travel day

as the kool kids say

the two sweetest words in the english language

so now it looks like the best scenario for us to avoid a default depends upon john boehner sacrificing his own political future for the good of the country.

god help us all.

which gets me thinking about what this default will mean, exactly? my basic understanding is that if the debt limit is not raised then the u.s. can't borrow any more money. at the same time, congress has already passed laws requiring the u.s. to spend money on various things. it's against the law not to spend that money but without being able to borrow, the u.s. government can only cover about 60% of the expenses its supposed to cover.

so who decides what 60% of america's bills get paid and which 40% don't? i assume the president does. he is the chief executive of the federal government. that is, he's the guy who executes the laws of the u.s. if all laws can't get the funding to be executed, then the chief executive has to decide which ones get funded and which ones don't.

which puts a tremendous amount of power into the president's hands, doesn't it? i mean, there's probably stuff that has been budgeted that the president isn't personally in favor of. if he has to choose what gets funded and what doesn't, then the stuff he doesn't want to fund is probably the stuff that will have to go. building projects in john boehner's district, to pick one example.

so is that actually how it will work? and if so, why the hell aren't the teatards scared to death to give our kenyan secret mooslim-in-chief so much power to unilaterally pick and choose what gets funded and what doesn't?

platinum baby, platinum

while the house of representative pisses away the remaining hours before a national default by naming post offices, the platinum option idea continues to quietly spread through the blogosphere.

i've yet to see any mainstream media news source pick up on it yet. until they do, it probably won't happen. it also occurs to me that designing and minting some coins, even just two or three, would take some time. i don't know what that amount of time is. but i would think that whatever that may be, it's probably more than three business days. so maybe the platinum ship has already sailed.

where things stand in fake-crisisland

and so the choice is now between a radical rightwing plan or a radical rightwing plan that is also engineered to manufacture another debt ceiling crisis next year. despite the fact that the plans are nearly identical, the parties involved are in too much of a pissing match to notice. and either way, the solution that a clear majority of americans favor is not even on the table.

if this is what it's like with republicans controlling one-half of a branch of government, i'd hate to see what it would be like if they got control of more.

could it be?

are these the signs that the fucking string is being pulled?

that still doesn't mean we'll end up with a non-horrible deal. but at least maybe by next week we can move on to a brand new completely manufactured crisis.

silver linings

because the federal courts are generally considered to be more prestigious, there is a chronic drain of talent from the state court system. that's why a lot of state court judges don't have a great reputation. the assumption is if they were really good they would probably be nominated to the federal bench. that bad reputation often extends all the way to the highest court in some states. while some state supreme courts have built a reputation for professionalism, most seem to be filled with washed up politicians who were nominated because the party machine needed somewhere to put them after they could no longer win elections.

anyway, thanks to a dysfunctional congress that is unable to confirm clearly qualified judicial appointees, i wonder if state courts will start improving by picking up the casualties of our broken federal confirmation process.

um

i just got an email advertising a CLE class entitled "lessons from the third reich." it includes an ethics credit.

the president's suggestion

last night president obama asked americans to call their congressperson and demand he or she attempt to resolve the debt ceiling debacle. fair enough, i'm tired of this bullshit crisis. but what to i say?

i don't want my congressman to vote for senator reid's plan, which the president has endorsed i don't want him to vote for the boehner's plan. i really just want him to vote for a clean debt ceiling increase, but my congressman already voted against that, and there's no real chance of it coming up before congress again before default day.

the sheer idiocy of this standoff is not just the fact that it is a completely manufactured crisis--there's no good reason for the republicans need to hold the american credit rating hostage to force through a bunch of unpopular cuts on the american people-- it's that we've gotten to the point where i don't know what to wish for. every plausible endgame to this would be absolutely terrible. the powers that be have eliminated any sensible option out. i guess i could just call to yell at some gerlach staffer about how much i hate that my alleged representative participated in this utter travesty. but would that accomplish anything? maybe the president should have tried to rally the troops before all the good options were taken off the table.

