The Commentariat -- Aug. 30, 2013

NEW. Anthony Faiola of the Washington Post: "BREAKING NEWS: Secretary of State John F. Kerry says the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made preparations three days before last week's chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus and fired the rockets from regime-controlled areas. This story will be updated shortly." ...

     ... UPDATE by Karen DeYoung & Anthony Faiola: "Secretary of State John F. Kerry made a forceful case Friday for U.S. military intervention in Syria, saying that U.S. intelligence has information pinning responsibility for last week's chemical weapons attack squarely on the government of President Bashar al-Assad. In a speech at the State Department, Kerry said U.S. intelligence has 'high confidence' that the Assad government was responsible for the attack based partly on knowledge of regime officials' conversations about the attack and the tracking of movements of regime personnel before and after the strike":

... Julian Pecquet of the Hill: "Thursday night's briefing by top Obama administration officials exposed divisions among key lawmakers on what to do in Syria. Lawmakers on the unclassified conference call said the officials made it clear that President Obama is still weighing his options but believes 'beyond a doubt' that Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces used chemical weapons 'intentionally' in an attack last week that rebels say killed more than 1,000 people. They left convinced that Assad's forces were responsible for using chemical weapons, and that Obama should respond. But they were split on the timeline...." ...

... AFP: "French President Francois Hollande said Friday he remained committed to a firm response on Syria despite Britain's surprise rejection of armed intervention. 'France wants firm and proportionate action against the Damascus regime,' he said in an interview with Le Monde daily to be published Saturday. Hollande said all options were on the table and did not rule out military strikes within days...." ...

... Michael Gordon of the New York Times: "The goal of the cruise missile strikes the United States is planning to carry out in Syria is to restore the smudged 'red line' that President Obama drew a year ago against the use of poison gas. If carried out effectively, the strikes may also send a signal to Iran that the White House is prepared to back up its words, no small consideration for an administration that has proclaimed that the use of military force remains an option if the leadership in Iran insists on fielding a nuclear weapon." ...

... Mark Landler, et al., of the New York Times: "President Obama is prepared to move ahead with a limited military strike on Syria, administration officials said Thursday, despite a stinging rejection of such action on Thursday by America's stalwart ally Britain and mounting questions from Congress. The negative vote in Britain's Parliament was a heavy blow to Prime Minister David Cameron, who had pledged his support to Mr. Obama and called on lawmakers to endorse Britain's involvement in a brief operation...." ...

... Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "The administration insisted Thursday that President Obama has both the authority and the determination to make his own decision on a military strike against Syria, even as a growing chorus of lawmakers demanded an opportunity to vote on the issue and Britain, the United States' closest ally, appeared unlikely to participate." ...

... Paul Lewis & Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian: "Barack Obama's plans for air strikes against Syria were thrown into disarray on Thursday night after the British parliament unexpectedly rejected a motion designed to pave the way to authorising the UK's participation in military action.... The timing of the British vote, 272 to 285 against the government, was disastrous for Obama. Less than 30 minutes after the vote, senior intelligence officials began a conference call with key members of Congress, in an attempt to keep US lawmakers on side." ...

... This "guidance" issued by the Prime Minister, outlines the government's legal position re: its right to take action against Syria. ...

... Mike Lillis of the Hill: "... dozens of liberal Democrats joined scores of conservative Republicans in warning the administration that any strikes without congressional approval would violate the Constitution. In a letter to [President] Obama, 53 liberal Democrats -- including a long list of Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) members -- argued that, while the human rights atrocities being committed by the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad are 'horrific,' they alone 'should not draw us into an unwise war -- especially without adhering to our own constitutional requirement.'"

... ** SNAFU. Josh Rogin of the Daily Beast: "The Obama administration has refused to send gas masks and other chemical-weapons protection gear to Syrian opposition groups, despite numerous requests dating back more than a year and until the reported chemical-weapons attack that struck the Damascus suburbs August 21.... One former Obama-administration official said the national-security staff ... ruled out providing gas masks, though thousands sit in Defense Department warehouses all over the region, left over from the war in Iraq." ...

