Nate Silver, the number-crunching wunderkid, does the math for how much a blogger or freelancer is likely to make from any given post to Huffington, now an AOL property — which offers prospective writers the chance to churn out 5-10 articles every day for five dollars a pop.

Silver: “…you find that the average blog post — which we estimate generated a couple thousand page views — was worth about $13 in advertising revenue. The median blog post, with several hundred views, was worth only $3 or $4.”

Fantastic.

“All people yearn for ... the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed”
— President Obama in Cairo (2009)

A stark contrast from what is being disseminated from State and, of course, the White House. The transition does not appear to be meaningful... yadda yadda. Tomorrow brings the test of whether the revolution grinds to a halt due to a (possible) military takeover or is reinvigorated by the words of the obstinant autocrat, or both, or something we cannot predict.

Tahrir now appears to be almost liberated and 100s of thousands await Mubarak who is being famously late.

AJ is calling this a revolution. Questions of a military coup waiting in the wings are ubiquitous.

More as things develop. Suleiman is heir apparent but no one knows what will happen.

Tahrir Square in Cairo is sounding more like Tiananmen, as pro-Mubarak forces are trying to put down the popular revolt by force. There are now reports of serious casualties, according to people on the scene via Twitter feeds.

Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) and Noor Khan talk about what has been brewing in the streets up until it all erupted.

Meanwhile, Stephen Carter wonders aloud if GWB was right about his professed desire to expand democracy in the Arab world, and Anshel Pfeffer tells fellow Israelis to calm down about the alleged prospect of imminent Islamist rule.

“Okay guys, synchronize your watches to zero hour and high-tail it outta here”

(Photo by Pete Souza/WH)

Danny Sullivan imagines what the Demand Media version of the NYT would look like. (Above: a possible future?)

North Africa has been convulsing for weeks. First, Tunis and now Cairo and Alexandria. For both a familiar script: massive street demonstrations by the young and jobless and desperate and angry, met up against by overwhelming state violence, tear gas, curfews. (Above: an Egyptian demonstrator kisses a riot policeman, now a widely-circulated photo.) The public service that Al Jazeera is providing really is incredible, as reflected in my feed from repostings by @lisang (Lisa Goldman) and @jeremyscahill (Jeremy Scahill). And of course @dailydish (the ever-present Andrew Sullivan).

To digest, the authorities in Cairo, who have been receiving American diplomatic and financial largess since the late 1970s, have now cut off internet access and closed the airport. Hosni Mubarak is trying to put out a fire that does not appear to be quenchable. Meanwhile in Israel, which has been used as another vital US client, there was a peaceful assembly of 20,000 citizens against its government for its perilous decisions but nothing at all like the sturm und drang surrounding it, particularly at its northern border where Hezbollah now holds the reins of power in Beirut.

No one has a crystal ball with which to divine how all of this turns out across the region, the implications for US policy, etc. But it is needless to say how momentous it all is, and that before we can figure out all of the details many things will be totally changed. If that is too general a statement it is of course intended to be, since events are moving too quickly.

The grisly incident this weekend in Tucson, Arizona has sparked a row about extremism in political discourse, particularly violent rhetoric. The following is clipped from an article written by me for The Wooster Voice in April 2009:

Laird Wilcox is a specialist in political extremism, drawing up some time ago a list of specific traits that extremists use. He identifies 21 of them in total; its versatility is very broad. I’d like to go through them point by point — which should help us in our everyday filtering of valuable information from the bullshit.

1. Character assassination. Extremists care not at all for the merits of the argument before them, and instead will savage the personality or “associations” of the one making the argument. This serves to throw red herrings in our path.

2. Name-calling and labeling. In a recent episode of “The O’Reilly Factor,” radio/TV personality Bill O’Reilly declared that once someone resorts to calling people names, they’ve “lost the argument.” QED.

3. Irresponsible sweeping generalizations. My favorite. Wilcox writes that extremists “tend to make sweeping claims or judgments on little or no evidence” — facts are for the weak, waffling types.

4. Inadequate proof for assertions. This is similar to generalization, but the difference is that, to extremists, standards of evidence are so weak that they collapse upon rational inspection.

