The trend of “white right” violence is definitely increasing – we’ve had the abortion doctor murder, the austin suicide plane, and now a shooting at the Pentagon in Washington DC:

Officials said the man, indentified as John Patrick Bedell, 36, of the US state of California, died on Friday from head wounds recieved in a shoot-out with police near the US Pentagon building outside of Washington, DC.

Police said Bedell pulled out a gun at the busy commuter rail subway entrance that serves the Pentagon, shooting and injuring two police officers. Police returned fire, shooting Bedell in the head.

Richard Keevill, the chief of Pentagon police, said Bedell was “well armed” with two 9-mm handguns and several magazines.

“There was no distress,” Keevill told reporters at a press conference on Friday.

“When [Bedell] reached into his pocket, they assumed he was going to get a pass and he came up with a gun. He wasn’t pretending to be anyone. He was wearing a coat and walked up and just started shooting.

I was reluctant to label this terrorism last time but I’m increasingly convinced otherwise. It looks like this guy was a 9-11 truther believing that the attacks were a government conspiracy. Just as Joe Stack did, it seems that Patrick Bedell also  had an internet rant or two which may shed light on his motivations. (Note – its not clear whether JPatrickBedell really is the same person – the FBI are still investigating). 

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Tags: City Of Brass

Milad mubarak!

Like hundreds of millions of muslims worldwide, I honored the Prophet Mohammed SAW last week, finding the anniversary of his birth (by most authoritative sources, 12 Rabi ul Awwal) a time to reflect on my love for him as the Messenger of Islam.

Is it controversial to celebrate the milad (birthday) of the Prophet of Islam SAW? It may surprise non-muslims that the celebration of Milad al Nabi is indeed a matter of dispute; a thread at Talk Islam provides a nice summary. Unfortunately, some muslims take this disagreement to extremes – using it to dabble in anti-semitic and anti-Shi’a prejudices and even resulting in violence against people in milad processions.

The debate about celebrating milad is indicative of a broader theological dispute within Islam that is centuries old. The root issue is whether the legitimacy of Islamic practices is a top-down or bottom-up process. The bottom-up argument goes like this:

“Practice X is performed by millions of muslims and has been for centuries, therefore there is validity to it.”

Now, the top-down rebuttal to this is:

“If something is wrong or bid’a, it’s still wrong or bid’a (innovation), no matter how many muslims do it or for how long.”

Note that the top-down line of thought implicitly lays claim to the authority to define what is bid’a or wrong.

The problem is that no practice is performed in a vacuum. Something that millions of muslims have done for centuries is also something that has inevitably been discussed by ulema and authorities for the same length of time. The legitimacy of these practices is the pre-requisite for its popularity; that popularity is not a sufficient defense, but it is sufficient evidence that a robust defense exists.

Were it not so, and the practice in question truly bid’a or outright wrong, then an airtight case on the merits would long ago have been presented which refuted it.

The rejoinder to my case above is to invoke alcohol as an analogy. “Millions of muslims drink and have been drinking for centuries, and that is clearly in violation of shari’a” goes the argument, “are you saying that drinking alcohol is validated by the precedent?”

Of course not. And a diligent reader will already note the flaw in the analogy, but let’s spell it out anyway. No muslim who drinks alcohol attempts to argue that there is merit in this act, or tries to defend the act within the context of Islam. There is no debate whatsoever about whether alcohol is permitted. There is no defense of alcohol as fostering piety or virtue of any kind. The debate over practices such as milad, in contrast, is not about something expressly forbidden, but about a pious action which is not expressly permitted.

The fundamental truth is that the diversity of the Ummah manifests itself in very human ways. Even accounting for all that is expressly forbidden in Shari’a, there is infinite space for cultural practice within Islam.

The doctrine against bid’a is misused as a sweeping legalistic injunction when it fact is limited in scope to the Deen itself. Those who seek to impose their views of what Islam should be, often implicitly admit by their actions that they are misusing bid’a itself, because their arguments are always accompanied by secondary attempts at delegitimizing the behavior they seek to forbid, such as ascribing the practice to Jews, or attempting to undermine the validity of other madhabs. For an example, see an essay series by Yasir Qadhi at Muslim Matters against observance of milad, which ostensibly sets out to be a dispassionate historical analysis of mawlid celebrations but then can’t help blaming Shi’a and Sufis in a classic guilt-by-association and delegitimization ploy.

It is indeed a fact that there is disagreement among Muslims of different madhabs as to which hadith to follow, who the descendants of the Prophet SAW are, and other general matters relating to how authority is defined. But that disagreement often strays into takfir; the accusation of heresy against Islam itself. Takfir is rarely invoked explicitly, but instead exists as an undercurrent of implication (though Yasir Qadhi barely suppresses his takfiri sentiments, especially when he talks about Ismailis). It’s an intellectually lazy tactic which fosters needless dispute between muslims and weakens the Ummah as a whole. It is sad to see so many ostensibly modern muslim intellectuals engage in it.

