Harper and Iggy in 2011

Saw a traffic spike to an old piece of mine on Ignatieff from 2006. So I re-read it. And one paragraph seemed more relevant than any other...though perhaps not the one the linkers intended.

That's not to say he'd be a worse Prime Minister than Stephen Harper, of course. Stephen Harper is a zealous market fundamentalist; a neoconservative exploiting a base of social conservatives to gain the kind of autocratic power that only a Canadian Prime Minister at the head of a majority government can enjoy. We've already seen that he wants to control the government from his own desk, and the only check on his ambitions is the reality that he only controls a minority government. That's why every single thing he's done since the end of January has been turned towards winning that majority; from budgetmaking, to speechmaking, to muzzling his ministers, all of it is aimed at gaining power. Nobody knows what Harper would do with that power, but I imagine it would be to do his damnedest to remake Canada in the image of Howard's Australia and Thatcher's England. Needless to say, anybody would prefer Ignatieff to THAT.

I actually think Ignatieff has changed. I still prefer Dion or Rae to Ignatieff, but "Iggy" has moderated his tone, and has handed off the lead on foreign policy to Bob Rae.

Meanwhile, if anything, Stephen Harper has become worse. He seems to be working hard to become the most autocratic leader of any democracy in the english-speaking world. He cows his party and the public service at the same time, and lies with impunity only when he can't simply ignore you. A Harper majority would be disastrous, and the only reason anybody could possibly think otherwise is that much of Canada's media is so bizarrely right-wing—compared to the public—that they seem to welcome the prospect of a Thatcherite Canada.

Just to be clear, and I'm saying this as a once-strident Ignatieff critic: Given the choice between Ignatieff and Harper, I'd choose Ignatieff in a flash.

Paul Ryan's Top-Down War for Plutonomy

Yeah, let's not mince words here. That's what's going on. Taibbi:

[David Brooks slobbers] over all of Ryan’s ostensibly daring proposals, from the Medicare block grants to the more obnoxious Medicare voucher program (replacing Medicare benefits with vouchers to buy overpriced private insurance, which Brooks calls the government “giving you a sum of money” to choose from “a regulated menu of insurance options”).

What he doesn’t mention is that Ryan’s proposal also includes dropping the top tax rate for rich people from 35 percent to 25 percent. All by itself, that one change means that the government would be collecting over $4 trillion less over the next ten years.

Since Brooks himself is talking about Ryan’s plan cutting $4 trillion over the next ten years (some say that number is higher), what we’re really talking about here is an ambitious program to cut taxes for people like… well, people like me and David Brooks, and paying for it by “consolidating job-training programs” and forcing old people to accept reduced Medicare benefits...

...The last ten years or so have seen the government send massive amounts of money to people in the top tax brackets, mainly through two methods: huge tax cuts, and financial bailouts. The government has spent trillions of our national treasure bailing out Wall Street, which has resulted directly in enormous, record profit numbers – nearly $100 billion in the last three years (and that doesn’t even count the tens of billions more in inflated compensation and bonuses that came more or less directly from government aid). Add to that the $700 billion or so the Obama tax cuts added to the national debt over the next two years, and we’re looking at a trillion dollars of lost revenue in just a few years.

You push a policy like that in the middle of a shaky economy, of course we’re going to have debt problems. But the issue is being presented as if the debt comes entirely from growth in entitlement spending. It’s bad enough that middle-class taxpayers have been forced in the last few years to subsidize the vacations and beach houses of the idiots who caused the financial crisis, and it’s doubly insulting that they’re now being blamed for the budget mess.

But the icing on the cake comes when a guy like David Brooks – like me a coddled, overcompensated media yuppie whose idea of sacrifice is raking one’s own leaves – comes out and calls Paul Ryan courageous for having the guts to ask seniors to cut back on their health care in order to pay for our tax breaks.

A FOUR TRILLION DOLLAR WEALTH TRANSFER. That's what we're talking about here. A forcible transfer (for what choice do Americans have?) of four TRILLION dollars from the poor, middle-class, destitute and aged to monied chucklefucks like David Brooks and Paul Ryan.

If this were happening anywhere else in the world, there would be people on the streets. Things would be burning. But in America, where everybody thinks he's gonna be a billionaire someday, there ain't a damned word said about it or thing done about it. Never mind that income mobility is pathetic and getting worse. Never mind that "equality of opportunity" is naught but a sick joke. Never mind that (as I said in my last post), the guys running the show don't even care if your water poisons you.

No, people aren't even realizing that they're in the middle of a one-sided war for plutonomy. Maybe they'll begin to realize it before they've been hung up and bled dry. Considering what just happened in Wisconsin, though...I wouldn't lay money on it.

Edit: Oh, and pardon my language here, but the very fact that that disingenuous dipshit David Brooks couldn't be bothered to even discuss the possibility of tax increases just shows how fucked up the American media truly is. There's no way that someone like that should be taken seriously, let alone given space in the Times. But there it is.

Apparently the Republicans Want Floridians to Drink Soiled Water

Sounds strange, but take a look at the budget's policy riders if you don't believe it. Specifically, look at section 4035, which "prohibits funds for the EPA to impose and enforce federally mandated numeric Florida water quality standards". Yep. Right there, in black and white. That's what they want.

You may be confused. You may ask yourself "why would the Republicans be deliberately harming Floridians, considering how important that state is?" You may ask "who the hell is against water quality standards"? Sure, contraception, Republicans hate contraception and its role in women's emancipation. But water quality standards? That is, without a doubt, 100% within the purview of government. It's like policing, or the military, or food quality...

...oh, right. If you look at Section 1268, they're also trying to screw the FDA, too.

So, once again, there you have it. That's the party that American voters chose in large numbers. The party that doesn't care if there's poison in your water, or mercury in your cement (Sec. 4008), or radioactive coal ash in your air (Sec. 4045). If you get sick, or your loved ones get sick, or your CHILDREN get sick? Not their problem. F.O.A.D.

All that, and they still haven't done a damned thing to bring jobs back to America. But, then, they were never going to, were they?

Edit: Oh, and before the Dems get too smug: this was in the compromise bill. Which means the Dems signed off on all of this.

No, You Idiots, Ryan Isn't "Courageous"

Just saw a great piece in Time (Yeah, I know, but it happens) by Michael Grunwald. It's about the Beltway nonsense about how Ryan is "courageous" for his determination to screw the non-rich:

You may not like Congressman Paul Ryan's budget plan, but you must admit that it's courageous. You simply must. By order of the Washington establishment, you may question whether Ryan's plan is sensible or humane or even remotely honest, but you have to confess that it is undeniably an extraordinary act of bravery, or else pundits will beat the confession out of you with swoony prose.

To New York Times columnist David Brooks, Ryan's 73-page budget outline — it's not an actual budget — is "the most comprehensive and courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes." Here at Time.com, Joe Klein wrote that it's "without question, an act of political courage," while Fareed Zakaria declared that "Ryan's plan is deeply flawed, but it is courageous." The Economist agreed: "Credit where credit is due; whatever you think of Paul Ryan's budget, it is politically gutsy." (See "The Ryan Budget: A Test of Character for Obama.")

This is just weird. Ryan is a conservative Republican committee chairman in a conservative Republican caucus. He was reelected last year with 68% of the vote. Sorry, Joe, but I do question whether it was really courageous for him to propose huge tax cuts for the rich, squeeze health care for the poor, and promise that nobody over 55 — the heart of the conservative Republican base — will have to make any sacrifices. Honestly, does anyone think this week has been bad for Ryan's career?

Yeah, screwing the poor has never taken courage in Washington. It just takes the ability to see where everybody around you stands as well.

As Grunwald points out, what would have been "courageous" is if Ryan had advocated tax increases. Same if he had called for curtailed military spending, or if he had touched that "third rail" of Social Security. But he's not courageous at all. He's just convenient, because he's advocating policies that Americans would never accept in order to fix a deficit that his billion-dollar buddies were responsible for.

One other bit I liked was the one about "adult conversations":

Supposedly, Ryan is brave because he's willing to start an "adult conversation" about the deficit and entitlements in Washington. But politicians talk about the deficit and entitlements all the time. Some close observers of American politics may recall that President Obama proposed a health care bill last year; it included half a billion dollars in Medicare cuts, which Republicans attacked as vicious rationing that would pull the plug on Grandma. I don't recall a lot of David Brooks commentary about the courage of that plan, even though, unlike Ryan's, it had a chance of becoming law.

That's the whole point. "Adult", here, means "realistic". And "realism", in Washington, means admitting that the New Deal is dead, that plutonomy is the new normal, and that the only policies that have a hope in hell of getting implemented are the ones that could issue from the pens held in the Koch brother's desiccated hands.

Thinking that the non-wealthy are allowed to anticipate anything but the workhouse or the gutter? Yeah, that might as well be fairy dust and unicorns for all that it's likely to happen. The only hope people are allowed to have is that the other guy just might get screwed harder and sooner than they are. It's all relative: as long as there's someone worse off than you, you don't have to feel so bad.

That's not "adult", except in the sense of the word where somebody's always getting screwed.

He closes with this:

So by all means, let's have an adult conversation about deficits. A good place to start would be the origins of our current predicament. President Clinton left behind a huge budget surplus. As Joe pointed out, it was wiped out by President Bush's tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit.