For the sake of space, here are the rest: “advocacy of double standards”; “tendency to view their opponents and critics as essentially evil”; “Manichaean worldview”; “advocacy of some degree of censorship or repression of their opponents and/or critics”; a tendency to “identify themselves in terms of who their enemies are”; “argument by intimidation”; “use of slogans, buzzwords and thought-stopping cliches”; “assumption of moral superiority over others”; “doomsday thinking”; “belief that it’s okay to do bad things in the service of a ‘good’ cause”; “emphasis on emotional responses and … less importance attached to reasoning and logical analysis”; “hypersensitivity and vigilance”; “use of supernatural rationale for beliefs and actions”; “problems tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty”; “inclination toward ‘groupthink’”; “tendency to personalize hostility” and a belief that “the system is no good unless they win.”

The would-be assassin of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a 22-year-old creep with a psychotic persona, did not appear fully-formed out of a vacuum. It appears overly-simplified, as well as convenient, to place blame for yesterday’s incident on the likes of Palin and Beck, but by now it is more than obvious that dangerous, apocalyptic rhetoric has serious consequences (cf the Pima county sheriff).

Above: from a time not too far from our own, courtesy the John Birch Society.

Protect the Bay

An estimated two million fish mysteriously died in the Chesapeake because of “cold weather,” according to anonymous officials informing the Baltimore Sun. This “joins a growing list of reports from around the globe of mysterious fish and bird deaths.”

The apocalyptic-minded may suspect something more sinister than a deep chill, though as of yet no evidence of some strange divine plan has emerged.

There appears to be little to add to the WikiLeaks saga, which already feels like a story from yesteryear. Yet several puzzle pieces lay on the table, unconnected to the bigger picture that has already been put forth: a humiliated State Department, enraged Pentagon, irritated Swedish prosecutors, and a tagged and house-bound cyberpunk whose organization has become an unstoppable force in our information age.

In my investigation of how a gallivanting, galvanizing hacker from Melbourne, who first made headlines in the Australian press in 1995 for breaking into a telecom’s mainframe, became public enemy no. 1 over the course of several months in the past year (from April onward), the unconnected pieces became more visible.

As follows: how did a relatively low-level military operative, Lt. Bradley Manning, get access to hundreds of thousands of confidential cables? And if the accusations are borne out, what were his motives? As for Mr. Assange, the “high-tech terrorist” in Vice President Biden’s now memorable turn of phrase, does he really believe that his legal troubles in Sweden, which led to an Interpol warrant for his arrest, were concoted in Langley by spooks out to get him?

The “state’s secrets” continue to be released in periodic batches to the press, of which the New York Times is demonstrating considerable discretion. One multi-gigabyte file alleged to be a smoking gun against Bank of America is on the horizon, reams of files said to echo the Enron paper trail that can be easily torrented. The list of targets — the military, our diplomatic apparatus, and now a major financial player — raises another question which, though it may play into the propaganda campaign against WikiLeaks, is worth asking: does Assange intend to bring down the United States?

That question implies that his organization, which appears rather anarchic, even has such a capability, given the fact nothing earth-shattering has come of the cables themselves, aside from understandably mortified embassies. But the “high-tech terrorist” meme may retain much power, the facts aside, many of which remain unclear. It is thus imperative to discover them: writing in a piece for CBS, tech writer Joshua Norman noted, as Scott Horton did in August, that US officials saw the whistle-blowing group, which includes Chinese dissidents in its roster, as a “national security threat” in 2008.

Among similar lines but within a broader frame, Francis Shor observed yesterday, “Given the battered economic and military standing of the United States over the past several years, the hysterical reaction of the American political class over the recent release of State Department cables by WikiLeaks is not surprising.”

WSJ: INDIA, IRAN’S LARGEST TRADING PARTNER, HELPS U.S. ISOLATE IRAN IN ABOUT-FACE

BETHESDA — Jay Solomon and Subhadip Sircar reported yesterday that officials at the Reserve Bank of India have “instructed the country’s lenders ... to stop processing current-account transactions with Iran using the ACU,” the Asian Clearing Union, which was “originally set up by the United Nations in 1974 to help facilitate trade in South Asia and headquartered in Tehran.”

