Diplomacy Is Syria’s Business, Yo

Looks like Bashar al-Assad is ready to deal.

The Syrian government has accepted U.N. envoy Kofi Annan’s plan to forge peace and end violence, Annan’s spokesman said on Tuesday.

Annan has offered Syria a six-point plan – supported by the U.N. Security Council – as a way to halt the violence.

The proposal seeks to stop the violence and the killing, give access to humanitarian agencies, release detainees, and start an inclusive political dialogue to address the legitimate aspirations and concerns of the Syrian people, according to a U.N. statement.

Hey look.  Smart power and stuff.  It’s like it works or something, and that there are ugly foreign policy problems that can be solved without blowing things up.  Can’t wait until the usual suspects tell us how awesome the United Nations suddenly is, and that President Whatshisface had nothing to do with this.

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Sorry, Larry

Anne Laurie was speculating on the World Bank pick earlier today, and I think it’s good news it wasn’t you-know-who after all:

President Barack Obama startled handicappers by selecting Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim as the U.S. candidate to lead the World Bank rather than the reported front-runner Larry Summers, Obama’s former National Economic Council director.
The Korean-born Kim is a medical doctor, anthropologist, and MacArthur fellow, best known for his pioneering work to fight HIV and tuberculosis in the Third World. Kim helped develop treatments for drug-resistant TB, and then successfully pushed to reduced the cost of anti-TB drugs. He is close associate of Dr. Paul Farmer, the lead founder of Partners in Health and subject of Tracy Kidder’s 2003 book, Mountains Beyond Mountains.
While Third World leaders had pushed for an alternative to Summers, Kim was a total surprise. The appointment is a two-fer in the sense that it gives the job both to an American and to an Asian, as well as a welcome breakthrough in that the presidency goes to someone with on-the-ground work fighting poverty and disease as opposed to an international dignitary or economist.
Jeffrey Sachs, who audaciously threw his own hat into the ring, can take some credit for this surprise choice, since his own move created some pressure for Obama to think outside the box. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was also reportedly favorable to the Kim selection. For Summers, this ends a winning streak of falling upwards.

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Early Morning Open Thread: Global Financeering

Well, here’s a new extremely political campaign for the horse-race addicts to worrit. The World Bank, “an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs”, will be choosing a new president in June. All former WB presidents have been Americans, because of the Golden Rule: Those that have the gold, make the rules. Felix Salmon, Reuter’s finance blogger, reports that this year’s race is different:

Lesley Wroughton has the wonderful news: two very highly qualified non-American candidates — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Jose Antonio Ocampo — are going to be nominated to be president of the World Bank. This really puts the pressure on the White House to knock it out of the park with their nomination, because Ngozi, in particular, is broadly regarded both within and outside the Bank as being pretty much perfect for the job. She’s a whip-smart economist, she’s honest, she’s imaginative, she’s dedicated, she’s expert at navigating the Bank’s labyrinthine bureaucracy and politics, and she’s passionate about the way that the Bank can really make the world a better place…

Now that Ngozi’s in the running, the US is going to find it incredibly difficult to nominate a relatively low-profile person like Susan Rice, because it’s almost impossible to make a credible case that Rice is a superior candidate to Ngozi on the merits. And other big names seem to be falling away:

U.S. Senator John Kerry and PepsiCo’s Indian-born CEO Indra Nooyi also made an Obama administration shortlist, according to a source, although Kerry has publicly ruled out the job and Nooyi is no longer in contention, according to another source.

This is really bad news, because by a process of elimination it more or less forces Obama to go with Larry Summers. Larry would be a dreadful nominee, and a worse president, in a job whose primary prerequisite is diplomacy. And before he’s even nominated, there’s already a website up, ForgetLarry.org, devoted to campaigning against him for the job. It covers pretty much all the bases, although it weirdly misses the Russia/Shleifer scandal: for that, check out Cathy O’Neil’s post from a couple of weeks ago.