... ** Another Reason Obama Should Call a Special Session of Congress before Attacking Syria. David Atkins of Hullabaloo: "Those of us who know it's unfair tend to look down on those who think the Presidency is essentially an elected kingship, and who believe that the President can simply enact universal healthcare, deftly reduce the deficit and end student loan debt with a wave of his hand. But why shouldn't they believe that, after all, when the President can simply decide to drop bombs on another country without an act of Congress?" ...

... David Rieff in the New Republic: "Orwell famously said that 'if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.' Posing the question of how to respond to the Assad's regime's use against its own people of the most terrible weapon that exists, apart from nuclear bombs, in terms of punishment is a prime example of this. Such metaphors are prophylactics against thought. The United States is neither the world's parent..., with the unwelcome but necessary responsibility of administering a spanking to a delinquent child, and still less is it the world's judge, jailer, or, to judge by the Weekly Standard letter..., its executioner, tasked with putting the Assad regime to death.... I remain entirely convinced that the correct course would be to refrain from any military action against the Assad regime.

Richard Esposito, et al., of NBC News: "Edward Snowden accessed some secret national security documents by assuming the electronic identities of top NSA officials, said intelligence sources." ...

... CW: This article by Keith Wagstaff of the Week is very helpful in explaining how Snowden managed to access & download documents. I had thought his position as "systems administrator" meant he headed up a group of systems analysts, programmers &/or other systems personnel. That's not it at all; Snowden was even lower on the totem pole than I thought. Wagstaff cites Kevin Roose of New York: "The sysadmin is in charge of setting account permissions, creating and deleting accounts, and routing information to the correct people and places." Wagstaff writes, "Once Snowden had access to sensitive documents, his position as a system administrator allowed him to do what other NSA employees couldn't -- download files onto an external hard drive.... As ZDNet's Larry Seltzer notes, with only two levels of 'security access, "Top Secret" and "Unfettered", it's surprising that a Snowden-like leak didn't happen long ago.'" ...

... Barton Gellman & Greg Miller of the Washington Post: "U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government's top secret budget. The $52.6 billion 'black budget' for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from ... Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses those funds or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.... The summary [budget] describes cutting-edge technologies, agent recruiting and ongoing operations. The Washington Post is withholding some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods. Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online." ...

... CW: read the very last section of the report, titled "Counterintelligence." Oh, the irony. ...

... Here are the charts & "selected pages" of the "black budget" the Post has chosen to publish. CW: Again, bear in mind that Snowden gave the Post the entire black budget, including material that the Post was convinced could compromise national security. And Snowden has (or had) those compromising documents on him while he's living in Russia. ...

... Here's an interactive breakout of the national security budget, by agency. ...

... Joan McCarter of Daily Kos: "Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire points out where a huge percentage of the money has gone: 'ODNI confirmed that 70% of the intel budget goes to contractors. With the new WaPo numbers, that's $36.8 billion in 2013 to BOOZ SAIC et al.' It's sustaining the intelligence/industrial complex, much like the grift that made plenty of millionaires out of the Iraq war. As with so many of the military contractors in Iraq, this is happening with very little oversight from Congress and -- until now -- no scrutiny from the public." ...

... Craig Timberg & Barton Gellman of the Post: "The National Security Agency is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks, filtering vast traffic flows for foreign targets in a process that also sweeps in large volumes of American telephone calls, e-mails and instant messages.... New details of the corporate-partner project ... confirm that the agency taps into 'high volume circuit and packet-switched networks,' according to the spending blueprint for fiscal 2013.... Voluntary cooperation from the 'backbone' providers of global communications dates to the 1970s under the cover name BLARNEY, according to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. These relationships long predate the PRISM program disclosed in June..." ...