US officials believe that the Iranians are using the ACU, based in their country, in order to help finance the Revolutionary Guard, a sprawling paramilitary/social services organization that is increasingly dominant in its economy, according to a 2009 study by the Rand Corp.

As Solomon and Sircar report further, “Major Indian energy companies, including Oil & Natural Gas Corp., have been exploring how to jointly develop energy resources with Iranian partners. India’s Reliance Industries Ltd. was a major supplier of gasoline to Iran, which lacks sufficient refining capabilities, before the international sanctions caused the company to pull back last year.”

CABLE SHOWS INDIAN INVOLVEMENT IN AFGHANISTAN, AS FEARED BY PAKISTAN

BROOKLYN — India is heavily involved in nation-building efforts in Afghanistan, with the decisive nod of now recently-deceased diplomat Richard Holbrooke, according to a confidential cable sent to the State Department from New Delhi nearly 11 months ago.

The cable, transmitted in January 2010 and signed by Timothy J. Roemer, the top American diplomat in India, suggested that Pakistan’s fears of Indian influence in Afghanistan may be substantiated to some degree, as news of the departure of the top CIA station chief in Pakistan reverberates between Islamabad and Washington.

Holbrooke’s interlocutor, Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, emphasized that her government’s activities in Afghanistan were wholly “transparent” and not cause for alarm by the Pakistanis, who claim that its arch-rival is meddling in Afghan affairs.

The cable added, “Rao said that Afghanistan has the potential to prosper as a hub or transit point for energy, agriculture and trade if it could be connected to its natural market in India. She said it was unfortunate that Pakistan does not allow this to happen.”

Further, the Indian Foreign Secretary said that Iran could also have a “positive” role in taking part in Afghan efforts to rebuild their war-torn country, a prospect that Washington may be very loath to countenance.

However, one day after that cable was sent, Bruce Riedel, a South Asia expert with background in the CIA, Pentagon and the National Security Council, disclosed that Indian involvement is no secret, nor is their work with the Iranians.

In an interview with Council on Foreign Relations official Bernard Gwertzman, Riedel said, “India announced completion of a $1 billion project to build a road connecting Afghanistan’s main highway to a main highway in Iran, giving Afghanistan access to the Indian Ocean without having to go through Pakistan.”

Riedel added that as far as New Delhi was concerned this was a good development, but as the situation is seen in Islamabad, which is “obsessed with the threat from India,” the infrastructure project and other work “looks like encirclement.”

In another cable, marked secret and dated June 29, 2009, Indian Army Chief of Staff A.K. Antony informed National Security Advisor James Jones, “India has a stake in Afghanistan, reminding him that India’s borders before partition extended to Afghanistan.

“The Indian military is concerned by the situation in Afghanistan, Antony admitted, and stressed that the international community’s operations there must succeed because the India cannot imagine for a moment a Taliban takeover of its ’extended neighbor.’”

Roger Cohen is on top again: You are not real Jews! And now, a debate.

Happy Thanksgiving!

John Nichols eulogizes an American patriot, Chalmers Johnson, who has died at 79. R.I.P.

Lanky, bespectacled and wearing cross-trainer shoes, Noam Sheizaf sat on a bench at Cooper Triangle as he was leafing through George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points. Sheizaf is not a stranger to decision points of his own. He is now 35, even though he doesn’t look it. And in that time he has built up enough connections to be a free agent at last.

Fiddling with the cardboard piece holstering a small cup of coffee and braving the autumn cold one night late last week, Sheizaf was somewhat fatigued. He ran the New York City Marathon five days earlier and in the slow cadence of his words explored the long run that brought him from Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv, to New York City — and back again.

The one point he cannot recall is where he decided to be a journalist. “I’m not sure that’s how things work,” he said. “Otherwise, how would you have all these people working in a McDonald’s or an insurance company? You don’t know any kids who say, ‘I want to work in an insurance company.’”

Sheizaf is now a political observer who writes with an ear to the mainstream. Yet he started out copy-editing sports stories while he attended university after his army service, mandatory for Israelis. “I started studying at the same time,” he said, majoring in political science and French. “It was easy to look at it as one of these odd jobs that students take.”

