Turkey's Invisible Democratic Revolution

Since Attaturk, the Turkish military has served a the defender of a secular constitution in a country that was dominantly Muslim at the expense of majoritarian democracy. But, it appears that this role has now ended for good as the senior military leadership has been purged by the combination of dozens of arrests of senior military officials by civilian law enforcement authorities and the mass resignation of the remaining top military officers. It isn't entirely clear from half the world away to what extent the charges that have led to the arrests of military officers are valid and to what extent they are cover for a political purge.

It also isn't clear what made it possible for the arrests to be successfully carried out this time when in the past civilian authorities have seemed unable to carry out these kinds of arrests, although the generalized influences of the Arab Spring in the region could be a factor.

Turkey's days of military supremacy over civilian rule has ended, bringing it out of the classic newly emerging democracy phase of development. But, it isn't yet clear if the civilians who now have unquestioned supremacy will be able to avoid the temptations to engage in unconstitutional conduct or establish a religion in governmental affairs, which could be worse.

The example is a worthwhile one for American political scientists to examine because a similar strategy of civilian arrests of military leaders is essentially the only recourse in the U.S. Constitution should there ever be a threat of a coup in the United States and a coup is by far the most plausible end of regime scenario for the American system of government.

READ MORE - Turkey's Invisible Democratic Revolution

Planet GOP

What motivates people like 11 Colorado State Senators (almost the entire GOP caucus in the State Senate): Kent Lambert, Bill Cadman, Scott Renfroe, Mark Scheffel, Keith and Steve King, Nancy Spence, Kevin Grantham, Ted Harvey, Mike Kopp, and Kevin Lundberg, to sponsor "Birther" legislation? (In fairness, the legislation proposed, which is prospective, does not itself on its face question the legitimacy of President Obama's current tenure in office.)

What makes Republicans like Scott Gessler, our Secretary of State, convinced that there are massive numbers of illegal immigrants voting our elections, in the absence of evidence that this is happening (or does he really believe it)?

What drives Republicans like Retired General William Boykin to forward an agenda arguing that Islam is Satanic and shouldn't be included in the freedom of religion?

Why do so many Republicans support succession? Why do so many think contrary to the historical fact, that the Founders were evangelical Christians trying to create a Christian nation?

Why do so many Republicans think it is O.K. to pass laws that are clearly unconstitutional either because they violate the Supremacy clause and assert a state right to disregard binding federal law, or because they violate well established precedents like Roe v. Wade?

Why do so many Republicans claim that President Obama is a Muslim? If one wanted to sully the President's religious credentials, surely the claim that he was a closet atheist, given his adult conversion to Christianity after a secular youth would have been more plausible and atheists are almost as despised by Americans as Muslims in public opinion polls.

How did the Republican party manage to secure a lock on the crazy absurd positions and ideas so fervantly opposed to our constitutional traditions, while claiming a banner of greater patriotism?

Really, factually incredible claims simply don't have the same political currency in the Democratic party that some factually incredible claims do in Republican circles. Really, the Democratic party is far more comfortable with the framework established by mainstream constitutional law than Republicans. Even when Democrats disagree with authoritative interpretations of the constitution in areas such as corporate free speech rights in political debates, they generally don't argue that their view is the absolute law which other parts of the political system are free to ignore. Republicans, in contrast, seem to delight in proclaiming a fantasy constitution to be the real one.

Democrats live with a world view that is bounded by a sense of legal and factual reality; an important subset of Republicans seem entirely divorced from both.

It is hard to hope for politics based on a reasoned search for the truth when a significant share seem to be delusional in many cases. How does one build common political ground with people who don't seem to be playing by the same rules?

Not all Republicans, especially among the rank and file in professional and managerial ranks in America fit this stereotype. But, a surprisingly large number do seem to be a fit for it.

What is going on? Is this really a stable ideology, or a case where a small, tightly disciplined cadre of of extremists have taken hold? For how many are these beliefs sincere and heartfelt, and for how many is this calculated hypocricy and stagemanship?

