All posts by Jay Pinho

About Jay Pinho

Jay is a data journalist and political junkie. He currently writes about domestic politics, foreign affairs, and journalism and continues to make painstakingly slow progress in amateur photography. He would very much like you to check out SCOTUSMap.com and SCOTUSSearch.com if you have the chance.

A visit from the boss in Gaza

Politics, , , , , , , ,

Khaled Meshal made his first visit to the Gaza Strip today as the head of Hamas:

For Mr. Meshal, 56, it was a triumphant visit, and Hamas fighters, armed with rifles and wearing balaclavas, lined the streets where he was to travel. He entered from Egypt, through the Rafah crossing, an indication of a new alliance with Cairo.

“Gaza, with its martyrs, cannot be described in words,” he said as he arrived here, with tears in his eyes. “There are no words to describe Gaza, to describe the heroes, the martyrs, the blood, the mothers who lost their sons.

“I say I return to Gaza even if I never have been here. It has always been in my heart.”

Mr. Meshal’s visit resonated on multiple levels, reflecting the many changes that have swept the region since the Arab Spring. Mr. Meshal was permitted to cross the Egyptian border now that allies of the Muslim Brotherhood — a cousin of Hamas — have come to power. But it also reflected at least a symbolic effort to heal divisions within Hamas between Mr. Meshal and the leadership in Gaza, and for Hamas to promote its contention that it was victorious in its recent battle with Israel. Mr. Meshal fled the West Bank with his family after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and had never returned to Palestinian territory. In 1997, when he was in Amman, Jordan, agents from the Israeli intelligence service, posing as Canadian tourists, tried to kill him by injecting him with poison. The agents were captured by Jordanian authorities, and Mr. Meshal lay in a coma until the agents handed over the antidote.

Color me ignorant, but it seems bizarre to me that Meshal can navigate around Gaza so freely and openly just weeks after the conclusion of fighting precipitated by an unexpected Israeli air strike on a senior Hamas operative, Ahmed Jabari. The fact that Jabari was apparently a somewhat key contact of Israel’s makes Meshal’s very public visit all the more striking.

Israel has, quite obviously, not always been above attempted assassinations of Meshal (as evidenced by its failed 1997 attempt), so it’s interesting to guess exactly what’s preventing it from taking the easy shot now. Obviously, there would be international repercussions of some sort. But given the recent overwhelming vote (over Israel’s strong objections) to award Palestine nonmember observer state status at the United Nations, it’s not particularly clear that Israel cares much about its increasing isolation anyway.

So what is preventing Israel from assassinating Meshal? If the entire reason for its restraint is the recent truce negotiated by Egypt, then perhaps there really is some baseline level of trust between senior Israeli and Hamas officials. After all, it seems unlikely Meshal would risk appearing in public in Gaza if he didn’t have utter certainty that he wouldn’t be targeted.

Thank you, Kevin Drum

Media, Politics, , , ,

For putting the kibosh on the “Hillary Clinton is the unquestioned Democratic nominee in 2016” meme:

I don’t want to go all Andy Rooneyish on y’all, but can everyone please stop with the nonsense about Hillary Clinton being the heavy favorite for the 2016 Democratic nomination? She’s not. She’s just the best known Democrat at this moment in time. There’s a world of difference.

Heartily seconded. If I were to guess, I’d say the name Andrew Cuomo will be gaining some serious traction in the next few years. But that’s just the thing: it’s all a guess at this point.

+1: Google+ still alive and kickin’

Technology, , , ,

Admit it: you thought Google+ was basically dead. (I know I did.) Turns out, the social network is very much alive and healthy:

Google today announced that it has 135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month, up from 100 million in mid-September. If you run the math, that means Google+ is now growing at the same pace as Facebook when it was similarly sized.

Google announced the user growth alongside a new feature called “Google+ Communities” and enhancements to Google’s mobile photo app Snapseed. Its last user count update was on Sept. 17, meaning Google+ has added 35 million stream-active users in the past 2.5 months.