Fundamentally, both approaches are necessary in tandem. The bottom-up evolution of muslim practices in the social sphere is a necessary and inevitable outgrowth of human society. Muslims are men and women, not robots. And yet there is a need for a corrective action from the top to ensure that the organic growth of culture does not transgress across the lines defined by Deen and Sharia. The key to reconciling these seeming opposite forces is to acknowledge reason and choice; the muslim must choose for themselves who they accept as their authority, and must respect that choice made by other muslims.

In the sixth ayat (verse) of Surat al Kafirun (109:6), the Qur’an gives words to the muslim to speak to the unbelievers: “To you be your way, and me mine.” The primary audience here is those who do not believe in Islam. But there’s a philosophy therein which applies equally well to intra-muslim debates. We can disagree about the validity of mawlid, ziyarat, moonsighting, etc. But we must remember that ultimately, Islam is about our personal relationship to Allah, and no one else’s. And Allah knows best.

Related: the issue of forbidden acts versus acts not exxpressly permitted is akin in some ways to the debate over implied powers and the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution and the “Elastic Clause“. These are invariably legalistic debates by their very nature, reliant on source texts and exegesis of Founders’/Creator’s intent.

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Tags: City Of Brass

The health care summit at the White House has begun – here’s the live video feed from Whitehouse.gov:

mcjoan at dkos had a preview of the summit earlier which takes a pretty pessimistic view of expectations. But I like what I’m hearimng from Sen. Lamar (R-TN) so far, about wanting Obama to succeed. This is rhetoric that the GOP leadership hasn’t been using until now.

Still, the insistence on a “blank sheet of paper” is simply equivalent to doing nothing. If that’s the line we keep hearing during the summit, then this is indeed pointless.

UPDATE: here’s the simple truth of why the GOP call for “a blank paper” is just “kill the bill” in disguise, succinctly from Ezra Klein:

Think about what’s entailed in restarting the process. The Senate Finance Committee and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee would have to build new bills. The House Energy and Commerce Committee, Education and Labor Committee, and Ways and Means Committee would need to write new legislation. All of those proposals would need to be merged. There would need to be discussions in committees, and then weeks and weeks on the floor. Then there would need to be conference. Then they’d have to come back to the floor.

There’s no time for that. Congress has a few, final months before everyone scurries home to campaign for 2010. And they want to spend those months forcing Republicans to take difficult votes on jobs legislation, not arguing over whether Medicaid is solvent enough for a major expansion.

More importantly, there’s no political upside in starting over. The right will still cry “death panels!” and let loose the dogs of tea, and the left will savage them for failing to pass health-care reform despite controlling the second-largest congressional majority since the 70s. There’s a policy argument here in that a fallback plan will cover more people than no plan will cover, but if covering people is what the Democrats want to do, they’ll pass the comprehensive plan, which both covers more people and actually gives them a major accomplishment.

At this point, health-care reform either passes or it dies. Democrats are all in on this one. They know it, Republicans know it, and maybe more importantly, they know the Republicans know it. Letting health-care reform fail is indistinguishable from conceding the 2010 election. There’s no real fallback plan. If Democrats fall back, they fall.

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Tags: City Of Brass

Have you ever had COBRA health insurance coverage? It’s the stopgap insurance coverage you get after you leave a job, intended to fill the gap in your coverage until you find a new job (and doesn’t last forever, which is why extended unemployment still leaves people uninsured. This in a nutshell why single-payer/Medicare for all is a better system than our employer-provided insurance model, and why since we are stuck with employer-provided insurance, why we need universal insurance coverage reform.)

As NPR reminded us today, the “R” in COBRA stands for none other than budget reconciliation, the very process currently being painted as a “nuclear option” by establishment Republicans desperate to stop the health reform train. In fact, as it turns out, budget reconciliation has a long history of being used for health care legislation:

health care and reconciliation actually have a lengthy history. “In fact, the way in which virtually all of health reform, with very, very limited exceptions, has happened over the past 30 years has been the reconciliation process,” says Sara Rosenbaum, who chairs the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University.

For example, the law that lets people keep their employers’ health insurance after they leave their jobs is called COBRA, not because it has anything to do with snakes, but because it was included as one fairly minor provision in a huge reconciliation bill, she says.

“The correct name is continuation benefits. And the only reason it’s called COBRA is because it was contained in the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985; and that is how we came up with the name COBRA,” she says.

It’s not just COBRA – children’s health insurance has also been implemented via reconciliation:

The expansion of health insurance coverage for low-income children is a prime example.

“In 1980, children who were living at less than half the poverty level in the United States could not get a Medicaid card in half the states if they had two parents at home,” she says.

But via a series of budget reconciliation bills, beginning in 1984, Congress began expanding Medicaid coverage. In 1997, also in a budget reconciliation bill, it created the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP. Today, says Rosenbaum, who helped write many of the children’s health provisions in those bills, Medicaid and CHIP together cover 1 in every 3 children in the United States.

“So literally we’ve changed everything about insurance coverage for children and families, and we’ve changed access to health care all across the United States all as a result of reconciliation,” she says.

What about Medicare? Yup, also via reconciliation:

Budget reconciliation has also been an important tool for changing the Medicare program.