I’ve talked to a fair number of people about this position, including a few who are quite sympathetic to Larry, and not one of them thinks that he would be good in the post. If the US forced the world to choose between Larry and Ngozi, it would have to expend an astonishing amount of diplomatic capital to twist the requisite number of arms to get him the job, just because no one would actually want to vote for him. Their hearts would be with Ngozi…

I certainly don’t know enough about international economics to judge anybody’s fitness, but I do know enough recent history to agree that Larry Summers should not be considered for any position other than ‘premiere test subject in the Soylent Green factory’. (I can’t be the only person planning never to forgive Summers for his ‘thought experiment’ suggesting that toxic industries should be shipped to “less developed countries”, where life and the environment were cheap.) Felix Salmon’s suggestion for the ideal candidate, on the other hand, is going to enrage a certain portion of the Obama Administration’s self-described base. Anybody with a better grasp of the topic want to help the rest of us understand?

And what else is on the agenda for the end of another workweek?

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Pierre Poutine in the Great White North

The Tory ratfucking robocall scandal in Canada is heating up:

A former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper says last year’s election day robo-calls are of a scale he’s never seen before and warrant a “huge investigation.”

Ian Brodie, who was Mr. Harper’s chief of staff from 2006 to 2008, said revelations from an Elections Canada probe that has centred on the Southern Ontario riding of Guelph and its local Conservative campaign likely indicate “a very devious local effort that could well lead to charges against several campaign volunteers.”

But he didn’t dismiss the possibility of “a national effort at subterfuge.”

Elections Canada has found evidence of calls directing voters to fictitious polling places in 31 ridings across Canada, even though Tories have argued that they were the work of one operative in Guelph going by the name of “Pierre Poutine”. It sounds like Pierre wasn’t acting alone—Betty Beavertail, Bob Backbacon and Nancy Nanaimo-Bar must have been helping out. Any other ideas for unindicted co-conspirators?

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Pillow Talk

The Guardian has gotten their hands on Bashir al-Assad’s private emails between him, his wife and some of their closest friends. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot new or shocking in them. They buy expensive shit. They share YouTube videos. They hate the peasants and want to crush them under their bootheels. One interesting find is that the daughter of the Emir of Qatar told them to bail and seek asylum, which made the Assads take her off their Christmas list.

It’s worth noting that this big document dump was not released to Wikileaks. I can’t remember the last time a big document dump came out that wasn’t in some way associated with Wikileaks, but perhaps I’m missing one.

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Tonight We Smoke Them Out

Ratfucking has come to the Great White North, courtesy of the Conservatives:

Elections Canada has traced fraudulent phone calls made during the federal election to an Edmonton voice-broadcast company that worked for the Conservative Party across the country. [...]

Elections Canada launched its investigation after it was inundated with complaints about election day calls in Guelph, Ont., one of 18 ridings across the country where voters were targeted by harassing or deceptive phone messages in an apparent effort to discourage Liberal supporters from voting.

It looks like the Tories will try to pin this on a 23 year-old staffer, who’s already resigned. The opposition isn’t buying it, and have starting to use the “N word” (Nixonian). Harper has personally issued a blanket denial, saying that “our party has no knowledge of these calls”, which seems like a statement begging to be refuted. It will be interesting to see if this is enough to bring down Harper’s government.

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Why Don’t They Just Let It Default?

I really do not understand this:

After more than 12 hours of talks, the countries that use the euro reached an agreement early Tuesday to hand Greece euro130 billion ($170 billion) in extra bailout loans to save it from a potentially disastrous default next month, an European Union diplomat said.

The euro surged as the news broke, climbing 0.7 percent to $1.328 within minutes. While much depended on the details of the deal, a final agreement on the bailout for Greece will take some pressure off the 17-country currency union, which has been battling a serious debt crisis for two years.

Why don’t they just let Greece default rather than be a bottomless pit of banker bailouts. Default would be better for everyone involved, particularly the Greeks.