I know some of the outlines of where some of these ideas have roots in intellectual history, their political roots, and the origins of the political identity of people who now identify as the conservative Republican right wing. But, that doesn't make it seem any less bizzare when I encounter it. How did ideas from Glen Beck recycled from a John Bircher political philosopher gain such much currency with so many people? Why was the intellectual environment so fertile for these ideas? How did right wing media and mainstream media (there scarcely is any truly left wing media) become so disconnected from each other? Why has the outcome of the Civil War been so hard for so many to accept a century and a half later?

Europeans aren't rushing to talk radio stations proclaiming that the monarchies deposed in the 1870s are still the legitimate governments of their countries today and winning majority support in polls of members of major political parties. Why are an important subset of Americans engaged in the same exercise?

Why are Tea Party members so angry at government's existence and operations? Does it make any sense for what is at its roots, as the name suggests, an anti-tax party, to be thriving at a point when taxes are already at sixty year lows?

Why is the public so succeptible to mass political hysteria? Is there something in the political process that is encouraging this kind of sentiment? Or, is this kind of sentiment inextricably intertwined with democracy itself? What does it take to make the masses see crazy talk for what it is?

READ MORE - Planet GOP

Daylight savings time and other annoyances

* So, we're back on daylight savings time, which takes more of the year than standard time. Daylight savings time is like the ultimate popular kid stunt: "I can make the entire country pretend its an hour ealier than it really is, just because I can get everyone to agree with me." And, of course, once it takes off, you really have no choice but to go along. Still, losing an hour in the spring is brutal.

* Washington Park in Denver has a special magical glow that keeps it attractive regardless of what is going on in the outside world. But, I'm beginning to think that it may be a force field instead. I've been trying to stop paying $17 a month for free TV by setting up an antenna. Before I started getting basic cable, I'd tried it from a powered antenna inside my living room and get one or two channels. This weekend, after going to the trouble of setting a powered antenna up on the highest point on my roof, I got absolutely zero reception. Needless to say, I am not very impressed with the digital broadcast TV revolution, although it may simply be that Wash Park is as much of a TV dead zone as it has a reputation for being a cell phone dead zone.

* Another of the great mysteries of life is why old computers accumulate problems. They produce stray, seemingly meaningless error messages. They slow down. Virus scans and disk defragmentation stops helping. It might be possible to remove accumulated programs, but who knows what it is safe to remove. It reaches the point where you'd like to just run the restore disks and start over, but of course, by that point you've invested money in programs and misplaced the restore disks and the original programs with their access codes.

* Then, of course, there are the dreaded smart phones. I held out for the longest time. But, finally, about three years ago, I had to give in because it was expected that you have access to e-mail at all times for work. But, every now and then, you have to change phones, and the switch is painful. It takes weeks to get it back to the unsteady compromise that you have with the machine before you switched, when you knew how to work what you needed and it all worked smoothly.

* My daughter embarks on the brave new world of Home Economics (or whatever they call it these days), today. Rumor has it that the cooking agenda is full of things that we would never actually cook in our own house for want of nutritional value, but such is life. Hello Hamburger Helper(R)!

* The 8.9 magnitude Earthquake which initially seems to have spared Japan too much damage, now seems to have actually inflicted a Katrina class blow as more news reaches the world.

* The situation in Libya is getting ugly, as Kaddafi and the rebels civil war. (On the bright side, the monarch of Oman appears to be ready to convert from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in the next thirty days.)

* Japanese manga and anime make frequent use of images and scenes that draw on the characters of the real story, but rather than being blubs are just riffs on the concepts that aren't part of the story itself, something quite rare in American media (as is the habit of having the author reserving space to directly address the audience). Is there a general name for these extraneous sketches?

