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Jimmy Carter gets the front page to discuss resolution to an international crisis in the Middle East. Because... Jimmy Carter.
President Carter's take on the Assad government...
Before the revolution began in March 2011, Syria set a good example of harmonious relations among its many different ethnic and religious groups, including Arabs, Kurds, Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians who were Christians, Jews, Sunnis, Alawites and Shiites. The Assad family had ruled the country since 1970, and was very proud of this relative harmony among these diverse groups.
When protesters in Syria demanded long overdue reforms in the political system, President Assad saw this as an illegal revolutionary effort to overthrow his "legitimate" regime and erroneously decided to stamp it out by using unnecessary force. Because of many complex reasons, he was supported by his military forces, most Christians, Jews, Shiite Muslims, Alawites and others who feared a takeover by radical Sunni Muslims. The prospect for his overthrow was remote.
And Russian involvement...
The recent decision by Russia to support the Assad regime with airstrikes and other military forces has intensified the fighting, raised the level of armaments and may increase the flow of refugees to neighboring countries and Europe. At the same time, it has helped to clarify the choice between a political process in which the Assad regime assumes a role and more war in which the Islamic State becomes an even greater threat to world peace. With these clear alternatives, the five nations mentioned above could formulate a unanimous proposal. Unfortunately, differences among them persist.
Are considerably more nuanced than the take you get on the evening news or the Sunday morning talk circuit.
Carter has tried to point this out to US leaders from Reagan on, that there was a means of applying pressure to Syria, but that to do so would require cooperating with both Russia and Iran. Which we won't do. Because we're more interesting in looking tough than saving lives.
The needed concessions are not from the combatants in Syria, but from the proud nations that claim to want peace but refuse to cooperate with one another.
But hey, negotiating the rest of this morning's APR is as simple as clicking past that orange scrawl. Which looks like of like a signature. Hmm.
Dana Milbank recaps the nittiest 11 hours of nit picking in the history of nits.
The House Select Committee on Blumenthal, as some are now calling it, came to order at 10 a.m. Lawmakers didn’t finish questioning Hillary Clinton until 11 hours later — just after the Democratic presidential candidate succumbed to a coughing fit.
In that period of time, the name of Sidney Blumenthal was invoked more than 75 times, and scores of questions were asked about the longtime Clinton friend. By lunchtime, Blumenthal had been invoked 49 times — exactly the number of mentions of J. Christopher Stevens, the ambassador to Libya whose death in Benghazi is the supposed subject of the congressional probe. ...
Clinton refused to get riled. “I don’t know what this line of questioning does to help us get to the bottom of deaths of four Americans,” she said.
But Gowdy knew. A couple of minutes later, he announced: “I’ll tell you what: If you think you’ve heard about Sidney Blumenthal so far, wait until the next round.” ...
During private testimony from Blumenthal, to which he was summoned by federal marshals, Republicans asked more than 160 questions about Blumenthal’s associations with Bill and Hillary Clinton but fewer than 20 about the Benghazi attacks.
Can we get Bernie to record an appropriate remark about what a #@!&*$ waste these hearings have been? "The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn Blumenthal!"
Kathleen Parker is also part of the America people.
Who the blast is Sidney Blumenthal?
Doubtless many watching Thursday’s House select committee hearing on Benghazi must have wondered the same. This obviously important person’s name was mentioned so many times, it was challenging to remember that Hillary Clinton, not he, was the one on trial, for lack of a more-accurate word. ...
None of this was remotely relevant to the alleged purpose of the hearing — to find out once and for all what happened before, during and after that terrible night in Benghazi when four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, were killed. The real purpose was as obvious as the shine on Gowdy’s nose — to discredit Clinton both as secretary of state and as a leading presidential candidate — and, if possible, to make her head explode.
Gowdy would be wise not to stand too close to any explosions. Whatever it is that he puts on that hair, it's probably flammable.
...whatever Republicans hoped to accomplish in the hearing, they fell embarrassingly short. You don’t have to like Clinton to objectively observe that the hearing was little more than a prolonged reiteration of known bungling characterized by contempt-coated questions delivered with near-hatred. At times, I thought lasers might suddenly burst from Ohio Republican Jim Jordan’s eyes and incinerate Clinton on the spot.
That didn't happen, but it's quite possible that I spent part of the hearing with my fingers posed around Jordan's image saying, "I'm crushing your head!"
The Miami Herald isn't just mad, they want action.
For 17 months, to the tune of $4.7 million, Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi have been promising the nation that the hounding of Hillary Clinton was something more than a waste of tax money and a partisan fishing expedition.
On Thursday, they put her on the stand for their big reveal.
They failed.
The 11-hour marathon grilling of the former secretary of state – and current Democratic frontrunner for the White House — yielded nothing that Americans didn’t already know about the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Libya that claimed the lives of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three colleagues. ...
So it is now time to disband this costly farce of a committee. Even as political theater, it hasn’t worked.
Republicans would have been better off to fold this tent before bringing Clinton in.
Leonard Pitts on watching the watchmen.