And when they decide to be a serious nation that actually collects taxes, they could move on from there.

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Open Thread: Sunday Salmagundi

(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)

In an entirely different sense, Katrina vanden Heuvel hopes that the progressive backlash against Rick Sanctorom-onius and his ilk might just make 2012 a”Year of the Woman“: “It also seems that support for Democratic women candidates is attributable to more than choice and health issues. A poll conducted by EMILY’s List on January 31 shows that the issues women consider priorities are the economy, tax fairness, Social Security and Medicare…”

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But Cheryl Russell at TNR worries that young people won’t turn out to vote this year:

... So why don’t young adults vote? That’s a vexing question political campaigns have been asking for decades. The most likely answer is that young adults do not vote because many are still—in a sense—children, without adult commitments or responsibilities. The data suggest that three factors consistently make a difference in voting rates: money, marriage, and homeownership. Those are the adult commitments that give people a stake in society; to protect and expand their stake, they vote. Take a look at money and voting: The gap in voter participation between the highest and lowest income groups is a stunning 26 percentage points. For marriage and homeownership, the gaps are 16 to 17 percent.

Recent years have seen Americans in their twenties delay starting careers, getting married, and buying homes—and as the road to adulthood has lengthened, voting rates among the young have generally fallen (the notable exceptions are 2004 and 2008). Now, the bad economy is exacerbating these trends. For the nation’s young, the Great Recession has turned money, marriage, and homeownership into an impossible dream…

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Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect does a take-down on American Select—I mean, Americans Elect—aka “Wall Street’s Third Party“:

... The digitization of politics is only part of Americans Elect’s mission. Its other, greater purpose is to give a voice to what it believes is the “disempowered center” of American politics—thus the requirement that its presidential ticket must represent both parties. What the country needs, Americans Elect insists, are leaders who draw their ideas and support from both parties, from liberals and conservatives. If you press them, Americans Elect’s officials go further and say that what the country really needs are culturally liberal, fiscally conservative leaders—leaders whose thinking matches that of the nation’s socially enlightened business elites from whose brow Americans Elect has sprung.

“What do I want in the ticket?” asks Eliot Cutler, who ran an unsuccessful independent campaign for governor of Maine in 2010 (splitting the center-left vote and thereby helping elect a right-wing Republican) and is a member of Americans Elect’s nine-member board of directors. “A ticket that reflects moderate politics, a pragmatic approach to politics, that looks like the Bowles-Simpson Commission in terms of approach—people who reflect my own biases toward social progressivism and fiscal discipline.”...

This is actual journalism, as opposed to the Moustache of Understanding’s latest tongue bath of Pete Peterson’s anti-populist sockpuppet, which calls itself “the Comeback America Initiative”. Pete Peterson just wants his Gilded Age back! Being an entitled rich sociopath really meant something in those dear dead days!

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Apropos of absolutely nothing, a vintage British bank robbery saga goes Southern Gothic as “19 Years and £1 Million Later, a Past Catches Up“.

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Brad Plumer at Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog (WaPo) wonders how much online shopping has influenced the cutback in Americans’ gasoline useage.

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And the NYTimes is happy to tell us that “Foxconn Plans to Lift Pay Sharply at Factories in China“, which some people say could maybe just possibly be related to the problem that Chinese workers are becoming less accepting of slave-labor conditions.

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Crossing The Rubin Con: Endless Wargasm

Jennifer Rubin pauses from her Romney cheerleading day job to go after the 51% of America that actually learned a lesson from the decade of wars we’ve been thrust into, as the latest Pew Research poll finds there’s not too much support for backing up an Israeli attack on Iran.  With only 39% of Americans wanting the US to follow Israel into the Hot Gates of Thermopylae Tehran, Rubin chastises the Dems for not being explodey enough:

It’s stunning, actually, that in the event of a conflict between the revolutionary, jihadist state Iran and our democratic ally Israel, Democrats want us to be neutral.

