it says "person", not "citizen"

while i agree with glenn greenwald that the al-awlaki killing has crossed a new line for the u.s., i don't understand why people are so focused on the fact that al-awlaki is an american citizen. the fifth amendment prohibits the federal government from depriving life without due process of a "person" not just a "citizen." i think the constitution pretty clearly prohibits the assassination of anyone, not just people who happened to have been born in the u.s. or of american parents, or who were naturalized at some point.

and yet, when criticism of targeted killing comes up, it always seems to focus on citizenship. i'm not sure where that distinction comes from. it's also interesting that the people who call themselves "strict constructionists" seem to have no issue at all with targeted killings.

ADDING: i think what is going on is that most americans want their government to be able to assassinate foreigners-who-are-bad. but they personally don't want to be assassinated so they (meaning americans) have come up with this assumption that if the government can assassinate people, it can't assassinate its own people. for lack of any better basis for that idea, they point to the due process clause of the fifth amendment. the idea has a sort of common-sense appeal to it, that seems even more sensible the more commentators that adopt that assumption.

the problem is that the citizen/non-citizen distinction doesn't exist in that clause. the targeted killing of osama bin laden is just as unconstitutional as the targeted killing of any american. i don't see any textual basis for coming to any different conclusion.

the onion scoops reality again

al qaeda speaks out against mahmoud ahmadinejad's suggestion that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by the u.s. government.

the onion, of course, covered this story years ago:


9/11 Conspiracy Theories 'Ridiculous,' Al Qaeda Says

(first link via memeorandum)

silk is flammable

is "silk" really the right name for the browser that comes with the kindle fire? shouldn't they have gone with something that goes better with the fire theme? they should have called it "charcoal" or "smoke."

(okay, charcoal is a crappy name for a browser. but smoke isn't terrible)

american chest-beating is not foreign policy

the headline this morning, "Gov. Christie slams Obama, talks foreign policy during Reagan Library speech" caught my eye. not because i care much that christie slammed obama (that is what i would expect an up-and-coming governor from the opposing party to do), but rather because it mentioned he "talk[ed] foreign policy" and i was curious what christie's views on foreign policy were.

but the article under the headline was completely uninformative. the only mention of foreign policy in the article was a single sentence: "Christie spoke extensively about foreign policy, saying gridlock and inaction in Washington reflect poorly on the country on the international stage." yeah but what were his extensive foreign policy remarks? i googled up the full text of christie's reagan library speech to find out.

now that i've read it, i still have no idea what christie thinks about any foreign policy issue. although he did refer repeatedly to the rest of the world in his speech, his point was that the u.s. needs to get its domestic house in order if we want any credibility internationally. but that assertion isn't foreign policy, it's domestic policy.

қара жорға лос-анджелес

the kazakh dance craze has reached LA

and maybe knox is being prosecuted as part of a secret plot to dismantle the perugia public transit system

not that i am following the amanda knox case at all, but this is a pretty weird headline. i mean, isn't jessica rabbit supposed to be a cartoon femme fatale? a quick google shows that i'm not the only one to think so.

it's also pretty strange that an italian defense lawyer would rely on an allusion to a 23 year old american film. does "who framed roger rabbit?" have that much of a following? i mean, will the average italian appellate judge have any idea who jessica rabbit is? i would not risk making a reference like that to an american judge.

cainmentum!

now that herman cain has won a bullshit unscientific straw poll, i wonder if he will have his brief period in the sun being called a "front runner", even though he has little chance of actually winning.

and if people start taking him seriously, i wonder his crazy 999 tax plan will start getting serious attention. and if it starts getting serious attention, i wonder how long it will be before someone notices that the plan is the number of the beast upside-down.

