JustOneMinute

Rising Seas, Rising Blood Pressure

As part of their Paris climate overage the NY Times presents a Timesplainer intended to hit the progressive talking points on climate change in a simple Q&A format:

Short Answers to Hard Questions About Climate Change

As part of the exercise readers are encouraged to submit their own short questions, so that the Times can cherry-pick the friendly liberal ones.

My submission: Is the climate situation so desperate that Pres. Obama and Senate minority Leader Reid will drop their objections to the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waster Repository? Or are the nuclear-deniers still opposed to this proven low-carbon technology?

Yeah, that will get an answer. I had a shorter version - "Can you spell 'nuclear'"? - but the absence of that word in the entire Q&A provided an answer. Evidently the situation is desperate but not urgent. Cities will flood, millions will starve, but Yucca Mountain will remain pristine unto the umpteenth generation. Got it.

NOW THAT IS CRAZY TALK: If you strain you can imagine The Times giving about half a phrase to geo-engineering, which is how this will eventually be solved if we reach a crisis point:

In the best case that scientists can imagine, several things happen: Earth turns out to be less sensitive to greenhouse gases than currently believed; plants and animals manage to adapt to the changes that have already become inevitable; human society develops much greater political will to bring emissions under control; and major technological breakthroughs occur that help society both to limit emissions and to adjust to climate change.

I imagine 'adjust to' could include things like controlled sulfate particle emissions to mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes.

He'll Always Have Paris

Building a legacy, Obama style:

Obama’s Legacy at Stake in Paris Talks on Climate Accord

By CORAL DAVENPORT   NOV. 28, 2015

WASHINGTON — At a joint news conference here Tuesday with President François Hollande of France, President Obama veered from his focus on the terrorist attacks in Paris to bring up the huge international gathering beginning in the French capital on Monday to hammer out a global response to climate change.

 

“What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children,” Mr. Obama said of the climate conference.

 

The segue brought mockery, even castigation, from the political right, but it was a reminder of the importance Mr. Obama places on climate change in shaping his legacy. During his 2012 re-election campaign, he barely mentioned global warming, but the issue has become a hallmark of his second term.

 

Well, yes. Obama had to sneak climate policy past the voters because the bitter-clingers in the heartland are still hung up on saving their dirty, polluting jobs in coal and oil. And, as the Times goes on to explain, he can't find the votes in Congress to actually move any legislation.

 

But even as Mr. Obama presses for a deal in Paris, it faces steep obstacles, not least the legal and legislative assault on his own regulations at home. During the course of the Paris talks, Republicans in Congress are planning a series of votes to fight Mr. Obama’s climate agenda. More than half the states are suing the administration on the legality of his climate plan. And all the Republican presidential candidates have said that they would undo the regulations if elected.

 

On Nov. 19, Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, chairman of the environment committee and the Senate’s most vocal skeptic on climate change science, and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming sent a letter to Mr. Obama, signed by 35 other senators, promising to block the funding for any climate deal unless the Paris pact is sent to Congress for ratification. A vote on the deal would fail in the Republican-controlled Congress.

 

If a legacy can be built without a foundation of popular or legislative support, Obama is well on his way. Just as he is on his way to legacy achievements in health care and immigration reform.

Barry Red Line On Guns (Ongoing...)

Yesterday it was raining. I went out and shook my fist at the sky. Fiercely! Today it is sunny and beautiful. You're welcome, fellow New Englanders.

Our President seems to have a comparably unsettled relationship with reality. Here he is after the Colorado Springs shooting:

Obama Says ‘Enough Is Enough’ After Colorado Shooting

By JONATHAN MARTIN   NOV. 28, 2015

President Obama responded angrily on Saturday to the mass shooting that took three lives, including that of a police officer, at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs over the Thanksgiving holiday, calling the country’s recurring outbreaks of gun violence “not normal.”

“We can’t let it become normal,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “If we truly care about this — if we’re going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience — then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough.”

Enough is enough! The President is going to act! By heavens, it's time for leadership!

Well, Obama actually agrees - it is time for leadership. Just not his:

Without calling explicitly for new laws, Mr. Obama invoked the name of the slain police officer, from the University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus, to plead with leaders to show the will to address such shootings.

"Plead with leaders"? Damn right - get the President on the line! Oh, wait...

Angela Merkel is tied up with the refugee debacle, so she can't help. Putin doesn't really seem like a gun control guy. I wonder who will help him here?

 

The Most Transparent Administration EVER!

The NY Times fills a typically slow news weekend with a report on the most transparently deceitful Administration ever:

Tighter Lid on Records Threatens to Weaken Government Watchdogs

By ERIC LICHTBLAU  NOV. 27, 2015

WASHINGTON — Justice Department watchdogs ran into an unexpected roadblock last year when they began examining the role of federal drug agents in the fatal shootings of unarmed civilians during raids in Honduras.

The Drug Enforcement Administration balked at turning over emails from senior officials tied to the raids, according to the department’s inspector general. It took nearly a year of wrangling before the D.E.A. was willing to turn over all its records in a case that the inspector general said raised “serious questions” about agents’ use of deadly force.

The continuing Honduran inquiry is one of at least 20 investigations across the government that have been slowed, stymied or sometimes closed because of a long-simmering dispute between the Obama administration and its own watchdogs over the shrinking access of inspectors general to confidential records, according to records and interviews.

What? The IGs are a part of the Executive Branch. Surely the Most Transparent Administration in History  wants the straight dope on what is happening in the various department? Ahhh, not really:

“The bottom line is that we’re no longer independent,” Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, said in an interview.

If you like your Inspector Generals you can keep your Inspector Generals.

The restrictions reflect a broader effort by the Obama administration to prevent unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information — at the expense, some watchdogs insist, of government oversight.

Justice Department lawyers concluded in a legal opinion this summer that some protected records, like grand jury transcripts, wiretap intercepts and financial credit reports, could be kept off limits to government investigators. The administration insists there is no intention of curtailing investigations, but both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have expressed alarm and are promising to restore full access to the watchdogs.

...

“This is by far the most aggressive assault on the inspector general concept since the beginning,” said Paul Light, a New York University professor who has studied the system. “It’s the complete evisceration of the concept. You might as well fold them down. They’ve become defanged.”

...

In a rare show of bipartisanship, the administration has drawn scorn from Democrats and Republicans. The Obama administration’s stance has “blocked what was once a free flow of information” to the watchdogs, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said at a hearing.

 

A number of investigations are being hampered. One in particular will undoubtedly draw the eye of conservatives:

Nowhere has the fallout over the dispute been felt more acutely than at the Justice Department, where the inspector general’s office said 14 investigations had been hindered by the restricted access.

These include investigations into the F.B.I.’s use of phone records collected by the National Security Agency, the government’s sharing of intelligence information before the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, a notorious gun-tracing operation known as “Fast and Furious” and the deadly Honduran drug raids.

Hmm.

Well, if Congress is unhappy now, wait until Hillarity! is President. Little Ms. Sunshine Law she is not. And once again, we are fortunate that this is not happening under Bush and Cheney, or libs would be leaping from ledges and the streets would be unsafe.

ERRATA: Here is info on the July 20 OLC opinion, a bipartisan blast, and a proposed bipartisan legislative fix.

Traditional Saturday After Thanksgiving Open Thread

Fun Fact: On November 28, 1925 the first broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry aired live on the radio, under its original name the WSM Barn Dance. At the time, the show aired after an NBC radio program featuring opera and classical music. On December 10, 1927 host George Day opened the show by saying, "For the past hour, we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand Opera. From now on, we will present the 'Grand Ole Opry'."

The Grand Ole Opry is the longest-running radio broadcast in US history. Happy 90th birthday.

 

Link to Last Page of Thread.

Happy Thanksgiving All!

You think you know a person, and then you find that Megan McArdle could have chucked the whole politics/economics thing years ago and gone into comedy. Her Thanskgiving tips.

Obama Pre-Thanksgiving Press Statement

We have the video of Obama's statement to the press and public about the terror threat this weekend, which followed a meeting with his national security team.

He had no new initiatives to announce against ISIS.

His biggest laugh line:

He added that Americans should still be vigilant. “If you see something suspicious, say something,” he said. “That’s always helpful. Unless its a Muslim kid with a beeping box containing a tangle of wires. Then I'll just have to invite him to the White House to prove we aren't a nation of haters and you'll get sued for ten million buckaroos. But if you see some elderly nuns acting suspiciously, or even the armed and dangerous Swedish Bikini team, definitely give us a call."

He didn't actually say that. But he might have!

I SHOULD ADD: Given Obama's luck with "ISIS is contained", this is bold talk - his polling numbers and loss of public confidence must have rattled his handlers. How it will be helpful to announce that there is nothing to announce and we should all be chill because his long term plan is on course remains unclear, to me anyway.

Thousands of Dancing American Muslims Simply Did Not Happen

Hard though it may be to prove a negative, the Times does us all a service by talking to a guy who really is in a position to know:

A Definitive Debunking of Donald Trump’s 9/11 Claims

How alarmed were New Jersey officials by reports of Muslims dancing in the streets of Jersey City and Paterson on Sept. 11, 2001, to celebrate the destruction of the World Trade Center?

They feared riots would break out and were ready to send in the National Guard and the State Police to preserve order.

But John J. Farmer Jr., then the New Jersey attorney general and the state’s chief law enforcement officer, said on Tuesday that he ordered an investigation that very day and found the reports to be bogus, more wild stories born in the stricken hours after the attacks.

...

Few people, if any, could address the circumstances more definitively than Mr. Farmer, who went on to serve as senior counsel to the Sept. 11 commission.

In an account Mr. Farmer provided Tuesday, he described being in the state’s command center, in Liberty State Park in Jersey City, directly across the Hudson River from the burning wreckage of the trade center. The New Jersey State Police radio antenna had been on top of one of the towers, cutting off communications.

“We were forced to rely on runners for intelligence about what was happening across the river and in New Jersey,” Mr. Farmer said.

In the vacuum, rumors were flying, he said. Bombers with suicide vests were in Times Square. Saboteurs were lurking around power plants. New York City’s mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was missing.

And then there was the wisp of a story that Mr. Farmer said was most disturbing of all: “That Muslims were dancing on the rooftops and in the streets of Jersey City and Paterson.”

Indeed, pockets of radical Islamists had set up in Jersey City in the past. The 1993 World Trade Center bombers rented a van and stored chemicals and fertilizers in that city.

Open jubilation at the mass death, Mr. Farmer said, might quickly be followed by rioting and more deaths. “If true, we would have had to mobilize the State Police and National Guard and locked the place down,” he said.

“We followed up on that report instantly because of its implications,” he added. “The word came back quickly from Jersey City, later from Paterson. False report. Never happened.”

This surely cannot prove that nobody celebrated anywhere in New Jersey, but Trump spoke of "thousands", seeing it on television, and claimed it was widely covered. Not good.

Coach Obama: Assad Must Go For A Run. Or Something.

AllahPundit follows the arc of Obama's impotent exhortations to and about Syrian thug Assad - from "Assad must go" in 2011 to "we can start looking at Mr. Assad choosing not to run" for re-election in 2015. If Barry Red Line still had credibility left to lose in Syria this would be a problem. Instead Putin and Assad will continue to treat Obama like a lost tourist in a bazaar who has become separated from his group, lost his wallet, and doesn't know the name or address of his hotel.

Still, Obama has excellent Thanksgiving advice for Assad and so many others: Assad must go for a run.

FWIW, AllahP also plugs the Bolton Super-partition of Iraq and Syria to create a new Sunni state.

Bolton Echoes Biden - Create A Sunni State

Writing in the Times, Bushmen John Bolton has a plan for battling ISIS:

John Bolton: To Defeat ISIS, Create a Sunni State

By JOHN R. BOLTON  NOV. 24, 2015

Before transforming Mr. Obama’s ineffective efforts into a vigorous military campaign to destroy the Islamic State, we need a clear view, shared with NATO allies and others, about what will replace it. It is critical to resolve this issue before considering any operational plans. Strategy does not come from the ground up; instead, tactics flow deductively once we’ve defined the ultimate objectives.

Today’s reality is that Iraq and Syria as we have known them are gone. The Islamic State has carved out a new entity from the post-Ottoman Empire settlement, mobilizing Sunni opposition to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the Iran-dominated government of Iraq. Also emerging, after years of effort, is a de facto independent Kurdistan.

Although Biden insisted Iraq could remain one country under a federal structure, this looks like a grander version of the Biden plan to partition Iraq. But let's take that as a positive - there might be a voice within the Administration willing to push this.

As to the logic, this seems right to me:

If, in this context, defeating the Islamic State means restoring to power Mr. Assad in Syria and Iran’s puppets in Iraq, that outcome is neither feasible nor desirable.

...

Sunnis today support the Islamic State for many of the same reasons they once supported Al Qaeda in Iraq — as a bulwark against being ruled by Tehran via Baghdad. Telling these Sunni people that their reward for rising against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq will be to put them back in thrall to Mr. Assad and his ilk, or to Shiite-dominated Baghdad, will simply intensify their support for the jihadists. Why would they switch sides?

This is why, after destroying the Islamic State, America should pursue the far-reaching goal of creating a new Sunni state. Though difficult in the near term, over time this is more conducive to regional order and stability.

The Kurds also get a state, which will freak out the Turks. Mr. Bolton slides past this, as well he might. On the other hand, I infer that Assad keeps the parts of Syria that include the airbase and naval facility prized by Putin.

He alludes to the fact that the West drew these lines on a map a century ago. As a a centennial observance we could re-draw them.

Lots of ideas. We'll have to take a look at this. Have to look at a lot of things! #TrumpKu

Doctored Upbeat Intel

I yield to no one in my admiration for an upbeat, sunny attitude but...

Analysts Accuse CENTCOM of Covering Up Cooked ISIS Intelligence

Allegations are mounting that senior intelligence officials at Central Command not only skewed findings on the ISIS war to please D.C., but tried to hide what they did.

 

In July, a group of intelligence analysts at the U.S. military’s Central Command accused their bosses of distorting and selectively editing intelligence reports about the fight against ISIS in order to portray that campaign as more successful than it really was. As a result of those complaints, the Pentagon’s inspector general opened an investigation.

 

Now, the allegations of misconduct have extended to a possible cover-up, with some analysts accusing the senior intelligence officials at CENTCOM, Maj. Gen. Steven Grove and his civilian deputy, Gregory Ryckman, of deleting emails and files from computer systems before the inspector general could examine them, three individuals familiar with the investigation told The Daily Beast.

 

We can find Times coverage of the allegations against General Grove and more at Hot Air.

 

Now, a key point in following the legacy media coverage of this - when the Intelligence Community distorted the intelligence on Iraq to fit Dick Cheney's preferred narrative, that was all Cheney's fault; when the IC distorts the intel to fit Obama's preferred narrative, it is all their fault.

 

And do recall - conservatives spent time exonerating Cheney, and those arguments will probably be recycled to defend Obama. As someone nearly said, in the future we will all be Cheney for fifteen minutes. And Obama!

 

So how did Cheney work his dark magic? The gist, as I recall, is that there was a range of opinions within the IC. Analysts who sent up reports Cheney liked got their reports circulated, their phone calls to the VP's office returned, and generally enjoyed an elevation of status. Conversely, anyone presenting an adverse report was either subjected to an intense, hostile grilling or, worse, ignored. Anyone with experience in a bureaucracy knows the drill.

 

So could Team Obama have been playing the same games, or was it just a coincidence that the alleged doctoring happened to mesh with the White House narrative of steady success?

 

A possibly fruitful line of inquiry would be to track the career of Gen. Steven R. Grove. A lot of top brass left/were purged under Obama (but more than under Bush? I have no baseline) and Grove might have found a patron in the White House. Or he has a modicum of common sense and a sense of survival - does anyone think Obama comes across as a guy who welcomes bad news?

The Paleo People Will Eat This Up

Science confirms what the Paleo people have been saying for years - this whole wheat-based diet is new and humans are not necessarily well-adapted to it:

Agriculture Linked to DNA Changes in Ancient Europe

The agricultural revolution was one of the most profound events in human history, leading to the rise of modern civilization. Now, in the first study of its kind, an international team of scientists has found that after agriculture arrived in Europe 8,500 years ago, people’s DNA underwent widespread changes, altering their height, digestion, immune system and skin color.

Researchers had found indirect clues of some of these alterations by studying the genomes of living Europeans. But the new study, they said, makes it possible to see the changes as they occurred over thousands of years.

I'll skip the explanations and pick a few examples:

Previous studies had suggested that Europeans became better able to digest milk once they began raising cattle. Dr. Reich and his colleagues confirmed that LCT, a gene that aids milk digestion, did experience intense natural selection, rapidly becoming more common in ancient Europeans. But it didn’t happen when farming began in Europe, as had been supposed. The earliest sign of this change, it turns out, dates back only 4,000 years.

While agriculture brought benefits like a new supply of protein in milk, it also created risks. Early European farmers who depended mainly on wheat and other crops risked getting low doses of important nutrients.

So a gene called SLC22A4 proved advantageous as soon as Europeans started to farm, Dr. Reich and his colleagues found. It encodes a protein on the surface of cells that draws in an amino acid called ergothioneine. Wheat and other crops have low levels of ergothioneine, and the new variant increases its absorption. That would have increased the chances of survival among the farmers who had the gene.

Yet this solution created a problem of its own. The same segment of DNA that carries SLC22A4 also contains a variation that raises the risk of digestive disorders like irritable bowel syndrome. These diseases, then, may be an indirect consequence of Europe’s pivot toward agriculture.

There are some skin tone insights for people of pallor:

Dr. Reich and his colleagues also tracked changes in the color of European skin.