“Odd jobs” is a phrase he often employed to describe what he had to do to pay the bills while chasing after something better. Journalism become a bona-fide career for him by the time he reached his late 20s. “Things have their own flow,” he said.

After 10 months in Paris, Sheizaf returned to the promised land to make the idea of creating a career into a reality. How to do it was not so simple, he said. Friends of his connected him to interviews with papers like Yediot Achranot, Israel’s largest mass-circulation daily, and Ha’aretz, the country’s equivalent to the New York Times, but after meeting with them they took a pass. Instead, he began working at an evening paper called Ma’ariv (which means “evening,” incidentally), the 2nd-largest. For better and worse, he stayed on for six years.

Sheizaf started working there as a sports editor, from 2001 to 2005, and then moved to their weekend magazine — after he got sick of editing sports stories.

He mentioned that in his last three years there he had four editors, and he was recognized as the most senior editor there. “That is no way an organization is supposed to run,” he remembers thinking.

Even before the market crash in 2008, Maariv was bleeding cash. Management turnover was high and morale was low. “People were telling me, You’re in a dead-end job, you’re making good money but you’re not going to get anywhere.”

“I was too scared to move on,” Sheizaf added. The fire at his feet sparked to life when he finally realized that in a professional sense he was mired in a dead-end job in a failing media company, running the paper’s weekend magazine while CEOs were in and out. “There was nothing else to do,” he said, and then pointed out that many friends of his said he should have made a move much earlier.

Noam Sheizaf the professional journalist became Noam Sheizaf the professional blogger. “The Promised Land” was launched in 2008. Written in English, with an eye to a larger readership, it combined his strong interest in politics with a keen journalistic sense of fairness. Through this project, he discovered a group of like-minded bloggers, Israelis of different stripes but common passion who were also writing in English, and helped corral them into an online venture called +972 magazine.

Named after the long-distance country code, the collaborative webzine featured writers like former Haaretz editor Ami Kaufman and Didi Remez, who authored the Web site Coteret (“headline”), which translates the Hebrew press. With this platform, Sheizaf is free to opine in a newsy way, although he doesn’t “like to shout stuff.”

“The choice of subjects is ultimately more important,” he said. “I don’t try to throw it in their face. I’m a firm believer in the fact that opinion pieces are only reaffirming positions we already had.”

The most persuasive he thinks he’s ever been is when he tried to make a position seem like one the reader reached on his or her own. “I think one of the most effective stories I was involved in was a piece I wrote for Haaretz about right-wing people in Israel who support the one-state solution, who support annexing the West Bank and ultimately making the Palestinians Israeli citizens.

“I didn’t criticize that,” Sheizaf added. “I don’t have a clear position on whether the one-state or two-state solution is desirable but I oppose the status quo. If a reader reads this piece, and he’s against the one-state solution, he might think, ‘Well, we need to get out of the West Bank or else this is going to happen.’”

“There’s no such thing as an unpolitical reality,” he said. “I don’t like the fact that journalists will say, ‘I’m neutral, I’m only reporting the facts.’ I don’t believe them.”

For Sheizaf, it has been a long haul. He expects as much for anyone aspiring to follow in his footsteps. “It’s a funny moment in time,” he said. “Go with the flow.”

After a rocky courtship, Newsweek and the Daily Beast have wed. This seems to be more of a victory for Tina Brown than for print media, which is on its way out. The very fact of this merger strongly suggests that the end is very near.

The phantom prospect of peace walks along a threadbare tightrope. About a decade has now passed since the breakout of the ruinous second Intifada, and the latest news is that the US is desperately cajoling the Arab League to keep the delegations on their respirators.

Saeb Erekat, the top negotiator for Team Abbas, declared after League practice ended, “If Israel continues to build settlements then there will be no negotiations,” according to Isabel Kershner in the Times. After the Sept. 26 expiry for the settlements passed, the very idea of direct (or proximity) talks threw itself completely into question—if not oblivion.

Team Netanyahu has yet another opportunity to declare that there is no partner for peace. If they themselves were Palestinian, doubtless they would, and in fairness should, terminate the talks without any hesitation. Any agreement with a coalition as extreme and rejectionist as Bibi’s would totally ruin any credibility Abu Mazen still may have.

