kids, guns, and santa claus

it's rare that i read a story about the gun-nut subculture in this country without wondering "what the fuck is wrong with these people?"

well that was fun

no one tells his campaign that he is "reassessing" whether he will continue to run for president unless he intends to stop running for president.

at least that's how it works for a regular candidate. i guess there's a possibility that cain isn't regular. he certainly hasn't followed the usual script on other matters. but i am still fairly sure this means cain is done. so unless i'm wrong, there should be no further question that newt is the clown of the month.

what was that?

what happened on the afghan-pakistan border last weekend makes no sense. this wasn't just a stray bomb hitting pakistani forces, it was a sustained two hour attack against two different pakistani military posts that continued even after the pakistanis sent news of the assault up their chain of command. in other words, it doesn't look anything like a mistake.

on the other hand, attacking pakistan does not serve u.s. interests at all. even if the pakistanis were attacking u.s. forces, it wouldn't be worth it to attack back. the u.s. depends on the country to supply its troops and to base its drones. it really can't afford to have pakistan cut that off, at least not as long as the u.s. is mired in afghanistan. which makes it look like a mistake after all. why else would the u.s. military do something so stupid?

of course pakistan is pretty dependent on the u.s. the dirty secret is that the u.s. funds a significant chunk of the pakistani military budget, which is why any cut-off will probably be quietly uncut once public attention wanders away. so why while the relationship can have its ups and downs, neither side will let it end completely. but that doesn't mean the pakistanis won't make the stuff the americans depend upon--access to bases to launch drones, use of airspace, and use of pakistan to supply NATO forces in afghanistan--more difficult.

the u.s. has promised an investigation of the incident. but i don't think there's much chance that we will ever hear the real story of what happened. it's all tied into the complicated dysfunctional relationship between the u.s. and pakistan. and those interested parties are the ones who would be providing the evidence for the investigation. i don't think there's any real chance that the truth will make it through that convoluted path.

the anyone but romney bulge

this is the best graphic representation i've seen of it yet! check it out as the anti-mittens bulge moves from bachmann to perry to cain and now to gingrich.

the only question is where it will go when newt does his usual newtering. will it continue down the line to santorum? (let's face it, it will skip paul) or will it loop back to give bachmann, perry or cain another moment in the sun? the thing to remember is that even when the bulge leaves it doesn't go totally down to zero. so bachmann, for example, still has 3-6%. perry is still dropping, but is still likely to hold onto his own 5% or so. same with cain. assuming those true bachmann/perry/cain believers are just as anti-romney as the bulgers, then where do they go when their candidate drops out? if they all go to the same last-non-romney standing, all those little percentages can add up to a significant bounce.

the answer to life, the universe and everything

it's nice to have a birthday that is only twenty-four hours long.

previously: [41], 40, 39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34

if only we could watch all the presidential debates like this

black friday

so how do people in other countries know when to start their christmas shopping mania?

a request

"hamas and hezbollah", it just seems to roll off the tongue of a lot of american politicians. it comes up all the time whenever they want to evoke a scary-sounding terrorist organization, even though the two are much more anti-israeli than anti-american. (hamas, as far as i can tell, has never acted violently against americans. hezbollah has not in at least a quarter century)

so the next time an american politician unders the phrase "hamas and hezbollah" when not talking about israel, i wish someone would ask him or her to explain the difference between the two. i'd love to hear any of the GOP presidential candidates try to explain that one.

the CBO are a bunch of doodyheads!

this isn't just newt. it's pretty clear that most american conservatives who yell about "socialism" have no idea what the term actually means. it's just a label for something they don't like. they might as well substitute the word "doodyhead".

i'm also a little amused by the term "reactionary socialist". maybe a real historian would know that "reactionary" is often considered to be the opposite of "socialist".. "a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like" indeed.

and mustard gas is a condiment, essentially

mmmm, pepper.

this is why the results of this study should surprise no one. it's not really a news source in any sense of the word "news".