i used to believe that, when push comes to shove, the big money people who really pull the strings of our politicians, would step in and make sure that a default doesn't actually happen. but what the fuck is taking them so long? pull the string already!

the modern GOP

the center for budget and policy priorities concludes that if house speaker john boehner's current proposal in the debt ceiling standoff is enacted, "it could well produce the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history." so naturally, the chairman of the republican study committee is denouncing the plan for not going far enough.

pam atlas shrugs

my favorite insane bigoted blogger, pam atlas, made it into the new york times! (again)

i'm not sure if i want to get into the issue of whether pam is at all to blame for anything that happened in norway. on the one hand, pam can't help it that a nutball like anders breivik was a fan of her site. i wouldn't want to hold any blogger responsible for everything any single reader might do. on the other hand, if you continuously publish hateful propaganda about a group of people, it shouldn't be surprising if the violent nutballs act on it, which would raise questions about responsibility to anyone with a conscience. if i were pam, i would feel pretty awful about what happened, even if i didn't think that i had any real responsibility for the incident.

then again, it's already clear that pam is not like me.if she feels awful at all, it's buried beneath her usual defensive lashing out at critics. which is, to be honest, what makes her site so much fun to read in a can't-take-my-eyes-off-that-terrible-car-crash kinda way.

one thing that is absolutely clear, however, and i say this as a longtime reader of her site: if the shoe were on the other foot, if anders the christian was ahmed the muslim and it turned out that he was a fan of the daily kos, there's no question that pam would be insisting that markos moulitsas was personally responsible for the killing. guilt by association is pam's speciality. unless, of course, the association points in her direction.

LC has moved on

mustang bobby is has ended his weekly liberal coalition blogarounds. that ends the last active vestiges of the liberal coalition blog alliance. i joined the alliance when it formed in 2003 and for a few years it was pretty active. but then after more time passed, it wasn't. that's okay, things change. the alliance members did a lot to support this site in its early years and i made a bunch of great bloggy friends in the process. but i think it's now time to end the LC portion to my blogroll on the right. over the next few days, i will incorporate the blogs i regularly read from the LC list into my regular blogroll.

not that anyone reading this probably cares. but it's still something of a landmark in the history of this site. i thought i should mention it, and so i did.

the end.

!يللا أرحل يا بشار

in case you're curious, i believe this is a  video of the song mentioned in this article:



catchy!

...and it looks like the NYT's blog "the lede" has a subtitled version:

don't know much about history

you'd have to have no idea what "historic" means to slap it on what looks like a run-of-the-mill faux centrist sell-out deal. if the president wants to make history, he should go platinum. that would be something completely unprecedented.

been spending most our lives living in a gangsta's paradise

all the talk of the "gang of six" reminds me of this post i wrote two years ago. i'm still surprised by congress' propensity to form gangs. but also as glomarization points out on G+, it's even stranger considering the potential associations with the gang of four. could it be that all of these attempts at a broad compromise transcending party lines is, in fact, an insidious chinese communist plot?

[yes, this is my first post inspired by something i saw posted on G+. i guess that's some kind of landmark or something]

platinum pieces were always my favorite

the more i read about the mint-our-way-out-of-debt-ceiling-crisis idea, the more fascinating i find it to be.

i realize the odds of this ever happening are pretty much nil, but i would love it if the president told the republican congressional leadership: "you had your chance, but i'm sick of this bullshit." then withdrew all of his offers to resolve the debt ceiling and just had tim geitner make a bunch of trillion dollar platinum coins.

the case of the missing nazarbayev

kazakhstan president nazarbayev disappeared. his office says he's on a short vacation. but a german tabloid reported that he is in a hospital in hamburg. the telegraph of london picked up the story and reported that he is in the hamburg hospital for prostate surgery.

