Month: June 2014

The numbers don’t lie. The percentage of self-described liberal Democrats who have a problem with Hillary Clinton being the next presidential nominee for the party is actually quite low. I think I may know (by name, at least) every individual in the country who is expressing doubts, misgivings, or worse.

I’d like to think there are more people like me, but even I don’t see the point in fighting this tide if no one is going to take up the banner. You know, I didn’t oppose Clinton last time around because of the war. I opposed her because of people like Dick Morris, Mark Penn, Lanny Davis, and Doug Schoen. That problem hasn’t changed.

From Alito’s opinion in the Hobby Lobby case:

The Hahns and Greens believe that providing the coverage demanded by the HHS regulations is connected to the destruction of an embryo in a way that is sufficient to make it immoral for them to provide the coverage. This belief implicates a difficult and important question of religion and moral philosophy, namely, the circumstances under which it is wrong for a person to perform an act that is innocent in itself but that has the effect of enabling or facilitating the commission of an immoral act by another. Arrogating the authority to provide a binding national answer to this religious and philosophical question, HHS and the principal dissent in effect tell the plaintiffs that their beliefs are flawed. For good reason, we have repeatedly refused to take such a step. See, e.g., Smith, 494 U. S., at 887 (“Repeatedly and in many different contexts, we have warned that courts must not presume to determine . . . the plausibility of a religious claim”)

Justice Samuel Alito just wrote that taking birth control is an immoral act. Then he said that the Court should take no position on whether or not taking birth control is an immoral act.

Maybe that’s just sloppy writing, but he wrote what he wrote. It’s certainly a core feature of religious freedom that the government does not make decisions about whether or not Joseph Smith was a con-artist or Jesus really walked on water or the moon is made of cheese that is occasionally grated onto the plates of devout Pastafarians. But, in this opinion, Alito is conceding the point that taking birth control is immoral and then saying that the Court shouldn’t make a determination like that.

I’m pretty sure NASA has an opinion on the structure of the moon, but I guess that wouldn’t hold up in Court if it conflicted with the beliefs of devotees of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

There are obviously limits on how crazy someone’s religious beliefs can be and still pass this kind of test, but the limit is certainly unclear in this case. It looks more like five Catholic Justices just made the Catholic Church’s position on birth control the law of the land and told us that it was all in the interest of our religious liberty.

That’s outrageous and insulting.

Samuel Alito kicked us in the nuts today, not once but twice. Unlike the normal procedure where you’re doubled over in pain for a while but eventually recover, there will be no recovery from this nut-kicking. These injuries are permanent, at least until such time that there is a liberal majority on the Supreme Court again. Some closely-held corporations are now allowed to have religious beliefs, meaning that people can form corporations for the express purpose of defying the law. And public sector unions can no longer viably organize government employees unless those employees work in traditional jobs on government property.

The pair of 5-4 decisions, both authored by Alito, are a blow to this country that will hurt people every day for the foreseeable future.

In the immediate aftermath of last year’s debt default crisis, Jia Lynn Yang and Tom Hamburger wrote an article for the Washington Post about how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was sticking with their man, John Boehner.

Despite presiding over a chamber that nearly drove the country to a debt default, John A. Boehner still has the enduring support of a group that would have been most harmed by that event: the business community.

Rather than revisit their strategy of supporting Republicans after this week’s near-disaster, influential organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are standing behind Boehner. More important, Boehner’s friends in the business community are getting ready to take sides in a few Republican primary races against tea party candidates in Michigan, Idaho and Alabama who could cause the House speaker more trouble.

Boehner, who was once president of a small plastics company in Ohio, has spent much of his career burnishing the GOP’s identity as the party of business, building deep relationships since the 1990s with groups like the U.S. Chamber by providing legislative favors and easy access through countless receptions and rounds of golf.

The Chamber didn’t see the Speaker as the problem, and they were willing to give a wink and a nod to his indulgence of his more intransigent members.

In return, business groups have helped Boehner and his counterparts in the Senate raise millions of dollars to put Republicans in office, including the 2010 election of tea party lawmakers who have now roiled the GOP.

