Month: July 2014

A year and a half ago when John Kerry took over
as secretary of state at the start of President Obama’s second
term, he set his sight on the quixotic holy grail of U.S. shuttle
diplomacy, a Palestinian-Israeli peace. Today, with Hamas and
Israel locked in a violent struggle, John Kerry has found he can’t
even negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, with The
New York Times reporting that Israel told U.S. officials they
did not need, and were not interested in, another round of “shuttle
diplomacy” by Kerry. The U.N.  Security Council has also
called on both sides to
cease fire.

Egypt has taken the lead on negotiating a ceasefire between
Hamas and Israel, a role it’s assumed on and off since signing a
peace treaty with Israel in 1979. That treaty was negotiated at
Camp David with the help of President Jimmy Carter and insured by
the promise of billions of taxpayer’ dollars in U.S. aid aid to
Egypt and Israel, an arrangement that continues to this day. That
treaty ended a state of war between Egypt and Israel that began
during the 1948 war that followed Israeli independence, and was the
first time an Arab state recognized Israel. It also involved the
withdrawal of Jewish civilians and troops from the Sinai peninsula,
which Israel occupied after the Six Days’ War in 1967. The
Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty also led to Egypt being suspended
from the Arab League for a year and eventually the assassination of
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by Islamist extremist s.

Thanks in large part to the annual U.S. aid, the peace treaty
has survived nearly 40 years despite widespread disapproval among
the Egyptian population and even when the Egyptian government was
headed briefly by a president from the Muslim Brotherhood. Mohammed
Morsi vowed to
respect the peace treaty with Israel and
during the last flare-up between Israel and Hamas he tried to
broker a ceasefire, as Egypt is doing again now.

John Kerry would desperately like to be able to claim some kind
of victory in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process but his failure
to make any progress so far, even as expectations are lowered,
illustrates why the American government is a less-than-ideal, and
hardly necessary, broker in whatever “peace process” may still
exist. The U.S., for example, does not recognize Hamas so on the
Palestinian side U.S. diplomats can only talk to Fatah, which has
effectively no power in Gaza. Because of its aid to Israel, U.S.
diplomats aren’t seen as unbiased brokers. And as Israel’s defense
minister Moshe Yaalon showed when
he said he wanted John Kerry to win a Nobel Peace Prize so he
could leave Israel alone, there’s a sense that U.S. involvement in
Israeli-Palestinian peace process is more a matter of prestige than
peacemaking per se. The U.S. government should give Yaalon what he
wants: disengage from the peace process and stop
subsidizing the Israeli military. Maybe it’ll open the door for
Israel and Palestine to settle their problems on their own the way
they want.

Michael Hayden, former Director of both the CIA
and the National Security Agency (NSA), has said a lot of things
about Edward Snowden. He’s called the former government contractor
a “defector,” a “traitor,” and a
“morally arrogant, troubled young man.” He’s also joked about
getting the
“evil” Snowden
killed. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to hear Hayden
finally on pace with
the majority of Americans by finally referring to Snowden as a
whistle-blower.

First spotted by
one of Snowden’s legal advisers, Jesselyn Radack, Hayden said
during an
Aspen Institute Security Forum (a “gathering of top-level
present and former government officials from all relevant national
security agencies”) last week, “When Snowden blew the
whistle on the 215 program, that’s the metadata stuff, the
phone bills up at Fort Meade, I’ve got to tell you, people at the
fort thought they were cruising smooth.”
Here’s the video:

Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick
suggests that it might have been “something of a Freudian slip”
since “he goes on to insist that the program was clearly perfectly
legal based on all of the supposed ‘oversight'” though he
“conveniently leaves out the fact that many of the details of the
program were not actually known by those who did the approving” and
other facts that disrupt his narrative of a squeaky clean
NSA. 

Nevertheless, this is a surprising softening of rhetoric from
Hayden. He has in the past vigorously
refused to use the
term whistle-blower to describe Snowden, arguing
that “he did … not tell the appropriate authorities.”

Maybe Hayden’s changed tone has to do with the fact that the NSA
is losing interest in Snowden. “As time goes on” he becomes less
relevant, a current NSA official
said at the conference. “It’s been over a year since he had
access to our networks and our information so the need for us to
understand that greater level of detail is lesser and lesser.”

Snowden’s asylum in Russia is set to expire this Thursday, July
31. He has applied for an extension, but is still “awaiting
approval from Moscow,”
according to Al Jazeera. 

• Raids and airstrikes continue
  in
  Gaza after a truce ended. Hamas infiltrated a Jewish village
  and killed Israeli troops. Civilians in a park were killed in an
  explosion. Residents blame Israel. Israel says it was a misfired
  Hamas rocket.
• A federal appeals court panel has struck down
  Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage recognition. The court also
  has jurisdiction over North and South Carolina, West Virginia, and
  Maryland.
• France is offering asylum to
  Christians from northern Iraq being driven out by the Islamic
  State, which has ordered them to convert or die.
• Liberia’s president has closed most border crossings and
  instituted quarantines to try to contain its
  Ebola outbreak.
• Amazon.com has launched a service for customers to
  purchase 3d-printed items.
• Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union put
  out a joint report today showing that America’s surveillance
  programs are making it more difficult for government officials to
  
  speak anonymously to journalists. So … working as intended,
  then?