meanwhile, before the telegraph story came out, KZBlog said it was premature to panic. i understand the sentiment, but that speaks volumes about just how irresponsible president nazarbayev has been by not addressing the successorship issue. an entire country is potentially one choke-on-a-pretzel away from chaos. (or maybe not. that's just it, no one knows what will happen after prez naz goes)

the other thing this incident brings to mind is all the times i was told that while the medical system in taraz was a mess, the country had first-rate medical facilities in almaty and astana. maybe that's true. but it's still telling that nazarbayev flew to germany for prostate surgery (a fairly common fairly low risk procedure) instead using one of the allegedly first-rate facilities in astana. or maybe he decided to have the operation in another country because he knew that a kazakhstani doctor would be so nervous to operate on the official leader of the nation, the doctor's hands couldn't be counted on to stop shaking.

sesame street breaks it down

(via cuz'n BB on FB)

memories

it is somehow fitting that august 2, 2011, the date the u.s. will default unless congressional republicans agree to increase the debt ceiling, falls just one day after the tenth anniversary of the date that george bush pissed away the surplus and brought back deficit spending.

doesn't every country try to influence u.s. policy in its favor?

i'm surprised if anyone is surprised by this. the u.s. has an extremely corrupt political culture. (or at least it would be considered to be corruption in other countries. here, it's just called campaign contributions). when policy-makers in the world's most powerful country are for sale, foreign countries that have the money would be crazy not to try to work the system in their favor.

public financing of campaigns seems to be on the wane in the u.s., at least when it comes to financing supplied by u.s. taxpayers. maybe public financing by foreign taxpayers will be the wave of the future!

if the trick is the story, you're not going to fool the people who are paying attention

negotiations are part of my job. so i understand how crafting a deal that creates the impression that it does something that it really doesn't do and really is much more about saving face for everyone involved is sometimes an important way to resolve a problem and sell it to each respective side. but that tactic doesn't work if the fact that it is a trick gets out.

so how could this possibly resolve the current debt ceiling standoff? it's not going to fool anyone when it's referred to as a "trick" in an above-the-fold headline on the cover of the new york times. the article doesn't just use the word "trick" a couple of times, it also includes the phrase: "a slick effort to dodge accountability." it's only slick if the newspapers are telling people about it, is it?  the article doesn't even talk about what the scheme is until it's more than halfway through (and the bit that is continued onto page A3 in the print edition). those details aren't central to the article. the trick is the story. it's the focus of the coverage. so how can this possibly work?

nope, nothing to see here...

it's hard to imagine how this british hacking story can get any crazier.

even a bullshit political theater solution could cause real harm

this is what i don't understand about the so-called mcconnell proposal: as i understand it, the proposal would resolve the current debt limit increase standoff by allowing the president to raise the debt ceiling initially but then setting up congress to have a series of additional debt ceiling standoffs between now and the 2012 election.

the big concern about the debt ceiling is that the current standoff is trashing the u.s.'s AAA bond rating. that rating will definitely be trashed if the country defaults, but the damage could be done before a technical default happens just by virtue of the uncertainty created by the standoff. so doesn't setting up a series of future standoffs really just make the uncertainty the u.s.'s credit worthiness even worse? sure, under the mcconnell plan the debt ceiling will probably go up each time, but just the repeated possibility that it won't would inevitably damage the country's credit worthiness, right? am i missing something?

the un-undefeated

the sarah palin fawnumentary opens today! but alas, even if i wanted to see it the closest theater is (roughly) 643 miles away.

you'll have to see it without me CaTHY! but at least it looks like you won't have much trouble getting tickets.

minnesota politicians suddenly find a way to get the booze flowing

wow, that worked even faster than i predicted.

i still find it stunning that the entire republican caucus in the state legislature was willing to make 22,000 minnesotans lose their paychecks to make sure that the state's millionaires don't pay a few hundred dollars more each year. well, maybe it isn't stunning that politicians want to do it. i just can't believe that we live in a political culture that would allow them to do it and then expect to ever be elected again.

choot-spa

i'm not posting this to make fun of bachmann. in fact, i think she's the innocent victim here. this is bound to happen when you don't follow sensible transcription rules.