The original hunter-gatherers, descendants of people who had come from Africa, had dark skin as recently as 9,000 years ago. Farmers arriving from Anatolia were lighter, and this trait spread through Europe. Later, a new gene variant emerged that lightened European skin even more.

Why? Scientists have long thought that light skin helped capture more vitamin D in sunlight at high latitudes. But early hunter-gatherers managed well with dark skin. Dr. Reich suggests that they got enough vitamin D in the meat they caught.

He hypothesizes that it was the shift to agriculture, which reduced the intake of vitamin D, that may have triggered a change in skin color.

So the Vitamin D idea lives on, with a twist blaming 'modern' farming.

 

 

 

Five Shot In Minneapolis

We are offered conflicting narratives about a shooting in Minneapolis. Here is the WaPo with two versions [with UPDATES below]:

Five Black Lives Matter protesters shot in Minneapolis; police searching for white suspects

By Michael E. Miller and Lindsey Bever  November 24 at 8:53 AM

Simmering racial tensions have boiled over yet again after several men shot five people who had been protesting the recent police killing of an African American man in Minneapolis.

...

Police announced on social media that five people suffered non-life-threatening gunshot wounds and that officers were searching for “3 white male suspects” who fled the scene.

Here is the first version the WaPo presents, my emphasis throughout, and let's call this version WaPo1:

Details of the shooting, however, remain murky.

Oluchi Omeoga, a young protester who has participated in the demonstrations since last Monday, said she witnessed the incident.

Omeoga and her fellow protesters saw three people wearing masks who “weren’t supposed to be there,” she told the Associated Press. When the three interlopers left the crowd and began walking down the street, a few protesters followed them. But when the three men reached a corner, she said, they pulled out weapons and fired at the protesters.

A second WaPo version cites the Minneapolis Start Tribune; let's call this WaPo2:

“A group of white supremacists showed up at the protest, as they have done most nights,” Miski Noor, a Black Lives Matter organizer, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Police have not confirmed or denied Noor’s claim.

Noor said the white men “opened fire on about six protesters,” after the protesters tried to herd the men away from the protest area.

Here is what we see in the Star Tribune. Call it Strib1:

Miski Noor, a media contact for Black Lives Matter, said “a group of white supremacists showed up at the protest, as they have done most nights.”

One of the three counterdemonstrators wore a mask, said Dana Jaehnert, who had been at the protest site since early evening.

When about a dozen protesters attempted to herd the group away from the area, Noor said, they “opened fire on about six protesters,” hitting five of them. Jaehnert said she heard four gunshots.

Three white supremacists, a dozen protestors. And the mood?

Jie Wronski-Riley said angry protesters moved the counter-demonstrators away from the encampment at the police station. Wronski-Riley heard what sounded like firecrackers and thought, “surely they’re not shooting human beings.” Two young black men on either side of him were hit, one in the back and leg, the other in the arm.

At least two of the three men who had been taunting protesters were firing guns, said Wronski-Riley, who described the incident as “really chaotic, really fast.”

Whites taunting protestors, who become angry so a dozen protestors "herd" them to a dark area. I assume their defense will be that they felt threatened, and that their previous actions were all legal as free speech, free assembly, and so on.

Here is the NY Times, version, NYT1:

Miski Noor, an organizer at the Minneapolis arm of Black Lives Matter, said the shooting happened as demonstrators were escorting three masked men who had been behaving suspiciously away from the site of the rally, where people have gathered for more than a week to protest the Nov. 15 shooting of Jamar Clark, 24.

When they reached a dark area, the men turned around and opened fire on the demonstrators before fleeing, Ms. Noor said.

That is basically WaPo2 with "escort" substituted for "herd". I know I would rather be 'escorted' than 'herded' and I guess Times reporter Ashley Southall feels the same way. Since the word "herd" is not in quotes in the source Strib1, that may have been an appropriate editorial judgment.

More from the Times:

During a telephone call to the precinct, police officers were overheard reviewing surveillance video and describing a masked white man pulling out a firearm, a description that appeared to align with accounts of the shooting that witnesses had given to Ms. Noor. In accounts given on social media and to Ms. Noor, witnesses described the gunmen as three men, two white and one Asian, wearing masks and bulletproof vests.

Ms. Noor said that groups of men had been showing up to the demonstrations and “acting shady” since Friday. Witnesses reported that the men were filming protesters and refusing to answer questions about why they were there, she said. In response, the group put together a safety committee to watch for potential agitators and escort them away as a preventive measure, she said.

What, an Asian white supremacist? Standards are evolving in the Little Apple.

As to "acting shady", I don't know what that means but I know that at Mizzou there was a call for 'muscle over here' when one (Asian) reporter who appeared to be unsympathetic approached the protestors' 'safe space' in the middle of campus. Whether the Minneapolis protestors had a similar mindset is an undeveloped theme here. But 'escorting away' or 'herding away' people who are filming, taunting and asking questions does not sound wholly legal to me; asking for a police intervention would be the appropriate response.

That said, if three guys are in bullet proof vests, carrying sidearms and 'taunting' the protestors one might argue they were approaching this situation with an aggressive mindset and were looking for trouble.

And do keep in mind - this is Minneapolis, so the odds are good that the protestors are a mix of white, black and other. That seems to be confirmed on this video, anyway.

SINCE YOU ASK: The WaPo1 version - the whites supremacists were walking away, then turned and fired on a few people following them - is the current candidate to take hold as the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" version. Since BLM spokespeople aren't advancing that line, we doubt it will take hold anywhere other than the WaPo.

However, look for the dozen angry herders on the safety committee to be whittled down to three elderly nuns and a retired school crossing guard by the end of the week. Plus the people who got shot.

Not to put the reporters in an awkward spot or blame the victims, but... if the shooters are likely to claim self-defense, is it worth asking whether any of the shooting victims have a history of violence? One would hope the protest organizers aren't that foolish, but who knows? In any case, look for that line of pushback to be developed by Rush et al.

UPDATE: TWO MEN ARRESTED SO FAR: Police have arrested one white man and one Hispanic (likely the 'Asian', but let's not leap to conclusions. And then released; this story is shifting as I type). This Strib story has names for five shooting victims, so I imagine their backgrounds will emerge.

Black Lives Matter protesters move downtown; 1 of 2 shooting suspects released

Protesters marched from the 4th precinct to downtown Minneapolis Tuesday afternoon. A 23-year-old white man was arrested in Bloomington at 11:20 a.m. A second shooting suspect has been released.

Police have arrested two men they have been seeking in connection with a shooting at the Black Lives Matter encampment Monday night.

Minneapolis police said they arrested a 23-year-old white man in Bloomington at 11:20 a.m. Tuesday. A second shooting suspect arrested in south Minneapolis at 12:05 p.m. has been released. The search for other suspects continues.

Authorities are weighing whether to treat the shooting of five people protesting near the Minneapolis Police Department’s Fourth Precinct station Monday night as a hate crime, sources familiar with the investigation said Tuesday morning.

The victims, all black men — ages 19 through 43 — were taken to hospitals with noncritical injuries, according to police.

Minnesota is not a stand your ground state but we may yet see the self-defense hate crime play out.

As protesters took turns speaking, one of the shooting victims returned to the scene, leaning heavily on a cane. Wesley Martin, 43, said he was shot after he and a group of others chased the suspected gunmen toward an alley off Morgan Avenue.

The suspects have variously been "herded", "escorted" and now "chased".

“I’ve been out here every night since it started and you know when people look suspicious,” Martin said.

The bullet ripped through his right knee, Martin said. He said his 19-year-old brother Teven King was also shot, in the stomach.

As Martin spoke, his cousin Leroy Williams, nodded in agreement.

“Really we could get violent,” Williams said. “And there’s a lot of us that are willing to go to jail (for this). But we’re not. We’re keeping the peace.”

Violent towards whom?

Williams also said that one of Clark’s cousins, Cameron Clark, 24, was also among the shooting victims.

Carrie Brown, Martin’s cousin, lives down the street from the precinct house and said she and others were cooking dinner for the protesters when “these four white guys walked up … They had masks and they had a briefcase. I thought they were there to donate [something].”

Brown said that someone in the crowd pointed the men out as suspected agitators and the crowd started to chase them away, heading north on Morgan Avenue.

The men got as far as an alley just north of the precinct house when they started shooting, Brown said.

“When we turned around they started to shoot at us from behind,” Brown said.

The shooters appeared to be wearing bulletproof vests under their clothing, she said.

“It was all scary. You wouldn’t expect anything like that. We didn’t have a security details. Everybody here was peaceful. We didn’t expect these psychos.”

“We all were terrorized last night,” Brown added. “I’ve never seen racism like that.”

So now roughly twelve protestors, some of them with a temperment to violence, chased three men towards an ally. But it was only  when the protestors turned back that the three men started shooting, which doesn't really explain the guy who was shot in the stomach. Well, maybe he turned again and ran to the sound of guns.

The defense side is going to see a real opportunity here. Which means the upcoming trial might be as polarizing as the Democrats need it to be.

UPDATE 2: From the Srtrib:

Still, the shootings galvanized protesters, who said Tuesday that the shots rang out after they attempted to drive the men, who they described as “white supremacists,” from the area.

Witnesses to the shootings said they confronted the men before they fired and forced them from the protest area. According to a video interview with two men immediately afterward, the group demanded that the assailants remove their masks. When they refused, a scuffle ensued. As the crowd began to push the men out, shots were fired.

So now we have a scuffle preceding the shooting?

Three suspects are in custody, all seemingly white:

On Tuesday, days after that video went public, four men were arrested in connection with Monday night’s shooting of five protesters a block from the Fourth Precinct headquarters in an act that drew condemnation coast to coast.

Police arrested Allen Lawrence “Lance” Scarsella III, 23, of Lakeville, and a 32-year-old man from Minneapolis, who was later released from custody after police determined he wasn’t at the shooting scene.

Later Tuesday, two more men — Nathan Gustavsson, 21, of Hermantown and Daniel Macey, 26, of Pine City — turned themselves into police and were booked on probable cause assault in connection with the case.

 More from Wesley Martin, a shooting victim:

At 10:41 p.m., three masked men began shouting. Wesley Martin was among those who escorted them away.

Suddenly, shots rang out.

“I heard the N word and that’s when everybody started charging,” he said. “And we get to 14th and Morgan [avenues], and all I heard was pow…pow, pow, pow, pow, pow.”

"Charging", "Scuffle", the N-bomb and a fighting words scenario - this is a self-defense hate crime.

 

I Am Filing This Under 'Good News' While Awaiting Developments

I may be overcome by holiday cheer but the BBC report that Turkey shot down a Russian SU-24 may be good news. Well disguised good news of the life handing you lemons so break out the gin and tonic variety, but good news nonetheless.

This might just serve as a warning shot over Putin's bow and help him refocus on the fact that he is not the only armed power in the Syrian region with advanced military capability and an agenda. A bit more cooperation in coordinating an effort against ISIS would be welcome. If this also leads to a bit less Russian support for Assad, well, let the chips fall. The Times coverage includes this favorable straw in a bale of grim news:

Mr. Putin said he found it suspicious that Turkey had reached out to its NATO allies after the episode but not to Moscow. He nevertheless insisted the situation should encourage more cooperation in the fight against terrorism.

I still want to see Hillary's no-fly zone, and reminding the Russians that sure, we will shoot you down might help with that. The NY Times has a report of major schisms developing inside Team Obama; now it is Dour John Kerry urging a more vigorous effort against ISIS. How do you ask a man to be the first man to die for a mistake? Over to the Times:

John Kerry Adds Voice to Those Urging Bigger Push Against Islamic State in Syria

By DAVID E. SANGER  NOV. 23, 2015

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — With the Obama administration under mounting pressure from some of its own top former officials to take a more aggressive approach to combating the Islamic State, Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that he would like to see the American-led military and diplomatic effort in Syria “go faster.”

He added that President Obama had charged his aides with “coming up with any concepts that will, in fact, work, and which could help change the situation on the ground.”

...

In interviews over the past few days, however, White House, State Department and Pentagon officials have described fierce debates within the administration over how deeply to involve American forces in the campaign against the Islamic State.

Several said that the arguments made last week by Mr. Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton — calling for a no-fly zone in Syria and a more muscular military response to bolster the diplomacy now underway — generally reflected arguments Mr. Kerry made, and lost, in the Situation Room.

“I think you are going to see many of those decisions revisited now,” said one senior administration official, who declined to speak on the record about continuing strategy discussions within the administration.

Yet so far Mr. Obama appears to be sticking to his incremental approach, part of a long-term effort to make the Persian Gulf states less dependent on American intervention in the region’s crises. His trip to Asia over the past week was part of his aim to refocus American diplomatic energy.

Troubling. Obama quit talking to Republican Congressional leaders a long time ago, rarely chats with Congressional Democrats, and is probably going to have to shut out all these questioning voices inside his own Executive Branch. Fortunately Sasha and Malia should be around for the holidays so they can pick up the conversational ball if Valerie and Michelle lag.

BACK IN THE AIR: Doc Drezner is worried about the Russian shootdown but remaining calm:

So will this business get out of control?

Obviously, it could — but I don’t believe it will. For one thing, Russia and Turkey are sufficiently interdependent that a serious heightening of tensions would severely impair both countries. Turkey would find it very difficult to suddenly stop using Russian natural gas. Russia would find it very difficult to not use the Dardanelles.

On the military side of the equation, as strategically reckless as Vladimir Putin has been, I suspect he would not want to escalate this conflict. Doing so would involve NATO, not just Turkey, and I doubt that Putin wants to get into a war of attrition that would grind away Russia’s air force. Furthermore, there is the pesky problem of the Syria conflict not going away, and Putin’s proxy in Syria still being in grave danger.

I am in my "punch a bully in the nose" phase, so I would be all in for the diplomatic equivalent of "You're damn right I ordered the Code Red!". But from Team Obama?

Carson And Jefferson - USA Today Breaks Ranks

USA Today hopped on the "Carson is a Constitutional clown" bandwagon earlier today but has now hopped off:

Oops! Carson's not actually wrong about Jefferson: Column

Do tell! I should add that the USA Today climbdown is amusing and informative. Will it serve as an example to the many, many Progressive Groupthinkers that couldn't spend two minutes Googling Jefferson and the Constitution before bashing Carson?

That's not my bet, but I am never going to be smart enough to be a progressive. My goodness, I can't even spell "epistemic closure" and I am still hazy as to what an "echo chamber" might be.

Well, hardly for the first time - the InstaPundit gets results!

 

We Have Nothing To Fear But... Sweet Jiminy Get Me Out Of Here!

Our Commander-in-Chief:

 “The most powerful tool we have to fight ISIL is to say that we’re not afraid. To not elevate them and to somehow buy into their fantasy that they’re doing something important.”

Our Commander-in-Chief's State Department:

Worldwide Travel Alert

Last Updated: November 23, 2015

 

The State Department alerts U.S. citizens to possible risks of travel due to increased terrorist threats. Current information suggests that ISIL (aka Da’esh), al-Qa’ida, Boko Haram, and other terrorist groups continue to plan terrorist attacks in multiple regions.  These attacks may employ a wide variety of tactics, using conventional and non-conventional weapons and targeting both official and private interests.  This Travel Alert expires on February 24, 2016.

Only worldwide? No word on whether we should also limit interplanetary exploration.

Look, I understand that if we give in to the notion that ISIS is doing something important then THE TERRORISTS WIN, but - and call me selfish - not getting my ass shot off by a jihadist remains important to me. Not having my family, friends and fellow citizens shot down or blown up also remains a priority.

Great to see Obama has this all buttoned down as my family members travel hither and yon on the holidays.

To The Barricades For Carson! And Jefferson!

More snark from the WaPo, echoed in their morning round-up:

Ben Carson, author of book about the Constitution, incorrectly states that Thomas Jefferson crafted it

By Fred Barbash

It’s a common misconception that Thomas Jefferson participated in drafting the United States Constitution in 1787. But as Republican presidential candidate and retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson points out in his latest book, “A More Perfect Union,” Jefferson was “missing in action,” serving in Paris as minister to France.

That did not stop Carson from praising Jefferson in a C-Span interview Sunday as one of the most impressive of the Founding Fathers because he “tried to craft our constitution in a way that it would control peoples’ natural tendencies and control the natural growth of the government.”

Ha ha, that silly neurosurgeon! Hey, history ain't brain surgery. buddy, so put down your book on the Constitution and listen to the experts. Or not. As preparation, let's reprise a more complete Q&A from Mediaite:

“You talk a lot about the Founding Fathers,” host Steve Scully noted. “Do you have one that impressed you the most?”

“I’m impressed by a lot of them, but particularly impressed with Thomas Jefferson, who seemed to have very deep insight into the way that people would react,” Carson said. “And he tried to craft our Constitution in a way that it would control people’s natural tendencies and control the natural growth of the government.”

Let's keep in mind that Carson was asked whose ideas and influence he most admired, not whose penmanship, and press on.

Since the WaPo was kind enough to link to the Carson book, let's employ the power of Amazon and look inside. This is from Chapter One, all the way down in paragraph four:

I am reading "Our government follows the model set out by Thomas Jefferson...". Can't fault Ben for flip-flopping, anyway.

As to the basis of that claim, let's segue to the Library of Congress (If you are feeling lucky, or pressed for time, the LoC site is the top Google hit on "Thomas Jefferson Constitution"). Under the Thomas Jefferson section on "Establishing A Federal Government" we see this, concealed in the lead paragraph:

Although Thomas Jefferson was in France serving as United States minister when the Federal Constitution was written in 1787, he was able to influence the development of the federal government through his correspondence. Later his actions as the first secretary of state, vice president, leader of the first political opposition party, and third president of the United States were crucial in shaping the look of the nation's capital and defining the powers of the Constitution and the nature of the emerging republic.

