Sunday Roundup - June 15, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at Syria, pro-gun antics, the State Senator sellout and the Tea Party victory in Virginia, and Iraq.

Syria
According to the UN, more than 160,000 people have been killed in Syria's civil war.  Nearly three million refugees have sought sanctuary abroad and six million people have been displaced inside the country.  Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was re-elected to his third seven-year term on June 3 in an election held in government controlled areas.  On June 9, Assad announced a wide-ranging amnesty.  As reported by the Reuters news agency: In a decree published by state media, Assad commuted some death sentences to life imprisonment, reduced jail terms for many offences and canceled some others altogether.  Foreigners who entered the country "to join a terrorist group or perpetrate a terrorist act" would receive an amnesty if they surrender to authorities within a month, the decree said. Kidnappers who free their hostages and army deserters would also be covered.   On June 10, Reuters reported on the  internecine fighting among Assad's mainly Sunni Muslim opponents.  A six-week offensive by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) against rival Islamists in eastern Syria has killed 600 fighters and driven 130,000 people from their homes...The group follows al Qaeda's jihadist ideology but its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has defied orders by al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri to stop fighting in Syria and focus on Iraq. The UK-based Observatory said 241 fighters from ISIL and 354 from Nusra and other Islamic brigades had been killed in fighting since ISIL launched its offensive in Syria's Deir al-Zor province, seizing four oilfields from its rivals. Civilian deaths are estimated at 39.

Gun Violence
Mass shootings continue in the US with no Congressional action to even establish standards for universal background checks anywhere in sight.  Among other shootings in the past several weeks, a couple allegedly at the Cliven Bundy ranch shot to death two Las Vegas police officers and a bystander.  In a June 10 post, The Daily Kos analyzes the disappearance of the Tea Party terrorist story from Fox News reports after just one day.  Ordinarily, Fox, or any news operation, would grasp dearly to a story that had the emotional punch of police officers murdered in an ambush. It has the drama of a horrific crime and the sympathy reserved for a community's fallen heroes. For Fox to forgo all of that makes it clear that they are afraid of their own audience. They are not going to risk upsetting them with a story that indicts their most closely held principles. And Fox is surely not going to indulge in a story that contradicts everything they have stood for over the last seventeen years.

Meanwhile just when you thought the anti-gun-control fanatics couldn't get any nuttier, we are treated to the spectacle of packs of Open Carry Texas members carrying their rifles into commercial establishments and hounding gun control advocates, the NRA criticizing OCT actions and then retracting its criticism, "Joe the Plumber" insisting to parents of children killed at UC-Santa Barbara that the deaths of innocent people "don't trump" his constitutional rights, and a loaded gun being found in the toy aisle of a Target in South Carolina. Perhaps some of these pro-gun activists are afraid of universal background checks because they act so bat-shit crazy that, in any civilized society, they would be deemed unsuited to carry weapons.  President Obama asked for us as a nation to do some soul-searching and that may be all that happens for the foreseeable future on a Federal level.  With NRA money backing so many in Congress and with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, don't expect too much by way of courageous action to stop the American gun slaughter.  

Virginia Doings
Referring to what appears to have been the bribery of a Democratic state senator by Virginia Republicans, Zoe Carpenter writing in The Nation wonders "What won't the GOP do to keep the poor uninsured?" Phillip Puckett, who served as a Democratic state senator for one of Virginia's poorest districts, resigned suddenly on Monday. His decision to step down appears to have been the result of a bribe offered by Republican colleagues bent on stopping the expansion of Medicaid. Puckett’s resignation gave Republicans the one seat they needed to take control of the Senate; it also put him in the running for a paid post on a state tobacco commission that is controlled by some of the very same Republicans. And it cleared the way for the chamber to appoint his daughter to a state judgeship. Turns out Puckett, in view of the uproar, may not be taking the post at the state tobacco commission.  But the damage was done.  By stepping down, Puckett effectively ended a months-long battle over the fate of the 400,000 Virginians who are too poor to buy insurance but don’t meet the state’s restrictive eligibility requirements for Medicaid. The state Senate had been on course to vote to expand the program under the Affordable Care Act, setting up a budget showdown with the Republican-controlled House. But with the GOP now in control of the Senate, both chambers are expected to pass a spending plan on Thursday that does not include the expansion.  Virginia is not the only state where Republicans have gone to insane lengths to keep millions uninsured, or to justify doing so.  Carpenter cites Missouri, Louisiana, Utah and Arkansas as examples of these Republican efforts.

In other Virginia political news, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was deemed too moderate (wow, Cantor pressured Boehner from the right!) for the likes of his constituents.  David Brat, an obscure right-wing professor of economics, supported by the Tea Party but outspent 25 to 1 by Cantor, defeated Cantor by 11 percentage points.  How did this happen? New York Magazine assessed it this way:  Brat ... benefited from the constant undercurrent of discontent emanating from the base that House Republicans had accommodated President Obama by failing to force him to accept their agenda — the still-extant pangs of anger that drove the party to shut down the government last fall.  But the biggest issue by far was immigration reform. Cantor was no reformer, really. He rejected the bipartisan immigration reform deal ...but he did hope to salvage some partial compromise, perhaps allowing some illegal immigrants who had been brought over the border as children.... Brat rejected even that. Any token of conciliation was too much. He still uses the old lingo, calling undocumented immigrants “illegals.” The chortling on the Democratic side has begun.  They are glad that Cantor has been defeated.  I wonder what they can possibly be thinking.  He was replaced on the 2014 Republican ticket in a secure Republican district by someone even further to the right than he is. Albeit this was one of the few Tea Party victories against the Republican establishment candidates in this primary season.

