Month: May 2014

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That ‘our’ Western leaders are foolhardy and make decisions contrary to interest of the people was well known. Their vision of exceptionalism leads to policy for economic gain benefitting corporations in a power play of western imperialism.

I was astonished by the statement of PM Cameron when Christian Annapour asked him to join the #BringBackOurGirls campaign to free the abducted schoolgirls in Nigeria. Either his words were chosen to head off the rising popularity of UKIP leader Farage and the May elections for European Praliament, or he is indeed ignorant what Boko Haram stands for. Probably a mixture of both.

 ○ Amanpour asks PM Cameron to join #BringBackOurGirls

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Michelle Obama has been campaigning for the release of the girls (BBC News)

Nigeria kidnap: David Cameron joins ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ campaign

Mr Cameron also spoke of the importance of tackling extremism around the world.

“This is not just a problem in Nigeria, we’re seeing this really violent extreme Islamism – we see problems in Pakistan, we see problems in other parts of Africa, problems in the Middle East.

“Also, let’s be frank, here in the UK there is still too much support for extremism that we have to tackle, whether it’s in schools or colleges or universities or wherever.”

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Equating all Islamist violence These words could have come from the Islamophobe campaign of Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller and Geert Wilders.

Boko Haram is a local Nigerian issue involving people from the villages joining the Islamists to renounce all Western values, the Christian religion and renouncing education for girls. The Nigerian leaders in its capital Abuja lack the resolve to take countermeasures, send in police who are trained and armed and really solve the local issues which are at the root of the religious violence.

The leaders of Boko Haram got a second wind when arms started coming in from Libya due to the outbreak of the civil war and overthrow of the Gaddafi regime by NATO, US and GCC states. The Boko Haram fighters are much better armed than the local police, so it would be suicide for anyone to go into the forest and search for the abducted girls. Before the attack on Chibok, the security services received an advance warning!

Nigeria: Schoolgirls Abducted as Terrorists Strike Borno – April 15, 2014

Nigerian President in Crisis as Rescue for Girls Awaited

Continued below the fold …

Nigerian President in Crisis as Rescue for Girls Awaited

(Bloomberg) May 9, 2014 – President Goodluck Jonathan faces a credibility crisis among Nigerians as long as more than 200 girls kidnapped by Islamist extremists remain missing, even as investors affirm confidence in his country.

International political and business leaders attending the World Economic Forum ending today in the capital, Abuja, including Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Bharti Airtel Ltd. Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal, condemned the Boko Haram Islamists that seized the women and pledged continued investment in Africa’s biggest economy. Jonathan welcomed the support, describing it as “a major blow” to terrorism, yet pressure is mounting from the populace to secure the captives’ freedom.

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Brig. Gen. Chris Olukolade, Nigeria's top military spokesman, left, speaks to people at a demonstration calling on the government to rescue the kidnapped school girls of a government secondary school Chibok, outside the defense headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria. (Photo Sunday Alamba / AP)

“Barring a rescue of the abducted women, Jonathan’s standing will deteriorate,” Philippe de Pontet, an Africa analyst at Eurasia Group, said in an e-mailed note to clients yesterday. “The political implications are damaging for the Jonathan administration, which has been seen as ineffective in its response.”

Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, which means “western education is a sin” in the Hausa language, has claimed responsibility for the April 14 abduction of 276 girls from their dormitories in Borno state in the northeast. He has threatened to sell the girls in “markets” and marry them off, helping galvanize a global campaign to free them joined by U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama and Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai.

“President Jonathan has failed to show the kind of leadership that would unite the country and give him a political bump from the widespread outrage directed at Boko Haram,” said de Pontet. “Instead, much of that outrage has shifted to the administration itself, giving the opposition an opportunity to hit the president on his already-suspect national security credentials.”

See my earlier post and diary on Boko Haram – Obama Promises to Mop-up of Boko Haram In Nigeria .

Can Nigeria Exploit the Split in the Boko Haram Movement? [Terrorism Monitor, pp 8-9 – pdf]

(Jamestown Foundation) Sept. 22, 2011 – The Northern Nigerian militant group Boko Haram is showing signs of splitting along the ideological lines that emerged at the time of the July 2009 death of the group’s founder, Mallam Ustaz Mohammed Yusuf. Whereas the divisions then were an internal matter, their differences are now becoming public. In particular, the Yusufiya Islamic Movement (YIM) is distinguishing itself from more radical elements in Boko Haram. The latter movement has become increasingly notorious for its attacks on civilians and places of worship, as well as high-profile vehicle-borne suicide-bombings such as those on the United Nations Headquarters and the Nigerian Police Headquarters in Abuja (see Terrorism Monitor Brief, July 1).  

