the end of the danforth era

for the first time since at least 1992, none of the presidential/vice presidential debates will take place at washington university in st. louis. not that anyone who isn't affiliated with the university will notice or care (i only notice because it is where i went to law school).

but this is a testament to the fading influence of senator danforth, and of his brother chancellor danforth. both left their respective offices in 1995 and yet the university continued to host at least one of the four debates through 2008. it's remarkable it continued for as long as it did.

and so it is

woo-hoo!

super-democrats'opening bid is a bigger compromise than all prior center-right "compromises"

once again i am appalled by their negotiation tactics. this is why i hope the commission fails to come up with anything to present to congress next month. if you don't want seniors eating more cat food than they would under the cat food commission recommendations, then the super committee needs to completely fail.

#occupy oakland sympathy march in cairo

this is really remarkable. especially considering that, as bad as oakland was, the egyptians faced much more brutal treatment when they marched against mubarak last winter.

bad lip reading

i've been watching too many of these tonight. i particularly like the herman cain, mitt romney, and rick perry videos. i wish they got better voices for the barack obama and michele bachmann ones.

i wanna see newt!

the google primary

(via MatthewB on FB)

azania

so basically the kenyans are trying to carve out a new somali de facto state in the south. i doubt if it will work. (because it is being imposed by non-somalis and because the ethiopians are not on board with the project) but it does raise the issue of whether a break-up of somalia is the ultimate solution to the endless civil war.

the relative success of somaliland and puntland in bringing peace to their respective corners of somalia, has made me wonder whether the international community shouldn't just recognize their governments and make them officially independent. the rest of the country is divided under the control of different local warlords, including the shabaab in the south, so international recognition of the two states in the north would give other regions the incentive to prove they can create an island of stability and peace in exchange for international recognition.

if more regions follow suit and become independent, it would also shrink the total area of lawlessness, and take away the largest prize in the conflict: control over mogadishu. mogadishu is a ruined city. it's only value is the fact that it is internationally recognized as the capital, so whichever clan controls it can claim to have the right to rule the entire country. if regional independence is permitted, then the various warlords might be satisfied with controlling their own region where their own clan is dominant, rather than all converging on the capital.

the international community tends to be pretty adverse to recognizing any changes to africa's colonial-drawn borders. it has only recognized changes to those borders twice: when eritrea succeeded from ethiopia in 1990 and when the republic of south sudan became independent this year. (and the former was really just a return to an earlier version of colonial borders). the fear is that if you let one place mess with its borders, then everywhere else will try to mess with their own borders, leading to chaos and civil war across the continent. but that didn't happen when eritrea and south sudan became independent, and a blind commitment to the current borders is arguably making the tragedy of somalia worse.

with only two months to go...

i fear that going trick-or-treating with my toddler, who doesn't really know what candy is and certainly wouldn't miss pieces if they went missing, will prove to be the biggest test of my 2011 resolution.

romney is driving the entire GOP primary

IMHO, the reason that cain is doing so well has little to do with cain, despite the unprecedented nature of his campaign, the fact that he is making all the wrong moves, that his campaign is in chaos, that he's not raising any money, that he doesn't have any major endorsements, that he appears to be on a book tour rather than a presidential campaign, that he can't even give a straight party-line answer to a fairly simple question about an issue important to the GOP base, and that he has released a campaign commercial that has already entered the le bad pantheon. that's because this isn't about cain.

it's all about romney. a large portion of the GOP primary voters hate romney and they are looking desperately for someone, anyone who doesn't blunder across one of their red lines, to be the nominee. that other stuff, the stuff that would matter if a candidate is trying to sell themselves to the electorate, doesn't matter when it come to cain because the people telling pollsters they will vote cain haven't been sold on cain. they are just sold on not-romney. if someone else emerges as a plausible not-romney, they will have no problem ditching cain, just as they ditched bachmann for perry, and perry for cain.