It’s this decades-long relationship that helps explain why even as one wing of the Republican Party threatened to drive the economy off a cliff, the business community has largely stuck by its party — and its man, Boehner. These lobbyists say they are worried that Boehner has a shaky hold over his caucus.

“I don’t think [lobbyists] are going to push John to commit suicide as a political leader,” said John Motley, a longtime lobbyist and former vice president of legislative affairs at the National Federation of Independent Business. “It’s more important to have him there than to not have him there.”

But Boehner is not delivering. He hasn’t allowed a vote on immigration reform, he hasn’t delivered money for the Highway Trust Fund, and he’s now feigning neutrality on the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank:

This past week the divide played out in the debate over whether to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, a government agency that makes and guarantees loans to help U.S. exporters sell their products. It’s a priority for the business community, but conservatives have seized on it as the latest example of corporate welfare, with conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation urging lawmakers to stand opposed.

It’s certainly a minor matter to most voters, and some more establishment-aligned Republicans marveled that it’s become an issue at all.

“I never thought in my wildest dreams that the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank could become a defining issue for Republicans,” said Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa.

Yet the conservative opposition has been such that the newly elected House majority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., reversed himself and announced his opposition to the bank, and Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, a supporter in the past and a leading business ally, elected to remain neutral in this go-round.

Think about that. The Chamber of Commerce has spent all this money trying to defeat Tea Party candidates only to have the Speaker adopt a position of official neutrality on the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank.

They’ve been defeated, and their best ally has abandoned them.

My brother Phil wrote the cover story for the March/April/May issue of the Washington Monthly: Oops: The Texas Miracle That Isn’t. Now comes another major look at the downside of Rick Perry’s Texas from Paul Solotaroff in Men’s Journal Magazine.

This one focuses primarily on the issue of water supply, particularly the increasing need to use groundwater rather than surface water because of the endless drought and higher temperatures associated with climate change. In Texas, unlike any other state, landowners have the right to extract any amount of groundwater from wells on their property. And, just as with oil wells, you can drain the water from your neighbor’s property. This concept was explained well in the Oscar-winning movie There Will Be Blood.

In that clip, Daniel Day Lewis explains how he “drank your milkshake” by using a bigger straw to drain the oil beneath his neighbor’s land. That same exact phenomenon is going on all over Texas with groundwater, as those with the money to invest are sucking the aquifers dry and selling the (expensive) water to the cities. Meanwhile, people are drinking wastewater from Austin, filled with too much estrogen from birth control pills.

Like most of her neighbors in this brown-collar town [Bastrop, Texas] of mechanics and landscape workers, [Linda] Curtis gets her water from Aqua Water Supply Corporation, a local utility with shallow wells that pull groundwater from the Colorado River. But the source of some of that water is actually treated sewage flowing downstream from Austin. It contains enough iron to clog Bastrop’s wells, and enough estrogen from excreted birth-control pills to cause horrid mutations in frogs and fish.

“We’ve got quite a bunch of six-legged toads,” says Phil Cook, a senior water expert who recently retired from Sierra Club Texas. “Bastrop’s dirty secret is that it treats water for iron, but not estrogen and other drug compounds. That’d be way too expensive for their small system.”

Meanwhile, we have clowns like Texas congressman Joe Barton who famously argued in 2009 that wind is a “finite resource” that is slowed down by harvesting it for energy, which causes temperature to rise. Rick Perry insisted during his humiliating and disastrous 2012 presidential campaign that climate change is a hoax.

In 2011, Dallas suffered 40 straight days of triple digits. Austin obliterated its record for 100-degree weather, posting 85 days, total. The state at large shattered dust-bowl marks, posting the three hottest months in American history – a truth that barely inconvenienced the governor. Taking the podium to road-test his run for the presidential nomination in 2012, Perry denied climate change at every turn, famously calling it a “doctored” crisis and “a contrived, phony mess.” He did so while much of his state shoveled ashes, following the worst fire season in history: More than 31,000 blazes burned 4 million acres, or about half the national lands lost to fire in 2011, and cost Texas more than half a billion dollars in razed homes.

