The Agonist - thoughtful, global, timely

How Desperate Is FOX News To Improve Their Falling Ratings?

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:47:15 -0500

By the way, this exchange shows just how ignorant and idiotic Steve Doocy and the other blonde bimbo are:

Host Steve Doocy, however, seemed to be fully invested in the interview. He mentioned that Eddie Van Halen used to stipulate, in his contract riders, that there should be no brown M&M’s in the dressing room.

“That’s got to make a candy feel bad,” Doocy said, feigning a frown.

“Well, he didn’t know what he was missing,” Ms. Brown replied, “and I’m the ruler of all. So…it’s his loss.”

“Take that, Eddie,” Doocy replied.

"Ms. Brown" was the M&M.

The truth of the Van Halen story is, yes, it was in their contract, no brown M&Ms. But here's the thing: it wasn't that they had anything against brown M&Ms.

They put that clause in there as a very clever way to make sure the contract was being adhrered to. It was a down-and-dirty "checksum." If they found brown M&Ms in the dressing room, they could almost be certain the promoter or arena was screwing them in other ways, too. They would then unleash the lawyers and accountants, and usually recoup bookoo bucks.

Yes, it was a cute way to get a gimmick extended another thirty seconds, but the gimmick shouldn't have happened in the first place AND they shouldn't have doubled down on the stoopit.

A Trainwreck

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:34:00 -0500

That's sort of the take-away I get from the 9th Circuit decision on the case against Proposition 8 in California.

The relevant paragraph:

"Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples," states the opinion written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt, one of the court's most liberal judges.

This is the litigatory equivalent of "Ohno, you din't!"

Attorneys on both sides seem prepared to take this case to the Supreme Court, and I'd be willing to bet that at least six justices (the four liberals, Scalia and Roberts) are pawing the ground in the starting gate.

But...

The decision applies strictly to California, even though the 9th Circuit could have extended it over all nine states in its jurisdiction.

Too, the Appeals Court relied heavily on the 1996 Supreme Court ruling which overturned a Colorado law that limited civil rights protections for homosexuals.

Taken together, these conditions may force the SCOTUS to say "Thanks, but no thanks." Not that it has a history of non-intervention (Bush v. Gore *koffkoff*) but that was a different court, almost altogether.

It's going to be an interesting year, as the kids say.

Arab Sprung

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:10:18 -0500

This is probably not the way a junta should operate, at least internationally:

(CAIRO) — Egypt's ruling generals are playing a risky game of brinksmanship by cracking down on American nonprofit groups that promote democracy, threatening a relationship with Washington that has brought the military billions of dollars in aid over the past three decades.

The generals may be betting the U.S. cannot afford to cut relations with Egypt — a cornerstone of American Mideast policy. But the ruling military council may also fear it has much more than foreign aid to lose if it fully embraces a democratic transition that could bring civilian oversight of its substantial financial assets and curb its long-standing domination of politics.

Egypt on Sunday referred 19 Americans, including the son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, and 24 other employees of pro-democracy nonprofit groups to trial before a criminal court on accusations they illegally used foreign funds to foment unrest in the country.

Set aside for a moment the fact that perhaps Egypt has a point: American NGOs have in the past been not-so-"N," often serving as CIA fronts.

And let's be fair, the US really does need the military leadership, not only as a chess piece in the game of Middle East Peace, but also as a show to the Islamic Brotherhood, which had a strong showing in the recent parliementary elections, that we're not going anywhere anytime soon.

But brinksmanship has never played well with American interests. Just ask North Korea. It's a game we play right out on the wire, and we play it very well, mostly because the vast majority of the American people couldn't give a rat's ass what we're doing 5,000 miles and two continents away.

It's sort of a "license to kill," is what I'm saying.

The military leadership, meanwhile, is under pressure to ensure an orderly transfer of power to a duly-elected civilian government. Likely, they are looking for assurances from the US that they will not be financially abandoned, and will continue to be supplied weapons and aid. Just as likely, we've probably pulled back on the reins of commitment to those understandings. After all, would you want to hand a gun to someone who might be ordered to fire it on you?

42,000 year old Neanderthal art found

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:35:50 -0500

This is simply awesome.

