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House Democrats Call For ‘Urgent Review Of Our Relations With Turkey’ After ‘Confrontation’ With Israel

By Ali Gharib on Nov 7, 2011 at 6:45 pm

Rep. Engel, a Democratic leader of Congressional anti-Turkish campaign

A bipartisan group of senators sent a letter to President Obama in September asking him to “mount a diplomatic offensive” against Turkey in the aftermath of souring Israeli-Turkish relations last summer. Now House Democrats are throwing their weight behind the anti-Turkey campaign. A round-up of weekly news from Americans for Peace Now highlights two Democratic-led efforts to re-evaluate the U.S. relationship with Turkey, long since a close U.S. ally and partner in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The first is a letter from seven congressional Democrats to Obama calling for an “an urgent review of our relations with Turkey”:

It is our hope that an intensified and frank dialogue with Turkey can convince Ankara to deescalate some of its rhetoric and roll-back its increasingly destabilizing policies. However, if that cannot be achieved, we look forward to working with your Administration to review the changed environment and develop an approach which better suits the situation.

Spearheaded by Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) and signed by Democratic Reps. Howard Berman (CA), Nita Lowey (NY), Shelley Berkley (NV), Brad Sherman (CA), Steve Israel (NY), and Adam Schiff (CA), the letter — in language reminiscent of Islamophobic attempts to portray Turkey as in the U.S.’s “enemy camp” — decries Turkish “confrontation with our closest friends and allies.”

Following up on the letter, Engel and Berkeley introduced legislation that would block a proposed $111 million sale of helicopters and support equipment to Turkey. A release from Engel’s office helpfully explains that during a 15-day notification period, Congress can try to pass legislation blocking arms sales. “The resolution introduced by Berkley and Engel would prohibit this sale,” the release said.

The lawmakers justified the block with the same rhetoric as the letter. “The U.S. should be busy raising these very serious concerns with Turkey, rather than selling arms to them,” they said in the release.

After a hyperventilating neoconservative proclaimed last week that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was an “enemy” of the U.S., Foreign Policy’s Dan Drezner pointed out that Turkey bankrolled the U.S.-supported Libyan revolution and is “now creating an enclave for the Free Syrian Army.” He didn’t mention that Turkey also recently agreed to host a radar for a U.S. missile defense system designed as a bulwark against Iran (which criticized the move). Drezner went on:

Erdogan has clearly made life difficult for another ally — Israel. On the other hand, lots of America’s allies make life difficult for other American allies (see: Gibraltar).

Turkey’s relations with Israel went south after unheeded Turkish complaints about the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, and collapsed completely after nine Turks and an American were killed by Israeli forces on a humanitarian flotilla to the besieged Palestinian territory.

“If other countries disagree with Israel,” asks Drezner to conclude his post, “does that mean… that they no longer qualify as either friend or ally? Are there any other of America’s friends that fall into this super-special status? I really want to know.”

Climate Progress

A New Record: 14 U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather Disasters in 2011

By Joe Romm on Nov 7, 2011 at 6:44 pm

In September 2010, Munich Re one of the world’s leading reinsurers, wrote “the only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.”

In January, they summed up 2010 this way:  “The high number of weather-related natural catastrophes and record temperatures both globally and in different regions of the world provide further indications of advancing climate change.”

Last week meteorologist and former hurricane hunter Dr. Jeff Masters analyzed 2011, “Fourteen U.S. billion-dollar weather disasters in 2011: a new record,” which I excerpt below:

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Alyssa

‘Boardwalk Empire’ Open Thread: Family Reunions

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 7, 2011 at 6:37 pm

This post contains spoilers through the November 6 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

It seems that giving birth has liberated Lucy, taken a literal weight off her body, and given her latent cleverness a motivating force. “Of course I fed her,” she snaps at Nelson, who assumes she’s neglecting their as-yet-named child. “What do you think I am?” And she’s blunt with him about the terms of their arrangement, telling him, “This is your baby. You bought it.” She’s more tender than that about the baby with Nucky, though, even if he starts their conversation by forcefully denying paternity. “I look like shit. She’s kind of cute, though. Ten toes and everything,” Lucy explains, setting up the scheme that will lead Nucky to try to blackmail Nelson with the knowledge of his illegitimate child. “Now, there’s someone else I’ve gotta make happy. And she’ll always be mine.”

