Month: August 2013

Speaking of sending signals

by digby

h/t @IncredibleViews

Going to congress doesn’t change the merits of the argument

by digby

Just a note to say that while I’m glad the president has decided to get congressional authorization — it is a necessary concession to democratic principles — it does not change my calculus about the wisdom of bombing Syria. I’ve thought a lot about this since the war with Iraq, when I made arguments repeatedly about “norms” and just war theory and constitutional requirements and the necessity of UN approval.  And I realized later that it was all a dodge on a certain level.  Yes, international norms are important as are our adherence to treaties and constitutional obligations.  But they don’t trump the fact that it is unwise to take certain actions even if all those conditions are met.

I do not think it makes sense to bomb Syria on the merits, regardless of who approves it.  I think the US is needlessly running into a buzzsaw and may very likely make things worse. In my view, the correct approach for the US is energetic diplomacy with an eye toward pulling Russia and China away from their positions and getting the other Middle Eastern countries to put pressure on Assad. We have become dependent on the idea that bombing and killing is the only way to affect change despite the evidence that it doesn’t work any better than using other approaches. The US has a lot of power and influence aside from an ability to launch cruise missiles.  I think we’ve gotten tremendously uncreative. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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We don’t need no stinkin’ scientists

by digby

Is this a great country or what?

New data compiled by a coalition of top scientific and medical research groups show that a large majority of scientists are receiving less federal help than they were three years ago, despite spending far more time writing grants in search of it. Nearly one-fifth of scientists are considering going overseas to continue their research because of the poor funding climate in America.

The study, which was spearheaded by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) and will be formally released next week, is the latest to highlight the extent to which years of stagnant or declining budgets, made worse by sequestration, have damaged the world of science.

More than 3,700 scientists from all 50 states participated in the study, offering online responses in June and July 2013. They offered sobering assessments of the state of their profession. Eighty percent said they were spending more of their time writing grants now than in 2010, while 67 percent said they were receiving less grant money now than they were back then. Only two percent of respondents said they had received money from their employers — predominantly academic institutions — to make up for the loss of federal funds.

So, what’s the problem? As long as we have Jesus and the the Invisible Hand (pretty sure they are the same thing) we don’t need a bunch of scientists wasting our hard earned money. Our problems will all go away as long as rich people are properly rewarded for their great service to our society. It’s like magic.

I am beginning to agree with the conservatives about one thing: the self-esteem movement has hurt this culture terribly.  However it’s not the squishy ladymen on the left who have taken it to heart, however. It’s the right wing yahoos who believe the United States has been ordained by God to be the “greatest country the world has ever known.” The fact that we are rapidly turning ourselves into a second rate backwater means nothing to them because well — we’re Number One! Everybody says so.

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One More False Equivalence

by tristero

And while we’re on the subject of science….

The logic goes: people on the right have screwy ideas, therefore people on the left must have equally screwy ideas. And therefore, a reasonable person must position her/his own ideas between the equal “extremes” of right and left opinions.

Of course, this logic is itself screwy. But that doesn’t prevent the Times from publishing letters like this one, from a poor ‘ittle conservative who believes he was treated unfair:

Anti-science complaints are most often aimed at the creationism espoused by religious conservatives, but there’s rarely a word about the left’s dubious opposition to engineering marvels like nuclear energy…

That’s right: opposition to nuclear power is as extreme and intellectually vapid as refusing to accept the fact that organisms evolve.

There a little problem with that, however. It’s called reality. From CNN:

While the amount of radioactivity released into the environment in March 2011 [by the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster] has been estimated as between 10 percent and 50 percent of the fallout from the Chernobyl accident, the 400,000 tons of contaminated water stored on the Fukushima site contain more than 2.5 times the amount of radioactive cesium dispersed during the 1986 catastrophe in Ukraine…

…[A] huge amount of highly contaminated water – enough to fill 160 Olympic-size swimming pools…

Like it or not, nuclear energy is an extremely dangerous form of power. Given Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima (to name just three), opposition to the building of nuclear power plants is a reasonable position.

On the other hand, any way you cut it, creationism is simply a crude theology and nutso science that deserves not an iota of respect.

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Can someone explain to me why this isn’t a bigger deal?

by digby

I realize that the intelligence memo was a Friday newsdump on a holiday week-end but I’m still surprised I haven’t seen any discussion of this.