On July 20, 2011, less than two weeks before the start of Ramadan, the YIM distributed flyers in Maidiguri (Borno State), the base of Boko Haram. Though the flyers fail to name the group they target, it is almost certainly Boko Haram that is referred to when the YIM says it is: “concerned that some people with evil motives have infiltrated our genuine struggle with a false Holy War that is outright un-Islamic. We call on this evil group to desist, failing which we shall have no option than to expose and hunt them…. We therefore distance our group from all the bombings targeted at civilians and other establishments and equally condemn them and pray that Allah exposes those who perpetrated them and attributed them to us… This is necessary in the light of genuine concern by individuals and groups to the mass suffering of innocent citizens caught in the crossfire between our members and the Nigerian troops” (The Nation [Maidiguri], July 7).

[From my diary: Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)]

○ Nigeria Katsina State and Sharia Law   by Oui on Dec. 27, 2009 [!]

Came across another gem in thinking by policy makers:

○ Regime Change in Syria Modeled After Yemen  by Oui on June 12, 2012

Hillary Clinton wants the removal of Assad in Syria saying it’s natural for citizens to back their President as they are afraid of what change might bring. Once Assad is removed, his backers will appreciate the blessings of democracy. Clinton refers to the succes in Yemen as model for transfer of power in Syria.

Chris Cillizza makes some good points about the differences between House and Senate races and why the generic ballot poll isn’t a very reliable barometer for predicting how the Senate elections will turn out.

But he misses something that people really ought to keep in mind. It’s well known that the Democrats have a hard time turning out their base in midterm elections, but the Republicans see a drop-off in voter participation, too. So, let me put it this way. If you are Mitch McConnell, would you rather run for reelection in a midterm or in a presidential year in which your party’s nominee carries your state 60.5% to 37.8%, with a margin of four hundred thousand votes?

If you are Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, would you rather run in a midterm or in an election in which your party’s presidential nominee gets only 36.9% of the vote and loses by over two hundred and fifty thousand votes?

The truth is, midterm turnout cuts both ways for senate candidates. Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina would definitely benefit from Obama’s turnout machine, but Mary Landrieu and Michelle Nunn are glad not to be running with Obama on the same ticket.

Another reason that the generic ballot question is kind of useless for predicting how the Senate will turn out is that only a third of the Senate is even up for reelection. It doesn’t matter what people in Florida or Missouri or Indiana or Utah think about the Senate because they won’t be voting for a senator in November, and neither will anyone in New York, Massachusetts, Arizona or California.

In any case, low turnout elections are bad for Democrats in a general kind of way, but Democratic senators running for reelection in deep red states would find it harder to win in a high turnout election because there are simply more Republicans than Democrats in those states. What they have to do is win over a considerable number of people who vote for the Republicans in presidential elections. That’s easier to do when a presidential election isn’t taking place.

Yet, as Jon Tester and Heidi Heitkamp just demonstrated in the last cycle, Democratic senate candidates can win in deep red states even in a presidential election year. So, basically, look at the races themselves and the candidates, their campaigns, their fundraising, and the polls. The generic ballot number is only useful for predicting House elections.

If the ostensible casus belli for creating a House Select Committee to investigate the attacks of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya is the belated disclosure of a White House memo detailing talking points for Ambassador Susan Rice, then why is the focus of the committee going to be on the reasons why we had personnel stationed in Benghazi at all?

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said on Sunday morning that, as chair of the newly created select committee on Benghazi, one of the biggest questions he would like to ask former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is why the United States was still there.

“Why were we still in Benghazi? The British ambassador was almost assassinated. Our facility was attacked twice. There were multiple episodes of violence. We were the last flag flying in Benghazi, and I would like to know why,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

For one thing, this seems like a non-sequitur. I thought the investigation was supposed to probe the accuracy of the White House’s explanation for the attacks, including such gravely important semantic points as what exactly qualifies as terrorism and what is the exact definition of al Qaeda.

But Gowdy wants to explore the policy behind our presence in Benghazi, and Speaker Boehner says he wants to explore the lack of security.

Appearing on Fox News on Sunday morning, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) took a slightly different approach. While he said the select committee should focus on the events leading up to the Benghazi attack, he specifically said that members should investigate “the number of requests for more security and why it was not provided.”

As Sam Stein of Huffington Post points out, these questions have already been asked and answered. There is certainly no need for a special investigative body to ask these questions again. In the latter case, I don’t think that Speaker Boehner wants to discuss Congress’s decision to deny the administration the full funding they requested for diplomatic security. A month after the Benghazi attacks, Rep. Jason Chaffetz explained that decision on CNN:

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) acknowledged on Wednesday that House Republicans had consciously voted to reduce the funds allocated to the State Department for embassy security since winning the majority in 2010.

On Wednesday morning, CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien asked the Utah Republican if he had “voted to cut the funding for embassy security.”