“Going back even close to 30 years, if you start say in 1982, the reconciliation bill that year added the hospice benefit, which is very important to people at the end of life,” says Tricia Neuman, vice president and director of the Medicare Policy Project for the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Over the years, budget reconciliation bills added Medicare benefits for HMOs, for preventive care like cancer screenings; added protections for patients in nursing homes; and changed the way Medicare pays doctors and other health professionals.

Because the point of budget reconciliation was usually to cut the deficit, the huge Medicare program was nearly always on the chopping block.

NPR even provides a helpful list summarizing all the health-care legislation over the past 30 years that was passed via the reconciliation process – see below. The bottom line is that reconciliation is a valid legislative process – one used by every President, including Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Reagan, and health care reform qualifies because it is fundamentally about a government outlay and thus well within the boundaries of the Byrd Rule.

Kudos to NPR. Then again, its not a surprise, given that NPR listeners are the most well-informed of any broadcast news audience. That’s the value of public broadcasting in an era where the mainstream media are forced to lay off hundreds of staff by their entertainment industry conglomerate owners.

A History of Reconciliation

For 30 years, major changes to health care laws have passed via the budget reconciliation process. Here are a few examples:

1982 – TEFRA: The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act first opened Medicare to HMOs

1986 – COBRA: The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act allowed people who were laid off to keep their health coverage, and stopped hospitals from dumping ER patients unable to pay for their care

1987 – OBRA ‘87: Added nursing home protection rules to Medicare and Medicaid, created no-fault vaccine injury compensation program

1989 – OBRA ‘89: Overhauled doctor payment system for Medicare, created new federal agency on research and quality of care

1990 – OBRA ‘90: Added cancer screenings to Medicare, required providers to notify patients about advance directives and living wills, expanded Medicaid to all kids living below poverty level, required drug companies to provide discounts to Medicaid

1993 – OBRA ‘93: created federal vaccine funding for all children

1996 – Welfare Reform: Separated Medicaid from welfare

1997 – BBA: The Balanced Budget Act created the state-federal childrens’ health program called CHIP

2005 – DRA: The Deficit Reduction Act reduced Medicaid spending, allowed parents of disabled children to buy into Medicaid

(List reproduced from “Health Care No Stranger To Reconciliation Process” by Julie Rovner on NPR’s Morning Edition. Here’s the story transcript and audio.)

Related: An explanation of how the budget reconciliation process works, also at NPR. Props to David Waldman at DailyKos for the original heads up.

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Tags: City Of Brass

Today is the one-year anniversary of the landmark stimulus bill which most economists agree has staved off a second Great Depression. The evidence that the stimulus has worked is overwhelming – the New York Times has an in-depth article looking at its actual impact on jobs, and an indispensable graphic showing a timeline of key economic indicators before and after its passage. There’s another beautiful chart based on job loss data from Dec 2007 to Jan 2010 which also makes the impact of the stimulus crystal clear. The recognition of the stimulus’ success isn’t just data-driven – Republican lawmakers who have publicly denounced it for political gain have been quietly and hypocritically scrambling for stimulus money for their districts – as documented by the Wall Street Journal and by the Washington Times.

The only real flaw in the stimulus bill was that it wasn’t big enough – and in a wasted effort at seeking bipartisan Republican support, included some of the largest tax cuts in the nation’s history (but no Republicans voted for it anyway).

And yet, not only is public opinion largely hardened in the perception that the stimulus is a failure, but Obama himself has suffered a major drop in his approval ratings, even to the point that a majority of respondents in a recent CNN poll felt he didn’t deserve a second term. That anti-incumbent attitude is largely the result of a perception that there hasn’t been enough change, that the new Administration hasn’t made progress on fixing the economy (undeservedly so) or health care (deservedly so).

Why hasn’t Obama been able to make his case for his achievement in his first year? It seems largely due to his reliance on the “Chicago Core” – a tiny coterie of four powerful advisers who see everything in “campaign mode” political calculation rather than “governing mode” policy and communication. The main argument and description of the structural problem is laid out in a massive insider piece by Financial Times bureau chief Edward Luce. It’s far too comprehensive to summarize in a few excerpts, but one anecdote is very illustrative of the problem – “the Obama Campaign goes to China.”

On Mr Obama’s November trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr Gibbs, Mr Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president’s side.

The White House complained bitterly about what it saw as unfairly negative media coverage of a trip dubbed Mr Obama’s “G2″ visit to China. But, as journalists were keenly aware, none of Mr Obama’s inner circle had any background in China. “We were about 40 vans down in the motorcade and got barely any time with the president,” says a senior official with extensive knowledge of the region. “It was like the Obama campaign was visiting China.”

Supplemental evidence to the Luce piece is provided by Steve Clemons, who concludes and summarizes:

…one thing essential to understand is that the kind of policy that smart strategists (…) would be putting forward is getting twisted either in the rough-and-tumble of a a team of rivals operation that is not working, or is being distorted by the Chicago political gang’s tactical advice that is seducing Obama towards a course that has not only violated deals he made with those who voted him into office but which is failing to hit any of the major strategic targets by which the administration will be historically measured.

