Al-Muhajabah's Sundries

fear of a black president?

In trying to understand how the polls were so wrong in the New Hampshire primary, some people have considered the Bradley effect. Many of those looking at this only to dismiss it seem to have an incorrect understanding of exactly what the Bradley effect is, for example here.

According to the Pew Research Center, the Bradley effect is defined as:

White candidates in most of these races generally did better on Election Day than they were doing in the polls, while their black opponents tended to end up with about the same level of support as the polls indicated they had.

Using the standard estimate from Pollster.com and the rolling average from Real Clear Politics, I made a chart of how the polls compared to the actual results for Obama and Clinton.

Click for a larger, clearer view

You can judge for yourself whether or not that matches the description. This doesn't mean that it was the Bradley effect, but it clearly does not rule it out either.

Added: The Guardian gets a prize for actually understanding the Bradley effect correctly:

The Bradley effect suggests that white voters disguise their intentions from pollsters when a black candidate is in an election. In the case of New Hampshire the unusually high proportion of "undecided" voters - as much as 20% - may have concealed some of those hostile to Obama.

"I think it's very naive to dismiss the racial factors in this," said Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia.

Later: The president of the Pew Research Center writes in the New York Times that he believes it was the Bradley effect.

just when you thought the story of Iraq couldn't get any more bizarre

So the U.S. paid Serbia for information it claimed to have about Saddam Hussein's bunkers. One of the sources is allegedly war criminal Veljko Kadijevic, who may have received immunity for his crimes because of it. Via Blog around the Clock and Neretva River.

may the farce be with you

Somehow, the "number three in al-Qa'ida" is always to blame - no matter how many of them there are.

But this time, it's a guy that was arrested in May 2005 and has apparently been in custody since then (never mind the joke)

Guardian:

Pakistani security sources said yesterday that al-Qaida's "number three" was behind the alleged plot to blow up several transatlantic flights leaving the UK...

...Abu Faraj al-Libbi, who after Osama bin Laden and the Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahiri, is suspected of being al-Qaida's third in command, has been named by Pakistani security sources as the main planner of the alleged plot, according to Dawn, a daily newspaper. He has also been accused of being in a plot to assassinate Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, and was arrested last year and turned over to the US.

History repeats itself as farce, apparently.

Later: Is Abu Laith al-Libi the same guy, or yet another person. But don't worry, as he was also number three in al-Qa'ida!

the other paramilitaries in Iraq

I somehow completely missed this before.

Iraq begins to rein in paramilitary force

Information on the Facilities Protection Service:

Global Security profile

Commentary from Helena Cobban

Are Western PMCs involved in this?

The question is, are any of these acting as death squads?

Found via John Robb's Weblog.

blinded by their own double standards

British trade minister:

“There can’t be one rule away and one rule at home,” he is expected to say. “Such hypocrisy makes global progress impossible. And how can the richest countries in the world lecture others about the gains from liberalisation whilst adding further barriers to entering their own markets?”

It's the hypocrisy that really kills here, since they are forcing other countries to allow everything to be sold off to American corporations, blasting any protests as "protectionism", but then they don't allow anybody to do the same to them.

would be nice for a change

Link: democracyarsenal.org: National Security Vision: Right, Left, or Dare to Be Different?.

The argument Democrats might want to think about is that they are more pragmatic, competent, less ideological, and more inclined to exercise true international leadership in the pursuit of America’s interests than the Republicans.

For some reason, this made me think of Wes Clark, with Hillary trying to outflank the Republicans from the right.

Related: Now, this headline seems tailor-made for the handsome retired general from Arkansas: Hillary's No. 2: A Good-looking Military Progressive from the South. Ironically, the article doesn't mention him at all.

secret history of socialism

Via Lenin's Tomb, Marx and Religion and Bolsheviks and Islam: Religious Rights (full version here).

(rival Marxists groups have produced rebuttals: 1, 2)

See also Muslim National Communism and the Soviet Union and The Soviet Union and Muslim Guerrilla Wars,written from a non-Marxist perspective on the same question. Both are by the same authors (the book in 1980 and the paper in 1981) and written in the context of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which the paper makes explicit.

The seeds of national liberation provides a more general historical background on Bolshevik nationalism policy.

delusional nation

MyDD:

Like I said earlier, the existence of such a sharp divide among American voters is not really new knowledge. However, we're getting some indications here that division is more than a political one, hence it emerges on non-political measurements of right direction/wrong track and on local job conditions. This indicates to me a major new potential finding (at least from what I've seen and read): the division among the American electorate may be evolving into more than a political or public policy one; it may be that such disparate perceptions on everyday issues involve fundamentally different world views, one the rose-colored glasses  'no worries' 'we're winning' meme promoted by Bush, the Republicans and their allies as opposed to what one might call a less enthusiastic, more measured, 'realistic', down-to-earth view, espoused by David Sirota and many, many others.

In other words, 38% of Americans are not in touch with reality in a very real sense.

American complicity in Balkans war crimes?

US links to Croatian war crime - Did the U.S. provide weapons and training to the Croatian Army, which committed massive war crimes (including the ethnic cleansing of 200,000 Croatian Serbs) after its Operation Storm in 1995?

This is not news: the Guardian ran Guns secret set to haunt US in 2001 and the allegations first surfaced in 1995. See for example the hints in this Guardian report from 1995 itself:

The release of evidence pointing to a massacre comes at a time when the US and Germany are being criticised by Britain and France for taking an indulgent attitude towards Croatia after its offensive against rebel Serbs within its borders in the Krajina region.

UN officials describe the exodus of tens of thousands of Krajina Serbs as one of the biggest humanitarian disasters in the war. The American accusations shift the burden of ethnic cleansing at its most extreme form - in this case, in Bosnia - squarely back to the Serbs.

UN spokesmen in the former Yugoslavia have voiced the suspicion that the spy photographs and other evidence - which they consider insufficient to prove that there are mass graves at Srebrenica - are being presented now to deflect attention from Croatia's expulsion of the Krajina Serbs.

It'll be interesting to see if anything further comes of it this time.

Later: Croatian general's war crimes trial begins at the Hague:

General Ante Gotovina, working closely with American advisers, was the commander of a campaign in the summer of 1995 known as Operation Storm that put an end to the Serbian occupation of Eastern Croatia and forced more than 150,000 Serbs to flee towns and villages where they had lived for generations...

...Observers of the trial believe it may also shed more light on the little-known covert American role during that decisive Croatian counteroffensive against Serbia.

U.S. advisers, among them retired and active American military personnel, helped plan the operation, and Americans directed unmanned aircraft over the battle zone to gain real-time intelligence for Croatian forces, Croatian government officials have said.

The United States is not implicated in any of the charges related to the operation, but its intelligence methods and sources might be revealed, lawyers at the court said. In the summer of 1995, Washington and Western diplomats were seeking to end the war and were in favor of rolling back Serbia's considerable military gains in Bosnia and Croatia, in order to create a viable peace plan.

Fighting Dems

In case I need these later:

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Band of Brothers

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