Libya

I supported Obama's Libya intervention from the beginning. It seems to me that after decades of enabling Arab dictatorships in various ways the United States has an obligation to help the Arab people, in this Arab Spring, take control of their own destinies. Strategically the success of the Arab Spring is our best hope to contain Islamic terrorists. In Egypt and Tunisia that support was public pressure and behind the scenes. In Syria it is necessarily through diplomatic and economic, rather than military pressure, unless the regime loses significant control. In Bahrain we have failed to live up to our principles. In Libya there was a clear risk of massacres which we had an opportunity to prevent. Once we chose to intervene the only real choice was to maintain the pressure until Gaddafi was gone.

I wonder whether our invasion of Iraq accelerated, delayed, or had no effect on the Arab Spring. If rising food prices were necessary to sustain a broad-based rebellion, you might argue that US intervention drive up the price of oil, giving the dictatorships extra cash to hold down prices. Combined with rising nationalism over the foreign occupation of a major Arab state.

Gaddafi's defeat is another foreign policy win for Obama, combined with withdrawal from Iraq and killing bin Laden and Obama has guaranteed his Republican opponent won't be playing the weak on defense card.

Android Tablet not there yet

I use my Nooks all the time, and the ASUS Transformer looks like a great replacement for a laptop, but Android isn't there yet as a tablet OS.

Nokia is Doomed on the Low End

Via the Android channel on Trove, via Forbes, Jeremy Ford reports that the Android based IDEOS from Huawei is selling like hotcakes:

this $80 smartphone has found its way into the hands of 350,000+ Kenyans, an impressive sales number in a country where 40% of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. The IDEOS’s success in this market firmly establishes the open source Android as the smartphone of the people and demonstrates how unrelenting upswings in price-performance can jumpstart the spread of liberating technologies.

Nokia can't compete with that, certainly not with a bloated, proprietary platform.

Nokia president Chris Weber shows the way

over the edge.

Chris Weber, Nokia's new North American president, is making the rounds touting Nokia's smartphone strategy. Tim Bray has the most succinct response:

Not really sure this "phone" app on my pocket computer has much of a future.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyTim Bray
timbray

Microsoft and Nokia are trying to make the case that customers want a people-centric interface, not app centric. In an interview with Venturebeat Weber says that apps are 'outdated', that Nokia is putting customers, to him the end user and the carrier, first, and that this will differentiate WP7 and win the market.

This seems to me very far off target. My phone is about me more than my contacts. People who want a phone with nice contact lists and communications would probably be happy with a feature phone. Emphasizing carriers without even mentioning developers shows how this strategy doesn't incorporate the mobile Internet, the future of the mobile platform.

Om Malik is rightly skeptical:

If its current sales numbers are any indication, then Nokia’s on-the-fly reinvention is like Wile E. Coyote racing off the cliff in pursuit of Road Runner, and flapping hard before going splat. If there continues to be a global economic slowdown, then Nokia would find itself in a pretty bad place much sooner than the company can handle.

Going negative, forget the economy

Our economic situation shows no sign of improving, and in fact is more likely to deteriorate given shrinking state revenues and Federal austerity. But at least the White House has recognized reality, though their strategy to cope politically leaves much to be desired. Here's Robert Reich, via Krugman:

So rather than fight for a bold jobs plan, the White House has apparently decided it’s politically wiser to continue fighting about the deficit. The idea is to keep the public focused on the deficit drama – to convince them their current economic woes have something to do with it, decry Washington’s paralysis over fixing it, and then claim victory over whatever outcome emerges from the process recently negotiated to fix it. They hope all this will distract the public’s attention from the President’s failure to do anything about continuing high unemployment and economic anemia.

This strategy aligns well with their Romney strategy:

“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” said a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House.

The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”

Unfortunately it means there is no chance the White House will do anything to improve the economic situation of most Americans.

Because he's black?

Harold Meyerson: Obama won't face a primary challenge because he's black.

The other reason Obama hasn’t faced a challenge, and isn’t likely to, is that he’s black. Any Democrat who would challenge Obama, whatever the basis of his or her candidacy, would almost surely encounter intense opposition from the party’s African American base, the one group in Democrats’ orbit that regularly votes Democratic at a 90 percent rate. Such a challenge could create a rift that might take decades to heal.

Should have figured Meyerson was projecting when he accused Hillary Clinton of racism.

Needless to say, this is not why Obama has no primary challenger. For all his faults Obama is an effective and strategic politician. He neutralized his most effective Democratic opponents, has taken great care to de-fund any potential alternate liberal power centers, and passed health care reform. As economists pointed out early on his economic policies were inadequate, his failure to spur economic recovery is the one major threat to his re-election. But he was never at risk of being primaried.

UPDATE: Now Eleanor Clift is making the same claim in the Daily Beast.

Anyone contemplating a run against Obama must consider the consequences of not only defeating the president, but the likely repercussions to his or her own career. “If he were white, he would have a progressive challenger,” says Bill Schneider of the Democratic group Third Way.

Clift and Schneider appear to have forgotten 1996, when a president with poor poll numbers, who just lost the House, and who was white, had no serious primary challenger.