So Jefferson crafted the Constitution both in the writing phase, by way of Madison, and in the rubber meeting the road phase, where the meaning of the words was brought to life by governmental interactions. Marbury v. Madison springs to mind as an example of the importance of practical experience (don't progressives tell me the Constitution is a living, breathing document?), or perhaps the WaPo wants to argue that the example fails because that decision was not a part of the crafting of the Constitution.

What else does the LoC tell us?

Jefferson objects to absence of Bill of Rights

Thomas Jefferson's December 20, 1787, letter to James Madison contains objections to key parts of the new Federal Constitution. Primarily, Jefferson noted the absence of a bill of rights and the failure to provide for rotation in office or term limits, particularly for the chief executive. During the writing and ratification of the constitution, in an effort to influence the formation of the new governmental structure, Jefferson wrote many similar letters to friends and political acquaintances in America.

Hmm, some of us think that the Bill of Rights was a key part of the Constitution, although obviously they are amendments, not part of the original text. Is this a distinction upon which the WaPo wants to hang it hat?

Carson also claimed that Jefferson was a small government guy. From the LoC:

Jefferson advocates limited power of constitution

Thomas Jefferson's February 15, 1791, opinion on the constitutionality of a national bank is considered one of the stellar statements on the limited powers and strict construction of the Federal Constitution. Alexander Hamilton, a proponent of the broadest interpretation of the constitution based on the implied powers of the Federal Constitution, was the leading advocate for the national bank. Jefferson and Hamilton quickly became outspoken leaders of two opposing interpretations of national government.

After a booth review the WaPo will be picking up their flag. Kidding! They ought to, so we can be sure they will dig in. Doublechecks can be a bitch.

Bailing Out The Donald. Or Burying Him. Either Way.

I've poked and pulled at this off and on all day and am stumped. [But when you've lost Breitbart...] Here is a bizarre claim made and re-emphasized by The Donald about celebrations by Muslims in Jersey City on 9/11. This is with George Stephanopoulos:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, you made -- you raised some eyebrows yesterday with comments you made at -- at your latest rally -- and I want to show them, relating to 9/11.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, the police say that didn't happen and all those rumors have been on the Internet for some time.

So did you meek -- misspeak yesterday?

TRUMP: It did happen. I saw it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You saw that...

TRUMP: It was on television. I saw it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- with your own eyes.

TRUMP: George, it did happen.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Police say it didn't happen.

TRUMP: There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down -- as those buildings came down. And that tells you something. It was well covered at the time, George.

Now, I know they don't like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time.

There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.

STEPHANOPOULOS: As I said, the police have said it didn't happen.

But what I want to move on right now.

I don't quite know how to prove the negative here, that it absolutely did NOT happen and was NOT on television. On the other hand, one might think that 'thousands' of people cheering a few miles from the media capital of the world would not have been utterly overlooked.

So - can the talented sleuths of JOM find the evidence The Donald is lacking? Or some source(s) so comprehensive that the omission of this story can only be explained by agreeing that it didn't happen? (The folks at RCP couldn't but... kids these days, amirite?)

Just as a start, here is some internet commentary from Debbie Schlussel:

(a) Remember Who Celebrated and Cheered

Muslims around the world–Palestinian Muslims on the streets of Ramallah, Palestinian Muslim Sunnis on the streets of Patterson, New Jersey, Shi’ite Muslims who were waiters and staff at a Middle Eastern restaurant in West Bloomfield, Michigan, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Iranian Shi’ite Muslims all over Dearbornistan. 

Ms. Schlussel wants us to remember but she forgot to include any video or reporting from "Patterson".

MTV, the most trusted name in news? Is that what Trump was watching on 9/11? [I'll be damned - it was a post 9/11 report but yes, MTV did air allegations of a group celebration in Paterson. Not thousands, however.]

(b) More from Paterson and its Muslim community:

New Jersey City Raises Palestinian Flag Over City Hall – HAMAS CITY USA; Got Amnesty?!

By Debbie Schlussel

As longtime readers know, I’ve written about Paterson, New Jersey many times, noting that it has the largest concentration of Palestinian Muslims in the United States, North America, and practically anywhere outside the Palestinian Authority and Gaza. As I’ve also noted, even leftist MTV News (yes, that MTV) broadcast news reports showing thousands of Palestinian Muslims outside Paterson’s town hall, cheering the 9/11 attacks against America (and starting a riot using cement garbage cans and metal poles, which they used to attack police)...

MTV, the most trusted name in news? Is that what Trump was watching on 9/11? Now he is really in trouble!

But per (c) her clarification deep in the comments, we learn it may have been an after-the-fact documentary:

I’ve done extensive internet searches on Muslims dancing in the street or celebrating 9/11 in the US. I’ve gone through pages and pages of Google searches.

It seems that it happened in Palestine, and possibly a few other Middle East countries, but not here in the US. Every website that mentions Muslims celebrating 9/11 and dancing in US streets is accompanied only with the above newsreels of the Palestinians celebrating in Palestine/East Jerusalem.

Though I’m not a fan of Islam (or any other religion), and I think that Muslims have a much higher percentage of violent radicals than most other religions, I’m thinking that the reports of Muslims dancing in Dearborn or anywhere else in the US after 9/11 are false. No website has pix or video or interviews with witnesses.

T: WRONG. In fact, MTV did an hour special showing the celebration protests in Paterson, New Jersey. And Muslims celebrated in Dearbornistan and West Bloomfield, Michigan. And there are other documented instances. Some Muslim women in Dearbornistan even had their children’s births and labor induced on 9/11’s first anniversary to celebrate. So please keep your “extensive searches,” “research skills,” and incorrect corrections to yourself, as it is quite apparent you limit yourself to googling, which ain’t real research, brother. Here’s a tip: just because a website doesn’t have pics, video, or interviews, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. That’s the BS Wikipedia way of “confirming” facts. Um, I don’t see any video of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, so it didn’t happen, right? DS

It's a start. Paterson, not Jersey City, but still. FWIW, I have gleaned elsewhere that MTV suspended its regular broadcasting on 9/11 and ran the CBS news feed. That does not rule out a subsequent special as described above, but given the politics at MTV, what are the odds?

Look, none of this will hurt the Teflon Don. But if his Muslim database notion is predicated on this bit of brain fog, that is Not Good.

BONUS IDEA: Maybe he saw celebratign after the 1993 attack and got his mental files confused? Or for a real longshot, it is possible that also cross-filed under "Muslims", "Jersey City", "9/11" and "demonstrations" in the mind of The Donald is this account of a "Don't blame Islam" protest in Jersey City a month after the 1993 attacks:

Obama - The Media Needs To Go To War!

Obama to press - Leave space for the planes that land safely!

Thank heaven Bush didn't say the following, or liberal pundits would be leaping from ledges and the streets would be unsafe. Here is Obama at a presser in Indonesia describing the effort against ISIL, my emphasis:

And so the message I have is that those of us who are charged with protecting the American people are going to do everything we can to destroy this particular network.  Once this network is destroyed -- and it will be -- there may be others that pop up in different parts of the world, and so we're going to have to continue to take seriously how we maintain the infrastructure that we’ve built to prevent this.  But it doesn't have to change the fundamental trajectory of the American people. And that we should feel confident about.

And the media needs to help in this.  I just want to say -- during the course of this week, a very difficult week, it is understandable that this has been a primary focus.  But one of the things that has to happen is how we report on this has to maintain perspective, and not empower in any way these terrorist organizations or elevate them in ways that make it easier for them to recruit or make them stronger.

More happy talk or the terrorists win! What's next, he questions reporters' patriotism? As an example of an inappropriate non-perspective, let me repeat the question that prompted that response:

Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  You said moments ago that Americans should not give in to fear when it comes to these terrorist attacks.  But you also said that the person who may have been the person behind thinking about the attacks is not a mastermind and that anybody who can get their hands on some conventional weapons can -- and is willing to die can blow themselves up.  How should Americans feel that if they shouldn’t be scared?  

And if I may, The Washington Post and ABC News just this week came out with a poll that said 83 percent of the voting public believes that an attack, a terrorist attack against the U.S. with mass casualties is likely to happen in the near future, and 40 percent say it’s very likely.  Does that in your mind -- given the fact that you think the public should not be so fearful -- mean that the terrorists are winning?  And do you believe that this is sort of the new normal, and Americans will have to live with this kind of fear?

That reporter's BadThink was prompted by Obama's 'reassurance' from earlier in the press conference:

I want to be very clear about this.  I am not afraid that ISIL will beat us because of their operations.  When I see a headline that says this individual who designed this plot in Paris is a mastermind -- he’s not a mastermind.  He found a few other vicious people, got hands on some fairly conventional weapons, and, sadly, it turns out that if you’re willing to die, you can kill a lot of people.  

Fortunately, as the First Comforter explained, any such non-mastermind won't kill most of us. After all, two million Parisians were not killed in the Friday night attacks. So when a guy with Secret Service protection tells you not to be afraid, listen up.

WHERE I AM REALLY HEADED WITH THIS... Regular readers see right through me. Back in the Dark Days of Bush, comments like those below made Brendan Nyhan's list titled "Republican attacks on dissent since 9/11":

December 2001: In response to Democratic plans to question parts of the USA Patriot Act during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, John Ashcroft suggests that people who disagree with the administration's anti-terrorism policies are on the side of the terrorists. "To those who pit Americans against immigrants, and citizens against non-citizens; to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil."

February 2002: Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle expresses mild disagreement with US anti-terror policies, saying US success in the war on terror "is still somewhat in doubt." In response, Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) says that Daschle's "divisive comments have the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to exploit divisions in our country."

May 2002: After the disclosure that President Bush received a general warning about possible Al Qaeda hijackings prior to 9/11, Democrats demand to know what other information the administration had before the attacks. In response, White House communications director Dan Bartlett says that the Democratic statements "are exactly what our opponents, our enemies, want us to do."

I just know Mr. Nyhan is compiling a similar list right now. In addition to "The media needs to help" noted above, he surely has such gems as this from earlier in Obama's Indonesia trip:

I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric that’s been coming out of here during the course of this debate.  ISIL seeks to exploit the idea that there is a war between Islam and the West.  And when you start seeing individuals in positions of responsibility, suggesting that Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land, that feeds the ISIL narrative.  It’s counterproductive, and it needs to stop. 

And this is from the press conference linked above, questioning those who question the refugee program:

In our diverse societies, everybody can do their part.  And we will not give in to fear, or start turning on each other, or treating some people differently because of religion or race or background.  That wouldn’t just be a betrayal of our values, it would also feed ISIL’s propaganda -- there assertion, which is absolutely false, that we must absolutely reject, that we are somehow at war with an entire religion.  The United States could never be at war with any religion because America is made up of multiple religions.  We're strengthened by people from every religion, including Muslim Americans.  

So I want to be as clear as I can on this:  Prejudice and discrimination helps ISIL and undermines our national security.  And so, even as we destroy ISIL on the battlefield -- and we will destroy them -- we will take back land that they are currently in.  We will cut off their financing.  We will hunt down their leadership.  We will dismantle their networks and their supply lines, and we will ultimately destroy them.  Even as we are in the process of doing that, we want to make sure that we don't lose our own values and our own principles.  And we can all do our part by upholding the values of tolerance and diversity and equality that help keep America strong. 

Do let me note that, Obama's words notwithstanding, one basis for refugee status in the US is legitimate fear of religious persecution. By US law, a Syrian Christian is likely to have a claim on refugee status not available to a Syrian Muslim, although there are of course a variety of Muslim sects with reasons for fear. And of course there are reasons to think Obama's enforcement of this law, like others, will be based on his whims, polling and political strategy rather than the tedious text.

In any case - There was a time when dissent was the highest from of patriotism, or so progressives told us. Its almost as if that was partisan BS.

As Hillary Pursues Her War On Non-Islam

While looking for something else I noticed a wrinkle in the transcript of Hillary's speech on ISIS to the Council on Foreign Relations. Her topic is whether we are at war with Islam, which of course no Republican leader is saying:

...we are in a contest of ideas against an ideology of hate, and we have to win. Let’s be clear, though, Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people, and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. The obsession in some quarters with a clash of civilization, or repeating the specific words radical Islamic terrorism isn’t just a distraction, it gives these criminals, these murderers more standing than they deserve. It actually plays into their hands by alienating partners we need by our side.

Yeah, yeah, never say "radical Islam" or ISIS wins. But these are her very next words (my emphasis):

Our priority should be how to fight the enemy. In the end, it didn’t matter what kind of terrorist we call bin Laden, it mattered that we killed bin Laden. But we still can’t close our eyes to the fact that there is a distorted and dangerous stream of extremism within the Muslim world that continues to spread. Its adherents are relatively few in number, but capable of causing profound damage, most especially to their own communities throughout an arc of instability that stretches from North and West Africa to Asia.

What?!? There is a "distorted and dangerous" strain of Islam capable of causing profound damage to which we "can't close our eyes"? But using the word 'radical" to describe this "distorted and dangerous" group is out of bounds? (I am giving her a pass on her ludicrous 'Don't know your enemy, just kill 'em' exhortation.)

She has some stray thoughts which touch on this in a puzzling manner:

Today, European nations don’t even always alert each other when they turn away a suspected jihadist at the border, or when a passport is stolen.

Jihadist? How could that have anything to do with terror or Islam? And back in the States:

Law enforcement also needs the trust of residents and communities, including in our own country Muslim Americans. Now, this should go without saying, but in the current climate, it bears repeating. Muslim Americans are working every day on the front lines of the fight against radicalization.

The source of my confusion should be obvious - if the struggle with ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, why is she citing mosques and their efforts against radicalization? Surely the Pope and the US bishops and cardinals could be as helpful in eliciting the assistance of the Catholic Church. Why not mention that?

Her closing thoughts include this:

This is a time for American leadership. No other country can rally the world to defeat ISIS and win the generational struggle against radical jihadism.

Hillary's also used this formulation - it's not radical Islam, it's radical jihadism - at the recent Democratic debate. It was nonsense then and her effort at the CFR speech shows the near-impossibility of discussing ISIS without admitting a connection to Islam.

From the debate:

DICKERSON: Secretary Clinton, you mentioned radical jihadists. Marco Rubio, also running for president, said that this attack showed and the attack in Paris showed that we are at war with radical Islam. Do you agree with that characterization, radical Islam?

CLINTON: I don’t think we’re at war with Islam. I don’t think we’re at war with all Muslims. I think we’re at war with jihadists who have —

DICKERSON: Just to interrupt. He didn’t say all Muslims. He just said radical Islam. Is that a phrase you don’t…

CLINTON: I think THAT you can talk about Islamists who clearly are also jihadists, but I think it’s not particularly helpful to make the case that Senator Sanders was just making that I agree with, that we’ve got to reach out to Muslim countries.

We’ve got to have them be part of our coalition. If they hear people running for president who basically shortcut it to say we are somehow against Islam, that was one of the real contributions, despite all the other problems, that George W. Bush made after 9/11 when he basically said after going to a Mosque in Washington, we are not at war with Islam or Muslims.

We are at war with violent extremism. We are at war with people who use their religion for purposes of power and oppression. And, yes, we are at war with those people. But I don’t want us to be painting with too broad a brush.

Of course this is just Radical Islam denialism - does Ms. Clinton, or anyone else, think there are Hindu jihadists or Christian jihadists? Buddhist jihadists? Atheist or agnostic jihadists?

Other Clinton excerpts from the debate:

CLINTON: Well, our prayers are with the people of France tonight, but that is not enough. We need to have a resolve that will bring the world together to root out the kind of radical jihadist ideology that motivates organizations like ISIS, a barbaric, ruthless, violent jihadist terrorist group.

Later:

I have said the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. But I think if we’re ever going to really tackle the problems posed by jihadi extreme terrorism, we need to understand it and realize that it has antecedents to what happened in Iraq and we have to continue to be vigilant about it.

Hmm, so now we need to understand "jihadi extreme terrorism". Just let's not call it "radical Islam".

I do agree that in particular, Turkey and the Gulf nations have got to make up their minds. Are they going to stand with us against this kind of jihadi radicalism or not?

This Orwellian notion that 'radical jihadism' is fine but "radical Islam" will alienate the world is probably going to be a tough sell to the great unwashed in this country. Especially when both Hillary and the DNC are relying on that progressive darling George Bush, who did in fact, praise Allah, use the dread "radical Islam" phrase in a 2006 State of the Union address:

No one can deny the success of freedom, but some men rage and fight against it. And one of the main sources of reaction and opposition is radical Islam; the perversion by a few of a noble faith into an ideology of terror and death. Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously. They seek to impose a heartless system of totalitarian control throughout the Middle East and arm themselves with weapons of mass murder.

 

 

When You've Lost Slate...

The NY Times pushes its chips into the middle of the table:

Donald Trump Sets Off a Furor With Call to Register Muslims in the U.S.

Under assault from Democrats and Republicans alike, Donald J. Trump on Friday drew back from his call for a mandatory registry of Muslims in the United States, trying to quell one of the ugliest controversies yet in a presidential campaign like few others.

In paragraph five Ms. Haberman of Times finally gets around to noting that Trump may not have actually called for anything:

By Friday, though, he appeared to pull back slightly from the idea. In a post on Twitter, Mr. Trump complained that it was a reporter, not he, who had first raised the idea of a database. And his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, insisted that Mr. Trump had been asked leading questions by the NBC reporter under “blaring music” and that he had in mind a terrorist watch list, not a registry of Muslims.