(via memeorandum)

like five year locusts

just before i performed a wedding ceremony this evening, i realized that it was almost exactly five years since the last time i officiated. which means that i only perform weddings every five years during the fourth weekend in september.

so engaged people or people planning to be engaged by then, act now to reserve your noz-officiated wedding for the weekend of september 23-25, 2016! hurry before someone else grabs those dates and you have to wait another five years!

metastupid

as i have mentioned before, the right often criticizes obama for doing things that all modern presidents have done. perhaps the stupidest examples of this very stupid line of attack are their jokes about the fact that obama uses a teleprompter. but governor scott of of florida somehow managed to take the joke to a whole new level of stupid when he read a joke making fun of obama's use of a teleprompter off of a teleprompter.

perrymentum!

it looks like the rick perry juggernaut is starting to lose it's steam (do juggernauts have steam? uh, sure. why not?)

just a few weeks ago he seemed to be cruising to the nomination, like bachmann before him. i'm not sure if his near-universally panned debate performance will knock him out of serious contention, but he's clearly not the guy racing to a win anymore. the only thing that could change the narrative back is if a bunch of post-debate polls show him with a better-than or equal-to lead compared with his pre-debate performance. but it doesn't look like that will happen.

and so. once again, we have republicans casting about for a new savior, followed by the usual denials. luckily the speculation circus will soon be coming to a close. the deadline for declaring is next week.

north!

i'm off to pose as a priest to make an honest man of who-the-fuck-is-john.

confession

after reading some of the blog commentary about last night's republican presidential debate, for the first time ever, i actually regret that i missed watching it live. it sounds like it was filled with entertaining moments.

once upon a time televised debates were rare and so candidates used them to seem boring and respectable. now that we have them every week or two, i guess the candidates just can't resist letting the crazy out.

the process

i always feel guilty when a day goes by and i don't post here.

that's my first thought. my second thought is the backlash: screw you, blog, you don't own me! if i am too busy to post or don't have anything to say you will simply have to wait. who does that blog think it is anyway?

my third though is: why am i talking to my blog?

the terrorist are winning

if staging a play about a scary mooslim is verboten because of 9/11, then why is oklahoma an appropriate substitute? doesn't anyone remember oklahoma city?!?!

(via atrios)

there can be only two

for years every state in the union awarded its electoral votes in a presidential race with a winner-take-all system, except two: maine and nebraska used a proportionate system where the winner of each congressional district gets one electoral vote for that district, plus two additional electoral votes for the candidate that gets the most vote in the state. now with the GOP in pennsylvania considering a switch to a proportionate system, the nebraska GOP is pushing to switch that state to a winner-take-all system.

if both changes to through it would not be a wash, however. NE has only 5 EVs whereas PA has 20. PA is a purple state (with some congressional districts that are solidly red, some that are solidly blue and several others that swing) whereas NE is pretty solidly red in every district. in 2008, there was some early speculation that obama might be able to peel off one of NE's EVs, but that didn't actually happen and the state gave all of its EVs to mccain. if obama couldn't pull it off in 2008, it's even more unlikely he will in 2012. i expect that nebraska will be solidly red no matter what system it uses.

ahoy, th' teutonic tribes be rumblin again

this be news that could not 'ave come on a more auspicious day, yar.

class warfare

does this "class warfare" line really work? republicans seem to think it does. they trot it out every time someone proposes doing something that will harm the economic interests of rich people. (they don't bring it up when their own proposals would harm the interests of poor). but I wonder if it really resonates enough with the average voter to have any effect on the poll numbers.

on the other hand, the press seems to love the phrase and will report solemnly that the GOP has used the dreaded "class warfare" line as if that fact is significant. so even if the public at large doesn't care, i guess in that sense it does work. i just wonder if there is any polling data to support the popularity of the phrase.

no good reason?

is there any reasonable argument for why the palestinian authority shouldn't seek recognition at the UN? other than "it would be bad for israel", i mean. what are the down sides for those of us who don't simply assume that the guiding lights in the middle east are israeli interests?