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The New York Times has been highly
critical of the recent tax cuts enacted in Kansas, calling them
“ruinous” and “spectacularly ill-advised.” But Ira Stoll has some
advice of his own: Don’t believe the hype. In his latest column,
Stoll explains what the Times’ breathless coverage gets
wrong about tax policy in the Sunflower State.

View this article.

Rhode Island resident Gregory Manko has been
selling shaved ice on the seashore for 11 summers standing. By all
accounts Hawaiian Desserts—the shaved ice stand he operates from a
private parking lot near the beach in Westerly, Rhode Island—is not
a bother to the local community. But Westerly recently
imposed a ban on all street vendors except at festivals and
special events. Town officials say the ban is necessary to protect
public safety. 

Police Chief Edward St. Clair told the Associated Press that no
one had complained about Manko’s business, but other vendors
setting up in inappropriate areas caused traffic congestion. One
can’t help but wonder, then, why the law wasn’t written to apply
only to those vendors actually causing problems and not those
unobtrusively serving the community? 

Manko thinks it’s because the public nuisance rationale is just
a cover. He told AP that town officials want to turn the
“blue-collar beach town” into the next Martha’s Vineyard. Banning
all street vendors is an authoritarian attempt to class up the
place by fiat. 

Whatever the city’s true rationale for the ban, Manko now stands
on the wrong side of the law. He’s continued to operate his
shaved-ice stand in spite of the new ordinance. 

In court last week, Manko pleaded not guilty to 16 counts of
violating the street vending ban. If convicted, he faces up to 30
days in jail and an $8,000 fine ($500 for each count); he’s due
back in court this Thursday.

Kenneth Adams, who owns the local Ocean View Motel, is also
challenging the ordinance, after being cited for selling ice cream
out of a truck on his own property. 

New York Times columnist
David Brooks and Washington Post columnist

Ruth Marcus produced two of the year’s most embarrassing
commentaries on marijuana legalization, so naturally they were
invited to
discuss that issue on Meet the Press yesterday.
They did not disappoint.

The most annoying thing about the segment is the jokey tone that
Brooks establishes as soon as host David Gregory asks him about the
recent
New York Times editorial calling for the repeal
of marijuana prohibition at the federal level:

Brooks: I disagree with them on the larger
issue. I don’t know what they’ve been smoking up there in the
office. The haze is…

At this point Brooks is interrupted by uproarious laughter from
Gregory and the other panelists, who apparently have never heard
this ancient joke before. Despite that disadvantage, they
understand Brooks’ point: The position taken by his colleagues at
the Times is so absurd that they must have
high when they wrote the editorial! Just like everyone who
opposed alcohol prohibition must have been drunk! Trying
to join in the mirth making, PBS
NewHour anchor Judy Woodruff chimes in with, “They
didn’t inhale.” Then, having finally understood the gravamen of
Brooks’ jest, she adds, “Maybe they did.”

Perhaps we should cut Woodruff some slack, since she later
confesses, “When I think of grass, I think of something to walk on.
I think of pot as something you put a plant in.” This provokes more
merriment. It also raises the question: Exactly how old
is Judy Woodruff? According to Wikipedia, she was
born in 1946, which means she graduated college in the late 1960s.
Hmm.

And the jokes keep coming:

Marcus: It is a vast social experiment.
We do not know the outcome, except that the best evidence is that
if you use marijuana as a teenager regularly, eight IQ points…and I
don’t know about the rest of the table, but I don’t have eight to
lose.

I believe here. But wait, there’s more:

Woodruff: I think it’s important to have
the debate, but I wonder what’s the rush.

Marcus: Pardon the pun.

I don’t think I will. Yet when the panelists turn serious,
their contributions are even lamer. Both Brooks and Marcus, while
agreeing with those crazy potheads at
the Times that states should be
free to set their own marijuana policies, argue that legalization
is a mistake…because of the children:

Brooks: I just don’t think we can
sanction—say for adults, fine, but if you’re 18, you can’t do it.
That’s just not gonna work, I don’t think….

Marcus: I think for states to decide to
go the full legalization route is a problem, precisely for my mommy
reason, that you can say it’s OK for adults, but everybody knows
who has teenagers like me that…the fact that alcohol is legal
increases their access to alcohol. Making marijuana readily,
legally available will increase their—my kids are at home, laughing
at me.

Maybe they are laughing at her because they see the folly
in arguing that anything deemed inappropriate for children should
be forbidden to adults as well. In any case, Brooks’ concerns
extend beyond children:

I don’t think the government should be sanctioning
activity that most of us mature out of, most of us age out of it. I
just don’t think it’s the way we want to spend our
minds….

