The reporter and author violated FOX News’ rule #1: do not criticize FOX News.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUz3pIPmTY]More from Brian Stelter here.
Category Archives: Politics
Hamas, in its own words
Surprise, surprise. Turns out that, despite a lot of unsavory rhetoric and actions, Hamas doesn’t sound quite so radical and irrational as it’s made out to be in the Western press. Open Zion snags this quote by Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal:
“I am the leader of Hamas. I tell you and the whole world, we are ready to resort to a peaceful way, without blood and weapons as long as we attain our Palestinian demands: a Palestinian state and the ending of the occupation and the (West Bank separation) wall.”
-Khaled Mashaal says in an interview with CNN – largely ignored by the Israeli media.
The Ynet article includes more from Mashaal:
Hamas Politburo Chief Khaled Mashaal said his Islamist movement Hamas is willing to accept a Palestinian state within the 1967borders or 22% of “historical Palestine.”
According to Mashaal, this has been Hamas’ mission and what it has been fighting for since its inception. In an interview aired this weekend on CNN, Mashaal said: “I accept a Palestinian state according to the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as the capital, with the right to return.”
Mashaal also addressed the issue of recognizing Israel, saying “I want my state. After this state is established, it (can decide) its position toward Israel. Don’t ask me when I’m in prison under Israeli pressure. You cannot ask me, as a victim, what is my stand toward Israel.”
Other encouraging signs exist as well (see first link above), including a Hamas-led investigation of “unlawful executions” of Israeli collaborators. Of course, it seems likely this will be a sham, but the very fact that Hamas feels the need to legitimize itself by carrying out some semblance of the judicial process is more evidence that the broad brush used so frequently to portray the democratically elected organization is inaccurate and out of date. One of the key contradictions of Israel’s position vis à vis Hamas is the fact that it continues to decry the organization as a fanatical terrorist group while simultaneously negotiating truces and ceasefires with it, with an eye towards a potentially more permanent settlement later on. The coexistence of those two actions is logically absurd, yet Israel and its defenders persist in perpetuating it as if it makes even a shred of sense.
(The same can be said, in many respects, in regards to Iran. In that nearly all experts agree that striking Iran’s nuclear facilities would set back progress on the bomb by only a few years at most, what does Israel get out of doing it? Given its inability to stop the technical savvy of Iran, a preemptive Israeli attack only makes sense as a deterrent — a message to Iran that further development is useless because bomb-building facilities will continue being destroyed. But if this type of deterrent measure works, then Israel’s constant depictions of the ayatollah as a fanatical theocrat operating outside the bounds of rationality simply do not add up.)
The New York Times, Israel, and Gaza
Robert Wright justifiably takes issue with the Paper of Record’s description of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip:
Sadly typical of the way the MSM covers the issue is a recent New York Times piece about the ceasefire by David Kirkpatrick and Jodi Rudoren (both of whom have done excellent work on other issues in the region). The piece described the blockade as “Israel’s tight restrictions on the border crossings into Gaza under a seven-year-old embargo imposed to thwart Hamas from arming itself.”
Putting it this way is a real time saver, not just because it fits into a single short sentence, but because, if you’re too busy to actually write that sentence, the Israeli government’s press office would be happy to do it for you. But this description of the blockade raises a question:
If the essential purpose of the blockade were indeed to “thwart Hamas from arming itself,” wouldn’t restrictions on imports into Gaza suffice? (And even then the import restrictions wouldn’t have to be as draconian as they were when imposed, or even as tight as they are now, after some loosening.) What I’d like to see an enterprising MSM reporter ask is: How do Israel’s severe restrictions on Gazan exports keep arms from getting to Hamas?
The Nation‘s Greg Mitchell is on the same page regarding the newspaper’s photo captioning.
The peace process industrial complex
Stephen Walt thinks the media relies too heavily on stale sources with nothing new to add on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (as exemplified by this New York Times piece):
Case in point: Helene Cooper and Mark Landler’s New York Times article from a few days ago. The title of the piece was “Obama, Showing Support for Israel, Gains New Leverage Over Netanyahu,” and the article suggested that the combination of Obama’s reelection, Netanyahu’s support for Romney during the campaign, the Gaza fighting, and the upcoming Israeli election would suddenly give Obama a lot of new-found influence over the Israeli leader.
There were two fundamental problems with this piece. The first is that it is almost certainly wrong. Netanyahu is going to get re-elected anyway, so he hardly needs to curry favor with Obama. In fact, quarreling with Obama has increased Netanyahu’s popularity in the past, so where’s the alleged leverage going to come from? Over the past four years, Obama has backed Israel over the Goldstone Report, the attack on the Gaza relief vessel Mavi Marmara, and the Palestinian statehood resolution at the UN. He’s also stopped trying to get Israel to halt settlement building. Obama was already re-elected when the latest round of fighting broke out, yet the administration reflexively defended Israel’s right to pummel Gaza as much as it wanted. If you’re looking for signs of new-found leverage, in short, they’re mighty hard to detect.