And much later in the story we get a bit more obfuscation passing as illumination:

Asked by the Yahoo reporter about the possibility of a database for Muslims or “a form of special identification that noted their religion,” Mr. Trump did not reject either idea. Later that day, as Mr. Trump left a campaign event in Iowa, an NBC reporter followed up. Asked if he would set up a database to track Muslims, Mr. Trump replied, “I would certainly implement that. Absolutely.”

Asked about the effect that would have, however, he replied, “It would stop people from coming in illegally” — perhaps suggesting that Mr. Trump, who has vowed to build a “beautiful” wall along the Mexican border, was not focused on the question.

And when the NBC reporter approached Mr. Trump a second time and asked about the difference between registering Muslims and what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany, Mr. Trump grew impatient: “You tell me,” he said.

Really? Perhaps she is a bit of an ironist, but in defending this story on Twitter Ms. Haberman actually asked her critics whether they had read the transcript. Not in the Times we didn't! But we did wonder whether she had read it - here is the Vox version, with the bit she elided emphasized:

"Should there be a database system here that tracks the Muslims in this country?" [the NBC reporter] asked.

Trump's response: "There should be a lot of systems. Beyond databases, I mean, there should be a lot of systems. And today you can do it. But right now we have to have a border, we have to have strength, we have to have a wall. And we cannot let what is happening to this country happen."

The dialogue continued:

NBC: Is that something your White House would like to implement?

Trump: I would certainly implement that. Absolutely.

NBC: What do you think the effect of that would be? How would that work?

Trump: It would stop people from coming in illegally. We have to stop people form coming in illegally.

It takes a special reporter to pretend that "I would certainly implement that" was directly responsive to "Should there be a database system that tracks Muslims" while ignoring the intervening rhetoric about Trump's favorite campaign promise, building a wall. Perhaps overcome by conscience she does note that Trump went on to talk about illegal immigration giving the "suggestion" that Trump "was not focused on the question.". Yeah, those were pretty subtle hints.

Josh Voorhees at Slate played the tape, stared at the transcript, and hung a No-Sale sign on Times-style reporting.

Whatever. Interesting to see the Times ratchet up their spin machine to this level this early in the cycle.

 

Saturday Morning

Let me kickoff the weekend with the funniest ISIS joke I heard last week. Yes, that is a low bar - there are not a lot of entries and I excluded Obama's "We have them contained".

Anyway, a doctor, a lawyer and an ISIS jihadist walked into... no, that's not it, here we go.

We all know that ISIS does a lot of recruiting and promotion by way of social media. In response to the Paris attacks, the hacker group 'Anonymous' announced that they would target ISIS and sweep them from the internet.

Prompting one wag to note that this had to be a real shocker to ISIS since these weren't the 72 virgins they were expecting.

As to whether we are at war with radical Islam, let me defy our current president's posturing and note that it depends on what the meaning of ISIS is.

All About The Donald

Joel Pollak of Breitbart has the details of the evolving story [Which may have evolved past me as I typed... See Just In]. The crux is this: Trump was asked about registering all Muslims in the US but seemed to be responding with ideas about registering immigrants.

Step 3: Distort. NBC News’ Vaughn Hillyard confronts Trump: “Should there be a database system that tracks the Muslims here in this country?” Trump replies: “There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. We should have a lot of systems. And today you can do it. But right now, we have to have a border, we have to have strength, we have to have a wall, and we cannot let what’s happening to this country happen any longer.” Hillyard asks: “But that’s something your White House would like to implement?” Trump: “Oh I would certainly implement that. Absolutely.” Hillyard follows up: What do you think the effect of that would be? How would that work? It would stop people from coming in illegally. We have to stop people from coming into our country illegally.” Hillyard asks if Trump would go to mosques to register people. “Different places,” Trump says.

It is clear from the exchange that Trump thinks Hillyard is talking about new entrants to the United States, presumably Syrian refugees. But Hillyard reports Trump’s answer as if he is talking unambiguously about Muslims already in the United States.

The Times assures us that the various Democratic candidates managed to respond as they fell to their fainting couches. Republican candidates (i.e., Nazi sympathizers, in TimesSpeak) are less fierce in their criticism, although the Times musters some. Democratic preening is inevitable but Republican forebearance is shrewd, since Republicans can't win with their supporters by siding with the media in what seems to be a media created non-story.

But is it a non-story? We think so, but Trump has let the morning pass into the afternoon without denouncing NBC News or clarifying his views.

For the record, we won't be registering US citizens by their religion. I would be stunned if it were Constitutional and surprised (not to say disappointed)  if pollsters found strong support for the idea.

As to tracking immigrants by religious affiliation, I am not a lawyer and can't opine on the US Constitutional rights of a foreign citizen applying from a foreign country. My guess is those rights are limited, but having said that, the DS-260 visa application for immigrants does not have (as best I can tell) any questions about religious affiliation. A word search comes back empty for "religion" and only gets hits on "religious" in the context of religious names or vocations.

The same is true for the DS-160 tourist visa application.

So even if Trump means to track Muslims by religious status we would need retrospective data collection on the immigrants already legally here.

As to whether that could be done Constitutionally, I don't know. I would guess we could simply ask all immigrants to declare their religion. That would answer 'equal treatment' questions and leave us in position for the day when militant Buddhists rise up in protest of the Chinese activities in Nepal. Or whatever.

What we do with the devout observers who answer "None" to the religious question is just one of the legal puzzles such a law might create. Frankly, given our history as a country founded by people fleeing religious persecution, I would be stunned if even the registration of immigrants (not citizens!) by religion was implemented.

JUST IN: This Trump Tweet timestamp is 10:51 Am but all the reaction in my Twitter feed is in the last half-hour, so I infer it was tweeted at 1:51 Eastern time. Not only does Twitter never sleep, it doesn't even walk out to get the mail. (You remember, stamps, envelopes...)

I didn't suggest a database-a reporter did. We must defeat Islamic terrorism & have surveillance, including a watch list, to protect America.

Well. He didn't suggest a database but he didn't reject it either. Normally Trump does not lack for energy is denouncing his foes.

Sum Ting Wong

The embedded white European privilege embedded in Facebook algorithms is truly embarrassing.

That said, I am not sure Typepad and Google are much better, so please follow the link for details. The teaser headline:

Man Tries to Prove His Name Is Real After Facebook Shuts Down Account Three Times

Since it is in the same mental file this great prank deserves a mention.

 

Apocalypse Now!

Tuesday I suggested we bring ISIS the apocalypse they seek at Dabiq, a village near the Turkish border. It is a somewhat strange idea and whenever you have a plan that relies on the enemy being crazy you risk sounding crazy yourself. Oh, well.

Crazy or not, some heavy hitters have poked around the edges of this idea. Jessica Stern of the Hoover Institution has written on Dabiq and the apocalyptic vision of ISIS. And here is William McCants of The Brookings Institute, who is the Director of Brookings' US Relations with the Islamic World Dept., writing on Dabiq thirteen months ago:

ISIS Fantasies of an Apocalyptic Showdown in Northern Syria

The meadow outside the small village of Dabiq, Syria is a strange setting for one of the final battles of the Islamic apocalypse. Although close to the Turkish border, “Dabiq is not important militarily” observed a leader in the Syria opposition. And yet the Islamic State fought ferociously to capture the village this summer because its members believe the great battle between infidels and Muslims will take place there as part of the final drama preceding the Day of Judgment.  

In a prophecy attributed to Muhammad, the Prophet predicts the Day of Judgment will come after the Muslims defeat Rome at al-`Amaq or Dabiq, two places close to the Syrian border with Turkey. Another prophecy holds that Rome’s allies will number 80. The Muslims will then proceed to conquer Constantinople (Istanbul).

The Dabiq prophecy has not figured prominently in the Islamic State’s propaganda until recently. Abu Mus`ab al-Zarqawi mentioned it as the ultimate destination of the spark that had “been lit here in Iraq.” The first head of the Islamic State, Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, quoted the prophecy in one of his statements. But it was not until this year that the Islamic State really began to focus on the Dabiq in its propaganda. An Islamic State spokesman mentioned the ill-fated village in a statement in April, and in July the Islamic State released an English-language magazine named “Dabiq.” The editors, calling themselves the “Dabiq team,” explain why they adopted the name for their magazine: “The area will play a historical role in the battles leading up to the conquests of Constantinople, then Rome.” But first the Islamic State had to “purify Dabiq” from the “treachery” of the other Sunni rebels who held it and “raise the flag” of the Caliphate over its land.

...

Jihadi tweets about Dabiq spiked again last month when the United States began to consider military action against the Islamic State in Syria. Islamic State supporters counted the number of nations who had signed up for the “Rome’s” coalition against the Islamic State. “Thirty states remain to complete the number of eighty flags that will gather in Dabiq and begin the battle.” Yesterday, after Turkey’s parliament approved military operations against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the jihadi twittersphere applauded “Turkey’s entry into the war will permit the foreign invasion of northern Syria, meaning from the plain of Dabiq. The battles (of the End Times) have grown near.” “#Turkey_commitedsuicide,” tweeted another. “In Dabiq the crusade will end.”

Eighty flags? That is a Bush-level coalition. But could we run up the count by having the US troops fight under the flags of their home states? We await a booth review from the Imam of Apocalyptic Prophecy.

He closes with some grim history for ISIS:

The last time the Turks invaded Dabiq, things did not go well for the Arabs. The Turkish Ottoman sultan, Selim I, defeated the slave armies of the Mamluk Sultanate in the meadow of Dabiq in 1516, which gave them the eastern Mediterranean and eventually Egypt and the Hijaz, inaugurating 500 years of Ottoman rule over the Arabs. His grandfather Mehmed II conquered Constantinople from "Rome," the Byzantine Empire and his son Suleiman the Magnificent would go on to conquer large swathes of eastern Europe.

Well, if that doesn't faze ISIS then how could Barack Obama?

As to policy, well, he sidesteps:

The inevitable defeat of the Islamic State at Dabiq, should it ever confront “Rome,” would also argue against the prophecy’s applicability. But in the apocalyptic imagination, inconvenient facts rarely impede the glorious march to the end of the world.

If their defeat is inevitable but the battle is an important part of their message and self-image, why not accommodate them? The world is certainly looking for ideas.

Mr. McCants has a book out, The ISIS Apocalypse, and shares more details of the prophecies.

Buttressed by my point that at one time Dabiq was in an area that Turkey and the US discussed as a potential safe haven last summer, I think this could be turned into a plan, or at least a proposal. The downside seems to be that a multilateral push to create a safe haven liberates Dabiq and environs but ISIS is a no-show. We end up with a safe haven, ISIS is embarrassed as they are forced to back away from their own prophecies, their foreign recruiting may be undermined, and we go on with other plans. That seems tolerable, especially if (as is likely) we downplay the whole apocalypse angle - elements of the evangelical community my find it appealing but my guess is that most Westerners would find it, well, weird.

A second-tier Republican candidate looking for buzz could repackage this into a non-kooky trial balloon (an example of a need for creative approaches, say), cite Mr. McCants or Ms. Stern, and get some buzz. Just thinking out loud.

MORE: Here is McCants writing in Politico, Aug 19 2015:

Although the messianic fervor has cooled in the Islamic State’s leadership, the group’s apocalyptic rhetoric has intensified. References to the End Times fill Islamic State propaganda. It’s a big selling point with foreign fighters, who want to travel to the lands where the final battles of the apocalypse will take place. The civil wars raging in those countries today lend credibility to the prophecies.

For bilateral support, this is from a Vox-splainer with Mr. McCants:

"The leadership of the early Islamic State [in 2006 to 2010] seemed to have really believed these prophecies and acted accordingly," he told me. But "for the later leadership of the Islamic State, under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the extent to which prophecy drives their behavior is unclear."

But if that's true, it only serves to highlight how important apocalyptic mythology is to ISIS as a whole. ISIS's apocalypticism is a key selling point for the group, which means that the group needs to act as if it believes it's bringing on the apocalypse even if individual leaders like Baghdadi don't really believe that's true.

For instance, ISIS invested significant resources into taking the Syrian town of Dabiq last summer. Dabiq has minimal military significance, but figures prominently in some of the apocalyptic prophecies that ISIS uses in its propaganda.

"You can say they capture the piece of territory because they believe the prophecy, or you can say they capture the territory because they want others to believe the prophecy," McCants said in our conversation. "But either way, they captured the territory. So the political impact [of the prophecy] is the same."

And here is Mr. McCants in a Vox-splainer today:

In the organization's early history, they were not really focused on state building; they were much more focused on the end of the world, and they believed a savior figure called the Mahdi was going to appear at any moment and the great cataclysmic battle with the infidels was going to transpire.

That made the Islamic State make some very poor decisions on the battlefield as a consequence, and over time the organization changed the nature of its apocalypticism. It focused much more on institution building as a fulfillment of prophecy — i.e., the caliphate — as opposed to the appearance of a messiah-type figure.

That did two things for them: One is that it put their political program on a much more stable, long-term footing. But, two, they were able to maintain the apocalyptic expectations of their followers and potential recruits. They could argue that it was just around the corner. The first major stage in the end-of-days drama had been fulfilled with the appearance of the caliphate, and there was more to come — just not immediately.

This apocalyptic recruiting pitch has been especially powerful among foreign Muslims, particularly younger Muslims. If you think about what it takes to excite a young person to leave his family, leave his friends, leave his job and travel abroad, the idea that the world is coming to an end at any moment and that you want to be fighting on the side of God as everything comes crashing down can be a very powerful motivator.

Which suggests that the political impact of a recapture by the West would be dramatic, even if it only forced ISIS to hem and haw about their prophecies. Hmm, I wonder if they really would resort to counting flags and disqualifying Team USA for flying fifty?

Unfortunately we have a recalibration suggested by this exchange between Graeme Wood (who wrote the excellent Atlantic piece) and Mr. McCants:

GRAEME WOOD, The Atlantic:  Yeah.  So the propaganda magazine ‑‑ Dabiq, all the talk about Dabiq as this city in Syria where there is going to be a kind of millennial showdown, I wrote about this and some supporters of ISIS wrote to me and said, “Yeah, that’s right.  We’re very interested in this,” but they said, “You do know that Mecca and Medina have to fall before Dabiq happens.”...

So if Mecca and Medina have not yet fallen then a US attack into Dabiq need not trigger anything - ISIS could announce that the infidels have entered the trap and will be allowed to await their fate while ISIS tends to the fall of Mecca and Medina by overthrowing the Saudi pretenders.

This is disappointing but not crippling to the notion of triggering the ISIS apocalypse. Could an ISIS attack on Saudi Arabia succeed? Another expert at this conference, Bernard Haykel, had this:

You know, but taking on Saudi Arabia frontally like with a convoy would be suicide.  I can’t see them, you know, doing more in Saudi Arabia than what Al Qaeda already has tried, which is, you know, a series of suicide bombing attacks, which would lead to fights with interior ministry security forces.  And based on past experience with Al Qaeda, if ISIS were to take on the Saudi State through terror tactics, that would strengthen the Saudi State.

I mean, states love to have groups to crush.  They’re very powerful, states are very powerful, and the Saudi State is a particularly powerful state when it comes to this sort of thing.  So I think it would actually help the Saudis if they were to try a terror campaign inside the Kingdom, and an attack by, you know, kind of traditional military means would get them nowhere.

To be fair, Obama has his own plan to demonstrate to ISIS that this is not the apocalypse they are waiting for - it is sitting this one out.

And maybe ISIS would have a bit of a schism. An Apocalypse Now faction, likely to include the craziest of the foreign recruits, would thrill at a chance to fight and die, or not, in the final battle against the West. The less crazy member so ISIS might prefer to wait a bit longer for the apocalypse. Still, divisions in the ranks and red faces among the ISIS members backing away from a fight might help the cause of the West.

JUST FOR INSPIRATION: As an example of the psy-ops I have in mind, I picture (in quite the role reversal!) ISIS as the Knights of the Round Table and the Army of Rome tucked away in Dabiq as the French.

The Cost Of Bullshit

In an interesting discussion with Vox, Will McCants of Brookings, an ISIS authority, introduces a side angle on the No True Muslim argument  - Islam has nothing to do with terror - made today by Hillary Clinton.

Jennifer R. Williams: You talked about the traditional Sunni scholars trying to keep their adherents on side but that the youth in particular can be attracted by ISIS's ideology. Do you think there's a disconnect, particularly in the Middle East, but I guess also in the West, between the clerical establishment — the imams — and the youth? Is it a generational difference? Why is the traditional party-line message of Sunni Islam not connecting with youth in the same way?

Will McCants: It's generational. A lot of these scholars are seen as part of the establishment as well, and ISIS is presenting itself as counter-establishment.

But it also has to be said that many of these scholars are not honest about what's in Islamic scripture, and they will protest very loudly that such-and-such an action could not possibly, in any way, be sanctioned by scripture, and then the Islamic state comes along and cites chapter and verse.

If you're a young person looking at the argument, you would be dismayed that the traditional scholar that you looked up to seems to have either been ignorant of these passages or downplayed them for some reason. I think traditional scholars would make much more headway if they would be upfront about what's there and try to impart to their young audience a more sophisticated understanding of the scripture than what ISIS offers.

Walking around saying "Islam means peace" may be well intentioned (and feel good - don't discount that!) but loss of credibility leads to loss of audience.

The Petulance-In-Chief

Even the Times feels obliged to note Obama's dismal salesmanship in covering the passage of a House bill changing the Syrian refugee program:

House Approves Tougher Refugee Screening, Defying Veto Threat

WASHINGTON — The House voted overwhelmingly Thursday to slap stringent — and difficult to implement — new screening procedures on refugees from Syria seeking resettlement, seizing on the fear stemming from the Paris attacks and threatening to cloud President Obama’s Middle East policy.

