the our way or the highway strategy

there are two ways to look at this:

(1) tea partiers are dumb. they don't seem to realize that their party only controls the house, and that the budget has to pass the house, senate and presidency to become law. that means in order for a budget to be passed, it has to be acceptable to a majority of the senate and to the president. because the senate has already rejected the house version of the budget and the president was against it too, that means they have to compromise. if they refuse to, the government will shut down and they will get the blame for it.

(2) tea partiers are smart. they know if they hold the line long enough, the democrats will ultimately crumble and give in to most of their demands. that's what democrats do. unlike the GOP, the leaders of the democratic party don't give a shit about their base.

although eric cantor's recent statements suggest that the answer might be #1, i'm afraid that the truth is probably #2.

the defiant speech? -- check

they all seem to be working off the same script. like every other embattled arab leader before him, yesterday it was bashar al-assad's turn to give a defiant speech in which he refused to announce the reforms that everyone expected.

i don't know what will happen with syria. it's been a remarkably stable place despite a huge influx of refugees, the loss of its control over lebanon and both american and israeli efforts to destabilize the country. i just think it's funny that every single arab leader gives essentially the same speech in the face of their country's "arab spring." and they keep trying it even though both ben ali and mubarak gave their defiant speech just days before they left power.

i did find these reactions to be interesting: the arabist, juan cole, syria comment 1 syria comment 2, global voices.

jamuan teh

this can only be viewed as an "odd alliance" if you view the tea party as another other than the social conservative base of the republican party with a new name. the GOP has long tried to stir up populism to defend the interests of wealthy multinationals. the institute for liberty itself was founded in 2005, years before they called themselves a tea party group.

the only curious thing about this is that the media keeps pretending that the tea party movement is a new political faction. it's not a recent populist uprising, it's a well established sliced of the republican base that was pissed off because barack obama won the presidency.

if they could take on the u.s., why can't they beat qadhafi?

isn't the idea that the libyan rebels are really the same al qaeda militants who fought so ferociously again u.s. troops in iraq belied by their complete disarray on the battlefield?

the wrath of noz

one thing that will increase the political impact of a government shutdown is the fact that it is happening right around tax season. that means that anyone waiting for a refund will have to wait longer. and that means that whoever is blamed for the shutdown will risk their wrath.

(full disclosure: i am waiting for a tax refund. beware my wrath!)

and speaking of unelectable

there is a part of me that is looking forward to the circus.

at this point i wouldn't be surprised if joe the plumber threw his hat in the ring. (remember, you read it here first!)

the least unelectable

booman sez:

It's weird. It's both impossible to imagine that Mitt Romney will win the Republican nomination and to imagine that he won't. That actually places him above any of his challengers. I can't imagine any of them as a genuine presidential candidate.

the really weird thing is that you could have said the same thing about the crop of GOP presidential candidates in 2008. i remember talking to MatthewB in the summer of 2007 about the various GOP candidates and we both concluded that every single one was unelectable for republican primary voters. and yet, we both knew that someone had to win.

our conversation took place at the time that mccain's campaign had utterly tanked. it failed to attract much support and was completely broke. everyone assumed he was dead in the water. but instead, just by not dropping out, he ended up being the one who got the nomination after GOP primary voters ruled out everyone else.

i expect something like that will happen in the coming year. the only question is who will be this year's mccain?

against doctrines

honestly, i wish presidents would dispense with the idea that they have to develop some kind of one-sentence doctrine as the guiding light for all their foreign policy decisions. foreign policy is complicated. a lot of factor have to be weighed. reducing all problems to a single formula, while politically appealing, is only going to get the country into trouble.

really it's all james monroe's fault. have you thought about the monroe doctrine since grade school? we all had to pretend to learn about it when we were kids, but looking at it with modern adult eyes, it's almost embarrassing. in case you've forgotten, the monroe doctrine was the united states laying down the following principles:

(1) european powers can no longer interfere in the internal politics of the americas.
(2) but we can.
(3) hahahahahahahaha.

let's face it, whatever a modern president comes up with as his doctrine is going to look just as embarrassing in the future. wouldn't it be better to just ditch the whole idea that presidents have to develop a doctrine?

the other cost of the libyan operation

one of the many problems with intervening militarily in libya is that from that point onward, the obama administration is going to have to explain why they are not intervening in other places.

although i am against u.s. intervention in libya, the consistency argument isn't the reason i'm opposed to it. when deciding how to respond to a crisis the u.s. always has to consider how the actions it could take will affect its various interests. libya is different from most other countries because qadhafi had pissed off just about everyone¹ the u.s., france and the UK can bomb his forces with fewer consequences than they would have to face if they bombed somewhere else. in that sense, treating libya and syria (or libya and bahrain) differently is not inconsistent, the weighing of interests just plays out differently in different places. because of libya's relative diplomatic isolation, it is the low-hanging fruit of military interventions.

but those comparisons still pose a political problem for the administration. because when asked why the u.s. is bombing libya and not syria, secretary of state clinton can't just say, "libya is the low hanging fruit." military campaigns are always wrapped up in moral language. this operation is allegedly to protect civilians in rebel-held areas. i do think that is one of the actual motives behind the bombing, but just one of them. so is the fact that other countries that the u.s. has important ties with don't like qadhafi and would like to see him go. it's hard for the administration to say out loud that we are doing something in libya because an absolute monarch sitting on top of the world's largest oil reserve gave his blessing to that operation and it is very unlikely that he would give the same blessing for syria. it's also hard to say that syria is next to iraq and israel and bombing syria will have large negative repercussions in those countries that the u.s. has already invested so much.

so instead hillary clinton tried to distinguish syria and libya by claiming that the syrian regime is not as bad. which is far from clear, and opens the administration up to all kinds of ridicule (especially if the asad regime continues to slaughter protesters). but i don't think there's any other thing they can get away with politically. the ridicule is just another cost of this war that they must bear.