All of those budget-busters went on the national credit card. And all of them were supported, no doubt courageously, by Congressman Ryan.

But that's just it. It's people like Joe that are the problem. Sure, they'll savage the policy. But, shit, that's utterly irrelevant and always has been. Obamacare-as-policy was savaged by all the liberal pundits back when it was the finance committee's recommendation, but it's the one that Americans ended up with. What matters is whether or not these guys are willing to put away the personal lionizing of people who think that they're scum and call them out for what they are. Klein will never, ever do that. Unlike his conservative counterparts, Joe Klein would never have the stones to say that someone like Ryan's a convenient coward. That would create issues. Klein can't afford issues. He needs beltway access and beltway friends, and knows that ineffective policy critiques are the perfect way to do it.

(Unfounded, bizarre personal attacks on people to his left are also a great way to do it, which is why Klein became synonymous with it.)

If he didn't need access, and didn't need beltway friends, then he might be comfortable saying that Paul Ryan is an absolute coward, a fool, a liar, and a danger to his country and the people that reside within it. But we'll never, ever know. All we'll ever get is "courageous". More's the pity.

Shutdown Coming

So, the government's going to shut down because anti-choice nuts are freaking out over the funding of Planned Parenthood. I'm guessing that this isn't what people had in mind when they threw the Dems out. But, rest assured, that's what you were gonna get.

On the plus side, though, the Republicans appear to be living up to every negative stereotype that you could possibly think of them. Not only are they basically working as the footsoldiers for plutonomy and working hard to screw over everybody who makes less than 500k a year, but they're having a gigantic tantrum because people dare to have a different opinion on an issue that motivates their base. They're doing no better at improving the lot of the country than the Dems did; in fact, they're objectively and unmistakeably worse, just as everybody would have expected.

That's probably going to help Obama and the Dems in 2012—assuming they don't compromise themselves into oblivion between now and then. Poor comfort for all the people who are going to get screwed over by this prospective shutdown. But at least everybody knows the score.

Frabjous Day

Beck's leaving Fox.

Julian Sanchez, Copyright, and the Undeserved Inheritance

Go here to read an excellent, unsentimental piece on copyright by Julian Sanchez (h/t DeLong).

Excerpt follows:

Wise assessment of copyright policy should have nothing to do with how you feel about the person or entity who holds the right at any particular time, because copyright policy is not about identifying wonderful and meritorious people and ensuring—certainly not as an end in itself, anyway—that their income is proportioned to their intrinsic moral desert—or lack thereof. We are all the massive beneficiaries of millennia of accumulated human scientific knowledge and cultural output, and not one of us did anything do deserve a jot of it. We’re all just extremely lucky not to have been born cavemen. The greatest creative genius alive would be hard pressed to create a smiley faced smeared in dung on a tree trunk without that huge and completely undeserved inheritance.

I really liked that first paragraph; it laid down the situation as it stands EXACTLY as it stands. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, as the saying goes. We don't pay them a thing except the intrinsic honor of building edifices upon the foundations of thought and technology that they bequeathed us, with the understanding that the same thing will happen to us, one day.

So banish the word “deserve” from your mind when you think about copyright. Nobody “deserves” a goddamn thing. (I say this, for what it’s worth, as someone who makes his living entirely through the production of “intellectual property.”) The only—the only—relevant question is whether a marginal restriction on the general ability to use information incentivizes enough additional information production over the long run to justify denying that marginal use to every other human being on the planet, whether for simple consumption or further creation. That’s an empirical question, and while I strongly suspect the answer will generally be “not by a longshot” beyond a whole lot more limited level of protection than we currently provide, I’m happy to be persuaded otherwise along any particular dimension. But if you want to make an argument that turns in any significant respect on how unlikeable big corporations are or how marvelous creative people are… well, spare me. And the rest of us. Because in both cases it’s probably true, but as a policy matter, nobody should really give a damn.

I liked this more, though. Sanchez is wonderfully unsentimental here, and discards the hollow "MINE! MINE!" variety of pseudo-morals that tends to underpin this. The only reason the copying monopoly exists is to produce more information and creativity than would exist otherwise, and in an age where more is produced free of charge on the Internet than could ever possibly be consumed, it's sort of a hard argument to make. At best you could argue from quality, and that might work for, say, film and some forms of video games. But things like music and prose writing? Good lord, there's more amateur material out there NOW than you could possibly consume in a lifetime; and while much of it is dreck, there's certainly enough quality there to raise the question of why the lucky few who benefit from the copyright system should be so expansively (and expensively) coddled.

(Of course, I might have a different view if I had ever written for cash; but as you can see by the distinct lack of advertisements on this site, that isn't the case.)

(I use a pseudonym. How would I even cash the cheque?)

Most of the moral arguments revolve around the idea that artists should be paid a fair wage for their work. I'd buy that if artists seemed to give a rat's ass about the fact that nobody else is getting paid for their work. No, I'm not terribly pleased with how the Huffington Post exploits its writers, but it's no different than a thousand other industries where that happens. The plight of the people who are furiously "tweeting" on their iPads about how horrible the Internet is for their profession pales in comparison to the plight of the impoverished, suicidal workers who MADE the damned things to begin with. Are they aware of that? Do they even care?

(Of course, I doubt Sanchez does, being a CATO writer and all; but even libertarians occasionally have their uses.)

Once everybody else gets a fair wage for their labor, then I'll start crying over the plight of Zack Snyder and Miley Cyrus. But I expect that I'm going to have a very, very long wait.

Edit: DeLong's commentators are very much annoyed with a different part of the Sanchez piece, which was about how one shouldn't blame corporations that exploit artists because "bad contracts happen, deal with it". Obviously that's absolutely ridiculous, and why I didn't deign to quote it. It's also not really about copyright in the first place; it's about the political economy of corporate power. It applies to every sector, not just copyright.

Again, libertarians have their uses—but you'd never want to endorse one's arguments wholesale.

Re-Edit: Or, as John Emerson put it: "Deep pockets can break anyone".

E.J. Dionne Asks "The End of Progressive Government"?

This has been in the works ever since the Republicans started lying their way into a House majority. Hell, it may have been in the works since Citizens United opened the floodgates of corporate cash. But now, finally, here we are.

Americans are about to learn how much is at stake in our larger budget fight, how radical the new conservatives in Washington are, and the extent to which some politicians would transfer even more resources from the have-nots and have-a-littles to the have-a-lots.

And you wonder: Will President Obama welcome the responsibility of engaging the country in this big argument, or will he shrink from it? Will his political advisers remain robotically obsessed with poll results about the 2012 election, or will they embrace Obama’s historic obligation — and opportunity — to win the most important struggle over the role of government since the New Deal?

This week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will announce the House Republicans’ budget plan, which is expected to include cuts in many programs for the neediest Americans.

The Ryan budget’s central purpose will not be deficit reduction but the gradual dismantling of key parts of government. Remember that Ryan wants both to preserve the Bush tax cuts and, over the long run, to enact more breaks for the wealthy, including the elimination of the capital gains tax.

Ryan’s plan reportedly will include steep Medicaid cuts, disguised as a proposal to turn the program into a “block grant” to the states. The net effect would be to leave even more Americans to the mercies of the private insurance market.

In deference to the GOP’s success in turning last year’s health-care law into “Obamacare,” let’s call this proposal Ryancare — and let’s make sure we look carefully at its impact on the elderly and the disabled, the main beneficiaries of Medicaid.

Put the two parts of the Ryan design together — tax cuts for the rich, program cuts for the poor — and its radically redistributionist purposes become clear. Timid Democrats would never dare embark on class warfare on this scale the other way around.

No shit. What's so enraging about this is that the Republicans are likely to accomplish more with their majority in one House than the Dems did with both Houses and the Presidency. The Republicans have stood their ground over and over again, and the Dems have caved over and over again.

And this is part of the reason:

But while I am assailing his ideas, let me put in a good word about Ryan himself:he is, from my limited experience, a charming man who truly believes what he believes. I salute him for laying out the actual conservative agenda. Here’s hoping he is transparent in the coming weeks about whom he is taking benefits from and toward whom he wants to be more generous. If he thinks we need an even more unequal society to prosper in the future, may he have the courage to say so.

WHY? Why praise a man who is trying to tear apart every program that has ever helped the non-wealthy in America? And why, especially, praise him for being "charming" and for consistency? He is a VILLIAN. Not only that, but he is a villian who, by all credible standards, knows absolutely nothing about economics and will most assuredly do more harm than good.

HIS HEALTH CARE PROPOSAL WILL KILL PEOPLE, DIONNE. DO NOT "SALUTE HIM" FOR HOW "CHARMING AND HONEST" HE IS ABOUT THAT.

(What the hell is it about the American media that they must embrace amoral, potentially-deadly bastards as long as they're honest about it?)

You want to know why the Republicans are winning? There it is. It may not be what Dionne thought it was. Dionne almost certainly was just trying to play a silly little trick where he damned with faint praise, and he spends a fair amount of time tearing the policies apart.