عبد الله

putting aside cain's blatant bigotry, i'm pretty certain that an arab named "abdallah" is not christian. he should have come up with a different name for his apocryphal story.

leaving kazakhstan

a fascinating post (and comments) by a peace corps volunteer in kazakhstan who was just evacuated with the closure of the program.

arab fall

has anyone else noticed that the "successful" arab springs are getting worse? tunisia was first and they removed ben ali fairly quickly and with few casualties. then came egypt, which took a little less time but was much more violent before mubarak left power. next came libya, which started as a peaceful protest in february but by march had descended into a full-scale civil war that didn't end until the fall of sirte on october 20th.

the later the arab spring started, the harder it was. and that patterns seems to be holding in the post-removal-of-dictator phase as well, at least so far. tunisia's transition into a post-revolutionary government has been going the best. they had a free and fair election with no major problems and there have been few clashes between the people and authorities since ben ali fled.

in egypt the protests continue, now against SCAF, the military council that took over after mubarak left and seems to be angling to hold on to power. and SCAF is violently cracking down on the protesters, just like the mubarak government.

it's only been 2 months since the civil war in libya ended, and it was only the other day that the last qadhafi was captured. but already the transitional government is paralyzed with infighting and they have at least one armed faction, the zintan militia, that isn't willing to submit to the authority of the new central government. a second civil war is a real possibility.

three isn't much of a pattern. but it does look like the later the arab spring, the harder it gets. if the pattern holds, things really don't look good for syria.

europe's problem in a nutshell

the ECB made a video game:

Despite having a few other things going on, the European Central Bank found time to release an iPhone app this fall. It's called €conomia. (You can also play on your computer.)

The goal of the game is to keep inflation just below 2 percent.

maybe in version 2.0 you can also try to do other stuff, like helping those economies you've strangled through austerity measures, or stopping the entire currency union from falling apart.

kaput

woo-hoo! it's not only the best result i could hope for, it also makes it a lot less likely that congress creates another stupid supercommittee in the future.

now comes step two: hoping that congress does a clean repeal of the entire trigger and doesn't just carve out the defense cuts.

from the university of chicago alumni magazine

more on the taraz attack

there is a pretty detailed article about last weekend's attack in taraz here. the article is in russian, but running it through google translate produces a passable (if rough) translation.

what i find most interesting is the account from some witnesses that kariyev told them they should not be worried about him and that he made no attempt to harm them, even as he was firing at the police. that makes the whole incident seem more like an attack directed against the authorities, rather than what is normally considered to be a "terrorist attack" (i.e. an attack directed against civilians in an attempt to sow terror among the general populace). on the other hand, the article also says that earlier kariyev shot and fatally wounded a guy reading a book in the gun shop. maybe he changed his mind about what he was trying to do after he robbed the gun store?

(via JD on FB)

gotcha cheese day

today is the one year anniversary of the day we got custody of noz jr. we had a crazy year before that and it's been a crazy (but significantly better) year since.

also, today is cheese day.



two great tastes that taste great together!

39

the number is associated with the word for "pimp" in afghanistan, so everyone avoids the number. but nobody seems to know where the association came from.

i wanted to figure out of the abjad explanation made any sense, so i found translations for "pimp" in a few languages that are used in the country and totaled up the abjad values. i couldn't get any of them to work. google translate says the persian word is جاکش ("jaaksh"?), which has a total value of 324. in urdu the word is دلال ("dalaal"?), which adds up to 65. pashtu was harder to find, but this site says that "pimp" is  بړوه ("biruuh"?), which adds up to 213 (but that's assuming that the ړ is the same as a ر, despite what looks like a small circle attached to the bottom of the pashto letter. modified arabic scripts are very confusing to me)

the arabic word for pimp قواد ("qawaad") comes in at 111. if you're going to have a cursed number, 111 is way cooler than 39.

second second stamp day

one year ago, we moved to step three.

and, in honor of second stamp day, it looks like the peace corps will be getting the fuck out of kazakhstan.

