Meanwhile, In Syria...

And while the chemical weapons are being dealt with, the much larger problem of the Syrian civil war and millions of refugees remains, the UN is about to make life very uncomfortable for Bashar al-Assad.

A growing body of evidence collected by U.N. investigators points to the involvement of senior Syrian officials, including President Bashar Assad, in crimes against humanity and war crimes, the U.N.'s top human rights official said Monday.

Navi Pillay, who heads the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the scale and viciousness of the abuses being perpetrated by both sides almost defies belief, and is being well documented by an expert U.N. panel of investigators.

"They've produced massive evidence," she told a news conference. "They point to the fact that the evidence indicates responsibility at the highest level of government, including the head of state."

But Pillay said the lists of suspected criminals are handed to her on a confidential basis and will remain sealed until requested by international or national authorities for a "credible investigation," and then possibly used for prosecution.

Pillay said she worries about striking the right balance in determining how long to keep the information secret. The lists "rightly belongs to the people who suffered violations," she said, but they also must be kept sealed "to preserve the presumption of innocence" until proper judicial probes can be done that could lead to trial.

In other words, the movement for Syrian regime change is about to get a major shot int he arm, and this time the world's not going to be able to look away.  With a formal declaration of war crimes against the Assad regime, somebody's going to have to go in there and get the guy out.

Well, unless Russia wants to play chicken with the UN some more, which would actually keep troops out of there.  Considering there's a very likely possibility those troops will be American, I'm thinking that some sort of deal for Assad's departure will be worked out.

Hopefully.

If not, well, it's going to get ugly.

StupidiNews!

• National Transportation Safety Board officials say the Bronx commuter train in Sunday's deadly derailment was going 82 miles an hour through a curve rated for just 30 MPH. 
• Police in Reykjavik, Iceland are apologizing for the country's first fatal police shooting as officers were unable to subdue a man with a shotgun without resorting to lethal force.
• US Justice Department officials are accusing a former governor of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas of using millions in drug cartel bribes to invest in Texas real estate.
• New global finance figures show China's yuan has surpassed the euro in 2013 as the second-most used global currency in the world, behind the US dollar.
• Facebook is finally allowing users to channel their inner passive-aggressive tendencies by having users keep their friends, but be able to unfollow their posts.

Last Call For Papal Bull

Ross Douthat, conservative columnist for the NY Times and self-styled modern right-wing Catholic, has decided that Pope Francis's recent missive on the evils of trickle-down capitalism just doesn't apply to trickle-down capitalists like Ross Douthat.

That explanation rests, I think, on three ideas. First, that when it comes to lifting the poor out of poverty, global capitalism, faults and all, has a better track record by far than any other system or approach. 

Second, that Catholic social teaching, properly understood, emphasizes both solidarity and subsidiarity — that is, a small-c conservative preference for local efforts over national ones, voluntarism over bureaucracy. 

Third, that on recent evidence, the most expansive welfare states can crowd out what Christianity considers the most basic human goods — by lowering birthrates, discouraging private charity and restricting the church’s freedom to minister in subtle but increasingly consequential ways. 

This Catholic case for limited government, however, is not a case for the Ayn Randian temptation inherent to a capitalism-friendly politics. There is no Catholic warrant for valorizing entrepreneurs at the expense of ordinary workers, or for dismissing all regulation as unnecessary and all redistribution as immoral. 

And this is where Francis’s vision should matter to American Catholics who usually cast ballots for Republican politicians. The pope’s words shouldn’t inspire them to convert en masse to liberalism, or to worry that the throne of Peter has been seized by a Marxist anti-pope. But they should encourage a much greater integration of Catholic and conservative ideas than we’ve seen since “compassionate conservatism” collapsed, and inspire Catholics to ask more — often much more — of the Republican Party, on a range of policy issues. 

Translation:  Conservative Catholicism can never fail, it can only be failed.  Spare the rod and spoil the child beats I am my brother's keeper any day of the week, apparently.  We'll just have to double down on the beatings until morale improves and bootstraps are lifted by themselves.