(via either think progress or matthew yglesias, which is also kinda think progress. i don't remember where i saw it first)

dance monkey, dance

diane swonk, chief economist for mesirow financial and an economic advisor to the CBO and the fed, regarding the chances that the u.s. will fail to raise the debt ceiling in time and default:

Right now, financial markets in the U.S. are giving this a 0% probability of happening. With all the time I’ve spent in Washington, although everyone believes it’s just inconceivable, those who don’t agree it’s inconceivable are the Congresspeople we need to actually vote on it. And that’s what really is disturbing: they’re the ones who are unconvinced that there’s any problem out there.

Everybody else is saying, ‘This is just so horrible. There’s no way they could possibly be this stupid.'

it sounds like the financial markets haven't been paying attention to people elected to congress last year.

for weeks, i have been watching this whole spectacle over the debt ceiling with a bit of embarrassment. but in the back of my mind i have been reassured that actual default is unlikely. that this attempt by the republican party to hold the full faith and credit of the united states hostage to extract spending cuts from the democrats is ultimately a bluff. the financial industry and chamber of commerce, the people who fund and really pull the strings of the GOP, will not tolerate a default. so as long as the president could hold out long enough, the other side would ultimately crumble, taking whatever best deal they can get.

the problem is that we have captain caveman as president. so any plan that requires the president "holding out long enough" is deeply flawed. still, obama seems to have bungled his way there, if only because of the internal politics of the modern republican party. instead of holding out as a good negotiator would do, obama offered to give up the store, but only so long as the GOP accept a small percentage of the deficit reduction package to include changes that would make really rich people pay more taxes. a rational GOP would have taken the money and run. but (luckily in this case) it's not clear that the GOP is rational. any plan that includes anything that can be called a tax increase on the wealthy has become an insurmountable poison pill. a deal that gives them 83% of what they want is not good enough for the party that only controls one-half of the two political branches of government. the compromiser-in-chief meets a party that is, at its core, completely unwilling to compromise even when the "compromise" gives them almost everything they want. which means the president isn't the only one who sucks at negotiating.

and miraculously, obama finally found a place to draw a line in the sand. "i will go no further than giving you most of what you want!" he proclaimed. to obama loyalists this shows his brilliance as a negotiator. but it looks to me like we lucked out in having a GOP that has wandered so far into loonyland they've lost track of the fact that they can't get 100% when they don't control 100% of the government. yes, ms. swonk, they really are that stupid.

which makes me wonder how this can possibly end. as i said above, the money interests behind the GOP won't let a default happen. but the party leadership is trapped. after cultivating the tea party as a way to dress up their blatantly pro-corporate positions in populist clothing, they now have a force in their own party that seems to actually want a default. i still think in the end the GOP will find a way to allow the ceiling to raise, even if that means pissing off the teatards. they could even do it while pretending to be against it by having most of their caucus vote against the deal. so long as they carefully count the votes they can deliver exactly the number of republicans they need to make it happen.

but does the republican leadership have the spine to pull that off? this week for the first time, i think a default is an actual possibility, though still unlikely. but i wonder if the internal dysfunction of the republican party means that we can no longer depend on them to dance for their capitalist masters.

incentive

i predict a resolution of the minnesota budget standoff within the next week.

أيام الخوالي

hey, does anyone else remember the good old days, when the blogosphere was all into iraq and the arab world, and everyone fancied themselves a middle east expert?

i just was thinking about that as i browse through the memeorandum headlines, as i do most mornings. aside from israel, the blogosphere as a whole doesn't obsess about the middle east much anymore. it's not like the middle east doesn't have a lot going on, what with the arab spring (now well into mid-summer), oh and that brand new shiny war in libya.¹

of course, there are still plenty of middle east centric blogs. but i'm not talking about them. i'm talking about the generic political sites. i seem to remember them spilling a lot of electrons about the region. i mean, think back to how everyone obsessed about the demonstrators in the cedar revolution in 2005. there were big demonstrations in egypt just this week, but the political sites are too fixated on the washington kabuki to take an interest in that far off corner of the world. or maybe they just got tired of it.

to be clear: i'm not criticizing any blogger for not writing about the middle east. people should blog about whatever they want. there are plenty of important issues and regions of the world that i never mention here. i just noticed a change in behavior from how things were in the past and thought i would point it out.

also, i miss cursor.

