Dancing with my selfie

Nelson Mandela's memorial service was an important occasion of international import. Yet with all the possible news to cover, the media went wild over Obama's selfie with David Cameron and Denmark's very attractive (blonde) Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt. Thus ensued a tidal wave of thinly veiled snark about "angry black woman" Michelle Obama who was pictured looking serious, or (if you're a pro journo looking for clickbait)a  pissed off wife. Nearly everyone got it wrong and not just about Michelle Obama. Yes it said a lot about our bias, but no, taking the selfie was not disrespectful in any way. Funerals are not somber events in Africa. Surely the media saw the parties in the streets when Mandela died. They apparently do not mourn death there as we do. They celebrate the life of the person who passed. As for the misconstrued photo, let's let the photographer explain the selfie:

I’d been there since the crack of dawn and when I took this picture, the memorial ceremony had already been going on for more than two hours. [...]

Anyway, suddenly this woman pulled out her mobile phone and took a photo of herself smiling with Cameron and the US president. I captured the scene reflexively. All around me in the stadium, South Africans were dancing, singing and laughing to honour their departed leader. It was more like a carnival atmosphere, not at all morbid. The ceremony had already gone on for two hours and would last another two. The atmosphere was totally relaxed – I didn’t see anything shocking in my viewfinder, president of the US or not. We are in Africa.[...]

I later read on social media that Michelle Obama seemed to be rather peeved on seeing the Danish prime minister take the picture. But photos can lie. In reality, just a few seconds earlier the first lady was herself joking with those around her, Cameron and Schmidt included. Her stern look was captured by chance.

I took these photos totally spontaneously, without thinking about what impact they might have. At the time, I thought the world leaders were simply acting like human beings, like me and you. I doubt anyone could have remained totally stony faced for the duration of the ceremony, while tens of thousands of people were celebrating in the stadium. For me, the behaviour of these leaders in snapping a selfie seems perfectly natural. I see nothing to complain about, and probably would have done the same in their place. The AFP team worked hard to display the reaction that South African people had for the passing of someone they consider as a father. We moved about 500 pictures, trying to portray their true feelings, and this seemingly trivial image seems to have eclipsed much of this collective work. [...]

I confess too that it makes me a little sad we are so obsessed with day-to-day trivialities, instead of things of true importance.

I was especially disappointed to see my hero Charlie Pierce jump onto the scolder bandwagon.

@ESQPolitics Et tu? There's a few more out there that aren't getting RTed much. Like this. pic.twitter.com/nJuu6QpAGd
— Libby Spencer (@libbyspencer) December 10, 2013

Truth is there were many world leaders enjoying themselves at the service. Including this guy:

Such an eloquent look on Bishop Tutu's face: "Jeez, they'll let ANYBODY into these things." pic.twitter.com/QEcRVrfWCC
— billmon (@billmon1) December 10, 2013

This is why, as much as I support freedom of the press, I can't get too exercised over the WH Media's alleged lack of access to every waking moment of Obama's day. They're not really giving us some great hidden truth from behind the scenes. It's all about finding the clickbait to invent outrage and drive traffic. Just not seeing what civil society gets out of that.

Deep Tweets

This one has no explanation because it would either take a million words or none to do so. But trust me, it's deep.

I was in the presence of @EliLake last night. He was rapping. He rhymed Ashkenazi and Benghazi in his flow. Surreal.
— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) May 31, 2013

GOP hypocrites hate handshakes

President Obama had the audacity to shake the hand of a world leader at Mandela's funeral. Before the internet was invented, we used to call this good manners. Some might even have called it responsible statesmanship. But the world leader in question was Raul Castro standing in for his brother Fidel. So of course GOPers immediately launched themselves onto the fainting couches, demanding smelling salts.

Maybe somebody gave them bath salts instead, because this reaction from Senator Grumpy Gramps was batshit crazy.

When asked if Obama should have extended his hand, McCain was quick to respond.

"Of course not," the senator said. "Why should you shake hands with somebody who's keeping Americans in prison? I mean, what's the point?"

Then, after a slight pause, McCain went there.

"Neville Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler," he added.

I'll spare you the endless photos of GOP illuminaries shaking hands with every genocidal tyrant our government propped up over the years when it was convenient to keep them in office and simply post this obvious answer to McCain's ravings.

Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his "ranch" in Libya - interesting meeting with an interesting man.
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) August 15, 2009

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio complains:

"If he was going to shake his hand, he should have asked him about those basic freedoms Mandela was associated with that are denied in Cuba," Rubio told ABC News.

Sure, if only Obama had immediately scolded Castro, all Cubans would be enjoying freedom right now. Hell, maybe all the world leaders there could have engaged in a huge argument upon arriving at a funeral because, what better way to show respect for the occasion?

In any event, perhaps Rubio could have watched the damn speech before he shot his mouth off. Not like Obama let anybody off the hook.



Yes I know our own record of supporting domestic dissent isn't exactly stellar but we're still better than most places and it was important speech in support of human rights. Not that the corporate media is much interested in talking about that. Too busy reporting every anguished blathering coming from the GOpers and other assorted cons.

The last true freedom fighter of his generation

Nelson Mandella is dead. He was among us for longer than most of our present day heroes. His body wasn't even cold before his former critics and enemies leapt to co-opt Mandela's legend to score cheap political points.

I'm not reading any of cheap potshots and vile conservative commentary. For myself, I choose to reflect on my good fortune to have lived to witness so much of his life and work. Many have already spoken of his legacy so I'll spare you my inadequate thoughts and simply outsource to Charlie Pierce's eulogy.

Nelson Mandela died yesterday, and he was the last of them, the last of the patriots in a line all the way back to George Washington who fought to rid their native countries of the deadweight of colonialism, who fought for self-determination against the rule of distant, unyielding governments that slid into tyranny without even knowing they were doing it, who fought and won and, in Mandela's case, like Washington, but unlike Michael Collins and so many others, outlived the stifling detritus of dying empires. Nelson Mandela was a reminder of all the others, famous and obscure, who fought the same battle in so many places against so many oppressors, known and unknown. He was the last in their line, the last of them -- people like, to name only one, Ho Chi Minh -- who drew strength and purpose from the deep, lasting echoes of what a group of wealthy merchants and planters -- and, yes, slaveholders -- set loose upon the world in Philadelphia in 1776. What they did was to set freedom itself free, although most of them probably didn't know they were doing it at the time, and many of them would have blanched at the prospect. But the one thing they did, Mr. Jefferson and all of them, was throw out to the world in their magnificent rhetoric a magnificent bluff. Nelson Mandela was the last man who called it in the last place it was called.

All men are created equal.

Endowed with certain inalienable rights.

Self-evident.

Read the rest at the link. You won't have to read anything else.

Don't want to go to war no more

I haven't talked about Syria because there's already enough chatter out there but for the record, this is one fight I hope Obama loses. I believe Assad used chemical weapons. Yes it's appalling but I don't want to bomb Syria. I fail to see how that solves anything. The end result is more dead people. So what's the point?

Why Americans are so uninformed

Not sure if this says more about the media, or the markets.

Each week, TIME Magazine designs covers for four markets: the U.S., Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. Often, America's cover is quite, well – different. This week offers a stark example. [...]

This is not an isolated incident, for perusing TIME's covers reveals countless examples of the publication tempting the world with critical events, ideas or figures, while dangling before Americans the chance to indulge in trite self-absorption.

Click over to see more.

It's easy to blame Time for dumbing down the public but they're in the thankless business of selling magazines. I'm not sure who reads Time in the paper version these days but my anecdotal experience is far too few Americans care about world politics anymore. Time's US cover stories reflect what they think the US market will buy. I'm not sure they're wrong.

Who do you trust?

I have never trusted any government to tell me the whole truth. All my life they've lied to me. Sadly, outside of handful of responsible journalists and bloggers, now that click bait journalism has become the accepted business model, I don't trust the media to tell me the whole truth either.

I do trust Charlie Pierce. I don't always agree with him entirely, but I always listen to what he has to say because he's honest, he's smarter than me and his institutional knowledge is deep. I completely agree with him about the NSA:

...(There is simply no logical reason to take anything the NSA says on this topic in good faith.)

I would like to believe that this is not simply another salvo in the ever-escalating Toobin-Greenwald pissing contest. The issues are simply too important to get buried under a mudslide of personal pique, even though they're half-interred in that already. But, Green Room hooleys aside, Toobin here fundamentally is telling us, again, that they are all honorable men. I don't care what you think of Glenn Greenwald or Edward Snowden. In this democracy, "trust us" is not half good enough any more.