-------------------------
1- except for countries in sub-sahara aftica. but the u.s. (like other western powers) doesn't pay much attention to their concerns as there's not much they can do to make things more difficult for the u.s. later on. the bombing campaign is unpopular in, for example, mali. but no one expects this to affect u.s.-malian or (the more close) french-malian relations all that much.

outside the job

i watched inside job last night and then woke up to this.

it's always been easier to prosecute the not-rich over the rich in this country. what's remarkable is how the feds can stand in the midst of the biggest financial crime scene in american history, and decide to go after some random schmo who did not trash the world economy.

inflated conclusions from small self-selected sample sizes

yesterday mark thompson's post titled "Just Who Are These Libyan Rebels?" got a bit of attention. the post highlights the fact that in a 2007 study of documents captured in iraq (pdf), the per capita majority of foreign fighters in that country came from libya as shown in the below chart:

 furthermore, of the libyan foreign fighters in iraq, a majority came from either benghazi or darnah, both eastern libyan towns that are currently rebelling against qadhafi.

the thing that is annoying about the point thompson's post makes is that he slips in that key words "per capita." libya has a relatively small population of only 6.4 million. libya's population is less than two percent of the population of the entire arab world. plus, as thompson notes, the 2007 study had a small sample size. it only only looked at the countries and towns of origin of 595 foreign fighters. (see the bottom of page 7 of the pdf of the study). when you mix a small sample size with a per capita adjustment for a relatively low-population country, small blips in the data can balloon and distort the ultimate conclusion.

it you look at the actual data, the study identified 112 individual foreign fighters who were from libya. the study also identified more than twice as many (244) from saudi arabia. but because saudi arabia has four times the population of libya, a per capita accounting makes the libyan per capita contribution much highter. which is potentially interesting, but how do we know that the sample is representative of the total number of actual foreign fighters? we don't. the study could only look at the records that u.s. forces happened to capture. it could be the documents came from a raid on a safe house that happened to hold a disproportionate number of libyans.

the small sample distortion gets even worse when thompson "drills down" and looks at the home town data from the study. he uses the above pie-chart shows to suggest that 23.9% of those libyans came from benghazi, the city that is now the effective capital of the anti-qadhafi rebellion. but that's not really true. look at the fine print at the bottom of the pie chart. of the 112 records identifying libyan foreign fighters, only 88 indicated the fighters home town. which means the already tiny sample size just got even smaller. it's 23.9% of 88, which is 21 individuals that the study identified being from benghazi. 21 people out of a city of about a half-million.

so how exactly does that say anything about the people who lead the current rebellion? it doesn't. the other problem with using the 2007 study of foreign fighters in iraq to make a statement about the people who currently live in benghazi is that the sample in the 2007 study is at least partly self-selected. that is, it looks at people who chose to leave their home town to fight the u.s. in iraq and makes it seem like that is representative of the city they came from as a whole. which is nonsense.

for example, in 2008, one year after the study that thompson cites, the FBI estimated that "[a]nywhere from 15 to 20" minneapolis residents left to become foreign fighters in somalia for a group the FBI claims is linked to terrorists. minneapolis has a population of 382,578, that's about 25% smaller than benghazi. that means that on a per capita basis, in 2008 minneapolis was the home to anywhere between as many or more foreign fighters than benghazi had the year before. what does that say about the members of the minneapolis city council? uh, nothing. every city has it's wackos (the minneapolis suburbs elected michele bachmann to congress!) the existence of those wackos doesn't mean that entire city is filled with crazy people.

insubordination rampant in syria

last week there was a rare protest against the government of bashar al-asad in da'ara, a small city in southern syria. the police cracked down and six people were killed. that triggered more protests over the killings and yesterday asad seemed oddly conciliatory, claiming that the people firing on protesters were acting contrary to his orders.

today, security forces fired on and killed more demonstrators in at least three cities: dara'a, latakia and homs. i guess they hadn't read the orders either.

qadhafi regime collapses in earth-18

Libya became so flush with cash that Bernard L. Madoff, the New York financial manager who stole billions of dollars in a long-running Ponzi scheme, approached officials overseeing the country’s $70 billion sovereign fund a few years ago about an “investment opportunity,” according to a State Department summary of the episode in 2010. “We did not accept,” a Libyan official reported.

qadhafi is funding his fight against the rebellion with the cash that he horded before the crisis erupted. so it will be a while before he can't pay his soldiers and mercenaries. if only we were in that alternate universe where those officials had said yes to that deal and bernie made off with qadhafi's riches.

look at the bright side

japan's radiation release not as bad as the worst nuclear accident in world history, at least not yet.

uh, woo-hoo?

the guardian's "arab spring" timeline

the guardian has a really well done interactive timeline of the pro-democracy protests/ rebellions in the arab world (plus iran and israel) since mohamed bouaziz set himself on fire in mid-december 2010 through the present, with links to guardian articles about each incident.