the best thing herman cain has going for him, other than the fact that he is not mitt romney, is the fact that the voters are running out of time to do another ditching and there isn't time for the pool of alternatives to expand much more. (but wait! check out this last-minute entry. lookout, cain!)

setting a new low bar for scary sharia

"The Hutton Hotel is now under Sharia law" says william murray, loon and chairman of the preserve freedom conference, after the hotel learned more about the islamiphobic gathering and refused to host the event.

i'm living under sharia too, because i wouldn't let them have it at my house. sharia really is popping up everywhere.

timing

"There is only one Arab Muslim country that elects its own government, and that is Iraq." said retired general john keane in an article that the washington times published on the very day that "arab muslim" tunisia elected its own government.

(via memeorandum)

the missing kenyan war dispatches

i'm really surprised by how little news there is about the kenyan offensive into somalia. as of this writing a google news search for the word "kenya" produces some articles about a grenade attack in nairobi in retaliation for the military campaign, but little coverage of the campaign itself. the #2 story category (after the one about the grenade attack) is about a bumper crop of cashews.

kenya invading southern somalia seems like a big deal to me. (and i'm not just saying that because my brother is in kenya now) maybe the kenyan military doesn't want coverage, and few reporters are likely to venture into southern somalia these days. i still find it odd that i can't find news about a war in this day and age.

the crossover

2010 was a pretty shitty year for me and mrs. noz, at least until the end. so throughout 2011 whenever i write the date, i have noted one bad anniversary after another.

that all changes around now. one year ago this week i returned to kazakhstan and things basically went much better after that. so between now and december 16th, there will be a bunch of happy anniversaries. after that we will cross back over, having ten months of crappy second anniversaries before things turn happy again.

the liberal judiciary isn't all that liberal

it occurs to me that if federal judges did have fixed terms rather than lifetime appointments, the courts would probably be more liberal, not less. the american judiciary historically has been a conservative institution. the exception being the period between the switch in time that saved nine and the reagan era. that roughly 50 year period (typified by the warren court) has burned itself into the movement conservative's mind so that now, even with a pretty conservative judiciary, they instinctively cherry pick judicial results they don't like as evidence of an out of control liberal judiciary. and so they point to gay rights decisions (which are moving in a more liberal direction) and ignore more numerous conservative legal victories, like the recognition of an individual right to bear arms, curtailment of discrimination and voting rights statutes and a host of other pro-corporate decisions (like the recognition of corporate free speech).

the reason why the judiciary tends to be conservative is because lifetime appointment generally locks into office people who a decade or two later might not meet the evolving sensibilities of society. it doesn't always work that way. but that is the tendency. if judges turned over more often, then the judiciary would follow the drift of political opinion more closely as (for example) the obama administration would be able to replace the term-limited appointees from earlier republican administrations.

also, newt is totally behind the times in his jihad against the ninth circuit. yes, the 9th used to be very liberal. but that's not true anymore. currently, among the full-time judges, it has 9 republican-appointees and 5 democratic-appointees. if you count the senior judges (who are retired but who effectively work part time, being assigned to fewer panels), that adds another 8 republican-appointees and 10 democratic appointees, bringing the total of 17-15, still favoring the Rs. that also shows the increasingly conservative shift of what used to be america's more progressive circuit court. i guess it's not surprising that newt gingrich is still stuck in the 1990s.

the age of elderly monarchs

i guess we can thank modern medical science that these days a monarchy means the passing of power from an elderly monarch to an also pretty old successor.  the monarchy is probably one of the oldest forms of government in the world. for most of that history the term "crown prince" would imply someone who was pretty young. that's not really true anymore. prince charles is 63. as far as i can tell his mother is in good health and isn't going anywhere soon. hell, the queen's mother lived to be 101. if queen elizabeth lives that long, charles will have to wait until he is 80 before he is king.