That's pretty much the opposite of what Pope Francis is actually saying, but that's what Ross sees.  Funny how that just happens to be exactly the same social shaming formula we've seen from the fire and brimstone set for the last entire history of Christian religion.

General Austerity And Major Cutbacks Meet Private Sector

The NY Times editorial board has tossed a few at the austerity dartboard and has decided that the real problem with Pentagon waste is all those people.

Big-ticket weapons like aircraft carriers and the F-35 fighter jet have to be part of any conversation about cutting Pentagon spending to satisfy the mandatory budget reductions known as the sequester. But compensation for military personnel has to be on the table, too — even though no other defense issue is more politically volatile or emotionally fraught. 

After a decade of war, the very idea of cutting benefits to soldiers, sailors and Marines who put their lives on the line seems ungrateful. But America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is over or winding down, and the Pentagon is obliged to find nearly $1 trillion in savings over 10 years. Tough choices will be required in all parts of the budget. Compensation includes pay, retirement benefits, health care and housing allowances. It consumes about half the military budget, and it is increasing. 

In a speech last month, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned that without serious savings in this area, “we risk becoming an unbalanced force, one that is well compensated but poorly trained and equipped, with limited readiness and capability.” Meanwhile, Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, told a hearing: “The cost of a soldier has doubled since 2001; it’s going to almost double again by 2025. We can’t go on like this, so we have to come up with [new] compensation packages.” 

That's really something to think that the largest part of the Pentagon budget is paying the troops, not the billions thrown into weapons programs.  Apparently, we still need the weapons programs, but the troops, well, not so much.

So if you're wondering where the outcry is when we've got 900,000 veterans on SNAP assistance for food and that's getting slashed, the answer is that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets and surviving Vietnam, Korea, and Gulf War vets don't all mean that much to the Great Austerian Movement.  They're government employees, after all.  And we've learned to treat them as the enemy.  Better to load up with private contractors to do the dirty work rather than a standing military force.

Welcome to Somebody Else's Problem Military.

Going Sane In The Ukraine

Things are getting rather interesting in Russia's neighbor to the west, as tens of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets of Kiev to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich over his too close relationship with Vladimir Putin's Russia.  The result?  A massive, bloody crackdown.

Eleven days of intensifying protests over Mr. Yanukovich’s refusal to sign political and free trade accords with the European Union have now directly shaken the president’s prospects of remaining in power. Cracks have begun to emerge in his political base: His chief of administration was reported to have resigned, and a few members of Parliament quit his party and decried the police violence.

Many Ukrainians see the agreements with Europe as crucial steps toward a brighter economic and political future, and as a way to break free from the grip of Russia and from Ukraine’s Soviet past. Now, the outcry over Mr. Yanukovich’s abandonment of the accords is pushing Russia into a corner.

The Kremlin, which has supported Mr. Yanukovich as a geopolitical ally for years despite its frequent annoyance with him, used aggressive pressure to persuade him not to sign the accords. Now the anger over Russia’s role has made it all but impossible for Mr. Yanukovich to take the alternative offered by the Kremlin — joining a customs union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Any compromise with the protesters would have to revive the accords with Europe, and reduce Russia’s sway.

Even as Mr. Yanukovich was said to be considering declaring a state of emergency, parliamentary leaders began contemplating various ways to curtail his powers, rather than remove him from office entirely. Volodymy Rybak, the speaker of the Parliament, which is controlled by Mr. Yanukovich’s Party of Regions, on Sunday called for “round-table talks” to help resolve the crisis. Similar talks were conducted in 2004 to resolve the disputes that set off the Orange Revolution.

The steady escalation of the protests — and the threat of further violent crackdowns — has created a volatile situation that showed no sign of abating.

Yanukovich reneging on his trade deals with the EU was the bridge too far here, in what was already seen as a puppet regime for Putin.  The Ukrainian military brought in all kinds of hardware to clear the streets of Kiev over the weekend.  If all this seems familiar, you're recalling Ukraine's Orange Revolution nine years ago.  Then, Yanukovich was the man who stole the election.  Now, he is the man stealing Ukraine's future.

As of now, protesters are blockading Kiev's main government building, supposedly meaning Yanukovich is somewhere inside.  We'll see what happens, but it's going to get a lot worse on the streets of Kiev before they get better.