The question was first posed by Juvenal, a Latin poet whose life spanned the first and second centuries: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Translation: “Who watches the watchmen?”
The old question finds new relevance in an era of heightened concern about police brutality, where cameras are omnipresent and police misbehavior routinely goes viral. These days, all of us watch the watchmen,, a de facto citizen’s review board armed with cellphone cameras. ...
Which brings us to the unfortunate thing Rahm Emanuel said earlier this month at a summit of police officials and politicians in Washington. In explaining a recent uptick in violent crime, the Chicago mayor said cops have gotten “fetal.” He added, “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict … they don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact.”
... Had it been Emanuel’s intention to make police seem petulant, pouty and entitled, he could hardly have chosen more effective language. Small wonder a police union official promptly denied that officers have returned to the womb or are otherwise giving less than their best effort.
As with many of Pitts' columns, I have to stop myself before I throw "fair use" aside and just copy it all. So go. Go read it all.
Francis Clines warms up the theramin.
Americans looking for an explanation for the House Republicans’ frantic infighting for political survival amid the nation’s mounting problems might want to consult a new CBS-TV “comic-thriller” due next summer called “BrainDead.”
It is set in the political caldron of Capitol Hill, and it will follow a young congressional aide who discovers two things, according to the show’s summary: “The government has stopped working, and alien spawn have come to Earth and eaten the brains of a growing number of congressmen and Hill staffers.”
Jokes that begin "How is this fiction?" should queue to the left. Thank you.
The New York Times has an interesting bit on that scam the goes by the name of "law school."
If this sounds like a scam, that’s because it is. Florida Coastal, in Jacksonville, is one of six for-profit law schools in the country that have been vacuuming up hordes of young people, charging them outrageously high tuition and, after many of the students fail to become lawyers, sticking taxpayers with the tab for their loan defaults.
Yet for-profit schools are not the only offenders. A majority of American law schools, which have nonprofit status, are increasingly engaging in such behavior, and in the process threatening the future of legal education.
Law schools threw open the doors and helped thousands of new students to come in, trailing new federal loans. They sold the dream of being a lawyer, even as the market for law school graduates was collapsing.
For years, law schools were able to obscure the poor market by refusing to publish meaningful employment information about their graduates. But in response to pressure from skeptical lawmakers and unhappy graduates, the schools began sharing the data — and it wasn’t a pretty picture.
Careful, law school grads. You might wind up doing something distatesful... like writing for a blog (you're invited to scroll to the bottom of the screen, click "Writers" and peruse the C.V. of the DK staff).
Ross Douthat saves us all the trouble of holding primaries.
Four years ago this week, I boldly predicted that Mitt Romney would inevitably be his party’s nominee.
It was admittedly not really the boldest of predictions. But at the time the press corps was obsessed with the revolving door of non-Romney “front-runners,” and many intelligent people were still convinced that Romney’s ideological deviations would cost him the nomination in the end.
The boldness here consisted of picking the guy in second place when Herman "9-9-9" Cain had slipped into the lead, but hey, he did go all in on the Mittster. Let me look in a drawer or two, I know I have a sentence I've been keeping for this occassion. Ah yes, here it is. Douthat was right.
But don't worry. It doesn't last.
2016 is very different: The G.O.P. candidates are stronger overall
See? In any case, saving you the paragraphs of advanced Douthat ciphering, he concludes that only Marco Rubio can be this year's nominee. Because.... because. But of course, there is a problem.
His past support for comprehensive immigration reform is a major liability, but Rubio has shown a lot more finesse on that issue than has Jeb, and one liability isn’t usually enough to doom a candidate who otherwise looks like a winner.
I want it noted that, in 2016, support for fixing a problem—not support for a particular solution, just support for taking rational action—is considered a major problem for a Republican candidate.
The New York Times makes an appeal that they shouldn't really need to make.
Puerto Rico’s government is on the verge of running out of money. A messy default is in nobody’s interest, which is why Congress ought to move swiftly to provide the American territory with a way to restructure its huge debt and revive its economy.
The Obama administration last week offered the outline of a rescue plan to help the island and the 3.5 million American citizens who live there. The plan would impose new oversight on the island’s finances and expand access to government programs like Medicaid and the earned-income tax credit. Crucially, it asks Congress to change the law so that Puerto Rico’s territorial government and its municipalities can seek bankruptcy protection.
That "change the law" bit is something of a problem, because 1) Republicans always appreciate another reason to do anything they conceive is a frustration to Obama and 2) Congressmen in both parties are being heavily lobbied by investment groups that have an interest in stopping Puerto Rico from restructuring its debt.
Many investors who have lent money to Puerto Rico and stand to lose under any debt restructuring are bitterly opposed to the Obama plan. They say Puerto Rico can repay all of its debt if it tightens its belt and privatizes utilities and other government-owned businesses. Changing the law now, they argue, is deeply unfair. But the record of what has happened in troubled countries like Greece is clear: Austerity policies have only worsened the crisis.
The entire economic basis of modern conservatism requires that they believe austerity works, no matter how many times austerity fails. So it's hard to be all that hopeful.