That means that every month Google+ is adding about 14 million stream-active users, the type of users most comparable to those on Facebook. As it happens, Facebook added monthly active users at almost the exact same pace between late August 2008, when it reached 100 million active users, and early April 2009, when it hit 200 million active users. That seven-month spurt resulted in growth of of 14.3 million users per month.

Instagram for the snob class

Miscellaneous, Technology, , , , , , , , ,
Courtesy of TheVerge.com.
Courtesy of TheVerge.com.

Snapseed, an iOS Instagram-like app for users who like to think of themselves as more sophisticated than simply slapping a filter on photos of household vegetables, is now being released on both iOS and Android for free:

This is not a head-to-head battle with Instagram. Google’s strategy here is to go after the photo geeks, the prosumers, the folks who resent how 90 percent of images now have the same retro filter. “It’s not like Instagram with one click filters,” says Josh Haftel, a 12-year-veteran of Nik Software now working out of Google’s Mountain View HQ as a product manager on Snapseed. “You’re not in and out in 5 seconds. You do more customization, from color saturation to light leaks.”

Having Google’s resources at its disposal allowed Snapseed to do way more than it originally thought was possible on Android. “We had assumed we would be limited to tablets with the Nvidia chipset for Android,” said Haftel. “But we were able to pull this off for all chipsets and for tablets and smartphones, which is pretty amazing considering this is a high end photo editing tool which does not compromise.”

There are unconfirmed reports that I have already downloaded it.

Republican unity is a figment of the Times’ imagination

Media, Politics, , , , , , ,

Contra the post immediately before this one, New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer has a piece today talking up Speaker of the House John Boehner’s supposed “strong backing” in Congress’ lower chamber:

With a daunting fiscal crisis looming and conservatives outside the House torching him at every turn, Speaker John A. Boehner might be assumed to have a shaky hold on his gavel. Instead, it appears he is enjoying the broadest support of his tumultuous two-year speakership from House Republicans.

As Mr. Boehner digs in for a tense fiscal confrontation with President Obama, the strong embrace from a broad spectrum of the rank and file may empower him as he tries to strike a deal on spending cuts and tax increases that spares the country a recession, without costing Republicans too much in terms of political principle.

The problem is, nowhere in the article does Steinhauer present even a reasonable facsimile of evidence supporting her hypothesis. At one point she writes that “member after member spoke in support of” Boehner at a private House Republican meeting, and elsewhere quotes from a handful of post-election chastened Republicans who are now more willing to accept compromise in theory (if not in practice). These vignettes, paired with the observation that Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor have signed onto Boehner’s $800 billion proposal — a brief moment of agreement on an issue on which even Republicans in Steinhauer’s article admit they have virtually no leverage — constitute the near-totality of Steinhauer’s thesis.

Must be a slow news day over at the Grey Lady, so they decided to concoct some of their own.

Throwing Boehner out with the bathwater

Politics, , , ,

Jeffery A. Jenkins considers the possibility of a conservative Republican mutiny against House Speaker John Boehner:

The most radical suggestion, offered by Ned Ryun on the conservative blog Red State, is that a small group of Republicans signal their unhappiness with Boehner by voting against him in the speakership vote on the House floor.  Ryun argues that if 16 Republicans abstain from voting for Boehner for Speaker, based on the assumption that there will be 233 Republicans in attendance when the 113th House convenes in January, then he will fail to receive a majority – and, in time (assuming repeated, inconclusive speakership balloting), the Republican Conference will be forced to choose a new speakership nominee, one more amenable to the preferences of the dissident faction (and, presumably, conservatives more generally).

(One aside: Ryun argues that dissident members should simply abstain from voting.  But the rule for electing Speakers has been interpreted differently over time. At times the requirement has been a majority of all members-elect, and at other times it has been a majority of all members present and voting “for a person by name.”  The most recent interpretation has been the latter. For example, in the 105th Congress, Newt Gingrich was elected Speaker with 216 votes, which constituted a majority of all members present and voting for a person by name, but not a majority of all members-elect.  So Ryun’s strategy, to be safe, should direct dissidents to cast their protest votes for one of their own, rather than abstain.)