i'm not just talking about britain. the passing of saudi crown prince sultan bin abdul-aziz al saud at age 80, means that the next crown prince will probably be 78 year old nayef bin abdul-aziz al saud. the king of saudi arabia abdullah bin abdul-aziz al saud is 88. king adbullah ascended to the throne at 81, succeeding the 84 year old king fahd (although abdullah had acted as regent for the last 10 years of fahd's reign, after his debilitating stroke in 1995)

i guess the kings of morocco and jordan are fairly young (both are in their 40s, though king abdullah of jordan turns 50 in a few months). but i still think that medical science is dramatically reducing the odds that we will have many young kings.

sometimes a little bungling can be a good thing

i'm not sure what really happened. for weeks there have been reports that the obama administration has been negotiating to extend the american military presence in iraq. at the same time, pulling out by the end of 2011 is what obama has been promising since he was a presidential candidate, and the few times that the president has spoken publicly about his intentions, he has always reaffirmed that commitment.

but if they did try to get the troops to stay and if they screwed it up, count me as thankful that they didnt find a way to make it work. personally, i don't think the iraqis would agree to any extension with immunity for soldiers no matter what they offered. the only way to stay with immunity would be to break the SOFA agreement. i'm at least glad they weren't willing to do that.

who's next?

with reports of qadhafi's death, i wonder who the next big mean bogeyman in the american media will be. qadhafi became our #1 bogeyman in the 1980s (supplanting ayatollah khomeini the reigning bogeyman before him), but then faded from view as he was overshadowed by saddam hussein. saddam had a long reign as #1 through almost the entire 1990s, before he was supplanted by osama bin laden in late 2001. but only briefly before the saddam hussein bogeyman revival in late 2002 as part of the propaganda campaign to drum up support for the iraq war.

meanwhile, qadhafi looked like he might escape the bogeyman list completely when americans were focused on those other boogies and muammar was trying to cozy up to the west to get in on some of that foreign investment action. that worked until this year, when he cracked down on protesters and the rest of the world jumped at the chance to get rid of that asshole.

so now where are we? saddam hussein and osama bin laden are dead. and if this morning's reports are true, so is muammar qadhafi. the usual cast of characters for bogeyman is running dry. it's time for new blood. mahmoud ahmedinajad is still around. he has never quite made #1 before, but over the last few years there have been moments that he has hovered around #2 or 3. the problem is that ahmedinajad just lost a power struggle with ayatollah khamenei and does have all that much authority right now. (not that facts like that have ever gotten in the way of a good bogeyman theory.)

i suppose ayatollah khamenei could assume the #1 bogeyman mantle. but i think his chances are hurt because his name is too similar to a previous bogeyman : khomei-khamenei, how are people supposed to keep those ayatollah's straight? name confusion has been dealt with before in the bogeyman process. the whole reason i can say "saddam" and you all know who i am talking about is because during the gulf war the first bush administration had to find a way to demonize the president of iraq without tarring the name of the american friend and ally king hussein of jordan. but it's hard to do that in retrospect. if we start referring to the current ayatollah by his first name, seyyed ali, to distinguish him from his hostage-era predecessor, ruhollah, all that will do is prompt a lot of people to ask "who the fuck is ruhollah?"

so maybe it's time to really think outside the box and to find a number 1 bogeyman who is neither arab nor persian. maybe we can even move away from the muslim world entirely! but who would that be? hugo chavez? (possibly not a long shelf life on that one), kim jung il? (there are health questions there too) surely there is a relatively healthy conveniently demonized world leader out there!

i am a 99%er

it's official, i just checked.

observer effect

once again, i didn't bother to watch the GOP presidential debate and just like i did after the september 22nd debate, from reading the coverage the next day i feel like i really missed out. i actually tuned in to the web stream of the october 11th debate (the one between the sept 22nd one and the one last night) and after 10 minutes i concluded it was too lame to watch and turned it off. so i went back to not watching them for last night's debate and the candidates go into full freak mode again. it's like they know when i'm not watching and only become not-boring then.

my favorite line that i didn't see in last night's debate (about obama's decision to send 100 soldiers to uganda): "He put us in Libya. Now he’s putting us in Africa!"

you'll never guess who said it.

they have no concrete agenda! no one's in charge!

two weeks ago, i asked:

it's fascinating to see how differently the OWS people are being covered from the tea party. plenty of people have criticized OWS for not having a clear agenda, but are other demonstrations held to that standard?

from "What's the Tea Party all about?", McClatchy 9/14/2010:

Q: What's their [the tea party's] platform?