The Democratic National Committee chairwoman doesn’t want to make Israel an “election” issue. Maybe before lecturing Republicans to clam up she should work on educating her own party about the U.S.-Israel relationship and about the menace of a nuclear-armed Iran. It is embarrassing for the Democratic Party’s finger-wagging chairwoman to be saddled with a constituency that is so indifferent to the plight of the Jewish state. As for Obama, it seems he’s right in sync with opinion in his party on Israel. And that is a big problem for the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship, the survival of the Jewish state and the continued credibility of the United States, which under two administrations has vowed that it is “unacceptable” for Iran to obtain nuclear weapons.

Once again, I am struck as to how Rubin seems to have completely omitted our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the country’s memory, and how we arrived at them, and that she has no issues with Israel dictating foreign policy to us.  Indeed, she is “stunned” to find that after nine years in Iraq and ten going on eleven in Afghanistan, that the American public really isn’t terribly keen on going to war with Iran and want us to stay out of an Israel-Iran fight, and want us to not invest another lost decade’s worth of blood and treasure just because Israel gets trigger-happy.

Besides the ridiculous notion that people who don’t want war are somehow not only “indifferent” towards the Israel but ostensibly against Israel’s very survival itself, I have to ask if all it took to get the US to invade Iran was Israel attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, why hasn’t Israel simply done it already if the Iranian nuclear program is such an existential threat?

Also, it’s not like the United States is truly “neutral” anyway, nor are we just standing around doing nothing to support an ally.  America is applying tough economic sanctions and has gotten the European Union to go along with them.  These sanctions get much tougher in another five months or so when the clause that the US will no longer do economic business with countries that do buy oil from Iran fully kicks in.  Hell, even FOX News is admitting the sanctions are working.  Oh, and yes, we have carrier groups hanging out in the region as well just in case Iran does something stupid, and in fact to specifically prevent Iran from doing anything stupid.  It seems to me that Israel is choosing not to act for a reason, and that reason is the sanctions are working.

But Rubin blithely insists war is the only option and goes after anyone who believes in any other approach to Iran, when President Obama is calmly proving that this just isn’t the case in reality.  After a decade of blood and trillions of dollars, America is getting tired of having its patriotism questioned by armchair Alexanders who engage in nothing but endless wargasm.  Certainly the Post’s readers deserve something slightly more nuanced than Rubin’s cartoon-inspired approach to international relations.

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Senses Working Overtime

So much win and so much fail at the same time:

Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Tuesday reported that Anonymous hacked the office of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and dumped hundreds of emails online, including damning prep notes for Assad’s December 2011 ABC News interview with Barbara Walters, in which a press officer encouraged bringing up America’s police response to the “Occupy Wall Street” protests as well as America’s “policy to torture people,” as counter-examples against allegations of Syrian regime-ordered killings.

Seventy eight inboxes of Assad staffers were compromised, according to the newspaper, including several that used the password “12345,” one of the most-common but obviously least secure passwords possible.

4tehlulz.

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The abortion mill that conservatives just love. They can’t get enough of funding THIS abortion mill!

Now, after a few days, here’s my contribution to the ongoing Komen-foundation-shooting-themselves-in-both-feet-after-putting-both-feet-in-their-mouths-gate.

I’d like to take a moment to discuss the abortion mill that conservatives love with all their heart.  That organization that they want to force every American to support that kills tens of thousands of the pre-born every year.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…the state of Israel.

The US government gives approximately $3 billion a year to the state of Israel in military aid.  Money, being a fungible thing (H/T to McSuderman) that means that the $3 billion they get from us is 3 billion of their own money that they aren’t spending on military hardware.  Some of that 3 billion dollars allows the Israelis to build, support, and protect illegal settlements in the West Bank.  Some of it goes to support other Israeli activities that are diametrically opposed to American national security goals in the region and the world.  Some of that money makes room in the Israeli economy for spending on Israel’s socialized medical system.  Conservatives just loves them some socialized medicine in other countries, don’t you know.