(via VT on FB)

the bubble we are all in

americans overwhelmingly support air strikes in libya, which i find fairly surprising as my impression was that people were either against it or fairly conflicted about it. i would have guessed it would be an even split at best.

i guess it just goes to show how our personal experiences are almost always non-representative of the world at large. i'm convinced that is why so many tea partiers were shocked by the election of obama when it seemed obvious he would win to me. probably everyone they talked to was for mccain. when your personal experience tells you that you're a majority, it's hard to accept when you are later told you are a minority.

fighting for us all

الكاميكازي الليبي

qadhafi's sixth son khamis was killed when a libyan air force jet intentionally crashed into barracks. which raises a few questions:

(1) did this really happen? if so, why isn't it being reported more elsewhere?

(2) have there been more defections of members of the libyan military? it seems like this one was only reported because it ended up killing one of the qadhafis. have there been more that involved less notable people?

(3) why did qadhafi name his sixth son khamis? maybe he was born on a thursday.

(via memeorandum)

наурыз мейрамы құтты болсын!!!

who picked that name?

the american mission in libya is code named "operation odyssey dawn." the word "odyssey" refers to an ancient story about a bunch of people who get lost trying to leave a war and wander around the mediterranean, getting hit by one calamity after another as they try to find their way home that they don't reach for ten years.

kristof's kommanders

right about now would be a good time for that ninety percent of libyan military commanders who aren't really with qadhafi that nick kristof wrote about last month to start defecting. if all those commanders really were on the fence, shouldn't we start seeing some of them jump?

monopoly

as a customer of both AT&T and t-mobile (my iphone is AT&T, my wife's phone is t-mobile), i think this deal is really bad. AT&T and t-mobile are the only two national cell phone carriers in the use who use a GSM network, the cell phone standard for most of the world. (verizon and sprint use CMDA, a network standard that doesn't exist in all but a handful of countries although it is dominant here). i like to travel, so i purposely got a t-mobile phone when i got my first cell phone, the phone line that mrs. noz inherited when i got my AT&T iphone.

you can't swap SIM cards on a verizon or sprint phone. which means that if you travel outside the U.S. with a phone from those companies, either your phone won't work or you have to pay some outrageous roaming charge to your cell phone carrier. on GSM phones you can remove your american SIM card and replace it with a SIM card bought in-country. then you're just like the locals, paying the same rates as them. in almost every other country, the system is based on prepaid minutes not monthly contracts. that means that for an occasional caller like me, cell phone service is a lot cheaper in most, if not all, other parts of the world. when i was in kazakhstan, we paid beeline for our calls, not t-mobile, even though we used mrs. noz's phone that was purchased at a t-mobile store in the u.s. that trick only works for t-mobile and AT&T, at least among major u.s. cell phone carriers.

from that perspective, an AT&T/t-mobile merger would create a monopoly. the resulting company would own the only national GSM network. the people like me who want a GSM phone would have no choice. that might not matter for most of the people in the u.s. i think that's worse than whatever service coverage benefits i might enjoy from the new combined network.

no exit strategy?

i keep reading that the u.s. has no exit strategy in libya. that's not exactly true. the u.s. has a rather simple exit strategy: it could simply stop entering libyan airspace, stop firing cruise missiles and stop flying planes over libyan airspace. then the u.s. would be out.

this isn't like the situation in iraq or afghanistan... at least not yet. in those other two countries the u.s. has a lot of soldiers, equipment, bases, contracts and development projects, on the ground in the country. the u.s. has "entered" iraq and afghanistan in a lot of ways that it still hasn't entered libya. it is all those other things that makes the exit so difficut.

my fear is that if this libyan campaign continues the u.s. inevitably will become more like those other two countries. commitments like that tend to spring up the longer the u.s. is involved. but it's not like we've gotten to a point where it would be logistically hard for the u.s. to leave libya. if the president ordered it, all u.s. forces could be out in less than one hour. that's not true with regard to iraq or afghanistan.

what the u.s. doesn't seem to have is a clear end game. at least not one that it has shared with the american public. which is itself a major problem. but there is still time to avert another quagmire.

oops

i guess it wasn't with their blessing after all.

apparently those silly arabs don't believe in flying tanks.

all roads led to a no-fly zone

as i mentioned earlier today, according to the NYT, secretary of state clinton was a proponent of the current "no fly zone" over libya. john mccain came out in favor of a "no fly zone" almost two weeks ago.

it occurs to me that at no point in the last presidential election, either in the primary or general election, did i have the ability to vote for a viable candidate who would not have supported the current western intervention in libya.

[i guess there's john edwards. but i'm not sure where he stands because no news organization has bothered to ask him what he thinks about the situation in libya. failed republican candidates who no longer hold political office, even those who did a lot worse than edwards, never seem to go away. but people only pay attention to failed democrats who are no longer in office when they have sex scandals]

the imperial president and the flying tank

i'm not a fan of andrew sullivan, but i agree with his reaction to obama's speech yesterday. it's really quite amazing how little public debate there has been about this in the u.s. i mean, i didn't think there was enough consideration of the possible consequences of the iraq war before the u.s. invasion and that war was preceded by months of debate and a resolution in congress. there seems to be even less thought about the end game to this libyan operation.

the new york times reports that the obama's administration's sudden switch from letting libya sort out itself to endorsing u.s. military action took place in a single 24 hour period. the switch is attributed to hillary clinton's influence. the main reason i voted for obama over clinton in the primary was because clinton was much to hawkish for my tastes, but i guess i ended up with the clinton hawk anyway.