A: There's no universal platform. Common themes among tea party groups are deficit reduction, opposition to spending "earmarks," reducing the size of government, eliminating mandates and repealing Obama's health care expansion. In recent months, there have been some efforts to rally tea party activists against global warming policy. Social policy has not been central to the tea party movement, although there have been some efforts, including Fox commentator Glenn Beck's recent rally in Washington, to connect religion to the tea party movement.

Q: Who started the tea party movement and when?

A: There's no one founder. The movement came together in January and February of 2009, as President Obama took office. Rick Santelli of CBNC on Feb. 19 delivered a commentary from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that went viral on the Internet, in which he ranted against federal mortgage refinancing, said the federal government was rewarding irresponsible consumers, compared the U.S. to Cuba, and proposed a "Chicago Tea Party" to dump derivative securities in Lake Michigan.

Conservative talk radio hosts already were condemning the proposed federal stimulus, tagged at $787 billion when it passed. A stock trader in January had posted a message on the Web urging that tea bags be mailed to lawmakers in protest of federal bailouts. And a Seattle-based blogger in February 2009 organized an anti-stimulus protest.

The tea party moniker took off after what became known as the Santelli rant. The movement swelled as April 15, 2009, "tax day" protests were organized, and activists campaigned against Obama's health care overhaul before turning attention to the 2010 elections.

Q: Who's in charge, and where does the movement get its money?

A: There's no one leader. Umbrella groups such as the Tea Party Patriots, and social networking sites including Teabook.org, link activists who are members of hyper-local tea party organizations. It also has become a cottage industry for campaign consultants, T-shirt makers and convention organizers. Sal Russo, a California-based Republican political strategist behind the Tea Party Express, says there are roughly 4,000 tea party groups in the United States and hundreds being formed in other countries.

Some pre-existing advocacy groups that push fiscal conservatism or pro-business agendas, such as FreedomWorks, led by former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey, have been active in organizing tea party members. Financing for the movement comes from a variety of private sources, from grassroots small-dollar donations to backing from wealthy business leaders including the billionaire Koch oil family.

(via RS (aka the guy who used to run the phillybits blog) on FB)

#occupy protests we won't see

the #occupy movement has now jumped U.S. borders and is spreading around the world. still, i'm gonna go out on a limb here and predict that the following #occupy movements will never catch on:

-#occupy gaza
-#occupy hebron
-#occupy nablus
-#occupy [every other palestinian-controlled city in the west bank]
-#occupy baghdad
-#occupy [anywhere else in iraq]
-#occupy [anywhere in afghanistan]

you get the idea

stay classy rusty

at least one person in the media is informing his audience that the LRA is christian: rush limbaugh has successfully avoided my pet peeve, except that he supports the group! leave it to rush to endorse a terrorist organization famous for kidnapping small children and then forcing the boys to become child soldiers and the girls to be sex slaves.

but hey, they call themselves "christian", so everything must be cool. why should little details like murder an child rape matter?

what is never said when people inquire "what is the lord's resistance army?"

president obama's decision to send 100 soldiers to uganda has prompted TPM to publish a short piece called "What Is The Lord's Resistance Army?" and as a result it has blundered right into one of my long running pet peeves. as i said way back in 2004, by any measure the LRA is a christian fundamentalist militant group. i have never seen an article about a muslim militant group that doesn't use the word "muslim" or "islam." and yet, in the rare instances when the LRA gets any coverage, i almost never see the word "christian" despite the fact that the organization quite clearly claims to be motivated by its own warped brand of christian theology. TPM's piece is yet another example of that clear double standard.