In its worst drought ever, the state set no limits on car washing, sprinklers, or the building of backyard pools, nor did it ask frackers, power plants, or row-crop farmers to use less water and recycle. What’s more, in the disaster plan that each state files with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the state didn’t consider drought as a major threat, saying it had more than enough supplies to tough one out. Rather than face facts, Perry kept right on selling, handing checks to Fortune 500 firms: $21 million to Apple, $12 million to Chevron, $7.9 million to Visa, and so on. What he didn’t impart to companies making the move was that what little water Texas had was already committed to existing clients and no new reserves were being secured for the thousands of transplants arriving daily.

Pretty soon, it will be commonplace for many Texans to get their water the same way NASA’s astronauts do: by treating their own wastewater.

They’ve faced droughts before, but this one is different, particularly in a place like Texas. Over the course of the last decade, the arid state has run desperately short of rainfall. Reservoirs everywhere have thinned or tapped out – Lake Meredith has nearly gone dry, parching Amarillo and Lubbock; Lavon Lake dwindled to half its size, threatening supplies for Dallas and Fort Worth; and the majestic Rio Grande ran so thin that the city of El Paso put in doomsday restrictions, closing laundries and car washes and ordering its residents not to bathe or wash their clothes. It could always be worse, though: They could live in Wichita Falls, a city of 100,000, northwest of Fort Worth, that’s less than two years from running dry. There, they’ll be drinking their own wastewater, once it’s been treated at the plant. They won’t be alone: Other cities in Texas are planning so-called “toilet to tap” conversions.

“It’s something we’re all headed to,” says Lubbock’s mayor, Glen Robertson. “It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when.”

When Texans are all drinking their own pee, they better figure out how to get that estrogen out of it. Based on their record so far, their most likely solution will be to ban birth control and pray for the best.

I feel so badly for Mexico. They were the better more-deserving team today, but you can never relax against the Netherlands. I can’t imagine the pain Mexican football fans are feeling right now. For me, at least I can go back to rooting for the Dutch.

Next up, Costa Rica and Greece.

Any Greeks around here?

Costa Ricans?

Saudi Arabia churns out holy warriors by the batch load, either directly or through the subsidies it gives for radicalized sectarian education throughout the world. But now the King feels threatened by them. Maybe he shouldn’t have financed them in the first place. Maybe he should have cracked down on people in his kingdom who finance the worst of the worst of these holy warriors.

Since the first annual international conference on men’s issues has convened in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, maybe now is a good time to try to imagine what a legitimate men’s issues group would or should do. I am fortunate enough to have never had to work my way through divorce or family court, and my experience in joining a family was to come in on the mother’s side. I don’t have any first-hand or even second-hand experience with how men are treated under the law in disputes with women. I won’t presume that the law is perfectly fair and equitable, but I also won’t presume that men are systematically getting a raw deal. My sense is that there are a lot more men than women skipping out on their families and not providing child support. There are more men than women committing domestic abuse on their spouses and children. Perhaps these facts make it falsely appear that men are treated unfairly. But, perhaps, these truths create biases that disadvantage men in our court system. It could be that, all other things being equal, men do poorly in court compared to what equity would predict.

Just as a father deserves a right to an attorney in any family dispute, men in general deserve advocates in the legal system. This is true even if the current law is basically correct and fair. So, I can imagine a men’s rights group that focused on assuring fairness that would be perfectly legitimate. Perhaps, like any advocacy organization, it would occasionally make unbalanced attacks and maximalist demands, but it wouldn’t be based in any antagonism for women or feminism or liberalism. By it’s nature, it would include a lot of deadbeat dads who were less interested in actual fairness than in lessening the burden of parental responsibility, but it wouldn’t have to be defined by bitter people who resent having to support their children.