“Absolutely,” Chaffetz said. “Look we have to make priorities and choices in this country. We have…15,000 contractors in Iraq. We have more than 6,000 contractors, a private army there, for President Obama, in Baghdad. And we’re talking about can we get two dozen or so people into Libya to help protect our forces. When you’re in tough economic times, you have to make difficult choices. You have to prioritize things.”

It seems like a fair point to me. I’d be willing to forgive the House Republicans for denying adequate security for our diplomatic officials serving in dangerous posts overseas. But they aren’t going to investigate themselves, are they?

Eric Cantor was booed in his home district this morning as party activists rejected his choice to lead Virginia’s 7th Congressional District Republican Committee in favor of a Tea Partier. Cantor was left sputtering:

“It is easy to sit in the rarified environs of academia, in the ivory towers of a college campus with no accountability and no consequence. When you throw stones,” Cantor said, “you throw stones at all of us who are working every day to make a difference.”

He was referring to his primary opponent, David Brat, who is a professor of economics at Randolph-Macon College. But, really, there isn’t anything “academic” about the opposition to Cantor within his own party.

Michael Sam was the co-Defensive Player of the Year of the Southeastern Conference of the NCAA. He played defensive end for the University of Missouri. Despite that, he lacked the ideal height to play defensive end in the National Football League and the speed to play linebacker. He’s strong, but he did not perform well at the NFL combine where players are asked to go through various drills to measure their strength, speed, and flexibility. As a result, his stock in the NFL Draft dropped.

But what really alarmed NFL scouts is that Michael Sam came out as an openly gay man. There have been gay players in the NFL, but no one has ever openly admitted that they were gay before Sam. He wound up getting selected by the St. Louis Rams with the 34th pick of the seventh and final round of the draft. Only seven players were drafted after him.

It’s nice that he will have the opportunity to make the roster of a team from the same state where he starred as a collegiate athlete, but few think he would have been drafted so low if he hadn’t admitted to being gay.

What happened right after 1993 that caused Congress to never raise the gasoline tax again?

Lawmakers in both parties have been reluctant to raise the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gasoline and 24.4-cent diesel taxes that are the main sources of revenue for the Highway Trust Fund. Neither tax has been raised since 1993. In the two decades since then, inflation has driven up construction costs and the amount of revenue flowing into the fund has lagged because motorists are driving less and vehicles are more fuel efficient. The reluctance to hike the fuel taxes has left the fund constantly teetering on the edge of insolvency.

Oh, yes, that’s right. The Gingrich Revolution, followed by the complete triumph of the Grover Norquist anti-tax pledge.

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx has said the federal Highway Trust Fund is expected run dry by late August. Without congressional action, transportation aid to states will be delayed and workers will be laid off at construction sites nationwide, Foxx said.

To that end, the White House will spend next week highlighting the issue and pressing for action. In contrast to President Barack Obama’s 2014 goal to act without Congress wherever he can, the highway funding issue is not one he can solve on his own.

The president and vice-president will dot the country highlighting worthy transportation projects in an effort to get the Republicans in Congress to pay for the upkeep of our national infrastructure.

That this is even necessary is sad. That it might not work is scary.

Jonathan Martin reports in the New York Times that the RNC has moved aggressively to reduce the number of debates Republican candidates for president will have to endure.

The Republican National Committee moved Friday to seize control of the presidential primary debates in 2016, another step in a coordinated effort by the party establishment to reshape the nominating process.

Committee members overwhelmingly passed a measure that would penalize any presidential candidate who participated in a debate not sanctioned by the national party, by limiting their participation in subsequent committee-sanctioned forums.

The move represents the party’s effort to reduce the number of debates and assert control over how they are staged.

In making the case for adopting the new rule, party officials repeatedly criticized the moderators and format of the 2012 primary debates, appealing to the suspicions that many Republican activists have about the mainstream news media. “The liberal media doesn’t deserve to be in the driver’s seat,” said the committee’s chairman, Reince Priebus, addressing committee members here at their spring meeting.

This means that underdog candidates will have to weigh the advantages of appearing in unsanctioned forums versus the disadvantages of being blocked from sanctioned forums. Of course, that’s an easy decision if you haven’t been invited to the sanctioned forums in the first place.

It’s smart for the Republicans to do this, but their distrust of the mainstream media is just one more manifestation of their divorce from reality, which really took place no later than Sarah Palin’s appearance on the national stage.

When being asked what papers you read is too hard of a question, mistrust builds up in a hurry. If the Republicans are hoping to go through debate season without anyone ever puncturing their right-wing media fantasy bubble, these reforms are not going to be fully productive. And, in any case, if the candidates are cheering the death penalty and talking about the sanctity of marriage and how “severe” their conservatism is, and the wisdom of a self-deportation immigration policy then it won’t matter who the moderator happens to be.

