Author Archives: CeciliaPud

"Arming Our Allies" a Fiasco Yet Again in Yemen

Mother Jones

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No surprise here:

The Pentagon is unable to account for more than $500 million in U.S. military aid given to Yemen amid fears that the weaponry, aircraft and equipment is at risk of being seized by Iranian-backed rebels or al-Qaeda, according to U.S. officials.

….“We have to assume it’s completely compromised and gone,” said a legislative aide on Capitol Hill, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

“Arming our allies” works sometimes, but just as often it ends up like this. If we’d done this in Syria two years ago, those arms would most likely be in the hands of ISIS or Iranian militias by now.

There just aren’t very many good middle grounds between staying out of a fight and getting fully engaged in it. Iraq is our latest stab at this middle ground, and so far it’s too early to say how it’s going. But recent history is not kind to the idea.

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"Arming Our Allies" a Fiasco Yet Again in Yemen

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Watch Killer Mike’s Passionate Speech on Michael Brown

Mother Jones

Moments before a scheduled performance in St. Louis Monday night, Killer Mike of the rap duo Run The Jewels delivered an incredibly forceful speech about the news of a grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the Ferguson officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown more than three months ago.

“Tonight, I got kicked on my ass when I listened to that prosecutor. You motherfuckers got me. I knew it was coming, I knew when Eric Holder decided to resign, I knew it wasn’t going to be good.”

“I have a twenty-year-old son and I have a twelve-year-old son and I am so afraid for them,” Killer Mike told the crowd, his voice cracked through held-back tears. “When I stood in front of my wife and I hugged her and I cried like a baby, I said ‘These motherfuckers got me today.'”

The impassioned speech ended with a powerful reference to Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights leader’s tragic death at the age of 39.

“I promise if I die when I walk off this stage tomorrow, I’m going to let you know it’s not about race, it’s not about class, it’s not about color. It is about what they killed him for: It is about poverty, it is about greed, and it is about a war machine. It is us against the motherfucking machine.”

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Watch Killer Mike’s Passionate Speech on Michael Brown

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Obama Announces Policy Change, Hill Dems Complain. Film At 11.

Mother Jones

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Here’s a Twitter conversation between me and Ezra Klein on Saturday:

Klein: What I’m hearing from Hill Dems is that they’re happy the immigration order is delayed, but angry at how poorly the issue has been handled

Drum: Of course they are. That’s the eternal complaint when they can’t think of anything substantive to gripe about.

Klein: I think that’s too pat a response: sometimes issues are poorly handled.

Drum: Sure. But lately, Ds complain about *every* issue being badly handled. (Or having “bad optics.”)

Klein provides more detail here, and Andrew Sullivan rounds up the liberal reaction here. But is there really any serious political malpractice going on? There is to this extent: the White House apparently didn’t read the tea leaves properly earlier this summer when it announced that Obama would take executive action on immigration after it became clear that Republicans in the House were unwilling to act. Following that, though, Obama’s only choice was either to stick to his guns or announce a delay. The former would have irked congressional Democrats, so he chose to announce a delay.

It’s hard for me to see anything poorly handled here. The truth is that anytime a president changes course, a bit of awkwardness is baked into the cake. It’s inevitable, and if you can’t accept that you shouldn’t urge a chance of course. What’s more, I don’t see anything in Obama’s actions that made this any better or worse than usual. It was pretty routine, and will be forgotten by all but political junkies within days. Democrats are probably doing themselves more damage with another round of their all-too-routine whinging than Obama did by announcing the delay in the first place.

That does leave one question, though: Did Obama consult sufficiently with congressional Dems before he initially announced that he planned to take executive action on immigration? Frankly, the political implications of that announcement were so obvious that it beggars the imagination to suppose that he didn’t. Everyone in the world immediately knew that (a) it would help drive Latino turnout and (b) it might pose problems for Democrats running close races in red states. Obama’s political team might not be Olympic caliber, but there’s no way they failed to talk to “Hill Dems” about immigration back in June, is there? I’d be very interested in reading a neutrally-reported deep dive about this.

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Obama Announces Policy Change, Hill Dems Complain. Film At 11.

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