The Blog of Andrew Ivers

Syria etc

I woke up today to a Morning Edition report about amateur journalists documenting atrocities in Homs, Syria. Then I hit the snooze and woke up a bit later to Steve Inskeep and David Ignatius having a really intense conversation about Iran and Israel. So I guess my point is: sometimes it is unsettling, albeit educational, to have NPR set as your alarm. And while I'm dumping links, here's Robert Kagan on Charlie Rose last night.

The operator

Michael Zantovsky reminds us just what Vladimir Putin is:

The salient fact about Putin is, and has always been, not that he is a cool-looking dude who does judo and rides horses, or a coldly analytical brain who speaks passable German, but that he is, in the modern Russian parlance, a silovik. He has been well educated, in what was one of the most thorough training regimens in Russia available to anyone, in methods of controlling, manipulating, and deceiving people. The chances that he is watching the demonstrations on television and telling himself, “My, I must have done something wrong, these folks really seem not to like me, maybe it’s time I should up and go,” are therefore pretty slim.

Sunday morning, 2 a.m.

Looking south from E Street and New Jersey Ave. NW, Feb. 12th, ca 1:45 a.m.

Get excited #3

The local Fox news affiliate in St. Louis continues its hilariously overzealous investigation of the “ghost employee” at the city treasurer’s office. Previous reports here and here. And thanks once again to Jack for keeping me up to date.

‘It’s for their own good’

I really admire the polite condescension this sixteen-year-old has for her mushy religious elders:

Does she empathize in any way with members of her community who want the prayer to stay?

“I’ve never been asked this before,” she said. A pause, and then: “It’s almost like making a child get a shot even though they don’t want to. It’s for their own good. I feel like they might see it as a very negative thing right now, but I’m defending their Constitution, too.”

From an article about Jessica Ahlquist, enlisted by the ACLU as a plaintiff in a successful lawsuit against Cranston High School West, in Cranston, Rhode Island, which in the early 1960s (shortly after it was made illegal) hung a prayer written by a seventh grader in its school auditorium and never bothered to take it down. Ahlquist has caught hell for taking such an unapologetic and unpopular stance in this small and predominantly Catholic town. The prayer has been temporarily covered, pending appeal.

Ahlquist's website here, her Facebook fans here.

And in other religion news: a tv show in Pakistan that ambushes couples in public places and demands that they produce marriage documents. Don't you miss the simpler days when we used to allow public prayer and sexual persecution in schools? But that's all behind us, right?

EU ... two!

Don't watch this clip (starting at 13:35) just because it's about Vladimir Putin's "Eurasian Union," which is interesting and important and kind of crazy. Watch it because you get to hear John McLaughlin talk about Russia in that crazy-old-man-of-Washington style that makes him so obnoxiously loveable. Yes, do it for that, friends. Do it for that.

‘Will do video link instead. Damn.’ #2

Remnick relays part two of Rushdie's Jaipur debacle:

The Jaipur Literary Festival, a giddily chaotic celebration of the written word set on the grounds of a Rajasthan palace, ended in misery and embarrassment today, with the organizers bowing to pressure from local security forces and scotching plans for Salman Rushdie to “appear” at the festival, finally, by video link. Rushdie had already been forced to cancel plans to come to Jaipur after he had received intelligence reports—bogus intelligence, as it turned out—that everyone from “paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld” to radical Muslim clerics were sitting in malevolent wait.

Rushdie’s video image was not allowed at the Festival, but he was on television tonight in India, being interviewed on NDTV, and he spoke out angrily about the “unscrupulous” Muslim groups that threatened him, and an Indian government that failed to act. Speaking from London, Rushdie called the whole affair “fantastically fishy” and blamed the ruling Congress Party and other officials for bowing to electoral priorities and ignoring the priorities of freedom of expression.