------------------------------------------------------
1-okay, maybe not part of the middle east. but still.

fracked up

i just got through this week's episode of TAL. and i thought last year was when i was living in a corrupt energy industry funded kleptocracy.

newspeak

what i find baffling is the fact that mitch mcconnell calls raising taxes a "job killer" when what he is proposing as an alternative to deal with the deficit, deep cuts in spending, will literally kill jobs. when you cut funding, people get laid off. there's no getting around that. that's true of both public and private sector employers as a lot of "private" jobs are funded through federal grants that are on the potential chopping block. (and that's putting aside the multiplier effect)

mcconnell and the other leaders of the GOP are pushing to eliminate jobs to save the government money and ruling out revenue raising alternative to save as much money without eliminating those jobs it's that job saving alternative that they are nonsensically calling a "job killer."

google+

i like facebook. i'm on it every day. it's a great time-waster and a lot of my social life now relies on the site (whether for keeping up to date with people, or because so many invites to live events are now through FB).  but the launch of a potentially serious competitor, google+, is also pretty appealing to me.

there's a lot of things to be annoyed about with FB. i posted this video as a joke, but there's some truth in it as well. FB revamps its site every 6-12 months. the revamps themselves don't bother me, but what does is that each time it happens FB resets your privacy settings to the most permissive setting. so after each revamp, i eventually learn about the setting change and then have to follow an unreasonably complicated series of steps to make it more private.

i also really don't like how FB tries to decide which information about my friends is worth showing me. a lot of people aren't even aware that FB defaults to only displaying the posts from your friends that you interact with the most. (to fix it, scroll down to the bottom of your news feed and hit the "edit options" button. next to the words "show posts from" select the "all your friends and pages" from the pull down menu. getting to the "edit options" button may be a little tricky and the current version of FB will add posts to your feed as you scroll down). even then, FB will try to pick the stuff it thinks you want to see the most as the default display option for your news feed is "top news." to see everything, you need to click on "most recent" from near the top of the page, and then reclick on it ever few days as it keeps defaulting back to "top news" automatically, no matter how often you make your preference clear.

in the broad scheme of things, that stuff is not a big deal. FB is a free service so i can't really complain, but it is really annoying. (okay, yes i can complain!)i suspect if you surveyed most FB users most would not prefer the defaults that the site imposes on us, and i bet most casual users have their settings set for those defaults without being aware of it. and even when you do know, it takes constant vigilance to keep fighting back against the defaults.

the main benefit of google+ is that it might end up being a less anti-privacy, less decide-for-me-what-i-want-to-see kind of site. if that becomes the main selling point, then that would both give google+ and advantage in its competition with FB and raising the possibility that the better site would supplant FB, or (probably more likely) get FB to copy the better features of G+, making FB a better site. G+ is already better at allowing you to control who sees the things you post by permitting you to restrict anything you put on the site to specific "circles". that's a major privacy improvement over FB in my mind (and addresses problem #3 from the video).