The bill, which passed 289 to 137, with nearly 50 Democrats supporting it, would require that the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence confirm that each applicant from Syria and Iraq poses no threat, a demand the White House called “untenable.” The measure received significant support from Democrats, even after administration officials implored them to abandon the measure on Thursday morning.

So what went wrong?

Halfway across the world on a diplomatic mission to Asia, Mr. Obama fed the tensions with members of Congress and presidential candidates by belittling their concerns, lashing out at them for being insensitive and condemning the suggestion that only Christian refugees, not Muslims, should be let in.

That was helpful. As we were saying.

Obama Overboard! Hillary Cuts Loose On Syria

The NY Times comically attempts to minimize the gap between Obama's 'policy' in Syria and the plan outlined by Hillarity! at a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. [Hmm - link clickers will see the piece has been notably rewritten, so some of my excerpts are now gone, many details have been added, and the tone has shifted. Geez, speed kills.]

Hillary Clinton Urges No-Fly Zone and More Airstrikes to Defeat ISIS

By AMY CHOZICK and DAVID E. SANGER  NOV. 19, 2015

Hillary Rodham Clinton called for accelerating the American-led operation to defeat the Islamic State on Thursday, going well beyond what President Obama has proposed by urging a no-fly zone with coalition forces to protect Syrians, expanding the deployment of Special Operations troops to assist local ground forces, and significantly stepping up airstrikes.

“Our goal is not to deter or contain ISIS, but to defeat and destroy ISIS,” Mrs. Clinton said, using an acronym for the Islamic State, the group that has claimed responsibility for the coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday.

So, in addition to breaking with Obama in ISIS/ISIL she went "well beyond" Obama's proposals. Or did she? Here is paragraph five:

Mrs. Clinton’s approach to the Islamic State after the Paris attacks remains an incremental increase over what the White House is now doing — just one that would be executed at a faster pace. The Pentagon has said, for example, that it will bolster the use of Special Forces if the initial effort to train and equip Kurdish fighters and improve the targeting of airstrikes is successful; Mrs. Clinton appeared ready to do that now.

So now it is an "incremental increase"? Well, ISIS has no air assets, so one might argue that the no-fly zone is directed at Assad. Or, one might argue that giving the rebels a safe haven from Assad, where their only foe is ISIS, will make them more able to take a bite out of ISIS. The headline and lead certainly suggest that the no-fly zone was presented as part of a plan to go after ISIS. And [Spoiler Alert] protection from Assad may be less important under Hillary's plan than currently, as we will soon see.

So, was it only last month that Obama described the no-fly plans put forward by Republicans as "half-baked" "mumbo-jumbo"? And didn't he then explain that Hillary was only adopting no-fly zones as political posturing? Gosh, the Times had a long analysis of the awkward relationship between President Obama and Candidate Clinton last October. But now all is forgotten and forgiven and no-fly zones represent an "incremental increase" in current Administration plans.

I assume that neither camp wants war with the other, so the Times played along with their attempts to minimize their rift. Here is Hillary:

Mrs. Clinton did not directly criticize Mr. Obama’s approach, and said her plan amounted to “an intensification and acceleration of the strategy” the White House has put forth.

That is political BS but the Times won't call her on it directly. The no-fly zone was hardly Hillary's only notable point of departure:

But in a remarkable break with the administration, Mrs. Clinton declared publicly what White House officials have privately said for months: that the fight in Syria is no longer about ousting President Bashar al-Assad. “We need people to turn against the common enemy of ISIS,” she said.

For those scoring at home, Hillary has gone "well beyond" Obama's plans, engaged in an "incremental increase", and now delivered a "remarkable break". Quite a speech.

In saying so, Mrs. Clinton seemed to align her strategic approach more closely with those of Russia and Iran, who are backing the Assad government, though she criticized both nations in her speech Thursday.

Abandoning our insistence that Assad must go erases another of Obama's erasable Red Lines, and also leaves the NY Times editors a bit red-faced. It was only yesterday they were explaining how to defeat ISIS:

Only if America, Russia and other governments agree on a political settlement to end the Syrian war will there be a realistic opening for the warring parties to shift from fighting Mr. Assad to fighting the Islamic State. The bombing of the Russia airliner over Egypt should persuade Moscow that it needs to help ease Mr. Assad out of power in a way that doesn’t destabilize Syria further and get serious about confronting the Islamic State.

That intransigent Putin and those pesky Iranian mullahs! I guess in an alternative paragraph the editors could have written that the attacks on Paris should convince Obama of the urgency of fighting ISIS and dropping his insistence that Assad must go. Whichever. Someone had to back down, and if you had "Putin" in the office pool, well, you lose.

I SHOULD ADD: Following progressive protocols, Hillary included the "No True Muslim" update to the No True Scotsman fallacy:

 “We are in a contest of ideas against an ideology of hate and we have to win,” she said, adding: “Let’s be clear, though: Islam itself is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

Yeah, yeah. Shadi Hamid is "a senior fellow at the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution's Center for Middle East Policy" and he has some thoughts on this:

Does ISIS really have nothing to do with Islam? Islamic apologetics carry serious risks.

The impulse to separate Islam from the sins and crimes of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is understandable, and it often includes statements such as ISIS has “nothing to do with Islam” or that ISIS is merely “using Islam” as a pretext. The sentiment is usually well-intentioned. We live in an age of growing anti-Muslim bigotry, where mainstream politicians now feel license to say things that might have once been unimaginable.

To protect Islam – and, by extension, Muslims – from any association with extremists and extremism is a worthy cause.

But saying something for the right reasons doesn’t necessarily make it right. An overwhelming majority of Muslims oppose ISIS and its ideology. But that’s not quite the same as saying that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, when it very clearly has something to do with it.

If you actually look at ISIS’s approach to governance, it would be difficult – impossible, really – to conclude that it is just making things up as it goes along and then giving it an Islamic luster only after the fact.

So those interested in understanding the goals and motivation of our enemy are not helping their cause by pretending that religion has nothing to do with it. "Don't know your enemy" is a bit of military advice given by nobody ever.

There is a role for Islamic apologetics – if defending Islam rather than analyzing it is your objective. I am a Muslim myself, and it’s impossible for me to believe that a just God could ever sanction the behavior of groups like ISIS.

But if the goal is to understand ISIS, then I, and other analysts who happen to be Muslim, would be better served by cordoning off our personal assumptions and preferences. What Islam should be and what Islam is actually understood to be by Muslims (including extremist Muslims) are very different things.

For scholars of Islamist movements and Islam’s role in politics, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, there should be one overarching objective: to understand and to explain, rather than to make judgments about which interpretations of Islam are correct, or who is or isn’t a “true” Muslim.

Of course, Hillary is not a scholar, she is a politician seeking progressive votes.

The “is ISIS Islamic?” debate can seem circular and exhausting. But it’s an important one nonetheless. Islamic apologetics lead us down a path of diminishing the role of religion in politics. If the past few years of Middle Eastern turmoil have made anything clear, it’s that, for Islamists of various stripes – mainstream or extremist – religion matters.

Often, religion matters a great deal. It inspires supporters to action; it affects the willingness to die (and, in the case of ISIS, the willingness to kill); it influences strategic calculations and even battlefield decisions. Insisting otherwise isn’t even effective at countering Islamophobia, since, to the unpersuaded, claims that Islam and ISIS are unrelated sound entirely divorced from reality.

Hillary seems likely to abandon this pose after the primaries, since (based on my casual reading of various polls), the general public does not share the view of her progressive base on this point. Then again, "Divorced from reality" seems to be one of the goals of the left, which is taking inspiration from the Campus Kiddies and trying to turn the rest of the US into a "safe space" where offensive ideas will not intrude.

In the end, though, it’s not my job to make Islam look good, or to argue that Islam “is a religion of peace,” when the reality is more complicated. We have to be faithful to our findings and conclusions, even if – or perhaps particularly when – they make us most uncomfortable.

 

Refujihadis, or, End These Washington Cram-downs

Amid the furor over what to do with the US program to admit Syrian refugees, one point has been underemphasized. A legitimate conversation could be had about the risks (probably small) and benefits (also small) of admitting hard-to-vet Syrian refugees.

But we have not had that conversation. Instead, we have what looks to a lot of people like one more Washington cram-down. If [Snort Alert, and just set down your coffee for a moment] Obama had troubled himself to reach out to Congress and the state governors (AS IF!) we might have relatively quickly reached a sensible consensus.

Instead, people across the country are wondering - and shouting - "this is my life and my neighborhood, when do I get a say in what happens here?"

Although it may have escaped the seers in the White House, there is a bit of distrust of Washington just now, particularly in cram-down flyover country.

There is also distrust of the White House in the Congress, as there should be. We have a Chief Executive who picks and chooses which laws to enforce and which laws suit him. And this detail about the refugee program from 2009 probably freaked a few Congress people out (my emphasis):

FBI(WASHINGTON) -- Of the at least 30 states that have declared their opposition to taking in Syrian refugees, one state, Kentucky, has a specific reason to be wary of the background check process: Previously, two Iraqi refugees who settled in Bowling Green turned out to be al Qaeda-linked terrorists with the blood of American soldiers on their hands, an ABC News investigation found. Both pleaded guilty to terror-connected charges after trying to acquire heavy weapons while in America’s heartland.

The 2013 ABC News investigation also revealed that several dozen other suspected terrorist bombmakers, including some who were believed to have targeted U.S. troops, may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the U.S. as Iraq and Afghanistan War refugees, among the tens of thousands of innocent immigrants.

...

In the wake of the Kentucky case, the U.S. halted the refugee program for Iraqis for six months, a fact the Obama administration did not disclose to Congress at the time, officials told ABC News in the 2013 investigation.

Very few marketing professionals believe that the best way to make a sale is to drop a product on the customer's doorstep and let them figure out for themselves that it is just what they wanted. That wisdom has not penetrated the White House.

FOR EXAMPLE: As if torn from today's headlines, here is Obama's latest sales pitch:

President Obama said Thursday that Syrian refugees are no more dangerous to the U.S. than tourists, and he accused Republican presidential candidates of stoking fears about the refugees and closing the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention center to score political points.

Speaking to reporters at a summit in the Philippines, Mr. Obama said the “overwhelming numbers” of Syrians who are applying for entry to the U.S. “are children, women, families — themselves victims of terrorism.” He said they are already subject to rigorous vetting by U.S. security officials.

“The idea that somehow they pose a more significant threat than all the tourists who pour into the United States every single day just doesn’t jive with reality,” Mr. Obama said. “So my expectation is after the initial spasm of rhetoric, the people will settle down, take a look at the facts, and we’ll be able to proceed.”

Let's see - the critics are insincere, playing politics, uninformed, and will change their minds after they R-E-L-A-X. I'm sure that rhetoric thrilled his progressive base but it can't have changed any minds.

I have to steal from Ace here (links, eventually) - Obama sounds like he's a Salon commenter trying to win an argument - he's all L8er, H8ers. Peter Wehner develops that theme at Commentary.

Heather Wilhelm at RCP has more on Obama's "salesmanship".

Obama Says Persuasion Is Necessary, His Actions Show He Thinks It Beneath Him

President Obama sat down with Bill Simmons for an interview in GQ. Which makes sense, the former ESPN columnist is a good fit for President Sports Center. At one point Obama expressed surprise about how the the American government is organized:

What I didn’t fully appreciate, and nobody can appreciate until they’re in the position, is how decentralized power is in this system.

So much for all that "professor (sic) of Constitutional law" being so super smart about how government works. And all that stuff about Bush's imperial presidency and the unitary executive? Visions of Emily Litella dance in my head.

Do tell us more, Obama:

..not only do I have to persuade my own party, not only do I have to prevent the other party from blocking what the right thing to do is, but now I can anticipate this lawsuit, this lobbying taking place, and this federal agency that technically is independent, so I can’t tell them what to do...

He's practically saying he came into the office thinking he could just wave his magic wand and get things done. Maybe that's why he has complained on several occasions about not having the powers that come with being President of China.

Obama went on (and on and on and on, because he's Obama):

A lot of the work is not just identifying the right policy but now constantly building these ever shifting coalitions to be able to actually implement and execute and get it done.

I feel ya, Obama. The struggle is real.

Or not really. His signature domestic achievement - Obamacare - required no persuasion of Republicans, no cares about lawsuits or lobbying; it certainly included assumptions that federal agencies would just make up or bend rules as they went along.

Hey, it worked out well for Obama. The rest of us, not so much. But the rest of us are not Obama's concern.

I am reminded - as I often am - of Obama's interview with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes on the eve of the election in 2008. Pelley asked Obama why he would make a good president. Obama was not in his dictator mode at the time, and evinced - or at least mouthed - an understanding that being president took more than edicts from on high:

One of the things I'm good at is getting people in a room with a bunch of different ideas who sometimes violently disagree with each other and finding common ground and a sense of common direction.

I mean, there was no evidence Obama had ever done any such thing before - and while past performance should never be used as a guarantor of future events - in this case Obama's past and subsequent actions aligned perfectly (although with the caveat that Obama has produced a number of instances in bringing people of both parties together . . . to oppose him).

In fact, it only took a week to unravel Obama's drivel. When asked in an ABC interview if he could have done more to help Congress address the financial crisis unfolding in the fall of 2008, Obama declared:

I don't think me calling House Republican members would have been that helpful. I tend not to be that persuasive on that side of the aisle.

Obama for once told the truth, but the voters liked his 60 Minutes answer better, all evidence be damned.

And so here we are seven plus years later. Obama knows he won't be persuasive - not only with those on the other side of the aisle from him politically, but also with those on his side of the aisle - who are questioning his decision to allow tens of thousands of Syrian refugees into the US - many of whom are not Syrian, and many of whom are not refugees, if numbers according to UN statistics in Europe hold true.

However, as a lame duck, Obama fully appreciates that he really doesn't even have to pretend to try and persuade any more. The guy who said ISIS was "contained" in an interview aired mere hours before the attacks in Paris resorts to mocking others instead.

So now we will have the potential for some literal, honest-to-goodness "violent disagreements" - like those in Paris last week - perpetrated as a result.

But that's not Obama's concern.

 

Link to Last Page of Thread.

Border Insecurity

This might make others nervous:

Honduras arrests five Syrians heading to US with fake passports: report

And there are other Syrian sun-seekers:

Three Syrians with fake Greek passports arrested in St. Maarten

But do keep in mind - there are plenty of people desperate to get out of Syria and fake passports are easy to come by in that part of the world:

Forgers in the Middle East are offering fake Syrian passports, ID cards or birth certificates for as little as £165. In September, Mail Online journalist Nick Fagge obtained for £1,300 the same forged Syrian passports being used by IS fighters to trick the authorities into believing they are asylum seekers.

And just this week a Guardian journalist in Iraqi Kurdistan was offered fake Syrian passports by two separate smuggling rings.

And FWIW, I have read speculation that some forged passports might be produced by desperate/corrupt/unpaid Assad civil servants with access to genuine Syrian documents. Which means that in one sense they aren't fake at all, so detection could be difficult.

Accept No Substitutes

The dark comic genius of The Ace spreads its wings and flies. Well, takes a cab actually, but still.

I'm Not Normally An Apologist For Turkey, But...

Turkish soccer fans booed during a moment of silence honoring the dead in Paris. Awkward.

On the other hand, did anyone boo in any European stadium during the minute of silence honoring the 100 dead after the Ankara train station bombing last month, described by the BBC as "the deadliest ever of its kind on Turkish soil."

No. There was no booing last October because there was no moment of silence. Not to say one bad turn deserves another, but maybe the Turks have as much solidarity for problems in Paris as Europeans have for problems in Ankara.

I am not alone with this explanation - The Independent of the UK has more, including that the "Allahu Akbar" chanting has been misreported:

Turkish fans booed during a minute's silence before their national team faced Greece in a friendly on Tuesday night in Istanbul, but comments on social media suggest the booing was not a mark of disrespect to the 129 victims who were killed in Paris on Friday.

The silence was observed at matches across Europe, including Wembley Stadium where England hosted France, as a mark of respect to the people killed by Islamic State militants. The term 'Allahu Akbar' can also be heard, with suggestions from some media that supporters in the crowd were in support of ISIS.

...

Turkish manager Fatih Terim suggested after the game that fans at the Basaksehir Fatih Terim Stadium should have been more respectful.

"Our fans should have behaved during the national anthems and during the one minute silence," Terim is quoted as saying after the 0-0 draw.

"Greece is our neighbour. Today is world neighbours day, but our fans didn't behave like neighbours in this match."

On the other hand...

However, comments on social media sites have suggested that the boos were not to disrespect those who had died in the attacks - but more to do with the hypocrisy of the Western world.

International teams did not hold a minute's silence after the Ankara terror attack in October. More than 100 people died in the Turkish capital after two bombs were set off outside the Ankara Central railway station on 11 October; Turkish fans also booed during a minute's silence of their game against Iceland on 13 October [link].

Turkey is a NATO ally and in the front line of the fight against ISIS, when they aren't bombing our other front-line ally, the Kurds. But Obama can go on bloviating about the "universal values that we share" (hence, "universal" - ed) - apparently some of them aren't quite so universal that an attack in France rouses overwhelming sympathy in Turkey.

 

 

ISIS Just Sort Of Snuck Up On Us...

The NY Times tries to explain the rise of ISIS without blaming Barack "JV" Obama. Mission unaccomplished, but it is fun to watch them wriggle:

In Rise of ISIS, No Single Missed Key but Many Strands of Blame

Already, a hint that they can't figure out how to pin this exclusively on Bush. The lead confirms that:

By the time the United States withdrew from its long bloody encounter with Iraq in 2010, it thought it had declawed a once fearsome enemy: the Islamic State, which had many names and incarnations but at the time was neither fearsome nor a state.