(eurasianet link via dagger aleph or aliph sikkiin or whatever she calls herself nowadays)

[more on the PC pullout from kaz here and here]

cain makes a play for the illiterate ignoramus faction of the GOP

no doubt, a crucial constituent in the republican party coalition.

is it worth it?

i've long wondered about how the cost-benefit analysis for all those foreign military bases the u.s. maintains abroad plays out. i understand why, when the u.s. was concerned that soviet tanks might roll across europe, it might want to base substantial forces in europe (and for that matter, substantial forces in japan, to hedge the USSR in from the other side).

but that doesn't explain why we bother to maintain (and pay for) large bases there now. i don't think germany and japan need a substantial u.s. presence anymore. the military seems to use germany as a staging ground for deployments into the middle east and north africa. and forces in japan are probably seen as a deterrent to north korea (though we have substantial troops in south korea to do that already). so the rationale for these deployments is evolving, which means that they will never end because there will always be a trouble spot you can point to for justification for the status quo.

but the "is it worth it" question really comes to the fore when the u.s. considers a new deployment. like the newly announced marine base in northern australia. how much can 2,000 soldiers really do that the australian military couldn't already do? the potential benefit of this decision isn't clear at all.

meanwhile, the cost looks substantial. i mean, it may be a drop in the bucket of the overall american military budget, but rotating marines in and out of australia is still not cheap. plus there's the political costs. the NYT article mentions how the move is pissing off china, but i also imagine that there are other asians who are not happy with a projection of american power into their neighborhood. what will this do to u.s. relations with indonesia and malaysia? will they view the marines as a protector against a potentially aggressive china? it seems more likely that they would feel more threatened by the u.s., a country which, unlike china, seems quite willing to intervene militarily in countries (especially muslim countries) whenever it feels like.

my guess is the plan can't survive a simple cost-benefit analysis, which is why none of the articles i have read about it bother to look at it that way.

extend NY

ExtendNY extends the manhattan street grid over the entire world. finally, provincial manhattanites can make sense of addresses on the rest of the planet.

for example, in taraz i stayed at the corner of 120,997th street and forty-four thousand three hundred and sixtieth avenue. no, the A train does not go that far. it's even farther than far rockaway. transferring at howard beach can get you there eventually though.

(via b²)

NYPD occupying liberty square, demands unclear

funny.

getting the worm

so kazakhstan's parliament is dissolved and president nazarbayev scheduled new parliamentary elections for january 15, 2012, six months earlier than they were originally scheduled. last year. nazarbayev himself was just re-elected last april, in an snap presidential election called almost two years ahead of schedule.

my question is: has kazakhstan ever held elections on schedule?

i recently read kazakhstan: unfulfilled promise, a book about the first ten years of kazakhstan's independence (next month they are celebrating 20 years of independence, so yeah, i was a little late in getting to the book). the book recounts how president nazarbayev moved up one of its first elections in the 1990s, which meant that opposition parties didn't have time to get their act together and resulted in a nice rubber-stamp parliamentary majority for the administration. i guess the trick worked so well, he just kept going with it.

the baggage starts to spill out

i don't care if freddy mac wanted to waste its money paying newt for his opinions about stuff. but this is still a big deal, because it's become republican party orthodoxy that "fanny and freddy caused the housing crisis", along with obama, of course. if gingrich was on freddy's payroll, that makes him part of the problem, along with obama, of course.

could this be the shortest shelf life of a GOP presidential frontrunner in this entire race of short-term frontrunners? could this finally be ricky's big chance to break out of single digits?

what "religious liberty" means

the right to make sure people who want to get married can't, even if they don't believe in your religion.

in my religion, catholic bishops aren't allowed to speak to the press. stop denying my religious liberty!!!!

stuff twirling around in his head

sometimes it still amazes me what the republican party has come to. i've long disagreed with their political positions, but i used to think they at least put forth candidates who were able to discuss policy coherently. watch this video [or see the addendum below] and reflect that for the past 1.5 months that guy was the republican's front runner for president!

and the craziest thing of all is that cain is not an outlier. if anyone bothered to ask perry, bachmann, santorum or even romney a straightforward question like that i doubt if any of them could string together a coherent answer. it's like the GOP's big lesson from their last turn in the presidency was that W was too brainy. sarah palin was a joke. but that joke turned out to be the future.

newt, at least, would be able to answer the question. although his answer would totally contradict one of the two positions he has already taken on the issue.

