The Egyptian mess plays out . . . well, the way it looked like it would

"Although the generals promised fresh elections, they gave no timetable."

-- from "Egyptian military ousts Morsi, suspends
Constitution," on washingtonpost.com

by Ken

Sometimes train wrecks catch most everyone by surprise, and sometimes they're there for everyone to watch unfold, powerless to avert the disaster. In an update to his post yesterday, Howie reported that the developments he reported seeming about the be developing seemed to be developing. The Muslim Brotherhood doesn't seem to accept that what has happened has happened -- namely that their bumbling incompetent president, Mohammed Morsi, Egypt's first elected president, has been ousted from that office by the country's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which insists that it's not a "coup." What it is, says SCAF, is a "road map" to new elections, with one that leads places the ousted president doesn't seem to have seen the country going.

Of course it's a coup. What else could you call it?

The WaPo team of Abigail Hauslohner, William Booth, and Sharaf al-Hourani reports:

The abrupt conclusion of Morsi’s year-long tenure came in a televised address to the nation by the head of Egypt's armed forces, Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, early Wednesday evening. The move, he said, was aimed at resolving the country’s debilitating political crisis.

Sissi said that the country’s new constitution -- ratified under Morsi -- would be suspended and that the chief of Egypt's constitutional court will assume the presidency on an interim basis until the elections are held. Sissi said the interim president -- Adly Mansour, who assumed the position of the nation’s top judicial authority just three days ago -- will have the right to declare laws during the transitional period.

Without mentioning Morsi by name in his eight-minute speech, Sissi said the military had responded to the Egyptian people's demands in an act of "public service."

"The armed forces have tried in recent months, both directly and indirectly, to contain the internal situation and to foster national reconciliation between the political powers, including the presidency," Sissi said. But those efforts failed, he said. The president, he added, "responded with negativity in the final minutes."

The thing is, the general wasn't romancing when he said the military was responding to the Egyptian people's demands. On the whole, the mood in the streets seemed to be jubilant. Morsi, you'll recall, moved quickly and decisively to consolidate his and his party's power, but that seems to be the limit of his vision for his country. Of course Egypt's problems are immense and hideous, and would tax the competence of a leader who actually had the intellectual resources, gumption, and public support to try to tackle them. Alas, President Morsi wasn't any of those things.

On washingtonpost.com you could find a number of story blurbs of an obvious nature -- some true, others (despite their obviousness) not. "Ouster a setback for Islamist parties." Yes. "Egypt’s lost opportunity" (this is Fareed Zakaria). Well, duh. "Washington 'could stop' ouster, critics charge as Obama breaks silence." Idiotic bullshit. But then, our president can claim the distinction of having the stupidest, most dishonest, and most cynically opportunistic critics in, well, the history of critics.

Ironically, the military coup provides a reminder of where the ultimate power still lies in Egypt. I say "ironically" because the military seems genuinely not to have wanted to have had to do what it has done. After not quite a year of Morsi, large numbers of Egyptians figured out that this isn't what they wanted. Unfortunately, the chances don't seem great that they would support a leader who tried to deal seriously with the country's problems. On the remote chance that such a leader happened to turn up.

It's a happy day for people who like chaos and hopelessness, and possibly cynical opportunism as well. For everyone else, it's, well, a mess.

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To reduce litter, you get rid of the trash receptacles, right?

by Ken

Some time ago signs suddenly appeared in one of my frequently used subway stations, the Rector Street station of the no. 1 train, informing riders that, as part of a campaign to reduce litter in the subway, all the trash receptacles were going to be removed from the station.

Um, wait a sec, removed? Yes, removed. The thinking (for want of a better word) was that if people saw that they had no option but to carry their trash with them to . . . well, points unknown, then they would feel obliged to do so. This is based, of course, on the assumption that it's the option of using a trash can that causes people to litter. I know that sounds crazy, but does it sound any crazier than saying that people deprived of the possibility of depositing their litter in a suitable receptacle will be more likely to dispose of it responsibly?

Of course what's really being saved is the cost of removing the canned trash. Once the crud is in the trash can, after all, it becomes the responsibility of the designated authorities to do something with it. Somewhere along the line some genius came up with the "idea" that having trash cans readily available makes people lazy and causes them to litter.