But what it really is is the same goddamned thing that happens every time: reasonable progressives giving quarter to bastard conservatives, ones that would never, ever return the favor. The same thing he's saying that Obama must not do, he's doing. The same Republican policies of minority rule, gutted revenue, and destroying social security and medicare that he's decrying, he's actually aiding. He can castigate the policies all he wants; it's completely irrelevant.

In the interest of being "nice" and "fair", he's handing his enemy a rope and an instruction manual on noose-tying. Ryan doesn't deserve it. "Charming and honest" or no, he deserves nothing but scorn.

No quarter. Not ever.

Bob Herbert's Leaving the Times?

Well, that's just a damned shame.

I shudder to think at what sort of wingnut trogg is being lined up to replace him. After all, their last big hire was Douthat, wasn't it? And THAT guy has proven himself as someone who would would be over his head in a local alt-weekly, let alone the Times.

But, hey, it's a brave new world where the entire media revolves around keeping the New Robber Barons happy. And it IS the New York Times, after all. Now that we know that Wall Street will be permitted to continue it's inexorable climb to 100% of (quasi-legitimate) GDP, I imagine they'll soon have little choice.

Edit: Yes, that is completely unfair. And, yes, they may hire a progressive. If they do, great! It's just that I'm not expecting it.

Then again, I think they should hire digby, now that she's no longer pseudonymous and all. So I might be especially biased that way.

Something to Keep in Mind:

The Tea Partiers "won" on the budget, as Ezra put it, because they screamed and yelled and wouldn't compromise and threatened to primary everybody to the left of Genghis Khan. The Republicans cut even more than they had before, and then "compromised" with the Dems back to their original desired position.

The lesson should be obvious for the "reasonable" Democrats that folded like a cheap suit from 2008 to 2010. It should be even more obvious for "reasonable" so-called "progressives" that just went along with the ride for the sake of a party that, like or not, couldn't give a rat's ass about them.

Yet, for all that, I suspect not a soul will figure it out. They haven't yet. Why would they now?

Supreme Court Blows Off Man Unjustly Imprisoned on Death Row for 14 Years

This is sick. And yet more proof that "keeping your powder dry" was a terrible idea. If Roberts and Alito hadn't been appointed with the Dems' tacit consent, this man would have received justice. Instead, he gets nothing more than a pathetic slap in the face by the Roberts court.

And, now, because of this, prosecutors know that they can act with complete impunity. There will be more miscarriages of justice coming out of this. I guarantee it.

If you're on the wrong side of a public prosecutor, take NOTHING for granted. And if you see that someone's been convicted? I wouldn't necessarily take THAT for granted either. After all, how do you know the evidence is worth a tinker's damn?

America's Industrial, War-Winning Might

Interesting piece by Krugman today in relation to the Times' new Civil War blog, about how the North won the Civil War (and, later, how America helped win WWII):

[T]he way modern America won was characteristic. Southerners were better warriors — man for man, they almost always outperformed Union armies, although the gap narrowed over time. But the North excelled at the arts of peace — that is, in industry and ability to get things done. The North couldn’t stop Bedford Forrest from raiding supply lines; but it could repair track incredibly fast. And it was that Northern superiority in logistics, in production, that eventually proved decisive.

America’s other great moral war, World War II, was similar. The war movies I watched when I was a kid always had plucky, individualistic American heroes beating superbly equipped Nazis, but the reality was mostly the other way around. We had many heroes, but the truth is that Americans were never as good at the art of war as the Germans. What we were good at was the art of production, of supply. Honor the heroes who stormed Omaha Beach — but it was the floating harbors, the trans-Channel fuel pipeline, and the air superiority achieved through production miracles that really did it.

Not much to add to that. Except that I still find it amusing that fantasy strategy games like Starcraft and the like are much the same way: the wars between the little robots and aliens and whatnot are usually won through canny production and resource management, not through a player's dextrous handling of their onscreen avatars.

Wars really are won on the homefront.

Election in Canada

It seems somewhat trivial compared to what's going on in the Middle East and Japan, but for those interested, Canada's moving into another election.

It's a bit of an odd one, thanks to Canada's equally odd party system. It has four major parties (the Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats and Greens), a single member first-past the post electoral system, and a rather notoriously powerful executive branch leading to a sort of "winner take all" situation regarding the Prime Ministership. Unlike, say, the United Kingdom, where MPs generally have more say. Thanks to regionalism, you also have a lot of ridings (electoral districts) where the Conservatives and NDP fight it out, the NDP and Liberals fight it out, the Conservatives and Liberals fight it out, or all three at the same time. Add in a staunch nationalist (and quasi-separatist) party in Quebec called the Bloc Quebecois, and you have a recipe for continuous hung parliaments—which Canada has—and coalition governments.

Except there IS no coalition. That's the strange part. The Conservatives have ruled the country without a coalition for over five years now, simply by threatening the Liberals with another election every time a confidence vote—which would bring down the government—came up for a Parliamentary vote. The Conservatives have enough money to fight an election whenever they please, while the Liberals are a bit skint these days, so the Liberals tended to knuckle under. (Though, when pressed, the New Democrats have propped up the Conservatives as well.)

But what if a defeated government just led to a new government with the same Parliament? Certainly that CAN happen. It happens pretty much everywhere else with three-party-plus electoral systems. The UK, New Zealand, Australia, and of course Israel, Germany, Japan and the rest. Both the UK and Israel are run by parties that didn't win the plurality of seats. So why not Canada?

Remember that big pot of money the Conservatives have? That's why. After an attempt was made at changing governing parties back in 2008, they successfully used their huge war chest to demonize the very concept of a coalition in the minds of the Canadian public. Part of that was due to the presence of the aforementioned nationalist party, which is unpopular in the rest of Canada due to separatist leanings, but a lot of it is due to attacks on the very concepts itself.

So, now, the prevailing opinion in Canada (at least among the commentariat) is that the party with the plurality is the only one that should be allowed to try to form a government. Other arrangements aren't acceptable, and the leader of the Liberals, Michael Ignatieff, has ruled it out. Yet there's almost no hope that he'll get a majority of the seats, so he'll have to do something to coordinate with the other parties should he get a plurality. Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, for his part, is claiming that the choice is between giving him a majority and a Liberal minority government; but even he can't necessarily hope for that. His numbers are strong now, but these are early days, and Ignatieff has successfully jettisoned a lot of the foreign policy adventurism and American apologism that made him such a problematic candidate in the past.

(I was no fan of "Iggy", and still have doubts, but he's certainly a better choice than the paranoid, autocratic, near-dictatorial Harper.)

This multi-party, first-past-the-post system also means that the lion's share of votes will be utterly wasted. Although some candidates win with a majority of votes, many win with a plurality; in either case opposition votes (in classic FPTP style) do absolutely nothing except sit there. So any plurality of seats may not even really be a plurality at all; Harper may be Prime Minister again with a "mandate" of a minority of seats held by people that each received a minority of votes.

It makes strategy difficult, too. Since each party is contending with all other parties in a variety of winner-take-all plurality battles in a country riven by regionalism, no single strategy will do. A strategy which would work in the Prairies for the Conservatives against the New Democrats may fall flat in Ontario against the Liberals. A Liberal strategy or policy that would be killer in inner Toronto against the NDP would be suicidal in battles against the Tories in ridings only about twenty miles away. The "also-rans" are always there bleeding off support and creating the possibility of candidates coming up the middle.

And in Quebec? Five parties contend there, the issues are totally different, the ideology is muddled at best, the separatist question looms over everything, and since the dominant language is different, communications are a whole different bag, too.

So, yeah, strange election. And likely to get stranger.

Libya Attacks

I'm very, very skeptical that the airstrikes on Libya will do more harm than good. I'm also very skeptical that this won't end up turning into a broader conflict.

But I do think that, unlike in Iraq, this is not a simple case of thinly-justified American aggression against a target of convenience. Libya has already descended into civil war, and the Libyan government has demonstrated that it neither has the confidence of its people nor even the most basic decency and respect for human rights.  I would have preferred that it went away peacefully, but that was apparently not to be.

So the question of the hour is what happens next. Can the rebels really accomplish much? Will the cause of Democracy in Libya fizzle? And, most importantly, will the Arab Uprising get bogged down in yet another argument about the intentions of the west that obscures the dangers of their own leadership?

And, worst of all, what happens if it turns out that Seumas Milne's charge that US Special Forces are helping to repress, arrest, and kill dissidents in places like Bahrain and Yemen turns out to be true?

TEPCO and Transparency

The lesson of Fukushima isn't what you think it is.

It's not about nuclear power, or at least not really. Fukushima is almost certainly not going to be like Chernobyl, because it's not designed like Chernobyl. It doesn't use graphite as a moderator, and it was the explosive graphite that turned Chernobyl into a de facto dirty bomb. There is some danger from melting of the cores, but two of the cores are cooling normally and the other appears to be settling down after some issues with the hydrogen buildup.

Even a "meltdown" would only mean that the core would melt into the thick concrete beneath it. That would still protect the environment from the core until it could be cleaned up. Modern reactors aren't even be prey to that much danger. A pebble reactor in this situation would, I believe, simply cool down and stop normally.  The frothing panic over this is completely unwarranted.