The world's oldest works of art have been found in a cave on Spain's Costa del Sol, scientists believe.

Six paintings of seals are at least 42,000 years old and are the only known artistic images created by Neanderthal man, experts claim.

Professor Jose Luis Sanchidrian, from the University of Cordoba, described the discovery as 'an academic bombshell', as all previous art work has been attributed to Homo sapiens.

Spanish scientists sent organic residue found next to the paintings to Miami, where they were dated at being between 43,500 and 42,300 years old.

In 2010, archaeologist João Zilhão at the University of Bristol found 50,000-year-old jewelry at two caves in southeastern Spain, art dating back 10,000 years before the fossil record reveals evidence of modern humans entering Europe. The oldest art by homo sapiens is some 75,000 years old and was found in South Africa in 2002.

This new find shifts back the earliest known hominid painted art by 10,000 years, and away from being exclusively a creation of homo sapiens. That's mind-blowing. Still, the thought that our neanderthal cousins had the kind of complex mental states and rich culture needed for art is just a warm fuzzy on a day when I've read so much depressing news.

Romney's Minimum Wage Comments Draw Rightwing Anger

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:33:54 -0500

Poor Mitt Romney. (No, not really.) Having been lambasted for being richer than God - and paying a lower tax rate than the Deity too - he has tried to get some "compassionate conservative" chops back by advocating linking the minimum wage to inflation.

Oops.

Romney's comments have caused concern among conservatives inside and outside the party.

"It goes to show he's still very defensive about his own wealth," Steve Forbes, the publishing magnate who made his own bids for the presidency in 1996 and 2000, told Yahoo News. "All it does is give the base another reason to be unenthusiastic about him."

Forbes, a free-market advocate who advised Rick Perry's campaign before the Texas governor quit the race last month, said the minimum wage lowers employment among young people who need to build job skills. "So in the name of showing his compassion, he hurts the opportunities for those who need it the most," Forbes said of Romney.

Dick Armey, the former Republican House Majority Leader who leads the influential small-government advocacy group FreedomWorks, told Yahoo News that Romney was "wrong" on the issue. "The fact of the matter is, when you look at the economic truths surrounding the minimum wage, higher mandated wages ultimately lead to job loss," Armey said.

And Newt Gingrich, Romney's leading rival for the nomination, said Sunday on Meet the Press that "virtually every economist in the country believes that [indexing the minimum wage to inflation] further makes it difficult for young people to get a job."

Also blasting Mitt for caring about the poorest were The Club For Growth, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, Jim DeMint, Michele Bachman and Andy McCarthy.

This is going to be a major feature of the 2012 electoral landscape. Thanks to folks like the Occupy movement, income inequality is one of the biggest hot-button issues. Romney realizes that to stand any chance in the general he has to address blue-collar concerns about his own wealth and "government of the people by the 1%, for the 1%". However, every time he does, he's going to take flak from "I'm Alright, Jack" Republicans. He's between a blue-collar rock and a far-right hard place.

The Renminbi Standard

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:04:06 -0500

Via the WSJ, a new Brookings study (PDF) says the Chinese currency will become an international reserve currency within the next decade, "eroding but not displacing the dollar’s dominance."

This Is Not Syria's "Benghazi Moment"

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:16:50 -0500

I'm a little leery of citing the UK Independent's Robert Fisk for various reasons, but this seems right to me.

President Bashar al-Assad is not about to go. Not yet. Not, maybe, for quite a long time. ...look east, and what does Bashar see? Loyal Iran standing with him. Loyal Iraq – Iran's new best friend in the Arab world – refusing to impose sanctions. And to the west, loyal little Lebanon refusing to impose sanctions. Thus from the border of Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, Assad has a straight line of alliances which should prevent, at least, his economic collapse.

There's also the small matter of the Russian naval base at Tartus, which Russia upgraded last year so that it was deep enough even for Russian aircraft carriers. The Kuznetsov was there last November for a flag-waving visit in support of the Assad regime.

Syria won't see regime change by foreign intervention for the same reason Bahrain won't - a Great Power has too much vested interest there. Whether or not Assad is practising genocide and should go is neither here nor there in that assessment, notice. This is the realpolitik.