(i might add that i am far from convinced that UN recognition would be counter to israeli interests in the broad scheme of things)

out

FBI chart

a lot of people have posted about the FBI's islamaphobic training materials.among those materials is this graph:

seriously? i mean, if someone handed me that chart i would think it was a joke, even if i bought the premise that islam is an inherently violent religion. the y-axis is supposedly showing the level of violence displayed by adherents of each religion. but how does they measure violence? it is a body count? the number of wars? and why are the lines so smooth and straight? no actual data looks like that. it looks like something that someone just made up. which i'm sure is exactly what it is. but jesus, couldn't they at least make up something that looked a little more convincing?

also why are the lines named after holy texts? the texts themselves have not changed much in the past 1000+ years even though the lines show the violence level changing over time. it seems that the creator really is talking about people, not books despite the labels. and do the authors know that "torah" and "bible" are not good stand-ins for judaism and christianity (the torah being part of the bible, and the fact that jews call their own holy text "the bible" even if it is just "the old testament" to christians)

then there's the overall direction of the lines. let's put aside the "koran" and "torah" lines. i would think the "bible" (i.e.christian) line would look a whole lot different than it does on the chart. rather than starting violently and then getting progressively more non-violent as time progressed as the chart shows, christianity was probably its most non-violent at its founding ("turn the other cheek" and all that). it was only in the centuries afterwards that we had schisms, religious wars and crusades, not to mention the only world wars driven primarily by predominantly christian countries.

i have a hard time believing that the chart would convince anyone over the age of 12. but maybe i'm giving the general public more credit than they deserve. still, i know it's hard to be an FBI agent. you need more education than any run-of-the-mill cop. and yet, the FBI is treating its agents like a bunch of ignorant kids.

whacking day

the GOP courageously points out the job-killing ban on the import of foreign snakes. next time senator nelson should refer to them as illegal alien snakes. the GOP loves regulations that target illegal aliens, even when the rules kill a major sector of the economy.

NY-09

no doubt democratic consultants are trying to determine what david welprin's loss in the special election for anthony weiner's seat in congress means for the party. in my opinion the main lesson is that the democrats were idiots to pressure weiner to resign when a clear majority of his constituents wanted him to stay. then they were idiots again to dump resources into the special election race over a seat that is likely to be eliminated due to redistricting.

good idea done wrong

actually splitting the electoral votes more-or-less proportionately is a better system than the winner-take-all approach. we would have a better system, one that is far less likely to have a presidential race where the winner of the popular vote loses the election, if all states allocated their electoral votes by congressional district, like maine and nebraska currently do.

at the same time, on a purely selfish level, it's stupid for PA to do this when all the other states don't. PA has been deemed a "swing state" (even though it has ultimately swung blue for two decades), which means that presidential candidates pay attention to us. but they don't just pay attention because PA is a swinger (as in, to swing), they do it because PA is an alleged swing state with a big fat juicy portion of 20 EVs (down from 21 thanks to the 2010 census). in 2008 montana was also deemed a "swing state" but didn't get nearly as much attention with its measly 3 EVs as PA did. if PA starts allocating its EVs proportionately while other swing states like florida and ohio continue to use a winner-takes-all system, PA will cease to be a critical state in the race. a swing state with a proportionate allocation system is just a state expected to have a roughly even split of EVs, a wash to the two campaigns. the state legislature is trying to peel away EVs from obama's 2012 reelection tally, and it probably will do that. but it will assure that much of the country to ignore us in the upcoming campaign.

the best solution would be for the legislature to enact the bill proposed by the national popular vote campaign. under that proposal, states would pass a proportionate EV allocation system than would only go into effect if enough states pass the same legislation. if PA passed the bill it would undermine its importance as a swing state, but it also would move towards abolishing the swing state phenomenon in US presidential races and force candidates to run truly national (as opposed to state-by-state) campaigns.

of course, that won't hurt barack obama's reelection chances. so i expect the current governor and legislature is completely uninterested.

to avoid apologizing israel may become a state supporter of terrorism

as a coda to yesterday's post and just to show how willing israel is to bring its foreign policy to the next level of crazy, read this. as matthew yglesias says: "Bibi Netanyahu doesn’t seem to want Israel to have any allies."