So then the question becomes, what's a concerned citizen to do? Where do we get the facts? Are we seriously supposed to trust a media that rushes to print every wild rumor, (often from an unnamed source), they can dig up in their frenzy for a ten minute exclusive on the internets? The media standard for publication is no longer are we sure this is true, it's now if it's at all plausible -- run with it and maybe make corrections later.

Take the instant matter of Greenwald's spouse and his troubling detention at Heathrow. The Guardian rushes the story to print, inciting instant mass hysteria about innocent spouses of journalists being detained for no reason. But they omitted a couple of pertinent facts. Within hours the NYT tells us Mr. Miranda was acting as a courier for secret documents between Glenn and Lynn Poitras and his trip was financed by The Guardian. Only then did The Guardian amend its story and I'm told they didn't bother to note anywhere it had been amended. So most people who read their story in the hours before that wouldn't be aware of those salient facts. This does not make for an informed public or a reasonable debate.

Meanwhile, Atrios posts today that "the lack of noise about the destruction of the hard drives has been a bit unsettling." He's referring to the Guardian's story about the UK government destroying their hard drives. Well, at least that's what the first story implied. The second story today tells us they actually destroyed the drives themselves, voluntarily, under the watchful eye of a couple of agents, rather than force the government to get a court order. Which doesn't really make sense to me on any level. But the really weird thing is this happened a month ago. Have to wonder why are they just printing it now?

It's not like this is an isolated instance and it's not confined to The Guardian. Every major story in the last few years has played out the same way. The first 48 hours (or longer) are complete chaos with conflicting reports. Anything incendiary enough to drive traffic gets posted immediately. The subsequent mitigating information is downplayed or sometimes ignored. It takes an enormous amount of effort to glean the complete story from numerous news orgs. Frankly, I'm tired of it. In fact, I'm just plain tired of the hysteria, of the in-fighting, of being told what I'm supposed to feel and do. So sorry if it makes me a bad liberal that I just watch and wait from the sidelines instead of immediately jumping into the melee but I just don't the see the point of adding to the noise.

Simply so predictable

Glenn Greenwald says this is a misquote:

"I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England too. I have many documents on England's spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did," Greenwald, speaking in Portuguese, told reporters at Rio's airport where he met Miranda upon his return to Brazil.

He's right. It wasn't an exact quote. Nonetheless, having read Glenn's version, I think Reuters captured the general sense of Glenn's statement. Even in his own words, it reads like a not so subtle threat. And I can't help but recall a similiar threat Glenn made against the US government on behalf of Snowden. But this isn't about the stolen NSA documents.

In case you somehow didn't hear, Glenn's spouse was detained for nine hours at Heathrow yesterday. They questioned him at length and then they took all his electronics and let him go without charging him. This is apparently legal under British law and to avoid confusion, let me stipulate the law they used is as troubling, if not more, than our own anti-terror overreach. Steve M has more on the law and the thousands of people who endured to varying degrees, the same horrible detention as David Miranda. These overly broad laws in all countries need to be clarified and narrowed, if not abolished. But this isn't about odious anti-terror laws either.

What I find most appalling about this incident is I can't help but think this was entirely predictable. Joshua Foust supplies the full backstory but if here's the short: Glenn has publicly stated he sent the leaked docs to David in the past. In the instant matter, The Guardian paid David to fly to Berlin to courier some sort of documents from Glenn to Laura Poitras, (the other journo on the Snowden story) and then return to Brazil with her docs for Glenn. So they book the return flight through Heathrow? Glenn is not stupid. Thus I'm forced to conclude Glenn set up his own spouse to take this fall and I wonder why.

Joshua articulates my current state of mind rather well:

More immediately, too, the instinctive reaction of far too many journalists to shriek about their own spouses being targeted is going to have a downside. Few journalists would treat their spouses as authority-bait the way Greenwald did this past weekend, and few would tell other reporters, for a profile, that they used their spouses to help them avoid intelligence agencies. Glenn Greenwald is a very smart man — he knew what he was doing. While we should all condemn the British authorities for holding Miranda for so long, we should also keep in mind exactly why he might have been singled out — and there a whole new set of complications and questions emerge.