But the big issue here is the fact that in Israel, abortions are legal, and paid for under that same socialized medical system.  Conservatives just love aborting Jew babies, it seems.  That has to be it, because they claim to hate abortions and to hate socialized medicine, but they love giving American taxpayers’ money to Israel to free up Israeli money to abort Israeli Jews.  In 2003, the latest year for which Wikipedia has Israeli abortion statistics:

Clauses 312-321 of the 1977 penal code limit the circumstances when an abortion is legal in Israel. Abortions can only be performed in Israel by licensed gynecologists in recognized medical facilities that are specifically and publicly recognized as a provider of abortions.  Abortions must be approved by the termination committee.

In practice, most requests for abortion are granted, and leniency is shown especially under the clause for emotional or psychological damage to the pregnant woman. According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics report from 2004, 19,500 legal abortions were performed in Israel in 2003, while 200 requests for abortion were denied. Most abortions were authorized because the woman was unmarried (42%), because of illegal circumstances, such as rape, incest, etc.  (11%), health risks to the woman (about 20%), age of the woman (11%) and fetal birth defects (about 17%).

Also, too, consider this an open thread.

 

EDIT—Clarification—Abortion is not strictly legal, but is subject to approval by a 3 person committee.  It is not correct to say that “abortion is legal in Isreael”, per se.  That committee however, approves almost all of the abortions that are requested, which are then paid for by the healthcare system.  There is a proposed law in the Knesset right now that would make abortion completely legal in Israel because women who can afford to go to private clinics do so and avoid the committee altogether, according to the same Wiki article.  The intent of the proposed law is to make abortion rights functionally equal for all Israeli women.

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Occupy the Toybox

I would love this even I didn’t have a half-dozen tchotchkes on my desk right now. From the Guardian:

Police in the Siberian city of Barnaul have asked prosecutors to investigate the legality of a recent protest that saw dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: “I’m for clean elections” and “A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin”.

“Political opposition forces are using new technologies to carry out public events – using toys with placards at mini-protests,” Andrei Mulintsev, the city’s deputy police chief, said at a press conference this week, according to local media. “In our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event.”

Activists set up the display after authorities repeatedly rejected their request to hold a sanctioned demonstration of the kind held in Moscow to protest disputed parliamentary elections results and Vladimir Putin’s expected return to the presidency in a March vote.

Passersby admired the display with giggles, but police took it more seriously, examining its details and writing down each placard…

Worth clicking the link just to read the comments. I’m looking forward to seeing what American protestors can achieve with their homespun Makerbots and the fast-advancing field of 3D printers.

And then, * sigh *, there is the state-sanctioned “creative play” of this guy, complete with gender-biased color insult:

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Smooth Operator

So, you know, this happened. But according to wingnuts, Obama is a pussy who gets pushed around.

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Kthug’s Slow Motion Nightmare

You honestly have to feel for Paul Krugman and the handful of others who have been telling us all along that austerity policies are bound to fail:

Europe’s leaders braced their nations for a turbulent year, with their beleaguered economies facing a threat on two fronts: widening deficits that force more borrowing but increasing austerity measures that put growth further out of reach.

Saying that Europe was facing its “harshest test in decades,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany warned on New Year’s Eve that “next year will no doubt be more difficult than 2011” — a marked change in tone from a year ago, when she praised Germans for “mastering the crisis as no other nation.”

Her blunt message was echoed in Italy, France and Greece, the epicenter of the debt crisis, where Prime Minister Lucas Papademos asked for resolve in seeing reforms through, “so that the sacrifices we have made up to now won’t be in vain.”

While the economic picture in the United States has brightened recently with more upbeat employment figures, Europe remains mired in a slump. Most economists are forecasting a recession for 2012, which will heighten the pressure governments and financial institutions across the Continent are seeing.