... Kevin Poulson of Wired: NSA Director James "Clapper writes in a line [of a summary report on the budget] marked 'top secret,' 'we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.' The Post's article doesn't detail the 'groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities' Clapper mentions, and there's no elaboration in the portion of the document published by the paper. But the document shows that 21 percent of the intelligence budget -- around $11 billion -- is dedicated to the Consolidated Cryptologic Program that staffs 35,000 employees in the NSA and the armed forces. In a WIRED story in March of last year -- the pre-Snowden era of NSA reporting — James Bamford reported that the NSA secretly made some sort of 'enormous breakthrough' in cryptanalysis several years earlier." ...

... Craig Whitlock & Barton Gellman of the Post: "The U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden was guided from space by a fleet of satellites, which aimed dozens of receivers over Pakistan to collect a torrent of electronic and signals intelligence as the mission unfolded, according to a top-secret U.S. intelligence document [which Edward Snowden provided to the Post]." ...

... Just Ask Ed. CW: When Ed Snowden gets through releasing all these top-secret documents, & the various media outlets get through publishing them, no other government will ever have to ask, when blindsided by some U.S. maneuver, "How'd they do that?"

Elections Matter -- 1, 2, 3

(1) Treasury Department: "The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) today ruled that same-sex couples, legally married in jurisdictions that recognize their marriages, will be treated as married for federal tax purposes. The ruling applies regardless of whether the couple lives in a jurisdiction that recognizes same-sex marriage or a jurisdiction that does not recognize same-sex marriage.

(2) Department of Health & Human Services: "Today, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a memo clarifying that all beneficiaries in private Medicare plans have access to equal coverage when it comes to care in a nursing home where their spouse lives. This is the first guidance issued by HHS in response to the recent Supreme Court ruling, which held section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. 'HHS is working swiftly to implement the Supreme Court's decision and maximize federal recognition of same-sex spouses in HHS programs,' said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. 'Today's announcement is the first of many steps that we will be taking over the coming months to clarify the effects of the Supreme Court's decision and to ensure that gay and lesbian married couples are treated equally under the law.'"

(3) Brady Dennis of the Washington Post: "The Obama administration on Thursday said it will not stand in the way of Colorado, Washington and other states where voters have supported legalizing marijuana either for medical or recreational use, as long as those states maintain strict rules involving distribution of the drug. In a memo sent Thursday to U.S. attorneys in all 50 states, Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole detailed the administration's new stance, even as he reiterated that marijuana remains illegal under federal law."

David Catanese of the New Republic: Democrats should invest more in trying to regain the House & less in holding the Senate. CW: Catanese rather obliquely explains why. I think the real argument is that there are enough Republican Senators who aren't Tea Party-crazy that the Senate, no matter who holds it, could work with the House & President to pass legislation. But here's the thing: right now there are enough Republicans & Democrats in the House to pass legislation in a number of area, though such legislation would necessarily be more conservative than we like. It's just that the House leadership won't allow that. The trick is to finesse Boehner, et al. Democrats don't seem to be trying very hard to do that. ...

... BUT. Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post: "The Obama administration and a group of Republican senators abandoned efforts Thursday to hammer out a budget deal and avoid a showdown over the national debt, saying they had failed to resolve their long-standing dispute over taxes."

Tim Egan: media figures like Rush Limbaugh & Matt Drudge stoke racism every time they hear of a black-on-white crime, & Internet sites anywhere in the nation instantly bring to mind an "Alabama Klan meeting."

Republican Means Never Having to Tell the Truth. Tommy Christopher of Mediaite: "One of the controversies surrounding the 50th anniversary celebration of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech has been the absence of Republicans at the event, despite many of them having been invited. One prominent Republican, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) [the only African American senator], told Roll Call through a spokesperson that he had not been invited, but the paper reported, Thursday afternoon, that an email confirms that Sen. Scott's office declined an invitation to the event earlier this month." Here's the Roll Call story.

Camille Dodero of Gawker comments on the reported execution of Hyon Song-wol, the ex-lover of North Korea's dear boy-leader. See also yesterday's News Ledes.