Groups that are privileged can be obnoxious when they band together to claim victim status, but it’s always legitimate to fight against any kind of systemic bias. There can be remedial factors that cause that bias, as in the case of preferential admissions and hiring for minorities and women, but if there were actual judicial bias, I think that opposition would be justifiable. Unfortunately, the men’s movement doesn’t look anything like this. It’s much more about sour grapes and hostility to women than it is about addressing real discrimination against men.

Aim was to kidnap Chinese-American scientist Honglu (Alan) Chen and trade him for a high-level Taliban detainee. Could be the same terrorist President Obama recently sent home to Qatar in Bergdahl prisoner deal. Honglu Chen, a martial arts expert, defended himself and was shot dead foiling the Taliban plan. All other mountaineers were subsequently executed one by one at a base camp. News of the Taliban involvement can be read in a new serie of articles.

Chinese-American was target of Nanga Parbat massacre

GILGIT, Pakistan (Dawn News) – The massacre of 10 foreign climbers on Pakistan’s “Killer Mountain” a year ago came after a failed attempt to capture a Chinese-American to use him as a high-value bargaining chip, officials and militant sources have said.

The June 22 attack at the base camp for the 8,126-metre Nanga Parbat, Pakistan’s second-highest mountain — nicknamed for its treacherous terrain — was the deadliest assault on foreigners in the country for a decade.

Through interviews with multiple officials, militants and negotiators assigned to bring the culprits out of hiding, AFP has been able to piece together a picture of the events surrounding the slaughter and its aftermath.

Mystery Commanders

The story begins in early June 2013, when a local jihadist contacted other fighters to tell them two mysterious commanders had arrived from out of town and wanted to meet. The northern Gilgit-Baltistan region, high in the Himalayas, has been relatively immune to the militant insurgency plaguing the country in recent years.

The men met at a house in the town of Chilas, where the two strangers, wearing all-enveloping burqas, were introduced as important Taliban cadres from Afghanistan. The local fighters were briefed on the planned Nanga Parbat operation.

“They were told that the mission was about kidnapping a foreigner in order to later bargain for the release of an important Taliban commander,” an investigator assigned to the case said.

Militant sources told AFP the Chinese-American was the specific target, with the plan being to trade him for Taliban in Afghanistan.

The men then met a local sectarian group in a forest, recruiting two more fighters — against the sectarian group leader’s wishes — to bring their number to 10. They left for the Nanga Parbat base camp in the early evening, wearing the uniforms of the Gilgit Scouts, a paramilitary police unit.

Oops, this seems to be an update of my breaking news diary in June 2013 …

○ Pakistan: Terror Group Kills 10 Tourists in Scenic North

Chilling Accounts of Nanga Parbat Massacre

Various accounts of the June 22-23 massacres of 11 climbers and support staff at the Diamir base camp of Nanga Parbat are emerging. Zhang Jingchuan, the sole surviving climber in base camp that night, has returned to China and gave a few details of his experience to Chinese reporters in this account.

 « click for more info
Nanga parbat means naked mountain in Urdu

American climber Jesse Huey, who returned from Pakistan this week after deciding not to continue on his planned expedition to the Karakoram, received an email recounting the experience of Polish climbers on Nanga Parbat during and after the massacre. This account by Polish Alpine Club member Boguslaw Magrel is reproduced below.

[For another perspective, Steve Swenson, a veteran of 11 climbing expeditions to Pakistan, has written about the historical and political background to the Nanga Parbat killings, options for climbing in northern Pakistan, and the impact of this incident on the local people of Gilgit-Baltistan at his blog. Click here to read this extremely informative piece.]

The Polish Nanga Parbat story originally appeared in Polish on the expedition website. Here is the rough translation using Bing and Google services:

CCTV: Sole Chinese survivor from Pakistan killer mountain arrives back home

Nanga Parbat assault: Tragedy in Himalayas

More below the fold …
An excellent informative piece about the local situation in Gilgit Baltistan

Steve Swenson: Attack on Climbers in Pakistan

I’ve been on eleven climbing expeditions to Pakistan.  Although the Country has been destabilized by the war in neighboring Afghanistan, sectarian violence, and a growing insurgency, I have always told my family and friends that the areas where we go climbing are safe.  The Karakoram and Himalayan mountains in northeastern Pakistan are stunningly beautiful, and contain a significant number of the world’s greatest mountains including K2, the world’s second highest.  They attract mountaineers and trekkers from all over the world, and.were a safe haven from the terrorist violence that has afflicted other parts of Pakistan.  All that changed on June 22nd, when Pakistani militants killed ten mountain climbers at the Nanga Parbat base camp.