It's not about the media, either. Not that they haven't acted execrably during this crisis. They seem to have completely ignored the massive toll of lives and property that was inflicted in Japan to focus on the sexy possibility of another Chernobyl. In doing so, they have failed two peoples: the Japanese people, whose real needs and real tragedies are being ignored; and the American people, who are being whipped up into such a panic that they are now in fear of mortal peril if they can't buy potassium iodide. The job of the media should be to tell them that they need not worry, that the Pacific is a big place and that they will be fine. But they aren't.  They're acting like savages and beneath contempt. But I still don't think it's really about them.

No,I think the real story here is about Tokyo Electric Power Company. Their press conferences are just about the only source of real information we have, and they have been TERRIBLE. They've been evasive and vague, and it's been like pulling teeth finding out what's really going on. 

That's fueling the destructive speculation, because this vagueness is serving as fertile ground for people to assume the worst. Whenever somebody who actually knows about this sort of thing tries to mollify the public, we find out something ELSE that TEPCO hasn't told us. The water level issues in reactor #2, the spent fuel storage issue in reactor #4, all of those things have been fueling destructive speculation about what they may not be telling people.  If people feel like TEPCO can't be trusted, they'll turn to other "experts", who will only fuel the rampant speculation with guesswork of their own. TEPCO needs to step up and be clear about what's going on, what they're doing, what is happening, and what ISN'T happening. Leave no room for speculation, and be transparent enough so that people will believe you.

This sort of vagueness and evasiveness fits the classical Japanese stereotype, of course. But I do wonder if it will remain so. Already, a lot of younger Japanese seem to have little time for it, especially with the old certainties having faded away over the last few years. After the way that this disaster has been compounded by the Old Way Of Thinking, is there any doubt that there will be an appetite for something new? We may see a serious cultural shift in the wake of this incident.

And while it's part-and-parcel with Japan's business culture, I can't imagine that "acting like TEPCO" is going to endear Japanese businesses to anybody either within or outside of Japan any time soon. This may, finally, be impetus for the real reform of business-government relationships that Japan so desperately needed.

Of course, all of this pales in importance compared to the quake and tsunami themselves. I honestly and urgently hope that the Fukushima issues can be speedily and safely resolved, so that the Japanese people can return to the business of taking stock of the damage, helping their countrymen, and rebuilding their shattered country. I also still urge you to donate to the Red Cross.

I definitely urge you to take everything you read about this with a huge grain of salt, and stop panicking about a singular, one-in-a-million disaster that pales in comparison to the devastation wreaked by hydrocarbons to the environment and human health each and every day.

Stay calm, stay skeptical, stop freaking out about potassium iodide, and be ready to support the Japanese as they rebuild their country and, perhaps, rethink their assumptions. And maybe, just maybe, you should do the same.

Japan Earthquake and Fukushima Explosion

You know what happened yesterday. I won't belabor it. Two points.

First: If you want to donate, do it to the Red Cross.

Second: It looks like the Fukushima power plant—the one whose cooling was affected by the earthquake—suffered an explosion. According to CBS, it was not a meltdown, and unlikely to become a meltdown. There IS radiation and people are being evacuated. Thankfully, though, it's no Chernobyl or Three Mile Island.

But it's still bad. VERY bad. Not only because the Japanese are just about the last people on earth who should endure a nuclear disaster, but because this could send the entire energy industry spinning off into crisis. Nuclear power had been barely rehabilitated in the public's eye, and this is going to make people distrustful of it all over again. Americans, certainly, ain't going to want no new nukes near them anytime soon.

Perhaps they're justified. This should NOT have happened, considering the Japanese's knowledge of nuclear power, attention to safety, and earthquake-consciousness. I know that I'm going to be a bit less receptive to the nuclear industry's claims.

But the one thing that nuclear power isn't is carbon-intensive. A wholesale switch from nuclear to oil, natural gas, or coal could exchange the possible environmental effects of a nuclear accident for the certain environmental devastation of climate change.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who pooh-poohs conservation and renewable energy in the name of putting nukes everywhere. Those people are short-sighted idiots. But I do think that nuclear power has its place, and in a world where the bought-and-paid-for "denialists" are getting more and more coverage and sympathy from the bought-and-paid-for "newsmedia", anything that could be used to justify tossing more carbon into our atmosphere is a bad thing on principle.

(Even if it we weren't talking about an explosion at a nuclear generator.)

I hope the optimists are right. I hope that the current situation is the end of it. And I hope that nuclear plant engineers and designers learn from the mistakes that have been revealed over the last few days. Our planet needs it, in more ways than one.

David Broder Passed Away on Wednesday

Sure, I disagreed with much of what he wrote. I will still freely grant his basic civility, his skill as a writer, and the generosity of someone who appeared to think that all of his countrymen could someday come together and reach a consensus on the issues of the day.

He'll be missed.

Digby in The Hill

Huh, I'm a bit behind the times. Didn't realize that Digby was doing real-name pieces now. But she is, at The Hill, and it's a great piece about how the talking heads in the media just ain't gonna sympathize with the American people, because they aren't really part of the American people to begin with. They make too much money for that, and (as digby puts it) "[i]t’s very easy to prescribe “shared sacrifice” when you will not personally sacrifice anything at all."

(Yes, it's under her real name. You want it, it's there. She was, is, and will always remain "digby" to me, so that's the name I'll use.)

DC is Booming. America is Not.

That's the core problem facing America, according to The Nation's Christopher Hayes. We all know that DC doesn't give a rat's ass about America's dubious jobs situation, where so many people are out of work and so many MORE people are under-employed. But Hayes has come up with one good reason why:

I think there are two numbers that go a long way toward explaining it.

The first is 4.2. That’s the percentage of Americans with a four-year college degree who are unemployed. It’s less than half the official unemployment rate of 9 percent for the labor force as a whole and one-fourth the underemployment rate (which counts those who have given up looking for work or are working part time but want full-time work) of 16.1 percent. So while the overall economy continues to suffer through the worst labor market since the Great Depression, the elite centers of power have recovered. For those of us fortunate enough to have graduated from college—and to have escaped foreclosure or an underwater mortgage—normalcy has returned.

The other number is 5.7 percent. That’s the unemployment rate for the Washington/Arlington/Alexandria metro area and just so happens to be lowest among large metropolitan areas in the entire country. In 2010 the DC metro area added 57,000 jobs, more than any in the nation, and now boasts the hottest market for commercial office space. In other words: DC is booming. You can see it in the restaurants opening all over North West, the high prices that condos fetch in the real estate market and the general placid sense of bourgeois comfort that suffuses the affluent upper- and upper-middle-class pockets of the region.

Hayes goes on to point out that for those living in the midst of that sort of boom, it's very difficult to see that the rest of America is hurting. Sure, you understand it on an intellectual level. But it just doesn't feel real when you aren't personally exposed to it.

We know what they can do when there's a personal connection. It's been (quite literally) scientifically proven that DC Politicians only really pay attention to the concerns of the wealthiest 10% of Americans, as Hayes reminds us. With that in mind, is it any wonder that they responded to the market crash quickly and decisively, and yet are dragging their feet while less-connected Americans continue their slow slide to unemployability?

That brings Hayes, and us, right back to Wisconsin.

There is only so much social distance a society can take. The social science literature shows that as social distance increases, trust declines and aberrant and predatory behavior increases. The basic mechanisms of representation erode, and the social fabric tears. “An imbalance between rich and poor,” Plutarch warned, “is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”

It’s against this backdrop of creeping dissolution that the word “union” takes on a renewed power. That’s why the struggles of the protesters in Wisconsin have resonated so profoundly. In banding together to oppose Republican Governor Scott Walker’s power grab, the students, teachers, cops, firefighters and neighbors have willed themselves to shrink the social distance those in power are cynically using to pit constituencies against one another. Walker exempted cops and firefighters from his bill’s radical limits on collective bargaining, but they joined the protests anyway. “An assault on one is an assault on all,” proclaimed Wisconsin Professional Firefighters Association president Mahlon Mitchell.

It’s in Wisconsin and across the Midwest that union members like Mitchell and his allies are showing us the antidote to the social distance that threatens the core of American democracy.

The Republicans know this quite well. That's the reason Walker's trying to bring down the Wisconsin public unions, and why the Republicans' various mouthpieces are bashing unions everywhere and every time they can. They know that this disconnect could easily convince the "other America" that they need to band with each other, instead of looking to their "betters" to solve things for them.

The American people are also starting to understand the situation. That's why the polls are showing that—despite all the anti-Union agitation of the Republicans' mouthpieces, the Kochs' various hirelings, and every corporation in the country—the American people support Wisconsin's public workers instead of Walker and his lot.

So the only group that doesn't understand this, as usual, are the DC Democrats. They're the ones who are so busy gobbling up corporate cash that they've forgotten that, as the old song goes, "the Union makes them strong". They're the ones who are disconnected with the "other 90%" when they shouldn't be. And they're the ones who need to reconnect, if they're ever going to be able to do more than pass Republican policies under a Democratic name.

(Edit: Added missing link.)

