Where I Agree With The Moustache Of Understanding

No, no THAT Morrissey...

I tend to think that Tom Friedman repackages stale elite conventional wisdom in a wrapping of crappy prose.

But he did say one thing over a decade ago that I agree with.  If you bring democracy to the Middle East, the Islamists will win.  But having won, they will have to produce good governance.  The key is not the first democratic election in an Islamic democracy, but the second.

We are seeing some of that in Egypt right now.  Morsi is not delivering public goods the way he should.  Islamists built their credibility on the efficient delivery of charity, jobs and basic health care.  Now that they have to run a state, they have to do everything well.

The best case for Egypt and Tunisia?  A Turkish style guided democracy, where the military insures fair elections.  As for Libya and Iraq, they just have to avoid civil war.

Hmmm, what do Libya and Iraq have in common...?

Long Day

Paula Deen also serves these.  Deep fried in lard, 

covered in butter and swaddled in mayonnaise.

Painted some of the outside of the house.  On a VERY tall ladder.  Drove to JFK to pick up this German kid for the summer school.  Horrific traffic.  Basically spent my day alternating between clinging to a ladder for dear life and sitting on my ass on the Hutchinson Parkway.

So I outsource the blog today to Booman on Paula Deen:

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/6/29/91751/0968

And that's all I have to say about that.

Where Is Rand Paul When You Need Him?

For the record, I find this 100 times more troubling than the NSA issue.

http://www.burntorangereport.com/diary/13705/72year-old-woman-arresting-during-wendy-davis-filibuster-charged-with-felony

UPDATE: And speaking of the NSA:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/glenn-greenwald-is-ralph-nader.html

Greenwald as Ralph Nader.  Perfect.

Too Awesome Not To Pass Along

Today's WTF Moments

Odious Smurf, known as Warmonger Smurf, is back at it.  Trying once more to involve America in Middle Eastern wars to help Israel.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/06/founder-of-new-national-security-advocacy-group-tied-to-new-york-state-pension-scandal.php?ref=fpblg

Thank God we got rid of that asshole.

And kudos to North Carolina for adopting the worst austerity program this side of the Atlantic.  This might be the thing that finally breaks out the pitchforks and torches.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/north-carolina-becomes-first-state-to-eliminate-unemployment-benefits.php

UPDATE:  Charlie Pierce takes Holy Joe apart brilliantly:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/joe-lieberman-scott-brown-think-tank-062813

World War Z

I finally got out to see World War Z.  Part of any complaint has to be: It's not as good as the book, because movies never are.

One of the tightropes zombie movies in particular have to walk, I think, is balancing the fantastical elements of zombies with the human elements of how people cope with the end of the world.  If the first part doesn't work, then the whole thing feels contrived.  If the second part doesn't work, the whole thing feels pointless.

WWZ does much better with the latter part than the first part.  Pitt is very good, as are the supporting cast.  There is a palpable sense of sadness by the late stages of the movie in Wales.  The human jeopardy feels real.

The zombies themselves are excellent.  One thing they do, which I appreciated, was to really minimize gore.  Your average episode of The Walking Dead is a smorgasbord of viscera and blood.  WWZ is remarkably bloodless, which makes the violence less gratuitous.  There's no effort to make "gore porn".

The actual zombies are clearly a mix between Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and insects.  They don't run so much as swarm.  The scenes in Jerusalem in particular are frightening because of the speed and numbers.

The main problem in Brooks' novel is that he never really gives a good explanation for where the zombies came from and he makes them too invincible.  He has them wandering the abyssal plains of the ocean, where their skulls would be crushed by the water pressure.  Why?  Because he needs them to, to take away the refuge of islands. That's where the contrived element takes over.