There’s also a bit of historical literacy we should perhaps add to the discussion. Histrionics aside, most governments, and many more unsavory groups, treat secrecy very seriously — sometimes with deadly seriousness. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of his decision to help pilfer and distribute the treasured secrets of several governments, to do so openly, with such braggadocio, is not only arrogant it is misguided. This is not a game, especially to the governments being exposed, and casually involving a spouse to take a hit when he won’t risk it is a bizarre and troubling decision.

I remember, respect and appreciate Glenn's work during the Bush administration but it feels different now. It's like I don't know who he is anymore and sadly, I'm not sure I can trust him.

You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here

Echoing the catch phrase of bartenders everywhere, it's last call for Snowden in Russia.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Russia had received no request for political asylum from Snowden and he had to solve his problems himself after 11 days in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport.

President Vladimir Putin has refused to extradite the American and Russian officials have delighted in his success in staying out of the United States' clutches since revealing details of secret U.S. government surveillance programs.

But Moscow also has made clear that Snowden is an increasingly unwelcome guest because the longer he stays, the greater the risk of the diplomatic standoff causing lasting damage to relations with Washington.

"He needs to choose a place to go," Ryabkov told Reuters.

Of course, Snowden's problem is nobody wants to take him. I imagine this is not the scenario he had in his head when he decided to go public. It seems he didn't calculate the geopolitical complications in seeking asylum. Kind of surprising. You might think a guy smart enough to hack closely guarded NSA data would have anticipated this in advance.

No where to run to, no where to hide

Well it seems our self-imagined international spy, Edward Snowden, is running out of options.

Snowden has prepared asylum requests in countries including India, China, Brazil, Ireland, Austria, Bolivia, Cuba, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and Venezuela, WikiLeaks has said.

Unfortunately for our intrepid leaker, after Snowden released a rather bizarre statement, only Venezuela has publicly indicated any real support for asylum but didn't actual offer to take him in. Several others have essentially said not going to happen and Russia has had quite enough of hosting their hapless house guest and would very much appreciate it if he could find new accommodations.

Meanwhile, Hendrick Hertzberg gets it exactly right on the traitor or hero question. The answer is neither. In the end, Snowden is just a kid who broke the law and is going to have to suffer for it in ways that he didn't properly anticipate before he decided to step into the klieg lights.

Snowden on the run

“He wanted a simple life.” ~Attorney Albert Ho

I'm at the point where I don't know what to make of of our hapless leaker. Edward Snowden's story keeps changing and with every new iteration he contradicts his earlier declarations. The only thing clearly true at the moment is he has fled Hong Kong. Certainly he didn't research the legal system there before he decided it was the perfect place to seek asylum.

Then began a two-hour conversation during which Mr. Snowden was deeply dismayed to learn that he could spend years in prison without access to a computer during litigation over whether he would be granted asylum here or surrendered to the United States, Mr. Ho said.

Mr. Ho who is, or was, his legal counsel in Hong Kong advises Snowden is a loner who had no real support system until he sought their counsel. Apparently it didn't occur to Snowden that he would certainly be charged with a serious crime and seeking asylum in a place closely connected to one of our greatest international rivals would be a big deal for both the US and his possible hosts. I imagine he was shocked to learn the Hong Kong government would be glad to get rid of him.

Meanwhile, the biggest news today is Snowden now says he got the Booz Allen job for the express purpose of stealing classified documents. Which also suggests he lied to Glenn Greenwald since Glenn specifically refuted that possibility in the beginning. So much for the principled civil rights activist who was moved to expose domestic surveillance out of horror when he realized its scope talking point.

At this point Snowden looks like little more than a clueless kid, a wannabe anarchist with delusions of grandeur and probably complicated self-esteem issues who desperately wanted attention. Which leaves me torn somewhere between scorn and pity for him.

Obama redefines the war on terror

President Obama gave a foreign policy speech this afternoon. Do yourself a favor. Read the whole speech before you read any of the instant punditry and take it as gospel. If you're out of free reads at the NYT, Booman has it and he also has one of the more temperate takes on it.

It was a huge and complex speech. A speech that takes some time to process fully. Maybe it was just too complicated in a world that now operates mostly in 140 character quips and expects on demand gratification. The initial wave of analysis I've seen was rife with cherry picked points that offer a ride on favored hobby horses.

