GOP’s The Walking Red

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Former Texas Governor Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaign, drifting around near the bottom of a field of 17 and struggling to escape the shadow of a badly bungled 2012 effort, is reportedly out of money and has puts its entire staff on unpaid “volunteer” status, nationwide.

Watch as a super PAC keeps this zombie walking…

The Perry campaign reported raising $1.14 million in the second quarter of this year and on July 15 reported having $883,913 on hand.

But a group of Opportunity and Freedom super PACs promoting Perry’s candidacy was in far healthier state financially, having raised nearly $17 million by the end of June.

Austin Barbour, senior adviser to the super PAC, said the group would step up “to aggressively support the governor in a number of different ways.”

 
Never before in modern American political history has it been easier for a completely dead and broke major party presidential campaign to keep going for no discernible reason and with virtually no chance.

Super PACs are like cult of personality worship machines for the excessively wealthy cult faithful.

I guess they’re creating a lot more consulting and media buying jobs though, maybe? There’s that trickle-down we’ve all been promised for so long… trickling all the way from the 0.1% to the 1% and back to the media companies owned by the 0.1%. That’s what passes for social mobility these days: Money moving around the hands of those within sub-tiers the top tier.

Iraq’s air conditioner uprising

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Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

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Washington Post: “Iraqi leader announces measures aimed at fighting graft, dysfunction”

The protests came amid a searing heat wave that saw temperatures rise to than 120 degrees. The heat has been particularly unbearable because of the country’s limited power supply, which gives Iraqis only a few hours’ worth of electricity a day to run fans or air conditioners.

The country’s powerful Shiite militias — whose political influence has grown as they overtake the Iraqi army in the fight against the Islamic State — also threw their weight behind Friday’s protests. Their participation presented an unusual challenge to Abadi from his own Shiite constituency. The demonstrations also prompted the office of the influential Shiite religious leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani to urge Abadi to implement more sweeping measures. Sistani said Friday that Abadi had not done enough to fight corruption within the Iraqi state.

 

A new Syria “red line”: No Kurds in the Turkish-backed zone?

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Regional View: July 24, 2015 map estimation of the perimeter of a potential Turkish occupation zone and U.S. no-fly zone in northern Syria. Enlarge Image. [See also our close-up detail map of the potential Turkish occupation zone perimeter.]

Regional View: July 24, 2015 map estimation of the perimeter of a potential Turkish occupation zone and U.S. no-fly zone in northern Syria. Enlarge Image.
[See also our close-up detail map of the potential Turkish occupation zone perimeter.]

The Wall Street Journal last week reported that the “U.S., Turkey Agree to Keep Syrian Kurds Out of Proposed Border Zone”:

The U.S. and Turkey have reached an understanding meant to assure the Ankara government that plans to drive Islamic State militants from a proposed safe zone in northern Syria won’t clear the way for Kurdish fighters to move in.
[…]
However, [YPG leaders] said they had made no commitment not to cross the Euphrates.

“The initial plan is to move to liberate the western side of the Euphrates once the areas to the east have been cleared of ISIS,” said Idres Nassan, a senior Kurdish official in Kobani. “But the YPG is acting in coordination with the local groups, such as the FSA and other groups fighting ISIS, as well as the coalition members.”

Preventing Kurdish forces from taking advantage of U.S. and Turkish airstrikes in the area is “red line” for Turkey as it steps up to play a greater role in battling Islamic State, a Turkish official said Monday.
[…]
Keeping Kurdish fighters from moving farther west restricts America’s ability to work in northwestern Syria with a Kurdish militia that has proved an effective fighting force. And it puts more pressure on the U.S. and Turkey to find an alternative capable of filling the void.

 
The United States promptly denied this report. However, the New York Times is still backing up the Wall Street Journal’s version as late as today.

The Turkish deal with the United States sets up an “ISIS-free” bombardment zone along a 60-mile strip of the border region that features another exclusion: At Turkey’s request, it is also explicitly a zone free of the Kurdish militia, even though the Kurds had begun advancing toward the area to start battling the Islamic State there.