StupidiNews!

• China has launched the nation's first lunar probe in an attempt to join the US and Russia as the only nations to land a probe on the Moon's surface.
• Four are dead and 63 injured in a commuter train derailment in the Bronx section of New York City over the weekend.
• Egypt's proposed new constitution does expand rights and freedoms of Egyptian citizens, but the military regime continues to crack down on protesters.
• In the wake of a government-blocked takeover bid by US agriculture giant ADM, eastern Austrailia's GrainCorp is now looking for a new CEO.
• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos debuted the company's latest project on 60 Minutes on Sunday:  delivery of Amazon Prime products by drone, which could be available by 2017 or 2018.

McMegan Strikes Again

Megan McArdle on the Hobby Lobby case for Bloomberg News, showing off her unique ability to completely miss the point on anything big:

Social media was on fire over this when it happened, and I confess that I am struggling to see why. There was a lot of outraged talk about how corporations aren’t people, of course, but a lot more about employers trying to control their employees’ sex lives, treating women as second-class citizens and so forth. To judge from these reactions, you would think that birth-control pills were a scarce resource that could only legally be obtained through employers. In fact, generic birth-control pills are available for $25 a month through a Costco pharmacy, $50 if you want a brand name. 

“But that’s expensive for a young woman on a budget!” you are about to cry. And I am about to answer that it doesn’t get less expensive because an insurer buys it. Regular, predictable expenses such as birth-control pills cannot be defrayed by insurance; they can only be prepaid, with a markup for the insurer’s administrative costs. The extra cost is passed on by the insurers to your employer, and from your employer to you and your fellow workers, either by raising your contribution or lowering the wage they are willing to offer. There’s obviously some cross-subsidy from your fellow employees who don’t use birth control, but overall, there’s no particular reason to force insurers to cover a minor and predictable expense.

If Megan would get over her privilege long enough to realize that A) plenty of employers -- including Hobby Lobby -- were covering birth control through insurance plans before the PPACA, B) it still represents an expense that no male employee has to worry about, and C) birth control is far less expensive than pre-natal, birthing, and post-natal care, she'd stop making such pathetic excuses to explain down to "those people" why they should just pay for it their damn selves if they want to open their legs.

The administration didn’t force employers with a religious objection to offer contraception because it made financial or medical sense; they did it because it had great symbolic value to Barack Obama’s political base. And much of that symbolic value seems to actually come from the willingness to coerce people who object to buy the stuff. You can imagine that in an intra-left debate over what mandatory services should be covered, some of the people now professing outrage at Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. (one of the parties involved) would see the logic of ditching birth control if it lowered premiums by $15 a month and thereby increased access.

To recap, the professional economics pundit can't come up with a single reason why an employer offering birth control would make financial sense to the employer.  (Here's a hint, it involves suddenly having another child to cover under the plan.)

But, in fact, if you want to make the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act viable for the long term, you’re going to need the support of folks like Hobby Lobby as much as you need low premiums. There are many religious people in America, and if you want to keep stirring up active opposition to the law, one good way is to suggest that this law forces them to pay for something they are convinced is morally wrong. (Hobby Lobby’s objection is not to contraception in general, but specifically to products that could prevent a fertilized egg from implanting.) If you want to still be fighting Obamacare in the trenches 40 years from now, the best way I can think of is appending it to the argument over abortion.

Why, which is exactly the reason the GOP is making a big deal out of this.  It doesn't matter than Hobby Lobby is scientifically wrong and financially ignorant, the religious issue itself is the major problem, and McArdle just dismisses it as "Hobby Lobby is right" and clucks her tongue.

What puerile vapidity.  At least admit it's Obama Derangement Syndrome, and being used to punish female Hobby Lobby employees who voted for Obama.

I understand that you may think Hobby Lobby’s position is ridiculous, or that contraception is a fundamental human right, but here’s the problem: Hobby Lobby’s owners, and millions of other Americans, hold the opposite opinion at least as strongly. In a pluralistic society, they have the right to fight you on it every step of the way. To state the obvious, Obamacare is probably not going to survive many more such battles.

