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« Liberal Outrage: April 2011 | Main | Liberal Outrage: June 2011 » Liberal OutrageThomas Friedman: worst writer in the world Friedman writes: Digby says: See here for some previous examples of his incredible writing style. By fnord12 | May 25, 2011, 2:41 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link This chart has been making the rounds for the past few weeks (latest is from TPM). Figure i should reprint it here. By fnord12 | May 25, 2011, 1:26 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Is that better than a regular admiral? Are there Front Admirals? All i can tell you is Rear Admirals apparently like to talk sense and use things like "logic" and "strategy". I know. Nutters. Link Rear Admiral Chris Parry said the conflict was becoming all too reminiscent of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a "classic example of how to act in haste and repent at leisure". Writing in the Guardian, Parry says Nato must accept that the UN resolution which allowed coalition forces to protect Libyan civilians will not bring an end to the fighting, and that diplomats should now consider seeking a new mandate. "What might a decent strategy look like? The Libyan people should, with international assistance, establish and articulate the political ends they require for themselves and their country. "The UK and its Nato allies could then conduct a campaign that is built around an explicit political purpose, expressed in a single, unambiguous aim (the 'master principle of war'). "That would focus and prioritise military activities. This would also enable a more sensible assessment of whether further authorisation from the UN might be required." "There is no clear statement of ends. The ill-defined outcomes and parsimony about resources limit the ways in which the campaign can be conducted." By min | May 24, 2011, 12:13 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link OK, ready? How does this paragraph end? Sounds good so far, right? Well, here's the rest of it... Let me be very clear: this is a good thing. And it's an incredibly brave thing for Obama to do, because you know how this is going to play. The truth is that he's already got budget to do this and doesn't have to go back to Congress, so that's why he can do something overseas that he can't do at home. But just wait for the pettifogging on this one. By fnord12 | May 19, 2011, 9:59 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Why are Pakistan and NATO firing on each other? "It happened early morning," a Pakistani intelligence official in the region, who declined to be identified, told Reuters. "The helicopter hit a Pakistani checkpost on the border in the Datta Khel area." NYT's article says Pakistan closed down NATO's land route through Pakistan last September. Now it seems they're closing the air route, as well. Sadly, neither article gives much info as to why Pakistan is so hostile to NATO when they've been singing the "We're totally behind helping fight al Qaeda" song all this time. (I'm sure if I'd been paying more attention, I'd know the answer to this. I'm waiting for one of you to explain it to me in the comments.) The articles rather bring up the tangentially related drama of the post-bin Laden raid US/Pakistani strained relations (I think they saw the word "Pakistan" and grabbed their opening to talk about it some more). However, according to this article, the US had a deal in place with Pakistan for the last 10 years that permits just this kind of military action. The deal was struck between the military leader General Pervez Musharraf and President George Bush after Bin Laden escaped US forces in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001, according to serving and retired Pakistani and US officials. So, the anger and posturing about invading Pakistan without warning is all an act. I'm still left with my first question - why are Pakistan and NATO firing at each other? By min | May 17, 2011, 3:06 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2)| Link Oh, China. Fields of watermelons exploded when he and other agricultural workers in eastern China mistakenly applied forchlorfenuron, a growth accelerator. The incident has become a focus of a Chinese media drive to expose the lax farming practices, shortcuts and excessive use of fertiliser behind a rash of food safety scandals. It follows discoveries of the heavy metal cadmium in rice, toxic melamine in milk, arsenic in soy sauce, bleach in mushrooms, and the detergent borax in pork, added to make it resemble beef. Now, the bit about the birth control in the cucumbers....I could get behind that. By min | May 17, 2011, 3:00 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Poor Matthew Yglesias was assaulted over the weekend. Being Matthew Yglesias, he immediately launches into a policy discussion. That said, as a matter of personal ethics you really shouldn't run around punching random dudes in the back of the head irrespective of the prevailing level of population density or policing. By fnord12 | May 16, 2011, 12:54 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link ...well, he's never been accused of sorcery. Several dozen people close to Ahmadinejad and his chief of staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei have been arrested in the past few days and charged with sorcery and "invoking djinns (spirits)," The Guardian reports. Another man arrested, Abbas Ghaffari, was described by a news site in Iran as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds." (Actually, i take that back.) By fnord12 | May 10, 2011, 10:06 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Ultra Orthodox Hasidic newspaper Der Tzitung has hidden the ladies from the now famous White House Situation Room picture. The original: Der Tzitung's: I'm still waiting for this to turn out to be a hoax, it's so ridiculous. But here's the link (via Digby via Krugman). The religious paper never publishes pictures of women, as they could be considered "sexually suggestive." Apparently the presence of a woman, any woman, being all womanly and sexy all over the United States' counterterrorism efforts was too much for the editors of Der Tzitung to handle. By fnord12 | May 9, 2011, 3:23 PM | Liberal Outrage & Ummm... Other? | Link Link: The outcome points to a rockier future for Britain's Conservative-led coalition government, with analysts predicting a more combative stance from the Lib Dems, the junior partners.