Odd Traffic Spike About Bahrain

I had an odd traffic spike a little while ago—specifically a spike in direct hits to this piece on Bahrain. I'm wondering if it has to do with the anonymous comment I got in response. Content is reproduced here:

for all word PLS see what happen in bahrain
http://a1.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/180956_10150151088095470_626170469_8431044_5088246_n.jpg

see this video, they kill the bahraini

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDX0T5Vt7xU

other video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeBVAjs4eeY&feature;=player_e

The two videos are very disturbing, so I'll just leave them as links instead of embeds.

Herbert and Krugman on Taxes and Wisconsin

Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert have, together, done a pair of excellent pieces on the forces that have led up to the crisis in Winsconsin.

Of course, Krugman already discussed Wisconsin more directly a little while ago, by turning to (surprisingly) Naomi Klein and her "shock doctrine" theory. But this latest piece, primarily about how low-tax, low-spending environments really hurt marginal children, also contains a key money quote:

By the way, given the current efforts to blame public-sector unions for state fiscal problems, it’s worth noting that the mess in Texas was achieved with an overwhelmingly nonunion work force.

Very MUCH worth noting. There's been a lot of blather about how bad public sector unions are, including from good ol' NYT Token Con David Brooks. But Texas is living proof that unions don't necessarily have anything to do with it: you can ruin your state just fine with nary a union in sight, simply by presuming that government programs spring forth from faerie dust and that ogres eat your tax dollars.

(All things considered, it's surprising that conservatives aren't more into high fantasy.)

Herbert really brings it home, though, by focusing on how important organization really is:

When you talk to the workers who are hurting most in this epic downturn, they are overwhelmingly out there on their own. No one has their back. The corporate community and the politicians who do their bidding know better than anyone else that workers who are not organized are most often helpless. They have no leverage. They cannot demand raises or health and retirement benefits or paid vacations or sick leave. They cannot negotiate shorter hours or better working conditions. It’s the boss’s way or the highway.

It’s not just pocketbook issues but the dignity of American workers that is at stake in the confrontations in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere. These confrontations are about so much more than the right of public employees to bargain collectively, as important as that is. This most recent assault on labor is part of an anti-worker movement that has been on the march for decades. Jobs have been shipped overseas. Workers have been denied their rightful share of productivity gains. Wages have been depressed and benefits in many, many instances have disappeared.

It’s true that states are facing serious fiscal problems, crises in some cases, but a much bigger threat to America as we’ve known it is the increasing inability of hard-working men and women to earn enough to maintain a middle class standard of living, even as the corporate sector is thriving. The economic lives of the poor and an ever-widening portion of the middle class have become maddeningly insecure as the wealth of the society has been funneled, increasingly and unconscionably, to those at the top.

This is the most important economic issue of our time. No other even comes close. We are watching the middle class bleed out at the same time as the wealthiest 0.1% become near-omnipotent Robber Barons, and the closest thing we thought we had to an FDR turned out to be more of an admirer of Reagan than Roosevelt. It isn't a white collar thing or a blue collar thing; both good office jobs and good blue-collar jobs are disappearing at the same clip. I wonder whether there will be a middle class worthy of the name in a decade or so.

And while it could be said that it's enriching workers in other countries, the basic facts of international trade dictate that somebody on the North American side must be benefiting as well. America wouldn't trade if nobody benefited from it. Middle class blue- and white-collar workers aren't benefiting: any benefit to consumption they might get is overwhelmed by their devastated income. That much is absolutely, abundantly, and trivially clear at this point.

No, it's the ultra-wealthy that are benefiting, and they are reshaping America—and the western world—to suit their needs. Deluging voters during campaign season with nonsensical attack ads, overwhelming the popular discourse with plutocracy-friendly "scholarship", ripping apart public sector unions (the only unions really left in the country)...they're busily tearing down both government and any vestige of the fair markets that liberals advocate and are replacing them both with a convenient plutonomy.

All that despite the damning fact that it was that lot that plunged us into a near-depression two years ago.

It's enough to drive you to drink, except that the American people aren't buying it. From CNN:

Forty-two percent of the public sides with the public employee unions and 31 percent backs Gov. Scott Walker, according to a Pew Research Center survey released Tuesday. Nearly one in ten say they don't support either side, with 18 percent unsure.

The poll's release comes as protesters rally for the third-straight week outside the Wisconsin state capitol, upset with Walker's plan to limit collective bargaining rights for public-sector employees. The Republican governor, who was elected last November, says his plan is necessary to reduce his state's budget deficit, but pro-union groups say the governor is trying to curb long-held labor rights under a guise of fiscal responsibility.

A new CBS News/New York Times survey indicates that six in ten oppose the elimination of collective bargaining rights for the public sector union workers, with 56 percent opposed to the cutting of pay or benefits to reduce state budget deficits. The poll indicates a partisan divide, with Democrats and independents opposed to both moves while Republicans in favor of Walker's proposals.

A USA Today/Gallup survey released last Wednesday also indicated that 61 percent of the public would oppose a move in their state to pass a bill that would take away some of the collective bargaining rights of union government workers, with one in three saying they'd support such a move.

According to the Pew poll, two-thirds of Democrats side with the government employee unions, with Republicans favoring the governor by a 53-17 percent margin. Independents questioned in the survey are more divided, with 39 percent siding more with the unions and 34 supporting the governor.

The survey also indicates an income gap, with lower income people siding with the unions and more affluent people divided.

This is heartening news, at least. Sure, affluent Republicans are going to be anti-union. But it's nice to see that everybody else appears to be at least open to the idea that unions can look out for their interests against the Powers That Be.

I just hope that the inevitable crush of anti-union bullshit that's inevitably coming won't distract them from remembering that.

Stephen Walt

Okay, somebody who knows Walt offline really needs to make fun of him at this point. Man actually wrote "Why the Tunisian Revolution Won't Spread" in January. Yep.

Goes to show that you have to be very, very careful about the predictions of International Relations experts, and ESPECIALLY of the Realists. They talk a good game, but the end of the Cold War showed that they can get it majorly, majorly wrong. Considering this is a similar case study, well...

Edit: Also, it shows that you need to be incredibly careful about pundits' track records. They don't exactly admit their mistakes much.

Re-Edit: Don't get me wrong. I like a lot of what Walt has written. I think that, when he gets away from wearing the "Realist" hat, he has a lot of good points to make.

But it's becoming harder and harder to conclude that Realism is anything but a creaky, decrepit doctrine—and that the only reason that it perseveres is because of the paucity of decent alternatives.

Gaddafi May Go On...

...but I cannot possibly see how. Strong leaders don't strafe their own people with gunfire from fighter jets. That's not a sign of strength—that's a sign of weakness.

Anyway, latest AJE liveblog is here. One react to Gaddafi's latest rant:

Anoushka Kurkjian, a Middle East consultant told Al Jazeera the address was "a typical Gaddafi speech". She said "Gaddafi's resiliance is not in doubt" and it can't be ruled out that he will stay in power for as long as he can.

She added: "The structures of the state are disintegrating. There is that shift from Gaddafi towards an alternitive, but that hasn't yet taken shape."

Regarding the Arab League expelling Libya, she said "The Arab League has been muted by saying that it's suspending Libya. If the death toll does mount, reactions will become more thoughtful."

I suspect that part of the problem is that the Arab League has no idea who's next. It's difficult to expel someone for pulling the same sort of repression that you might be contemplating in a few weeks or so.

As for U.S. reactions...Obama's being cautious, as always, but I suspect that Kerry is speaking for him by saying that the attacks were "despicable" and that the regime cannot go on. He did seem to sort of pass the buck to the UN, though, by saying that "United Nations leadership is on the line. Libya's mission to the UN bravely condemned their own government. Now UN action is critical." But that may just be Obama signalling to the rest of the Security Council that this shit will not fly with the Prez.

(Not sure what good it'll do, though. China is going to be loathe to go along with a serious condemnation. Not when they're scared stiff about what might happen to THEM.)

Unarmed Libyans Being Attacked by "Foreign Mercenaries"

Gaddafi's making Mubarak look like a reasonable man. According to the AJE Live Blog Gaddafi's son is warning of "civil war"...but as Najla Abdurahman put it on the Live Blog, how on earth could that be worse than what Libyans have had to deal with for the last 40 years?

Meanwhile Robert Fisk is in Bahrain, where he reveals that the people are making it clear that they are in control, repression or no repression. It isn't Libya or Egypt, not yet. This will not necessarily end in revolution. But if change doesn't happen soon, the Khalifas will be lucky if they get away with a simple transition to constitutional monarchy.

Libya

Can't comment much at the moment. But the AJE livefeed is here.

Bahrain is Getting Bad

Or, perhaps, "getting worse", after the government suppressed peaceful protests with deadly force. In either case, NPR:

Reporting from Bahrain — where, before dawn, riot police armed with clubs and shotguns charged into the protesters' camp in the capital's main square — NPR's Peter Kenyon tells Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep that Bahrainis' grief is "turning to anger very rapidly."

Four people were reported killed, and dozens more were seriously wounded in the raid in Manama's Pearl Square.

Peter, where are you now and what are you seeing?

Steve, I'm at the Salmaniya hospital, where many of the wounded and dead were brought initially. I have to say, uh, I have just seen one of the more gruesome sites in 10 years of covering the Middle East. I was in the mortuary. I saw a man lying on a gurney. The top of his head was literally blown off.