Despite cooperating with American forces for months, the Syrian Kurds are now starting to worry that their success might not outweigh Turkey’s importance to the United States.

 
I’m sorry, but if these reports of a rule excluding Kurdish fighters are actually true, this is bad policymaking. Pure impulse and incoherent nonsense. It has little strategic foresight or unifying logic, and it’s probably tactically unenforceable at best.

As we argued in our recent op-ed in The Globalist, to recruit Turkey against ISIS, the United States lost sight of its true friends (the actually effective anti-ISIS — and non-salafist — Kurdish militant groups). This scattershot obsession with the crises of the moment has destroyed any U.S. attempts to form a coherent policy for Syria (or Iraq). We just flail aimlessly from one thing to the next — reacting, reacting, reacting.

Previously from AFD on this topic:

– U.S. agrees to clear a “safe zone” in northern Syria
– Mapping the projected Turkish occupation zone in Syria

AFD Micron #9

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We like to think of historical people as trapped in the morals of their times, but history is filled with well-researched, articulate debates on the moral harms of slavery or Indian genocide—in societies that decided in favor of them anyway. The fact that we talk a lot about racism or sexism today can’t be taken as evidence that we’re effectively dealing with them.

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One year later

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In case you missed it last year, you can still stream or download my August 17th radio interview of eyewitness accounts in Ferguson MO from longtime area residents.

We talked about: Longstanding tensions with police in Ferguson and the wider St. Louis County, the geography of the Ferguson protests and manifestations of outrage, militarization of American police forces, respectability politics (why dressing and speaking a certain way won’t save Black Americans), personal stories of being harassed by police in the St. Louis area (including Ferguson), raising children under / growing up with an abusive police force, & organizing for future change (from social media to events on the ground).

This is one of several interviews and panel shows I did on Ferguson, but it’s the earliest one.

Bill’s reaction: The “Mitt” documentary

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Mitt_filmI watched the “Mitt” documentary. I don’t think it really changed my opinion of Mitt Romney particularly — perhaps because I’m from Massachusetts and already had a strongly held negative opinion about him rather than a vaguely negative opinion based in national media caricatures. I obviously was aware he was a person behind closed doors. That doesn’t have much to do with his bad policies and record.

What I did take away from it was how strongly Mitt Romney believed even in the moment of his (perceived) ‘surprise’ defeat that Pres. Obama was literally destroying the country in fall of “great nations” terms and believed America would reach an irreparable “tipping point” in “5 years” because of Obama’s policies. Mitt’s a relatively moderate and reasonable person, at least by comparison to most national elected Republicans these days, and even he had bought into that notion. (And in the documentary at least, a couple months earlier, Mitt and Ann were passionately discussing tax burdens on small businesses as a reason to win, rather than a perceived need to avert doomsday.) That’s pretty stunning and disturbing.

I think maybe the costs (personal, financial, emotional) of running for office have reached such intense levels that the only way you can convince yourself to keep going through it all is not only to megalomaniacally believe that only you can do the job (as most political candidates have long seemed to believe), but also that the other person will be so bad at it that it will be something the community/state/nation can’t recover from it.

In other words, to run for president these days, you can’t just have a messiah complex but a sincere conviction that the end-times are nigh. Which meshes perfectly with the presently now-mainstreamed (!) thought-currents rippling and roiling through the Republican Party. But even if it didn’t, that kind of divisive framing of campaigns is only going to fuel the toxic cycle that keeps producing worse and worse candidates and leaders at so many levels of government. There will be no good and decent people left on the campaign trail.

The smaller takeaway (as other people have observed) is: Wow, they really were delusional by the final month of the campaign and literally didn’t understand how the electoral math/map was going for them or needed to be handled. To which I would add: Can you imagine a Mitt Romney presidency if the “bubble” around him was that impervious to reality and basic structural facts that politics couldn’t alter?