Predictably, drones emerged as the first complaint. Obama didn't disown their use. He was honest in his assessment of their necessity. He didn't make false promises that they won't be used again. What was mostly ignored is that he acknowledged they were problematic and pledged to work towards making their use more transparent and accountable. What also won't be mentioned much is the appropriate Congressional committees were informed before every strike. And I suppose I'll lose whatever liberal cred I have left when I say, I agree with Obama. Given the choices, none of which are good, drones are still a better choice than any other option. I don't want our country to be killing people. But I honestly think, Obama doesn't either and he's making the best choices he can under the circumstances. He's not wrong when he says it's the best way to minimize civilian deaths.

I've seen him accused of passing the buck to Congress. Not sure how that works, when Congress is the body that has the responsibility for setting the parameters. Obama tried to close Gitmo practically on the first day he took office. Congress wasted no time in making it illegal to do so. Never understood what executive action progressives think he should have taken to override Congress. Funny, I thought we hated executive overreach. Don't see how he could do much more than say this.

"There is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have been opened."

Obama also addressed everything from surveillance on the media to prosecuting leakers to the incremental destruction of our civil rights under the aegis of national security. Much of it was more aspirational than operational. Given the political reality, don't see how he could do much more. But the most important part of the speech was clear and bold. He promised to work to rescind the AUMF. He won't sign another extension. No other president will be able to wage an undeclared war under that ill-advised leftover legacy of the Bush administration.

That's big. He deserves some praise for that, dammit. I'm thinking historians will be kinder to Obama in the future than the media and the internets are to him in the present.

You can't yell fire in a crowded theater

Well we have a brand new brouhaha about surveillance on a journalist. Today it's James Rosen of Fox News over a story he published in 2009 about North Korea, based on an insider leak. To be clear, it's important to protect journalists. It's equally important to protect leakers when they're exposing government wrongdoing. But once again, this is not really the case here.

I'll spare you my thoughts on how ineptly they covered their tracks. Hell they were practically asking to get caught, but here's my big problem with James Rosen's reporting. His motive appears to more about career enhancement than truth telling.

[Rosen] also wrote, according to the affidavit: “What I am interested in, as you might expect, is breaking news ahead of my competitors” including “what intelligence is picking up.” And: “I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses.”

I've read a few posts about this today and noticeably missing from most of them, is a link to Rosen's original article. Here, via Booman, is the key flaw in his reporting.

What's more, Pyongyang's next nuclear detonation is but one of four planned actions the Central Intelligence Agency has learned, through sources inside North Korea, that the regime of Kim Jong-Il intends to take -- but not announce -- once the Security Council resolution is officially passed, likely on Friday.

As Booman explains:

It's important that the policy advisers and policymakers inside our government know if the intelligence they are reading is coming from straight inside the Pyongyang government. It is equally critical that the North Korean government not know that.

If someone in Pyongyang sticks their neck out to talk to the CIA, they should not be reading about it the next week on the Fox News web page. The government was basically forced to try to figure out who leaked that information, and the only thing that should be up for debate is how far the government should be able to go to solve the mystery.

I'd add I'm not sure it was in the national interest to tell North Korea we lost track of their missle movement either, but I guess that's a judgment call. Thinking it's better the North Koreans not know that, but an argument could be made that the public has the right to know.

In any case, in striking a balance between national security and protected speech, there are competing interests. This is point worth remembering as we seek to strike that balance.

Adam Weinstein: We as journalists have the right to work with leakers to report the truth. The gov. has the right, within the laws, to find/punish leakers.

First Amendment protections are not absolute. The press enjoys greater protection than most of us. The onus is on them to use it responsibly. I have to agree with Booman. This is yet another case where it wasn't.

I come to defend Holder, not condemn him

The AP phone records story is still developing so I don't have much to say yet. Still waiting for more facts to emerge from the noise. So far I've seen nothing to suggest the government acted illegally. As a TPM reader points out:

More important it is clear to anyone who understands what happens in this type of investigation that the Justice Department subpoenaed phone records. Those records came from the phone company not from AP. They relate to dates and times of phone calls not content. Under the law such a subpoena is perfectly proper and under the law Justice and the phone company must notify the party (in this case AP) that records were subpoenaed.