From the Great Minds Think Alike file we learn that the National Park Service has reached the same conclusion, and implemented it in the form of a revolutionary new "Trash Free Parks" initiative. In this case the Washington Post's "In the Loop" team followed up. (I suspect that this item was written by "Loop" deputy Emily Heil, who wrote the earlier piece linked at the outset.)

When cans get canned

We wrote last month about the Park Service's new policy, begun on Earth Day, to start removing trash cans from sites along the George Washington Memorial Parkway -- including popular places such as the Iwo Jima memorial, Great Falls and Roosevelt Island -- essentially forcing visitors to take their empty water bottles, food wrappers and other trash with them when they leave.

This effort was part of the Park Service's "Trash Free Parks" initiative, which hopes to reduce the amount of garbage the government has to haul away. You could think of it as trying to empower the American people to do the right thing and not to rely on the federal government so much.

We were admittedly skeptical, thinking that folks were likely to just throw their trash on the ground if the cans were removed.

But Jon James, superintendent of the parkway, was more optimistic. "It's a mind-set shift," he told us, adding that the program has been successful in other parks, including Catoctin Mountain Park.

A Loop Fan who lives near the Iwo Jima memorial said trash and litter are often seen there since the cans were taken away. (He said the photo he sent as proof was taken the morning after a Marine Band concert on the grounds, so there was a bit more than usual, but it's nonetheless a constant problem.)

We talked trash Thursday with a National Park Service spokeswoman for this region. She told us that older,"well-established" programs have "an 80 to 95 percent success rate." So after a while park personnel only have to "deal with litter left behind by a small percentage."

Well, maybe a mind-set is a hard thing to shift very quickly in this area.

I'm embarrassed to admit that, even with a college degree, I didn't understand a word of what the parks folks had to say. But then, that's just me.


AFTERTHOUGHT: I SHOULD HAVE POINTED OUT . . .

. . . that even if we assume that this nutty scheme works, that people really are inspired to schlepp their trash out of Rector Street station and out of the parks, the amount of trash hasn't been reduced, it's just been offloaded onto somebody else's trash-collection budget.

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Is "system" really the word for our two-party, er, arrangement?

Do Republicans really grasp the significance of having people like VA Atty. Gen. (and 2013 gubernatorial candidate) "Cuckoo Ken" Cuccinelli as the face of their party? The Dems meanwhile have their own problems; we'll get to that.

by Ken

It's not exactly news that here at DWT we don't have a whole lot of hope for either of our major political parties. And since Howie has, as usual, been keeping us up to date on the horror shows of both, I haven't felt the need to chime in. (Not much anyway.) But a pair of items that have jumped out of the news hole into the opinion pages -- in one case, a Washington Post editorial, in the other a NYT column by Gail Collins -- and it struck me that they kind of sketch out the boundaries of the hole we're in.

AMERICA, MEET YOUR 2014 REPUBLICAN TEAM

You remember "Cuckoo Ken" Cuccinelli, the super-exreme right-wing wacko who got himself elected Virginia's attorney general and is now the Republican Party's candidate to succeed fake-moderate far-right-wing Gov. Bob McDonnell?

And you remember the ironic turn of events by which his handlers are forcing him to pretend to be a tad less crazy than he is in order to throw less of a scare into the non-wacko portion of the state electorate. After all, all he has to do is defeat perhaps the most loathsome candidate the Dems could have come up with: Mr. Moneybags, Terry McAuliffe, and he gets to move into the governor's office and unleash his full crazy.

And you remember the still more ironic turn of events by which the Cooch is now saddled with a running mate possibly even crazier than he is. (Yes, it's possible. As I like to say, you never want to put something like that in the form of a challenge.)