it's really notable that the president didn't bother trying to sell any of this on the american public until after it was already a done deal; the UN resolution was already passed and france, the UK and the US were already gearing up to enforce a "no fly zone". it's also funny how the first military action to enforce this so-called "no fly zone" was an attack on a (presumably non-flying) tank. the mission creep has begun with the very first shot.

on the other hand, it's still not completely clear whether the u.s. itself is going to fire any shots here. they could just be providing support monitoring the airspace over libya and sharing that information with france or britain. in other words, this could be more of france or britain's war that the u.s.' we shall see.

and i'm still hoping that this early stage will scare more of qadhafi's military commanders to defect to the rebels, causing a quick collapse of qadhafi's regime. that is still a possibility and if that ends up happening, then the UN resolution and pretend "no fly" zone could turn out to be the gamble that worked. but it's still a reckless gamble, because if it doesn't work, this will eventually evolve into quite a mess. (yeah, i know, it's already a mess. i mean a worse one. and, unlike the pre-yesterday mess, that potentially worse mess is a potential mess with my country's fingerprints on it)

middle east

i keep reading articles that refer to libya as being part of the "middle east." which is strange because i don't think of it as part of the middle east. instead, it is part of north african, i.e. the maghreb (egypt is the only country that is both north african and middle eastern in my mind, though it is not part of the maghreb). for some reason i thought the historic definition of the "middle east" was the land between the nile, the oxus and the indus rivers (the land beyond the oxus being transoxiana, the ancient name for central asia. the land beyond the indus being india)

i googled around and can't find anyone else who defines the middle east that way. still, my impression seems to roughly correspond with the "traditional definition of the middle east". wiki says that libya is part of the "greater middle east", but so are a lot of countries that i can't believe anyone would consider to be middle eastern, assuming he/she knows where those countries are actually located (somalia? kazakhstan? the comoros?)

not that i haven't been aware that some people do consider the arab countries in north africa to be part of the middle east. i once spoke to an italian guy who referred to morocco as "middle eastern."  "how can it be middle eastern when it is to the west of italy?" i asked. he didn't really have an answer.

on a related note, the only thing harder to define than the middle east is the middle west. i can't count the number of discussions i had about that when i lived in the midwest (or when i lived in the midwest and st. louis. lots of midwesterners contest the inclusion of any part of missouri, though people in st. louis seem to think they are midwesterners. the only place that everyone agrees is midwestern is chicago).

what is it with all those middle places?

if only mubarak had demolished liberation

the pearl monument in manama has been a rallying point for protesters in bahrain. so today bahraini security forces demolished it.

last week, when U.S. secretary of defense gates was meeting with the king, the protests briefly relocated to king khalifa's riffa palace. without the big pearl on slats, maybe the protesters will come back to the palace. i'd like to see the king demolish that.

paywall

the NYT paywall announced this week is being panned online. that makes sense. the people who write stuff online are the ones who will have to start paying for something they previously got for free. there are a lot of predictions it will fail, and it might. but i'm less sure than others seem to be.

basically the problem is that newspaper revenue is falling and they need to find a new business model. traditionally, newspapers have gotten most of their revenue from advertisements, not sales or subscriptions. but online advertisement revenue, for whatever reason, doesn't bring in as much money as print ads.¹ so if ads won't do the trick, the only alternative is either finding a rich patron or getting the readers to pay.

there aren't a lot of rich patrons out there. and even if there were, that model would probably only work for a few major newspapers. it would also raise a real danger of skewed coverage to cater to the whims of the patron. so that leaves the readers as a funding source. but the problem is that the readers are all used to getting the news for free.

other than the alt-weekly press, most newspapers would probably like to find a way to charge their readers, but they can't do it without running up against their reader's expectations. putting up a paywall is possible, but whichever paper does it first runs a big risk as it would both cut itself out of the conversation about the day's events and causing their readers to ditch that paper in favor of the many free alternatives. those fleeing readers would mean an additional economic hit as a fall in readers would mean a fall in advertising clickthoughts and the loss of what small online advertising clicks they currently profit from. on the other hand, if no one does anything, all the newspapers all will continue to lose money and will eventually go out of business.

so i think what the NYT is betting on is that it can put up its paywall and probably lose more money in the short term. but the 20 free articles per month will allow their casual readers to keep visiting, which will hopefully deter a big enough drop in hits to hurt their online ad rates. the times, unlike most other american newspapers, has a lot of clout that gives it a better chance than most of getting some people to pay to read their paper, even if isn't as many as they would want. and if the plan isn't perceived as a total disaster, other newspapers will probably follow with their own paywalls. once that happens and the pool of free alternative news sources starts to shrink and paying to read the times will get more attractive. they might have to fiddle with the price once they are competing with other paywalls, but it could work in the long run.

-------------------------
1-my personal theory for why online ads don't cost is much is due to the better ability to measure how effective an online ad is. online ads can record click through stats, giving clear data on how many people might have been influenced by the advertisement. when advertising clients see how few people actually click through to their site, they won't pay the times' usual exorbitant rates. chances are print ads are just as ineffective, maybe more so because of they lack the easy of clicking right over to the advertiser's products. but because there is no good way to measure their effectiveness, the advertisers can fool themselves into thinking they are more effective than they actually are and the times can soak them for more money
-------------------------

(expands on a comment i left here)

puntland ends contract with saracen int'l

maybe the problem was hiring a group that calls itself saracen to fight pirates.

third time's a charm

just what america needs: another war.

so now we have a UN-sanctioned no-fly zone that just about everyone agrees will probably not work on it's own to stop qadhafi's advance. so the "all necessary measures" to protect civilians clause will be interpreted creatively to authorize the bombing of places like tripoli (where, as it happens, quite a lot of civilians live).