Substitute "civil rights" for "contraception" and either "The Civil Rights Act" or "The Voting Rights Act" for Obamacare and read that paragraph again, and you'll find why Megan McArdle really does need to be fired for staggering incompetence.

You're A Democrat, Alison

The Daily Beast's Sam Youngman has the same question I do for Alison Lundergan Grimes as she tries to defeat Mitch McConnell in 2014:  When are you going to admit you're a Democrat?

There is grumbling in Frankfort and Washington, at least outside of the DSCC’s press office, about the state of the Grimes campaign and concerns about the lack of growth. 

Four factors have stopped Democrats from pushing the panic button: 1. It is just still way too darn early for Kentuckians to care about an election just less than a year away. 2. Grimes is avoiding any lasting damage from her missteps. 3. In national media reports, Grimes is being hailed as a strong and sturdy challenger who excels on the stump. And 4. She outraised McConnell in her first quarterly report at the end of October. 

The first two are undeniable and speak to just how much time and space Grimes has in front of her to find her footing as a candidate. 

The third is risky for Grimes, clearly enjoying the national media spotlight and potentially risking complacency as she and her team have looked at poll numbers in the mid to low-40s as signs of support instead of the more likely result of dislike for McConnell. 

But the fourth factor was key. Grimes raised more than $2.5 million in her first quarter as a candidate, out-raising the Senate minority leader, who came up with a personal best of $2.27 million. 

While the triumph was near universally pronounced as an eye-popping sign of Grimes’s strength, it too could be misleading. 

First and foremost, it ignores the $10 million McConnell still has in cash despite a shocking burn rate aimed at bruising Grimes and Bevin right out of the gate. Not to mention the cozy six degrees of separation two post-Citizens United groups—McConnell’s SuperPAC Kentuckians for Strong Leadership and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads—share with McConnell, beginning with former campaign manager and longtime ally Steven Law, who holds leadership positions with both groups. 

If you’re a conservative giving to Crossroads next year, your money is going to Kentucky.

Mitch McConnell is mortally wounded and should have lost to Bruce Lunsford in 2008.  But at some point, Grimes is going to have to at least pretend she's to the left of Mitch.  So far that's not happening.

It really needs to.

Another Failure To Communicate

NY Times columnist Timothy Egan has noticed that the entire GOP strategy these days is making sure President Obama (and everyone who voted for him) fails.

It’s hard to remember a time when a major political party and its media arm were so actively rooting for fellow Americans to lose. When the first attempt by the United States to launch a satellite into orbit, in 1957, ended in disaster, did Democrats start to cheer, and unify to stop a space program in its infancy? Or, when Medicare got off to a confusing start, did Republicans of the mid-1960s wrap their entire political future around a campaign to deny government-run health care to the elderly? 

Of course not. But for the entirety of the Obama era, Republicans have consistently been cheerleaders for failure. They rooted for the economic recovery to sputter, for gas prices to spike, the job market to crater, the rescue of the American automobile industry to fall apart. 

I get it. This organized schadenfreude goes back to the dawn of Obama’s presidency, when Rush Limbaugh, later joined by Senator Mitch McConnell, said their No. 1 goal was for the president to fail. A CNN poll in 2010 found 61 percent of Republicans hoping Obama would fail (versus only 27 percent among all Americans). 

Wish granted, mission accomplished. Obama has failed — that is, if you judge by his tanking poll numbers. But does this collapse in approval have to mean that the last best chance for expanding health care for millions of Americans must fail as well?

Egan has some good points here, but let's go over two things here.  One, what's different about Barack Obama compared to the previous 43 POTUS, and two how terrified are the Republican tea party rump of an America that allows someone like Barack Obama to become President?

It's gotten to the point where not only Obama must fail and suffer, but everyone who supported him.  We all have to pay for messing up "their" America.  So yes, that includes anyone Obamacare is trying to help.  That includes making it harder for the people who supported the President to vote.  That includes making it harder for the people who supported the President to feed their families, and earn a decent wage, and get decent health care and schools and opportunities.

Which is fine with the GOP.  They don't see it as rooting against Americans, because they don't see us as "real Americans".  We're just "those people".

