Month: December 2012

You can sort out the fiscal cliff for yourself. I’m going out. Have a wonderful evening and a Happy New Year!!

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{Update: See my new diary – Despite Peace Talks, US Drone Strikes Unrelentless.}

Original title: Speaking of Surprise Pardons

In the aftermath of murderous spree by the Taliban in recent days, the Pakistan government has decided to release top Taliban prisoners including close allies of OBL such as Mullah Nooruddin Turabi.

• At least 20 Shias pulled off bus, shot dead in northern Pakistan
• Taliban execute 21 captured policemen in NW Frontier

Pakistan ‘frees Afghan Taliban ex-minister Mullah Turabi’

(BBC News) – Pakistan has freed the Afghan Taliban’s ex-justice minister, Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, and three other Taliban prisoners, officials say. Afghan officials have been in talks with Pakistani counterparts to try to free certain Taliban prisoners in order to push forward a peace process.

Pakistan released 13 Afghan Taliban members in November. However, the former Afghan Taliban number two, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, remains in Pakistani custody.

• Pakistan releases eight more Afghan Taliban prisoners

 
Update [2013-01-01 03:32:46 EST by Oui]:

Taliban, Karzai allies to attend Afghanistan meeting in France

PARIS, France (RFI) Dec. 18, 2012 – The Taliban are to attend a conference near Paris along with supporters of President Hamid Karzai and peaceful opposition parties this week. The meeting comes after the Afghan government published a peace roadmap, which invites the rebels to take official positions if they give up violence.

The Foundation for Strategic Research, the thinktank that is hosting the meeting, had no statement about it on its website and the conference will be at a secret location to the north of Paris and will not to be open to the press.

Karzai gave his green linght for the meeting, French Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius told RFI on Sunday, and Afghan presidential adviser Haji Din Mohammad and Masoom Stanekzai of the Afghan High Peace Council will be present, according to The News, as will opposition leaders Abdullah Abdullah and Yunus Qanooni and members of the second most important armed opposition group, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami.

The Afghan government published a “Peace Process Roadmap”, which invited the armed opposition to take part in the country’s institutions.

It outlines a four-point programme:
1. Secure the collaboration of Pakistan, whose intelligence agencies have longstanding links to the Taliban, Hizb-e-Islami and other jihadi groups;
2. Negotiations with the Taliban in Saudi Arabia next year with the support of Pakistan and the US;
3. Ceasefire and transformation of the Taliban and other armed groups into political parties with possible participation in the “power structures of the state”, possibly including the cabinet and regional governorships;
4. A peaceful end to the conflict in 2014.

The plan calls on the US and the UN to drop sanctions against some Taliban and other armd group leaders to help negotiations.

On Monday the UN Security Council renewed its sanctions but adapted it to allow those on the blacklist to travel outside Afghanistan for peace talks.

Although the roadmap says that the peace process “must respect the Afghan constitution and must not jeopardise the rights and freedoms [of] the citizens of Afghanistan, both men and women”, rights groups and non-Pashtun parties are likely to be worried by the prospect of Taliban members holding high office.

The document also requires the rebels to break all links with Al Qaeda.

Afghanistan: An Army Prepares

• ISI – The Secret Government of Pakistan
• Pakistani Taliban leader Mehsud calls for talks plus Video

John Boehner has parties to go to, my friends. This is New Year’s Eve, his most holy holiday. Eric Cantor just announced that the House isn’t waiting around to see whether or not the Senate can hash out a deal. They’re going to start drinking as soon as it gets dark outside. I suggest that you do the same. We’re going over the cliff. And we were SOOOO close to a deal.

Perhaps the administration’s best argument for the deal that is being floated is that John Boehner is too budgetarily-illiterate and politically inept to actually press any advantage on the debt ceiling.

The White House laughs off the GOP’s theory that they can use the debt ceiling to extract big spending cuts without any further tax increases. For one thing, Boehner wouldn’t know how to achieve his “dollar-for-dollar” rule if you gave him total control of the budget. Raising the debt ceiling will cost around $1.5 trillion through 2014. Boehner has never named spending cuts even in the neighborhood of $1.5 trillion. In fact, he’s never named many entitlement cuts at all. Republicans actually seem terrified of entitlement cuts.

“You either cut Medicare or we default the country?” Asks one top Democrat, describing the fight the GOP is setting up. “And we don’t have the guts to put out our Medicare cuts so you need to put them out for us? And now you need to round up the Democratic votes to help us blackmail you? That’s the plan?”

Indeed, the Republicans are playing with fire if they threaten to default the country again, but that is triply true when you realize that they can’t even craft a bill that would do what they say that they want to do and they are terrified of even trying to craft such a bill.