President Obama needs to take stock quickly. Read the Luce piece. Be honest about what is happening. Read Plouffe’s smart book again. Send Rahm Emanuel back to the House in a senior role. Make Valerie Jarrett an important Ambassador. Keep Axelrod — but balance him with someone like Plouffe, and get back to putting good policy before short term politics.

Set up a Team B with diverse political and national security observers like Tom Daschle, John Podesta, Brent Scowcroft, Arianna Huffington, Fareed Zakaria, Katrina vanden Heuvel, John Harris, James Fallows, Chuck Hagel, Strobe Talbott, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others to give you a no-nonsense picture of what is going on.

And take action to fix the dysfunction of your office. Otherwise, the Obama brand will be totally bust in the very near term.

Another of the very few political commentators who have been talking about the Luce piece is Mark Schmitt at The American Prospect, who also offers his own insightful thoughts on the problem, namely that the Obama white house has embraced a “momentum” strategy instead of a patient grinding approach to governing. And Leslie Gelb in The Daily Beast also takes on the core dysfunction, making a solid case for Obama to replace Rahm as chief of staff.

Recall that Obama talked on the campaign trail about how he admired President Lincoln for his “team of rivals” approach to governing. There’s merit in that idea, as long as the team of rivals are interested in governing. Unfortunately, it seems that Obama’s team is more interested in campaigning – and that short-term tactical attitude is going to hurt Obama in the long run. It already has.

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Tags: City Of Brass

Since religious demogougery hasn’t worked out so well for Al Qaeda’s attempt to win hearts and minds of the muslim masses, Osama bin Laden is trying a new strategy: scare ‘em with science:

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming, according to a new audiotape released Friday.

(…) He blamed Western industrialized nations for hunger, desertification and floods across the globe, and called for “drastic solutions” to global warming, and “not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change.”

Bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warning in past messages, but the latest tape was his first dedicated to the topic. The speech, which included almost no religious rhetoric, could be an attempt by the terror leader to give his message an appeal beyond Islamic militants.

Let’s be clear here – Osama bin Laden’s only real interest in global warming is how he can exploit it for his own short-term ends. If he is aware that water scarcity caused by global warming will disproportionately impact muslim countries, it would be a bonus for him, not a tragedy. The craven attempt at exploiting a truly global disaster for short-term political gain would be obscene if we weren’t already inured to his shamelessness and utter lack of moral integrity.

Speaking of shamelessness and exploiting fear for political gain, conservatives are seizing upon bin Laden’s comments as evidence that the political left and Al Qaeda are ideological allies. This is a refrain we’ve heard many times from the right, however, so we are inured to this as well by now.

Unfortunately, the political right has internalized the extremist interpretations of Islam espoused by bin Laden himself. It’s ironic that these people accuse the left of being in ideological alliance with our enemies when by their own actions, they provide aid and comfort in practice (even if ostensibly opposed in intention). Unfortunately, the self-declared Defenders of the West and Watchers of the Jihad don’t have the clarity or commitment to principle to recognize the self-defeating nature of this attitude. The people who recognize that the best defense against our enemies is to embrace our principles instead of abandon them, are few and far between.

Incidentally, here’s my entirely serious and well-meaning advice to Osama bin Laden: hook up with the climate change denialists. Seriously – don’t you know that freshwater from melting glaciers will upset the salinity balance in the North Atlantic and plunge North America and Europe into a new Ice Age? You’d totally win by default.

Related: Talking global warming at Talk Islam. Also, bin Laden on Twitter isn’t amused.

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The White House has released some excerpts of the State of the Union speech and I am posting them below. My (brief) comments follow.

THE WHITE HOUSE


Office of the Press Secretary


_______________________________________________________________________________________


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


January 27, 2010

EXCERPTS OF THE PRESIDENT’S STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS

We face big and difficult challenges. And what the American people hope – what they deserve – is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences; to overcome the numbing weight of our politics. For while the people who sent us here have different backgrounds and different stories and different beliefs, the anxieties they face are the same. The aspirations they hold are shared. A job that pays the bill. A chance to get ahead. Most of all, the ability to give their children a better life.

You know what else they share? They share a stubborn resilience in the face of adversity. After one of the most difficult years in our history, they remain busy building cars and teaching kids; starting businesses and going back to school. They are coaching little league and helping their neighbors. As one woman wrote to me, “We are strained but hopeful, struggling but encouraged.”

It is because of this spirit – this great decency and great strength – that I have never been more hopeful about America’s future than I am tonight. Despite our hardships, our union is strong. We do not give up. We do not quit. We don’t allow fear or division to break our spirit. In this new decade, it’s time the American people get a government that matches their decency; that embodies their strength. And tonight, I’d like to talk about how together, we can deliver on that promise.

…

By the time I’m finished speaking tonight, more Americans will have lost their health insurance. Millions will lose it this year. Our deficit will grow. Premiums will go up. Co-pays will go up. Patients will be denied the care they need. Small business owners will continue to drop coverage altogether. I will not walk away from these Americans. And neither should the people in this chamber.

…

Rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated Washington for decades, it’s time for something new. Let’s try common sense. Let’s invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt. Let’s meet our responsibility to the people who sent us here.

To do that, we have to recognize that we face more than a deficit of dollars right now. We face a deficit of trust – deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years. To close that credibility gap we must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; and to give our people the government they deserve.

