Lungs – Py
This one will get you on your feet.
All posts by Jay Pinho
The GOP: always watchful of that UN takeover
Today, the Republican Party in the Senate rejected a United Nations treaty to protect the rights of the disabled:
Former Senator Bob Dole of Kansas sat slightly slumped in his wheelchair on the Senate floor on Tuesday, staring intently as Senator John Kerry gave his most impassioned speech all year, in defense of a United Nations treaty that would ban discrimination against people with disabilities.
Senators from both parties went to greet Mr. Dole, leaning in to hear his wispy reply, as he sat in support of the treaty, which would require that people with disabilities have the same general rights as those without disabilities. Several members took the unusual step of voting aye while seated at their desks, out of respect for Mr. Dole, 89, a Republican who was the majority leader.
Then, after Mr. Dole’s wife, Elizabeth, rolled him off the floor, Republicans quietly voted down the treaty that the ailing Mr. Dole, recently released from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, so longed to see passed.
A majority of Republicans who voted against the treaty, which was modeled on the Americans With Disabilities Act, said they feared that it would infringe on American sovereignty.
Among their fears about the disabilities convention were that it would codify standards enumerated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child — and therefore United Nations bureaucrats would be empowered to make decisions about the needs of disabled children — and that it could trump state laws concerning people with disabilities. Proponents of the bill said these concerns were unfounded.
The measure, which required two-thirds support for approval, failed on a vote of 61 to 38.
Joshua Keating notes the surprising influence of homeschoolers in ensuring the treaty’s failure to be ratified:
In addition to groups like the Heritage Foundation — which opposes nearly any U.N. treaty on sovereignty grounds — and anti-abortion politicians like Rick Santorum who argue, inaccurately, that the law could lead to abortion being mandated for disabled children, the politically powerful, but usually under-the-radar U.S. homeschooling movement has been one of the most pivotal lobbies working against U.S. Senate ratification of the treaty. The Homeschool Legal Defense Association claims to have sent anywhere from 8,000 to 20,000 letters and emails to lawmakers urging them to oppose the treaty:
“I think the homeschool movement was more mobilized on this issue than any issue in the last decade,” Estrada said, noting that a large population of homeschooling families had at least one child with a disability.
“They realized this wasn’t about disabilities issue, this was about who was going to make decisions for children with disabilities,” he said.
Keating explains:
Groups like the HLDA argue that the treaty could allow the U.N. to mandate that parents who home school their disabled children to send them to government-run schools. (It says nothing of the sort.) They may also be worried that adoption of the law could set a precedent for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which they oppose on equally specious, but perhaps slightly more comprehensible grounds
It is indeed sad that a perfectly reasonable treaty was just rejected based on a complete misreading of it, but it’s yet more evidence of how influential a small group can be when it gets very organized and very loud.
Polling our ignorance
Public Policy Polling had some fun with its first national post-election poll, released today:
As much of an obsession as Bowles/Simpson can be for the DC pundit class, most Americans don’t have an opinion about it. 23% support it, 16% oppose it, and 60% say they don’t have a take one way or the other.
The 39% of Americans with an opinion about Bowles/Simpson is only slightly higher than the 25% with one about Panetta/Burns, a mythical Clinton Chief of Staff/former western Republican Senator combo we conceived of to test how many people would say they had an opinion even about something that doesn’t exist.
Bowles/Simpson does have bipartisan support from the small swath of Americans with an opinion about it. Republicans support it 26/18, Democrats favor it 21/14, and independents are for it by a 24/18 margin. Panetta/Burns doesn’t fare as well with 8% support and 17% opposition.
Some reactions:
[tweet http://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/276084099070951424] [tweet http://twitter.com/Goldfarb/status/276076751036248066]Why Democrats are so confident about the fiscal cliff
A majority of Americans say that if the country goes over the fiscal cliff on Dec. 31, congressional Republicans should bear the brunt of the blame, according to a new Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll, the latest sign that the GOP faces a perilous path on the issue between now and the end of the year.
While 53 percent of those surveyed say the GOP would (and should) lose the fiscal cliff blame game, just 27 percent say President Obama would be deserving of more of the blame. Roughly one in 10 (12 percent) volunteer that both sides would be equally to blame.
Kevin Drum can’t get over how lopsided these figures are:
The Post site has a tool that lets you look at various demographic subgroups, and it turns out that everyone would blame Republicans. I figured maybe old people would blame Obama instead. Nope. Southerners? Nope. White people? Nope? High-income people? Nope. Literally the only group that didn’t blame Republicans was….Republicans.