Now searchable: the New York Times crosswords

Technology, , , , ,

Zachary M. Seward takes a lookaol at the appearance of “AOL” in the vaunted crossword puzzle over the years:

There are many ways to tell the story of AOL and its numerous reinventions, so here’s just one: The New York Times Crossword. With just a few letters, most of which are vowels, AOL is a common crutch of cruciverbalists. (See also: APE, EPEE, and BRIO.)

Below, I’ve compiled nearly every appearance of AOL in the Times crossword from 1997 to 2011, taking the company on a journey from “Prodigy competitor” (Jan. 14, 1997) to “Netcom competitor” (Mar. 29, 1998) to ”Juno rival” (Apr. 6, 2003) to “Gmail alternative” (June 5, 2007) to “Yahoo! competitor” (May 10, 2010)—oh, and finally, “Huffington Post buyer” (Apr. 17, 2011) and ”Company with Patch Media” (Oct. 9, 2011). There are many other gems in between.

Reimagining history via the selfie

Humor, Media, , , , , , , ,

kissingsailor

South Africa’s Cape Times launched a new advertising campaign with famous photos from the past, altered to look like those ubiquitous MySpace and Instagram self-portraits:

Taking a self-picture, or in the regrettable parlance of our times, selfie, removes all distance between the subject and the person capturing it. It might not be the most obvious premise for a brand promise, but that’s where we are. In the same way that cameras couldn’t possibly get any closer to the sailor kissing his best girl on V-J Day unless he was snapping the picture himself, The Cape Times couldn’t be any closer to the news unless they were making it. (Actual physical proximity may vary.)

Going crazy over Homeland

Film/TV, , ,

brody

New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum, who’s come up with an elaborate theory about the latest episode of the Showtime series Homeland (warning: spoilers below), worries that she’s turning into Carrie Mathison:

Yet I couldn’t help getting drawn in, because after some consideration, I found that I’d stumbled upon a solution—which is to say I developed a completely insane theory that explains everything. I am also prepared to defend my crazy theory at all costs, because this show is turning me into Carrie Mathison. Enough preamble. The theory is this: Nicholas Brody is faking it. He plotted with Abu Nazir to have Carrie kidnapped, so that Brody could “save” her, thus ensuring her loyalty and manipulating her into concealing their crimes (which she did, after all: she didn’t tell her bosses about the scheme to kill the Vice-President.) All that face-acting Damian Lewis was doing, with the yelling and the screaming into Skype—a notable departure from the subtlety of Lewis’s earlier performance? He knew Carrie was listening. It was an act.

Carrie Mathison is clearly in love with Brody. Brody has feelings for her, too, but he’s still capable of manipulating her (which is the same thing she’s doing to him, after all, in the name of the C.I.A.—calming him down with sex, holding his hand to reassure him.) When Nazir kidnapped Brody, during that mysterious prayer confab a few weeks back, the two came up with a plan. I’m not sure what that plan is, beyond killing the Vice-President, but it seems to involve messing with Carrie’s head—even more than she’s already been messed with.

When you think about it, my theory explains much that felt strange about “Broken Hearts.” It explains why Brody was going so over-the-top bonkers. It explains why Nazir didn’t walk away with his cell phone, to explain the pacemaker plan out of earshot of the C.I.A. operative he’d kidnapped. My theory also explains why Nazir was so willing to let Carrie go, even before Brody had given him the code: they’d scripted that element, to make it clear that Brody was motivated by love. The twist would match up perfectly with the show’s thematic fascination with behavior as performance, which goes back to Season One, when Carrie watched Brody strip and suffer on her monitors as if he were some especially juicy episode of Real World: The Patriot Act.