Adding to the gloomy outlook is the prospect of a downgrade in France’s sterling credit rating, a move that analysts say could happen early in the new year and have wide-ranging consequences on efforts to stabilize Europe’s finances.

Despite criticism from many economists, though, most European governments are sticking to austerity plans, rejecting the Keynesian approach of economic stimulus favored by Washington after the financial crisis in 2008, in a bid to show investors they are serious about fiscal discipline.

This cycle was evident on Friday, when Spain surprised observers by announcing a larger-than-expected budget gap for 2011 even as the new conservative government there laid out plans to increase property and income taxes in 2012.

Indeed, even in the country where the crisis began, Greece, the cycle of spending cuts, tax increases and contraction has not resulted in a course correction, and the same path now lies in store for much larger economies like those of Italy and Spain.

“Every government in Europe with the exception of Germany is bending over backwards to prove to the market that they won’t hesitate to do what it takes,” said Charles Wyplosz, a professor of economics at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. “We’re going straight into a wall with this kind of policy. It’s sheer madness.”

Rather than the austerity measures now being imposed, Mr. Wyplosz said he would like to see governments halt the recent tax increases and spending reductions, and instead cut consumption taxes in a bid to encourage consumer spending. More belt-tightening, he said, increases the likelihood that Europe will see a “lost decade” of economic torpor like Japan faced in the 1990s.

He has to be pulling his hair out.

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The Russian Protests and Their “Network Hamster”

Dmitry Golubovsky, editor of Esquire Russia, interviews “Alexei Navalny — blogger, political activist, and self-described “network hamster” “:

ESQUIRE: The primary cause of the current protests across Russia were the federal parliamentary elections on December 4. What do you remember most about voting day?

ALEXEI NAVALNY: Everybody was nervous and worried, myself probably more than others, because I initiated a campaign against United Russia, the ruling party, under the slogan “Party of Crooks and Thieves.” The slogan appeared by accident — during a radio show, the host asked me how I felt about United Russia, and I said, “Very bad. United Russia is a party of crooks and thieves.” Later, I announced a poll on my blog — “Do you consider United Russia to be the Party of Crooks and Thieves?” — and 97 percent of 40,000 people said “Yes,” and away we go. From the very beginning, it was clear that the election was going to be unjust, but I really wanted to know if one could do any significant damage to United Russia by means of a campaign launched on the Internet. That’s what we did, and our main message was: vote for anyone except the Party of Crooks and Thieves. It seemed way more effective than simply boycotting the election — just another strategy propagated by the opposition — because it was in the interest of all the small parties that took part in the vote to join us…

ESQ: How much do you think the Internet influenced the December protests?

AN: I think about 40 percent of people came to protest mainly because of the Internet. The past year, year and a half was very important in this respect: broadband became cheaper, mobile Internet spread dramatically. And this quantity transformed to quality. The Internet has become a true information infrastructure in big cities — and can now even challenge TV. Social networks gave us some very much needed infrastructure, and different services are useful in very different ways. LiveJournal (The main blogging platform in Russia. —Ed.) was good for informational, more detailed posts. Facebook has more multimedia features — likes, links, posters, videos, events, where you can see if your friends are going to this and that rally or not. Smartphones and Twitter hook people up to news 24/7. And for some things even I, a 35-year-old, am too old — for instance, I made a big mistake when I didn’t run the campaign against crooks and thieves in Vkontakte: I simply don’t understand how this social network works, unlike my employees at “Rospil.” (A noncommercial anti-corruption project founded by Navalny this year that raised over $250,000 from Internet users. —Ed.) But the people didn’t go out on the streets because of Facebook or LiveJournal — it’s because they were angry. If it wasn’t for this informational infrastructure, they’d go anyway, but it would be harder for them to coordinate their efforts, and because of that the protest would probably break out in a more aggressive way. Now, since everything is easier to organize, the protests are more peaceful….

More detail, including an explanation of the “network hamster” nik, at the link.

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