Traditional zombies are easy to kill because they are slow and witless.  WWZ changes this by making them lightning fast and massive in numbers.  It also gives a nice apocalyptic explanation for the zombie plague: Earth has to erase the stain of human damage.  It feels more like the Morningstar virus books, which did a great job with "zombie science" but were atrociously written with cardboard characters.  In this sense, WWZ borrows from two different sources to create a really compelling and scary zombie threat.

The movie does fall apart on "zombie science" at the end, I think.  Pitt's "solution" doesn't make sense.  Given the swarming behavior of the "zekes", the solution suggests a considered reflection on the point of zombies that doesn't work.  For me anyway.

What made the book so good was its episodic retelling of a disaster that had already happened.  The book captured that sad, guilty feeling among the survivors.  WWZ is clearly intended to launch a franchise.  It will be interesting to see if they continue that episodic feeling.  Frankly, given the choice to downplay the splatter factor, they should consider moving the whole thing to TV.

Because I Got Nothing

Cut and Paste Blogging:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/republicans-need-minorities-anyway.html

Keep in mind, though, that the racial dynamics of the modern Democratic Party are far more stable than they were 50 years ago. The New Deal Democrats were holding together a coalition of pro-civil-rights liberals and white supremacists. The Obama-era party is a coalition of nonwhites and white voters who are comfortable with diversity. The Obama coalition may fracture, and in any case, the Republican structural advantage in Congress will give it a viable power base for years. But the hope for building a nearly all-white party that regularly wins presidential elections is highly optimistic, not to mention more than a bit horrifying to contemplate.

That's a point I've made to my students for years.  FDR cobbled together a coalition that was bound to fall apart.  Reagan may have done the same thing.  We will see if immigration reform drives a real wedge between the Wall Street Republicans and the Walmart Republicans.

But the Reagan coalition is fading away as a result of demographic change and the loss of the college educated.

Once Small Step For A Wedding Planner, One Giant Leap For Weddings Of All Kinds

When I was interning on Capitol Hill in the late '80s, my Senator was Wyche Fowler, a Democrat from Georgia - there used to be such a thing.  I worked as a drone answering constituent mail.  We got a lot of astroturf letters about Fowler's vote against Robert Bork.  Bork had been nominated to the Supreme Court by Reagan, despite Bork's role in the Saturday Night Massacre, his whackaloon views on original intent, his thinly veiled racism and being a huge prick.

Anthony Kennedy was selected in his place.

And today, Kennedy did what he has done with some consistency over the past few years and that is take stand - a mild stand, but a stand - against the prejudicial treatment of gays and lesbians.

The twin rulings - allowing Prop 8 to go away and ruling some parts of DOMA unconstitutional - are important steps for marriage equality.  The end of Prop 8 validates marriage equality in the nation's biggest state.  If Illinois finally gets around to passing marriage equality, then three of the five most populous states will recognize same sex marriages.

The DOMA ruling is both broader and more narrow, as it only ends federal discrimination against same sex married couples.  It did not address the full faith and credit issues present in DOMA.  You can be not-opposite married in Connecticut, but move to Philly and you're no longer married.

Yeah, that makes sense.

But my guess is that the Court simply didn't want to rush into legitimizing same sex marriage across the country.  Before too long, someone is going to move from California to Arizona (why?) and their marriage will be invalidated, they will have standing and the case will start to make its way back to DC.

By that time, Kennedy must be thinking, people's opinion will have continued to shift in favor of marriage equality.

That or Scalia will finally have that massive coronary he's been working on.

Two Looming Fights The GOP Is Bringing On Itself

Time to throw down.

The last 24 hours have been very interesting, haven't they Precious?

(And it remains to be seen what the Court will do with Same Sex Marriage later today.)

After it turned out in November that PPP and Nate Silver were accurate and Karl Rove was full of shit, the GOP promised a moment of introspection and "rebranding" in order to accommodate the shifting demographics of the country.

Well, that didn't last long.