 ADDENDUM: i found an embeddable version of the video i linked to above:

newtmentum!

i suppose it is his turn.

poor ricky. always a bridesmaid...

WTF? the arab league stands for something?

i gotta agree with the former aardvark, this is a big deal because since when does the arab league care if an arab leader kills his own people?

i doubt if the arab league will apply its new libyan/syrian standard consistently in the future (arguably that ball has already dropped with bahrain last march), but i still can't help thinking this is a step in the right direction.

why would anyone spend all that time cutting and pasting?

after writing the below post, after scouring news sites for additional information about yesterday's attack in taraz and finding that new updates didn't seem to be forthcoming, i looked to see if other blogs wrote anything about the attacks. my usual blogs about central asia had not written about the attack yet (and still haven't as of this writing), so i searched for "taraz" on google blogsearch to see if i could turn up something on a site i wasn't already familiar with. (it's always possible that some blogger out there, who doesn't necessarily write one of the usual central asian-focused blogs, has some random connection with the city. you know, someone like me). i found a lot of posts about the attack, but almost all of them were simple cut-and-paste jobs of the article from reuters, the BBC, or AFP about the attack that i had already seen. (e.g.--not to pick on that particular site. there seemed to be dozens that did basically the same thing)

what is the point of running a blog like that? the reuters/BBC/AFP articles are already online. if you want to draw attention to them, a simple links would suffice. why would anyone bother to run a blog that is nothing more than copies of articles that anyone could find more easily elsewhere? i know, i know, what's the point of any blog? (i certainly would never say my site has any real purpose) but unless there is something new, some value added to the existing news story, a blog seems even more pointless than the usual level of pointlessness there is with every blog. i'm just surprised by just how many bloggers there seem to be out there who just blockquote entire articles. i had no idea it was that common.

yikes!

one thing we felt we could repeatedly reassure our friends and family last year when we were stuck in kazakhstan was that, despite all the other crap we had to deal with, at least we were physically safe. the country had little record of political violence and no history of terrorism. about six months ago, five months after we got out, that started to change. as i mentioned in may, there was a suicide bombing in aktobe and a (perhaps botched) car bombing in astana. after that, two officers were killed in a village in the aktobe region, and that was followed by a mysterious "security operation" in a nearby village also in the aktobe region. two weeks later, another police officer was killed in aktobe (city).

things then seemed to quiet down for a few months. then last month, the kazakhstani government passed a law that imposed restrictions on religion in the country, in part citing the threat of extremism. on october 21st, in response to the law a previously unknown group, jund al-khalifa, issued a statement in arabic threatening violence unless the law was repealed. on october 31st, the group claimed responsibility for a pair of blasts in atyrau (a city in western kazakhstan, in the country's main oil-producing region).

then a few days ago, two cops were killed in almaty, which put people on edge, but it wasn't clear whether it was related to the atyrau bombing, the police killings in western kaz earlier in the year, neither, or both.

today, a new incident struck even closer to home, or at least my home-away-from-home. a guy named m.k. kariyev killed the two kazakhstani security agents who had him under surveillance, and then went on a rampage, raiding a weapons store, killing the security guard and two customers, and then escaping with two semi-automatic rifles. he then hijacked a car and killed two officers who were pursuing him. after stopping at home to get a grenade launcher, he attacked the offices of the national security committee (the kazakhstani successor to the KGB), which resulted in a shoot-out. kariyev blew himself up in front of a "market", which my contacts in taraz tell me was the central food market on kazbek bi street. for anyone who knows taraz, the shooting that preceded the blast was in the vicinity of the corner of abai street and kazbek bi street--i.e. 1 block south of dostyk square (aka the central square with the statue of the guy on his horse), and about 2 blocks from where i lived for much of last year.