FB has a huge advantage in any competition with G+. social network sites are only useful if a lot of my friends are on them. a lot of my friends are already on FB, so right away it is by definition more useful than G+. until G+ somehow reaches a magic tipping point and gets everyone to dump FB as they once did friendster. but competition also has a down side. what i don't want is two social network sites with a critical mass of friends on both. the last thing i need are two major wastes of time to keep up with.

the republic of south sudan

hey, we have a brand new country today! congratulations ROSS!!!

this hasn't happened since, um, i guess kosovo (though other places like south ossetia make that question a little complicated). in any case, ROSS will probably end up with wider international recognition than the former yugoslav republic. we haven't seen a widely recognized independence since timor-leste in 2002.

so this seems like a big deal to me. but most american political blogs don't seem that interested. sadly, more electrons are being spilled over paul ryan's choice of wine than the unlikely independence of a region that has been fighting for a country for decades.

i'll give credit where credit is due: today's new country is the result of the peace deal brokered by president bush (the second). amidst the wreckage of all of his foreign policy disasters was this rare success.

sowing crisis in the dust of empires

a few weeks ago i read sowing crisis by rashid khalidi. then a few days ago i finished dust of empire by karl meyer. before i read them i had classified the two books as being about different things, "sowing" about the middle east and "dust" about central asia. but after reading them both, i realize that the two books really complement each other. "sowing" is about how the cold war rivalry between the US and USSR ended up inflaming fault lines and creating conflict in the middle east. "dust" is about how european powers (particularly the UK and tsarist russia) competed over control of the caucasus, south and central asia and how the legacy of that colonial conflict still haunts the world today. but what both books were really about the destructive effects of outside powers on local politics.

not exactly a novel thesis, but both books give a bunch of examples why that happens. in short, it's because the outside powers are spending all their time focusing on each other rather than on the people they govern. so when the UK sought to extend its control of british india into afghanistan, playing the various local leaders off of one another, it wasn't concerned with how this was affecting the afghan people. it was trying to get control of afghanistan before tsarist russia did, as it advanced south through central asia. in the cold war, the soviet union supported baathist iraq, a regime that arrested and executed its own communists, simply because that regime opposed the regime that the US favored. the real reason for the conflict between tsarist russia and britain had nothing to do with conditions in south and central asia, just as the opposing philosophies that were behind the cold war had nothing to do with the local fault lines in the middle east.

together they also seemed to be telling one coherent story, when the european colonialism of the 18th, 19th and early 20th century, blended seamlessly into the neo-colonialism of the cold war. then the cold war ended. but even when the basis for american intervention in the second half of the twentieth century disappeared (i.e. stopping the spread of communism), the economic interests that took root around the world-spanning american power meant that the u.s. never really shifted its policy away from intense foreign intervention in client states or states that threated its perceived interests. 

seems appropriate to post just as google+ is getting going

deep thoughts

today is the last day that sudan will look like illinois.

air flotilla

i understand that enforcing the blockade of gaza is israel's justification for turning back the boat flotilla (assuming any of those boats ever leave greece). but what is the basis for turning back members of the air flotilla?

"nuclear option"

GOP senators are starting to refer to the position that section 4 of the 14th amendment means that the president does not need congress to raise the debt ceiling as the "nuclear option." previously, the phrase "nuclear option" referred to a procedural tactic that would eliminate the filibuster in the senate by having it declared to be unconstitutional. that tactic has been much discussed but never actually used.

the reason people started referring to the elimination of the filibuster as the "nuclear option" is that opponents claimed that if anyone ever used it to eliminate the filibuster it would so poison relations between the two parties that nothing would ever get done again in the senate. it was "nuclear" in the sense of "mutually assured destruction." like with MAD, the threat of completely ending the senate's ability to function was viewed as so horrible as to deter anyone from actually trying it.

by applying the nuclear metaphor to the debt ceiling context, are the republicans now implying that if president obama decided the debt ceiling is unconstitutional that would also end all cooperation between the parties? if so, is that really much of a threat? congress is already pretty disfunctional. there doesn't seem to be much cooperation to lose..

whew, false alarm

i keep seeing headlines like this, but i keep reading them as being about this.

luckily, i was reading it wrong and the better NotW survives.

falked up

the controversy over the below cartoon raises a question i've mulled over before: what is the appropriate way to critically depict israel in a political cartoon?