The injuries have been widespread — clubbing and some shot and rubber-bullet injuries. Paramedics who were trying to get to the scene told me they were pulled from their ambulances and dragged to the ground and beaten.

It's ... it's been a scene, kind of. It's a bit quiet at the moment, I have to say, but just moments ago, this compound in the hospital was filled with screaming people. The grief is turning to anger very rapidly here.

And the situation is changing very rapidly. I recall, Peter, just yesterday you were telling us how the protesters had occupied the square and the police were nowhere to be seen, at least not in the areas where the protesters were. That seems to have changed very, very quickly.

It was a dramatic change and a bit hard to understand at the moment, I have to say. I mean, only Tuesday the king, Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa, had said he was sorry for the deaths that had happened earlier, the two people who were killed [during protests Monday], and he had vowed that there would be peaceful responses to peaceful protests.

The crowds had swelled over 36 hours in Pearl Circle there, which is what they had hoped would be their Tahrir Square. Many people had camped out for the night, mostly, I should say, young men but also some families, women and children there in family tents. I would say a percentage of the people go home after midnight to their own homes to sleep. But there is a corps that stays there every night, and they bore the brunt of this attack.

They said it started about 3 a.m. with tear gas being fired from above, where there's a bridge that overlooks the square. And then the police moved in, clubbing people out of their tents, according to witnesses, and then the wounded and the damage ensued.

As best you can determine, who ended up in possession of the square?

The police and the military are in charge of the square. There was a military convoy that moved in. It sealed off the square, and access to that area is now sealed off by police, armed police.

In fact, the man whose body I saw, I spoke with his son and he said they were trying to walk back into the square to help the wounded when the man was killed.

So we do not have the same situation as in Cairo, Egypt, where the protesters took over a central square, a symbolically important square, and managed through everything to stay there for days. The protesters have cleared out. Do you have any sense of what the protesters are going to do next or are attempting to do now?

You're right. Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, it was not a call for regime change immediately, except for a few isolated pockets. It was a call for political reform and economic reform.

The regimes in the region are getting more and more scared as the calls for reform and change grow. Egypt may have been relatively peaceful, barring the thuggery of the goons that Mubarak sent out, but I wonder how long that will remain the case. As the repression gets more and more violent, how long until the the protesters respond in kind? And, honestly, could you even blame them for doing so?

Nicholas Kristof brings up an important point, too: Bahrain is a critical American client state. It isn't just an ally that protects Israel's southern flank—it is the home of the Fifth Fleet. But as Kristof says, "If we favor “people power” in Iran, we should favor it in Bahrain as well."

It was so much easier back in '89, wasn't it? When it was the other guy's client states falling like dominoes, instead of your own? Good times, good times. Still, it makes me wonder if this is the final, TRUE end of the Cold War. Both sides ended up losing their clients and tributaries—it just took the one an extra 20 years to have it happen. And, like Eastern Europe, I can't help but wonder if the Middle East will ultimately be better off for it.

A Discussion of PBS Funding From A Man You ALL Should Listen To

Yes, PBS funding is important. But you don't have to listen to me. Listen to this guy:



Mister Rogers' PBS show was one of the most important formative experiences for a generation of children. If not generations of children. He wasn't alone in it, either; PBS is also the home of Sesame Street, for G--s sake. It is an absolutely vital part of American culture.

(Yes, G-d. Mr. Rogers wouldn't like it if someone swore on his behalf.)

House Republicans are planning to cut the funding of PBS and NPR. Entirely. Republican mouthpieces everywhere are defending it by whining about how NPR/PBS "suck on the public teat". No. What they do is exactly what government is SUPPOSED to do: use the public resources they are granted to provide a service to the public. That's exactly what they do, and they do a VERY good job of it—probably better than any of their conglomerated private-sector counterparts.

In fact, that's probably the reason why the Republicans and conservatives are so desperate to shut them down. They're living proof that the idea of well-provisioned public services at the heart of liberalism is TRUE, that it always HAS been true, and it always will be true where there is the will and honesty to serve your country and your fellow man.

That's what Mr. Rogers did, more than anything else. He served his country. He did a fantastic job of it. He was a parent to millions. He was universally recognized as one of the greatest of Americans. So let me be very clear: if you care at all about his work and his legacy, you will make d--ned sure you do everything you can to ensure that these deceptive, destructive ideologues do not have their way. Tell your Congressman and Senator not to betray his legacy. NOW.

He always believed in you. Start justifying it.

Obama Focuses on Deficit, and Guess Whose Fault it is?

What was that Atrios line? "And the millions of unemployed cheered themselves hoarse"? Yeah, that. I especially like the part where he eliminates Pell Grants and screws post-secondary students over on interest charges. Now THAT'S "winning the future", Barry!

Wrong time, wrong target. And as Paul Krugman ably demonstrates, one that's only going to piss people off when the thing you cut is something they like. Obama was voted partially to be a president that sets aside Washington's ridiculous GroupThink on issues like deficits, and focus on what's really bothering Americans. Guess that just doesn't happen.

But, hey, it isn't just his fault. It's also yours. Remember: you voted for this. You voted in a whole lotta Republicans who were wailing about budget deficits. You didn't just toss out those "blue-dog" idiots, either, which would be understandable and excusable; you also threw out Democrats like Howard Feingold and Alan Grayson who were solid on the issues and knew what they were talking about.

You chose a Republican House that will do its best to drag the country into the abyss and told the president that he should follow their lead. You chose to have your government focus on deficits by fucking the poor and jobless. That's what the Republicans were selling, and you bought it.

There were an awful lot of "experts" telling you that it was necessary, of course. The media's owned by the very corps whose execs and owners benefit so handsomely from the total wealth transfer to the richest 1% that's going on in America. It would make sense that they'd bring in the very finest expert opinion money can buy. But you DO still have options, especially in this day and age.

Ah well, you've got two years to suffer, and then maybe you can throw THESE bums out too. Assuming you aren't too distracted by Snooki and The Situation to pay attention. I can only hope.

Algeria: "Running Street Battles"

Algeria's Internet has been shut down, Egyptian-style. But that clearly hasn't stopped them from following the Tunisian and Egyptian lead:

Plastic bullets and tear gas were used to try and disperse large crowds in major cities and towns, with 30,000 riot police taking to the streets in Algiers alone.

There were also reports of journalists being targeted by state-sponsored thugs to stop reports of the disturbances being broadcast to the outside world.
But it was the government attack on the internet which was of particular significance to those calling for an end to President Abdelaziz Boutifleka's repressive regime.

Protesters mobilising through the internet were largely credited with bringing about revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.

"Security forces are armed to the teeth out on the street, and they're also doing everything to crush our uprising on the internet. Journalists, and especially those with cameras, are being taken away by the police." President Hosni Mubarak had tried to shut down internet service providers during 18 days of protest before stepping down as Egyptian leader on Friday.

Mostafa Boshashi, head of the Algerian League for Human Rights, said: "Algerians want their voices to be heard too. They want democratic change.

"At the moment people are being prevented from travelling to demonstrations. The entrances to cities like Algeria have been blocked."

At least five people were killed in similar protests in Algeria in January, when the Interior Ministry said 1000 people were arrested.

On Saturday at least 500 had been arrested by early evening in Algiers alone, with hundreds more in Annaba, Constantine and Oran taking part in the so-called February 12 Revolution.

"The police station cells are overflowing," said Sofiane Hamidouche, a demonstrator in Annaba.

"There are running battles taking place all over the city. It's chaos. As night falls the situation will get worse."

These are astonishing times. I don't know if the "running battles" in Algeria will hand the state the excuse for repression that it couldn't find in Egypt. Different countries require different tactics and strategies. But after Tunisia and Egypt, Algeria's Powers-That-Be must be sweating. If there's a way of stopping this tsunami of demands for freedom, nobody has yet found it.

Egyptian Army Refused Orders to Fire

Heard it around, confirmed by Robert Fisk:

Last night, a military officer guarding the tens of thousands celebrating in Cairo threw down his rifle and joined the demonstrators, yet another sign of the ordinary Egyptian soldier's growing sympathy for the democracy demonstrators. We had witnessed many similar sentiments from the army over the past two weeks. But the critical moment came on the evening of 30 January when, it is now clear, Mubarak ordered the Egyptian Third Army to crush the demonstrators in Tahrir Square with their tanks after flying F-16 fighter bombers at low level over the protesters.

Many of the senior tank commanders could be seen tearing off their headsets – over which they had received the fatal orders – to use their mobile phones. They were, it now transpires, calling their own military families for advice. Fathers who had spent their lives serving the Egyptian army told their sons to disobey, that they must never kill their own people.

I said it before. I'll say it again. These men were and are heroes. It was their decision to act like human beings, instead of deadly automatons, that prevented another Tiananmen Square from happening. That this is almost certainly common knowledge in Egypt might help explain why the people are rallying around the Army, instead of rallying against it.

Fisk's right about the West's issue, too:

The events of the past 12 hours have not, alas, been a victory for the West. American and European leaders who rejoiced at the fall of communist dictatorships have sat glumly regarding the extraordinary and wildly hopeful events in Cairo – a victory of morality over corruption and cruelty – with the same enthusiasm as many East European dictators watched the fall of their Warsaw Pact nations. Calls for stability and an "orderly" transition of power were, in fact, appeals for Mubarak to stay in power – as he is still trying to do – rather than a ringing endorsement of the demands of the overwhelming pro-democracy movement that should have struck him down.