it's really crazy. so crazy that one of our good friends lives in an apartment building that is over the central food market. so when kariyev blew himself up he did so right outside her apartment building. so far, everyone i have been in touch with is okay, but there are witness accounts of many wounded. this was, quite literally, right in our neighborhood where we were based this time last year.

there's still more questions than answers. is this related to jund al-khalifa? (as far as i know they haven't claimed credit for it yet) are the attacks in the past few weeks related to the earlier attacks against police? or was it a spur-of-the-moment thing, when one particularly homicidal individual found out he was being tailed and went on a rampage in revenge. for what it's worth, one of my friends in taraz seems to be assuming it was an islamic fundamentalist, and the kaz government claims that kariyev was a "follower of jihad."

UPDATE: a photo of the site of the blast (via ДА):

i can't express how creepy it is that i know exactly where that was taken. the photograph was taken in front of the photo shop where we got all of our photo prints made. that's also where noz jr. got one of his passport photos taken.

the mark of cain

karim sadjadpour writing in foreign policy magazine:

In one way -- and one way only -- the potential of an Israeli military strike on Iran is akin to a Herman Cain presidency. Its likelihood is slim, but the potential consequences are too dramatic to ignore.

i like how in an article that has nothing to do with american domestic politics (at least not directly), the prospect of a cain presidency is the analogy-of-choice for an unlikely but total disaster.

the eleventh day of the eleventh month

first it was armistice day to honor the end of the war to end all wars.

then it was veterans day to honor veterans of subsequent wars because it turned out that the war to end all wars didn't.

this year, forget all that war and veteran stuff. it's nigel tufnel day.

the presidential contenders D&D stats

yeah, i pretty much had to link to this.

(via balloon juice)

the cain defense

i generally agree with jon swaine that herman cain was the main beneficiary of rick perry's memory lapse-gaffe at last night's debate. but i disagree that he's lucky that people are not focusing on cain's princess comment. that's not actually true. plus saying "princess nancy" was not nearly the stupidest thing that cain did at least night's debate. i still think the dumbest line uttered in the debate, perhaps the dumbest line uttered in all of this year's GOP debates (and that's saying a lot) is when cain said that for ever woman who claims he has harassed him, there are thousands of other women who don't complain of harassment.

someone has got to try that defense at a murder trial. ("members of the jury, stop paying attention to the witnesses saying that my client killed the victim! consider the thousands of people he has met that he hasn't killed.")

ADDING: charles pierce picks up on the cain defense angle:

Back a few years, I covered the sanity hearings of Jeffrey Dahmer and, every day on the way to the courthouse, I walked past hundreds of Milwaukeeans who had remained uneaten. Never thought of that as an alibi for the accused, though.

breaking up is hard to do

i listened to tuesday's planet money podcast this morning in which they consider how greece might exit the euro by looking at what happened with the breakup of the austro-hungarian monetary union. apparently, it didn't go so well.

but that made me wonder why only look at that example for a common currency exit scenario. there are a ton of other examples of countries leaving a common currency. the ones that come to my mind are:

(1) mali leaving the west african CFA in 1961 (mali rejoined the CFA zone in 1984).
(2) mauritania leaving the west african CFA in 1973.
(3) the exit of 14 former soviet republics from the ruble zone between 1992 and 1995.
(4) the split of the czechoslovak koruna into the czech koruna and slovak koruna in 1993.

then there's this whole complicated mess that i haven't been able to make sense of, but which probably involves the comings and goings of various countries from the various common currency regimes of the british empire.

the bottom line is that stuff like this has happened before several times over. aside from kazakhstan's exit from the ruble zone (a story might not be the best example for what would happen to greece because kazakhstan's exit in 1993 was in the midst of the economic turmoil that came with the collapse of a superpower), i don't know the details of what happened in each of those cases. but presumably some went better than others. (stergios skaperdas mentions that the czech-slovak currency breakup, like the rest of their breakup, went fairly well). maybe someone could look into those other cases to see what factors made things better or worse.

just something to think about if you're going for the wolfson economics prize (pdf).

mississippi embryos are not corporations

see? they're not all yahoos after all!

all hail satan!

actually herman

i'm pretty sure that a significant portion of the democrat machine wishes very much that you become the GOP nominee.

something we can expect to actually happen

sign the petition.