actually, i wouldn't be surprised if the french take the lead initially on this. they've been pushing the hardest to support the rebels militarily. so maybe it won't completely be america's war at first. but if it drags on long enough, it will be.

and as much as i think this is a bad idea, there is still a scenario where this could end relatively soon. it's possible that the prospect of being attacked by a competent military force might cause a bunch of qadhafi's officers to defect. there were a bunch of defections when the rebellion first broke out, and as the rebels advanced there were rumors that there were a bunch more military commanders who were on the fence considering defecting. when qadhafi regained he upper hand and all talk of more defections faded away. but this UN resolution and/or the initial strikes could change their political calculations.

but unless a cascade of defections gets qadhafi out fast, this could just as easily devolve into another long bloody crisis. of course, it was a bloody crisis already. but the blood was mostly on qadhafi's hands, not our own. unless the defection scenario plays out, this is just likely to result in more death, not less. a military solution rarely is.

bahrain

the events in bahrain have been buried under the news from japan and libya . both of them are legitimately big stories, of course, but i am afraid that the lack of attention will give the obama administration a pass on the one major foreign news story that actually have the power to influence.

bahrain is a very small country that is the home to the u.s. navy's fifth fleet. the presence of such a major facility in such a small country means that the u.s. is already a major factor in king khalifa's decision-making. in that sense, the revolution in bahrain is more like the one in egypt (where u.s. funding of the egyptian military gave it a lot of influence), and less like the one in libya (where the u.s. had few pre-existing ties and thus its options in influencing events have been limited to various kinds of military intervention).

the scope of american influence was demonstrated last month when protests first broke out in bahrain, security forces killed two protesters, the u.s. government urged restraint, and the bahraini security forces backed off. it's not clear whether that trick would work again (in fact, it looks like it isn't), but it does show that the u.s. has influence.

last month's the backing off period seems to have ended. and i'm afraid that the arrival of saudi forces will mean that a violent crackdown will be easier to pull off. whenever there are protests against a government the biggest check against violent repression is the fact that the security forces themselves are citizens of the country and may share some of the concerns of the protesters or have family members who are participating in the demonstrations. qadhafi got around that problem by using mercenaries and by exploiting the tribal divisions within the libyan military (i.e. sending units comprised of soldiers of his own tribe against areas that are dominated by a different tribe). the saudi military, because they are predominantly sunni and are not bahraini, will undermine the effectiveness of that check in bahrain.

floating in the background of all of this is paranoia about iran, and the abiding belief that all shia arabs are really just iranian agents. the current saudi government is consumed by anti-iranian paranoia, and unfortunately, the american defense establishment is also strongly influenced by the paranoia emanating from its ties with the KSA and israel. iran's strong objections to the crackdown are probably just feeding the paranoia that this is little more than an iranian power play. which means that without the american public paying attention to bahrain and sympathizing with the protesters, it will be easy for the administration to let the iran hawks in the pentagon dictate policy, which is not good for the protesters.

sweded wars

yes michigan, there is a contract clause

maybe someone should read rick snyder the constitution.

pickling a nit

michael totten:

Here at home, liberals fear and loathe the very idea of another Iraq, which to them is "Vietnam" conjugated in Arabic...

dude, verbs conjugate; nouns decline.

(via)

the point of a boycott

i usually think that election boycotts are counter-productive. the boycotting side stays away from the polls and just ends up being less represented in the government that follows. instead of sending a message, election boycotts often end up squelching what little voice the boycotters may have had before.

but kazakhstan may have blundered into a situation where a boycott could actually be effective. as i mentioned before, next month's national elections are being held almost two years ahead of schedule in response to a "spontaneous" movement to extend the term of president nazarbayev until 2020. in december, a of concerned citizens claimed to produce a petition calling for the president to be immune from elections for the next ten years. the petition was signed by 5 million members of the kazakhstani electorate, a stunning number in a country with only 10 million eligible voters. the government then somehow managed to verify the signatures in record time and then destroyed all the signatures. for a few weeks, it looked like the proposal would pass, or at least be voted on in a national referendum, which either way would court negative attention in the western press.

then the constitutional council ruled that the proposal was unconstitutional. it could have ended there, but instead president nazarbayev swooped in proposing a grand compromise: move the next presidential election forward to april 2011 rather than december 2012. it's never been clear to me how that was a compromise exactly, but (he claimed) the people were clamoring for more naz, so what other choice did he have? thus the current presidential election campaign.

but remember, this whole circus started because supposedly 5 million citizens were spontaneously moved to demand that nazarbayev remain president. if less than five million people show up to vote, then it will implicitly discredit the entire story. when you control every lever of government, it's easy to stuff a ballot box or manipulate election returns. it's harder to fake a turnout.

and so there are effectively two election campaigns going on right now in kazakhstan: the ersatz presidential election campaign playing out on the state-run media, and the guerrilla campaign waged by protesters calling for an election boycott. i doubt if the boycott movement will work, outside of astana and almaty there doesn't seem to be much opposition to nazarbayev in the country. but at least this time i can see the point of a boycott.

the fact that they needed to add those last 7 words demonstrates why this is a bad idea

on the PA governor's proposed education budget cuts:

How much money is Corbett cutting from education in his proposed budget?

