When an oil company owns a country

The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians' every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.

The company's top executive in Nigeria told US diplomats that Shell had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew "everything that was being done in those ministries". She boasted that the Nigerian government had "forgotten" about the extent of Shell's infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.

via guardian.co.uk

Is the Wikileaks 'cyberwar' actually terrorism?

I've been deeply skeptical of Republican politicians who label Julian Assange and Wikileaks as "terrorists" deserving of a good Hellfire missile or two. What happened on Wednesday, though, muddies the waters for me a bit:

Within 12 hours of a British judge’s decision on Tuesday to deny Mr. Assange bail in a Swedish extradition case, attacks on the Web sites of WikiLeaks’s “enemies,” as defined by the organization’s impassioned supporters around the world, caused several corporate Web sites to become inaccessible or slow down markedly.

Targets of the attacks, in which activists overwhelmed the sites with traffic, included the Web site of MasterCard, which had stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; Amazon.com, which revoked the use of its computer servers; and PayPal, which stopped accepting donations for Mr. Assange’s group. Visa.com was also affected by the attacks, as were the Web sites of the Swedish prosecutor’s office and the lawyer representing the two women whose allegations of sexual misconduct are the basis of Sweden’s extradition bid.

The New York Times doesn't mention this, but Sarah Palin was also a target of the hackers. (Though she was typically witless in her response.)

Now, as a matter of course, I'm pretty sympathetic to Gizmodo's take on the whole Wikileaks affair. "Wikileaks is a flawed endeavor represented publicly by a smug egotist. But it deserves the respect and support of anyone who prioritizes the privacy of individuals over that of governments." And I think people like Palin and Mitch McConnell who throw around the word "terrorist" too freely are a menace to free society.

The hackers acting in support of Wikileaks, though, aren't freeing information and exposing the inner workings of government. They're disrupting lives. Lots of regular people use Amazon and Visa and PayPal to conduct their daily business. And they are, to some extent, "collateral damage" in Wednesday's attacks.

Now, that damage right now is that some people are pretty inconvenienced. Nobody has died or even had to declare bankruptcy based on the hackers' actions. I don't want to make too big a deal about it. But the willingness of Wikileaks supporters to disrupt the lives and businesses of bystanders is troubling to me. And, possibly, a portent of bad days to come.

Some good news

Republicans may hate Barack Obama but there look to be a pretty meaningful percentage of them who don't hate him enough to vote to put Sarah Palin in the White House. When you combine that with her complete lack of appeal to Democrats and independents she looks virtually unelectable for 2012.

via publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com

What, exactly, does Jonah Goldberg want us to do in North Korea?

Eventually this dynasty of misery will end and North Koreans, starved, stunted, and beaten, will crawl back into the light of civilization. My hunch is that it will not be easy to meet their gaze, nor history’s. No one will be able to claim they didn’t know what was happening, and very few of us will be able to say we did anything at all to help.

Jonah Goldberg, via nationalreview.com

Jonah Goldberg has a really annoying -- one might even say cowardly -- way of suggesting policy choices without explicitly advocating for them. He's well-remembered for wondering out loud why nobody had killed Julian Assange, but then (implausibly, in my mind) denied that he was making the case for killing Julian Assange. He's defended torture in similarly convoluted fashion, saying that waterboarding is bad, but is it such a big deal if it only happened to three people?

Here, Goldberg seems very much to be advocating for a U.S. invasion of North Korea. He's dismissive of opposition: "After all, America, we are told again and again, is overextended. And we all know that the concept of regime change — the only conceivable remedy for North Korea’s plight — is out of favor."

But he never tells us precisely how that regime change should come about. And good thing for him! Because if it *was* an invasion, he'd have to start wrestling with questions about the likely impact on South Koreans, or about China's likely reaction if the United States acted on its own initiative to bring down one of its client states. He'd have to grapple honestly with whether the United States actually can afford the blood and treasure that would be expended in pursuit of bringing down the Communist regime.