(via weigel--who has a screen shot, in case the white house notices and takes it down)

trying hard to live up to their reputation

today the people of mississippi will vote on whether embryos and fetuses are corporations, or something like that. if this passes, brace yourself for all that unregulated citizens united fetus money flooding the state!

oh also, it could inadvertently ban birth control, and criminalize miscarriages. (at least in the imaginary land where the amendment doesn't immediately get blocked by the federal courts). sometimes i feel sorry for mississippi, a state burdened with a reputation for being ignorant and backwards by much of the rest of the country. then there are those other times.

west-southwest

for the past year and a-half, since the spring 2010 revolution/ethnic violence, just about every article i have read about kyrgyzstan refers to the country's north-south divide. this is the first time i've actually seen a map using actual data to show the north-south difference (in this case, it uses the votes from the october 30th national election). the thing that really strikes me is that it's much more of an east-west split than north-south.

not that the label given to each side really matters all that much. but my surprise when i saw the map highlights how i have unconsciously internalized the dominant narrative about the country's politics.

is 2012 the year?

when u.s. forces withdraw from iraq at the end of this year, it will also end american control over iraqi airspace. a few years ago i mentioned in a couple of posts that one of the main reasons (IMHO) why an israeli military strike against iran would not happen was because such a strike would require israel to cross iraqi airspace. when the u.s. refused to give israel permission, that left israel with two choices: violate iraqi airspace anyway and risk a military confrontation with the u.s., or call off any attack against iran.¹

so starting january 1, 2012, that barrier to an israeli strike will be removed. sure, iraq still is unlikely to give permission for a strike. but israel is a lot less likely to care about what the iraqis say than their ally the americans. and they probably are a lot less frightened of a skirmish with iraqis.

that doesn't mean a strike will necessarily happen in 2012. it's just that one big reason reason that i have been consistently betting against a strike actually happening over the past few years will no longer apply. and recently there has been a sudden uptick of talk about an israeli attack on iraq.

-------------------------------------
1-a third choice, find an alternative route to iran that didn't involve iraqi airspace, was also not likely. deteriorating relations with turkey complicated the northern route from israel to iran while poison pill leaks about gulf state cooperation with israel complicated the southern route from israel to iran. plus, putting those complications aside, a longer alternative route, even with permission/acquiescence from the countries en route, also increases the chances of something going wrong with the strike.

why i hate mr. sun

i'm not usually one who is particularly bothered by grammatical errors, but this video, a current favorite of noz jr., is really driving me crazy.



at 0:22 i'm pretty sure it says "this little children are asking you", and then it does it again at 1:05. maybe i'm reacting stronger to this one because noz jr's fluency in english is a concern of mine.

but what really bugs me about it is it makes no sense to me how the error happened. i mean, the singer doesn't have an accent (i.e. he seems to have an american accent), but i can't imagine how a native speaker could make that kind of error, much less twice. and this isn't something written down, where anyone could make a typo. to a native, it just would sound wrong to say it that way. so how did that even happen in a recording?

lincoln-douglas II: electric boogaloo

the latest incarnation of the lincoln-douglas debate was last night. i didn't get to see it, but i wonder which one was arguing the pro-slavery side.

remember, remember

i'm curious whether guy fawkes day bank transfer day has enough participants to make any real impact.

and i still find it odd that a british historical figure who was a religious fundamentalist and attempted (but failed) to commit a terrorist attack centuries ago has become one of the icons of the OWS movement. it's probably all alan moore's fault.

cain wins the crazy pam primary

pamela geller endorses herman cain:

I endorse Herman Cain. What he doesn't know, we'll teach him.

the cain campaign should put that last line on a bumper sticker.

everybody loves/hates OWS

from memeorandum:

"custodian of mecca"

or maybe not.