Today, Russia's foreign minister is in Damascus to talk Assad down some.

Sergey Lavrov's visit comes days after Syrian allies Russia and China vetoed a Western- and Arab-backed resolution at the United Nations that would have condemned the Assad regime's crackdown on dissent and calling on him to transfer some of his powers to his deputy. The Syrian government had rejected the Arab plan as intervention in Syria's internal affairs.

Thousands of Syrians cheered Russia's foreign minister today as he arrived in Damascus.

"Necessary reforms must be implemented in order to address legitimate demands of the people striving for a better life," Lavrov later told Assad, according to Russian state-run news agency ITAR-Tass."

Lavrov also said Assad is ready for dialogue with the opposition.

"It's clear that efforts to stop the violence should be accompanied by the beginning of dialogue among the political forces," he said. "Today we received confirmation of the readiness of the president of Syria for this work."

So far, opposition groups have refused to talk to Assad, standing firm on their demand for regime change. The U.S. and the West could probably do more good by trying to cajole them to the negotiating table - while Russia holds Assad's hand and makes him play nice - than talking about how disgusted they are with Russia and China's UNSC vetos.

Obama Embraces Super-PAC

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:49:38 -0500

The Obama campaign press release punts the move as one of practical necessity.

The President opposed the Citizens United decision. He understood that with the dramatic growth in opportunities to raise and spend unlimited special-interest money, we would see new strategies to hide it from public view. He continues to support a law to force full disclosure of all funding intended to influence our elections, a reform that was blocked in 2010 by a unanimous Republican filibuster in the U.S. Senate. And the President favors action—by constitutional amendment, if necessary—to place reasonable limits on all such spending.

But this cycle, our campaign has to face the reality of the law as it currently stands.

Over the last few months, Super PACs affiliated with Republican presidential candidates have spent more than $40 million on television and radio, almost all of it for negative ads.

Last week, filings showed that the Super PAC affiliated with Mitt Romney's campaign raised $30 million in 2011 from fewer than 200 contributors, most of them from the financial sector. Governor Romney personally helped raise money for this group, which is run by some of his closest allies.

Meanwhile, other Super PACs established for the sole purpose of defeating the President—along with "nonprofits" that also aren't required to disclose the sources of their funding—have raised more than $50 million. In the aggregate, these groups are expected to spend half a billion dollars, above and beyond what the Republican nominee and party are expected to commit to try to defeat the President.

With so much at stake, we can't allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm.

There are going to be two stances on this. One will agree with the Obama campaign that it makes no sense to "unilaterally disarm" and thus perhaps allow a higher-spending Republican to win the presidency - for that would surely doom any overturn of Citizens United. The Obama campaign's basic argument is that Obama must embrace a super-Pac to eventually get rid of super-PACs.

The other view will be that this is sheer hypocrisy - that giving up a moral position just because it's a tough stance to take is, not to put too fine a point on it, immoral. It leaves Obama open to the charge that he is trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Readers' mileage will no doubt vary on which of these views to take.

Update: MSNBC's First Read notes the echo of Obama's 2008 reversal on public financing and adds.

his decision won’t just be a financial boon for the struggling Democratic Super PACs; it’s going to be a seal of approval for the Republican Super PACs. They now have been legitimized by the president and their effectiveness has been highlighted by the Obama campaign. The financial nuclear arms race is now afoot.

The message being sent right now is that winning is more important than principles.

Uncertain? Or Confused?

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:35:24 -0500

The Fatah and Hamas factions of the Palestinian people have come to an understanding on a pact to unify the factions. Mahmoud Abbas will continue to be the chief executive for the interim, supported by an independently elected cabinet until full elections can be organized.

This surprising move brings the Gaza Palestinians and the West Bank Palestinians together.

Understandably, the Arab street as reflected by its press, is uncertain. Note in particular the Israeli reactions.

I suppose there's good reason. When they aren't squaring off against Israeli forces, the two factions have been at each other's throats. This is not conducive to settling the larger issues at hand.