It’s true that the Republicans had too many debates, but so did the Democrats. And it didn’t appear to hurt the Democrats at all. It made Obama a better debater.

It says something that the GOP wants to have a primary season without allowing anyone to watch or question what they are doing.

The day after the September 11, 2012 attacks on our compounds in Benghazi!, I was very irritated. I was very angry with the mob that stormed our consulate and killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. But I was also really appalled by the behavior of Mitt Romney.

The first thing on the 12th, I put together the following list:

Sequence of Events

1. Gaddafi says he’ll hunt down the terrorists of Benghazi like rats.
2. The United Nations intervenes, led by NATO.
3. Benghazi is saved and Gaddafi is hunted down like a rat.

4. Some fruit-loop makes a stupid YouTube about Mohammed.
5. The Embassy in Cairo realizes trouble is brewing and condemns the fruit-loop’s stupid YouTube about Mohammed.
6. Angry Muslims storm our consulate in Benghazi and kill our Ambassador and three other government employees with a rocket-propelled grenade.
7. Ignoring that 5. came before 6., Mitt Romney issues press release blasting the administration for reacting to the death of our ambassador by sympathizing with the murderers.

I took particular umbrage at the behavior of Mitt Romney, who had issued the press release on September 11, but recognizing the sensitivity of both the day and the tragedy, asked the press to embargo it until midnight. Then he apparently could not stop salivating about the potential of the tragedy to redound to his favor, so he went ahead and issued the press release to the public before midnight.

Also, notice what Romney was condemning. He was condemning the behavior of the State Department officials in Cairo who, sensing they might be about to be overrun by an angry mob that was protesting the “The Innocence of Muslims” YouTube, issued a condemnation of the online movie. Romney was falsely suggesting that this condemnation had taken place after our ambassador was killed and that we had essentially apologized to the people who had murdered him. That was risible enough, but it also shows that even Romney had the two events linked in his mind that morning.

Also note that I had my own facts wrong. Ambassador Stevens wasn’t killed by a RPM, but by smoke inhalation. Facts were in short supply and unreliable in the immediate days after the attack.

By September 15th, I was seething about Romney’s behavior, calling him a “taunting jerk” who lacked all sense of “dignity or decorum.” By October 1st, I was in disbelief that the Romney campaign was chortling with glee at the death of four Americans and predicted that they would get the taste slapped out of their mouths if they continued to politicize the tragedy.

And then came the “Please proceed, governor,” moment in the second debate when moderator Candy Crowley called Romney a lying, liar and Obama just sat there drinking in the “the sweet sweet nector of Mitt’s humiliation.”

That should have been the end of it. The right should have just hung their heads in shame that they had tried to exploit the death of four Americans. But that isn’t what happened, is it?

Instead, they decided to make Benghazi! for the Republican Party what the original 9/11 attacks were for Rudy Giuliani: “There’s only three things they mention in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and Benghazi!”

And, now, they try to turn the tables on us and accuse us of being insensitive about these four men’s deaths. You can see the lengths Nancy Pelosi goes to avoid charges of insensitivity in her letter to Speaker Boehner (pdf) rejecting his proposals for the Select Committee charged with investigating the Benghazi! attacks.

The American people expect us to work together in a fair, balanced and open manner. For the sake of the families of the brave Americans who died in this tragedy, the process must not be politicized.

I look forward to meeting with you as you suggested so that we can find a way forward that is worthy of the sacrifice of our heroes who lost their lives in Benghazi and their families. I am still hopeful that we can reach an agreement. Thank you for your immediate attention.

Sadly, the Republicans’ behavior on Benghazi! has turned the very word into a punch line. But the seeds of this outcome were evident even before the fires were put out at the consulate, when Mitt Romney couldn’t wait even a few hours to publicly accuse the State Department of apologizing to the people who murdered Ambassador Stevens.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with painting of the 1937 Rolls Royce.  The photo that I will be using is seen directly below. I will be using my usual acrylics on an 9×12 gallery-wrapped canvas.

 When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

 

Since that time, I have continued to work on the painting.

Once again, I have concentrated my efforts on the car itself.  The changes are many.  Note that the grille has highlights and darkened areas, including the emblem at the top.  It really has taken on something of the quality of metal.  Out in front of the grille is the auxiliary headlight, standing above the bumper.  The main headlights have received attention in the form of shadowing of the lenses.  Below them are the dual horns.  The wheels have been painted and the whitewalls whitened.  Above, the windows and their frames have been painted.  Finally, the fenders have received another lighter layer of paint.  All of this has been done with black and white paints, and derivatives thereof.  The car is now essentially done, with perhaps only a few tweaks remaining.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week.  See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

Maybe it makes sense to have fewer than twenty debates during the Republican nominating process, but the paranoia involved about the bias of the national media is amusing. It’s not the media that draws Republican candidates to the right. It’s the base of the Republican Party.