03.09.16
by

Obama’s Drone Legacy

b8af10a3-5c51-4aa1-94da-68f32499eac2

An outstanding editorial in the New York Times today about President Obama’s drone legacy by the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman. The gist of the editorial is that Obama has greatly expanded the use of drones while creating a sketchy and mostly-hidden legal regime that justifies their use. Jaffer and Kaufman argue that the President should publish the Presidential Policy Guidance, release the justifying legal memos, acknowledge the all drone strikes “not just those carried out on conventional battlefields”, and “establish a policy of investigating and publicly explaining strikes that kill innocent civilians, and of compensating those victims’ families.”  All of these seem to me to be reasonable, and entirely compatible with living in a democracy.

(Disclosure? Brett is one of my best friends, the kind of stand-up fellow that everyone should know. That’s not why I like this article of course, but it’s goddamn exciting to see your friend’s name in the Times.)

The heart of the article is a stark reminder of what Presidential power does, and how it is nearly impossible to restrain once unleashed. Even if you think that Obama is justified to use drones (in which a case can be strongly made) or he has used them judiciously and wisely (a much harder case to make overall), anyone should be scared of what happens when someone neither as wise nor judicious takes over.

Continue reading →

03.08.16
by

Mississippi Bending: The Michigan Convergence

 

chicagoskylinemirage

Image via The Chicagoist and Seth Brown

 

If you were standing on the Lake Michigan’s eastern shores late this February, on a day unusually warm and clear for that bitter month, you would have seen the Chicago skyline, distorted and strange, rising up over the far horizon. Nearly 60 miles of lake separate these two shorelines, and visibility is essentially impossible. But due to a temperature inversion that caused a bending of light and water, the skyline rose up from the depths, grotesque and squat, but still visible, in a place where it manifestly should not be.

If you were to stand in the same place today and turn your gaze southward, you might see a similar, though distinctly more frightening illusion: that of the country folding in on itself, bending at some Mason/Dixon line of the national soul, and falling forward, imposing a grim Mississippi on Michigan. It isn’t just that the two states have primaries today. It’s that the vision of one of the parties is to create a deracinated owner’s paradise, the kind found in the south, and impose it on America’s working heartland.

Continue reading →

03.08.16
by

The Yemeni Nursing Home Massacre and the “Globalization of Indifference”

220px-aden_postcard1

Yemen is a country being pulled apart and battered by several different conflicts, internal and external, some a product of its history and some the imposition of global trends. It’s a proxy war for some nations and a Petrie dish for others.  It’s a country where modern violence has become, to the outside world, quotidian and expected, and where it takes a particularly horrific, or at least focused, attack to garner headlines.

Such an attack happened last Friday, in the Southern port town of Aden- once the capital of the secular and socialist south, later the hotbed for a new democratic Yemen, and now the bloody plaything for competing millenarians and indifferent governments. On Friday, at a nursing home, 16 nuns, volunteers from around the globe, were bound and executed with shots to the head.

(This was extreme enough to warrant an immediate disavowal and denunciation by Ansar al-Sharia, who said it wasn’t the way they fight. And it is true- since reforming in the last decade as AQAP, they have avoided the kind of blood-thirsty acts that alienate a local population.)

The global reaction to such a shocking crime was at once justified, but also indicative of how societies come apart at the edge of attention, until all it happens all at once.

Continue reading →

03.07.16
by

Political Dictionary

Via ThinkProgress

From Los Angeles, where the sun shines year round, if you can catch a glimpse…

Republicans took control of the air quality board in February, and new members have not been shy about their intentions to bring a more industry-friendly approach to pollution control. All seven of the board’s Republicans voted to dismiss Wallerstein, narrowly beating out opposition from the board’s five Democrats and one independent.

“With every rule-making and regulation we need to be looking at the economic impact as well as the environmental impacts,” Dwight Robinson, a Republican councilman from Lake Forest and a new member to the board, said in an interview earlier this week.

“Industry-friendly approach to pollution control” is the direct political translation of “learn to hold your breath, sucker”.

03.04.16
by

Politicization and Privatization: Rubio Excuses Flint

heres-marco-rubio-awkwardly-grabbing-for-a-drink-of-water-in-his-state-of-the-union-rebuttal

Good lord, you’d think if anyone knew the importance of an abundant supply of drinkable water, it’d be Marco Rubio.

The most interesting and enraging moment of last night’s debate- ok, except for the ridiculous juvenalia, which wasn’t so much a moment as a permanent state of affairs- was when the Fox moderators finally asked about the Flint water disaster. Only Rubio was brave enough to jump on it.  He defended Gov. Rick Snyder- whose complicity and cruel indifference become more clear by the day- praising him because “(h)e took responsibility.” Marco said, correctly, “I don’t think anyone woke up one morning and said, ‘let’s…poison someone.'”