richard falk of the UN human rights counsel included the cartoon in a blog post. when he was accused of posting an anti-semitic cartoon, he removed the image from the post (see the current version here) and apologized, claiming that he did not notice the anti-semitic symbolism when he posted the cartoon. that hasn't placated UN watch, who seems determined to have falk's head roll.

personally, i believe falk when he says that he did not see the cartoon as anti-semitic when he posted it. falk himself is jewish, which doesn't rule out antisemitism but does make it a lot less likely. also, it took me a few looks to see what the fuss was about. the key is the hat that the dog is wearing. the hat has been described as a kippah, but it looked more like a metal helmet to me at first glance. what i didn't notice until it was pointed out was the star of david printed on it. it's pretty small and not obvious at all. the arabic caption (العدالة العمياء) says "blind justice", not an overtly anti-semitic phrase. when i first saw the cartoon, i took it to mean that the u.s. was pissing all over justice. but if you see the star of david, then its meaning changes. either the dog is the u.s., presumably controlled by jews and/or israel as symbolized by the star of david on its head, or the dog is israel, functioning as america's attack dog even as it pisses on lady justice.

the key to seeing it as antisemitic is the star of david, which either symbolizes jews or israel, depending on how you read the cartoon. if it symbolizes jews, then it is straight-up antisemitic. but what if the star just indicates israel? does that make a difference? the star of david is a religious symbol, but it also appears on the israeli flag. which means in that sense it is also a political symbol. political symbols are fair game in a political cartoon, and political cartoons often depict countries as animals to make their point in order to tell the reader which country the animal stands for, cartoonists often label the animals with national symbols, like bits from the symbolized country's flag to make the symbolism clear.

so does the fact that a star of david appears on the israel flag make that religious symbol fair game if it is used to stand in for israel the country? i'm not sure if it does. and if it does, wouldn't that also make the shahada printed on the saudi flag fair game too? i doubt if many muslims would see it that way.

i should also add that i have followed the work of emad hajjaj, the cartoonist, for several years. hajjaj pens his cartoons under the pseudonym of "abu mahjoob" and i have posted abu mahjoob cartoons in posts here before. you may also noticed a link to the mahjoob site under the "fun!" heading to the right. i also have the abu mahjoob app on my iphone. for the past few years i've been looking at each cartoon of the day on that site to practice my arabic and to see if i can figure out what the cartoon is referring to. some of them have crossed the line for me, but most of them don't, certainly not enough to convince me that mahjoob is an antisemitic site, though antisemitism is not completely absent there either. even when they do cross the line into antisemitism i still find them to be an interesting window into the political culture of jordan where the cartoonist is from. the star of david does come up quite a lot to symbolize israel, as does the statue of liberty for the u.s. (see e.g. this cartoon about wikileaks). mahjoob has a habit using a country's flag or its symbols to make a statement about current events (see e.g. this one about the government crackdown against protesters in syria which spoofs the syrian flag).

the long and short of it is that while i think falk made a serious mistake, i understand how he could have missed the antisemitism in the cartoon he posted. which is why i don't think he should lose his job over this. but realistically, i don't see how he won't.

(via memeorandum)

sometimes countries act like children

from the NYT:

But he also said that Turkey stood by its demands for an apology and compensation for the victims of the Israeli raid.

“It is as natural as breathing air that a country would apologize and offer compensation to victims’ relatives if it barges into an unarmed ship sailing in high waters and causes the death of nine people,” Mr. Sanberk said. “That’s the precondition for the normalization of bilateral relations that Turkey expects.”

...

Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, asserted Wednesday that Israel should not apologize, warning that an apology would “harm Israel’s national dignity” and humiliate its soldiers, the Turkish newspaper Zaman reported.