That’s what I came to Washington to do. That’s why – for the first time in history – my Administration posts our White House visitors online. And that’s why we’ve excluded lobbyists from policy-making jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions.

But we cannot stop there. It’s time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my Administration or Congress. And it’s time to put strict limits on the contributions that lobbyists give to candidates for federal office. Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign companies – to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, and worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that’s why I’m urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.

I’m also calling on Congress to continue down the path of earmark reform. You have trimmed some of this spending and embraced some meaningful change. But restoring the public trust demands more. For example, some members of Congress post some earmark requests online. Tonight, I’m calling on Congress to publish all earmark requests on a single website before there’s a vote so that the American people can see how their money is being spent.

My commentary: sigh. “I’m not giving up on health care” he says, but is there going to be any specific call to the Senate to pick it up again? Will he take a stand and say that a sidecar bill passed via reconciliation is the way to go? Or is he going to step back again after issuing his vague exhortation?

Likewise, bragging about White House visitor records? talking about earmark reform? And limiting lobbysists sounds good, but “I am calling on Congress” is impotent language when his signature health care package sits on the shelf.

I’m not impressed. One hour to go. Let’s see what the rest of it contains.

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Tags: City Of Brass

The tech blogsphere is obsessed with Apple’s announcement of it’s new iPad tablet device today (personally, I’d have called it Newton 2). Frankly I don’t think the new device makes much sense from a consumer perspective and has zero chance of displacing Amazon’s Kindle from it’s throne – the Kindle is to books as the iPod was to music and iPhone to mobiles, and Apple seems intent on not repeating their common formula for success: do one thing superbly better than everyone else, for the same price. Instead, the Apple tablet wants to be all things to everyone, a classic case of being a jack of all trades and master of none.

If you’re as weary of the Apple hype machine as I am, then check out my more detailed argument for Apple Tablet skepticism over at my geek blog. Of course I might be totally wrong

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Congratulations to Senator-elect Brown – in the end, he was a better candidate and ran a better campaign against the hapless Martha Coakley, who thought she could coast on Kennedy-Obama coat-tails into office. A single statistic explains all – @marcambinder notes that “Coakley had 19 events after the primary through Sunday; Scott Brown had 66.” And more than anything else, the election outcome last night was not because of governing philosophes or political ideologies, but simply the economy, stupid.

The political blogsphere is of course consumed with the significance of MA-SEN as pertains to Obama’s anniversary in office, and the conventional wisdom is gelling across the usual lines. The GOP in full concern-troll mode says that Obama has governed as a leftist and thus must seek bipartisanship; of course it’s precisely because of Republican ideological obstructionism, filibustering every bill in the Senate and negotiating over health care in bad faith, that the Democrats have needed 60 votes to pass any bill instead of a simple majority. Then again, when your 60 vote “super majority” includes Democrats who also negotiate in bad faith, like Joe Lieberman, then you never really had 60 votes to begin with.

The simple truth is that Obama has sought a middle ground on health care insurance reform and pursued a bipartisan approach from the beginning, taking single payer off the table right off the bat, making a (in retrospect, also bad faith) deal with the industry on drug reimportation/price negotiation, and favoring but not drawing the line on a public option. As David Leonhardt points out at the NYT, the health-care reform bills before Congress are substantially more conservative than Bill Clinton’s 1993 bill or even Richard Nixon’s 1971 bill!

Meanwhile, the progressive left, immune to the irony inherent in their own ideological posturing, interpret last night as vindication of their argument that Obama hasn’t been progressive enough. In one sense, they are right – Obama has certainly not been governing as a leftist (in a sane world, this critique by the left wing would serve as sufficent rebuttal to the GOP’s claim that Obama has been too partisan, but…). But they also seem to think that Barack Obama is Howard Dean, when Obama explicitly campaigned as a moderate in all respects. Obama spoke of change, and the progressive Left translated this as “do everything the opposite of Bush” because from their perspective, that Bush was wrong on every decision and policy is an absolute political axiom. (I’m happy to list Bush policies that I agree with in a future post, but not right now).

Last night’s loss by Coakley was Coakley’s fault alone and as I have argued was in no way a referendum on Obama’s first year in office; it should be noted that Scott Brown even won Ted Kennedy’s home district of Hyannis, which suggests that the MA electorate (which is predominantly Purple, not blue or red) was looking for a Senator who respected them, not one who saw the seat as a birthright. As Mike Allen also noted on MSNBC, Coakley was leading Brown by 15 points only one week ago, which would not have been the case if this were a referendum on Obama or the Democrats.

And yet the race does indeed materially change the political environment under which Obama must labor for his second year. In some ways this is a preview of November, where the Democrats are guaranteed to lose more seats, so at some point Obama was going to have to figure out a way to govern without a supermajority in the Senate anyway. The question is what strategy to use.

The choice facing Obama and the Democratic leadership is to either a. pursue transformative, partisan, progressive-leftist change or b. pursue incrementalist, bipartisan, moderate-liberal change. The progressive netroots are as immune to reason on this as they were about the public option; they think that it’s worth abandoning health care, fighting Quixotic battles over ideological policies and achieving nothing, and maybe even primarying Obama in 2012. In this, they are allied to the Republicans, though they don’t realize it. The only progressive who does understand reality is Chris Bowers.