Well, it takes a lot to get the Editorial Board of the Washington Post worked up to the point of bluntly dressing down war-whooping right-wingers. But harken unto the start of this editorial, "Va.’s Cuccinelli plays fast and loose with the facts on abortion":

E.W. JACKSON, the fire-breathing pastor who stunned the Republican establishment by storming the party convention in Virginia and snatching the nomination for lieutenant governor, has been roundly mocked for saying Planned Parenthood has been “far more lethal to black lives” than has the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, the idea that Planned Parenthood is a racist, even genocidal enterprise, while scurrilous and estranged from the truth, is an article of faith among some right-wing Republicans — among them Herman Cain, the flash-in-the-pan presidential contestant in last year’s GOP primaries, and Mr. Jackson’s running mate, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, the party’s candidate for governor.

The Post editorial writer, bless him/her, goes on to actually investigate the "charges" the loony tunes have come up with, updated to include the idiotic notion "that Planned Parenthood targets African Americans for abortions today by concentrating its clinics in black communities." There's something preposterous about dignifying these imbecilities with "fact-checking," but I guess it has to be done.

And even the Post editorial writer gets there in the end.

Mr. Cuccinelli has written that Planned Parenthood’s sex-education programs in the nation’s schools are “a loss leader” for the organization, whose real goal is to hook youngsters into seeking “abortion on demand.” That conspiratorial view does not align with reality, but it does square with Mr. Cuccinelli’s general disdain for any facts that pose an obstacle to his ideological agenda.

Still, the problem isn't really the loony tunes' command of facts. The point is that they don't care about facts, and this is across the board, not just single-issue. It's as if they believe that facts are part of a liberal-socialist conspiracy. Instead of facts, they have, as the editorial writer put it, their ideological agenda, what I would describe as their warped, delusional primitive brains, saturated with ideological delusion.

I bring up the Virginians, not as a side show, but as part of the main event. Although voices of caution are finally being heard around the margins, the Republican Party remains in thrall to its farthest-right crazies. Howie has been tracking them here, so I don't need to review the list. Arizona Rep. Trent Franks's loony resurrection of Republican rape craziness should serve as a reminder that 2012 poster crazies Todd Akin of Missouri and Richard Mourdock of Indiana differed only in their nutty bluntness from their more circumspect colleagues like whiz kid Paul Ryan.

(I should add that there is, of course, another party dallying in the Republican tent: the people who view it -- in a good way -- as the Party of the Rich, who expect to use all those poor dumb sumbitches as tools toward enabling the party to personally enrich them. They are, again of course, bolstered by all those rich-guy wannabes who will settle for being lackeys to the elites, beneficiaries their largesse. I'm not including these people in my argument because, after all, they have correctly identified their own interests and are correctly pursuing them.)


THEN THERE'S YOUR DEMOCRATIC LINEUP

In today's column, "The Revenge of Magic Mike, the NYT's Gail Collins surveyed the fallout from the latest electoral initiatives of New York City's Michael Bloomberg, the man who, she imagines, has us all asking ourselves, "What would I do if I had $27 billion to toss around?"

As we all know, Mayor Mike has made illegal guns his immediate cause, and he and his fellow Mayors Against Illegal Guns have targeted the four Democratic senators who this year voted against the exceedingly modest gun regulation bill, despite heavy popular support. She points to the $350K Mayor Mike poured into ads in Arkansas targeting Sen. Mark Pryor, one of the two out of the apostate four running for reelection this year, along with Alaska's Mark Begich. And now there's Mayor Mike's letter to the thousand biggest New York Democratic donors encouraging them not to contribute to the campaigns of the Dem Four.

"Some gun control advocates," Gail writes, "regard this as a disastrous example of tone-deaf politics: the war on Big Gulps writ large." Pryor and Begich, she points out,

are going to be opposed by Republicans who are even more averse to weapons regulation. Right now it looks as if Begich’s opponent will be Joe Miller, a Tea Party stalwart who would be an improvement only to people who believe that the one thing this country needs is to bring back Sarah Palin.

Meanwhile "Democratic leaders" are going bonkers because they have so many candidates in tight races this year. While it's true that Mayor Mike has no stake in the care and feeding of the Democratic Party, being an "issue guy" here, still, even on those terms, those Dem leaders are apoplectic.

They argue, with absolute accuracy, that if the Democrats lose control of the Senate in 2014, there will be no gun bill to vote for, because Mitch McConnell, as majority leader, would never allow one to get to the floor.