Diplomats said Wednesday that the two sides had been searching for a word that would sound like an apology in Turkish, but not in Hebrew.

friends don't let friends...

stop the madness.

outrage because some random person who is allegedly famous was acquitted

i learned today that this country had the trial of the century and i didn't notice. oops. in a rational world that would mean i wouldn't have to worry about missing another one of these over-sensationalized trials until at least 2101. unfortunately we don't live in a rational world and trials of the century seem to come every decade or so.
 

cutting out the middle man

israel is the largest recipient of u.s. foreign aid. apparently israel has been forwarding some of that money to greece in the form of generous military aid to get them to harass u.s. citizens (and others) seeking to participate in the gaza flotilla.

wouldn't it be cheaper for the u.s. to pay greece directly to harass our citizens?

i've never had an injury that wasn't self-inflicted

three days ago i'm on my commuter train coming home from work. it was a packed train. i had a seat, but with people crammed in all around me. then i dropped my rail pass. the pass costs $120 and allows me to have unlimited rides on the local public transit system for an entire month. that is how i get to work. in other words, that little card is valuable. but it was on the floor and i didn't have any room to maneuver.

so i did my best to lean over and strained as i pawed around blindly on the yucky floor. as part of my contortions, my elbow pressed hard against my ribs. just as my hands found the pass, i got a really sharp pain in my side. it hurt to move my arms, lift things, walk, stand, sit, lie down, breathe. in retrospect, it was totally not worth it to reach for the pass. this was my ride home from work on june 29th. i had exactly two rides to go on my monthly pass before i would need a new july pass. i should have just left it there in the yuck and bought the last two tickets individually.

anyway, until yesterday i was convinced i had broken my ribs. so i tried to come up with a better story than "i elbowed myself while trying to pick up a train pass." then yesterday i saw my doctor. he said it could be a broken rib, but it's more likely just a strained muscle. either way, all i can do is wait for it to heal. when i told him how difficult it was to sleep, so he gave me some of rush limbaugh's favorites.

now it's the next day. i'm not currently in pain but in a bit of a haze instead. this could be my first blog post under the influence of a narcotic. i bet it's no more or less coherent than anything else i have ever posted.

the constitutional resolution of the debt ceiling stand off

all of a sudden, people are noting that section 4 of the fourteenth amendment says "The public debt of the United States... shall not be questioned." which means imposing a binding debt ceiling on the u.s. may be unconstitutional. tim geithner is suddenly citing that provision of the constitution and other commentators are jumping on the we-don't-need-a-bill-to-raise-the-debt-ceiling bandwagon.

WTF?!?!? didn't congress and the president just spend several weeks negotiating over what terrible cuts we will have to endure in order to get an extension on the debt ceiling? now they're telling us that we may not need to do this at all?!?!?

whether the constitution really prohibits it is an interesting issue. i'm not sure who is right. and i'm also not sure whether there is any plausible way to find out both because it might fall under the political question doctrine and because without the ability to borrow the courts might not operate to tell us the answer. but what makes no sense at all is why it took this long before people started bringing it up.

great news for rapists!

as long as you choose a victim who has lied in the past, you can sexually assault her all you want!

this highlights a problem with how the court system deals with credibility issues. there's an assumption that people fall into one of two categories: liars and truth-tellers. everything a liar says is suspect. if you want to cast doubt on someone's credibility, all you have to do is show that that person lied before. then she's a liar rather than a truth-teller, which means that everything else that person says is automatically suspect.

i hear that reasoning all the time whenever i do a hearing in a he-said/she-said kind of case. on the surface it has an almost common sense appeal to it. but only on the surface. real common sense should tell us that the theory is utter bullshit. everyone who can speak has lied. we all know that. everyone has lied at some point in the past and will almost certainly tell a lie at some point in the future. but that doesn't mean that no one ever tells the truth because everyone is a liar. a lie in one instance does not predict whether another statement is true or false. the fact that someone lies on a job application or when seeking political asylum doesn't mean that that person would lie when reporting a crime.

in a rational world each statement would be judged on its own merits. but that's harder to do. so the legal system falls back on an assumption that has little basis in reality. and so a guy who i think is a rapist is probably going to get away with it.