Senate Race

It seems Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who is running for the U.S. Senate, has an imaginary friend -- a drug-dealer whom he named "T-Bone" & whom Booker used to mention regularly in his speeches & interviews. Eliana Johnson broke the story at the National Review, but J. K. Trotter of Gawker debunks her source's claim that a New Jersey dealer would not adopt the handle "T-Bone." Gawker commenter "Not a Snort" sez, "... Back in the mid-90's, I used to hang out with a friend who was a Newark native, called himself Sirloin, and we would buy heroin together in some of the roughest neighborhoods there. Our regular dealer was a fellow named Rib Eye. His girl was an exotic dancer from Queens who went by the handle of N.Y. Strip. I remember being terrified of his 300 lb enforcer named Ground Round and his apprentice, Chuck. We used to meet up at a shooting gallery called the Porter House and just get wasted all day. Good times, if you overlooked all the bad cholesterol that was in the air."

Local News

Michael Barbaro of the New York Times: "Frustration with New York City's unaffordability and its aggressive police tactics is elevating Bill de Blasio, once dismissed as a left-leaning long shot, into the lead of the Democratic mayoral primary field, according to a poll by The New York Times and Siena College. Christine C. Quinn, the longtime front-runner in the nomination contest, is now lagging far behind Mr. de Blasio and struggling to connect with members of her own party: forty-five percent of likely Democratic voters view her unfavorably."

News Ledes

New York Times: "Seamus Heaney, a widely celebrated Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, died at a hospital in Dublin on Friday after a short illness, according to a statement issued on behalf of his family. He was 74."

Washington Post: "The FBI has arrested a man accused of making violent threats against freshman Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) -- threats that included her decapitation."

War, Words & Wittgenstein

This commentary by Akhilleus appeared near the end of yesterday's thread. In hopes of giving it a wider readership, I've copied it here:

On the use and misuse of language for political purposes.

A piece in the current New Yorker by Teju Cole on the ways in which clichéd approaches to language result in trite and defective thought processes led me to consider the way political expositions are currently being used in the run up to whatever the hell it is we are planning in Syria.

Akhilleus, August 29, 2013

It also reminded me of two old friends who have expressed similar trepidations regarding language and thinking, George Orwell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein concerned himself with the limits and uses of language in two of his most important works. As a gunnery soldier in WWI he spent much time considering the problems of locution and propositions thereby expressed. This work became the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”. He later, in his “Philosophical Investigations” reexamined much of his thinking on language and explored how inaccurate use and understanding of the limitations of language could lead to unsound and imprecise thinking.

George Orwell, in an essay on “Politics and the English Language” reached pretty much the same conclusions albeit in a more congenial fashion. He was concerned that sloppy, unclear language begets similarly sloppy thinking and demonstrates (hilariously) how clichéd political language is used to hide rather than rectify spurious thinking underlying terribly erroneous decisions.

Our contemporary political discourse is not much better. Euphemisms such as “collateral damage”, “limited strike” “Shock and Awe” and “symbolic attack” obscure the linguistic landscape in clouds of dusty metaphor. But if you’re talking about dropping bombs as a symbol, I’d have to say that most symbols I’m familiar with don’t kill people. Poor or willfully misleading expressions of bad ideas lead inevitably to regrettable outcomes (see: War, Iraq).

If we are intent on sending a message of international disapproval, because that’s pretty much all this is (no regime change intended, at least so we say), specifically because of the use of chemical agents, then why have we not sent “messages” to other regimes whose intentions and actions toward their own people have been equally nefarious and deadly?

A more accurate and careful use of language, that is, an approach that jettisons clichés and anodyne, mystical euphemisms would demand clearer, more nuanced thinking. Defaulting to political bromide-speak serves only to cloud the goals and methods and offers little opportunity for judicious, rigorous thought. And if such issues have already been carefully parsed then the employment of political, euphemistic language to sway public opinion presents its own set of problems, namely, that of inaccurately describing intentions and methods, as ruefully seen during the Bush debacle.