Now it's an article of faith among a lot of us on the progressive side of the spectrum that one thing we need urgently to do is to upgrade the quality of Dem office-holders, that while Republican obstructionism is indeed an important reality, too many important fights are being lost because of Democratic, not Republican, nonsupport. And isn't this just how you might go about holding the apostate Dems to account? By making sure their voters know what they're doing, and why it's bad?

Well, yes, but . . . .

We've been living with this argument for decades now: In any given instance, are we better off with a Republican or a Democrat who's not much better? And we all know the arguments on both sides.

In presidential politics, were we really (or would we really have been) better off with [fill in the name of any of the Dem candidates of the last several decades] than with [the R each was running against]> Or rather would we be enough better off to justify supporting so flawed a candidate? The Senate version goes like this: On the one hand, Rs who replace Ds will be voting for Mitch McConnell for majority leader, while on the other hand we can't go on indefinitely rewarding Ds who, when the chips are down, are likely to vote with the Rs.

(The latter is sometimes accompanied by the argument that maybe by t'rowing da bums out, we can hope for a resurrection, the dawn of a more enlightened-by-purge party and candidates. It was the argument of the people who voted for Ralph Nader. But I'd like to that that especially in the shadow of George W. Bush this argument isn't going to regain much currency.)

My point tonight is not to come down on one side or the other, but to step back and suggest that the very nature of this perennial dilemma is why there's so little to be hoped for from the Dems. I will still continue to vote for them, mostly, just as I've been voting Dem in pretty much each of the above-referenced instances. I have no doubt, for example, that we would be significantly worse off with a President Willard than we are with what we've got. But if someone wants to insist how much better?, beyond saying "a fair piece better," I don't think I want to talk about it.

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The time has come to start counting our monthly WaPo pieces of content

by Ken

So now we know when (more or less) and how (give or take) the Washington Post will begin charging for access to its online content. The good news is that the paper will not limit our ability to search classified advertising, in case you were worried.

Publisher’s letter: How the paywall will work

By Katharine Weymouth, Published: June 5, 2013 at 10:00 am

On June 12, we will begin phasing in our metered subscription model. It will take us a few weeks to get everyone into the system, but doing that will allow us to ensure that you have the best possible experience.

Once the subscription service launches, you will initially be able to view 20 pieces of content per month before being asked to subscribe. We hope you will consider subscribing even if you don’t reach the limit; a subscription will provide unlimited access to all The Post’s world-class journalism, multimedia and interactive features and more. Importantly, you will also be helping to support our newsgathering operations.

Whether or not you subscribe, we will not limit your ability to view The Post’s homepage and section front pages, watch videos or search classified advertising. In addition, readers who come to The Post through search engines or shared links will be able to access the linked page regardless of the number of articles they have previously viewed.

Our digital packages will be priced at $9.99 per month for access to the desktop and mobile web only and $14.99 for an all-digital package which includes access to all of The Post’s custom apps. Home delivery subscribers will continue to have complimentary access to all of The Post’s digital products.

Over the coming months, we will learn more about how everything is working, listen to your feedback and modify our model accordingly. There is going to be a great deal of experimentation ahead to strike the right balance between ensuring access to critical news and information and building a sustainable business.

So, June 12 or whenever they get to us. We freeloaders will get 20 free "pieces of content" a month -- "initially." (So I assume that will soon enough be 10.) Or else we pay either $9.99/month or $14.99 with all the apps you can eat.)

I know no one gets this anytime I say it, but let me say it again: While I don't begrudge or even criticize the Post for going "paywall," I don't expect to be signing on. And let me once again stress that first part. Newspapers have to find a way of generating revenue from their online presence or they can't stay in business. Whether they can generate enough revenue to stay in business isn't clear, but giving away all the "content" doesn't seem like a sustainable business model even to this economic semi-literate.

That said, however, I still get to choose whether I start shelling out, and I don't see it happening. And if my NYT experience is anything to go by, I may not come all that close to using up my free pieces of content. Life is too short to spend it counting Chris Cillizza pieces of content.

For the record, I've never actually searched the Post's classified advertising. I might make that my new hobby, but I wouldn't count on it.

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