via Mubarak’s Allies and Foes Clash in Egypt – NYTimes.com.

I suppose it’s not new to note that our TV talking heads are dumb as a bag of hammers. It’s really unfortunate that no major US cable systems carry Al Jazeera. They played a cat and mouse game with the regime to keep their signal alive. They were also harassed and beaten by Egyptian security forces. You have to respect their determination to carry on in the face of these obstacles. Their coverage was actually pretty even-handed and they better understood the underlying economic motivations driving the protests.

You can get it on their English language website (linked above) or if you have a big dish satellite system as described here. When I bought my house in 2001 it had a working big dish system I used for a few years. It’s a lot more trouble but also has cheaper content than a cable provider. You own and must maintain all the hardware yourself, there’s no one to call to complain if it’s not working. You become your own cable provider. It’s a good hobby for the technically inclined and gives access to wild feeds and unedited backhaul feeds outside the offerings on cable networks. I gave up on it once the neighbor’s trees began to block the birds I used the most. It also went all wobbly twice a year when the sun’s path would cross behind the birds and drown out the signal, right near the fall/spring equinoxes in these parts.

Anyway, has far as US foreign policy implications of the M.E. unrest go, we will once again pay a price for backing dictatorial strong man regimes. It’s pretty much all down side for the US. I don’t think the M.E. street will soon forget who backed Mubarak to the tune of $1.3 billion a year. That money was spent mostly on US made military and police hardware. This might be good for business interests but people notice that the tear gas canisters and rubber bullet casings are American made. This isn’t exactly a formula for winning friends among the people in the streets of Cario.

If there are democratic elections expect to see a strengthening of formerly suppressed religious parties that are adamantly opposed to US and Israeli interests.  The State Department and White House claim to support democracy, at least publicly. But often it results in the empowering of anti-US elements and complicates US policy goals. The goals of democracy and stability are often mutually exclusive. This isn’t inevitable, but an out growth of supporting those who keep a boot on the throats of their own people with generous US financial and military support. On a brighter note Egyptians are well educated and mostly moderate, so while I think religious parties might gain a bit I don’t think were talking anything like another Iran here.

The Obama administration had very little wiggle room here. It wouldn’t have been wise to immediately abandon Mubarak with no clear idea of what comes next. I try to be a realist and we do have a need for stability in Egypt if any progress is to be made in the interminable Arab-Israeli conflict. Time will tell how this plays out, but I fear it will not be in American interests. At this point we have little choice but to see how it plays out without much leverage on events on the ground.

Greenwald get a bit breathless and prone to hyperbole in many of his posts, but I think he’s dead on here. US foreign policy is the direct cause of terrorism on US target here and elsewhere. Plain old civilian courts work pretty well without resorting to military kangaroo courts.

Pakistan is presenting itself as the new viable partner for Afghanistan to President Hamid Karzai, who has soured on the Americans. Pakistani officials say they can deliver the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, an ally of Al Qaeda who runs a major part of the insurgency in Afghanistan, into a power-sharing arrangement.

In addition, Afghan officials say, the Pakistanis are pushing various other proxies, with General Kayani personally offering to broker a deal with the Taliban leadership.

via Pakistan Is Said to Pursue an Afghan Foothold – NYTimes.com.

I say give it to them. It makes far more sense for them to be leading in the region than it does for us.

Bill Kristol and Jamie Fly invoke Churchill to argue that Obama is a poor leader because he won’t attack Iran when told to by the editorial board of the Weekly Standard. They also argue that Iran won’t dare retaliate with a nuclear weapon. Isn’t that enough reason to stop going all breathless over Iranian nukes?

You can’t have it both way boys, either they’re crazy and will use a nuke to preemptively wipe out Israel or they’re too afraid of a US conventional attack to retaliate to a direct attack on their nation with a nuke. If you won’t use them when you get invaded, you won’t use them at all, I’d argue. Why does anyone pay any attention to Kristol anyway? He’s been consistently wrong about everything regarding the Middle East.

Marc Ambinder has some doubts about the motives of what looks like a coordinated effort to get the world to pay attention to 20 year old information about mineral wealth in Afghanistan. The NY Times today reports:

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

So the real question here is who’s attention are they trying to get? Wavering NATO allies? China? Russia seems obvious, but I think they found out all they need to know about Afghanistan during their ill fated invasion in the 80s. I don’t think it was really directed at the American public, we already got a close look at a war that supposed to pay for itself. It didn’t work out so well from a fiscal standpoint (or nearly any other) did it?

Then there’s this little gem in the NYT story:  “The Ministry of Mines is not ready to handle this,” Mr. Brinkley said. “We are trying to help them get ready.” By all means, send the US Minerals Management Service to Afghanistan. Their work with the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico has worked out sooooo well.

It doesn’t seem like this will be helpful in any conceivable way. Andrew Sullivan passes along this bit on if this will at least dissuade other “rouge” states:

Aside from Obama loyalists and administration members, no one thinks that this round of sanctions does anything of the kind. Engagement advocates find the pursuit of a new round of sanctions misguided, but recognize weak sanctions when they see them. As the Leveretts correctly observe, this round of sanctions is very weak and had to be very weak to gain Russian and Chinese support. On the other side of the debate, Jackson Diehl points out all the reasons why these sanctions are not very significant. Many governments will not adopt the stricter financial sanctions and ship inspections that the resolution allows but does not require.