Obviously I favor choice b. because long ago I realized, by actually paying attention to Obama’s speeches and rhetoric, that this is what he believes in, and the post-MA-SEN political environment essentially makes this the only pragmatic route to getting anything of substance done at all. You can have meaningful health care reform without a public option, you can have meaningful climate change policy without cap and trade, you can have meaningful financial reform without increasing corporate taxes.

In a perfect world, Obama would have been able to pursue bipartisan, transformative change, but that would have required an opposition party with more dedication to the national interest rather than their own political interest. But even 60 seats was an illusion – it was really 59 + Lieberman (who backstabbed Reid), and of the 59 remaining a large bloc are Blue Dog Senators who are fiscal hawks (which most of America, even liberal blue state America, doesn’t see as a bad thing, something progressives don’t seem to really understand).

The political environment for the GOP Senators is also different as well. The threat of a Democratic Supermajority is gone, so the incentive for minority party unity is gone. With the election in November ahead, and Obama’s brilliant decision to make financial sector reform and deficit reduction the next priority, many Republican Senators are going to want to lay claim to partial ownership on these issues to show the voters that they are doing their jobs. The crew at Open Left, Swing State Project, and Congress Matters will break down the 2010 Senate races in obsessive detail over the next few months and it will be clear that there are going to be at least a few Senators (R) who will be very receptive to Obama’s imminent charm offensive.

And doing their jobs is the way that all Congress critters, R or D alike, keep their jobs. Chris Bowers posits a simple hypothetical to everyone out there who thinks otherwise:

If you think the political situation for Democrats would have been better if they had different messaging or passed different legislation, consider a simple hypothetical:

• Over the past year, instead of saying and doing what they did, Democrats in D.C. and President Obama passed exactly the legislation, and engaged in exactly the sort of messaging, you suggest..
• Despite doing this, current economic conditions are exactly the same as they are today.

In this hypothetical, if you think the political situation would be any different for Democrats than it is currently, then you are deluding yourself.

Or even more succinctly, “If you are not facing scandals, and times are good, then you will be popular no matter what you pass into law. This is about being in power when times are bad.” The key then is to pass legislation that may not be “perfect” but at least is “good” in that it makes a material differenmce to people’s lives. And that’s not going to happen without bipartisanship. Even if the GOP still refuses en masse to cooperate, then at least the Democrats have a message for November: look, we tried, but the GOP obstructed everything, even deficit reduction and financial sector reform! It’s not like we have a super majority in the Senate to force it through!”

So, what is the bottom line? MA-SEN was no referendum on Obama, but it was a sea change. In many ways it is better that this happened now instead of (inevitably) in November, because we won’t waste the next 12 months seeking mythical 60 vote super majorities and appeasing Lieberman and engaging in pointless negotiations with Snowe. Instead, the illusion is gone, and the Republicans no longer have the cover they did for their nihilistic obstructionism. Obama is freer to seek common ground and find practical, if limited, solutions. To that end it’s worth recalling Obama’s own comments from MLK day this past monday:

…our predecessors were never so consumed with theoretical debates that they couldn’t see progress when it came. Sometimes I get a little frustrated when folks just don’t want to see that even if we don’t get everything, we’re getting something. (Applause.) {Rev. Martin Luther] King understood that the desegregation of the Armed Forces didn’t end the civil rights movement, because black and white soldiers still couldn’t sit together at the same lunch counter when they came home. But he still insisted on the rightness of desegregating the Armed Forces. That was a good first step — even as he called for more. He didn’t suggest that somehow by the signing of the Civil Rights that somehow all discrimination would end. But he also didn’t think that we shouldn’t sign the Civil Rights Act because it hasn’t solved every problem. Let’s take a victory, he said, and then keep on marching. Forward steps, large and small, were recognized for what they were — which was progress.

It’s a bitter irony indeed that progressives, of all people, are the ones who are most opposed to progress today.

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Tags: City Of Brass

There’s an annular solar eclipse today, with peak eclipse at about 07:06 UT – only affecting the Eastern Hemisphere, with path of maximum eclipse passing almost along the equator across Africa, the tip of India, and across Indonesia and China. Here’s the PDF from NASA with the graphical path and here’s the details from NASA’s 2010 eclipse page:

The first solar eclipse of 2010 occurs at the Moon’s ascending node in western Sagittarius. An annular eclipse will be visible from a 300-km-wide track that traverses central Africa, the Indian Ocean and eastern Asia (Espenak and Anderson, 2008). A partial eclipse is seen within the much broader path of the Moon’s penumbral shadow, which includes eastern Europe, most of Africa, Asia, and Indonesia (Figure 1).

The annular path begins in westernmost Central African Republic at 05:14 UT. Because the Moon passes through apogee two days later (Jan 17 at 01:41 UT), its large distance from Earth produces an unusually wide path of annularity. Traveling eastward, the shadow quickly sweeps through Uganda, Kenya, and southern Somalia while the central line duration of annularity grows from 7 to 9 minutes.