And offers some helpful background:

The shameful episode in Jaipur is, indeed, best seen in light of deeper, and troubling, tendencies of contemporary Indian politics. The country is Hindu majority, but the government seems eager to court the huge Muslim populace at election time, no matter how troubling the demands. One famous and trendsetting example: in 1978, a Muslim woman named Shah Bano was divorced from her husband. Shah Bano had no means to support herself and her five children, and she appealed to the civil courts to get alimony; after seven years she succeeded in winning a judgment from the Supreme Court. But then, under heavy pressure from Muslim groups and clerics, the government of Rajiv Gandhi reversed the Court’s judgment and passed the Muslim Women’s Bill, which decreased the authority of civil authority. That move, ceding greater power to religious authorities, was widely seen as a purely political attempt by Gandhi to win Muslim political support. Civil liberties groups and Hindu factions were enraged.

Then, in October, 1988, India, the world’s largest democracy, ordered “The Satanic Verses” banned. It’s worth remembering that it did so four months before the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for the execution of Salman Rushdie ...

In defense of Mitch Daniels

Or his demeanor, at least:

I'm mostly posting this in fairness to John Avlon, who I've criticized before for his flippant take on serious news. This is thoughtful and to the point. On the other hand, Governor Daniels did still say, "We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have nots; we must always be a nation of haves and soon to haves," which sounds pretty simplistic when you consider that moving up the social ladder in the US is almost always generational, meaning that even when the American dream works it means a pretty shitty life for the older generation(s), which isn't exactly how most people define "soon." But anyway, this was a smart little editorial.

Egypt tweets

WorldNow compiles remarks about #Jan25, one year later.

Our free press

I can't decide how much this bothers me:

Thanks to the many journalists arrested during Occupy Wall Street, the U.S. tumbled from 27th to 47th place in the annual international rankings of press freedom, compiled by Reporters Without Borders.

This is a good organization, but this rating seems fairly tempermental. Then again, cops can be assholes.

News coverage here, report here.

Romney's returns

Judging by various mentions, Jonathan V. Last's Weekly Standard take on Mitt Romney's wealth, anticipating the release of his 2010 and 2011 tax returns early this morning, is the piece to read today.

Listening

 

My soundtrack today, basically. Heat!

It’s the coattails, stupid

John Marshall makes a very good point:

It would be quite difficult for Newt Gingrich to beat President Obama. The bigger story is that he would likely devastate the congressional Republican party. He’d probably weigh down the GOP up and down the ticket. And that puts the whole thing in much sharper relief for Republican officeholders, committee chairs and money folks.

If I’m right about that, that means they have to and will do virtually everything possible now to crush Gingrich and make Romney the nominee.

Hat tip to Mr Sullivan, who has more on this theme here.

Angola’s missing billions

Economist:

In response to concerns raised by the IMF, the Angolan government denied that $32 billion is missing from its accounts. Officials admitted a discrepancy, but said this was due to poor record-keeping, not corruption.

An unlikely story.

The dead in Nigeria

Reuters puts last week's body count at 178:

The scale of the carnage makes this by far the deadliest strike claimed by Boko Haram, a shadowy Islamist sect that started out as a clerical movement opposed to western education but has become the biggest security menace facing Africa's top oil producer.

"We have 178 people killed in the two main hospitals," the senior doctor in Kano's Murtala Mohammed hospital said following Friday's attacks, citing records from his own and the other main hospital of Nasarawa.

Could Iowa’s recount hurt its stature?

Taegan Goddard quotes Jason Noble at the Des Moines Register:

The certified results released this week from the nation’s first presidential nominating contest revealed that Mitt Romney’s declared eight-vote victory on caucus night was actually a 34-vote defeat. They revealed that eight voting precincts went missing in action, and their votes will never be counted. And they were accompanied by evolving statements from the Republican Party of Iowa, which, having initially called the race for Romney, first declared this week’s result a “split decision” and only later acknowledged victory for Santorum.

Such a muddled result and response threatens the already-contested legitimacy of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status and underscores the need for reforms to professionalize the voting process, political observers and party officials said.

‘Will do video link instead. Damn.’

David Remnick reports on his trip to the Jaipur Literary Festival, in northwestern in India, where Salman Rushdie cancelled an appearance after credible threats on his life:

Just after I finished a session of my own, about the life and politics of Barack Obama, I started hearing rumors that Rushdie, who had been the festival’s main attraction, was not coming to Jaipur. The plan had been for him to give a talk on “Midnight’s Children,” and take part in a discussion on the history of English in India. Reporters were summoned for a press conference. The news was bad.