A sidebar on chemical warfare: I’m not entirely convinced that chemical agents are that much worse than bombs, bullets, and rockets (but I’m open to opposition on this). Granted it’s much harder to protect oneself from a chemical attack, but if one’s house has rockets raining down on it there ain’t a much better chance of surviving attacks by conventional weaponry. And consider this, we didn’t care when Iraq gassed the Iranians. In fact, we helped. We didn’t care when Saddam gassed the Kurds. We shrugged our shoulders. Sure he was an evil prick, but he was our evil prick. And there are plenty of other evil pricks in the world besides Assad. Do we go after all of them? No one cared about genocide in Rwanda or the Congo or Cambodia (conventional weapons like machetes and AKs are equally useful for killing hundreds of thousands, even millions). So why here, why now? (The question is rhetorical.)

Chemical warfare has been used for centuries dating back to the use of poisoned arrows, which does not, of course, make it okay (don’t ask me to explain what part of any war is “okay”), but is rather an acknowledgement that chemicals in war have a long history. The original (fictional) Akhilleus, was felled by a poison arrow. German tribes being attacked by Roman Legions poisoned their water supplies, a move first decried then gleefully adopted by Rome. In 1899, a Hague Convention declared the use of chemical warfare out of bounds, with only one nation voting against it, the United States, whose representative was the influential military envoy Alfred Mahan. Captain Mahan's rationale for opposition was the desire not to tie the hands of future US weapons makers, improvements in the industrial manufacture of cool new chemical agents offering many exciting options for killing a shitload of people at once.

And after all, would a cloud of sarin gas have been worse than the firebombing of Dresden? The end result would still have been tens of thousands killed.

But, as I said, this is a sidebar. This isn’t to say that the Geneva Conventions should be set aside, but let’s be clear. It’s a weapon. It kills. That’s its purpose. Sure it guarantees a maximum impact against the enemy with little or no exposure (so to speak) for those using the weapon. But drone strikes do something similar (not on the same scale, of course).

And if we attack a country that offers us no imminent threat, other than some made up bullshit, then this is no better than what Bush and Cheney did in Iraq. It doesn’t take an enormous facility with clear language and clarity of thought to arrive at that conclusion, but it would help us think through this situation and perhaps allow us to either defenestrate this plan and come up with something that we (and the world) find more acceptable (such as what Marie suggests), both strategically as well as philosophically and politically, or find a clearer, more supportable rationale for moving ahead with the current plan of “symbolic bombing” , minus the weasel words and threadbare thinking.

It’s clear that the Obama administration feels that they are in a "damned if they do, damned if they don’t" situation, but that’s just another way of defaulting to clichéd thinking. There doesn’t have to be only those two outcomes. Clearer heads may very well come up a way of thinking and talking about this problem that will pry us free from clunky ideas and poorly examined options. And keep Orwell from another spin cycle in his grave.

And what would Wittgenstein say? He famously concludes his Tractatus by declaring that there are things that even the best language cannot accommodate:

“Concerning that of which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.”

In other words, just because you CAN say something, doesn’t mean it should be said or that it has any useful meaning in the world.

Advice rarely followed by politicians. Or political commentators.

The Commentariat -- Aug. 29, 2013

** NEW. Alan Cowell & Stephen Castle of the New York Times: "... United Nations inspectors headed to the outskirts of Damascus for a third day on Thursday, seeking evidence of chemical attacks, while the British authorities took the unusual step of publishing an intelligence assessment blaming the Syrian government for the deadly onslaught." ...

... ** NEW. Kimberly Dozier & Matt Apuzzo of the AP: "The intelligence linking Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle to an alleged chemical weapons attack is no 'slam dunk,' with questions remaining about who actually controls some of Syria's chemical weapons stores and doubts about whether Assad himself ordered the strike, U.S. intelligence officials say.... A report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence outlining that evidence against Syria includes a few key caveats -- including acknowledging that the U.S. intelligence community no longer has the certainty it did six months ago of where the regime's chemical weapons are stored, nor does it have proof Assad ordered chemical weapons use." ...

     ... David Atkins of Hullabaloo: "Intervention in this situation is somewhat perplexing. After watching tens of thousands of Syrians die in a brutal civil war, the United States seems determined to use bombs on a rogue faction of an oppressive regime based on murky intelligence in order not to alter the course of the civil war, but to defend the narrow principle that it's OK to kill people with bombs but not with poisonous gas. That doesn't sound like a great idea." ...

... Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "Lawmakers stepped up their call on Wednesday for President Obama to consult with Congress before ordering a military strike on Syria, with more than 100 House members signing a letter pressing the president to seek a vote before taking action. 'We strongly urge you to consult and receive authorization from Congress before ordering the use of U.S. military force in Syria,' read the letter, signed by 98 Republicans and 18 Democrats."...

... President Obama says he has "not made a decision" on how to proceed regarding Syria:

... Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "The Obama administration appeared Wednesday to be forging ahead with preparations to attack Syria. It dismissed a Syrian request to extend chemical weapons inspections there as a delaying tactic and said it saw little point in further discussion of the issue at the United Nations. President Obama said that 'there need to be international consequences' for the Aug. 21 chemical strikes he said he has concluded were carried out by the Syrian government." ...

... Kathleen Hennessey, et al., of the Los Angeles Times: "One U.S. official who has been briefed on the options on Syria said he believed the White House would seek a level of intensity 'just muscular enough not to get mocked' but not so devastating that it would prompt a response from Syrian allies Iran and Russia. 'They are looking at what is just enough to mean something, just enough to be more than symbolic,' he said." ...

... Lara Seligman of the Hill: "Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Wednesday expressed outrage over leaks related to possible air strikes on Syria, calling them 'crazy.' McCain pointed to reports that say U.S. air strikes on Syria could begin as early as Friday.... 'But all of these leaks, when strikes are going to take place, where, what's going to be used, if I were [Syrian President] Bashar Assad, I think I would declare tomorrow a snow day and keep everything from work,' McCain said on Fox News. 'This is crazy. These leaks are just crazy.'" ...

     ... CW: The "crazy leak" by "a U.S. official" to the L.A. Times which I highlighted above almost certainly comes from a top Republican Congressman. (If you can't figure out how I came to that conclusion, I'll provide a close reading. I think it's obvious.)

... Political scientist Charli Carpenter on the (il)legality of a U.S. attack on Syria. Via Eric Voeten in the Monkey Cage. ...

... New York Times Editors: "Despite the pumped-up threats and quickening military preparations, President Obama has yet to make a convincing legal or strategic case for military action against Syria. While there should be some kind of international response to the chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds of civilians last week, Mr. Obama has yet to spell out how that response would effectively deter further use of chemical weapons. For starters, where is the proof that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria carried out the attack? " ...

... Amy Davidson of the New Yorker: "There have been calls for the President to reconvene Congress and put this one before them, and such calls are right. It might even help the Administration figure out what, exactly, it hopes to accomplish by shooting missiles in the general direction of Damascus." That's just what British PM David Cameron is doing. ...

... Jim Fallows agrees with Davidson. "Completely apart from the procedural nicety of involving the rest of the government in authorizing the use of force, [President Obama] has a compelling political interest in spreading the responsibility for this decision." ...

... Steven Myers of the New York Times: "President Vladimir V. Putin has conspicuously avoided public comment on reports of a chemical weapons attack on civilians outside of Damascus, the Syrian capital.... Instead he has carried on, like many ordinary Russians, as if the civil war in Syria had not reached an ominous new phase.... Mr. Putin's public reticence, though, reflects a calculation that Russia can do little to stop a military intervention if the United States and other countries move ahead without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council -- and that he has little to lose at home, at least, if they do." ...

... John Judis of the New Republic has a good overview of the Syrian quagmire. Thanks to contributor P. D. Pepe for the link. ...

... CW: here's my question & one that I've not seen even contemplated. Rather than our sending in, um, "humanitarian" missiles, why not go to the Security Council for a resolution demanding the destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons arsenal? After all, if using chemical weapons violates international law -- and it does -- then there's absolutely no reason to have any. If Syria refused, then some escalation would be indicated. Responses, please. ...