So, to recap, it won’t stop Iran, it’s ineffective and unlikely to stop other nations from doing the same thing. It also causes Iran to reduce cooperation with international inspectors. This effectively makes it a lose-lose-lose proposition.

The only thing it actually does is create an appearance of action, which in the world of Washington “optics”, is far more important than effective action. Which brings me back to this question: why is Iran having a nuke more dangerous than Pakistan? If we simply make it clear that if Iran is crazy enough to actually use one, Tehran will be reduced to a pile of radioactive rubble. Despite the obvious horror of “mutually assured destruction” it did create a certain stability during the cold war. This is a bit different, in that it’s more of a “unilaterally assured destruction”.

Also, we remain the only country to ever actually use nuke. So who’s the crazy rogue state again?

Fivethirtyeight.com posts a reply to Jonah Goldberg’s latest attempt to establish false equivalence between taxes and slavery from the op-ed pages of USA Today. Goldberg wants to tell us we’re slaves to teh gubbermint until “Tax Freedom Day”, which is sometime this week. Overblown rhetoric aside, the real question is: Are we really overtaxed? Not so much. Only 4 other industrialized democracies have a lower total tax burden. We come in with a total tax burden of 28% of GDP. The OECD* average is 35.9% with a range of 20.6% (Mexico) to 49.1% (Denmark and Sweden). Sadly you can’t fight truthiness with facts. People like Goldberg just know in their gut that we’re overtaxed. Any proof to the contrary must be nothing more than librul sophistry designed to enslave us in a socialist-islamofacsist-totalitarian-Marxist dystopian hell.

Could we do something better with our tax policy in the US? Absolutely. We could reverse the trend to regressive taxes as instituted in the Bush Era tax cuts. We have not and most likely will not. We lack the political will to restore fiscal sanity to the federal government. There ain’t no constituency for tough choices in America.

*For the non-policy wonks out there, OECD is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.  It’s an organization of 30 industrial democracies that collects and distributes a large amount of cross-national econometric and demographic data. It’s a treasure trove of data and very useful in comparing things like effective tax rates among many other things.

It’s just unciviliized. This is what destroyed whatever goodwill we might have had after removing Saddam. This is what encourages the recruitment of suicide bombers. Oddly enought suicide bombings only claimed 28% women and children.  Of car bombing victims, 49% were women and children. Sadly the US is the most indiscriminate in casuing civilian deaths.

Obama has to change the policy in Pakistan, either flat out declare war on Pakistan or give up on Afghanistan. This half-assed shit isn’t cutting it. We ARE turning more and more of the Muslim world against us. It only gets worse from there.  Let’s see what was the last foreign power to subdue and remain in control in Afghanistan? Oh right, NO ONE!

childpoverty.png (PNG Image, 500×400 pixels).

USATODAY.com – U.S. stands apart from other nations on maternity leave
out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United States in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

That’s some fine company we’re keeping there. If anyone is interested in backing policies that are unequivocally pro-family hos about starting here?

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Basically: borrow around a trilllion from the Chinese to give Iran a new client state next door, occupy it for the next thirty years, and still keep oil at $106 a gallon barrel. Yes: lots to debate.

Death, strategic and financial disaster, way to go Bushie.

Compared to other industrial nations the good old US of A ranks 19, out of 19, in preventable deaths. Way to show all those nasty socialist countries that we don’t need their stinking commie health care delivery systems!!!

The US (not surprisingly)  receives the worst rating. We’re right up there with Russia and China.

The GOP has taken obstruction and raised it to a high art. If something as basic and simple as “we shouldn’t torture” dooms a bill to failure something has gone horribly wrong. When the republicans held the majority they threatened changes to senate rules to short circuit democratic opposition. Perhaps it’s time to revive the nuclear option. After all if it was good enough for Trent Lott, it should be good enough for Harry Reid.

So we tortured the al-Qaeda village idiot, then claimed a great victory against a high level operative. Despite being briefed about the real value of the poor fool by the CIA, Bush went on TV to say that we’d foiled deadly plots and saved lives. Don’t you feel safer already?

A salivating ultra-hawk admits that the recent Iran NIE makes the chances of a strike against Iran extremely unlikely. Thank God.

Wow that’s good news. I guess the president will have to back off the bellicose saber rattling directed at Iran, right?

No so much:

President George W. Bush said on Tuesday that Iran remains a danger despite a U.S. intelligence report that Tehran halted its atomic weapons program four years ago.

Bush also said “all options” are on the table for dealing with Iran. He was speaking at a news conference a day after intelligence agencies released an assessment that contradicted his administration’s earlier assertions that Iran was developing a nuclear bomb.

Can’t allow silly facts to get in the way of really cool new war now can we?  Facts have a well know liberal bias.

Nothing logically inconsistent with prosecuting Japanese soliders for exactly the same behavior the blow dried one seems to think is really cool, is there? Maybe he should be waterboarded until he admits it’s torture?