In the past few days, there had been reports in the Times of India and elsewhere that Rushdie’s life was being threatened—hard evidence that a fatwa the Ayatollah Khomeini issued more than two decades ago, ordering Rushdie’s death, has hardly burned itself out.

Reactionary philistines: still assholes.

Hunger-striking Cuban dissident dies in prison

LA Times:

REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY -- A Cuban dissident serving a four-year prison term has died after staging a hunger strike to protest his incarceration, human rights groups say.

Wilman Villar, 31, died Thursday night in a hospital where authorities had transferred him after he fell ill, apparently from the effects of a seven-week hunger strike. His widow, Maritza Pelegrino Cabrales, told Human Rights Watch that prison guards had placed Villar naked in solitary confinement in a small, cold cell. Cuban rights activists said he succumbed to pneumonia.

"The responsibility for Wilman Villar Mendoza's death in custody lies squarely with the Cuban authorities, who summarily judged and jailed him for exercising his right to freedom of expression," Javier Zuniga, special advisor at Amnesty International, said in a statement.

Villar was convicted in November of "contempt" and resisting arrest when he participated in an antigovernment demonstration in eastern Cuba. Supporters of the government of President Raul Castro dismissed the little-known Villar as a common criminal.

Human rights groups, and the regime's enemies, harshly condemned his treatment.

Bigotry in the GOP field

Well said, TNR editorial:

Nuanced punditry is a fine thing. Agreeing with a candidate on certain issues but not others is a perfectly reasonable practice. Yet, when it comes to Santorum and Paul—whose histories on certain issues can only be described as deeply bigoted—all this "yes, but" commentary from left and right is more than a little troubling.

Trotsky talk

Great online find from this week: Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service in a July 2009 talk with Peter Robinson of Uncommon Knowledge about the legacy of Leon Trotsky.

The inevitable ‘Shit People in DC Say’

I don't want to sound cliquish, but y'all this is like a video of my life. Although it should probably be called "Shit People in Northwest Say" ... which is itself something DC people say, by which I probably mean something people in Northwest say. Got it?

Also, am I mishearing this or does he say "my buddy from CSI"?

Hat tip to Swift.

From Moscow to Vladivostok

Speaking of vast stretches of Asia ... I woke up recently to one of David Greene's "Russia by Rail" pieces on Morning Edition. A pretty amazing journey in a pretty amazing land. This particular piece chronicles the last leg of Greene's journey eastward, showing how far away Moscow and its politics (some 6,000 miles to the west) truly is for the people of Siberia. Also, the song Greene plays at the end of his epilogue report (Yuri Shevchuk's "Eta V'sor") really struck a chord in me for some reason (although I guess that was by design). I'm in search of a full version.

(Found one.)

Just read it

Arthur sent this along today. I was laughing too hard to finish it.

you hit me with your electric wheelchair so i challenge you to a duel - 29 (Giant in Columbia Heights Washington DC)

Hello sir,

My name is Ben and at about 8pm tonight (1/17/12) you ran directly into me with your electric wheelchair in front of the Giant in Columbia Heights, DC.

Allow me to illustrate what exactly happened that was so be-fuddling and anger inducing that it would inspire me to create a "missed connection" post on Craigslist. ...

What we think about when we think about China

I got a call from a pollster today. He asked if I would answer a few questions to see if I meet their criteria to take part in a questionnaire about China. First, "What is your job title?" Second, "How much would you say you know about China?" (with five options to select from: very much, somewhat, etc). Lastly, this:

POLLING GUY: What do you think of when you think of China?

ME: Do I have options to pick from?

POLLING GUY: No.

ME: Uh ... seriously?

POLLING GUY: Yes, what is the first thing you think of when you think of China?

ME: I dunno ... the Great Wall of China.

POLLING GUY: OK, you qualify for our study.

I'm still a little baffled by this. It seems like a weird way to filter people. But I guess Harris knows what it's doing. In all honesty, though, there was definitely a voice whispering in my head, "Don't say anything offensive, don't say anything offensive." I think my genuine first thought is a toss-up between a map of China and a montage of Mao Zedong laughing maniacally and triumphantly with, like, flames licking around his face and millions of starved-to-death corpses strewn behind him (sorta like this). A close third is that any China section in any bookstore seems to be a wall of red covers and dustjackets. Hasn't gotten old yet, I guess. Having said that, I would really love to see the list of all the answers to this question.