But here's the thing: a divided Palestinian people is actually in the best interests of many of the more strident regimes in the region, like Syria and Iran and yes, Israel, who can focus attention on the Israeli conflicts while minimizing the internal strife as just frustration with the "Zionist oppression of Israel," or some such conflated attitude. For Israel's part, the strife merely serves to support their claim that, so long as Hamas is a disruptive force, Israel's existence is threatened, so why should he deal fairly with the Palestinian Authority?

And yet, interestingly enough, Hamas' leadership in exile in Syria all left that country (the last departed yesterday) to head for Israel, under the guise of security from that nation's uprisings.

Sounds like a cover story to me. It's possible that Syria may have undermined Hamas' position as opposed to Fatah (although I admit that's pure speculation, and I really don't have a particular body of evidence to point to). It's also possible that Hamas has started to cozy up to Iran, which would explain the collapse of Syrian safety.

Naturally, Bejamin Netanyahu has begun sabre rattling over the deal, all but threatening Abbas with an "either you're with us, or with the terrorists" posture.

And yet, it was Netanyahu himself who insisted on a unified Authority before Israel would sit down and negotiate in good faith.

Mr. Netanyahu, peace is not for haggling. It is not sold in the open market like a carpet or a pound of meat. Sit down, and shut up now.

Rumors of your death ...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:14:46 -0500

...may not be exaggerated. But the acknowledgement may be delayed.
David Carter Found Dead In Foreclosed Home As Many As Four Years After Suicide (VIDEO) Huffington Post
By Henry Bradford Feb 6

"Abandoned homes have become an increasingly common sight amidst a national foreclosure crisis. Yet what may lurk forgotten behind closed doors may be much worse than nothing at all.

"A Milwaukee real estate agent entered one such house last month after it was repossessed due to tax foreclosure -- the government can foreclose on a home if taxes and subsequent fees are not paid off within a designated time period -- to find a sight he's not likely to forget soon. The body of the owner David Carter was found on the stairs in a "nearly skeletonized" state after being left there undiscovered for what investigators believe to be up to four years, The Daily Mail reports."

Bradford ties in another story and, in doing so, he creates a new genre, theater of the absurd vérité: "A Florida woman is currently suing her lender, JPMorgan Chase, after the bank mistakenly declared her deceased in 2010, which she claimed ruined her credit score." Seriously, why should there even be a law suit? What is so wrong with JPMorgan that they would not settle this right away. Never mind justice and common decency, this makes them look even worse than they already look.

Where is the "right to life" movement when life is denied in the face of undeniable empirical evidence?

This is the stuff of Nathaniel West and Samuel Beckett.

Tuesday Muse (formerly A Poem for Tuesday)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:00:20 -0500

Welcome to Tuesday Muse, the successor to A Poem for Tuesday. Think of it as "A (Poem + Painting + Spoken Word + Music + Performance Art + Sculpture + Noise + Mash + Animation + Story + Photography + Public Art + Multimedia + Theater Performance + Anything Art) for Tuesday." Today: Playing for Change, whose muse builds a song by having a crew travel the world to record one stellar musician after another, sometimes in remote outdoor locations, in such a way that each musician can hear and play to what the others have done while adding his or her own piece. It's like building a choir a person at a time while leapfrogging assumed barriers of geography, genre, and culture. It's also grown to be about more than songs: PFC is now building music schools in impoverished locales and is sponsoring social-change concerts. Founder Mark Johnson explains here how PFC's recording process works. And here is their version of Gimme Shelter:

Nerve Gas For Riot Control? Surely Not In Britain!

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:00:50 -0500

Recently a group of scientists at the Royal Society were asked by the UK government to investigate a range of "incapacitating chemical agents" and their uses. Worried about a 2009 shift by the government that relaxed the definitions of chemicals allowable for domestic law enforcement, the experts concluded:

that the Government may be preparing to exploit a loophole in the Chemical Weapons Convention allowing the use of incapacitating chemical agents for domestic law enforcement.

The 1993 convention bans the development, stockpiling and use of nerve agents and other toxic chemicals by the military but there is an exemption for certain chemical agents that could be used for "peaceful" domestic purposes such as policing and riot control.

States like Russia already use chemical weapons in hostage situations, for example, which would be outlawed if used on a foreign military. In 2002, almost all of over 100 deaths in a Moscow theater hostage crisis were attributed to the gas used.