The people of Egypt will, I suspect, remember quite well who their friends were in this struggle. They'll also never forget who hemmed and hawed due to their preference for tractable, predictable tyrants in the developing world. Nor should they.

Realists, Neo-Conservatives and Egypt

One under-appreciated but useful aspect of Egypt's revolution is that it is a direct repudiation of both the realists AND the neoconservatives. The realists never thought that anything like this could ever happen. Sure, they're preaching "military coup" now, and the military has a big role to play in the short-term, but there's really nothing in realist doctrine and theory that acceptably explains all this, and not a realist in the world that had predicted it.

It's even worse for the neocons, though. Their argument was that only violent, foreign-backed uprisings and takeovers could bring any freedom to the middle east. That was the whole point of the Iraq adventure, of their coddling of Iranian terrorists, of their advocacy of sanctions against states that they didn't like, and of their attitude towards the Middle East in general. They were completely wrong. It was non-violent, it was Arab-led, and it had NOTHING to do with outside pressure. (Far from being a target of sanctions, Egypt was a favored client of the West. )

In fact, if anything, it was more about outside support than about outside pressure; while this wasn't a "twitter revolution" or anything like that, there's no doubt that the people of Egypt drew strength and hope from the outpouring of support that they received around the world. If we as outsiders want people to "throw off their chains", we shouldn't try to force them into it, we should encourage them. Make it positive, not negative.

(The lessons for handling the Israel-Palestinian conflict are left as an exercise for the reader.)

If there's any theory in IR or political science that holds sway here, it's good ol' fashioned liberalism, the kind that realists since Morganthau have always sneered at as "idealism". The Tunisian and Egyptian people wanted to be free of their dictators, and used their passion and determination to do it. That is the finest example of liberal doctrine and liberal tradition as we've ever seen, in countries that were thought to be so thoroughly illiberal as to be unrecognizable.

This isn't just a new day for Egypt. It's a new day for how we understand the world and our place within it.

And So Much for Mubarak

AJE says that he's done. He just resigned.

Next step: Suleiman.

Edit: It happened without violence, too. That was almost certainly key: the military clearly couldn't be coaxed into attacking non-violent protesters. (I'd heard rumors that the order had actually come down, but the soldiers on the ground flatly refused. If true, it's amazing, and those men are heroes.) Mubarak was left powerless; the security forces just didn't have the power to enforce his rule, the army was unwilling, and the chaos strategy that I'd been so concerned about just didn't do the job either. I'd said that the only way the Chaos Strategy could work is if it managed to stop the Egyptian protesters from gathering momentum. It didn't. The thugs were repelled, and really wouldn't have worked again. Once the Wael Ghonim interview came out, it was all over.

That said, I'm very, very concerned about the army taking over, and about the comments being made questioning whether Egyptian democracy will be recognized as legitimate if the Muslim Brotherhood plays a role in the government. (As it almost certainly will.)

This is NOT over. Not by a long shot.

Well, THAT Didn't Go Over Well

Mubarak says "I might transfer power, but I'm going nowhere". Crowd is...displeased...by the news.

The shouts on Al Jazeera are deafening, and the crowd is beyond angry, shouting "he shall leave" in unison. I would be too. He sounded patronizing, out-of-touch, and more than a little delusional about his situation and about his people's attitude towards him. He tried to blame "outside forces", but his own countrymen are screaming for him to leave. He demonstrated exactly why no longer deserves the power he wields...if he ever really did in the first place.

Tomorrow will not be a peaceful Friday.

So Long, Hosni?

Looks like there's going to be an imminent transfer of power away from Mubarak to the Vice President and/or the army. Considering everybody and his dog has been predicting it, no big surprise; what will be surprising is if it's enough.

(Though, on AJE, they're saying that he might transfer it to the leader of Parliament in anticipation of elections in 60 days. He has that power under the Egyptian constitution. Nobody seems to know whether that's likely, though.)

Tea Partiers Buck Republicans to Kill Patriot Act

Er...I don't think anybody was expecting THIS.

A measure to extend key provisions of the Patriot Act counterterrorism surveillance law through December failed the House Tuesday night, with more than two-dozen Republicans bucking their party to oppose the measure.

The House measure, which was sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and required a two-thirds majority for passage, failed on a 277-to-148 vote. Twenty-six Republicans voted with 122 Democrats to oppose the measure, while 67 Democrats voted with 210 Republicans to back it. Ten members did not vote.

The measure would have extended three key provisions of the Patriot Act that are set to expire on Monday, Feb. 28, unless Congress moves to reauthorize them. One of the provisions authorizes the FBI to continue using roving wiretaps on surveillance targets; the second allows the government to access "any tangible items," such as library records, in the course of surveillance; and the third is a "lone wolf" provision of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act that allows for the surveillance of targets who are not connected to an identified terrorist group.

The vote came as several tea party-aligned members of the new freshman class had been expressing doubts about the measure.

Not that I have any more respect or admiration for the teabaggers. They're still a blight on the country. But it is interesting to see that they can and do buck some of the Republicans' default positions. Should make the next two years more fun.

Edit: Okay, true, most of the teabaggers voted for it. And it'll be coming up again as a regular vote, so it'll likely pass.

Still, for the Republican party, even a minor rebellion like this is somewhat of a big deal.

Andrew Coyne is What Happens When You Unleash a Republican-Style Troll on Canadians

He spouts unbelievable torrents of absolute liquid BS, but everybody's too nice to call him out on it.

Case in point: The last page of the article where he's advocating toll roads. (He has also advocated privatizing public transit, but never mind that.) He makes a whole load of absolutely unsupported and likely unsupportable conclusions. Let's go down the list:

1)Nobody cares about privacy because people use phones;
2)Poor people don't have cars in the first place;
3)Tax Credits would be a fine solution for people who can't afford to get to work TODAY;
4)Toll roads would make public transit pay for itself;
5)Transit Vehicles "speed up when tolls are imposed" (Subway riders would be amused by this, but Coyne also despises rail and believes all should ride buses);
6)This howler:

If getting more people to use transit is your aim, moreover, subsidies are the last thing you should want. The biggest factor in people’s decision whether to use transit is not the fares, but rather the speed, comfort and convenience relative to other options: that is, the passenger experience. And the surest means of forcing transit operators to pay more attention to the passenger experience is if their livelihoods depend on it. The greater the share of revenues paid for by passengers themselves, the more operators are likely to be lying awake at night thinking up ways to put bums in the seats; subsidies simply insulate them from that concern.

Now, this may be true. It may not be. But we certainly have no REASON to think any of it is true. Even if the transit operator were privatized, most sane people know that relatively few natural monopolists (which is what transit is) "lay awake at night thinking up ways to put bums in seats"; for those that do, why should they stop simply because they receive subsidies? Coyne's industry receives massive subsidies—does that mean that he doesn't give a tinker's damn about the circulation of his little rag?

(Do YOU not give a damn about the cost of mass transit when and if you use it?)

That is, I think, one of the enduring differences between the Canadian and American online media scene. While there is a lot wrong with the American blogosphere, I can be reasonably confident that someone like Coyne would be constantly assailed by people who are carving him up and serving his chunks as object lessons in what you cannot get away with in 2011. But, instead, this guy has a sinecure on Canadian public television, for God's sake, where he does little more than act the token conservative who gets all angry that the government isn't right-wing enough.

Even Kady O'Malley, someone whom I respect quite a bit, gets all chummy with him on Twitter, exhorting people to follow the old hack as if he needs any MORE of an audience. Collegiality should have its limits.

As much as I'm not terribly fond of how the Huffington Post's owners have become fabulously wealthy off of the backs of unpaid labor, at least you could rest assured that somebody at Huffpo would tear this guy up. In the UK, they'd probably tear his heart out and show it to him. But in the True North? Not so much. Unfortunate.

Holy Hell, Al Jazeera Offices in Cairo DESTROYED

ABC News

Al Jazeera's office in Cairo was stormed and burned today, the most dramatic evidence yet that Egyptian authorities are desperate to shut down the network widely praised for revealing the size and reach of the demonstrations.

Over the last week nine of the network's reporters have been detained and satellite providers across the region have shut its signal off.

The assault on Al Jazeera is part of an offensive against the foreign press by those in Cairo upset by the portrayal of the rock and fire bomb battles. More than 100 reporters, including those from ABC News, have menaced, threatened with death and beaten in the streets.

Much of the anger by the supporters of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak has been aimed at Al Jazeera.

That authorities have targeted reporters for Al Jazeera English – as well as those for Al Jazeera Arabic -- shows how the younger, more analytical of the two channels has come echo the Arabic channel's ability to get under the skin of autocratic, unpopular regimes.

For almost five years, Al Jazeera English has followed a single motto: "Giving voice to the voiceless." Despite the attempts to silence it, the network's coverage of the revolts seem to be ensuring that its own voice is only getting louder.