Map is from uniraq.org

Iraq

Iraq is facing its gravest test since the US-led invasion more than a decade ago, after its army capitulated to Islamist insurgents who have seized four cities and pillaged military bases and banks, in a lightning campaign which seems poised to fuel a cross-border insurgency endangering the entire region.  [The Guardian, June 11]  Al-Qaeda-linked extremists seized control of Nineveh province and Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city.  It puts terrorists in control of an enormous part of Iraq’s north and west.   As Bob Dreyfuss in a June 10 article in The Nation so correctly puts it: The crisis now engulfing Iraq provides the ultimate condemnation of the decision by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their cohorts—backed, of course, by Hillary Clinton and John Kerry—to invade Iraq in 2003. That action, which destroyed virtually all of Iraq’s institutions and created a power vacuum that led directly to an ethnic and sectarian civil war, is now playing out all of its terrible consequences.  The ongoing sectarian violence has taken a staggering toll in Iraq - with more than 8,000 killed in 2013 and monthly totals that suggest an even higher number of deaths this year; in May, 799 Iraqis died as the result of suicide bombings, car bombs, targeted assassinations, tit-for-tat killings and other civil war–like violence, according to the United Nations—and that data doesn’t even include Anbar province. 

Mother Jones, June 13 post: "What the Hell is Happening in Iraq Right Now?"

The Off-Year Elections and What They Mean

Tea Party nemesis Republican Chris Christie won a second term as New Jersey governor by a wide margin - more than 20 points - over the Democratic challenger.  Across the river in New York, progressive Bill de Blasio won in a landslide, 73-24, over his Republican opponent, thereby becoming the first Democratic mayor of New York in two decades.  In Virginia, Democrat Terry McAuliffe won the governorship by 2.5% over Tea Party favorite Ken Cuccinelli.

So what is the significance of these off-year election results and what do they  mean for 2014 and 2016?

Bi-partisanship works in a blue state.  Democrats generally believe that government can help people and will work with a Republican who is not too extreme.

• Christie is a popular governor who has made much of his ability to work with Democrats.  His handling of the damage wreaked by Superstorm Sandy was universally praised.  Christie had the support of several state Democratic leaders and politicians and he was endorsed by most of the state's newspapers, including the Newark Star-Ledger. 
• According to exit polls, Christie won majorities of women and Hispanics and increased his vote among African-Americans and union households.  Still, his percentage of the vote (60%) was less than the 1985 victory of Republican Tom Kean (69%).   
• New Jersey Democrats retained control of the legislature in spite of Christie's landslide win.

The Tea Party is down but not out.  They are still passionate about their causes and vote in droves when they are.

• Tea Party extremism is not as popular in New Jersey as in many other states.  Christie's victory there says nothing about his ability to win the Republican Presidential primary should he choose to run in 2016. 
• Even after the government shutdown, Republicans almost managed to win the governorship in Virginia.  Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli made "Obamacare" the issue in the weeks after the shutdown and almost pulled off a victory. 
• Six per cent of the vote in Virginia went to the Libertarian candidate.  This was double the margin of McAuliffe's victory.  Though no one can say how this Libertarian vote would have split, I think it's fair to say that McAuliffe owed his victory almost as much to this as Bill Clinton did to the Ross Perot vote in 1992 and George Bush to the Florida Ralph Nader vote in 2000.  (Okay, hanging chads and the Supreme Court had more to do with Bush's victory than the Nader vote.  Still Nader's 97,000 votes dwarfed the 537 vote margin by which Bush won Florida and thus the Presidency.)

Money and voter turnout (still) win elections. 

• McAuliffe had a big edge over Cuccinelli in money spent as did Democrats in the New Jersey legislative races.
• Thank God for the Democrats of (especially) northern Virginia.  As they did in the Presidential elections of 2008 and 2012, voters in the northern counties turned out in enough numbers to counteract the majority Republican vote in other parts of the state.
• Obama's Presidential victories in 2008 and 2012 were the result of the same dynamics.  He outspent his opponents and voter turnout was key. 
• Citizens United will bring essentially unlimited money into the 2014 and 2016 elections, primarily on the Republican side. Democrats had better begin planning now on how they will energize their base to a) not lose the Senate in 2014, b) pickup at least a few seats in the gerry-mandered House districts, and c) win the 2016 Presidential election. 

New York City is (still) overwhelmingly Democratic, progressive and ethnic.

• In electing progressive Bill de Blasio by nearly 50 points, New Yorkers returned to their roots.  The most liberal of the candidates in the Democratic field, de Blasio campaigned on a program to lessen New York's gap between the rich and the poor - provide universal pre-K, end stop-and-frisk, build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing.
• He is the fourth Italian-American to serve as mayor of the city.  He joins fellow Italian-American New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in running one of the most progressive cities in one of the most progressive states in the country.  De Blasio's  maternal grandparents were Italian immigrants.  He is married to an African-American woman and his inter-racial family was at the center of his campaign. 
• At 6' 5", he is 15" taller than the first Italian-American mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia.  Let's hope height is not inversely proportional to ability.  Fiorello LaGuardia, a progressive, reformist "New Deal Republican", is widely regarded as one of the 2 or 3 greatest mayors in US history.

Image
The photo of Governor Christie and President Obama is from The Governor's Office/Tim Larsen.