Politically speaking, President Obama’s main job is to keep things this way. Republicans pay a price for their anti-tax jihad only if the public blames them for the ensuing catastrophe. But if Obama sticks to reasonable asks—modest tax increases, modest spending cuts, and a debt ceiling increase—and pounds away at Republican intransigence, these numbers aren’t likely to shift much.
Cameras, and a death on the subway
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYHS03F7W4Y]
UPDATE BELOW (12/4/2012 8:52 PM EST).
Yesterday afternoon, Ki-Suck Han, a 58-year-old man from Queens, was pushed onto the subway tracks at the 49th Street station and then killed as he was struck by an arriving train. As it happened, a New York Post photographer was on the scene and snapped some photos of the approaching train just moments before it struck the man.
The photographer later told the paper a rather self-serving story about what had taken place:
Post freelance photographer R. Umar Abbasi — who had been waiting on the platform of the 49th Street station — ran toward the train, repeatedly firing off his flash to warn the operator.
“I just started running, running, hoping that the driver could see my flash,” said Abbasi, whose camera captured chilling shots of Suk’s tragic fight for his life.
The train slowed, but a dazed and bruised Han still wound up hopelessly caught between it and the platform as it came to a halt.
A shaken Abbasi said the train “crushed him like a rag doll.”
It’s possible that Abbasi’s version of the events is accurate, although flashing the camera at the train operator A) doesn’t seem to be the most obvious or helpful way of preventing the man’s death, and B) is remarkably convenient, considering the fact that the pictures Abbasi snapped while “repeatedly firing off his flash” just so happened to be perfectly framed photos of the situation, one of which made its way to the front page of today’s Post, accompanied by the grossly irreverent headliner text: “Pushed on the subway track, this man is about to die — DOOMED.”
What I find also quite distressing is the above surveillance video released by the New York Police Department. It depicts the suspect and victim arguing just before the fatal incident. But the video itself is shocking, to me at least, for two main reasons: 1) the fact that the audio is of such high quality, despite the video camera being quite far removed from the action, and 2) the seemingly non-automatic movement of the camera itself, which whirs rapidly from the left to focus on the arguing duo but continues to shake as if it’s a handheld camcorder.
It’s unclear where and how this camera was used (presumably, it’s on some sort of closed-circuit system, although the movements certainly don’t corroborate a hypothesis of an automatically-operated ceiling camera). But the high-quality audio and unsteady movements (implying a human element of some kind, perhaps?) suggest that subway users may have substantial surveillance concerns to worry about, in addition to the obvious (but highly improbable) horror of being pushed onto the tracks.
UPDATE: The New York Times has issued a correction regarding the above issue:
An earlier version of this post mischaracterized a video that the police released. The video was taken by a passenger on the platform on her phone; it was not a surveillance video.
Incoming! Elizabeth Warren lands post on Senate Banking Committee
The Huffington Post has more:
Nearly two years after Wall Street waged a successful campaign to keep consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren from running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the incoming senator will be tapped to serve on the Banking Committee, according to four sources familiar with the situation. It’s a victory for progressives who battled to win her a seat on the panel that oversees the implementation of Dodd-Frank and other banking regulations.
Warren knocked out Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts in the most expensive Senate contest of 2012, with Wall Street spending heavily to beat Warren, a former Harvard law professor.
Sources also told HuffPost that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) will be named to the panel.
Warren’s ascension to the panel gives her influence over regulators and the industry that non-panel members don’t enjoy.
As Daily Intel’s Kevin Roose notes, Warren is likelier to take her time building a network of ideological kin than to take a one-woman stab at the financial establishment right off the bat:
After my piece on Wall Street’s worries about Warren ran last week, I got a call from a senior banking industry lobbyist, who contended that Warren herself wasn’t planning to come into the Senate and immediately begin pushing an anti-bank agenda. Her more likely tactic, he said, would be to slow-play the situation, quietly amassing power and influence among fellow senators at first and then going after the banks once a coalition had been established.
“She realizes that if she appears to be a caricature of herself, she won’t be super-relevant in the Senate,” the lobbyist said.
Whatever her strategy, this is good news for progressive observers, who worried that Senate Democrats — always a weak and unreliable bunch — would cave under pressure from their Wall Street backers and keep Warren off the committee.
Photo for tonight
Irony of the day
Today’s New York Times reports on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to expand settlements by building 3,000 new housing units in the Palestinian land known as E1 (just east of Jerusalem proper). But the way reporter Isabel Kershner concluded the article suggests a certain wry sensibility about Israel’s endless self-delusion:
But beyond the tit-for-tat measures set off by the United Nations vote, analysts pointed to a trend of deteriorating relations between Israel and Europe in particular.