On the other side, any settlement on the question of settlements that does not allow the further absorption of the land that rightward Israeli opinion sees as Judea and Samaria is worthless, and any negation of the right to continue to settle the land is anathema to the coalition around which Bibi is surrounded. A man in an ideological straitjacket and a man with no power sit at the bargaining table pretending to be equals.

Abbas, although powerless, has a Plan B: appeal directly to Team Netanyahu’s sometimes reluctant patron and paymaster. Erekat confirmed that his players would ask the United States for recognition of an independent Palestinian state (somehow) built “on the 1967 borders,” according to a Reuters dispatch. Those borders no longer exist—like the homes of the refugees, or like most of the Israeli left.

What would become Palestine is, at present, an archipelago of quasi-autonomous “bantustans,” in the words of Jeff Halper, a veteran Israeli activist. Netanyahu, in last summer’s official approval of a Palestinian state, said it would be “demilitarized”—i.e., defenseless. In the prevailing circumstances, no Palestine can come into being worthy of anyone’s self-respect. Imagine if the Brits, instead of ending their mandatory rule, self-servingly approved a state of Israel under the condition that it be demilitarized and riddled with UK-sanctioned colonies and military checkpoints, for the Jews’ protection from the extremists living among them causing all the trouble.

Speaking of the refugees, whose descendants now number in the millions, Ha’aretz editorialist Akiva Eldar wrote that Bibi “does not want to create a crisis over the freeze.” Eldar asks the reader, “Why should he have a crisis over the demand of Jewish migrants to settle in Hebron if he can focus it on the demand of Palestinian refugees to return to Haifa?” He quotes Dan Meridor, pointman for the Netanyahu crew, saying that he is “not too optimistic” that the Palestinian Authority, set up in the wake of the Oslo agreements in 1993, will give up the right of return for their refugees. “That would mean conceding the rationale for the [PLO],” Meridor added, correctly. Some Israeli settlers, in a very underreported instance, indicated that they see no harm in Palestinians returning to their homes in Jaffa if they can return to their homes in East Jerusalem.

I want Israel to act honorably. Given the regional balance of power, there is an enormous responsibility to compromise. Yet its leadership refuses to act in good faith, and is therefore abusing that responsibility. I want the Palestinians to recognize how high the deck is stacked against them, and how hopeless talking is when the core issues are off the table in order to keep the talks alive. With Monday’s news that Israel has demanded the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state in order to extend the freeze (and the predictable reply), further progress is cemented.

Nabil Abu Rdainah, an Abbas spokesman, is quoted to have said, “The issue of the Jewishness of the state has nothing to do with the matter.” He’s incorrect; it has a lot to with the matter. For the religious-nationalists in Bibi’s corner, the settlements are not dry cartography: they symbolize the redemption of the land. If that land is going to be divided by the two national entities that live on it, as justice would suggest, and there is to be a freeze in perpetuity of any more settling, as politics would require, the other side has to accept the mythos. It refused, giving a gift to the Israeli right: there is no negotiating partner, they’re irrational, etc.

In all of the intricacies of this 60-year-old blood feud, let us make clear that Netanyahu is not Rabin, Abbas is not Arafat, and Obama is not Carter. No one is on the same page—not even close. The talks, however hard we should pray for them, as there may be no alternative, are doomed to failure. The faster the plug is pulled, perhaps the better. Until tomorrow’s choices arrive.

Note—Currently a resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant, once known as the Little Harlem of Brooklyn and now undergoing gentrification. Case in point: a hip coffeehouse. To the newcomer, the native, whomever, there is a place.


Sept. 27: On a gray, mordant raining damp chilled day, many would need to recharge. Sometimes this leads to a place to chill, even in a place most would not expect to be the home of a bohemian, people-centric café as quirky and affable as Bread Stuy [photo below, by Michael Agins (NYT)]. In the heart of historic Stuyvesant Heights, the brainchild of San Francisco-born actor Lloyd Porter is said to serve as a caffeinated, confectionary hub for the middle-class strivers and artsy folk of the neighborhood as well as the yuppies and hipsters that continue to stream in.