The midnight of the GOP

Thus, as to all contenders, South Carolina has come to Mitt Romney. It's where the Bush campaign fatally put the spikes to McCain in 2000; it's where the Clinton machine tried (unsuccessfully) to derail Obama in 2008. And now, it's become the scene for the most serious challenge the presumptive Republican nominee has yet to face in months of campaigning.

Encapsulated perfectly by the 28-minute Gingrich propaganda piece "When Mitt Romney Came to Town," the line of attack paints the former Massachusets governor – in the words of ex-primary opponent Rick Perry – as a "vulture capitalist," based on his 15-year career at the private equity firm Bain Capital. Party stalwarts have condemned the infighting, but the offensive has brough Gingrich (endorsed by Perry as he withdrew this morning) into a dead heat with Romney heading into Saturday's primary.

So now, after years of Tea Party mania and a seemingly endless string of hotheaded debates, the GOP finds itself in what seems to be a pretty wretched corner. The best-case scenario at present is nominating a multimillionaire (and not just a "rich guy" – wealthy candidates have made viable presidents in both parties – but a man who has a problem connecting with working-class voters and often comes off as secretive about his own wealth and fairly Darwinian in his capitalist philosophy) to run against a successful and moderate incumbent during a recession. And the dark-horse alternative is tapping the only Republican candidate who looks more opportunist than Romney – which is pretty hard to do – and has far more enemies. I mean, I know the opposition usually eats shit during a reelect, but this is just pathetic.

Rules of the sea

Love this:

Seamen have expressed almost universal outrage at Capt. Francesco Schettino, accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and of abandoning his crippled cruise ship off Tuscany while passengers were still on board. The last charge carries a potential sentence of 12 years in prison.

Jim Staples, a captain for 20 years, who spoke Wednesday from a 1,000-foot (300-meter) cargo vessel he was captaining near New Orleans, said captains are duty-bound to stay with the ship until the situation is hopeless. When they bail early, everything falls apart.

January/February

This issue turned out very well. PJ O'Rourke and Jamie Kirchick cover "Occupy Wall Street" from, respectively, Washington and Prague; Chuck Lane gives us a rundown of the GOP's meager foreign policy offerings; Tom Gjelten tells the story of the burgeoning natural gas market – and why it will likely reshape a power balance or two; Michael Totten, David Schenker, and Hussain Abdul-Hussain assess a year of Arab Spring; Peter Coclanis finds glimmers of modernization, if not exactly hope, in Myanmar; Sohrab Ahmari reviews Terry Glavin's unconventional new book of reportage on Afghanistan; Michael Weiss profiles Bill Browder and his struggle to bring justice to the Kremlin after the Russian government tortured and murdered one of his lawyers for trying to expose corruption; and Michael Zantovsky takes a long, cold look at Israeli-Palestinian relations circa 2012. Seriously: this issue is packed!

So have at it, folks ...

The long tail of the Sudan split

Gettleman reports from Pibor, in eastern South Sudan:

Ethnic clashes were unnervingly common here in 2009, before the final push for independence. More ominous than the small-scale cattle raids that have gone on for generations, the attacks often seemed like infantry maneuvers, fueling accusations that northern Sudanese leaders had shipped in arms to destabilize the south.

But southerners seemed to rally together as the historic referendum on independence from the north drew near. The exuberance brought reconciliation. Major ethnic clashes all but disappeared.

The respite was short lived. Fighting broke out almost immediately along the tense border between north and south. Then, only a month after South Sudan celebrated its independence last July with a new national anthem and a countdown clock that blared “Free at Last,” Murle fighters killed more than 600 Nuer villagers and abducted scores of children. That attack set this month’s massacre into motion.

The dead from recent killings number somewhere around 3,000.

Ms. FLOTUS

If you want to read about that book, David Remnick's review is probably your best bet. Also, by the by, Barack Obama just emailed everyone to tell us to wish his wife happy birthday next week. Strange times we live in ...

Song for a rainy night