in defense of mccain

greg sargent makes fun of john mccain's claim that the GOP jobs plan (which is, let's face it, the same plan the GOP has for just about everything) would save "billions and billions of jobs" when only 300 million people live in the u.s. but mccain didn't say his plan would save american jobs. there are 6 billion people on the planet, 1.3 billion in china and almost 1.2 billion in india. maybe mccain believes his plan will help send more jobs to those countries.

no new dawn for gaza

my main question relates to #8: will israel now lift the blockade of gaza?

the blockade was originally imposed to prevent hamas from moving shalit from the gaza strip. that original reason is rarely mentioned because since it was imposed israel has justified the continued blockade on a different basis: preventing hamas from getting weapons that could be used against israel. that second reason hasn't worked. there's no evidence that hamas is facing any shortage of weapons. in fact, imposing such a large scale blockade on the populace, one that banned both certain foods and medicine, gave the regular people of gaza a huge incentive to resort to smuggling. that ultimately produced a well developed network of smugging tunnels to supply gaza with critical supplies, but can also be used to get in weapons notwithstanding the blockade. if anything, the broad extent of the blockade may have made it easier for hamas to get weapons, not harder, as it gave ordinary gazans (people who might not otherwise be inclined to help hamas) working to build smuggling tunnels they needed to survive.

also there is the suspected non-articulated reason for the blockade: the idea that israel is imposing economic hardship on the people of gaza as collective punishment for electing hamas and/or as an incentive for them to rise up and overthrow the hamas government. the former is a violation of international law, the latter is a policy that has failed as hamas is as entrenched in power as ever. in fact, the shalit deal probably strengthened hamas' hold.

so while the blockade was originally imposed for reason #1 (preventing shalit from being moved out of the territory), the rationale behind it has since shifted to reason #2 (preventing hamas from getting weapons), and possibly also reason #3 (starving the gazans to punish them and/or undermine hamas' rule). once shalit leaves the strip for egypt, reason #1 won't apply, but #2 and 3 will still be there. so i'm guessing there won't be any relief for gaza, even though the reasons behind #2 and 3 don't stand up to any scrutiny.

actually, you're the 47%

erick erikson has launched we are the 53% as a kind of counter-protest to the occupy wall street (and every other city) movement. as others have pointed out, the we are the 53% tumblr is actually pretty sad, filled with messages of people facing difficult situations who don't seem to get that they are among the low-earners who pay no federal income tax or who otherwise receive assistance from the government.

which is why the "actually, you're the 47%" tumblr is so sadly funny.

hey, remember when republican candidates couldn't stop repeating the words "middle class tax cuts"?

these days they are singing a new tune. good luck with that!

who's next?

i think we should all bask in this brief moment when herman cain is considered a frontrunner. it's not going to last long, but his brief moment in the sun should be fun. my only question is who is going to be next when cain's time passes, the punditocracy goes back to romney and the base gets desperate again to throw its support with anybody but mittens.

password rant

one thing that really drives me batty is when a site that i have been visiting for a while suddenly tells me that my password is no longer acceptable because it doesn't fit the new rules defining a permissible password. who are they to tell me what my password should be?

even if we assume that the so-called "strong" passwords really are more secure (actually they are not) choosing a password should be an individual cost-benefit decision. there are easy to remember passwords that are less secure, and harder to remember passwords that are more secure. different people can come to different conclusions about how they weigh the relative importance of security vs. convenience. the people who worry more about their accounts being compromised might think it's worth it to come up with a convoluted password even if it means that they have to make a few tries before they get the right combination of characters to access their accounts. others might not be all that worried about security and would rather just use the same easily guessable password they use for everything. those people, the people who pick 1234 for their ATM pin code, assume the risk of having their account compromised in exchange for the convenience of never forgetting their password.

we all fall somewhere along the continuum in the relative value of security and convenience. but wherever we are, why can't we just be treated like grown-ups and get to decide for ourselves how risky we want to be? it's one thing for a web site to inform you that your password is laughably weak, but it's another to force everyone who doesn't meet some arbitrary security parameter to change it, especially if that means changing a password you have used for years without incident.

the mark of cain

as predicted two weeks ago, michele bachmann on herman cain's tax plan at last night's debate:

When you take the 9-9-9 plan and turn it upside down, the devil’s in the details

i should have known that bachmann would follow through with whatever i make up when i try to think of a truly crazy argument. how much longer before she accuses cain of killing his brother abel? something to look for at the next debate, i guess.