The 2010-2011 budget allotted $11.5 billion for education, and the proposed 2011-2012 budget calls for spending $10 billion, which is a decrease of $1.5 billion.

the tyrrany of apps

on my iphone, i have an app to read the new york times, an app to read the bbc, an app to stream al-jazeera english and an app to stream al-jazeera arabic, an app for facebook, an app for google maps, an app linked to my amazon account, an app to read the onion, an app to stream music, an app to translate foreign languages via google translate, and a bunch more. they're all really nifty, but sometimes i get tired of switching from one app to the other.

someone should come up with a universal app that would allow me to browse through all those online sites in a single program. i wish someone would do that. they could call it a "browser."

as matthew yglesias points out, the u.s. has enormous influence over bahrain because of its already existing military business with the island nation. in that sense, bahrain is like egypt, where the u.s. funded a significant portion of the military as part of its aid package to egupt, and not like libya, where the american ties have been a lot more limited influence.

insensitive?

in this article about philip crowley getting canned for his remarks on bradley manning, it mentions another incident:

On Friday, in the wake of the earthquake in Japan, he sent out a message on ’Twitter that said: “We’ve been watching a hopeful tsunami sweep across the Middle East. Now we’re seeing a tsunami of a different kind sweep across Japan.”

Other officials said the message was insensitive, and Mr. Crowley pulled it from Twitter.

why is that insensitive? that's a real question, i really don't know the answer. must any statement he makes about the horrible disaster in japan mention how horrible it is or it is deemed insensitive? is this something particular to crowley? because of his position as official state department spokesman must he mention the human tragedy every time he alludes to japan this week? or would the remarks be viewed as insensitive no matter who said it?

i'm having a hard time seeing why it would be insensitive or serious enough to pull from twitter. it's not making fun of the japanese people or belittling their suffering in any way. it is making an odd analogy to two different things going on in the world, really just playing off the phrase "democratic wave" that has been used to refer to what is going on in the middle east. but isn't that what twitter is all about, quick quips and not some larger drawn out comparison?

it's also strange because he wasn't the only one making the comparison. here is today's abu mahjoob cartoon by jordanian cartoonist emad hajjaj:

the caption in the upper right says "arab tsunami!" the cartoon is also evocative of the famous japanese painting, the great wave off kanagawa, but i don't see why that allusion would make it any more or less offensive either.

syndrome

even though i agree with ross douthat's ultimate conclusion about libya, his discussion of the "iraq syndrome" seems totally off base:

Five years ago, in the darkest days of insurgent violence and Sunni-Shia strife, it seemed as if the Iraq war would shadow American foreign policy for decades, frightening a generation’s worth of statesmen away from using military force. Where there had once been a “Vietnam syndrome,” now there would be an “Iraq syndrome,” inspiring harrowing flashbacks to Baghdad and Falluja in any American politician contemplating an intervention overseas.

why is that a syndrome? doesn't a reasonable country learn from its mistakes? personally, if the next generation of leaders were frightened away from using military force unless they really had no other choice, wouldn't that be a good thing?

for that matter, there never really was a "vietnam syndrome". at least the loss of vietnam in the mid-70s didn't stop the u.s. from invading grenada in the 80s even though there was no rational argument that the u.s. had no choice but to use force (grenada! can you imagine a less threatening place to a superpower?)¹

the "vietnam syndrome" is just one of those things that people wonked about back when i first started paying attention to politics during the reagan administration. but it really was nothing more than political propaganda that labeled anyone who disagreed with hawkish positions as diseased. at the end of the gulf war george HW bush famously said; "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" expressing relief that the u.s. could now lower the threshold for when it used the u.s. military to kill people in other countries. if there is a pathology there, it's not on the part of the people citing the cautionary tale of vietnam or iraq.

-------------------------------
1- i guess you could argue that if the u.s. hadn't lost the vietnam war, it would have more directly intervened in iran, maybe sent u.s. troops to fight along side saddam hussein in his invasion of iran? if so, then the "vietnam syndrome" probably just saved this country from another foreign policy disaster.

crowley forced out for disagreeing with the administration's mistreatment of bradley manning

pathetic.

no fly

i'm surprised by the arab league's endorsement of a no-fly zone over libya. partly because the arab league never does anything. but also because a lot of regimes that are currently facing their own anti-government protests voted essentially to endorse the removal of a fellow arab leader.

the news coverage about the resolution mentions that it passed over the objections of syria and algeria. but that means that is passed without the objections of bahrain, yemen, jordan, saudi arabia, oman, sudan, kuwait and morocco. not that qadhafi was all that well liked among other arab leaders, but you'd think the ministers from those other countries would be a little more reluctant to set this kind of precedent.

yeah but which way?

the earthquake in japan has shifted the earth's axis by ten inches. but i can't find anything that tells me whether the earth tilts more or less than it did before the quake. nor can i find out if ten inches is big enough for us to notice. will sunrise/sunset times published in pre-japan quake calendars and almanacs be slightly off now?

the king hearings have no point

the only reason that members of congress are allowed to hold hearings is to allow them to engage in fact finding before drafting legislation or impeaching a public official.

so what legislation is representative king contemplating right now? as far as i can tell, none.

somewhere along the line, maybe with the watergate hearings, politicians discovered that hearings were a great way to host a political circus. which is fine. the fact that a circus will follow should not preclude a legitimate hearing for some legitimate legislative purpose. but no one even bothers to pretend that the king hearings are anything more than peter king trying to make a point. even reading defenders of the hearings, i see a lot of people claiming the hearings "make sense" because violent muslim extremists exist. but none of them are addressing the fact this isn't about any legislation. if you keep your eye on the supposed point for legislative hearings, the king hearings make no sense at all.