For the next two hours, the antumbra crosses the Indian Ocean, its course slowly curving from east-southeast to northeast. The instant of greatest eclipse [1] occurs at 07:06:33 UT when the eclipse magnitude [2] will reach 0.9190. At this instant, the duration of annularity is 11 minutes 8 seconds, the path width is 333 kilometers and the Sun is 66° above the flat horizon formed by the open ocean. Such a long annular duration will not be exceeded for over 1000 years (3043 Dec 23).

The central track continues northeast where it finally encounters land in the Maldive Islands (07:26 UT). The capital city Male experiences an annular phase lasting 10 minutes 45 seconds This is the longest duration of any city having an international airport in the eclipse track.

When the antumbra reaches Asia the central line passes directly between the southern tip of India and northern Sri Lanka (07:51 UT). Both regions lie within the path where maximum annularity lasts 10 minutes 15 seconds Quickly sweeping over the Bay of Bengal the shadow reaches Burma where the central line duration is 8 minutes 48 seconds and the Sun’s altitude is 34°.

By 08:41 UT, the central line enters China. The shadow crosses the Himalayas through Yunnan and Sichuan provinces Chongqing lies directly on the central line and witnesses a duration of 7 minutes 50 seconds with the Sun 15° above the horizon. Racing through parts of Shaanxi and Hubei provinces, the antumbra’s speed increases as the duration decreases. In its final moments, the antumbra travels down the Shandong Peninsula and leaves Earth’s surface (08:59 UT).

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The decade that ended seems to have its epitaph written by consensus: thank god it’s over. And while it certainly was no picnic for the West to have terrorism, economic meltdowns, and environmental catastrophes as afflictions, in all respects the burden of these bad things fell far more heavily on the muslim and developing world.

However, that’s not to say that the decade was uniformly a bad one. Even the silver linings attached to the catastrophes were valuable in themselves. In fact at altmuslim my friend Zahed takes pains to enumerate the “top ten good news stories of 2009” for muslims and it’s a reminder of just how much has indeed changed over the past ten years that we are not as aware of as we should be. I’ll list the top ten items below, but you must read the whole essay for the details:

1. A technological (if not political) revolution in Iran

2. Muslim countries become more democratic, more moderate

3. In 2009, a tipping point for halal foods

4. In the US, a Muslim promotes change from within

5. Striking gold with the Goldstone Report

6. Italy makes a stand against rendition

7. In popular culture, a new Muslim image

8. An education in freedom for Saudi Arabia

9. Faced with violent protest, Muslims learn from experience

10. Rifqa Bary is freed from her kidnappers

Again, read Zahed’s piece for in-depth explanations of each of these, it’s truly essential reading. I’m proud to say that I’ve covered many (though not all) of these stories here at City of Brass, and of course all of them have been debated at Talk Islam as well.

Zahed is not the only one considering the silver lining of 2009. Asim Siddiqui, a writer at Comment is Free at The Guardian, also considers the way in which muslim communities were empowered (by neccessity) to communicate:

The upside of this new focus on Islam has been far greater levels of engagement between Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Fresh voices began to be heard in the public domain that showed wider society an Islam whose values were common and whose aspirations were shared by most ordinary people. Muslims would increasingly ask themselves what benefit they could bring to those outside their faith community. There was also far greater interest in learning from others.

(…) Today, the diversity of Muslim voices in the public domain make it much more difficult than it was 10 years ago for any one Muslim group to get away with speaking on behalf all Muslims. It is also more difficult for elements in the media to make gross generalisations, as so many more Muslims are now themselves part of the print and broadcast media. The same is increasingly true of the political and business worlds.

The British press in particular has been one avenue of that communication and exposure of muslim voices – my friend and TI co-blogger Thabet gives credit where it’s due in that regard:

Muslims did not have an adequate platform on which to respond to such criticisms. However, to their credit, some in the “mainstream” English media are now giving voices to “mainstream” Muslims (this still appears, to me, to be a major problem in mainland Europe). And I think Muslims should recognise and welcome this change.

Perhaps the biggest and best experiment in mass blogging, The Guardian’s Comment is free, has given a voice to Muslims across the entire range of Islamic/ate viewpoints. This includes non-religious secularists; Islamists; reformists; representatives of major Muslim organisations; and even to the much-dreaded Hizb al-Tahrir (which is a major irony). Indeed, run through the list of contributors at the blog and see how many “Muslim names” appear.

And the very platfrom from which Ayaan Hirsi WhatsHerFaceName was recently denouncing Islam, On Faith (part of Washington Post), has devoted an entire section of their blog to mainstream figures such as Sh. Ali Gomaa, Sherman Jackson and Timothy Winter.

I think that this is a key point – in 2009, the muslim voice was liberated and motivated to respond to the provocations of the muslim etxremists. Those who continue to argue the old canard that muslims are “silent” are simply irrelevant; muslims are increasingly a part of the debate thanks to the new media and will continue to grow in that regard during the decade ahead.

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I was saddened to hear of the violence in Iran during Ashura, in which Ali Mousavi (the nephew of reform candidate Mir Hosein Mousavi) was among the protestors who were shot and killed by the security forces.