the cost of refusing to apologize

though i have never thought very highly of binyamin netanyahu, i am surprised by how badly the israeli prime minister has botched relations with turkey. turkey used to be israel's only real ally in the region. the countries had extensive trade and held joint military exercises. turkey was also israel's back door to portions of the arab world. israel often used turkey as a go-between to communicate with arab regimes that would not directly communicate with israel. using turkey as an intermediary, israel and syria conducted secret peace talks that not too long ago seemed to be the only promising development in the arab-israeli conflict.

in short, the israeli-turkish relationship was really important. nevertheless, relations between the countries have been steadily sliding downhill since israel launched its attack on gaza in operation cast lead, leading to pointed criticism by the turkish government. last year turkey suspended military cooperation with israel after israel attacked the gaza flotilla and killed 9 turkish citizens and since then the countries have been in an extended spat over whether israel should apologize for the incident. israel keeps refusing to do so, and relations just get worse and worse. ten days ago, turkey expelled israel's ambassador to ankara. then israel and turkey each harassed and detained the other's citizens when they arrived at the countries' respective major international airports. turkish officials are now promising to send turkish warships to guard future flotillas traveling to gaza and have promised to disable israeli weapon systems, which turkish newspaper hypothesizes "that such a confrontation would resemble dogfights in the Aegean Sea with Greek jet fighters."

meanwhile, turkey is signaling that it may side with lebanon in its dispute with israel over exploitation of the tamar gas field off the northern israeli coast. developing the field has become a major strategic issue for israel since the future of its current source of natural gas, the arish-ashkelon pipeline, is uncertain under the post-mubarak government. turkish threats against development of tamar could essentially shut down the project, as hostile warships prowling the waters around the gas field would scare off the energy companies that might otherwise allow israel to extract the gas.

it's also worth noting that turkey is a member of NATO. under the NATO treaty, an attack against any member is viewed as an attack against all members, obligating those other members to assist in the attacked member's defense. which means that israel cannot fall back on its usual method of dealing with disputes in its neighborhood by relying on its military superiority to threaten or force an outcome in israel's favor. in theory if israel attacks turkey, the u.s. (as well as canada and most of europe) would be obligated to side with turkey. i don't think the u.s. would actually go to war with israel, but if turkey evoked the NATO treaty during a conflict with israel, it could seriously jeopardize the existence of NATO and cause a cascade of negative fallout for israel and its relations with the western world.

the bizarre thing is that the current spat is just over whether israel should apologize for killing those nine turkish citizens last year, something that any other country would readily do if it killed the citizens of a major ally, even if convinced that the raid was justified. but instead of doing that, netanyahu has chosen to follow his foreign minister avigdor lieberman, who claims that any apology would broadcast israeli weakness. but if you look at the turkish press (at least the pieces available online in english), the turks seem to view the refusal to issue an apology as a sign that israel and its government is " extremely weak, unstable and... short-sighted."

as others have noted, september has been a bad month for israel (and we are only 12 days in!). considering that israel's number one priority is to head off the palestinian bid for statehood at the UN, you would think netanyahu would be doing whatever possible to shore up its alliances and drum up support with what few friends it has in the world. instead, bibi is sticking with israel's traditionally belligerent "porcupine policy." i don't see how it can do anything but make matters worse.

question of the day

how much of the remembrance mania (or, if you prefer, 9/11 porn) is due to the fact that we have named the event after the date that it occurred?

i can think about the 7th day of december without thinking of pearl harbor. maybe that's a generational thing as the japanese attack happened long before i was born. but as long as we are calling the 9/11 event as either "september 11th" or "9/11", it's going to be impossible for any tangential reference to that square on the calendar without evoking the tragic event. it fetishizes a date, a date that we are going to have to live through every year for the rest of our lives.

in an alternative universe, where what happened on 9/11 is now called something like "the second world trade center attack" or "WTC-2", maybe people could actually forget the date. or is that unlikely too? i don't know. it is a little odd that went with the date when we collectively decided on a name. i wonder what other effects that has on our psyche.