(HT: aaron)

ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan

actually, i think the question is stupid. i don't think candidates should waste their time memorizing the names of every foreign leader. i'm obsessed with central asia so i know who islam karimov is, but i can't off the top of my head give the names of a lot of world leaders, even from some pretty important countries. i doubt if the vast majority of people could name every one.

what's more of an issue is the fact that it seems like cain didn't know there was a country called "uzbekistan" and that when the questioner brought it up, he assumed the place was small and insignificant. in fact, it's neither.

uzbekistan solidly medium-sized. it's 57th in the world in terms of land area (out of 236 countries). that's slightly bigger than morocco, and a bit smaller than sweden. it also has more land than other more familiar mid-sized countries like germany and japan. uzbekistan is 46th in the world in terms of population, which is between malaysia and saudi arabia.

as for "insignificant", the significance of a country is usually pretty debatable. but i don't think you can call a country insignificant to american interest as long as the u.s. is fighting a war in a bordering country and is desperate for supply routes.

again, i am not slamming cain for not knowing these facts about uzbekistan. lots of well-informed people don't. but he's an idiot for pretending he knows something about a place he hasn't heard of. a few months ago, cain was refreshingly one of the only candidates who didn't pretend to know everything about anything, saying: "The thing that you’re going to learn about Herman Cain, if he doesn’t know something, he’s not going to try and fake it or give an answer that he doesn’t know what hes talking about." that's great! but why did he try to fake knowing something about uzbekistan?

whichmitt

i still think mittens is the likely nominee. but that just means we're going to see a lot more fun stuff like this.

if only they had called it "mittwhich" then it would sound like a delicious ice cream treat. mmmm, mittwhich.

"threat to carriers"

shorter NYT article: wireless companies are ripping people off. technology is making it increasingly easy for people to find a way to avoid being ripped off. wireless companies are freaking out at the prospect of not being able to rip people off in the future.

how this adds up to a "threat to carriers" is not clear. carriers in other countries tend not to gouge their customers as much as u.s. carriers do and somehow they have managed to thrive.

my question

why is the memo setting forth the legal basis for assassinating u.s. citizens secret? the contents are outrageous enough, but i haven't seen anyone asking that question.

second monday in october times ten

it's (roughly) the tenth anniversary of the day i learned when columbus day is. a decade later, i now always remember the holiday and the u.s. is still fighting in that country i glimpsed on the monitors in the bamako airport.

hiding under a blanket in the middle of the night blogging

8 years, 5,184 posts and this is the first time i have done this.

why romney will continue to make shit up

just to follow up on yesterday's post, here is the only mention of romney's foreign policy speech in today's new york times:

Mitt Romney sought to change that on Friday when, during his first major foreign policy address before an audience of crisply clad, closely shorn cadets at the Citadel in Charleston, S.C., he called for restoring cuts to the military budget, spending more on missile defense and being tougher with Iran.

no mention at all that there were no cuts to restore.

making shit up

i'm willing to bet that romney will get exactly zero negative press coverage for attacking obama's nonexistent "massive defense cuts". i also would not be surprised if one of the other presidential candidates picks up and runs with the "massive defense cuts" idea.

the fact that it has no basis in reality is not a problem because the media is not inclined to identify outright lies as lies when major candidates utter them.

see also.

(via)

maybe the problem was the ban on uttering the word "israel"?

how can you correct the label when you're not allowed to explain the problem?