... Time Staff: "On February 9, 1991, the Saturday Night Live cold open captured the press fervor before the Gulf War. As journalists search for scoops before another possible deadly conflict in Syria, it's a sketch worth remembering":

NEW. Ed Pilkington of the Guardian: 'The Obama administration is trying to dissuade federal judges from giving the New York Times reporter James Risen one last chance to avoid having to disclose his source in a criminal trial over the alleged leaking of US state secrets. The Department of Justice has filed a legal argument with the US appeals court for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, in which it strongly opposes any further consideration of Risen's petition. Risen's lawyers have asked the court to convene a full session of the 15-member court.... A three-member panel of the same court last month issued a 2-1 majority ruling in which they found that reporters had no privilege that would safeguard the confidentiality of their sources in a criminal trial."

Peter Baker & Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times: "President Obama stepped on Wednesday into the space where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once stood and summoned his iconic dream of a colorblind society in a celebration of a half-century of progress and a call to arms for the next generation." ...

A great Democracy does not make it harder to vote than to buy an assault weapon. -- President Bill Clinton

... President Jimmy Carter remembers "how it was":

... Dana Milbank: "Rising above it all was Rep. John Lewis, the 73-year-old Georgia Democrat who, as a civil rights leader, spoke at the original march, too. 'When I look out over this diverse crowd and survey the guests on this platform,' he told the audience, 'it seems to realize what Otis Redding was singing about and what Martin Luther King Jr. preached about: This moment in our history has been a long time coming, but a change has come.' It took a voice of '63 to give real meaning to '13."

... The Washington Post's page on the commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington is here. Video of the entire five-hour program is here. ...

... NEW. Remembering J. Edgar Hoover. Annie Laurie of Balloon Juice links to some excellent pieces about Martin Luther King, Jr., & about the government's opposition to him & the civil rights movement. ...

... GOP MIA. Emma Dumain of Roll Call: "Speaker John A. Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the House's two most senior Republicans, were invited to speak at the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington -- but declined. That wasn't a wise choice, said Julian Bond, a renowned civil rights activist, in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday afternoon.... 'They asked a long list of Republicans to come,' Bond continued, 'and to a man and woman they said "no." And that they would turn their backs on this event was telling of them, and the fact that they seem to want to get black votes, they're not gonna get 'em this way.'" ...

... Aamer Madhani of USA Today: "Both former Presidents [Bush] were invited to participate in Wednesday's celebration, which will feature speeches from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by President Obama as well as former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. But both Bushes are dealing with health issues and decided it best to skip the event." ...

** Alex Seitz-Wald, in a Washington Post post, has an excellent summary of the Republican no-show scandal. CW: (Seitz-Wald doesn't call it a scandal, but I do.) You don't have to be president of your local MLK fan club to honor one of the most significant events in the civil rights movement, especially when you are invited to do so. The fact that Eric Cantor preferred to "honor" oil industry lobbyists & John Boehner preferred to "honor" GOP donors tells you what you need to know about the Republican party.

... Alex Halperin of Salon: Republicans may have been AWOL for the commemoration, but conservative commentators tweeted their reactions.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. -- Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963 ...

... Charles Pierce: "That's the great loophole. It is an otherwise unremarkable sentiment given the context of the entire address, but, for the people who almost certainly would have lined up on the other side of the movement in 1963, it subsequently has been used as an opening through which all manner of historically backsliding mischief has come a'wandering in...." Pierce goes on to excoriate the National Review, [which can't be done too often]. "Lincoln won a war. Dr. King led a revolution. They both fought the same enemy, a stubborn, clever enemy that is not yet vanquished." ...

... Ta-Nehisi Coates: "... whenever I see conservatives [like George Will] embracing [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan, I wonder whether they've actually read the report."

Justice Is Not Color-Blind. Nicole Flatow of Think Progress has the shocking statistics on racial discrimination in our criminal "justice" system.

One of Thousands of Examples of Why We Need a Campaign Reform Amendment. Eric Lipton of the New York Times: "Eight months ago, Congress ordered the Obama administration to eliminate a stark example of federal government waste: more than $500 million a year in excessive drug payments being sent to dialysis clinics nationwide. But ... more than 100 of the same members of Congress who voted in January to impose the cut are now trying to push the Obama administration to reverse it or water it down. The conflicting message is due in part to the lobbying muscle of an industry dominated by two companies -- DaVita Healthcare Partners of Denver and Fresenius, based in Germany -- both of which have seen their bottom lines improve since 2011, when the federal government first started making the excessive payments."