Continue reading →

03.03.16
by

Sounds From A Sunless Sea: The Mariana Trench Recordings

cssfpexunl4tgjeveyog

If you are here, you’re probably in some trouble

When I was a kid the coolest thing I could think of was the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean. I used to say, incorrectly, that it was more than two Everests deep- Mt Everest, along with Rhode Island, being a standard unit of measurement at the time (“If you stood everyone in Rhode Island on each other’s shoulders in the Mariana Trench, most would die in terrible agony!”). Learning more, the ocean’s depths just get more amazing, and more inhuman: mud volcanos, liquid sulfur, CO2 vents, and the weirdest creatures in the world, living endless generations without knowing that humans are walking around arguing about sports.

So it is a particularly childlike and adult awe that greets the news of the first sound recordings from that crushing place. They found, much to their surprise, that it wasn’t silent, and that more than that, they heard sounds from all over the ocean. The area acts as kind of a vast echo chamber, with strange and disquieting sounds rumbling through the darkness.

Continue reading →

03.03.16
by

The Whitest Knight

mitt-romney-costco-shopping-photos-0110-480w

At the bloody Democratic Convention of 1968, Paul Newman, Ralph Bellamy, and Dore Schary gave a tribute to Adlai Stevenson, the two-time nominee, and two-time loser to Dwight Eisenhower. Stevenson was a decent man, a true liberal who rose above the venal party bosses both north and south, and who always seemed slightly detached from politics. The tribute to him was moving, gracious, a hallmark to his decency, and went completely unlistened to. There was chaos on the convention floor as anti-war delegates were being muscled out in a boss-driven rush to nominate Hubert Humphrey, a good man driven to extreme by proximity to LBJ and the war.  What’s more, there was madness on the streets, blood flowing in a police riot.  1956, the last year Stevenson ran, seemed light years away.

It’s easy to think about that when you see a relic from another time speaking today to try to save the Republican Party.

Continue reading →

03.03.16
by

Why Trump Is The Worst

 

Donald Trump

This guy.

 

I swear to kate, this blog was not supposed to be entirely about the election, and certainly not all about Trump, but as this nightmare becomes a reality, it is hard to avoid. It’s obvious to most of the country that Donald Trump is the worst, but it is still important, I think, to point out exactly why.

I know this sounds like apocryphal Pauline Kael, but I have yet to talk to a single human who isn’t disgusted by what’s happening, and who doesn’t feel fairly sick thinking about candidate Trump, or god help us, President Trump.  (They are obviously out there, of course. And there are a lot of them. They are the angry revenant of the original American character, one that predated and outlived the Revolution.) But what about it is exactly so sickening? I think it can be broken down into two main groups.

  • His platform, such as it is, which combines three horrifying planks in a way that is essentially unique in both American history and in the current world.
  • The fact that it is Donald goddamn Trump.

Continue reading →

03.02.16
by

A few notes on tonight

  1. Caveat on the last long post: I mostly ignored Cruz. He is of course part of this movement and a pure creature of it, but is coming at it from a slightly different angle. If he wins Oklahoma, and puts some pressure on Trump, that’ll be worth discussing, but right now he can’t even carry most evangelicals.
  2. Things I Am Looking Forward To Tonight #1: Rubio making it close in Virginia (Fairfax and Arlington might help him get over the top, but he still might be too far away) and making a sweeping victory speech for coming in 2nd in one state. Even if he eeks out a win, it’ll still be wonderful to hear him say he’s going to ride this to the White House. A small win in the most favorable state!
  3. Things I Am Looking Forward To Tonight #2: Bernie winning in Massachusetts and his supporters trying to delicately argue that Hillary can only win states with large black populations. It’ll be a neat flip of 2008 when the Clinton camp tried to do the same with Obama. Of course that’s garbage, like it was in 2008. Equally garbage is the idea that most Bernie voters will sit out, scorned (something Hillary supporters said in 2008). Maybe some will, but not enough. Especially if it’s Trump.
  4. Hillary is being very smart about running for Obama’s 3rd term. That’ll bring out a lot of voters who want to protect his legacy, especially if Trump spends the next 8 months saying what a disastrous loser, and totally ineffective guy, Obama has been. Because I think a lot of us, black and white, will rise as one, and say: fuck that.
03.02.16
by

Super Tuesday: The Night The Myth Of Movement Conservativism Died

It’s a little after 6:00, Central Time, and the earliest polls in this strange Super Tuesday are beginning to come in. Some places are already calling Georgia for Donald Trump. This is not surprising, but is a state which some said held out hope for young Marco Rubio, the marshmallow savior for voters who think George W Bush was too intellectually engaged.

Today is also known as the SEC Primary, taking place as it does largely in the south. SEC is a nice modern way to put it, how we paint the New South, still idiosyncratic, but tucked away into the warm belt of the corporate/media nexus. It would be impolite though to call this what it really is: the Confederacy Primary. More than any other year since at least 1972, however, the Confederacy is dominating our politics, in the bizarre avatar of a know-nothing billionaire demagogue from New York. It’s a Southern kind of day in a Southern kind of year, and it exposes, for once and for all, the myth of the conservative movement, revealing what it always has been: a vehicle for atavistic rage, well-armed ignorance, xenophobia, and most prominently, white nationalism. There’s a straight line between William Buckley and Donald Trump, and the media’s inability or unwillingness to recognize it has led us to this calamity.

Continue reading →