American intelligence agencies had indications three days beforehand that the Syrian regime was poised to launch a lethal chemical attack that killed more than a thousand people and has set the stage for a possible U.S. military strike on Syria.

The disclosure — part of a larger U.S. intelligence briefing on Syria’s chemical attacks — raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions for the American government. First and foremost: What, if anything, did it do to notify the Syrian opposition of the pending attack?

In a call with reporters Friday afternoon, senior administration officials did not address whether this information was shared with rebel groups in advance of the attack. A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the information had been shared.

But at least some members of the Syrian opposition are already lashing out at the U.S. government for not acting ahead of time to prevent the worst chemical attack in a quarter-century. “If you knew, why did you take no action?” asked Dlshad Othman, a Syrian activist and secure-communications expert who has recently relocated to the United States. He added that none of his contacts had any sort of prior warning about the nerve gas assault — although such an attack was always a constant fear.

Razan Zaitouneh, an opposition activist in the town of Douma, one of the towns hit in the Aug. 21 attack, said she had no early indication of a major chemical attack. “Even the moment [the attack hit], we thought it was as usual, limited and not strong,” she told The Cable in an instant message. That only changed when “we started to hear about the number of injuries.”

“It’s unbelievable that they did nothing to warn people or try to stop the regime before the crime,” Zaitouneh added.

Here’s the passage in the Intelligence Memo that to which article refers:

We have intelligence that leads us to assess that Syrian chemical weapons personnel – including personnel assessed to be associated with the SSRC – were preparing chemical munitions prior to the attack. In the three days prior to the attack, we collected streams of human, signals and geospatial intelligence that reveal regime activities that we assess were associated with preparations for a chemical weapons attack.

Syrian chemical weapons personnel were operating in the Damascus suburb of ‘Adra from Sunday, August 18 until early in the morning on Wednesday, August 21 near an area that the regime uses to mix chemical weapons, including sarin. On August 21, a Syrian regime element prepared for a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus area, including through the utilization of gas masks. Our intelligence sources in the Damascus area did not detect any indications in the days prior to the attack that opposition affiliates were planning to use chemical weapons.

Call me crazy but that seems like a big deal. Why didn’t they reveal this publicly? I get that they were probably protecting sources and methods but this is a chemical weapons attack, something we allegedly believe is so far beyond the pale that it requires military action despite the fact that military action is widely acknowledged to be useless in stopping the carnage. And anyway, the cat’s out of the bag now — if that was their concern why in the world did they put this in this memo?

If this is all about the international norms against the use of chemical weapons being upheld, then I honestly cannot understand why we wouldn’t have announced that we knew this was coming — if only to warn the people of Syria. Who knows, maybe Assad (or whoever else did this) would have called it off! Instead it looks as though we sat on the information, knowing it was coming. (And, make no mistake, there are people who will surmise that was done purposely in order to create a casus belli. And that would be despicably immoral.)

The US government may not be able to do much in this situation because it is perversely limited by its military dominance. But there is one thing it has: the entire world now knows it has the capability of listening in on pretty much any conversation anywhere. That’s a power they could have used to intimidate the Assad regime into thinking twice about doing this horrible thing. But it’s entirely possible that they are so instinctively over-protective of their secrets that they couldn’t move quickly enough.

On the other hand, this memo could just be full of lies. It wouldn’t be the first time US Intelligence put out bogus information to bolster a case for military action, would it?

Update: Greg Mitchell did note this yesterday.

Update II: People on twitter presume that the administration probably only put together this evidence after the fact. That may be true. But considering the vast resources that go into our NSA/CIA operations, one has to wonder why they couldn’t put it together in real time. After all, they knew what they were specifically looking for.

But hey, maybe all the money and capabilities they’ve developed haven’t improved their ability to connect the dots even when they have a small number of people to spy upon and they have very specific suspicions. Good to know.

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A fanfare for the common man on Labor Day weekend

by David Atkins

It’s Labor Day weekend here in America. People are dying in Syria while the rest of the world tries to figure out what if anything at all can or should be done about it.

Now would be a good time for Americans to think how lucky we are, and to be thankful for the brave labor and progressive activists who have made our middle class and our prosperity possible, in spite of the plutocrats constantly seeking to destroy it. It’s a good time for an old-fashioned Fanfare for the Common Man, courtesy Aaron Copland.