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• A US Korean War veteran remains held into a second month by North Korea and the communist country has issued an "apology" statement they say is from 85-year-old Merrill Newman.
• NASA's latest Space X collaboration mission may be to put a "lunar greenhouse" on the surface on the moon in 2015.
• The White House is "confident" that most of the problems with the helathcare.gov website have been ironed out as the President's self-imposed December 1 approaches.
• Business leaders are increasingly angry that zero progress has been made on the December 13th budget deal proposal made as part of the resolution of the government shutdown in October.
• An MIT scientist has come up with a process to make "superhydrophobic" materials that repel water in half the time of current water-repellent surfaces.

Last Call For Argle Bargle Bloogity Bloo

This country is insane.

A birther preacher is pushing the conspiracy theory that Miriam Carey, who was shot to death Oct. 3 after police said she tried to ram her car into a barrier outside the White House, was the mother of President Barack Obama’s illegitimate child. 

Rev. James David Manning, pastor of Atlah World Missionary Church who believes the president was born in Kenya, claims that Carey’s family has called for a paternity test to determine whether the woman’s 15-month-old daughter was fathered by the president. 

While Carey’s family has indeed asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to look into the fatal shooting, the only source for the claim about the family’s request for a paternity test seems to be additional videos posted online by Manning. 

He also links to a Change.org petition purportedly set up by Carey’s sister asking for more investigation, but that too fails to mention a paternity test.

Thanks, Obama!

The Other Side: Hobby Lobby's Waging War

A Twitter exchange this morning with Hot Air's Jazz Shaw about Hobby Lobby partially resulted in this post on something we both agree on:  the pending Hobby Lobby SCOTUS case will have far-ranging effects on American businesses and employees, and that the religious freedoms of the company are not the real issue (bold emphasis mine:)

But this leads us to what I think should be the real debate at the heart of this case. The question I would like to hear the SCOTUS justices ask the participants in this case is as follows: “Do you believe that the government has the power to tell employers how many days of paid vacation they have to offer their employees?” 

Employers offer a collection of things to prospective applicants for job openings which the HR department collectively refers to as a compensation package. This goes far beyond the wages offered, covering items such as vacation, sick time, casual Fridays, employer contributions to 401K plans and, yes, health care options. Different companies offer different packages, and as you would expect, those who offer the best collection of benefits will attract the most and the best applicants. The employer must balance the costs of all this against their bottom line. 

Conversely, an employer who offers virtually nothing but the bare minimum wage will attract only those who can’t find a position anywhere else. They may show up for work most of the time, but they will hardly be motivated to excel and further the company’s goals, generally keeping an eye on the clock and the door, hoping for a chance to bolt to a better situation. Such a company is unlikely to do well. It’s the invisible hand of the market at work yet again. So the real question I’m asking is not if the employer has the religious freedom to single out certain items of health care which they will or will not offer, but rather if they have the freedom to decide which – if any – benefits they offer the employee of any kind and to live with the consequences of those decisions. If the Hobby Lobby case actually settles anything, I’d hope it would be that question rather than the religious liberty debate which dominates the headlines.

And this is a point where I freely admit Jazz and I are on different sides.  Jazz argues that businesses should be able to determine in a free market system what compensation and benefits they can offer, and that the government should step aside and let the market determine the winners.  My argument is that if a local, state, or federal government elects people who create laws to mandate minimums that apply to all businesses and those laws are passed by elected officials in a representative democracy, then businesses are obligated to follow those laws.

It's classic libertarian versus liberal stuff here.  US v. Darby Lumber Company, decided in 1941, clearly held that under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution that since Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, and that Congress has the power to regulate commerce, then a federal minimum wage was within the purview of the Congress.   That's the same legal logic behind the Affordable Care Act's minimum coverage laws for health insurance, including birth control.

The issue of the scope of what constitutes "commerce" has long been a bone of contention in American jurisprudence, as the Tenth Amendment declares intrastate commerce the dominion of states themselves. Either way, states all have minimum wage laws that cover this as well, even if it just says "The minimum wage is whatever the federal minimum wage is right now."  Some states have higher minimum wages than the federal one.  Those too are constitutional.