Do Cooper and Landler think Netanyahu will be so grateful for all this support that he’ll suddenly abandon his life-long dream of Greater Israel? Or do they think Obama will be so empowered by re-election that he’ll put the rest of his agenda on the back-burner and devote months or years of effort to the elusive grail of Israeli-Palestinian peace? After pandering to the Israel lobby throughout the 2012 election, does Obama now think it is irrelevant to his political calculations? Hardly. We might see another half-hearted effort at pointless peace processing (akin to the Bush administration’s token gesture at Annapolis), but who really believes Obama will be able to get Netanyahu to make the concessions necessary to achieve a genuine two-state solution, especially given all the other obstacles to progress that now exist?
The second problem with the article were the sources on which Cooper and Landler relied. The article quotes four people: Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller, and Robert Malley. All four are former U.S. officials with long experience working on U.S. Middle East policy, and mainstream reporters like Cooper and Landler consult them all the time. There are some differences among the four, but all share a powerful attachment to Israel and both Ross and Indyk have worked for key organizations in the Israel lobby. All four men have been closely connected to the post-Oslo “peace process,” which is another way of saying that they have a lengthy track record of failure. I know Washington is a pretty incestuous hothouse, but are these really the only names that Cooper and Landler have in their smart phones?
Texas caterwaulin’
It should surprise no one that some Texas residents are making secession noises:
Sales of bumper stickers reading “Secede” — one for $2, or three for $5 — have increased at TexasSecede.com. In East Texas, a Republican official sent out an e-mail newsletter saying it was time for Texas and Vermont to each “go her own way in peace” and sign a free-trade agreement among the states.
A petition calling for secession that was filed by a Texas man on a White House Web site has received tens of thousands of signatures, and the Obama administration must now issue a response. And Larry Scott Kilgore, a perennial Republican candidate from Arlington, a Dallas suburb, announced that he was running for governor in 2014 and would legally change his name to Larry Secede Kilgore, with Secede in capital letters. As his Web page, secedekilgore.com, puts it: “Secession! All other issues can be dealt with later.”
In Texas, talk of secession in recent years has steadily shifted to the center from the fringe right. It has emerged as an echo of the state Republican leadership’s anti-Washington, pro-Texas-sovereignty mantra on a variety of issues, including health care and environmental regulations. For some Texans, the renewed interest in the subject serves simply as comic relief after a crushing election defeat.
Is there really that little to do in Texas?
Black Friday and the Walmart strike
Robert Reich explains why shoppers should stay away from Walmart today:
A half century ago America’s largest private-sector employer was General Motors, whose full-time workers earned an average hourly wage of around $50, in today’s dollars, including health and pension benefits.
Today, America’s largest employer is Wal-Mart, whose average employee earns $8.81 an hour. A third of Wal-Mart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.
There are many reasons for the difference—including globalization and technological changes that have shrunk employment in American manufacturing while enlarging it in sectors involving personal services, such as retail.
But one reason, closely related to this seismic shift, is the decline of labor unions in the United States. In the 1950s, over a third of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Today fewer than 7 percent do. As a result, the typical American worker no longer has the bargaining clout to get a sizeable share of corporate profits…
Is this about to change? Despite decades of failed unionization attempts, Wal-Mart workers are planning to strike or conduct some other form of protest outside at least 1,000 locations across the United States this Friday—so-called “Black Friday,” the biggest shopping day in America when the Christmas holiday buying season begins.
At the very least, the action gives Wal-Mart employees a chance to air their grievances in public—not only lousy wages (as low at $8 an hour) but also unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, excessive hours, and sexual harassment. The result is bad publicity for the company exactly when it wants the public to think of it as Santa Claus. And the threatened strike, the first in 50 years, is gaining steam.
Josh Eidelson, meanwhile, notes that Black Friday may only be the start:
Expectations are high for a historic strike. Given Walmart’s role as the dominant employer of our era, the current wave of work stoppages is already among the country’s most consequential twenty-first century strikes. But in interviews this month, workers and organizers described today’s actions as a turning point, not a climax, in their struggle against the retail giant. “This is the beginning of something…” said Dan Schlademan, a United Food & Commercial Workers union official who directs the allied group Making Change at Walmart. “This is a new permanent reality for Walmart…2012 is the beginning of the season where retail workers are going to start to stand up.”
“There’s going to be more days that we’re going to strike,” said Rozier, “and it’s not going to stop. I’m not going to stop until they respect us and give us what we want.”
Andrew Sullivan has more.