I think AP protests just a bit too much and seeks to smear Justice (knowing full well that many Republicans will jump on this quickly).

Which of course will be great for traffic. This is Drudge bait as tempting as pure crystal coke from Columbia to a junkie.

To be clear, it's vitally important to protect the freedom of the press, especially in its social mandate to investigate government wrongdoing. While it's apparent our present day media had mainly failed in that mission, devoting most of their time to inventing psuedo-scandals in order to drive traffic and make profits for their wealthy owners, we nonetheless need to continue to protect the media from government intimidation and protect whistleblowers from retribution when they assist the media in exposing government malfeasance.

All that being said, let's review why the DoJ started the investigation on the AP and its inside sources. This scoop was not the Pentagon Papers. They weren't exposing something like bombing Cambodia and lying about it, or the cover-up of the Mai-Lai massacre. The AP exposed an undercover, anti-terrorist operation that thwarted a bomb plot which would have killed Americans. In doing so, the AP jeopardized the life of an inside US intelligence asset and effectively forced a CIA operation that could have netted vital intelligence in stopping future terrorism to shut down.

Sorry, if that strikes me as more self-serving than noble. Finding it difficult to couch this one as serving the public. Feels more like serving the bottom line of the AP with a sensational scoop that actually endangered the public. So while it's far too easy for the government to claim national security as a cover for secrecy, in this one particular case I see no evidence Holder can't claim national security concerns drove the investigation. At least not so far.

Benghazi is the new circle derp

Obama is right. The Benghazi frenzy is a sideshow. Actually I would call it a freak show stuffed into a clown car, but not going to quibble about it. Certainly, it's painfully obvious why the GOPers are pushing it. With polling already being done showing she would blow anybody on both sides of the fence out of the race in 2016, they fear the Hillary.


[graphic via]

What may not be apparent, at least to those who don't watch the media players closely, is why our "both sides do it" journos suddenly got so interested in pushing such an obviously fake controversy and in fact, taking the GOP's side in blaming the White House. Kevin Drum thinks it boils down to just another fight over syntax.

No, it will be because the small group of reporters who are credentialed to the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room feels aggrieved that the press secretary told them something to their faces that concealed a bit of unseemly bureaucratic squabbling. It doesn't matter if the subject matter itself was important. In this case, it wasn't: the nickel version is that the State Department objected to the CIA adding a sentence making sure everyone knew they had warned about possible attacks beforehand, a statement that was both gratuitous and off subject. But trivial or not, Carney misled the reporters in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room about this, and that makes it personal.

Never underestimate the power of a press corps that suddenly decides the story is personal. It may be a while before they let go of this.

Maybe Kev wasn't on the twitter when it happened. The quibbling over the definition of the word "editing" was just a cover for why they were mad. The real outrage was over Jay having played favorites before the briefing started. He held a background briefing beforehand and only a few of the very important journalists were invited. So Kevin is right, it's personal. Hell hath no fury like a insider journo who's been consigned to the B list.

Meanwhile Greg Sargent wryly notes it feels like the 1990s all over again. Shorter, less polite version: Petty scandal mongering because of perceived slights is not responsible journalism. It's tacky and makes them look a pack of jackals.

Counting our blessings after the Boston bombing

Every time there's a major attack of some kind in America, whether it be 9/11, or Newtown, or yesterday's bombing in Boston, we as a nation are instantly traumatized. We personalize it, as if it had happened to us no matter how remote our connection. Not to minimize the tragedy of the these events, but these are small horrors in the greater world.

In the Middle East this sort of violence is part of their "normal" lives. I mean, while we were all glued to the media yesterday, watching in disbelief, this was happening in Iraq:

Officials said more than 30 bombings and a shooting hit 12 different areas of Iraq, leaving 50 people dead and nearly 300 injured, making Monday the country's deadliest day since March 19.

The deadliest attacks were in Baghdad, where eight bombings struck in seven neighbourhoods across the capital despite tougher checkpoint searches and heightened security.

Among them was a car bomb in a parking area used by vehicles making their way to Baghdad's heavily guarded airport, a rare bombing on the road famously known as "Route Irish".

In Tuz Khurmatu, 175 kilometres north of Baghdad, six people were killed and 67 wounded by three near-simultaneous car bombs, and in Kirkuk, five people were killed and 44 wounded by six more car bombs.