(i was going to title this post "i shot the sharif", but it didn't quite work)

a tempting offer

senior members of greek prime minister george papandreou are calling for him to resign if i were prime minister papandreou, i would jump at the chance. there is no upside at all to staying in power in greece right now. whatever happens, whether the government shoves another round of harsh austerity measures on the greek people to assure that international banks get paid off, or a greek default and divorce from the euro, neither is going to go well for whoever is sitting in that PM chair. papandreou has proposed a referendum, thus showing the greek people that he actually gives a shit about what they think. if the pushback against the referendum is too great, resigning might actually allow him to salvage some kind of legacy.

why can't we just decide on one?

strange maps has a map of electrical socket standards around the world (click to embiggen):

does anyone have any idea who the world uses multiple competing standard for electrical plugs? is any standard better or worse than the others?

the weirdest place i have been in terms of electrical outlets was dubai. as the above map shows (or would show if you make it big enough to see the UAE), the country used the "british imperial" standard (dark blue on the map, a plug with two horizontal rectangles on the bottom and one vertical rectangle on the top) for its outlets, but all the product in the stores had plugs that were continental european standard (light green, two round circles). why didn't the stores order products with plugs that would fit in the local outlets? who knows! maybe because so much of dubai's economy is being the middle man for products sent elsewhere, there's more demand for products that follow the standard of wherever the products will eventually end up. i was told that if you buy an electronic product in dubai, they often will throw in an adaptor if you ask.

i didn't ask for the one electronic purchase i made in dubai (a cheap mobile phone). the charging cable with two round prongs was just what i needed for when i got back to kazakhstan.

rooting for grover

i find myself in the odd position of hoping that the super-GOPers stick with grover norquist and hold the line on their crazy "no tax increases to rich people under any circumstances" position. as i've mentioned before, i want the super-committee to fail. if the GOP starts compromising, that will mean the draconian cuts the super-democrats have already put on the table might actually happen. but the most plausible path to super-failure is if the republican members continue to be total assholes and maintain their #1 fealty to grover and his rich patrons. so right now at least, that's what i want to happen.

УРА+1

excommunication is hard to reverse

i have to admit, i feel a little sorry for richard goldstone. the respected jurist was recruited to lead a UN committee to investigate the 2008-2009 gaza war. israel refused to cooperate with the investigation, so the committee issued a report with the information it had, a report that has come to be known as "the goldstone report". goldstone foolishly believed that israel and the leaders of international jewish groups tolerate dissenting opinions about israel, especially views backed by the evidence uncovered in an investigation led by a well-respected zionist jew, who had been repeatedly honored by israel in the past. he was wrong.

the campaign against goldstone was savage and personal. so-called defenders of israel made it their mission to personally retaliate against goldstone, and that included going after him in his personal life.

goldstone has spent much of this year trying to rehabilitate himself among the same people who have trashed him over the past few years. he recanted the goldstone report and today penned an op-ed piece in the NY times rejecting the comparison between israel and apartheid.

is the rehabilitation campaign working? not with the zionist blogisphere. william jacobson calls today's op-ed "a good first step but does not go far enough" (i guess recanting the goldstone report doesn't count as a step?) the elder of ziyon quotes from the piece and notes that even "someone like Goldstone" think the apartheid comparison goes too far, making it clear that he doesn't think goldstone has earned back any ziyon cred. over at israel matzav, carl in jerusalem at least acknowledges that goldstone "is trying to make amends for his pernicious Goldstone Report due to his virtual excommunication from the Jewish community", but concludes that the op-ed piece isn't good enough. carl's beef is that goldstone says israeli oppression of palestinians in the west bank is different from apartheid because israel has at least theoretically recognized the concept of a palestinian state, whereas carl thinks israel should not give up any part of judea and samaria without giving its palestinian residents any political rights and still not be called "apartheid" because, um, well, just because. "Goldstone still has a lot to learn," says carl. indeed he does.

(via memeorandum)