Beaten back by the American troop surge and Sunni tribal fighters, it was considered such a diminished threat that the bounty the United States put on one of its leaders had dropped from $5 million to $100,000. The group’s new chief was just 38 years old, a nearsighted cleric, not even a fighter, with little of the muscle of his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the godfather of Iraq’s insurgency, killed by the American military four years earlier after a relentless hunt.

Oh, my - you mean ISIS was beaten when Obama brought our troops home, prematurely if his critics at the time (e.g., Boehner, Panetta, others) could be believed? Oh, dear.

Yet now, five years later, the Islamic State is on a very different trajectory. It has wiped clean a 100-year-old colonial border in the Middle East, controlling millions of people in Iraq and Syria. It has overcome its former partner and eventual rival, Al Qaeda, first in battle, then as the world’s pre-eminent jihadist group in reach and recruitment.

It traces its origins both to the terrorist training grounds of Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan and to America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, and it achieved its resurgence through two single-minded means: control of territory and, by design, unspeakable cruelty.

Clinton shares some blame for Afghanistan; Bush orchestrated the invasion of Iraq. But the origin story is important only because, although seemingly defeated, ISIS came back. How did that happen?

Were signals missed that could have stopped the Islamic State before it became so deadly ?

And there were, in fact, more than hints of the group’s plans and potential. A 2012 report by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency was direct: The growing chaos in Syria’s civil war was giving Islamic militants there and in Iraq the space to spread and flourish. The group, it said, could “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”

“This particular report, this was one of those nobody wanted to see,” said Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who ran the defense agency at the time.

“It was disregarded by the White House,” he said. “It was disregarded by other elements in the intelligence community as a one-off report. Frankly, at the White House, it didn’t meet the narrative.”

The Times does not explain here just what that narrative was, although they took a stab a year ago.

However, they have time for a philosophical detour:

No report or event can stand in hindsight as the single missed key to the now terrifyingly complex puzzle of the Islamic State. And assigning blame has been part of the political discourse in the United States and beyond: The decision by President George W. Bush and allies to marginalize Iraq’s political and military elite angered and disenfranchised some who formed the heart of the Islamic State. More recently, President Obama and his allies have been criticized as not taking seriously enough the Islamic State’s rise.

Really, they ask, there is blame to go around, so why play that game now? Uh huh. If Bush's early mistakes were corrected, ISIS was defeated, and Iraq was, as Obama said when he withdrew the troops, “sovereign, stable and self-reliant”, then why would Bush be due any blame for the ISIS resurgence? Never mind.

So what happened?

Looking back this week, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, recounted in a speech to a Washington think tank that the Islamic State was “pretty much decimated when U.S. forces were there in Iraq.”

“It had maybe 700 or so adherents left,” Mr. Brennan said. “And then it grew quite a bit.”

There is little dispute about that initial success. The American military and Sunni tribesmen, banded together in what became known as the Awakening, left Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other Sunni jihadists in disarray by 2010. In June of that year, Gen. Ray Odierno, leader of the American troops in Iraq, said that “over the last 90 days or so we’ve either picked up or killed 34 of the top 42 Al Qaeda in Iraq leaders,” using one early name for the Islamic State.

We were winning! But then...

Americans wanted to believe that the Iraq war had ended in triumph, and the troops were soon withdrawn.

Really? That belief just fell from the sky? It wasn't fostered by, hmm, Barack Obama as part of his 2008 pledge to bring the troops home? It wasn't linked to Obama's absurd distortion of John McCain's alternative vision of leaving troops in Iraq as we do in South Korea and Germany as a symbol of our ongoing commitment?

Declaring victory and bringing the troops home wasn't a policy promoted by the NY Times editors? (Someone check and please tell me I am right here...)

Yeah, that belief just happened. No one can be blamed.

But almost immediately tensions began rising between the Sunnis and the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki — supported by the United States and Iran, the Shiite giant to the east. Salaries and jobs promised to cooperating tribes were not paid. There seemed little room for Sunnis in the new Iraq. The old Sunni insurgents began to look appealing again.

“The Sunnis were just trying to survive,” recalled Col. Kurt Pinkerton, who was an American battalion commander in Iraq at the time. “It was more about survival and assimilation.”

Right, and no one had seem any of that coming. Oh, wait, long-time Timesman John Burns saw exactly that:

At the worst, as some high-ranking Iraqi officials and American military commanders warned in the course of the negotiations that preceded Mr. Obama’s Oct. 21 announcement, the removal of the tripwire that a residual American force of some size would have represented could open the way for a new fracturing of Iraq’s fragile and fractious political center.

Down that road, in the darkest reckonings, lie the possibility of worsening violence by Sunni and Shiite militias; a resurgence of al Qaeda as a murderous wild card; an intensification of covert Iranian meddling and offsetting manipulations by Iran’s enemies among the region’s Sunni-majority states; and heightened factional strains within the Iraqi security forces, even their gradual disintegration. With American troops gone, and with them the role they have played as the ultimate guarantor of the new constitutional rules adopted under American occupation, all bets, at least potentially, will be off.

Although the Times had detailed reporting on the desultory Administration effort to extend our troop presence and avoid those dire possibilities, that reporting does not reappear here.

Back to the rise of ISIS:

Then a civil war broke out in Syria — a new and promising front for the Islamic State’s ambitions.

Protests erupted against the government of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, in 2011 amid the wider Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere. The world struggled with how to help — with a weary America unenthusiastic about engaging anymore — and after a brutal crackdown by government forces, Syrian protest groups morphed into fighters. At first many were army defectors and locals, focused on defending their communities and overthrowing Mr. Assad. But because foreign fighters, some steeped in extremist ideologies, often proved to be the best organized and funded, they gained momentum on the battlefield.

Yeah, those darn weary Americans with their pesky beliefs. Hillary Clinton, to pick a name almost at random, advocated arming the Syrian rebels. That didn't happen until much later, when what Obama initially described as "a fantasy" became Obama's policy. Yeah, I blame Bush too.

And 'no-fly' zones to create rebel enclaves and safe spaces for refugees? That saved the Kurds in 1992, but as Obama calmly and cogently explained recently:

And when I hear people offering up half-baked ideas as if they are solutions, or trying to downplay the challenges involved in this situation -- what I’d like to see people ask is, specifically, precisely, what exactly would you do, and how would you fund it, and how would you sustain it?  And typically, what you get is a bunch of mumbo jumbo.

Hmm. And when asked why Hillary supported that sort of mumbo-jumbo Obama explained that she was engaged in pre-election posturing and would shift her views once she was up to speed on the issues.

All of this is more nuance than the Times wants to drop on their readership, so it is omitted. But here at JOM we can handle the truth!

The Times does note issues of potentially doctored intelligence. They would blame Cheney if this were Iraq and WMDs but since it is ISIS, the idea that the brass is smart enough to deliver the message the White House wants without overt arm-twisting is left unalleged and unexplored:

At United States Central Command — the military headquarters based in Tampa, Fla., that is in charge of the American air campaign — intelligence analysts have long bristled at what they see as deliberate attempts by their bosses to paint an overly optimistic picture of the war’s progress.

A group of seasoned Iraq analysts saw the conflict as basically a stalemate, and became enraged when they believed that senior military officers were changing their conclusions in official Central Command estimates in order to emphasize that the bombing campaign was having positive effects. The group of analysts brought their concerns to the Defense Department’s inspector general, who began an investigation into the complaints.

That just happened, too. Gosh, we have a hard-luck Commander-in-Chief.

Even in the weeks before the Paris attacks, intelligence analysts were also deeply divided over the future of the Islamic State’s terrorism campaign. Some believed that the group was content to keep a local focus — consolidating the “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, urging followers around the world to launch small-scale attacks, but eschewing the centrally planned “spectacular” attacks that had long been Al Qaeda’s strategy.

But other intelligence analysts were less certain, arguing that it was only a matter of time before the Islamic State turned to attacks against Europe or the United States that would grab headlines and sow fear in Western capitals.

And what about this straw in the wind for the JOM readership?

Last Friday, it seems, the answer to this debate revealed itself, though to what end is unknown. Some experts wonder if the Islamic State has moved to complete its apocalyptic vision in a final battle with the forces of what it calls Rome, or the West.

No mention of my "Apocalypse Now!" piece? Hey, get a blog and you can be an expert too. More seriously, it is heartening to think that idea is being kicked around, and it would be interesting to see more Times coverage of that theme.

Sad News For Kevin Drum

Yesterday, from Kevin Drum:

Liberals Should Knock Off the Mockery Over Calls to Limit Syrian Refugees

Today, from the Snarkist-in-Chief, as reported in The Hill:

Obama: GOP refugee opponents 'scared of widows and orphans'

No report as to his view on "scared" Democrats such as Chuck Schumer or New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan.

Obama apparently nodded to the possibility that security fears have a modest basis in reality:

Obama defended the screening for Syrian refugees as the "most rigorous process conceivable," hours after White House officials held a conference call with governors to reassure them about the security procedures for refugees.

That word may not mean what he thinks it mean. Let me note - the "most rigorous process conceivable" may not be satisfactory when people are coming from a war-torn country with no infrastructure and no credible police or government records about their past associations. But why ask me when I happen to have Marshall McLuhan FBI Director James Comey right here?

During a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on Thursday, FBI Director James Comey sounded a cautious note that is likely to be picked up by critics of the White House’s plan to welcome more refugees into the U.S.

“My concern there is there are certain gaps ... in the data available to us,” Comey said.

“There is risk associated of bringing anybody in from the outside, but specifically from a conflict zone like that,” he added.

“There is no such thing as a no-risk enterprise and there are deficits that we face.”

Obama was clearly determined to elevate the tone of the debate by acknowledging his opponents legitimate concerns while explaining that these are risks worth taking because of America's self-conception and leadership role in the world. Kidding!

"We are not well served when, in response to a terrorist attack, we descend into fear and panic," he said. "We don't make good decisions if its based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks."

Absolutely not! We need to make decision based on knee-jerk political correctness, with a clear eye on the late night comics and the heirs to Jon Stewart's "Daily Show.

I FEEL OBLIGED TO ADD: The Democratic New Hampshire governor and Senate hopeful Maggie Hassan is not taking Syrian refugees. The Democratic Presidential candidates will be touring the state prior to the primary talking up their visions and no doubt hoping the issue of Syrian refugees is never raised. But if it is, they will be in lockstep with Jon Stewart Obama, which seems awkward. How do they avoid creating RNC campaign ads, with Hillary running against Hassan?

Hassan may feel like the Democratic base in New Hampshire will stick with her regardless and is taking this position on the basis of its general election appeal. But what if she has correctly judged the mood even of her own base?

Gosh, there will be a growing list of topics for the media to ignore as Hillarity! rattles to its scripted conclusion.

ONE FOOT ON THE GRAVE AND THE OTHER N A BANANA PEEL: James Comey is also on the wrong side of the question of a Ferguson effect - you know, that kooky theory that screaming at police they are murderers and thugs inhibits them from doing their job. And now refugees?

Libs loved Comey when he stood up to the White House over the Bush surveillance program and facilitated Fitzgerald's pursuit of Dick Cheney. But that was a long time ago. Then again, he was appointed and confirmed to a ten year term in 2013, so what happens next in this now-unhappy marriage? What, you think the FBI will find a problem with Hillary's emails? This is better than '24'!

WITH THE WISDOM OF HINDSIGHT AND HISTORY: Knowing what we now know about the Department of Justice pushback against the Cheney-led anti-terror initiatives, primarily enhanced interrogation and surveillance, I am personally convinced that Comey appointed Fitzgerald to Get Cheney, not investigate the Plame leak. Or get Karl Rove.

Lone Wolf, Cry Wolf, or WTF

A soccer match between Germany and The Netherlands was disrupted today due to a bomb scare:

Germany-Netherlands match called off shortly before kickoff

HANNOVER, Germany (AP) — The friendly soccer game between Germany and the Netherlands was canceled at short notice due to the serious threat of an attack at the stadium on Tuesday.

"We had concrete evidence that someone wanted to set off an explosive device in the stadium," Hannover police chief Volker Kluwe told German TV.

Referring to another bomb threat about an hour beforehand that turned out to be a false alarm, Kluwe said, "After the first object turned out to be harmless, we got a tip that had to be taken seriously that an attack was being planned."

Lower Saxony Interior Minister Boris Pistorius, speaking at a late news conference, said no explosives had been found by then, and no arrests had been made.

Pistorius said there was no confirmation of rumors that an explosive device was placed in an ambulance or another vehicle inside or outside the stadium.

Federal Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told the same news conference that indications of a planned attack became stronger as the match approached, and that the game was called off at his recommendation.

Now this story mentions "another bomb threat about an hour beforehand that turned out to be a false alarm", reminding us that it is easy enough to phone in false information.

Which takes us back to Friday morning in Paris the day of the terror attacks there:

Germany squad return to Paris hotel after bomb threat evacuation

The Germany football team returned to their hotel in western Paris after being evacuated following a bomb threat on Friday morning.

The Hotel Molitor said an anonymous caller phoned in the threat at 9.50am local time and that members of Germany’s squad, who face France later on Friday, and all other guests were immediately evacuated.

Police with sniffer dogs went on site to check for potential explosives and a security perimeter was established around the hotel. While the police carried out their searches, Germany’s players spent a few hours up the road at Roland Garros, home of the French Open tennis tournament.

Another false alarm, subsequently overtaken by events, including suicide bombers attempting to enter the soccer stadium.

I have no idea what the authorities are supposed to do here - crying wolf costs terrorists roughly nothing, yet how could the authorities fail to respond? And although I say "terrorists", any disaffected person might spend the dime to create some excitement.

 

Exercises In Rhetoric

From the Obama press conference after the Paris attack, explains that he is "too busy" to provide inspiration or give the appearance of winning:

We'll do what’s required to keep the American people safe. And I think it's entirely appropriate in a democracy to have a serious debate about these issues. If folks want to pop off and have opinions about what they think they would do, present a specific plan. If they think that somehow their advisors are better than the Chairman of my Joint Chiefs of Staff and the folks who are actually on the ground, I want to meet them. And we can have that debate. But what I'm not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning, or whatever other slogans they come up with that has no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people, and to protect people in the region who are getting killed, and to protect our allies and people like France. I'm too busy for that.

Churchill, reporting to Parliament after the evacuation at Dunkirk and the collapse of Allied resistance in France:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Interesting that with all the pressures of that calamitous war Churchill thought he had the time and the obligation to rally the public to what was really more a hope than a plan. Apparently he had a different conception of leadership. Or was just a poser, to borrow Obama's notion.

OK, before you ask - no, comparing Obama to Churchill is hardly fair (to either man), and I doubt many historians will be making such a comparison.

ERRATA: Only one of these guys has a Nobel Peace Prize. Then again, only one has a Nobel Prize in Literature. So far...

IRONY NEVER SLEEPS: Obama, in an interview with Bill Simmons appearing in GQ, describes lessons he's learned in the White House that he wishes he had known on Jan 20, 2009:

President Obama admitted in an interview with Bill Simmons that "a certain arrogance crept in" during the first two years of his presidency. The rare admission came in response to a question about what he'd tell himself if could go back to 2008 and tell himself one thing.

...I would probably tell myself to communicate more effectively early on than I did. We ran a great campaign. It wasn’t as great as it seems in retrospect—there’s always rose-colored glasses but there’s no doubt that we captured the country’s imagination. And somehow in those first two years, I think a certain arrogance crept in, in the sense of thinking as long as we get the policy ready, we didn’t have to sell it," Obama said, answering the question.

Well. He might tell Younger Obama to communicate more effectively but obviously Younger Obama wouldn't listen.

Outside The Box - Why Not Deliver To ISIS Their Apocalypse?

Lots of background on ISIS in this fascinating Atlantic article from March 2015 by Graeme Wood (with reaction here).

My takeaway - let's give ISIS, correctly described by Obama as an "apocalyptic cult", exactly what it wants. ISIS adherents believe there will be an apocalyptic showdown between their caliphate and the "Army of Rome" in the area of Dabiq. Dabiq is a village north of Aleppo, near the Turkish border in an area that Turkey and the US were planning to turn into a safe haven for rebels and refugees. So, the notion (Mr. Wood's if you like it, mine otherwise) - if ISIS wants to die there and we want to kill them, let's send in some US-led troops and give them their apocalypse. That should be much easier than liberating and occupying all of ISIS-occupied Syria and Iraq.

On with the article:

What ISIS Really Wants

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

A brief excerpt will not do the article justice. But let me isolate the apocalyptic vision:

For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need. Of the Islamic State supporters I met, Musa Cerantonio, the Australian, expressed the deepest interest in the apocalypse and how the remaining days of the Islamic State—and the world—might look. Parts of that prediction are original to him, and do not yet have the status of doctrine. But other parts are based on mainstream Sunni sources and appear all over the Islamic State’s propaganda. These include the belief that there will be only 12 legitimate caliphs, and Baghdadi is the eighth; that the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that Islam’s final showdown with an anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic conquest.

The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam.

“Dabiq is basically all farmland,” one Islamic State supporter recently tweeted. “You could imagine large battles taking place there.” The Islamic State’s propagandists drool with anticipation of this event, and constantly imply that it will come soon. The state’s magazine quotes Zarqawi as saying, “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify … until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.” A recent propaganda video shows clips from Hollywood war movies set in medieval times—perhaps because many of the prophecies specify that the armies will be on horseback or carrying ancient weapons.

Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse. Western media frequently miss references to Dabiq in the Islamic State’s videos, and focus instead on lurid scenes of beheading. “Here we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive,” said a masked executioner in a November video, showing the severed head of Peter (Abdul Rahman) Kassig, the aid worker who’d been held captive for more than a year. During fighting in Iraq in December, after mujahideen (perhaps inaccurately) reported having seen American soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure, like overenthusiastic hosts or hostesses upon the arrival of the first guests at a party.