…
Tensions in the region have been heightened recently as the US and NATO are about to pull most of their forces from Afghanistan.  This pending power vacuum incites the various militant groups to gain control of as much territory as they can, thinking it will give them an advantage in any subsequent power grab.

The conflicts in Iraq and Syria have inflamed sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia across the entire region.  The Taliban are ethnic Pashtuns who are Sunni Muslims.  Although the majority of the people in Pakistan are Sunni, the people in Gilgit Baltistan are Shia.  Some think that the Taliban group which claimed responsibility for the attack on the Nanga Parbat climbers is the same as the one responsible for murdering about 30 Shias who were pulled off a bus going over the Babusar pass to Gilgit last year.  As far as I know, no actions have been taken against this group as a result of the bus attack.  

The PML-N Party won the recent Parliamentary elections returning Nawaz Sharif to a third term as Prime Minister.  It remains to be seen if the new Sharif administration is both willing and able to depart from the policies of the past.  Any significant police or military action against the Taliban would require the cooperation and full support of the Army that continues to retain control of national security and foreign policy.  The last time Sharif’ was Prime Minister in 1999, he was kicked out in an Army coup.

 « click for more info
Protest Rally Against the Killing of IDPs by Police in Hunza, Gilgit-Baltistan

The economic impact on Gilgit Baltistan [map] of these attacks on the climbers will be severe.  Already extremely poor, the local people in the mountains are subsistence farmers who have come to rely on income from work as porters, cooks, and guides for their only cash.  Security concerns have already badly hurt the tourism industry and this attack will likely cause it to collapse.  This happened right after 9/11 and these people who could least afford this loss of income suffered terribly.  Unfortunately this is likely to happen again.

Shia killing: TTP claims responsibility for Mansehra attack

Night On Bald Mountain: The Nanga Parbat Massacre

The valleys to the west are the region of Kohistan. Its a Sunni majority region that abuts the significant Shia and Ismaili population of Gilgit-Baltistan. In the 1980s General Zia, perhaps not fully confident of the Jihad bonafides of the Shias, had the Kohistanis massacre some local Shias and started a sectarian feud that is still ongoing.

You know, the thing is that when Ahmed Abu Khatallah got pissed off, he didn’t wet his pants at the idea that he’d be attacking the consulate of the most powerful nation on Earth. He just went out and did it, killing our ambassador to Libya in the process. He’s not a bedwetter. He is a religious fanatic, but he’s not a coward. How much more courage does it take to attack the United States than to prosecute a criminal in court?

I’m not a rah-rah macho kind of guy, but I do expect my government to demonstrate some testicular fortitude. It embarrasses me when American elected officials act scared of anything, even when it is in some way understandable. This country is known for its can-do attitude, and I like that. When I was growing up and even into my early thirties, I knew guys who stormed beaches in Libya and Italy and the Solomon Islands. They didn’t talk about it much, but they sure as shit weren’t afraid to hold a trial for some asshole who attacked our foreign-assigned personnel.

On most political issues, I disagree with the Republicans because I have different values than them. But when it comes to folks who are afraid to hold trials for terrorists, it’s much more personal. I feel like these people are destroying my country’s reputation. They’re cowards. They’re cowards and they’re the face of my country. I have a really hard time abiding that. I don’t want anyone else in the world to see or even know that some of my countrymen are this pathetic because it shames me.

I feel somewhat similarly when I see people make idiotic anti-scientific statements, but cowardice really cuts me to the bone. I want these people to shut up not because I care about whatever political points I think they might be scoring but simply because I am ashamed of them. I am ashamed that they are Americans.