Three hipster-ish twentysomethings walk in while a serious man dressed in a camo jacket and striped cap checks email. His name is Shawn Peters, who hails from Mt. Vernon. Peters cautioned that his account of the place would be slanted. After all, he is a good friend of the owner. He’s on the phone talking about a script and a budget, and mentions that Porter, the owner, is an actor on the side.


“Nine times out of ten I’ll know someone who comes in personally,” says Peters. “Total strangers that come here, and hang out here, they become best friends.”

Old-school hip hop plays loudly over speakers perched below several board games, with names like Scrabble, Go, and Skillz. Orange-toned décor, with thin fibrous orange curtains surrounds you, with only the neonish orange in the front. The rest is brick with a tile-impressioned floor. A miniature disco ball and bell are atop the first door you see walking up Lewis Avenue from Fulton Avenue.

Lights from white orbs hung in placid suspension, while two fans spaced evenly apart whir silently. Framed large photos of happy children and other locals pepper the walls toward the far end, a space that used to be a barbershop until Porter and his wife Hillary bought the property in July 2004. At the other far wall a sounding board stands with ads for art galleries and community gardens, the provinces of a block that has weathered the storms of the last three decades and is now, fraily and slowly, showing the rest of Bed-Stuy a friendly face.

Yet the whole project almost failed—until the community that Bread Stuy had ginned up rushed in to save it. In February of this year, the Daily News reported that the establishment owed “over $20,000 in back taxes.” A padlock bolted the doors. The neighborhood scraped up the needed funds to keep Bread Stuy alive.

In the midst of the crisis a headline in the Gothamist asked, “Is Bed-Stuy Gentrification Dead?”

Peters does not seem to think so.

“At the end of the day, gentrification in black neighborhoods always starts with class gentrification,” he explains: first the wealth, then the whites. “Most stores here are Black-owned,” he adds—except, of course, for the Italians who own the nearby wood-oven pizza parlor Saraghina. “The races become more comfortable [with each other] because there’s a middle class.”

“In the 1970s,” Peters adds, “the UPS refused to deliver mail to Bed-Stuy,” dropping it at the nearest depot instead. The area around Bread-Stuy, Stuyvesant Heights, was always a middle-class enclave. Yet the recent change of the neighborhood “pushes the poor people out.”

“It changes the complexion of the neighborhood, in more ways than one,” Peters says, tapping away at his laptop.

Lloyd Porter has arrived at last. “My man!” Shawn Peters exclaims to get my attention. Quickly asked if my purpose was to pursue “another gentrification story,” Porter tells me, reclining in the leather couch-cum-bench at the front that journalism students up and down the city come over as often as “twice a year” to write about the place, perhaps attesting to its popularity and novelty.

Hope McGrath owns the local Brooklynite Gallery. Originally from Long Island, she has brought along her four-year-old daughter Ruby, who she lovingly calls her “Bread Stuy baby.” Ruby was just a newborn when the place opened. “It’s not just a café,” McGrath says. “It’s a community environment. It’s where you bump into your neighbors.”

“This is one of the most friendliest neighborhoods I’ve moved to,” she adds.

Amid all the changes, the surrounding area has not become “Disneyland,” Porter says. “It ain’t all peaches and cream, but it ain’t all cigarette butts and glass either.”

About half of his coffee is fairly traded—or “direct trade,” he explains. One, the Tanzanian blend, is produced there at Sweet Unity Farms, which is owned by Jackie Robinson’s son David. I ask about the elephant in the room, stalking all local coffeehouses: Starbucks. “You can’t fight City Hall,” Porter replies. “I don’t want to hate on them.”

Amin Husain, 35, is sitting on the counter where people used to get haircuts, with a shaved-head, yellow T-shirt and thick headphones slung around his neck. He is a newcomer to the ‘hood. “I’ve lived on the Upper East Side for five or six years,” he says, now just “two blocks” away after he moved a few months ago. “This whole block is very artsy,” Husain says approvingly. “There’s probably a cultural pulse, but I don’t know.”

“We’re trying to give a little joy to the people,” Porter says while his friend laughs, nodding. “We’re making our magic.”