The country is getting more libertarian on a lot of these
issues, and it’s “everyone should do what they want.” But we’re
part of a community; we’re part of a culture, where we’re
[affected] by each other’s views and each other’s values, and to me
there’s some role for the government playing some role in
restraining some individual choice, just to create a culture of
healthiness. 

As Mediaite‘s Evan McMurry
points out, the panelists never acknowledge the human cost of
forcibly imposing their pharmacological prejudices on their fellow
Americans. Although the total has declined from a
peak of more than 858,000 in 2009, police in the
United States still arrest
hundreds of thousands of people for marijuana offenses every year
(about 750,000 in 2012), the vast majority for simple possession.
It’s true that most of these people do not spend much time behind
bars. But the inconvenience, humiliation, financial drain, and
ancillary costs of being treated like a criminal should not be
forgotten amid all the marijuana-induced giggles. Nor should the
fact that people can and do receive lengthy prison sentences,
including life, merely for
growing or selling a product that you can openly buy at
state-licensed stores in Colorado and Washington. Funny
stuff.

New York Times columnist
David Brooks and Washington Post columnist

Ruth Marcus produced two of the year’s most embarrassing
commentaries on marijuana legalization, so naturally they were
invited to
discuss that issue on Meet the Press yesterday.
They did not disappoint.

The most annoying thing about the segment is the jokey tone that
Brooks establishes as soon as host David Gregory asks him about the
recent
New York Times editorial calling for the repeal
of marijuana prohibition at the federal level:

Brooks: I disagree with them on the larger
issue. I don’t know what they’ve been smoking up there in the
office. The haze is…

At this point Brooks is interrupted by uproarious laughter from
Gregory and the other panelists, who apparently have never heard
this ancient joke before. Despite that disadvantage, they
understand Brooks’ point: The position taken by his colleagues at
the Times is so absurd that they must have
high when they wrote the editorial! Just like everyone who
opposed alcohol prohibition must have been drunk! Trying
to join in the mirth making, PBS
NewHour anchor Judy Woodruff chimes in with, “They
didn’t inhale.” Then, having finally understood the gravamen of
Brooks’ jest, she adds, “Maybe they did.”

Perhaps we should cut Woodruff some slack, since she later
confesses, “When I think of grass, I think of something to walk on.
I think of pot as something you put a plant in.” This provokes more
merriment. It also raises the question: Exactly how old
is Judy Woodruff? According to Wikipedia, she was
born in 1946, which means she graduated college in the late 1960s.
Hmm.

And the jokes keep coming:

Marcus: It is a vast social experiment.
We do not know the outcome, except that the best evidence is that
if you use marijuana as a teenager regularly, eight IQ points…and I
don’t know about the rest of the table, but I don’t have eight to
lose.

I believe here. But wait, there’s more:

Woodruff: I think it’s important to have
the debate, but I wonder what’s the rush.

Marcus: Pardon the pun.

I don’t think I will. Yet when the panelists turn serious,
their contributions are even lamer. Both Brooks and Marcus, while
agreeing with those crazy potheads at
the Times that states should be
free to set their own marijuana policies, argue that legalization
is a mistake…because of the children:

Brooks: I just don’t think we can
sanction—say for adults, fine, but if you’re 18, you can’t do it.
That’s just not gonna work, I don’t think….

Marcus: I think for states to decide to
go the full legalization route is a problem, precisely for my mommy
reason, that you can say it’s OK for adults, but everybody knows
who has teenagers like me that…the fact that alcohol is legal
increases their access to alcohol. Making marijuana readily,
legally available will increase their—my kids are at home, laughing
at me.

Maybe they are laughing at her because they see the folly
in arguing that anything deemed inappropriate for children should
be forbidden to adults as well. In any case, Brooks’ concerns
extend beyond children:

I don’t think the government should be sanctioning
activity that most of us mature out of, most of us age out of it. I
just don’t think it’s the way we want to spend our
minds….

The country is getting more libertarian on a lot of these
issues, and it’s “everyone should do what they want.” But we’re
part of a community; we’re part of a culture, where we’re
[affected] by each other’s views and each other’s values, and to me
there’s some role for the government playing some role in
restraining some individual choice, just to create a culture of
healthiness. 

As Mediaite‘s Evan McMurry
points out, the panelists never acknowledge the human cost of
forcibly imposing their pharmacological prejudices on their fellow
Americans. Although the total has declined from a
peak of more than 858,000 in 2009, police in the
United States still arrest
hundreds of thousands of people for marijuana offenses every year
(about 750,000 in 2012), the vast majority for simple possession.
It’s true that most of these people do not spend much time behind
bars. But the inconvenience, humiliation, financial drain, and
ancillary costs of being treated like a criminal should not be
forgotten amid all the marijuana-induced giggles. Nor should the
fact that people can and do receive lengthy prison sentences,
including life, merely for
growing or selling a product that you can openly buy at
state-licensed stores in Colorado and Washington. Funny
stuff.