent in english, french, arabic, spanish, hebrew, italian, dutch, german, russian, estonian, farsi, swahili, greek, turkish, bambara, uzbek, tajik, vietnamese, and probably a few more that i can't think of right now. also, i seem to have momentarily lost my fluency in latvian and lithuanian, but i'm sure my entire proficiency in those languages will come back to me in a few minutes.

how polyglotinous of me.

شكرا

HOLY SHIT, the president of the united states said "thank you" in arabic!!!!!

the president's use of that one word--a word that mrs. noz managed to pick up within the first hour of our visit to tunisia--must mean that he is secretly fluent in "the language of the koran." this proves that he's a muslim terrorist! we're all gonna die!!!!!!!!!!

al-kharaa' al-muqaddasa! it's even worse than i thought.

the rubber hose of respectability

how about that! this little taco stand of mine gets counted as "press."

the ahmadinejad-mousavi presidential debate is today!

i wonder if the media coverage will be as zinger-driven as our debates.

won't it be awesome if mousavi hits ahmadinejad with a "where's the koobideh?"

fake somali passport

the guy who attacked the little rock army recruiting station "was once detained in Yemen for possessing a fake Somali passport" [.] is there any other kind?

somalia hasn't have a functioning central government in almost two decades. presumably all the pre-1991 passports have expired. while there have been various "governments" that were recognized by some of the international community, those entities rarely controlled more than a couple of small patches of somali territory and were under almost constant attack by other factions. i would guess they were too busy with other stuff to issue passports.

if you're going to carry a fake passport, somali is the worst possible one to choose. it pretty much guarantees increase scrutiny. few border guards would have seen one before. plus the well-publicized lawlessness of the place would immediately raise questions about its legitimacy.

what time is it?

it's richard conviser hit spike season!

drinking liberally

i'll probably be stuck in a hearing for most of the day today. but later i'll be at the center city philadelphia drinking liberally. if you're not going to france, you really have no excuse:

triumph brewing company, 117 chestnut street, philadelphia, PA, 6 p.m. until everyone leaves.

it is what it is

there's been a bit of i-told-you-so-ism surrounding the assassination of dr. george tiller. about two months ago, the department of homeland security issued a report (pdf) about the threat of violent rightwing extremism in the u.s. right blogistan flipped out about the report, claiming that that obama administration was criminalizing dissent.

as it happens, the next terrorist attack in the u.s. happened to be just the sort of thing the DHS was warning against in its report. thus, we have the i told you sos.

don't get me wrong, i think the "i told you so" is pretty well deserved this time around. when the kerfuffle first broke, the funniest thing was how so many conservatives thought that a report about violent rightwing groups was talking about them. but the problem is that, even after the tiller assassination, there's really zero chance that most rightwing bloggers will see this as terrorism. it seems pretty clear that it fits the definition and there's no serious question that if some muslim had gunned down a rabbi, the malkins of the world would be the first to pounce on the T-word.

for a lot of people, it's not "terrorism" unless an arab or muslim is involved. i've long noticed that violence regularly get called "terrorism" when an arab or muslim does it, even when the attack wouldn't be called "terrorism" if anyone else did it (e.g. attacks on soldiers in iraq, afghanistan, the west bank, etc. notwithstanding the fact that "terrorism" means attacks on civilian targets) likewise, attacks against arabs or muslims by non-arabs/muslims are usually not called "terrorism" even if it would otherwise fit the definition of the term (e.g. attacks by israeli settlers on palestinians). there's also a lot of cases where the definition of "terrorism" wouldn't normally apply, but gets applied anyway simply because arabs or muslims are involved (e.g. military forces generally are excluded from the definition of "terrorists"--when an army attacks civilians it is a war crime, not terrorism. and yet, the revolutionary guard was labeled a "terrorist organization" by the u.s. even though it is an official part of the iranian armed forces).

the abuse of the definition of terrorism has long been one of my pet issues. but for a lot of the country, the damage is pretty much done. when someone is kidnapped in mexico city, it's a kidnapping. when someone is kidnapped in iraq, it's terrorism. in that context, it is inconceivable for some people to imagine that killing an abortion doctor by a white christian has anything to do with "terrorism."