The Roberts' Rump ruling that "Hey, racism is over!" and the gutting of the VRA, means that every minority who gives a damn is now, in that memorable phrase, "Fired up!  Ready to go!"  As we saw in 2012, efforts to suppress minority turnout actually led to higher turnout.  If Democrats and democratic advocacy groups can mobilize Hispanic voters around this issue, then they can seal up that demographic for decades.

As comments at Balloon Juice noted, however, this will require sustained and dedicated efforts by Democrats over the next 6 years, which is something Democrats really suck at.  It will require not only voter registration drives, but driving registered voters to get their IDs.

We also had the spectacle in Texas last night.  As the GOP becomes increasingly a Southern, rural party, they will continue to Wage War on Women, especially women's vagi-gis.  For every mandated vaginal wand ultrasound that the GOP forces on women, they will continue to shrink their share of the majority of the electorate: women.

Wendy Davis may also have a future ahead of her as Texas conceivably shades purple in the next decade.  She's remarkably photogenic, and her personal story is pretty remarkable.  Looking at her, I was expecting some Dallas area debutante. Instead, she was a single mother at 19 who worked her way through college (first in her family) and Harvard Law School.

There is no doubt that the GOP has to embrace more and more voter suppression as their policies increasingly offend women, blacks, Hispanics, people who believe in science, people who believe in macro-economics, people who believe in the social contract, people who believe in Social Security and the New Deal and people who are tolerant of gays, brown people and pretty much everyone.

Since the GOP is going to have to double down on maximizing white votes, white male votes, I think we can stick a fork in immigration reform.  Or maybe the Roberts' Rump ruling gives them cover as they can pass immigration reform without worrying about Hispanics voting.  My guess is it's DOA in the House, unless the Chamber of Commerce can twist enough arms to get something passed.

SCOTUS has left DOMA for last.  Are they going to leaven the anger over the VRA with overturning DOMA?  Or are they going to punt and get out of town?

Whether or not the GOP doubles down on hating the Ghey, they have clearly decided to keep fighting the abortion fight and to keep charging down the Edmund Pettis Bridge.

Voting Rights

So, the SCOTUS Rump decided 5-4 to effectively end the Voting Right's Act.  The electoral consequences are probably very small at the national level, since the Old Confederacy is a GOP bastion, though Virginia, Florida and to a lesser extent North Carolina are swing states.  Texas could be if Latinos decide to vote en masse.

I would argue that what we are learning from places like Ohio and Pennsylvania is that voting rights need protection beyond Mississippi. Whenever the GOP gets its hands on the levers of power at the state level they restrict voting rights.  That is not a southern phenomenon.  It is a Republican one.

Pre-clearance is (was) important.  But what the Democrats should do is nationalize pre-clearance to keep voter suppression - especially of racial minorities as low as possible.

Your Daily Unexplained Excerpt

Many of us would reject the assumption that Paris Hilton’s contribution to society is hundreds of times greater than that of a police officer or schoolteacher. Hilton, of course, is a complicated financial case. She inherited a fortune but also earns $25,000 to $100,000 a pop to show up at a party or a nightclub. Hilton “earns” that for her skills as a young, blonde, anorexic-looking woman with low self-awareness or conventional self-respect. But her status as an heiress itself gave her earning potential unavailable to many other young, blonde, anorexic-looking women lacking self-esteem who would like to be paid a year’s salary to drink some booze.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/gop-economist-makes-terrible-defense-of-the-1.html

Climate Change And Jobs

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/climate-is-not-a-distraction-from-jobs.html

Chait really dissects this better than I can.  I would add one thing more.

The idea that there is a trade-off between good environmental policy and jobs is false.  There is a trade-off between good environmental policy and corporate profits.  But since corporations are sitting on mounds of cash and not hiring, whatever disincentive reduced carbon emission have on the job market is rendered moot by the fact that both corporate cash and unemployment are high right now.

Once again, it is important to remember that only one thing unites the Republican party: the upwards distribution of the wealth of this country.