In a way, there’s something sort of invigorating about seeing Nelson return from the land of hypocrisy to righteousness and stand up to Nucky’s attempts to weaken him further. But I’ll admit enjoying seeing him taken down a peg by Esther Randolph (the marvelously befreckled Julianne Nicholson) first. As the new lead investigator on the Nucky Thompson case, Esther’s a former radical who spent 10 years as “a public defender, representing draft dodgers and prostitutes.” And the collision between someone who’s been brought in to look unimpeachable and a man who thought he was unimpeachable and turned out not to be is inevitable and interesting. She’s less naive that he is — it makes sense that a woman who’s defended her clients against abuses of power would be less sanguine than the righteous man who works within the system. When Nelson complains that “the scales of justice are weighted down with graft,” she just raises her eyebrows and says, deadpan, “My, my. Isn’t that shocking.” But that flexibility also means that she’s prepared to help Nelson navigate his family problems so he won’t be vulnerable anymore.

And speaking of secrets, Margaret, it turns out, is stronger than we knew — if not actually who we thought we knew. “Would you have seen me off to the Magdalen Sisters and broken in the workhouse?” she asks her brother, who blames her for running off with his passage money to America and leaving their dying mother after she became pregnant out of wedlock. “The priests judged it fit correction,” he tells her, safe, if not prosperous, in his conformity. Later, he refuses her help, telling her, “I don’t hate you. I don’t feel much about you at all. I can’t accept the money. I don’t know where it’s from,” though he lets Margaret’s younger sister keep the gift of a novel from her estranged older sister. Who can deny a little girl who, after holding it in, bursts out “Send me books! I like anything with a horse in it!” And later, as if to reaffirm her commitment to make her own way, rather than living by anyone else’s rules, she does what she’s been wanting to do, taking Mr. Slater into her bed, a simultaneous rejection of her old country’s norms and embrace of the people created by them.

Yglesias

Europe’s Demand Must Come From Somewhere

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 7, 2011 at 6:15 pm

As Europe continues to austerity itself into oblivion, it’s worth looking at this chart of trade balances from Paul Krugman:

GIPS is Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain. What you’re looking at here aren’t budget deficits, they’re trade deficits and trade surpluses. And what you can see is the problem with trying to address the overall European economic situation purely through GIPS austerity. The way the European economic machine works is that Germany produces more than it consumers and the GIPS consume more than they produce. GIPS austerity is a mix of tax increases (which reduce GIPS citizens’ after tax incomes and therefore their consumption) and spending cuts (which reduce GIPS citizens’ after tax incomes and therefore their consumption). But if GIPS citizens consume less, then Germany is going to end up producing less and German citizens are going to end up regretting having twisted GIPS governments’ elbows to impose austerity packages that ended up boomeranging against Germany’s interests. At least German citizens would regret it if they understood the situation properly. More realistically, though, German citizens will watch their economy decline after the bailout/austerity combo is done and will blame the bailouts rather than the austerity.

Now it’s a bit difficult not to sympathize with the poor Germans’ perspective on this. After all, why should Portugese people get to consume more than they produce while Germans produce more than they consume? One perspective on this would be to simply abandon the nationalism. Here in the United States people don’t run around talking about how New Jersey runs a persistent trade surplus and Kentucky has a persistent deficit and it’s unfair for productive New Jersey to be subsidizing uncompetitive Kentucky. What we say instead is that the federal tax-and-transfer system is redistributive. Rich people consume considerably less than their pre-tax wages, while poor people consume considerably more. If they happen to be a large concentration of poor people in Kentucky and of affluent people in New Jersey, then that’s just how it shakes out. The real issue here isn’t Kentucky versus New Jersey, it’s the big picture ideological fight over progressive taxation and the welfare state.