Al Jazeera English has its detractors, but its coverage of Egypt has been lauded by most independent critics as aggressive, informative and more extensive than its competitors. Its increasing influence has earned the ire less of the United States -- often called its most obvious target, but which this week defended its right to report freely -- than of the governments of the region. Today at least four governments in the Arab world have banned the channel from operating, none more obviously than the Egyptians in the last two weeks.

Remember how I was talking about "desperation moves"? Yeah. That.

Ban-Ki Ain't Happy

And why would he be? Using hired thugs to attack pro-democracy protesters is terrible and cause for condemnation alone...but using said thugs to intimidate and attack journalists and calling them "Israeli spies" is beyond the pale. Makes sense that he'd condemn it.

Something's Up in Tahrir

Well, besides surprisingly peaceful (even joyous protests) that is.

There's a lot of chatter about how "something" is happening in the Square. People are cheering for some reason.

Edit: Apparently they thought Mubarak had acquiesced and stepped down. Not so much. Still, the protests appear to no longer be battles between pro- and anti-mubarak supporters. Supposedly the army is working to reduce the violence.

Odd, that. The chaos strategy was working. You'd think the military would continue standing by. Might reflect the divisions within the military. (And I've heard there are MANY.)

Egyptian Gov't Calling Western Journalists "Israeli Spies"

So, uh, Bibi? How's that "hey, at least the Egyptian dictators are pro-Israel" thing working out for you?

In any case, this is disgusting.

The conventional wisdom goes, when it’s too dangerous to film on the streets, you can always do an interview with someone inside a building.

Not in Alexandria you can’t. Not today.

We had arranged to interview a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood in his apartment, but the neighbours – sitting by the door on the street, snarled like guard dogs when we arrived. They didn’t want foreigners inside their building, they said, and saw us off.

We retreated down the street to our car. A group of young men approached, armed with baseball bats, sticks and machetes. They were the neighbourhood Popular Committee.

For the past few days, these groups have been smiling and friendly to us but this lot started shouting and banging on the roof of our car. They demanded to see our passports.

I think I know why. Last night and today, Egyptian state TV had been broadcasting of Israeli spies disguised as western journalists roaming the country.

It’s a wicked rumour to spread because it puts any westerner – or any Egyptian working with westerners – at risk of a beating or worse. It’s cynical to say the least.

This government did a deal with Israel, but it still stirs up anti-Zionist feelings when it suits and that’s one reason so many journalists have been attacked in Cairo today.

I guess rank anti-Semitism is okay after all, just as long as being stirred up by people who suit your state's interests. Good to know.

Nationalist Element of Chaos Strategy

I should have pointed out that part of all this is, as always, to blame "outside influences" for what's going on. That's what Suleiman is up to. Though he can't seem to decide between blaming Americans or terrists or both. That won't help him much.

Targeted Foreign Journalists and the Chaos Strategy

Foreign journalists are being targeted in Egypt, says the Guardian liveblog. It also talks about how a police van drove through pro-democracy protesters at speed, and confirmed that the Mubarak thugs had police IDs.

The game is becoming clear, as I noted earlier. Build up a perception of chaos not only in the Egyptian public, but among foreign journalists. Scare them into leaving or intimidate them into following the party line about how the "transition" will be enough. (It won't.)  Force the protesters into arming themselves in order to protect themselves against the "pro-Mubarak" hired goons, and then use that as an excuse to forcibly evacuate the square and suppress the protests.  Without the visible protests, people will start to assume that everything's over. Soon enough, it will be; Mubarak may leave, but his regime will stand.

This whole thing is built on momentum. The reason why the uprising has been so successful is because the crowds never stopped growing. Send the riot police or don't, it didn't matter: there was going to be more, and more, and more people no matter what you did. And since they were non-violent, they couldn't be effectively repressed without inviting the rage of both the country and the world. The cops couldn't do it, the military wouldn't do it, and it had showed no sign of stopping.

That's why he's "resigning" in order to protect his regime. That's why he had to play Mr. Dress-up with the security goons. That's why he's trying to scare the shit out of foreign journalists. He's using them to try to break up the momentum. He's banking on people saying "well, he IS leaving, and in the meantime we need order in Egypt", forgetting that the important part isn't removing the dictator, it's ending the dictatorship. It's a desperation play, and it is going to ruin any shred of credibility the regime has. But sometimes desperation plays work.

The worst part, though, is that if it DOES work, it could stop this wave of democratization in its tracks. Hell, it could stop democratization, period. Every dictator on the planet will watch this and think "aha, THAT is how you stop a non-violent uprising". They'll learn their lessons, and this "chaos strategy" will become ubiquitous. If the people rise up? Rest assured, the goons will be along shortly. Tunisia's dictators just had the misfortune of not knowing about this trick a month ago.

But if non-violent uprisings are neutered, what's left? We already know that neo-liberal pro-market reforms do two things to promote democracy: Jack and Shit. Just ask the Chinese. We also know that neo-conservative imposed democracies don't work, either; the imperial power seems to inevitably and comically screw it up, as we saw in Iraq.  Al Qaeda's pathetic inability to effect any useful change whatsoever shows that using terrorism doesn't do a damned bit of good, even if it wasn't monstrous.

So is armed insurrection all that's left?  Is that the only way that anybody will be able to remove an autocracy post-Egypt?

Maybe.

But it's going to be a depressing-as-hell world to live in if it's true.

Edit: And, yes, I'm sure they're also rooting the journalists out of Tahrir because they want to give the thugs a freer hand.  But I suspect that scaring the shit out of those journalists is just as important.

Healthcare Repeal Shot Down in Senate

Less important, of course, but it's still something notable, if only to show how the Republican house is willing to waste everybody's time tilting at windmills.

Has "Democracy Lost" in Egypt? Foreign Policy Sez "Yep"...Edit: AJ Sez "Not So Fast"

I'll grant that this analysis from Robert Springbord is superficially convincing. He argues that the democratic forces in Egypt have lost their opportunity, since Mubarak has (supposedly) turned the conflict in Egypt into one between pro- and anti-regime groups, instead of a clear-cut battle between the dictator and the people.   He's banking on people's desire for order to sap the will from the protesters, and notes that military has retained its legitimacy.

Again, superficially convincing. And yet I don't buy it. Why?

Because everybody knows that Mubarak is behind the thugs. It' s not a he said/she said sort of situation. It's not really debatable or questionable. The pro-Mubarak thugs are a mixture of plainclothes security forces, hired goons, and some poor bastards who work for various state enterprises that were forced to join or face termination. They are absolutely and universally recognized as such. So the situation hasn't really changed; it's still a battle between the security forces and the people. The only change is that the security guys took off their riot gear and grabbed machetes and rocks.

Springbord's right about the strengthened hand of the military. But that was never really in doubt. Civilians were never going to seize power from the military. The question was always whether or not the military as a whole were going to back Mubarak et al, and that question is still up in the air. The Egyptians don't seem to be terribly satisfied with the thought of Suleiman taking over, either, so it's not like having Mubarak act as a sacrificial lamb will help much. The military still faces the prospect of having to fire on Egyptians; something they are clearly unwilling to do.

The real problem, though, is that Springbord doesn't seem to really lay out how democracy could have won. Was he expecting a full-on armed revolution? Was he somehow not expecting Mubarak to stir up black-ops chaos, when every dictator under threat does that, including good ol' Saddam? Would he have handled things differently, or is Springbord just saying that popular, non-violent protest is useless? And if so, why has it worked in the past?

He may be right. The thuggery yesterday may herald the end of this popular uprising. But I don't buy it. Not yet. Not when the "experts" never came close to predicting any of this in the first place.

Edit: Oh, but look what was on the AJ liveblog:

The pro-Mubarak crowd suddenly retreated, and the pro-democracy protesters advanced a moveable wall of metal shields to a new front line much further up. A side battle erupted down a street behind the pro-Mubarak lines, with rock throwing and molotov cocktails. An armored personnel carrier opened fire into the air, shooting red tracers up over Cairo, in an apparent effort to disperse/frighten the pro-Mubarak crowd, who contracted again. The pro-democracy protesters are now advancing their line of staggered metal shields farther and farther and seem to have gained decisive momentum.

Looks like at least some of the military guys aren't too thrilled with Mubarak's goons. Though, ominously, it looks like more goons are on the way.

Kristof on Mubarak's Thugs

Here:

The pro-democracy protesters are unarmed and have been peaceful at every step. But the pro-Mubarak thugs are arriving in buses and are armed — and they’re using their weapons.


In my area of Tahrir, the thugs were armed with machetes, straight razors, clubs and stones. And they all had the same chants, the same slogans and the same hostility to journalists. They clearly had been organized and briefed. So the idea that this is some spontaneous outpouring of pro-Mubarak supporters, both in Cairo and in Alexandria, who happen to end up clashing with other side — that is preposterous. It’s difficult to know what is happening, and I’m only one observer, but to me these seem to be organized thugs sent in to crack heads, chase out journalists, intimidate the pro-democracy forces and perhaps create a pretext for an even harsher crackdown.

I have no idea whether this tactic will work. But the idea that President Mubarak should make the case that he is necessary for Egypt’s stability by unleashing violence and chaos on his nation’s youth — it’s a sad and shameful end to his career. And I hope that the international community will firmly denounce this kind of brutality apparently organized by the government.

I've differed with Kristof on a lot of things, but not this.