Goal number one (before the cliff) has always been to break the grip of the Norquist pledge, while the next most important goals were to help the economy by extending unemployment insurance and stimulative tax credits, and to (ideally) end the fuss about the debt ceiling. In the floated deal, most of this is accomplished. Although the debt ceiling remains a problem, the quoted bit above explains why they are not worried about it. Plus, there are (so far) no cuts beyond those included in the sequester. If they want money for the Pentagon, we can trade it for money for Head Start. This is the downside of not reaching a Grand Bargain. We will have to barter for everything we value in the federal budget, which means we can’t be fully focused on immigration reform or assault weapons or addressing climate change.

The floated deal provides a LOT that we would not otherwise get, yet I am still not sure that the White House expects it to pass, and a big part of Obama’s appearance this afternoon was about making the Republicans look especially bad and petty if they do not agree to a deal. Basically, the president said that a deal was almost done and that there were only minor, insignificant things left to resolve. He taunted Congress, calling them totally ineffectual and openly laughing at them. This led, inevitably, to a bunch of butt-hurt tweets from Republicans and Republican aides about how Obama was “moving the goalposts” and trying to “sabotage a deal.” Yes, getting them to write those tweets was part of the plan to maximize how bad the GOP will look if they don’t agree to a deal.

In other words, the president promised more than had been agreed to and dared the Republicans to blow up the talks. He can live with the deal he outlined, but he can live without it, too.

Some things appear to be stirring in the negotiations over the fiscal cliff. The White House has announced that the president will address the nation at 1:30ET. Meanwhile, the administration has delivered their pre-deal spin to Greg Sargent (who dutifully reported it, albeit with some skepticism). Meanwhile, Brian Beutler tweets that Sens. Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Al Franken, Jay Rockefeller and Tom Harkin have entered Harry Reid’s chambers. That would indicate that last-minute liberal arm-twisting is needed to get this deal done.

Some elements of a possible deal are leaking, including the $400,000/$450,000 tax level, an extension of unemployment benefits, no rise in the estate tax, and no stimulus, and no cuts.

Meanwhile, White House reporters on MSNBC are saying that Obama will not be announcing a deal.

David ‘Honey BoBo’ Brooks made the following observations during his appearance on Meet the Press yesterday.

MR. DAVID BROOKS (Columnist, New York Times): Yeah. Well, first, let’s say what’s happening in Washington right now is pathetic. When you think about what the revolutionary generation did, what the Civil War generation did, what the World War II generation did, we’re asking not to bankrupt our children and we’ve got a shambolic, dysfunctional process. Now I think most of the blame still has to go to the Republicans. They’ve had a brain freeze since the election. They have no strategy. They don’t know what they want. And they haven’t decided what they want. But if I had to fault President Obama, I would say that sometimes he’s– governs like a– a visitor from a morally superior civilization. He comes in here and he will not– he– he’ll talk with Boehner, he won’t talk with the other Republicans. He hasn’t built the trust. Boehner actually made a pretty serious concession, 800 billion dollars in tax revenues, probably willing to go up on rates. But the trust wasn’t there to get that done. And if the president wants to get stuff done over the next four years, it’s got to be a lot more than making the intellectual concessions. It’s got– got to get to the place where Republicans say, okay, we’ll take a risk. This guy won’t screw us.

So, Mr. Brooks criticizes the president for negotiating the fiscal cliff with John Boehner but not with other Republicans. Yet, David Brooks’ employer reported in early December that John Boehner had directly requested that others be excluded from the negotiations. Here’s New York Times’ reporters Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker from December 6th:

At House Speaker John A. Boehner’s request, Senate leaders and Representative Nancy Pelosi have been excluded from talks to avert a fiscal crisis, leaving it to Mr. Boehner and President Obama alone to find a deal, Congressional aides say.

All sides, even the parties excluded, say clearing the negotiating room improves the chance of success. It adds complexity as the two negotiators consult separately with the leaders not in the room. But it also minimizes the number of people who need to say yes to an initial agreement.

Maybe Mr. Brooks thinks that the president should be negotiating informally on the telephone with Republican backbenchers. He could invite them to the White House for egg nog, snowball fights, and other “trust-building” exercises. And then Mr. Brooks says that the president acts like he comes from some morally-superior planet. How is that really different from calling him an uppity arrogant Kenyan?

I also love how he says he lays most of the blame on the Republicans but it’s the president who gets called an alien.

John Boehner made a serious concession?

First of all, he didn’t. Second of all, because no one else was in the room to sign off on Boehner’s “concession,” it didn’t wind up being a concession at all. Because Boehner wouldn’t let the other Republicans in on the negotiations, he didn’t build the trust he needed to sell his caucus a deal. It wasn’t the president’s fault; it was Boehner’s.