Clara Ritger of the National Journal: "Republicans have long blamed President Obama's signature health care initiative for increasing insurance costs, dubbing it the 'Unaffordable Care Act.' Turns out, they might be right. For the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchange than what they're currently paying for employer-sponsored benefits, according to a National Journal analysis of new coverage and cost data. Adding even more out-of-pocket expenses to consumers' monthly insurance bills is a swell in deductibles under the Affordable Care Act." CW: for a number of reasons, I think this analysis may present a false picture. If some experts respond to the piece, I'll post links.

Steve Benen: "... there seems to be a pattern when it comes to the Tea Party: far-right activists are motivated by misleading claims they don't know to be false." The latest is the fake IRS "scandal," which, it turns out, was fueled by Tea Party-produced-and-paid-for complainants. ...

... Speaking of falsehoods that foment the foolish.... Texas Troopers Lie about Shit. Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon: During the Texas state senate battle over a new, restrictive antiabortion law, "the Texas Department of Public safety said that it had confiscated 'one jar suspected to contain urine [and] 18 jars suspected to contain feces.'" After pro-choice protesters denied the claim, the AP investigated: "Texas Department of Public Safety documents show troopers seized no jars of urine or feces from Capitol visitors the day of debate of controversial abortion bill. That's counter to a DPS statement issued the night of the July 12 debate and filibuster...."

Timothy Lee of the Washington Post explains how hackers took down the New York Times Website. Basically, they redirected the domain name (DNS) to another IP address. ...

... Paresh Dave of the Los Angeles Times has a less comprehensible but more specific explanation.

Gail Collins, Sports Sleuth: Yes, Billie Jean King really did beat Bobby Riggs in the 1973 tennis match dubbed "Battle of the Sexes." Don't believe everything you hear on ESPN. Collins notes that to realize the significance of the match, "You had to be there." I was working at ABC-TV at the time, & I watched the game with the handsome guy who played Dr. Ben Casey on a TV show of approximately the same name. I can't remember the actor's name, but I recall the match & my joy at Billie Jean's win.

News Ledes

Daily Telegraph: "Kim Jong-un's ex-girlfriend was among a dozen well-known North Korean performers who were executed by firing squad nine days ago, according to South Korean reports. Hyon Song-wol, a singer, rumoured to be a former lover of the North Korean leader, is said to have been arrested on Aug 17 with 11 others for violating laws against pornography. 'They were executed with machine guns while the key members of the Unhasu Orchestra, Wangjaesan Light Band and Moranbong Band as well as the families of the victims looked on,' said a Chinese source reported in the newspaper."

Reuters: "Fast-food workers went on strike and protested outside McDonald's, Burger King and other restaurants in 60 U.S. cities on Thursday, in the largest protest of an almost year-long campaign to raise service sector wages. Rallies were held in cities from New York to Oakland and stretched into the South, historically difficult territory for organized labor. The striking workers say they want to unionize without retaliation in order to collectively bargain for a 'living wage.'"

New York Times: "The N.F.L. agreed to pay $765 million to settle a lawsuit brought by more than 4,500 retirees with advanced dementia and other health problems as well as the families of players who have died from what they claimed were the long-terms effects of head trauma."

Guardian: "The US Department of Defense announced on Thursday it has released two men from Guantánamo Bay prison to their home nation of Algeria. A Pentagon statement said that the men, Nabil Said Hadjarab and Mutia Sadiq Ahmad Sayyab, had been approved for transfer after a review directed by President Obama.... The move brings the number of detainees in Guantánamo down to 164."

AP: "Striving to take action where Congress would not, the Obama administration announced new steps Thursday on gun control, curbing the import of military surplus weapons and proposing to close a little-known loophole that lets felons and others circumvent background checks by registering guns to corporations."