A twerking trainwreck

by digby

Brain bleach and tequila please.  And make it a double

“Iraq was a long, long time ago”

by digby

The New York Times ombudsman has been getting complaints from readers about the newspaper’s coverage of Syria. Apparently quite a few people are hearing echoes of Iraq — and they don’t like it. She looked into it:

I talked with the managing editor Dean Baquet about this on Thursday, and to Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, on Friday. I asked both to what extent the work they are supervising – respectively, news stories and opinion pieces, including Times editorials – is influenced by an expressed desire to avoid past mistakes.

Mr. Baquet told me that the specter of Iraq is not something that has come up explicitly for discussion in meetings he has held among editors and reporters on the Syria coverage.

“I’ve never said, ‘Let’s remember what happened with Iraq,’” he told me. “I don’t think it’s necessary. I haven’t had to instruct the staff to ask hard questions. They are doing that.”

He added: “The press’s coverage of Iraq always lurks in the background. But it was a long, long time ago.”

Syria is not another Iraq, he said – one of the major differences, he said, is that the Obama administration has no enthusiasm for this conflict in the way that President George W. Bush’s administration did a decade ago.

“Nobody could read our coverage and say that The New York Times is trumpeting war,” Mr. Baquet added.

Hoookay. The paper that published Judy Miller’s WMD propaganda certainly has no obligation to be especially mindful of its reporting about another “WMD” threat in the middle east. It was, after all, a “long, long time ago.”

Sullivan weighs in:

I’ve been observing The Times’s Syria coverage and its editorials for many weeks, with an eye to this question. While The Times has offered deep and rich coverage from both Washington and the Syrian region, the tone cannot be described as consistently skeptical. I have noticed in recent weeks the ways that other major newspapers have signaled to their readers that they mean to question the government’s assertions. For example, although it may seem superficial, The Washington Post has sent a strong message when it has repeatedly used the word “alleged” in its main headlines to describe the chemical weapons attacks.

I have also found that The Times sometimes writes about the administration’s point of view in The Times’s own voice rather than providing distance through clear attribution. This is a subtle thing, and individual examples are bound to seem unimportant, but consider, for example, the second paragraph of Friday’s lead story. (The boldface emphasis is mine.)

The negative vote in Britain’s Parliament was a heavy blow to Prime Minister David Cameron, who had pledged his support to Mr. Obama and called on lawmakers to endorse Britain’s involvement in a brief operation to punish the government of President Bashar al-Assad for apparently launching a deadly chemical weapons attack last week that killed hundreds.

With the use of the word “apparently” – rather than directly attributing the administration, The Times seems to take the government’s position at face value. It’s a tiny example, of course, but in the aggregate it’s the kind of thing the readers I’ve quoted here are frustrated about.

I think this has been the usual approach of most of the big establishment papers for decades on these national security stories. They all comically cheered the run-up to Iraq, making their support so clear that it couldn’t be ignored. You would think that would have made a difference, but it hasn’t. Still, in my experience, the mainstream press identification with the government is these situations is always obvious.

When the government decides its going to war, most elite opinion falls in line and public opinion usually shifts, at least temporarily, as a result. Most pundits seem to think that being against a war that ends in victory is far more embarrassing than being against a war that ends up being a mistake, which has always struck me as very telling.

Still, this doesn’t seem to be going as well for the government as one might have expected. The administration seems to have hoped they could get in and out quickly before anyone paid close attention and that hasn’t worked out. And it seems not to have anticipated the reluctance on the part of politicians everywhere to stick their necks out again, which is downright puzzling. This product roll-out has been very bumpy and it’s hard to see where it’s going to end up at this point.

*In fairness, Sullivan does also point out that the editorial board has been more skeptical and that there has been some good, front page reporting that didn’t have its thumb on the government’s scales.

As California goes, so goes the west

by David Atkins

California emigres are changing the west:

Colorado’s politics have become positively Californian lately. There are new restrictions on guns. Pot is legal. The legislative agenda featured an expansion of alternative-energy use requirements for rural consumers. Gay couples can now enter into civil unions.

There’s a reason for all this.

Lots of Californians have moved to Denver and its environs, bringing a progressive strain of politics with them and angering more conservative parts of the state — so much so that 10 northeastern counties are planning symbolic but serious votes on secession this fall.

Conservatives have discovered that living on the far side of the Rockies is no longer far enough to get away from the influence of West Coast liberals.