Attacks elsewhere killed nine people and wounded 92 others.

A total of 14 election hopefuls have already been murdered and just 12 of the country's 18 provinces will be taking part in this weekend's vote.

The worst part is, for Iraqis, this is an improvement over the years of terror they suffered during the war when the stench of death was never absent from the streets, not for a single day. These horrors happen to innocent men, women and children regularly, all over the world. So while we obsess over our own trauma about the senseless violence in Copley Square, we might also take a moment to remember how lucky we are that it doesn't happen more often.

Margaret Thatcher is dead

I don't have much to say about (must not forget to call her Baroness) Margaret Thatcher's death but there's no dearth of commentary about Thatcher's politics on the internets. Never paid that much attention to her myself. I recall being thrilled when she became the first woman PM because, milestone for women, but her politics were so dismal the good feeling didn't last for long. The nicest thing I can say about her is she made me laugh when she so thoroughly put Sarah Palin in her place when Griftzilla tried to cadge a meeting with her.

Hugo Chavez is dead, his legacy will linger

It can't be denied he was a flawed man. By the end, it became all too clear that Hugo Chavez was a bad administrator. One could even say he behaved tyranically, seduced by power and tripped up by his own machismo. But I think what remained true to the end was he truly cared about social justice.

He began with the best of intentions and surely his people loved him. Chavez was the champion of the mestizo, Venezuela's shockingly poor underclass. He was one of them. He empowered them. He gave them a voice. He lifted them a little from undeserved, grinding poverty. They re-elected him in a democratic process more than once.

The wealth holders, the upper class -- native and foreign -- who had until then so freely exploited the country's treasures, hated him for his egalitarian policies. He disrupted their stranglehold on power. And again, he was a very imperfect man. He made a lot of mistakes. Still, on the balance, he was a better man at heart than many of his critics.

Addendum: You have to go the foreign press to find out, but proof his people loved Chavez. The wealthy Venezuelans who loathed him, to their credit, are lying low and allowing the people space for public mourning.

The 100 million protest march

Chances are you didn't see this story on your TV news stations. I only saw it because I caught an odd RT in my twitter stream. My google-fu tells me it was barely covered by the high profile US news orgs even in print/online. But Al Jazeera was there:



If you can't watch the video, the workers of India have had enough of being exploited by the owners and the politicians.

As many as 100 million Indians angry about high prices, low pay and poor working conditions walked off their jobs Wednesday as a two-day strike organized by 11 major trade unions closed banks, disrupted major transportation and reportedly saw two deaths, Al-Jazeera reports.

The strikers want a legal minimum wage, fairer contracts, better working conditions and a halt to outsourcing of public jobs to the private sector.

Doesn't sound so different from the current state of our country.

Worker solidarity will get any government's attention. Wondering how bad it will have to get here before the exploited workers of America take to the streets.

Game of drones

There isn't a word in any language to describe how depressing I find listening to a Democratic administration justifying extra-judicial drone kills. Been thinking about it all day and here's the thing. On principle and belief, I'm anti-war. I'm against all acts of violence. Especially killing people.

Yet, to paraphrase Dave Weigel on the twitter, it's a false choice but given it's going to happen and nothing I can do is going to stop it in the short term, I prefer drone warfare to sending in hundreds of thousands of ground troops. On a scale of which does the least human damage to the troops, the innocent population and physical damage to our planet, there's no contest.

That being said, the idea our government can virtually codify executive death sentences outside the realm of the judicial system by bypassing the legislature terrifies me to "confronted by an actual zombie" level. As Charlie Pierce already explained (do read it all), there's danger in this snail paced slide into unilateral executive power:

What matters more to me is that we seem to be slow-playing ourselves into a situation in which the presidency becomes an institution primarily concerned with foreign affairs and, specifically, with where we make war, and against whom, and why, and all of those according to reasons that the presidency can decline to share with the rest of us. This puts more distance between the president — any president — and the people who put him in office. It hamstrings the president's power to do anything about the issues most immediate to the people in this country, but it unleashes him to do anything he wants anywhere else in the world. It is a deformative reinvention of the office, and it will come to no good end.

Truthfully, al-Awlaki notwithstanding, I trust Obama not to abuse the power. I don't trust it won't be abused in the future. Not a precedent that should be allowed to set. Ever.