“That is because the top-level people making decisions here in recent years are completely insular and out of touch with the rest of the world, especially regarding the Palestinians and the settlements,” said Mark Heller, a foreign-policy analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. “Self-righteousness may be good for domestic politics,” he said, but it is not a policy.”
At the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, 138 nations voted in favor of upgrading the status of the Palestinians and 41 abstained. The nine that voted against it were Israel, the United States, Canada, the Czech Republic, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Panama and Palau.
Yes, Mr. Heller, key decision-makers in the 138 countries that voted in favor of Palestinian observer status at the United Nations are out of touch with the “rest of the world,” by which he means the nine countries that voted no. At this point, Israeli rhetoric has entered a self-parodic stage.
“Broken Hearts” on Homeland: Sam Lim and I discuss Episode 10
Last night’s episode of Homeland was crazier than ever, in both good ways and bad. As fellow obsessives of the Showtime series, First Casualty contributor Sam Lim and I usually follow up each weekly episode with a series of frantic emails back and forth to digest what just happened in the preceding hour. This time, I decided (with Sam’s permission) to put (a slightly edited version of) them up on the blog, which we’ll be doing for the last two episodes of Season 2 as well. Without further comment…
Sam Lim: Where to start with this week’s episode…did NOT see Carrie getting abducted by Abu Nazir. Smashing a car in public and then dragging away a woman seems like it’d garner a lot more attention than it did, no? And where the heck did Abu Nazir have time to find an abandoned mill on his own?
Jay Pinho: Damn! Wow…another veryyy twisty episode. Here are a couple random thoughts:
1) Homeland keeps surprising me. Every time I think I’ve figured out where it’s going to go next, it seems to anticipate what that is and goes in another direction instead. Case in point: Carrie getting captured. Like you said, that was completely out of the blue. I expected the rest of the season to have a storyline involving Carrie finding out about the plan to assassinate Brody, and trying to warn him. Actually, that might still happen, but if so, the show is taking a really interesting/circuitous route to get there. Continue reading “Broken Hearts” on Homeland: Sam Lim and I discuss Episode 10
Netanyahu’s free ride
Gershom Gorenberg urges the United States to take a harsher stance towards Israel’s settlement expansion:
American opposition to settlement would matter only if an Israeli government felt that it was paying a direct cost in support from Washington, or an indirect cost in political support at home. Only rarely, though, has settlement caused enough tension between Washington and Jerusalem to become politically significant in Israel. The clearest example was when the first President Bush linked loan guarantees to a settlement freeze and turned relations with the U.S. into a major campaign issue in Israel’s 1992 election.
As measured by actions, American policy has otherwise been acquiescence. The lesson to Israelis—politicians and voters—is that American objections are not to be taken very seriously…
Whatever administration officials actually intend, this is the way Israeli voters are hearing them: Bibi is still king in Washington, and pays no price for intransigence. Less than two months before the Israeli election, this is indeed counterproductive.
Meanwhile, A.B. Yehoshua argues against labeling Hamas a “terrorist” group:
The time has come to stop calling Hamas a terrorist organization and define it as an enemy. The inflationary use of the term “terror,” of which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is particularly fond, impedes Israel’s ability to reach a long-term agreement with this bitter enemy. Today Hamas controls the territory; it has an army, governmental institutions and broadcasting stations. It is even recognized by many states in the world. An organization that has a state is an enemy, not a terror organization.
Is this just semantics? No, because with an enemy one can talk and reach agreements, whereas with a “terror organization” talking is meaningless and there is no hope for reaching accord. It is therefore urgent to legitimize, in principle, the effort to reach some sort of direct agreement with Hamas. That’s because the Palestinians are our neighbors and will be forever. They are our close neighbors, and if we don’t reach a reasonable separation agreement with them, we will inevitably lead ourselves down the path to a bi-national state, which will be worse and more dangerous for both sides. That’s why an agreement with Hamas is important not only for the sake of bringing quiet to the border with Gaza, but also in order to create the basis for establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Related articles
- ‘UK considers recalling Israel envoy over settlement plan’ (jpost.com)
- Netanyahu’s new settlement homes are a gift to Iran (blogs.timesofisrael.com)
- Netanyahu: ‘We will continue to build’ (cnn.com)
- Waging War on Palestine (sjlendman.blogspot.com)
- Israeli cabinet rejects Palestinian status upgrade in UN (altahrir.wordpress.com)
- Clinton raps Palestinians for missing opportunities, Israelis for lack of empathy (jta.org)
- France summons Israeli ambassador over massive settlements (worldbulletin.net)
- Israel withholds tax revenues from Palestinian Authority – Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)