The problem with predicting the future
Michael D. Ward and Nils Metternich examine Nate Silver’s success this past election — his state-by-state electoral predictions were 50-for-50 — and conclude that his methodology can be extended to political events more generally:
Forecasting models need reliable measures of “things that are usefully predictive,” Ulfelder notes. Well, sure. Does this mean that reliability is at issue? Or that we are using data that are not “usefully” predictive? This is a curious claim, especially in light of the controversial nature of polls. Indeed, there exists five decades worth of literature that grapples with exactly those issues in public opinion. Take the recent U.S. election as an example. In 2012 there were two types of models: one type based on fundamentals such as economic growth and unemployment and another based on public opinion surveys. Proponents of the former contend that that the fundamentals present a more salient picture of the election’s underlying dynamics and that polls are largely epiphenomenal. Proponents of the latter argue that public opinion polling reflects the real-time beliefs and future actions of voters.
As it turned out, in this month’s election public opinion polls were considerably more precise than the fundamentals. The fundamentals were not always providing bad predictions, but better is better. Plus there is no getting around the fact that the poll averaging models performed better. Admittedly, many of the polls were updated on the night before the election, though Drew Linzer’s prescientvotamatic.org posted predictions last June that held up this November. To assess the strength of poll aggregation, we might ask how the trajectory of Silver’s predictions over time compare with the results, and there are other quibbles to raise for sure. But better is better.
When it comes to the world, we have a lot of data on things that are important and usefully predictive, such as event data on conflicts and collaborations among different political groups within countries. Is it as reliable as poll data? Yes, just so, but not more. Would we like to have more precise data and be able to have real-time fMRIs of all political actors? Sure, but it is increasingly difficult to convincingly argue that we don’t have enough data.
The problem with this line of reasoning is a somewhat similar issue to that noted by other political writers regarding the potential for a proliferation of Nate Silver types: the more these people become seen as experts, the less incentive there is for firms to pay for, and produce, the underlying data the experts rely on.
In this case, the issue is that, if predictions of world political events begin to look anywhere near as prescient as Nate Silver’s election forecasts have so far, people will start to follow them rabidly, base personal and business decisions on the numbers, and so on. Given a large enough scale, this widespread behavioral reaction to the predictions could very well have a negative effect on the accuracy of the predictions themselves, especially if the forecasts have anything to do with market prices of assets or something similar. This, in turn, could eventually doom the forecasts to irrelevance over a long enough time period, or at the very least produce extremely uneven results.
Related articles
- Nate Silver: It’s the numbers, stupid (rawstory.com)
- War on Nate Silver: Final After-Action Report: The Flag of Reality Flies Uncontested Over Silvergrad Weblogging (delong.typepad.com)
- Nate Silver: it’s the numbers, stupid (guardian.co.uk)
- Has Nate Silver Ruined Politics? (outsidethebeltway.com)
- Nate Silver Brings the End of Pundit Prediction, Not Pundit Analysis (danielmiessler.com)
- Why Math is Like the Honey Badger: Nate Silver Ascendant (blogs.scientificamerican.com)
The math of war
At Mondoweiss.net, Phan Nguyen compiled a meticulous piece cataloging all Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks emanating from Gaza since 2004 and found that — in all that time — only 26 people have been killed as a result:
If we borrow the IDF’s claim that more than 12,000 rockets have been fired into Israel in the last twelve years (which I dispute later), we get a kill rate of less than 0.217%. Thus in order to secure a single kill, we should expect to fire about 500 rockets. However, if the goal is to specifically kill Jews rather than foreign workers and Palestinian laborers, then it gets harder. Only 21 Jews have been killed by this method, bringing the kill rate down to 0.175%.
If this sounds disturbing or even anti-Semitic, note that I am just testing the argument of the current Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, who, during Operation Cast Lead, co-wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the Gaza rockets and mortars were “more than a crude attempt to kill and terrorize civilians—they were expressions of a genocidal intent.”
Yet the statistics demonstrate that it is much less than a “crude attempt to kill.” One can imagine easier ways to kill a random person than to manufacture and fire 500+ homemade rockets.
As for genocide, at the going kill rate, it would require 4,477,714,286 rockets and mortars, and 4,477,714 years to kill all the Jews in Israel. This is assuming that Israel’s Jewish population does not increase. And of course we would need to factor in the limited range of the projectiles, which would require Israel’s non-growing Jewish population to all congregate in the western Negev by the year 4479726 CE, give or take a few years.
But by then, all of Israel’s Jewish population will have already been exterminated by the country’s other violent killer, automotive accidents.
It makes more sense, then, to suppose that there are political rationales for the firing of rockets and mortars.