Meanwhile... The Scottish National Party (SNP) scored a bumper haul, winning an outright majority in Scotland's assembly -- which has limited powers devolved from London -- and opening the door for a referendum on secession from the rest of Britain. It's been the Irish who fought for their independence for so long while the Scotts sat around like loyal wankers, so this is an interesting twist. By fnord12 | May 7, 2011, 11:31 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Link: Now BofA is charging a flat $25 plus 1% of the amount withdrawn for CDs with terms under 12 months and 3% for longer terms. That means the early withdrawal penalty for that same $10,000, 12-month CD now runs $125 -- a nearly 1,700% increase. The penalty for a five-year, $10,000 CD is $325 -- a roughly 1,600% increase. As Kevin Drum notes: This is yet another example of a fee that (a) most people don't really know much about, (b) most people don't think they'll ever incur, and (c) generally gets paid by people in some kind of distress. To be fair, the tradeoff of a CD is supposed to be that the bank is guaranteed the use of your money for a defined period of time in return for that higher interest rate. On the other hand, interest rates on CDs have been awful since the 2001 recession. By fnord12 | May 7, 2011, 11:16 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link I don't have a tag for "Things i would send to my father if i thought it would make a difference, but it wouldn't, so i might as well let him rant", but if i did, this would be a good use of it. The Restarting American Offshore Leasing Now Act, which passed 266 to 144 with 33 Democrats buying into the scheme, orders the Department of the Interior to move quickly to offer three leases to drill in the Gulf of Mexico and one off the coast of Virginia. The bill demands that the leases be executed by next year. But the legislation won't reduce the price at the pump, experts said. Nor would a vastly more ambitious effort have much impact. "It's not going to change the price of oil overnight, and it's probably not going to have a huge impact on the price of oil ever," said Mike Lynch of Strategic Energy and Economic Research, Inc. referring not just to those four leases, but to expanding all U.S. drilling. But people who study oil markets for a living say they are wrong. There is this: Republicans are right about some things, the experts agreed. More drilling would mean more jobs and more tax revenue, if the industry's subsidies and tax breaks were revoked. It could also reduce oil imports -- even if gas prices wouldn't drop. But we could also create jobs by having people dig holes and then fill them up again. Or by hiring all the out-of-work construction workers to install solar panels on the roofs of every government building, which would probably have a greater effect on energy prices than drilling. By fnord12 | May 7, 2011, 11:08 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Matt Yglesias says: This all kind of raises the question, however, of why the Republican leadership pushed Paul Ryan's Medicare privatization plan in the first place. Obviously the fact that they favor privatizing Medicare played some role in that. But conventional wisdom is that the smart time to push a major piece of politically controversial legislation is when you can pass it into law... But right now anything the House passes still needs to go through a Democratic-controlled Senate and then Barack Obama's desk. So what's the point in asking vulnerable members of congress to vote for taking away seniors' health care benefits? The answer is that Barack Obama responded to Ryan's plan by endorsing the Simpson-Bowles plan. Caveats to that endorsement apply, but before the Ryan plan, Simpson-Bowles was the most right-wing plan that was being taken seriously. After the Ryan plan, it's the sensible center. Or to put it in Chocobo-speak: "Fight fight fight! And never give up!". Something the Democrats would do well to learn. By fnord12 | May 5, 2011, 12:59 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Bin Laden's transition from scion of a wealthy family to terrorist mastermind came in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was trying to conquer Afghanistan. Bin Laden was part of the resistance, and the resistance was successful -- not only in repelling the Soviet invasion, but in contributing to the communist super-state's collapse a few years later. "We, alongside the mujaheddin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt," he later explained. The campaign taught bin Laden a lot. For one thing, superpowers fall because their economies crumble, not because they're beaten on the battlefield. For another, superpowers are so allergic to losing that they'll bankrupt themselves trying to conquer a mass of rocks and sand. This was bin Laden's plan for the United States, too. "He has compared the United States to the Soviet Union on numerous occasions -- and these comparisons have been explicitly economic," Gartenstein-Ross argues in a Foreign Policy article. "For example, in October 2004 bin Laden said that just as the Arab fighters and Afghan mujaheddin had destroyed Russia economically, al Qaeda was now doing the same to the United States, 'continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.' " For bin Laden, in other words, success was not to be measured in body counts. It was to be measured in deficits, in borrowing costs, in investments we weren't able to make in our country's continued economic strength. And by those measures, bin Laden landed a lot of blows. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the price tag on the Iraq War alone will surpass $3 trillion. Afghanistan likely amounts to another trillion or two. Add in the build-up in homeland security spending since 9/11 and you're looking at yet another trillion. And don't forget the indirect costs of all this turmoil: The Federal Reserve, worried about a fear-induced recession, slashed interest rates after the attack on the World Trade Center, and then kept them low to combat skyrocketing oil prices, a byproduct of the war in Iraq. That decade of loose monetary policy may well have contributed to the credit bubble that crashed the economy in 2007 and 2008. Then there's the post-9/11 slowdown in the economy, the time wasted in airports, the foregone returns on investments we didn't make, the rise in oil prices as a result of the Iraq War, the cost of rebuilding Ground Zero, health care for the first responders and much, much more. In addition to the economic aspect, it always seemed obvious to me that the other angle was exposing our values as hypocrisy. After the attack, we give up on habeas corpus, start torturing, invade other countries without provocation, etc. Regardless, here's hoping we use this occasion as a reason to finally bring all the troops home. By fnord12 | May 3, 2011, 12:26 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link « Liberal Outrage: April 2011 | Main | Liberal Outrage: June 2011 » |
