"Benton Harbor has not had local democracy since last year" (or Running against the State, pt 2)

This is what a constitutional coup looks like, when an organized cadre takes over the mechanism of the State (in this case, the small "c" state of Michigan) and uses it for its own purposes.

If the cadre can't be ousted and the rule-changes can't be reversed, we're beyond politics. The hammer we're dealing with is the machine called the State.

Maddow (at about 2:50):

[Quoting the "emergency town manager"]: "We [in effect, the State] believe [the radio station] is going to be so much more useful in [the school district's] hands than ours."

More useful? More useful than what? Well, what was it used for before? In addition to news and music, [the station] was used for dissent. For expressing dissent ... about the town being stripped of its democrat rights, for instance.

Watch (to open large in a new tab, click here):



Three points:

(1) The next Republican president will have Michigan and Wisconsin and Florida as a template. Say "Nader-Nader" (whatever that means) all you want; it's just a fact, and smart people have to factor that into their voting decision. (Or not. The good news: the 2012 election is over, as I see it. Time to plan for 2013.)

(2) This is an instance of a coup at a state-wide (small "s") level. The coup at the national level (in my humble opinion) has already occurred; more soon on that.

(3) You really do want to read about Hungary. This is how "Michigan" is done at the level of a nation.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
 

Syrian civil war spreads

The massacre in Homs has not suppressed opposition to the Assad regime. Earlier this week the fighting reached the heavily guarded neighborhood where many of the senior members of the government have their homes.

Reporting from the region is still prohibited by the regime. Global Post has one of the few reporters still working there:

DAMASCUS, Syria — Rebel fighters landed their most serious blow yet against the Syrian regime’s security apparatus, even as dramatic but conflicting accounts emerged of what triggered an intense overnight firefight in a heavily protected neighborhood of Damascus earlier this week.

Both the regime and the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) claimed as a victory the battle that eyewitnesses said began around 11 p.m. and lasted into the early hours Monday morning. The battle involved heavy machine gunfire, rocket-propelled grenades and helicopters, the witnesses said.

The Syrian civil war is following a very different pattern to the one that brought down Gadaffi but that does not mean that Assad is winning. The longer Assad is unable to win, the more likely he is to lose. The Libyan uprising was a tribal affair where progress could be measured by the territory held by each side. The Syrian insurgency is an urban guerrilla war where both sides have the ability to deny the other effective control of an area.

Assad's emails leaked

The Guardian reports that they have obtained copies of Assad's private email:

Bashar al-Assad took advice from Iran on how to handle the uprising against his rule, according to a cache of what appear to be several thousand emails received and sent by the Syrian leader and his wife.

The Syrian leader was also briefed in detail about the presence of western journalists in the Baba Amr district of Homs and urged to "tighten the security grip" on the opposition-held city in November.

The revelations are contained in more than 3,000 documents that activists say are emails downloaded from private accounts belonging to Assad and his wife Asma.

As is usually the case in these situations the initial disclosures mostly confirm what we already knew but besides the thuggery and the bragging there is the banality of the wife's demands for crystal chandeliers and fondue sets in the midst of a civil war.

We have no way to know whether the emails are genuine or fake but many of the major intelligence services monitoring Syria will have a pretty good idea. It takes a lot of information to produce a forgery that would withstand cross checking with the volumes of information they have on file [1].

The opinion of the emails that is likely to matter is that formed by Russia's GRU. According to the US establishment media Russia is the principal force blocking UN action against Syria. Which is the truth but not necessarily the whole truth. A cynic might suggest that with the Libyan civil war just finished and the war in Afghanistan continuing, the Obama administration would prefer to have its hands being tied by the Russians than charge into what could be a messy situation in an election year. Should Russia decide to change that position, the emails would provide a convenient pretext.

[1] Dissatisfied by the opinion of the CIA analysts who dismissed evidence of Iraqi WMD as clearly spurious, the Bush administration had to create a new intelligence unit (Feith's Office of Special Plans) to pronounce the evidence compelling. Unlike Feith, the CIA analysts could spot that it was rather unlikely that Iraqi plans for nuclear technology would use Farsi, the language of Iran.