Dabiq, per Google Maps, is roughly 60 Km (37 miles) North North east of rebel-held Aleppo. It is somewhat near the Turkish border and well within the area described in this July 2015 Times piece as a space that Turkey and the US may turn into a safe haven for Syrian rebels and refugees. See map below.

Need I explain further? Send enough US led troops to liberate Dabiq, then hold it against what should be the inevitable ISIS counterattacks. Hey, they want to die there and we want to kill them, so this is what we call a win-win. A battle over limited real estate will surely be easier to manage than Obama's hypothetical liberation of all of ISIS-occupied Syria and Iraq.

And if this does not draw them into the long-awaited apocalypse, well, we were planning (last summer, at least) to sweep that zone and make it a haven anyway. Where is the downside? Rhetorical question, I know Obama will find one.

Lest you wonder, the possibilities did not escape the author; this is from his discussion of military alternatives:

If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be routed, it might never recover.

And just to display my knack for confirmation bias, let me note that the possibilities may not have escaped Mr. Wood's readers either. Mr. Wood actually heard praise for his fair-handedness from some ISIS jihadists, one of whom passed along these thoughts: (note - I have substituted 'ISIS jihadists' for "Muslims" for clarity]:

One ISIS supporter wrote to me to note the peculiarity in all this. The piece, he said,

is grounded in realism, and argues that not understanding what is happening is very dangerous, especially if fighting a war, one must fight the war that is real, not the invented one that one wishes to fight. Perhaps ironically, your [writings] ... are most dangerous to the [ISIS jihadists] (not that it is necessarily meant to be so on your behalf), yet they are celebrated by [ISIS jihadists] who see them as pieces that speak the truth that so many try to deny, but also because [ISIS Jihadists] know that deep down the idealists of the world will still ignore them.

What stands out to me that others don't seem to discuss much, is how the Islamic State, Osama [bin Laden] and others are operating as if they are reading from a script that was written 1,400 years ago. They not only follow these prophecies, but plan ahead based upon them. One would therefore assume that the enemies of Islam would note this and prepare adequately, but [it’s] almost as if they feel that playing along would mean that they believe in the prophecies too, and so they ignore them and go about things their own way. ... [The] enemies of the [ISIS jihadists] may be aware of what the [ISIS jihadists] are planning, but it won't benefit them at all as they prefer to either keep their heads in the sand, or to fight their imaginary war based upon rational freedom-loving democrats vs. irrational evil terrorist madmen. With this in mind, maybe you can understand to some degree one of the reasons why many [ISIS jihadists] will share your piece. It’s not because we don't understand what it is saying in terms of how to defeat the [ISIS jihadists], rather it’s because we know that those in charge will ignore it and screw things up anyway.

On behalf of those who simultaneously have their head in the sand and up their posterior let me just say - that's interesting.

That reader reaction certainly makes me want to read the article again to see what other ideas for defeating ISIS may have jumped off the page for the ISIS readership. But having the enemy name the battlefield on which they want to die seems like a clue to me.

HATE SPEECH ALERT: If Obama was reading this article he probably threw it down in disgust here:

We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature....

...

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.

Adherents to the Islamic variation of the "No True Scotsman" defense will recoil, of course. There is more on this much later in the article:

V. Dissuasion

It would be facile, even exculpatory, to call the problem of the Islamic State “a problem with Islam.” The religion allows many interpretations, and Islamic State supporters are morally on the hook for the one they choose. And yet simply denouncing the Islamic State as un-Islamic can be counterproductive, especially if those who hear the message have read the holy texts and seen the endorsement of many of the caliphate’s practices written plainly within them.

Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the Prophet. “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid,” Bernard Haykel says. That really would be an act of apostasy.

The Islamic State’s ideology exerts powerful sway over a certain subset of the population. Life’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies vanish in its face. Musa Cerantonio and the Salafis I met in London are unstumpable: no question I posed left them stuttering. They lectured me garrulously and, if one accepts their premises, convincingly. To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that they would win. If they had been froth-spewing maniacs, I might be able to predict that their movement would burn out as the psychopaths detonated themselves or became drone-splats, one by one. But these men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as anything else.

 THE APOCALYPTIC MEME IS OUT THERE:

“There is a time for soft power and playing the long game in the Middle East, but there is also a time for the ruthless application of hard power. It is NATO’s responsibility to recognize our current moment qualifies as the latter,” James Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral and former NATO top commander in Europe, wrote in Foreign Policy. “The Islamic State is an apocalyptic organization overdue for eradication.”

 The meme also makes an appearance in this Federalist list, point 3:

16 Of The Worst Ways To Respond To ISIS' PAris Attack

...

3) Opining On “What ISIS Wants”

...

ISIS leaders are actually pretty straightforward about what they want. And if you want to read just one article that gets to the heart of who they are and why they exist, I’d recommend “What ISIS Really Wants” from Graeme Wood earlier this year in The Atlantic. It’s not perfect — toward the end it pooh-poohs the idea that ISIS fighters might want to bring the fight back to their home countries — but it does a good job of explaining their motivation and what they seek.

Wood explains that ISIS is committed “to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.” ISIS probably does want you to respond to their attacks by playing Yoko Ono tunes rather than killing them before they can strike again, but that in itself is not reason to avoid playing “Imagine.”

Apocalypse Now!

GREAT MINDS RUN IN THE SAME CHANNEL. Of course, it is also said that fools think alike.

 

 

 

Obama Might Be Right - Liberation Is Easier Than Occupation

Obama has a fair point about the use of ground troops to root ISIS out of Syria and Iraq. This is from his otherwise disturbing press conference:

He said the United States was seeking to persuade other allies to engage more deeply in the fight against the Islamic State, and he said the American effort to find more partners on the ground in Syria and Iraq was accelerating.

But he said large numbers of American troops on the ground would repeat what he sees as the mistake of the Iraq invasion of 2003 and would not help solve the terrorism problem around the globe.

“That would be a mistake, not because our military could not march into Mosul or Raqqa or Ramadi and temporarily clear out ISIL, but because we would see a repetition of what we’ve seen before,” Mr. Obama said. Victory over terrorist groups, he said, requires local populations to push back “unless we’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries.”

That was certainly an issue in Iraq - the planning and troop strength that went into the liberation turned out not be have been matched by the effort that went into the occupation.

Of course, in Libya we tried Hillary's approach of liberating from the air and not occupying at all, and that country is now a lawless bastion of terror as well as a jumping off point for refugees bound for Europe.

And Syria looks a bit like Alphonse and Gaston going to war - everyone is eager to support someone else in their use of ground troops, but no one wants to be first.

A professor from Paris helps sort out the players. A starter:

The main actors in the Middle East deem other enemies to be more important. Bashar al-Assad’s main adversary is the Syrian opposition — now also the main target of Russia, which supports him. Mr. Assad would indeed benefit from there being nothing between him and ISIS: That would allow him to cast himself as the last bastion against Islamist terrorism, and to reclaim in the eyes of the West the legitimacy he lost by so violently repressing his own people.

The Turkish government is very clear: Its main enemy is Kurdish separatism. And a victory of Syrian Kurds over ISIS might allow the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., to gain a sanctuary, and resume its armed struggle against Turkey.

The Kurds, be they Syrian or Iraqi, seek not to crush ISIS so much as to defend their newfound borders. They hope the Arab world will become more divided than ever. They want to seize Sinjar because it is in a Kurdish area. But they won’t attack Mosul, because that would be playing into Baghdad’s hands.

For the Kurds of Iraq, the main danger is seeing a strong central government emerge in Baghdad, for it could challenge the de facto independence of Iraqi Kurdistan today. ISIS stands in the way of the creation of any such power.

He also has blurbs for the Iraq Shiites, the Saudis, the Iranians, and Israel. The upshot:

In short, no regional player is willing to send out its forces, bayonets at the ready, to reclaim land from ISIS. Then again, unlike after 9/11, neither are the Americans. The United States’ strategy today relies on waging a war from afar, based on aerial strikes; Washington does not have the political will to send ground troops. Containment will have to do, and so, too, will killing terrorists by way of bombs and drones.

But war is not won without infantry.

His next troubling thought - ISIS needs successes to promote its brand. But it has reached natural geographic limits in Syria/Iraq (e.g., the Kurds to the north; the Shiites in Baghdad). So rather than gain publicity by raising their flag over Syrian cities, they are killing people in other cities, such as in Ankara, Beirut, and Paris. This shift was apparently not emphasized by the intel community, I read somewhere [link???].

One might argue that there is some Third Way between air strikes and a full invasion/occupation. But Obama lives and dies by the straw man, so those are the only choices he envisions.

Just to exemplify his love of phony arguments, let's pick up the next argument he offered against ground troops:

Moreover, he added that sending large-scale ground forces into Syria would set an untenable precedent. “Let’s assume that we were to send 50,000 troops into Syria,” he said. “What happens when there’s a terrorist attack generated from Yemen? Do we then send more troops into there? Or Libya perhaps? Or if there’s a terrorist network that’s operating anywhere else in North Africa or in Southeast Asia?”

Others might suggest we can jump off that bridge if and when we get to it. But Barack "We've contained the JV" Obama has such a clear vision of the future that he just knows that action today in Syria can only lead to ghastly outcomes somewhere else at some other time.

SECRETLY I AM A FAN: Obama's "I can't do it perfectly forever" rationale is why I don't paint the house, so who am I to criticize? And like Obama, I look to outsource the solution!

 

Black Math Matters

The NY Times Business Section presents an uncritical take on Buying Black:

Blacks Are Challenged to Buy From Black-Owned Businesses to Close Gap

By TATIANA WALK-MORRIS   NOV. 15, 2015

CHICAGO — Should black people go out of their way to patronize black-owned business?

Maggie Anderson says they should. In 2008, with the economy in the middle of the worst downturn since the 1930s, Ms. Anderson enlisted her husband and two daughters in a yearlong plan to consume goods and services exclusively from black-owned businesses. The journey became a basis for her 2012 book, “Our Black Year,” the subject of several TED talks about how to increase wealth in the African-American community, and the narrative behind a current cross-country tour aimed at spreading her gospel.

These are private citizens acting privately to advance a perfectly legal cause they believe in, and more power to them. However, I am incensed by the hijacking of math, statistics and verbal clarity displayed here:

“At first, I did take it personally that people would call us racist,” Ms. Anderson said. But “if we want to create jobs in the black community, we have to support black businesses.”

Spurring job creation in the black community is one of her goals. A study by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University found that between half a million and a million jobs could be created if higher-income black households spent only $1 of every $10 at black-owned stores and other enterprises.

We are offered a similar description of the study here:

“According to the landmark Northwestern University’s Kellogg Business School study based on The Empowerment Experiment, out of close to $1 trillion in Black spending power, maybe 3 percent of that goes to Black professionals, suppliers and firms,” Anderson wrote. “But if Black households with annual income of $75,000 or more –middle and upper income African Americans – were to increase spending with Black professionals and firms from 3 percent to just 10 percent, we could create close to 1,000,000 jobs.”

She explained, “This 10 percent includes direct spending with local Black-owned businesses, as well as indirect spending through the support of Black vendors, agents, dealers and franchises of mainstream firms. The new jobs would be created from the money we already have and currently spend – no government program and no corporate social responsibility outlay necessary.”

First, we are not talking about "jobs created", we are talking about "jobs transferred". The businesses currently supported by blacks as they re-direct their spending will sell less and the impact may (or may not) ripple up their supply chains. If this results in job creation in black communities offset by job losses in other communities, well, I can accept that as their goal but the Times ought to present it a bit more clearly.

Secondly, the study, at least as summarized in Ms. Anderson's book does not have the heft to support these conclusions. The study is described in pages 84-86 (Yes, you can look inside) and I have challenged Amazon's copyright people by including screenshots of the three relevant pages below.

The gist: Although caveated as a soft number, $913 trillion is the total spending by black consumers in the US (2008). Black families earning more than $75,000 a year make up some portion of this total, not disclosed here. But if these families increased their spending on black businesses from 2% to 10%, that would lead to $14 billion in revenue for black business.

They then divided $14 billion by the cost of a new Subway franchise ($81,300 to $203,000) and concluded these revenues could support between 69,000 and 172,200 new Subway stores, each of which would employ 8 to 13 eager young ethnics. Using the lower estimate for new stores (69,000) implies half a million to nearly a million new jobs.

To be fair, they note that even the 69,000 figure is larger than all the Subways in existence. What they do not note is that "revenue" does not equal "income" does not equal "investable capital".

So just to begin the rollback: the assurance that his community would spend $203,000 a year in his new store is unlikely to be enough to prompt someone to open a new Subway:

Subway's startup costs, which include construction and equipment leasing expenses, range from $116,200 to $262,850, according to the company.

Opening a McDonald's restaurant requires as much as $2.3 million in startup costs alone, by comparison.

But Subway restaurants generate less revenue than McDonald's units.

A Subway restaurant, on average, generates $490,000 in sales annually, compared to $2.5 million in average annual revenue for McDonald's restaurants, according to QSR magazine.

Averages can be deceiving, but still - using $500,000 as a target revenue stream, $14 billion in new revenue would support 28,000 new stores, not 69,000. And that ignores any obstacles involving owner's net worth or upfront opening costs.

Secondly, the notion that this black customer base will re-direct their new spending primarily to labor-intensive businesses is, well, optimistic. Ms. Anderson describes filling up her car at a black-owned gas station. Unless that owner is buying his gasoline from a black-owned supplier who is buying gas from a black-owned refinery who is buying crude oil from a black-owned driller in a black-run nation shipped on black-owned tankers, most of that money will cross back pretty quickly to the mainstream economy. A similar point can be made about groceries, appliances, televisions (I am looking around my kitchen wondering what I spend my money on... work with me here). Yeah, movie tickets - buying at a black-owned theatre won't make Luke Skywalker black. Or George Lucas.

Fine, I'm sure that buying groceries at a black-owned and staffed store instead of a suburban Whole Foods may shift jobs to Ms. Anderson's preferred ethnic group and more power to her. But 1 million new jobs, or even half a million? I doubt it.

From "Our Black Year":

A Mood Brightener - Time For An Obama Surge?

Sean Davis delivers an if-only tweet:

On the verge of defeat in Iraq in 2006, Bush admitted error & changed his strategy. Is Obama man enough to do the same w/ his ISIS strategy?

Well, the Broncos benched Manning. Last year the Pats benched Brady. I know when I think of resolute, successful leaders I think of Manning, Brady and Obama, so sure, anything is possible.

FOOTNOTE: You got me - Up above I left out "Whenever the topic is leadership and I am playing 'One of these is not like the other' ...

Wake Up, Little Peter, or, The Twilight Struggle Between Pedantry And Common Sense Continues...

Can "wake-up call" mean "Unexpected but important warning? We face these tough calls every day.

Peter Beinart, writing in The Atlantic, vigorously disputes the notion that the ISIS attacks represent an attack on Western civilization.

And he may make some excellent points! However, I am stalled at the third paragraph of his introduction:

ISIS Is Not Waging a War Against Western Civilization

A primer for Marco Rubio

...

At least Marco Rubio didn’t answer the attacks in Paris by demanding that the United States accept only Christian refugees. He left that to Ted Cruz.

But given the Florida senator’s reputation in GOP circles as a foreign-policy wonk, it’s worth looking in some detail at just how ridiculous his response was.

“The attacks in Paris,” Rubio began, “are a wake-up call.” Forgive the pedantry, but this is among the stupidest clichés in politics. Wake-up calls are things you plan yourself because you want to be awoken from your slumber at a set time, usually by a hotel clerk. The Paris attack was a horrific surprise orchestrated by France’s enemies. It wasn’t a “wake-up call” unless you believe its ultimate author was France itself.

Forgive the pedantry? Not likely! Is Rubio really blazing new ground by using that tired metaphor to mean "an unexpected alert"? Maybe Mr. Beninart could tell us which wordsmith used that very image to describe the ISIS approach to the gates of Baghdad in June of 2014:

So any action that we may take to provide assistance to Iraqi security forces has to be joined by a serious and sincere effort by Iraq’s leaders to set aside sectarian differences, to promote stability, and account for the legitimate interests of all of Iraq’s communities, and to continue to build the capacity of an effective security force.  We can’t do it for them.  And in the absence of this type of political effort, short-term military action, including any assistance we might provide, won’t succeed. 

So this should be a wake-up call.  Iraq’s leaders have to demonstrate a willingness to make hard decisions and compromises on behalf of the Iraqi people in order to bring the country together.  In that effort, they will have the support of the United States and our friends and our allies.

Wow, the Shi'ite leaders of Iraq planned the ISIS offensive? That is a heck of an allegation, if that is what Mr. Beinart wants to imagine was being said. Or (SPOILER ALERT - of course it was Obama) maybe Obama was employing the same lame metaphor as Rubio.

Or here we go from August 9 of 2014; the topic is still ISIS, and who said it?:

So the upshot is that what we’ve seen over the last several months indicates the weaknesses in an Iraqi government. But what we’ve also seen I think is a wake-up call for a lot of Iraqis inside of Baghdad recognizing that we’re going to have to rethink how we do business if we’re going to hold our country together.

Of course that was Obama. And here we go again, from August 28 2014:

It also means that states in the region stop being ambivalent about these extremist groups.  The truth is that we’ve had state actors who at times have thought that the way to advance their interests is, well, financing some of these groups as proxies is not such a bad strategy.  And part of our message to the entire region is this should be a wake-up call to Sunni,to Shia -- to everybody -- that a group like ISIS is beyond the pale; that they have no vision or ideology beyond violence and chaos and the slaughter of innocent people.  And as a consequence, we’ve got to all join together -- even if we have differences on a range of political issues -- to make sure that they’re rooted out.