But if Germans do want to be nationalistic about this and don’t want to be perennially subsidizing Portugal, then it’s in their own interests to recognize that German producers are currently counting on GIPS demand. If they don’t want their own economy to suffer in the face of GIPS austerity, they need to raise their own domestic consumption. Having a bunch of people take expensive vacations to Italy and eat a lot of bellota ham would probably be more fun than engineering enormous bailouts. What they can’t do is count on continuing to run trade surpluses of this volume even while insisting that their EU partners all follow Ireland in reducing their trade deficits. The numbers need to add up.

Economy

Most Unemployed Americans Are No Longer Eligible For Jobless Benefits

By Pat Garofalo on Nov 7, 2011 at 6:10 pm

Congress is reportedly looking at providing another critical extension of unemployment benefits, either through the fiscal super committee (which is likely to deadlock) or in a bill extending a variety of tax and spending provisions. Of course, as the Hill reported, “some Republicans are expected to oppose extending the benefits,” just as they did the last several times and extension was brought up for a vote.

While an extension would do nothing for those who have already exhausted their maximum 99 weeks of benefits (depending on state), an extension would help people who are still eligible for their benefits up to 99 weeks or those who lose their jobs with the economy still incredibly weak. According to a report in the Associated Press, a majority of the unemployed are no longer eligible for jobless benefits:

The jobs crisis has left so many people out of work for so long that most of America’s unemployed are no longer receiving unemployment benefits.

Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent — a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America’s 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.

As the Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative showed last week, “in the third quarter of 2011 (the three month period from July to September), approximately 31.8 percent of the nearly 14 million Americans who were unemployed had been jobless for a year or more“:

During the recession, unemployment benefits have kept millions out of poverty. Those struggling with long-term unemployment — at a time when there are still more than four job seekers for every available position — not only need benefits, but help with job retraining. Meanwhile, far from helping to bolster the social safety net, Republicans in several states have cut back on unemployment benefits entirely.

NEWS FLASH

More Alabama Utility Companies Denying Service To Undocumented Immigrants | At least one water utility company has been requiring customers to prove citizenship after Alabama’s immigration law went into effect, and now two more utility companies have started the practice. Decatur Utilities and Huntsville Utilities both are prohibiting undocumented immigrants from obtaining electric, gas, water or sewer service at their homes. A provision in Alabama’s immigration law makes it a felony for undocumented immigrants to do business with the state, which state-owned utilities are interpreting as preventing them from providing utility service to undocumented immigrants. In an August legal brief, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange claimed the fear of utility companies denying service to undocumented immigrants “has little basis.” The provision is still in effect.

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Nov 7, 2011 at 6:10 pm

Security

Family Of Drone Attack Victim Is Considering Suing CIA For Killing Innocent Civilians

By Ben Armbruster on Nov 7, 2011 at 5:50 pm

Tariq Aziz (circled) attended a conference on drones in Islamabad (photo credit: Pratap Chatterjee)

On Oct. 27, a 16-year-old Pakistani named Tariq Aziz traveled to Islamabad from his home in North Waziristan to attend a “Waziristan Grand Jirga,” an official meeting the following day to discuss the impact of drone strikes on local communities in Pakistan. According to Pratap Chatterjee at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Aziz “had come after he received a phone call from a lawyer in Islamabad offering him an opportunity to learn basic photography to help document these strikes.” Three days later, Aziz and his cousin were killed, Chatterjee reports:

The next day, Tariq and the other Waziris returned to their homes, eight hours drive away.

On Monday, October 31, Tariq took his cousin Waheed Khan to pick up his newly wed aunt, to take her back to Norak. When the two boys were just 200 yards from the house, two missiles slammed into their car, killing them both instantly.

‘I don’t see the logic and reasoning in killing two young boys,’ [Human rights lawyer] Shahzad Akbar told the Bureau. ‘We wanted to work with the youth, to include them in the search for accountability.’