Instead, his vagueness allows him to act as though the choices are made in a vacuum. North Koreans have it bad -- and, lordy, he's right about that one, their plight is a very real tragedy -- so somebody should do something. Fine, Jonah. What should we do? What should we do?

Christine O'Donnell, unemployment and John McCain's tarnished legacy

Christine O'Donnell on Tuesday compared the "tragedy" of extending unemployment benefits to Pearl Harbor and the death of Elizabeth Edwards. 

"Today marks a lot of tragedy," O'Donnell, the Tea Party-backed GOP Senate candidate from Delaware, said Tuesday night during an appearance in Virginia. 

"Tragedy comes in threes," O'Donnell said. "Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth Edwards's passing and Barack Obama's announcement of extending the tax cuts, which is good, but also extending the unemployment benefits." 

via thehill.com

You know what really bugs me about this story?

It's that The Hill is covering the opinions of Christine O'Donnell, failed Senate candidate from a small state that otherwise almost never gets press coverage. I don't know why her opinions merit continued coverage, exactly, except the press long ago decided that her O'Donnell merited coverage far in excess of her actual importance.

And if Christine O'Donnell becomes a part of our collective public and political life, saying dumb things every couple of weeks, I'm going to blame John McCain. He plucked Sarah Palin from relative obscurity to be his running mate, despite her lack of qualifications. Palin boosted O'Donnell -- whose only accomplishments seem to be running for office and losing every couple of years -- in the GOP's Senate primary, giving her the spotlight.

Which means, ultimately, that because John McCain made an awful mistake, the rest of it will pay for it in perpetuity by reading Christine O'Donnell quips in our morning paper. This makes me unhappy.

More about Obama and his willingness to fight

Asking Obama to fight for his own key campaign pledge and the desire of a majority of Americans is not mindless ideologically purity

Ari Berman, via twitter.com

I generally think Ari Berman is unrealistic in his vision of how liberals can govern in America. But I think he's right in this case.

President Obama: Visible mostly in surrender

Fascinating press conference today from Barack Obama.  His comments at the end about purists were, from my perspective, absolutely correct, substantively. 

The truth is that there are a lot of people who just don't accept that the President of the United States can want something, fight for it, fight effectively and correctly, and still not get it.  If it doesn't happen, it must have been -- in Obama's words -- a "betrayal."  Those people are wrong.

via plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com

Jonathan Bernstein's comments above made me realize that part of my problem with President Obama is, indeed, optics: the president has been very visible in compromise and surrender on liberal priorities. He's been a behind-the-scenes player when it comes to actually fighting for those priorities.

President Obama spoke with frustration about last year's fight over the "public option" and how he doesn't get credit for health reform on the left because of the lack of that option. The problem is that *I don't remember seeing him fight for the option.* For much of the yearlong healthcare debate, the president let Congress take the public lead and wrestle with the issues. When he emerged to make the case for a health reform law, he quite explicitly signaled his surrender on the option. Liberals never got the sense he fought and then compromised. All we really saw was the compromise.

Again on taxes: Obama ran for president promising to extend the Bush tax cuts for the middle class and end them for the rich. And he made, in my view, a persuasive case for that approach. But in recent months, as the clock ticked toward midnight, the president wasn't very visible in making the case again and now. He became most prominent, at the end, when he was showing frustration and disgust with the deal he himself had signed off on.

Behind the scenes during the fight. Visible during surrender and compromise.

Combine that public face of leadership with Obama's seemingly pre-emptive concessions on offshore drilling and freezing the pay of federal workers, and the overall impression President Obama gives is that he's most comfortable in accommodation mode. If the president wants the respect of the "professional left," he's going to have to show early, persistent and visible leadership on some issue that's dear to liberals. We might even forgive him if he compromises a bit in the end. But we want to see him fight.