* Why do the Denver Assessor's office have a nice online interface for its records, while the Denver Clerk and Recorder's office, which is just as automated, does not have its grantor-grantee index and file images available online? Both are public records. I suspect it is so that the clerk's office can make us pay 25 cents a page for copies and make title companies pay for bulk downloads to escape that problem. But, I'd surely favor any candidate in the current clerk and recorder's race who would promise to put the grantor-grantee index online.

* Some days, you think humanity is on the right track. Some days, you read the news from Cleveland, Texas (mass child molestation of eleven year old in a small town capture on cell phone video), and you are rather less hopeful. Ironically, the crime of taking the video will probably garner stiffer sentences than the underlying crime itself.

* For reasons mysterious to me, a wave of male enhancement product spam is deluging this blog at the moment, I am trying to review new comments an delete the bad ones a rapidly as I can. I still don't see why it is so hard for regulators to determine who the vendors being advertised are, trace them with sample transactions, and use the vendor records to shut these people down. It really is just a handful of industries that leave the bulk of them, and apparently there are not that many spam purveyors out there comprising the bulk of the traffic. They money trail ought to be auditable. Maybe all those SEC employees who were using government computers to watch porn could do it as a form of community service.

* We are about to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day (indeed, many people did this past weekend), after the man famous for converting the pagans of Ireland to Catholicism. Garrison Keillor's show this weekend (part of the show, apparently originally from 1997 are here) explained why this makes quite a bit more sense than celebrating Saint Olaf's day, something riotously funny to a fellow ex-Lutheran. But, in an era of anti-imperialism and distrust of institutions, why not celebrate Saint Francis of Assisi Day instead? (He has a Saint's Day on October 4, but it isn't all that big a deal.) Perhaps Saint Francis Day could be substituted for ever more controversial Columbus Day (October 12), as a day of Italian-American pride.

* The newspaper comics this weekend also posed the ultimate elementary school boy query for March: In a battle between ancient Romans (associated with the Ides of March) and Lepricauns (associated with Saint Patrick's Day) who would win? The particularly frightening aspect of this query is that there is apparently now a television show devoted to such questions, asking in a recent episode with quasi-scientific rigor, who would win in a fight between the Musketeers and the Manchu warriors (whose ancestors apparently have formed an immigrant community to the north of Denver).

* Also, in hopeful news, the Denver Post has reiterated its support for abolishing or narrowing the scope of the death penalty in Colorado. Narrowing the scope of first degree murder to exclude neo-natal homicide by women in the throes of childbirth and felony murder that does not involve triggermen or people who have solicited a murder would be a good start, and if applied retroactively, would improve the state of the state budget and greatly reduce the ranks of juveniles serving life without parole in the state.

READ MORE - Daylight savings time and other annoyances

The Entrenched Politician-Voter Disconnect

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

- Sir Winston Churchill, British politician (1874 - 1965)

Churchill's wisdom has much to be said for it, except that it doesn't do much to tell us which kind of democracy is to be preferred to the alternatives.

An important flaw of the American system, and some similar systems, is that it deeply and fundamentally entrenches a process that naturally produces an unstable equilibrium that is at always odds with voter desires in one direction or the other, rather than a stable process that consistently produces elected representatives who seek to maximize the popularity of the decisions made by the government.



Enik Rising (Seth Masket's blog) reports research that he and Hans Noel have done with a clever experimental design that establishes empirically and rigorously the empirical wisdom that:

There are actually plenty of moderate Assembly districts in California; there are basically no moderate Assembly members. Virtually every Democrat in the Assembly is more liberal than her district; virtually every Republican member is more conservative than her district. . . .

We also find that members of the majority party tend to deviate further from their districts than members of the minority party do. Time out of office, we suggest, causes the minority party to try to moderate to win back the majority.

The study focused on California, but its conclusions almost surely hold for all but a couple of states in the United States (Nebraska and Louisiana may be exceptions).

Actual partisanship in legislative districts has a bell curve distribution. Elected legislators have a bimodal distribution, like a two humped camel. The political middle is systemically underpopulated by elected officials, despite the fact that the vast majority of voters are in the political middle between the typical elected Democrat and the typical elected Republican on the spectrum of ideology from the political left to the political right.