The Royal Society has called for the British government to "clarify its attitude on the use of chemical weapons for law enforcement, before an international meeting next year to review the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention". The British government is, in my opinion, very unlikely to do so.

Britain is simply following in U.S. footsteps. Neil Davidson, writing in the June 2009 edition of the Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists, notes that the U.S. too has looked at a "law enforcement" cover for developing new chemical weapons.

In April 2007, 26 people from the U.S. Justice Department, local law enforcement, the military, academia, and civil society came together at the behest of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the research arm of the Justice Department, to consider the issue of "nonlethal" weapons development. Based on the findings of this meeting, Penn State University won a $250,000 contract to conduct further research into new incapacitating chemical weapons--for example, sedatives, anaesthetics, morphine-like analgesic chemical agents, and certain brain-signalling bioregulators--for police use in the United States and "operationalize" these weapons.

...In 1990, the U.S. Army rebranded their Incapacitating Chemical Program, which focused on the weaponization of fentanyl-related opioid chemicals, renaming it the Riot Control Program. A plan for a new chemical grenade emerged from this work. They called it the "advanced riot control agent device," but the fentanyl payload remained the same. The reason for this rebranding? The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which outlawed the use of any toxic chemical as a weapon, was entering the latter stages of negotiation.

...U.S. military officials have gone so far as to say that research and development of incapacitating chemical weapons will continue "as long as it is cost-productive to do so." Furthermore, these officials suggest that if there are technologies that the Defense Department is banned from pursuing, they will subcontract the work to the Justice or Energy departments. Meanwhile, Defense is busy working on a variety of chemical delivery systems, including airburst munitions and long-range 155-millimeter mortar rounds, but no one will say what they're going to put in them.

The bold emphasis is mine.

Next year's renewal of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention is going to be a kabuki dance, as the developed world makes grave and fine-sounding noises about the chemical arsenals of certain rogue states while preparing to reinvigorate their own miltary and domestic law enforecement arsenals with weaponry the Convention doesn't cover.

Let Them eat Cake!

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:02:08 -0500

Kevin Drum:

The Corporation for Enterprise Development recently released a scorecard for all 50 states, and it has boatloads of useful information. That includes overall tax rates, where data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy shows that in the median state (Mississippi, as it turns out) the poorest 20 percent pay twice the tax rate of the top 1 percent. In the worst states, the poorest 20 percent pay five to six times the rate of the richest 1 percent. Lucky duckies indeed. There's not one single state with a tax system that's progressive.

There's a chart where you can see how your State compares. Here in Texas, the poorest 20% out-pay the richest 1% at a rate of four to one.

Who ate all the pie?

Serving Officer Says Leadership Lying About Afghan Progress

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:39:28 -0500

Lt. Col Daniel L. Davis has caused a bit of a stir by taking to the pages of the Armed Forces Journal to accuse America's political and military leadership of lying about how well things are going in Afghanistan. His public statements are unusual in the extreme for a serving officer.

During his deployment last year, he writes:

I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.

I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.

From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.

I anybody really surprised?

Syria Or Somalia

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:50:05 -0500

Advocates of the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine have recently been agitating for a US-led, UN sanctioned military intervention in Syria. Neolibs like Anne-Marie Slaughter, Shadi Hamid and Nick Cohen, all of whom were gung-ho for intervention in Libya too, have pointed out that over 5,000 people have died in Syrian violence so far - and call the death toll sufficient to mobilize militaries and spend millions, perhaps billions, of dollars in order to try to halt the "massacre".

But all are silent about Somalian famine, where since July 2011 at least 2 in 100,000 have died each day. That's a death toll of around 21,000 in a nation also riven by violence - for years, not months. If one accepts the moral argument that horrific death tolls are something the West should intervene to try to halt, then why not Somalia instead of Syria? Somalia even already has peacekeepers on the ground, from the African Union, Ethiopia and Kenya. Surely that would mean that a greater proportion of the West's available resouces - in a time of economic austerity - could be devoted to actually alleviating suffering instead of on military action.

But you will not hear neolib advocates of R2P intervention talk of Somalia, or of the