no wonder he didn't call anyone from the justice department to testify

Rep. Peter King, New York Republican and chairman of the committee said, "There is no equivalency of threat between al Qaeda and Neo-Nazis, environmental extremists, and other isolated madmen." Peter King continued,  "Indeed, by the Justice Department’s own record, not one terror-related case in the last two years involved neo-Nazis, environmental extremists, or anti-war groups."

one day previously: Man With Neo-Nazi Ties Arrested In Spokane Bomb Case

[ADDED] and the day after: Alaska Militia Members Arrested for Plot to Kidnap or Kill Police

projecting libya

qadhafi looked like a goner not to long ago, but he's looking like a stayer now. it just goes to show the dangers of projecting forward whatever is happening at the moment into the future. two weeks ago the rebels were advancing, so i (like a lot of people) assumed they would continue to advance. then the rebels stalled out. so i again assumed that is how things would continue to go and imagined the possibility of an extended stalemate. now the rebels are in retreat, so, of course, i'm now thinking that qadhafi will eventually crush the rebellion and regain control of the entire country.

but aren't i just doing the same thing i have all along: projecting whatever is happening now into the future? haven't i learned my lesson yet?

probably not. even as i write this post is still believe that the rebel movement will collapse. any other scenario just seem unrealistic to me. probably just as unrealistic as qadhafi hanging on seemed two weeks ago.

still, it's disturbing to think about what my being right this time would mean for the people in the rebelling areas (not to mention the libyans in the places that never fell under rebel control but will still have to live under that ruthless megalomaniac). even if qadhafi does regain control, a post-rebellion libya will be facing a new landscape of extreme international isolation, economic sanctions and possible international indictments for war crimes. there's no going back to how things were before.

at least that's what i think at this particular moment.

end run

either the wisconsin senate just passed a bill illegally or governor walker has been lying all along.

i expect the complaint in the inevitable court challenge will include a voluminous appendix setting forth all the statements that walker and the senators who just voted for the bill have been making about collective bargaining's fiscal implications.

how many people are in (outer) space right now

in case you're curious.

but it should be "outer space". the number of people in "space" is approximately six billion.

useless alarm system in my office

(for full effect, turn the sound waaaaaay up)

i hate these things. the alarm sounds telling us that there is some unspecified emergency in our building. then it tells us to do nothing. and then it repeats, over and over, to assure that i can't get anything done.

urge to kill rising...

NRP punk

the thing i'm really curious about is whether or not NPR development people allowed to have and express political views? ron schiller wasn't an editor or journalist. he had nothing to do with the content of NPR's broadcast. he was just a fund raiser. so why is it a strike against NPR if he thinks that tea partiers are racist? a lot of people think that. so what?

not that i think that "so what?" will carry the day. like with the previous o'keefe projects, the real point will be lost as the right wing media gins up a controversy. o'keefe doesn't make coherent points, he tars by association. that's what the conservative movement thrives on these days.

the point

the kazakhstani presidential election season is in full swing. mrs. noz and i have had a few conversations about what exactly the point is. everyone knows that the incumbant nursultan nazarbayev will win. the only real question is whether he will get a mere 85% of the vote, or something in the 90s. so why waste all the time, money and effort to have an election when the winner is a foregone conclusion?

it's interesting that in this day and age no one is willing to call themselves an autocracy. almost all of the world's dictatorships pretend to be democracies. they have constitutions listing rights that aren't actually given to anyone, they hold fake elections, et cetera. it wasn't always like this. twentieth century fascist governments called themselves fascists. once they came to power, they didn't bother with fake elections. but these days while alternative forms of government are widely practiced, everything but democracy has been discredited, so almost every country at least pretends to be a democracy.

in that context kazakhstan going through the democratic motions makes sense, to do something else would be out of the world mainstream and draw unnecessary attention on their shortcomings. but what's in it for the opposition candidates? what would motivate anyone to participate in the farce? the end of this post caught my eye:

Since Nazarbayev is clearly going to win, what exactly is at stake for all these contenders, one might ask.

Nazarbayev adviser and confidante Yermukhamet Yertysbayev offers a revealing answer in an interview with Ekspress-K newspaper: "The runner-up can officially claim the title of national leader of the opposition, and his party stands a very good chance of getting into parliament at the upcoming parliamentary elections. And this is a good launching pad for the 2016 presidential election. Life does not end in 2011."

Guessing which party is going to get into the rubber-stamp Majlis, currently monopolized by Nazarbayev's Nur Otan, is something of a popular parlor game in Kazakhstan these days and Yertysbayev's observations offer a helpful hint about the government's thinking on the matter.

in the background of all this is the fact that president-for-life nazarbayev is 70 years old in a country where the average life expectancy for males is age 60. no one knows who will lead the country after nazarbayev, he has not groomed an obvious successor. but whoever is the leader of the opposition has a better shot than most to get an important slot in whatever government follows this one. in the west, elections decide who will get the office in the next term. in kazakhstan this presidential election may be more about who gets an office in the more distant future.

the problem with saying a % prediction is wrong

wendell steavenson in the NYer:

Even after a month of demonstrations in Tunisia had brought about the downfall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, on January 14th, some White House officials, along with American and Israeli intelligence experts, put the likelihood of a copycat revolution in Egypt at no more than twenty per cent

he then goes on to note that the prediction was wrong.

but was it? saying something is 25% likely to happen is not the same as saying it won't happen. predicting that something is unlikely is still predicting that it is a possibility. the experts did not say that there was a zero percent chance of a copycat revolution. so wouldn't that make them right?