wake me up on september 12th

i'm not a fan of the retrospectives that have been airing all week about 9/11. but for an event like that, i think this kind of coverage is all but inevitable. it would almost seem disrespectful to not spend days obsessing about it on the tenth anniversary. and i'm sure that plenty of people are watching or listening because they feel like that's what they should be doing.

but i wonder if anyone enjoys it. maybe "enjoy" is the wrong word. putting any feeling of obligation aside, would anyone be willingly tuning in to this stuff? i'm not being judgmental. i'm just curious. the best 9/11 experience i have had since 2001, was in 2003. that year i was traveling in uzbekistan and it didn't even occur to me that it was the second anniversary of the attack until the day was almost over (though it was still just starting ten hours behind on the east coast of the US)

my kingdom for a PACER app

have i mentioned how pissed off i occasionally get that there is no iphone/ipad pacer app?

yes, yes, i have.

is he familiar with the term "debate"

my favorite part of from last night's GOP presidential candidate debate (at least from the post-debate coverage--i didn't actually watch) is when newt "is this guy is still running for president?" gingrich "chastised the moderators of the debate, from NBC and Politico, and said they were trying to stoke divisions among Republicans"

military resistance

over the past few weeks i've been reading about how american military commanders are trying to convince iraqi politicians to allow the u.s. to keep 14,000 to 18,000 soldiers in iraq after the year's end. under the status of forces agreement, the u.s. must remove all u.s. forces by the end of 2011, unless the iraqi government gives them permission to stay longer. the punditocracy seems to assume that iraqis really secretly want the u.s. to stay, but are too disorganized to give the americans a straight answer. a more likely answer as far as i am concerned is that an american military presence is politically unpopular in iraq, and the iraqi politicians don't want to okay it but they are under pressure from the americans to let them stay.

the part that i am puzzled by is why the u.s. generals always seem to be the ones pressing both iraqis and the political leadership in washington to keep u.s. forces in iraq. why do they want to stay? iraq is a huge drain on military resources, both to maintain day to day operations and also the long term medical costs of caring for veterans wounded in the conflict. with military budget cuts being publicly discussed for the first time in recent memory, you would think that the military brass would welcome the possibility of an exit from that 8 year old/seemingly endless conflict.

so what is the deal? is it just cultural? is it difficult for career military people to walk away from a war? on the other hand, iraq is no longer a traditional war. isn't it the kind of nation building we were told in the 1990s the military hated? or maybe it is budgetary. maybe the brass is afraid budget cutting will be easier without an expensive iraq war to justify their budget?

woo-hoo! air security will get slightly less stupid

we still have a far way to go to reduce the senseless security theater in our airports, but hey, baby steps!

too soon

it looks like this week will become increasingly dominated by "ten years later" retrospectives on 9/11. unfortunately, i expect they will all tell us more about the politics of the writer than lend us any insight into the actual historic event.

maybe by the 20th anniversary the event won't continue to be so politicized. but i expect that i won't live to see the day that it isn't.

on orange

i've long wondered which came first, the use of the word "orange" for the color or the use of the word for the fruit. i finally got around to looking into it today and the verdict is the fruit.

and on a related subject, it looks the arabic word for both the orange color and fruit (برتقال bortuqaal) came from the name of the country "portugal" (which is derived from the latin for port of cale). not the other way around as i once wondered because arabs used to rule the iberian peninsula. i found this discussion of the subject to be pretty interesting.

still up in the air is where the name for the principality of orange came from. once i figure that out, it will also cover william of orange and thus also the orangemen in northern ireland.

doctor who, season six, part one

(more or less spoiler free--i think)

as hurricane irene approached last weekend and others were stockpiling food and water, i downloaded part one of season six of doctor who onto my ipad. i don't get BBC america, so i couldn't watch them when they aired. but my whovian friends all raved about the new season when the first part was airing earlier this year.

i watched all seven episodes over the past week and i must say it was pretty disappointing. first, it really pisses me off that they decided to divide the season into a part one and part two, each with its own DVD collection to be purchased separately. battlestar galactica did that after it became popular and it seemed like the only purpose was to soak the show's fans by getting them to buy twice as many DVD sets. i guess the BBC couldn't resist trying to suck more money out of dr. who fans. but honestly this kind of bullshit just encourages me to download the episodes illegally.