I know the collapse of Sunni Iraq to the junior varsity in 2014 was a big story and the President's reactions made news. Still, I have yet to unearth Mr. Beinart's criticism of Obama's metaphor selections. But the day is young!

Well. Maybe this incident will serve as a wake-up call to Mr. Beinart's editors to focus on the substance of the argument and to avoid easily mocked pedantic silliness.

JUST SAYIN': Please don't think I am out of ammunition after a mere three citations; I picked on Obama waking up to the ISIS threat but he, the country, the world, or the UConn Huskies have been woken up to Ebola, climate change, job losses, energy, and losing to Stanford (hard to imagine the Huskies scheduled that in advance.)

And when Mr. Beinart is done absorbing the news about the rhetorical shortcomings of our Wordsmith-in-Chief he can tackle Ms. Obama, describing the stresses of motherhood:

And one day, my pediatrician pulled me aside and told me, “You might want to think about doing things a little bit differently.”

That was a moment of truth for me.  It was a wakeup call that I was the one in charge, even if it didn’t always feel that way.

I can quit anytime. Mr. Beinart can go argue with Adam Levine about whether "Wakeup call" can mean "Unexpected warning".

 

 

 

Seeking Affirmation, Not Information, or, Hello From the Other Side

As I have noted before, an ongoing problem with our partisan, partitioned news outlets is that residents of both left and right can, if so inclined, remain entirely within their preferred bubble.

And if your bubble includes the notion that the other side is irredeemably daft, well, we have news outlets and blogs for that too.

So to get modestly meta, here are three blogs explaining why the Paris-related tweets from "the other side" are hopelessly stupid: Mother Jones (which really ought to know better, as many commenters there remark), TBogg at Raw Story, and from the right, The Right Scoop.

You'd get more illumination by setting John Kerry's press releases on fire, but if on this troubled and troubling day you need reassurance that your team is smarter than theirs, well, you're all set.

That said, I do have to ask a question, and perhaps unwittingly illustrate just how stupid this side or the other really is: how did Mother Jones happen to pick out this tweet?

Obama needs to stop pretending that we don't know how to stop ISIS. ISIS is not JV, nor contained. Obama's politics is putting us at risk.

— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) November 13, 2015

What, Obama has ISIS buttoned down? Or there are no policy changes worth debating? Or this isn't the time to talk about our ISIS "strategy"? Or we shouldn't be blaming Obama, since he is only Commander-in-Chief and Leader of the Free World?

Or maybe it is just the mismatch of "politics" and "is". If we suspend the rules of grammar, the terrorists win!

I am sure progressives would disagree with the theme of the tweet and redirect their animus toward Bush/Cheney/Koch Bros, but if this is the stupidest thing any righty tweeted last night we are in pretty good shape.

Mystifying.

WHEN YOU'VE GOT NOTHING, CRITICIZE OTHERS FOR HAVING LESS: Timesman Frank Bruni deplores the politicization of the PAris attack into tangentially related issues such as gun control, campus non-control, and, well, Obama's consistent underestimation of ISIS. Two of those examples work for me, but all three come from the right. Either Mr. Bruni has a surprisingly unbalanced Twitter feed or he missed such gems from the left as this from Ezra Klein:

This tragedy should make us sympathetic to refugees fleeing these murderers, not angry at them

Well, can we be angry about the utter lack if screening? Apparently there are reports that two of the Paris terrorists came in with refugees, sort of like some haters said would happen. Lest you wonder, a subsequent Vox post clarified that yes, people opposed to the current lack of screening procedures are haters:

This congressman just showed how not to respond to the Paris attacks

Although the perpetrators of the Paris attacks remain unknown, Jeff Duncan, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, took to Twitter to say that the tragedy shows Europe and America shouldn't let in Syrian refugees because it might lead to more attacks.

How's that Syrian refugee resettlement look now? How about that mass migration into Europe? Terrorism is alive & well in the world. #No

As Dan Holloway tweeted earlier tonight, this assumption is misguided:

To people blaming refugees for attacks in Paris tonight. Do you not realise these are the people the refugees are trying to run away from..?

— Dan Holloway (@RFCdan) November 13, 2015

Again, we still don't know who's to blame for the Paris attacks — so we don't know if a jihadist group was involved, or even what the motives were. But if a jihadist group is the culprit, these kinds of terrorist organizations are exactly the kind of danger that many Syrian refugees are fleeing from. It is ISIS, after all, that has terrorized Syria — and forced people to flee their home country to find refuge from the violence.

Groan. Team Vox read the Congressman's mind and concluded that he meant that "Europe and America shouldn't let in Syrian refugees". Might he have meant "absent credible background checks" or "absent any plausible plan for jobs and cultural integration"? Might he have meant "Despite your good intentions you are welcoming a dangerous mix of refugees and terrorists"? They know he didn't!

And why does this sort of politicization not bother Mr. Bruni? Oh, please. His real exhortation is to avoid politicizing events in ways with which he does not agree.

However, we are sympathetic to his plight. Under deadline pressure he has to deliver something for the Sunday edition. Not writing about Paris would be odd, but he has nothing to say. Easy answer - find people with even less to say!

His editors are happy, his readers are happy, Sunday morning was passed pondering the foolishness of the right and all is good in Timesworld.

OOPS: I may have jumped the gun on the deadline pressure. On this Sunday morning the print edition includes a Bruni-basher of Ted Cruz. Per the Times website listing Bruni's columns, that Ted Cruz piece comes *after* the Parids piece, so maybe the editors nixed it. Time will tell.

Pro Tip On Messaging

Here is some free advice for world leaders - they sound silly talking about a unified coalition against IS/ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. Maybe - thinking out loud here - they could unite on a name, just to reassure us of their ability to unite on a strategy?

Yes, I understand that this is fraught:

What's in a name? When it comes to how to refer to the extremist group that has terrorized Syria and northern Iraq and violently imposed a caliphate, a lot.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a bit of a misnomer, says France, as it lends the imprimatur of Islam to a group that the vast majority of Muslims finds despicable. "This is a terrorist group and not a state. I do not recommend using the term Islamic State because it blurs the lines between Islam, Muslims, and Islamists," France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in a statement. "The Arabs call it 'Daesh' and I will be calling them the 'Daesh cutthroats.'"

I guess "The Dread Pirate Roberts" is taken. The WaPo had lots on the ISIS/ISIL schism, which at one time seemed to hinge on whether ISIS operated in "Syria" or "the Levant".

It's time for world leaders to prove they can make the tough choices.

More Tough Decisions Ahead

Last January after the Charlie Hebdo attacks John Kerry teamed up with James Taylor to serenade senior French officials with "You've Got A Friend".

If reports hold up that one of the terrorists was in fact registered as a refugee on Oct 3 in Greece, then I doubt Kerry will want to go back with James Taylor to sing anything with a potential border association, like "Mexico".

But I can help - I suggest "Steamroller":

Do let me note - clearly these lyrics would require a trigger warning on today's campuses for the violent imagery against women. Well, unless James Taylor was singing to a Republican, in which case har de har.

 

 

 

Decisions Under Pressure, or, Making That 3AM Phone Call

Obviously it was a hectic day at the White House and elsewhere yesterday, but my wife remarked that this from Obama's press appearance Friday night was absurd:

The situation is still unfolding. I’ve chosen not to call President Hollande at this time, because my expectation is that he’s very busy at the moment. I actually, by coincidence, was talking to him earlier today in preparation for the G20 meeting. But I am confident that I’ll be in direct communications with him in the next few days, and we’ll be coordinating in any ways that they think are helpful in the investigation of what’s happened.

Her gist - "The next few days?!?" I tried to explain that Obama has a lot to do and these fantasy rosters don't fill themselves in, but apparently the lights are back on in the White House:

 

Shorter Obama: We will drown them in mush. But at least he called!

As to why that was a tough decision, well, we will await Obama's "Profiles In My Courage" memoirs.

ISIS is Claiming This One

From the Times:

ISIS Claims Responsibility, Calling Attacks ‘First of the Storm’

SINONE, Iraq — The Islamic State claimed responsibility on Saturday for the catastrophic attacks in the French capital, calling them “the first of the storm” and mocking France as a “capital of prostitution and obscenity,” according to statements released in multiple languages on one of the terror group’s encrypted messaging accounts.

The remarks came in a communiqué published in Arabic, English and French on the Islamic State’s Telegram account and then distributed via their supporters on Twitter, according to a transcript provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist propaganda.

This attack did not fit the current Al Qaeda profile:

The style of the attack was in line with the Islamic State’s tactic of indiscriminate killings and goes against Al Qaeda’s guidelines. In a 2013 directive, the leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, stated that Qaeda operatives should avoid attacks that could inadvertently cause the death of Muslim civilians and noncombatant women or children.

He argued that targeting markets, for example, was unadvisable because innocent Muslims might accidentally be killed.

Although Qaeda branches have deviated from these guidelines on numerous occasions, their attacks reflect more carefully defined targeting, as was the case in the killings at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris in January, when cartoonists were singled out and defined as legitimate targets because of what the group considered to be blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad.

A Dutch fighter for Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria commented on the distinction in a series of posts on Twitter.

“Al-Qaeda focuses mostly on political & military targets instead of civilians. That’s why this could be an IS attack,” wrote the fighter, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Saeed Al-Halabi.

I an sure shoppers across America will keep that distinction in mind as they head to the malls this holiday season.

I suppose it has been Al Qaeda forbearance that has slowed the spread of the Mumbai/Westgate terror model. Homeland Security reported credible threats of "Mumbai-style" attacks back in September 2010:

US and European officials said Tuesday they have detected a plot to carry out a major, coordinated series of commando-style terror attacks in Britain, France, Germany and possibly the United States.

...

US law enforcement officials say they have been told the terrorists were planning a series of "Mumbai-style" commando raids on what were termed "economic or soft" targets in the countries. Pakistani militants killed 173 people with guns and grenades during the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India.

I have been hand-wringing about well-armed terrorists attacking a shopping mall for a decade, which puts me in, I imagine, in a good and large company. Since you asked, two or three teams of two mimicking the Beltway sniper would also be a (relatively) simple, low-budget, very confusing way to terrorize a region.

And if ISIS is recruiting disaffected Americans with first-hand knowledge of this country, ideas like this will percolate through their ranks. Osama bin Laden seemed to have been fixated on big explosions and high body counts, which in some ways limited his imagination.

Well. Good morning and enjoy the day. Tonight the Dems debate, so perhaps we will learn whether this attack in Paris was due to deficiencies in the French health care model or their unwillingness to admit even more undocumented immigrants.

FWIW: Trying to figure out the time and channel for the debate is left as an exercise to the reader - the DNC wants to play hide-and-seek with their candidates, so why should I spoil their fun?

UPDATE: OK, Syrian and Egyptian passports have been found on two of the terrorists, but maybe they are fake, maybe they don't match the dead bodies, maybe ISIS (or whoever) wants to misdirect and confuse the intel agencies.

However, this Tweet ratchets up the fear factor:

PublicOrderMin Toskas confirms Paris attacker w Syrian passport was registered as refugee on Leros island in Oct.

Obviously, that passport could have been lost or stolen subsequently. Or, a refugee in October could have become a terrorist is November. Either way.

Is Paris Burning?

Multiple violent incidents, twenty dead, many hostages at a theatre - if these reports hold up it is cataclysmic.

JUST TO SPRINT AHEAD OF THE EVIDENCE: These attacks may have nothing to do with Muslims. But I wouldn't bet that way.

That said, this may have very little to do with the recent surge of undocumented arrivals - there seem to be quite a few terrorists involved, but it may well be a combination of disaffected local youths providing the muscle and a few French citizens returning from the Middle Eastern wars providing the techniques and leadership. In that scenario, all the terrorists are "French", technically if not culturally.

As to whether that is better or worse than having the terrorists be a part of the recently welcomed immigrant wave, who knows? I should go back to waiting for some actual information.

Hot Or Not

We have two videos. One shows a guy who (for perhaps the first time) looks utterly electable to the highest office in the land. The other shows a guy who just might be high - in fact, I am wide open to explanations that include "Someone slipped Rick Perry's percocet in his soft drink".

Away we go, winner and sinner.

SPOILER ALERT: Let me put it another way - if the "Dean Scream" was a disqualifying moment, WTF was Trump's performance?

Profiles In Courage

Part of the backstory to the Yale Halloween imbroglio has been the question of re-naming Calhoun College, named of course for John C. Calhoun of pre-Civil War fame pro-slavery fame.

For my money, that name has passed its Sell-By. However, we have some Fun Facts about Calhoun and the college named after him:

Because of his political, military, and intellectual achievements, Calhoun was venerated as an illustrious Yale alumni beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. He was the only Yale graduate to be elected to a federal executive office in the school's first two centuries, until the election of U.S. President William Howard Taft in 1909.

So in 1931 the naming decision was a lot more plausible.

Some notable names in this bit of Calhoun trivia:

He was the first of two vice-presidents to resign (the second being Spiro Agnew in 1973), and the second and last vice-president to have served under two presidents, after George Clinton.

Calhoun, as part of the Great Triumvirate, was named as one of the Five Most Outstanding Senators in its history by a Senate committee led by - I would not kid you here - John F. Kennedy:

On May 1, 1957, the Kennedy Committee reported its choices to the Senate. The first three probably surprised no one -- Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and Kentucky's Henry Clay — the so-called "Great Triumvirate" of sectional statesmen whose legislative compromises held the nation together during the tumultuous decades leading to the Civil War.

I should add that Kennedy promptly second-guessed himself:

When Senator Kennedy announced his committee's selections, he expressed frustration over the exclusion from the list of his three personal favorites. If the decision had been entirely up to him, he told his audience, the Senate Reception Room would include Webster, Taft, and Norris, along with Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri.

That's kind of tough on Clay and Calhoun, but there we go.

The next fun fact is that, setting aside the racial angle (OK, and other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?) Calhoun might have been quite happy talking social justice with Elizabeth Warren. Here is Calhoun from his (in)famous speech describing slavery not as a necessary evil but as a positive good:

I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one por­tion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is fully borne out by history. This is not the proper occasion, but if it were, it would not be difficult to trace the various devices by which the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally divided, and to show by what means so small a share has been allotted to those by whose labor it was produced, and so large a share given to the nonproducing classes. The devices are almost innumerable, from the brute force and gross superstition of ancient times, to the subtle and artful fiscal con­trivances of modern. I might well challenge a comparison between them and the more direct, simple, and patriarchal mode by which the labor of the African race is, among us, commanded by the European. I may say with truth, that in few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer, and so little exacted from him; or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe-look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind super­intending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the for­lorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poor house.

Calhoun versus the one-percenters! Or at least, Southern one percenters were better than the rest - his point is that every society has oppressors and oppressed, so why pick on slavery as a uniquely evil means of exploiting the worker class, especially when slaves get better working conditions and health care? Freedom as false consciousness, the hopeless plight of the exploited worker - dump the slave stuff and Calhoun could run to the left of Bernie Sanders. Who knew?

And a final fun fact, with a preface: NY Times columnist Nick Kristof has boldly tackled the Yale/Mizzou meltdowns, even calling out lefty intolerance:

Yes, universities should work harder to be inclusive. And, yes, campuses must assure free expression, which means protecting dissonant and unwelcome voices that sometimes leave other people feeling aggrieved or wounded.

On both counts we fall far short.

We’ve also seen Wesleyan students debate cutting funding for the student newspaper after it ran an op-ed criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement. At Mount Holyoke, students canceled a production of “The Vagina Monologues” because they felt it excluded transgender women. Protests led to the withdrawal of Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker at Rutgers and Christine Lagarde at Smith.

This is sensitivity but also intolerance, and it is disproportionately an instinct on the left.

I’m a pro-choice liberal who has been invited to infect evangelical Christian universities with progressive thoughts, and to address Catholic universities where I’ve praised condoms and birth control programs. I’m sure I discomfited many students on these conservative campuses, but it’s a tribute to them that they were willing to be challenged. In the same spirit, liberal universities should seek out pro-life social conservatives to speak.

Strong - we might even say triggering! - words. But the fun fact is this: the NY Times has another columnist who is rarely shy about commenting on politics, has an academic background, was a Yale professor and - again, truly - was at Calhoun college in his Yale days.

Yet oddly, the cat has Paul Krugman's tongue on this one. I blame the Koch brothers, or more specifically, their absence from this story. But if you want to blame Bush, that's my second choice.

OR MAYBE ECONOMIC IS HIS FORTE: While we wait for Krugman on the Yale topic, let's note that he may be penning his reaction to an aspect of the recent Republican debate that seems to be much more up his alley. Let's set the stage with this recent Times account:

Yet Mr. Trump and another candidate, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, inveighed against what they called amnesty and argued that undocumented workers were driving down Americans’ wages.

Surely his vigorous denunciation of Trump and Cruz is only delayed by a failure to come up with a cute putdown? Well maybe not, and stop calling me Shirley - although Krugman has basically ducked this topic since he planted his flag and got roasted by his readers in 2006, his position then (as described in a 2007 blog post) was this:

Paul Krugman: There’s a serious debate about the effect of immigration, but I’m generally more convinced by the argument that it does reduce wages of native-born workers — although it’s a huge wage increase for the immigrants.

Or from his 2006 column:

Second, while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration -- especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.

Immigration reform and income inequality are, for progressives, two of the great issues of the day. But the relationship between them? Ahh, progressive economists would rather not talk about it more than once a decade or so. To be fair, on the subject if income inequality Krugman is more preoccupied with the rise of the mega-rich than the decline of the working class, so there is a certain consistency there.