unless the prediction is 0% or 100% you can't ever say a prediction about an either/or event are ever right either. say the model had predicted that egypt had a 75% chance of having a copycat revolution, and then it happened. what about that 25% of doubt? the model didn't say it definitely would happen but then it definitely did happen. any time anyone makes a prediction that isn't 0% or 100% isn't it per se wrong? no matter what happens, it will never be completely right. hasn't the predictor admitted that from the outset by giving a percentage chance rather than a certainty?

things happen, or they don't. by giving a 25% chance that there would be a copycat revolution the model was saying 1 time out of 4 it will happen. but then history unfolds and we only get to see one of those times, the one that actually happened. we don't know what happened in those three other cases, because those cases didn't happen. or rather, we do know what happened in those three other cases, they didn't.

the percentage only makes sense when the event hasn't happened yet. once it has happened, there is no percentage chance, just what occurred. we only use percentages because we can't completely predict the future. so why get upset when it turns out that we didn't completely predict the future?

what else is at stake

if the libyan revolt fails, if somehow qadhafi comes out of this still in control of all or part of the country, his brutal response to the democracy protests will become the model that other arab leaders (and probably also leaders from beyond the arab world) will follow in the future.

so what is at stake in libya is more than just the issue of whether qadhafi's brutal rule is allowed to continue. what ultimately happens to him will also influence how future leaders facing such protests will react. if qadhafi falls and either dies or is hauled before a court for war crimes, then that will increase the chances that future leaders follow ben ali's path and resign and flee. if, on the other hand, qadhafi hangs on, his example and iran's similarly brutal response will stand as the best model for leaders who don't want to go.

poor david koch

Mr. Koch joked that the call could cause him problems. “I was thinking to myself, ‘My God, if I called up a senator or a congressman to discuss something with them, and they heard ‘David Koch is on the line,’ they’d immediately say, ‘That’s that fraud again — tell him to get lost!’ ” he said with a laugh.

oh no!!! now members of congress won't take his calls!!!!!

you know, just like the rest of us.

wow

what a long day.

so long, zahi

i don't know how they will ever find a big enough spotlight hogging character to fill his shoes.

are americans ready for democracy?

good question.

(via the arabists)

the revolting index

it's a week old, but i just found it.

i can't say i agree with a lot of the rankings. kazakhstan should be a lot lower than #30 (i think there is no realistic chance of a revolt there, unless president nazarbayev dies suddenly). and as the commentators highlighted in this post point out, it's a total mystery why kyrgyzstan and tajikistan aren't on the list. unlike the other central asian nations that are on the list, those two have a history of civil unrest (tajikistan had a full-fledged civil war in the 1990s and kyrgyzstan chased out its president just last year).

i suspect these kinds of rankings are always crap. the most interesting thing is the description of the methodology. the fact that the results don't look right, raises the question of where the rankings went wrong. that, in turn, raises the question of what factors should be considered more or less important in leading to civil unrest.

shorter governor walker

senate democrats, come back or the children get it.

the o'donnell angle

i don't understand why failed republican politicians continue to get news coverage. just this morning i saw a headline about sharron angle and christine o'donnell. those two didn't just fail in their senate bids, they both failed spectacularly. angle took on one of the most vulnerable democratic senators, a guy who had been polling well behind just about every republican for months, and then lost by six points. o'donnell lost her senate race by a whopping 17 points. both managed to lose senate races that should have been easy wins for the GOP in a year that overwhelmingly favored republican candidates.

so why are they still generating national media attention? personal delusions of grandeur notwithstanding, neither has any serious chance of ever being election to a national office. so why don't they just slip back into obscurity like most people who are not well known before they run for national office and who then fail to get elected? sometimes their coverage even strikes me as insulting to the failed candidate, especially when they end up being treated as some kind of celebrity. she always was a bit of a sideshow, but after a while i can't help but feel sorry for her.

the official malzberg stance on anti-colonialist revolts in the 1950s

the huckster dips his toes into birtherism-lite and says:

The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

by "ours" huckabee seems to mean the viewpoint of the typical listener to the steve malzberg show. does that audience really have an opinion of the mau mau uprising? what exactly is that view? maybe they wanted kenya to remain a british colony?

and even if we accept the lie that obama grew up in kenya, and assume that may have meant that he may have a different opinion of winston churchill than most americans do because he heard about churchill's efforts to keep the british colonial empire intact and not just about his fortitude during the bombing of britain. um, so what? isn't having a view of a historical figure that is informed by more facts better, not worse? and why would his opinion of churchill be at all relevant to his ability to be president of the u.s. in this decade?

even if you buy the bogus premise, this just looks like intense stupidity covered in loose-fitting intellectual clothing.

(via)

turtlecalls.com

wow, i should have thought of that.

except i don't sound anything like a talking turtle (or a turtle trying to impersonate don cheadle). so i'm not qualified for the franchise. oh well.

how to stop the forces of international communism by driving to a busy road, pulling over and doing nothing for an hour

oh man, i really hope this happens.

morning thought

for the past week or so, i've been thinking that qadhafi is on his way out. i don't think there's any serious chance that he will regain control of all of libya anymore. but what if the rebels and pro-qadhafi forces settle into an extended stalemate? what would that look like? although it is hardly clear, my understanding is that colonel Q doesn't have control over any contiguous chunk of libya anymore, just a bunch of spots around the mostly western half of the country. is that a viable state? and how long can he hold out if it isn't?