as for the half season itself, part one felt really rushed. the first episode showed a lot of promise. but then the problems started with the second episode, in which a ton of stuff happened off screen, leaving me, the viewer, a lot less engaged with the story. the same thing happened in episode seven. an entire war is set up and then over, from the armies being assembled to the messy aftermath, all in 45 minutes.

it occurs to me that my second beef might be related to my first. maybe the creators felt like they needed to cram an entire story arc (albeit one with a bunch of unresolved threads, presumably to be resolved in part two) into a mere seven episodes. but for that marketing decision maybe they would have stretching those seven into a full season. we'll never know, of course. but still, while i still count myself a fan (and i will make sure to see part two), it really was disappointing.

so why is everyone calling this such a great season? i will keep watching. i just hope they slow it down a little, go back to methodically building up to the finale, rather than thrusting it upon us when we're still trying to figure out why, for example, the doctor never came across the silence in 770 previous episodes if they were there from the dawn of history to 1969.

what's in it for them?

is there any plausible reason for the palestinian leadership to listen to american appeals and decide to delay asking the UN for greater recognition? why would they possibly do that? any delays would just mean more settlements. the current israeli leadership has effectively ruled out any plausible path to a negotiated two-state solution.

i understand why it would be in american interests to delay a UN vote. but the administration is really naive if they do not realize that this is one of the few bits of leverage the palestinians have. they would be crazy to give it up without something really good. and given who they are dealing with on the israeli side, they are not going to get anything really good. so why expect them to back off on their efforts?

al-kitaab fanfic video

yes, i found this while googling up the link to the maha/khalid video for the previous post. the above video is chock full of inside jokes from al-kitaab fii ta'allum al-arabiyya. (and if you thought the video was painfully bad, don't watch this one)

how japanese people learn english

if only we had videos like that when i was trying to learn arabic. all we had was an earlier lower-production value version of this.

busted

silvio berlusconi has had a remarkable run as the teflon prime minister. because of the chronic disarray of his opposition and the fact that berlusconi owns almost the entire italian media, he has managed to be the longest serving P.M. in modern italian history notwithstanding an endless stream of scandals. but this one really takes the cake. silvio has been caught on tape saying:

In a few months, I'm getting out to mind my own fucking business, from somewhere else, and so I'm leaving this shitty country of which I'm sickened.

yes, paying for sex with an underage girl is worse than anything he can say on a recorded phone conversation. but berlusconi already seems to be weathering that storm. how can the head of state possibly survive both that and being caught referring to the country he governs as "shitty" and promising to emigrate? can you imagine the reaction if obama were recorded saying something like that?

and yet, i would still give him a 50-50 chance of pulling through. but honestly, if the italians keep him this time, they will put up with anything.

(via MatthewB on FB)

eek! muslim reporters are calling me!

after publishing a provocative and i think tasteless 9/11 coloring book, really big coloring books, inc. has called the FBI. why did they call? wayne bell, the publisher, explains:

“These are people from Al-Jazeera that have called in here numerous times, people from Iranian TV, people from Palestinian Hamas TV,” Bell said, “A lot of people from the Islamic community have called in here and said increasingly negative things prior to the book being made and then after we made the book too, about the book itself.”

OMG! reporters from the mooooslim world are asking me questions about my book and then saying mean stuff about it!!!! call the feds!

okay, so maybe i am being unfair. i mean, maybe those reporters and other people "from the islamic community" threatened bell or the publishing house. except, apparently not:

When asked about whether he has had any threats because of the book, Bell stopped short of saying he had.

(via memeorandum)

s'wingin' it!

brendan, my friend and occasional commentator on this blog, has an album out. everyone reading this should buy it.

that is all.







ADDING: okay, that's not all. via brendan in the comments, you can also check out delco nightingale goodies (watch videos, listen to songs, info on upcoming shows, etc) here.