So that again brings us back to Jazz's question:  do businesses have any real freedom to decide what they can offer employees at all?  Would allowing them to do so help the American economy?

My answer is yes, they do, and yes, at the expense of workers.  Look, let's not split hairs here on this:  a business is in business to turn a profit, and in nearly every business I can think of, from lemonade stands to professional sports teams, the number one cost of a business is paying employees.  If we got rid of the minimum wage tomorrow, you can bet that the invisible hand of the free market would pull everyone's wages down.  If your employer can pay you less for the same work, they're going to do it.

If I'm Wal-Mart, and I have shareholders, my job is to provide maximum profit to the shareholders.  So if I can get away with paying my cashiers $2 an hour, and I can find cashiers who will work for that much, then I win.  Are they going to be the best cashiers?  Probably not, but you know what?  If I'm the nation's largest private employer and I drastically lower wages, and I've driven local competition out of business, and I can lower my prices even further in order to keep customers, I win again.

The real issue is not whether or not we need a minimum wage or regulation of benefits, it's whether or not we want to be a country where working 40 hours a week is enough to support a household.  Increasingly, the answer is no, and that has long term repercussions.  After all, workers that don't get paid don't have money to spend.

Recount Redux In Virginia

It's official:  Republican Mark Obenshain has officially filed for a recount in his 165-vote loss to Democrat Mark Herring for the Virginia Attorney General's race, and TPM's Dan Strauss has the details:

A three-judge panel is formed for overseeing the election process. The panel, made up of the chief judge of the Richmond Circuit Court, Bradley B. Cavedo, and two other judges appointed by the Supreme Court of Virginia will oversee the recount. Most of the rules for the recount are already established but the panel will handle setting some of the procedures for the recount as well as any complaints either the Obenshain campaign or Herring campaign has about how the recount is going. The panel will hold hearings roughly a week after the Obenshain campaign's recount petition has been filed to establish the specific dates and procedures for the recount.

The Obenshain campaign said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday morning that it expected the recount to happen sometime in mid-December and that it would likely take a day, possibly two, for all the ballots to be recounted.

This recount will be different from previous Virginia recounts in that all ballots counted through optical scan will be rescanned again. That's in contrast to the 2005 attorney general recount between Bob McDonnell (R) and Creigh Deeds (D). State law during that recount said that the three-judge panel had to re-tabulate scanned ballots by hand. In 2008, Deeds sponsored legislation changing the law so all scanned ballots went through optical scan machines again instead of a hand recount. All other types of ballots cast in the race, including provisional and absentee, will be hand counted again.

What I don't expect:  the idiotic Minnesota Al Franken/Norm Coleman 2008 recount that took well into 2009 before Franken was declared the winner.  Hopefully Herring will be declared the victor before Christmas.

We'll keep an eye on this one.

StupidiNews!

• US and Japanese officials are investigating an "improvised explosive device" found outside a US airbase in Japan.
• The Elkhart, Indiana Pizza Hut manager who was fired for closing his store on Thanksgiving so his employees could enjoy the holiday has been reinstated by corporate, but he doesn't know if he'll accept.
• The Congressional Black Caucus is asking Attorney General Eric Holder to take a closer look at Ohio's proposed voter ID and early voting restriction bills.
• Retailers are taking even more precautions this year to prevent any injuries or deaths from crowds of eager Black Friday shoppers.
• Georgia police apparently caught a group of people trying to sneak tobacco into a state prison by using a commercial drone.

StupidiNews, Turkey Day Edition!

• The International Atomic Energy Agency is accepting Iran's invitation to send nuclear inspectors to its Arak nuclear facility on December 8th.
• The Obama administration has pushed back the debut of the online marketplace for small businesses to shop for group health care plans until next November.
• With House Republicans blocking any tax increases, states from Maryland to Wyoming are resorting to their own tax measures to pay for roads and bridges in dire need of repair.
• President Obama and the First Family stopped by the Capital Area Food Bank to put together Thanksgvining meals for DC's neediest.
• A British journalist admits he had a number of Bitcoins on his hard drive that went to a London landfill, and now that data is worth $7.5 million.