“California migration, to a degree, has altered Colorado politics,” says Mike Krause, vice president of the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank in Denver. “I see California license plates in my neighborhood and on my commute all the time.”

California transplants aren’t the entire reason the Mountain West has become arguably the nation’s chief swing region in national politics. The number of Californians moving to other Western states has actually declined over the past couple of decades, while growth of Hispanic populations has been more important in terms of shaking things up politically.

Still, newcomers from California have not only helped put Colorado in the Democratic column in recent presidential elections, but they’ve also helped President Obama carry Nevada two times.

Californians have contributed to make Salt Lake City and Boise more Democratic in recent years, but they are easily outvoted by Republicans in other parts of Utah and Idaho. Similarly, other states such as Arizona and remain reliably Republican, but contain more liberal enclaves thanks to new arrivals from the West Coast.

Conservatives decry this undeniable phenomenon as Californians leaving a dystopia to ruin other places. Nothing could be farther from the truth, of course: California is such a desirable place to live that property values and other costs of living are through the roof. Inevitably, many professionals decide that it would be more worthwhile to go where the cost of living is cheaper, so long as they can remain reasonably well employed. And eventually, liberal policies will make those states more desirable places to live, which in turn will drive up property values and cost of living due to demand, etc. None of which are problems so long as wages can keep pace.

In the meantime, a liberal shift throughout West will eventually radically alter the entire nation’s politics. Soon enough the nation’s balance of power will shift away from the South and toward the West, with California–and Californians both resident and emigre–leading the charge.

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“Then and there the child of Independence was born” (Hint: it wasn’t about taxes)

by digby

I wrote about a California court decision allowing police to search the cell phone of any suspect who’se been arrested. I brought up the fact that cell phones aren’t just phones these days, they are a repository of all of our communications with access to our browsing history, emails, pictures an documents. It’s an extremely intrusive search and to do it without probably cause is really quite shocking.

This blog post by Brianne Gorod at the Constitutional Accountability Center gives some historical context explaining why it’s also an egregious violation of the Fourth Amerndment:

The Fourth Amendment broadly protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and also provides that “no Warrants shall issue” unless they “particularly describ[e] the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” When the Framers adopted this Amendment, they were responding, in large part, to the British use of “general warrants” and “writs of assistance.” These warrants and writs lacked any specificity about the people or items to be searched and were not predicated on any individualized suspicion; essentially unlimited in scope, they allowed the officers executing them virtually unfettered discretion to engage in broad searches of a person’s home and the personal papers and effects in that home.

The use of these warrants was the subject of great opposition on the eve of the American Revolution. In a high profile case in 1761, a group of Boston merchants challenged the use of general warrants. Their attorney, James Otis, decried them as “the worst instrument of arbitrary power” and warned that they “place[d] the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” Indeed, their use was one of the grievances that prompted the call for independence from British rule. John Adams later remarked that Otis’s attack on the use of general warrants “was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.” And as the Nation’s new Constitution was being debated, there were calls for an explicit prohibition on the use of such warrants. The uniquely detailed text of the Fourth Amendment was the result. It not only enshrined in our Nation’s charter a specific prohibition against general warrants, but it also reflected the Framers’ more general concern that government officers not be able to search a person’s home, papers, and effects in the absence of some individualized, justified suspicion that a specific search would produce evidence of wrongdoing. Stated simply, the Framers wanted to strip the government of the arbitrary power to rifle through a person’s belongings in the hope of finding something incriminating.

The practice permitted by the California courts (and others) violates this fundamental Fourth Amendment precept. Although the police may sometimes conduct warrantless searches after a lawful arrest, the traditional justifications for such searches were not present in Riley’s case—Riley’s cell phone had been taken away from him upon his arrest, thus eliminating any concern about destruction of evidence, and the text messages, emails, photos, and other digital contents of the phone could not have posed any threat, let alone an imminent one, to the arresting officers’ safety. To the contrary, the police acknowledged that they had dug through “a lot of stuff” on the phone specifically “looking for evidence.” This is precisely the type of search for which the Constitution demands a warrant.

Limits on the government’s power to search your home and personal communications without specific suspicion of wrongdoing and authorization by a judge is fundamental to the American definition of liberty. It goes all the way back to the beginning. It’s not an afterthought. This vacuous notion that “technology” somehow changes that basic principle must be challenged.

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