Death to Citizens United
That’s what Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) is going for. After surveying his options and concluding that no other alternative exists, Udall — who’s also integral to Senate filibuster reform efforts, which I’m covering in a magazine article to appear within the next month — is pushing for a constitutional amendment:
The amendment would give Congress the constitutional power to regulate the raising and spending of money in national elections, and it would give the states the same power to regulate spending in their elections. The amendment strikes at the fundamental heresy that lies at the heart of both Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo, the 40-year-old case that made CU inevitable, given the correct composition of a future Supreme Court: namely, that money is speech. To this, of course, was added the equally preposterous notion that corporations are people and that, therefore, they have the same free speech rights as you, me, and the guy on the next bar stool. (How preposterous? Google Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad some time and get a good look at how corporate personhood got birthed on the wrong side of the constitutional blanket.) Pass the amendment, and all of the entangled absurdity of Citizens United goes away. One doomsday machine takes out the other.
As a law student, Udall watched the Buckley case work its way through the system all the way to fruition. He was already a local district attorney in the 1980s when a constitutional amendment was proposed to overturn Buckley. (Udall’s uncle, the late Congressman Mo Udall of Arizona, was one of the early supporters of that amendment and took campaign-finance reform as one of his signature issues when he ran for president in 1976.) He saw clearly where the country was headed once that decision was handed down. He heard the floodgates beginning to creak open.
“Back then, Mo and Dave Obey (the former Wisconsin congressman) believed that, if you could investigate, and find that campaign contributions injected corruption, or the appearance of corruption, into the system, then you could regulate it.” Unfortunately, in its intricate tricks and traps, to borrow a phrase from Senator-elect Warren, Citizens United took care of that, too, with weathervane Anthony Kennedy famously opining within his crucial concurrence to the CU-based decision that struck down the Montana law that corporate independent campaign expenditures “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” And thus are born Super Pacs and phony, covertly-financed 501(c) “welfare” organizations out of which come roaring a thousands attack ads.
“What they’ve done, essentially, is legalize money-laundering,” Udall says. “You can shut down the 501(c) and then sluice the money into the campaign, and the secrecy around the donors is maintained. Secrecy has no place in a democracy and particularly not in the electoral process.
“Once you say that money is speech,then you get what we have now — a Supreme Court that’s getting bolder and bolder in defending its decision. That’s what you saw when the Montana law was struck down. They passed that law because they saw what unlimited and anonymous corporate money could do to democracy. Right now, there is no possible legal remedy to this decision on a national level. We have to go with a constitutional amendment because we have to take the Supreme Court head-on.”
This is still an uphill battle, however: so far only 26 senators support the amendment. So…41 to go, plus the House?
Say goodbye to all Bush tax cuts?
That’s what the New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn wants to do:
Unfortunately, raising taxes on the wealthy will probably not be sufficient to solve our fiscal problems. If we are serious about living up to our financial commitments—in particular, the guarantees of financial security in retirement and provision of basic health care to all—then eventually we will need more revenue. There are lots of ways to do this. The ideal would probably be a carbon tax, because it would have the virtue of raising revenue and slowing global warming. There’s also a case for some kind of consumption tax, which economists tend to think is more efficient than income taxes. But since neither option seems to be viable right now, the next best thing might be to let all of the Bush tax cuts expire, so that everybody—not just the wealthy—go back to paying what they did during the Clinton era.
But wouldn’t raising taxes on the middle class slow the economy? Yes, if the rates went up right away. In fact, one of the most worrisome elements of the fiscal debate right now is that deficit reduction has so much focus. As the economist Peter Diamond has said, Washington is acting like we have a debt crisis and an unemployment problem, when the opposite is true: We have a debt problem and an unemployment crisis. Diamond’s point—which Paul Krugman made in the New York Times recently—is that we should concentrate on bolstering the job market now, while working to stabilize federal finances for the future. The former ideally would involve putting more money into the pockets of the poor and middle class, who are most likely to spend it. Raising taxes on the middle class immediately would, of course, have the opposite effect.
That’s why a better approach might be to preserve tax breaks on incomes up to $250,000, and to renew anti-recessionary programs like extended unemployment insurance and a payroll tax holiday, but only on a temporary basis. And rather than setting these measures to expire on a fixed date, Congress could try an idea economist Peter Orszag has floated: Setting these tax cuts to expire when, and only when, the economy had become stronger. For example, Congress could declare that the tax cuts stay in place until four consecutive months of unemployment below 6 percent, at which point they would slowly phase out. Or Congress could set the tax cuts to expire based on some other indicator, like the employment-to-population ratio, or a combination of several.
I’m with Cohn, at least on principle. I’d have to look more into the specifics to see exactly how this would work in practice. But eventually there’s no reason the Bush tax cuts for the middle class should remain as low as they are either, unless we enact significant reform of the tax code.