The Islamic Republic's official representatives are generally barred from speaking with Israeli diplomats or even uttering the word Israel, preferring to describe their regional enemy as "that Zionist entity."

...

Iran's permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Dr. Ali Asghar Soltanieh, is pictured here at an IAEA meeting last month, seated at the Israeli delegation's desk while conducting his official business.

Soltanieh is engaged in a discussion with a member of the delegation of Ireland, which presides over the IAEA's nuclear safeguards committee, and a Cuban diplomat. He is accompanied by two other Iranian officials, according to a source who furnished Turtle Bay with this photograph.

It's hard to imagine how the top Iranian diplomat, after serving more than six years as Tehran's envoy to the atomic agency, wound up in the Israeli seat without an alarm bell going off in his head. You'd think there was a protocol office within the Iranian foreign mission responsible for avoiding such a diplomatic faux pas.

@#occupyphilly

during lunch i dropped by the occupy philly demonstration. as i mentioned before, it's just a block or so from my office. as i walked over the first thing i saw was a group of people stood with signs along 15th street. a surprising number of passing cars would honk in support. (click any of the photos to embiggen)

it was a pretty good crowd, people were gathered around doing the human microphone thing. it worked better than i imagined, both by engaging the crowd in what the speaker said (you had to pay attention to repeat) and by effectively amplifying the speaker's words.

but most of the time i spent wandering around looking at signs.

there was also (i think) a collection pile, where people could donate things for the protesters who will be camping out. (see also what susie wrote). it was a pretty random pile of crap, but i guess that's what democracy looks like.

ADDING: this is awesome. brendan on fox news!

crazy pam's conspiracy of meat

atrios is right, the method of slaughter for halal and kosher meat is quite similar. in fact, under islamic law, kosher meat is considered to be halal. (but under jewish law, meat is not kosher because it is halal)

EAU

given the EU's current economic woes, i find it really weird that anyone would be trying to emulate an EU-style economic union right now.

when i was in kazakhstan last year the agreement to form the russia-belarus-kazakhstan customs union was viewed as a really big deal. but in light of recent events, i would think they would want to take a wait-and-see approach to further integration, rather than pushing towards a new EU for eurasia.

also, the EAU acronym is taken.

dead horses everywhere!

does "the hill" run stories like this every time a member of congress vows to repeal the affordable care act? or whenever one promises to pass a flat tax? or abolish the EPA? or end the fed?

(via memeorandum)

occupy (something something)

occupy philly will be happening outside my window tomorrow. maybe i'll try to drop by and look around.

does it bother anyone else that as occupy wall street spreads to other cities, the movement takes the name of the city, not a place within the city? i mean, it is "occupy wall street", not "occupy new york". so shouldn't the philly spin off be "occupy broad street" or "occupy city hall"?

there is nothing in the constitution that allows rick perry to exist

it's true. i read the whole thing and it never once uses the words "rick perry".

occupy wall street

though i haven't mentioned it here yet, i'm pretty curious where the occupy wall street movement is going. the fact that they have kept up their demonstrations for more than two weeks now, enduring an initial news blackout as well as some pretty serious police brutality, and yet still continue to grow and spread to other cities shows that the movement is tapping into some real discontent among a lot of people.

and it's fascinating to see how differently the OWS people are being covered from the tea party. plenty of people have criticized OWS for not having a clear agenda, but are other demonstrations held to that standard? i think i have a fairly good idea of what the OWS movement stands for, even if they haven't yet outlined a comprehensive legislative agenda. are they any less focused than the tea party, the million man march, or countless other demonstrations that the media has not hesitated to take seriously?

maybe reading a bit about these people before recruiting them to run would be a good idea?

i think it's pretty great that christie might be getting bamboozled into running for president. i guess when enough people beg you long enough, it inevitably will go to your head. and so, after ditching rick perry because they discovered that he didn't hate undocumented immigrants enough, republicans are clamoring to replace perry with a guy who is already on record of not hating undocumented immigrants.

this should be fun to watch.