Police denied however that anyone had died in the clashes, which witnesses said came as tens of thousands of opposition supporters took to the streets of Tehran for a second straight day to use rituals of the Shiite Ashura ceremony to stage protests.

Police, according to witnesses, had first used batons and tear gas in the crackdown, which followed stern warnings by the authorities that they would crush attempts to use the Ashura processions as a launch pad for protests.

This is a tragedy indeed. But the fact that the protestors were trying to use the Ashura processions as a vehicle for their political protest disturbs me a great deal as well. The argument I object to is well summarized at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, in an email to him by a reader (and friend of mine):

Ali was a seyyed … of the line of the Imam.

Western analysts do not actually understand the importance of the twin mantles of heredity and scholarship to the Shi’ia. This will start the martyrdom remembrance cycle … with Ali Mousavi as the Shaheed, the martyr. I predict this is the single event that will crush the tyrant regime of Khamenei and ‘Nejad.

Killing a seyyed during Ashura? Gasoline on the fires of revolution. If Qom was not in the Green Wave before this will submerge them.


This is a martyrdom of far greater import than any killings so far….this is an exact parallel to the martyrdom of Imam Ali at the hands of Ummayyads.

Emphasis mine – and no, it is by no means an exact parallel at all, in fact it is the furthest thing from it indeed.

Imam Husain’s AS sacrifice at Karbala was definitely intended as an inspiration to all mankind, and sent a message of defiance to those who would seek to hide Ultimate Truth. This was an act of piety, resisting an enemy who sought not mere political power but the obliteration of the very salvation of humanity itself – the Message of Allah to humankind, as promulgated from the prophets Adam AS, Nuh AS (Noah), Ibrahim AS (Abraham), Musa AS (Moses), Issa AS (Jesus), and Mohammed SAW. Husain AS did not seek political power but rather the simple right to practice and preach the faith whose guardianship he was entrusted with – and the price he paid, willingly, was that of the blood of his entire family, including his six-month old son who died in his arms, thirst unslaked.

The Iranian reformists meanwhile are engaged in a political struggle, with the aim of replacing Ahmadinejad with Moussavi as President of the Iranian regime. It is right that they seek inspiration from Husain’s AS sacrifice, but wrong for them to wrap themselves in Husain’s AS mantle. The day of Ashura is to commemorate Husain’s AS sacrifice and to use that sacred and solemn moment to agitate for ther goals is to place deen above dunya, to value the short term over the eternal. The axis of struggle between Yazid LA and Husain AS was for the future of mankind, for Islam, and for God. not just about which mullah gets promoted to top mullah in some bureaucracy.

Imam Husain AS won his struggle by losing his life. The goal, and the destiny, of Husain AS was always to die at Karbala, and in his own words “meet his Lord while he is right. Thus I do not see death but as happiness, and living with tyrants but as sorrow.” Living under Yazid’s tyrannny was sorrow to Husain AS, not because of mere political repression, but because the Ummaiyads were trying to eradicate Truth, Islam itself, from within. It was by death that Husain AS could change this, and he succeeded, by reminding muslims what Islam really was.

I have long been sympathetic to the reformers’ cause. But for me to sanction how they have usurped Husain AS in the name of their struggle, on the very day devoted to his martyrdom, just because I agree with their cause? That would make me a hypocrite indeed, because I have faulted the likes of bin Laden and Al Qaeda for doing much the same thing. Religion isn’t a took to promote political struggle. Well, I guess it is – but it shouldn’t be.

(welcome, Instapundit readers – you may be interested in my thoughts on packs, herds, and security in the wake of the attempted bombing of Flight 253 to Detroiit as well).

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This is the view from an apartment of friends of ours who live in Cuffe Parade, Mumbai. The view is west, over the Arabian Sea (see the map). CP and Colaba and other areas at the very tip of Mumbai are among the most exclusive areas of the city. Getting here from Marol took about two hours, even with the new Sea Link bridge.

(more of my photos are here)

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The architecture of Mumbai is chaos incarnate, with slums and skyscrapers alongside. But there are also magnificent examples of British-era style that stand out and remind the observer of a different time, when a city named Bombay was the center of the mercantile world under an empire and queen.

(see more of my photos here.)

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The Islamic New Year is almost upon us – by the Fatimid calendar, the month of Muharram al Haram begins tonight at sunset. For Shi’a muslims, the new year marks the start of the Ashara 10-day period of mourning for Imam Husain AS, which culminates on Yawme Ashura, the 10th of Muharram (next Saturday). The centuries-old tradition of my community of Shi’a muslims, the Dawoodi Bohras, is to congregate en masse to hear sermons from our spiritual leader, Dr. Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin TUS. This year, Syedna TUS has chosen Marol, Mumbai as the venue for Ashara and so I am flying out tonight, to return Monday after next.

Inshallah I will be posting photos and the occassional text from there, but the frequency of my posts (especially over the next few days until I arrive in Mumbai) is going to be decreased. I do recommend saying tuned to Talk Islam for the latest news, politics, and discussions in the meantime (I’ll post an notice there too if/when I have new posts here at COB).

Off to Mumbai!

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