Akbar is suing the CIA for killing innocent civilians through drone attacks in Pakistan. And Tariq’s father is reportedly in discussions to join the lawsuit. Akbar wondered why the CIA didn’t apprehend Tariq while he was in Islamabad. “If they were terrorists, why weren’t they arrested in Islamabad, interrogated, charged or tried?” he asked. Writing for the Guardian today, Chatterjee, who photographed and videotaped Tariq Aziz at the meeting in Islamabad, had a similar question:

The question I would pose to the jury is this: would a terrorist suspect come to a public meeting and converse openly with foreign lawyers and reporters, and allow himself to be photographed and interviewed? More importantly, since he was so easily available, why could Tariq not have been detained in Islamabad, when we spent 48 hours together? Neither Tariq Aziz nor the lawyers attending this meeting had a highly trained private security detail that could have put up resistance.

The CIA’s drone campaign has expanded significantly during the Obama administration. U.S. government officials say 1,500 suspected militants have been killed since President Obama took office while the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has examined every recorded drone attack in Pakistan and said at least 175 civilians have been killed.

The CIA “has had freedom to decide who to target and when to strike” and the White House is usually notified after the fact. However the Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Agency has tightened rules after State Department officials and military leaders “demanded more-selective strikes.” “The bar has been raised. Inside CIA, there is a recognition you need to be damn sure it’s worth it,” a senior official said.

NEWS FLASH

Hockey Scout Speaks Out On The Importance Of Gay Role Models In Sports | Patrick Burke, an NHL scout and the brother of Brendan Burke — one of the first openly gay athletes in hockey — called on gays and lesbians to come out and straight athletes to accept their teammates. “We need more role models. We need more straight and gay athletes at the professional level to step up and say that it’s okay,” he said. “Having a masculine role model would be a huge, huge step forward.” Burke also cited this 2006 Sports Illustrated study, which found that 80 percent of hockey players would support an openly-gay player. Watch it:

Alyssa

Finding The Humor In Drone Strikes

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 7, 2011 at 5:22 pm

FX has announced that it’s making a dark comedy based on the experiences of drone pilots. This seems like an area that…demands sensitive handling. After all, drone strikes have directly impacted our relationship with Pakistan, and not for the better. Using them requires us to be willing to kill a lot more people than we would through more surgical strikes, and with a great deal less certainty about their level of culpability for terrorist attacks. The prospect of them getting viruses is pretty scary!

I don’t think this means that you can’t make comedy about high-stakes things: in fact, sometimes I think comedy is a necessary way to critique our behavior in high-stakes situations. Humor doesn’t end when you get PTSD as a firefighter working at Ground Zero, or when you fight in Iraq. But I do think, if you’re going to work in these circumstances, that you have to be thoughtful and precise about what you’re saying is funny. The fact that we kill a lot of people indiscriminately with drones is not necessarily that funny. The way people cope with that fact probably is a rich vein to mine for black humor.

NEWS FLASH

Romney Names Coal Baron Joe Craft As Campaign’s Kentucky Finance Chair | Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) today named Joe Craft, president and CEO of Alliance Resource Partners, as one of his campaign’s Kentucky State Finance Chairs, the campaign announced via release. Alliance, the nation’s fourth-largest coal producer, owns and operates the Dotiki Mine in Providence, Kentucky, where two miners were killed in a roof collapse in April 2010. Alliance had been cited for 840 safety violations in the 16 months preceding the Dotiki collapse. According to the Federal Elections Commission, Craft has not yet made donations in the 2012 election cycle, but he is among the hosts of a Nov. 17 Romney fundraiser in Lexington, Kentucky. He contributed $2,300 to Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign. Craft is well-known for his connectedness in Kentucky politics — earlier this year, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) fired Ron Mills, head of the state’s mine permit agency, after Mills denied dozens of Alliance’s permits, and despite the company’s shoddy safety history, one of Alliance’s top safety officials sits on Kentucky’s mine safety board. In 2010, Craft organized a $7 million grant to the University of Kentucky to name a new campus dormitory the “Wildcat Coal Lodge.”

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