Happy New Year, BoBo. I hope you enjoy your sinecures.

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LATEST UPDATE2:
Hillary Clinton’s Blood Clot Is Between Her Brain and Skull, but She’s OK

[UPDATE below: Clinton will remain hospitalized for two weeks.]

Secretary of State Clinton hospitalized with blood clot: spokesman

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was sent to the hospital on Sunday with a blood clot stemming from a concussion she suffered earlier this month and was being assessed by doctors, a State Department spokesman said.

“In the course of a follow-up exam today, Secretary Clinton’s doctors discovered a blood clot had formed, stemming from the concussion she sustained several weeks ago. She is being treated with anti-coagulants and is at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital so that they can monitor the medication over the next 48 hours.”

See my earlier post – Who is she fooling?

Back in the Hospital with a Blood Clot, Hillary Clinton Is Not Well

(Atlantic Wire) – Secretary of State and wouldn’t be New York City mayor Hillary Clinton is back in the hospital, after doctors discovered a blood clot related to the concussion she suffered earlier this month. Clinton was admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital on Sunday night, so that her treatment team could monitor how she handles the anti-coagulant medication that’s been prescribed to deal with the clot. (Read the State Department’s full statement on her condition here.)

Doctors discovered the blood clot in a follow-up exam for the concussion she suffered just over two weeks ago. Conservatives said that Hillary was faking the injury and her subsequent absence so that she wouldn’t have to testify about the Benghazi attack, but maybe they’ll be a little more understanding now that the former First Lady is back in the hospital, where doctors are taking care of the clots as well as “including other issues associated with her concussion,” to quote Clinton’s spokesperson Philippe Reines. It’s unclear where in Clinton’s body the clot is located, but doctors say she’ll remain in the hospital for two weeks .

Clinton had been all set to return to work after having been gone since mid-December, when she bumped her head. The concussion came after Clinton had been sick for a number of days with the flu, an ailment that prevented her from formally recognizing the Syrian Opposition Council.

NBC’s Robert Bazell about Hillary Clinton being hospitalized for a blood clot (Video)

We had the BooMan greater family Christmas today, so I was hanging with my parents and brothers and nieces and nephews. We had a very nice time, but I haven’t been following the news. I read this piece in the New York Times, which kind of gave me the basics. What are you hearing?

What kind of relationship do you have with your coffeemaker? Do you want to show it off to your friends or crush it with a sledgehammer, or something in between?

Growing up in bucolic Central New Jersey, I never experienced a hurricane or a tornado or a forest fire or an earthquake. We had some occasional flooding, but nothing like we began to see in the late 1990’s. I once woke up to discover that a layer of Mount St. Helens’ ash had dusted our cars, but that was my only interaction with a volcano. I always felt like we lived in one of the safest places on Earth, and I wondered how people tolerated living in locales where nature could reach out and smite them without a moment’s notice. Somewhere there is a chart that shows how much money New Jersey received in disaster relief in the years between my birth in 1969 and my departure for California in 1989. I can’t imagine that that number is very high. Yet, in all those years, the people of New Jersey were paying more in income taxes relative to what they were receiving in federal expenditures than any state in the union save (in some years) Connecticut.

It angers me that 32 Republican senators voted against giving New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut disaster relief. I don’t care what objections they claim to have to the bill. You fight for what you think should or should not be in the bill and then you vote to pass it (out of sheer politeness if nothing else).

The senators of the Mid-Atlantic did not vote against disaster relief for the Gulf Coast or for the people of Joplin, Missouri or for dealing with the Colorado wildfires or for flood victims along the Mississippi River.

There’s a basic lack of gratitude in this vote just sticks in my craw. I don’t know how a person goes to sleep at night knowing that there is a permanent record of them having voted against giving aid to the victims of Superstorm Sandy. Most of the Gulf Coast Republicans had better sense than to oppose the aid, but not Jon Cornyn of Texas or Jeff Sessions of Alabama or Marco Rubio of Florida. What if we give the middle finger to them from now on whenever their states get hammered by a hurricane? How about Sen. Blunt from Missouri? If his people have another city leveled by a tornado, how about we tell him it’s too damn bad, but he ain’t getting any federal money?

How about this? Why don’t we calculate how much Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey have paid in taxes versus what they have received in expenditures, compare it to Kentucky, and we send Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul a bill for the difference? Then we can do the same thing for Tennessee and Wyoming and Georgia. We’ll do our disaster relief that way instead, and see how these folks like it.

Seriously, though, this really angers more than the usual foolishness. It’s bad manners.