Generation Y

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/06/is_it_generational.php?ref=fpblg

Wow, I could maybe hate these guys as much as the Boomers!

Here, I think, is the nut graphs from this letter arguing that the take on Snowden differs by generation.

Edward Snowdon and I are the same age; our adolescence sits squarely between the fall of the Soviet Union (8 years old) and the events of 9/11 (18 years old). During that time, without the bipolar rivalry that overshadowed much of the twentieth century, American culture shifted toward a greater emphasis on issues that assumed global cooperation, such as environmentalism and humanitarianism, and placed significant value on cross-cultural exchange. (I’m thinking of shows like Captain Planet, in which an international, multi-ethnic team of kids thwart rapacious corporate villains). Furthermore, it was always assumed that the United States, secure in its position as the world’s sole superpower, would be leading such efforts, and doing what it could to bring about a more unified, less contentious world community.

Contrast that with the tenets of realism, which assume that competition between states is an immutable fact of life, and that individual nation-states are, in some sense, perpetually at each other’s throats for the upper hand on the world stage. In such an environment, the less savory aspects of spycraft (like spying on your allies, or hacking into the servers of private companies) make perfect sense. But in the world Edward Snowdon and a lot of other Gen Y kids thought they were growing up in, it’s a gross violation of basic decency. Worse, it’s a vestige of a bygone era, a worldview that has no appeal to children of the Information Age, who have seen the power of unbounded, collaborative spaces like the Internet and are increasingly disgusted with the human toll wreaked by self-serving foreign policy.

I've also noted a fair number of Boomers are also more upset by the Snowden revelations than I am.  Most of them are aging liberals who came of age suspicious of governmental and corporate power because of Vietnam.

But there's a reason it's called "Realism".  Hopefully there are certain areas where countries came come together and solve problems.  Take smallpox for instance.  Tougher for something like global warming, where a country may prize its economic development more than concerted effort on greenhouse gas emissions.  Tougher still where real conflicts of sovereignty are at play.

States are sovereign in a way citizens are not.  Citizens - by definition - are bound by a social contract.  States are not.  There are some efforts to constrain state sovereignty - say the Geneva Convention.  But look how easily the Bush Administration ignored the Geneva Convention and started torturing prisoners.

If you believe in this techno-libertarian magical world where it's totally cool to steal secrets and post them on Wikileaks, because all states are the same... Well, Snowden is a hero.

If you believe that states are different and have competing interests that are bound basically by what you can get away with, then Snowden is a thief.

UPDATE:  Hooboy... Looks like Snowden just dove into the hot water:
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1268209/snowden-sought-booz-allen-job-gather-evidence-nsa-surveillance

Your Daily Snowden

He's on the lam, working with Wikileaks, talking to Ecuador about asylum.  Too bad Hugo Chavez is dead.  Next stop Havana?  Tehran?

Now we get to see if Snowden is really in it to speak truth to power or after his own skin.

Catching Up With Game Of Thrones

I'm blowing through season three of Game of Thrones.  The red wedding... by the old gods and the new... the red wedding.

I think Lord Varis might be my favorite character.  While he's completely unconcerned with persons, he's devoted to an abstraction.  In some ways that defines the strongest characters in the show.

Rob and Ned Stark were devoted to honor and died for it.

Daenerys is devoted to the idea of ruling a country she can barely remember.  The idea of a country.

Arya Stark is devoted to revenge.

Tywin Lannister is devoted to family.

And then there is Tyrion Lannister, the wild romantic in the body of an imp.  "Keep up!  It's not easy being drunk all the time.  If it was everyone would do it."

Meanwhile, the real villains are consumed with desires of self.  Cercei Lannister, Joffrey, the various potentates that Daenerys has dispatched.

It's pretty clear Daenerys is being set up by the story to win the game of thrones, but then again, you'd have thought that about the Starks, too.

A remarkable story.  The golden age of television.