The study is focused, appropriately, on the facts, rather than the causes for those facts. But, political theory would suggest that this outcome is a very natural and direct consequence of our election laws and legislative process.

The Electoral Bias Against Moderation

Single member plurality district election system naturally gravitates towards having two dominant political parties in any one geographic area. In that system, adding a new credible candidate to the mix hurts that candidate's allies and helps that candidate's enemies. In order to mitigate mutually self-destructive behavior, we have entrenched, in the United States, a two party system in which the political left and the political right choose nominees in partisan primaries and then face off against each other.

The single member plurality district system doesn't necessarily have to create a two party system. It can support regional parties that have majority support in a particular area, like a Quebec Nationalist party or Irish Republican Party. It also doesn't require that the party of the right be the same everywhere, or that the party of the left be the same everywhere. Canadians have one party of the right to the West of Ontario, and another one, the Tory's to the East. One U.S. States have a Democrat-Farm-Labor Party rather than a Democratic party. The U.S. historically used to have, de facto, Dixiecrats in some parts of the country, and Democrats in other partys of the country, both against a common Republican party.

But, for distinct regional parties to emerge, something has to give that region a strong identity. The more homogeneous a region is politically, the less prone it is to develop a distinct political party.

A Majority Requirement As a Weak Fix

A weak solution to this problem is to use French style elections, which have been adopted in Louisiana, Denver and in a less pure form, in a handful of states, where the winner of the election needs to get a majority of the votes cast to win in the first round, with the top two vote getters facing off in a second round.

While this isn't immune to the pathology that similar candidates tend to undermine each other, it eliminates the requirement that a candidate wanting to make it into the second round must have a plurality coalition made up entirely of partisan voters on the right, or partisan voters on the left. A coalition of unaffiliated and bipartisan moderate voters can also secure a candidate a second round slot.

More generally, in its pure form, it is more more neutral towards the number of political parties competing in the district than a traditional two party system. Not surprisingly, Louisiana has historically been the source of moderate candidates in both the Democratic and Republican political parties.

Proportional Representation As A Strong Fix

A stronger solution to this problem would be a true proportional representation system that doesn't penalize two political parties for having similar views without not actually merging. In a system where each voter picks on political party and that party gets a number of seats proportional to the share of the vote received by that political party, the sensible thing for a voter to do is the pick the party most closely aligned with their views and a political party doesn't face a penalty for being small unless its market share approaches the treshold minimum percentage necessary to secure representation in the legislature (typically in the low single digit percentages). A proportional representation system also allows representation of parties that have a majority in no particular district.

This kind of true multi-party system, which naturally gravitated towards roughly four to eight major political parties, leads to unequal sized clusters of voters with much more homogeneous views.

The Legislative Bias Against Moderation

When Are Coalitions Made? How Stable Must They Be?

In an idealized two party system, coalitions need to be assembled before the election. In an idealized multi-party system, coalitions are made after the election.

In a parliamentary system, a governing coalition forming a legislative majority, need to hold together on all major issues for the political system to function. The legislative leader becomes the head of government (i.e. the Prime Minister) who runs government on a day to day basis. If the coalition that put the Prime Minister in place fails to secure majority support for any major proposal, the Prime Minister will typicall then lose a "no confidence" vote in short order, and new elections will typically be held.

Somewhat complicating the matter of coalition building is that American legislative coalitions don't need to be very stable across all or most issues. Since we have a strong President whose tenure doesn't hinge upon maintaining a legislative majority (indeed our current President doesn't have one), the executive branch can continue to function and carry out the business of government even when one coalition of legislators may prevail on one set on issues, and another coalition of legislators may prevail on a different set of issues.

Historically, for example, the U.S. had a de facto "two and a half" party system at the national Congressional level. One domestic economic issues Democrats generally united against Republicans. But, on matters of national defense and social issues like race, Southern Democrats often allied themselves with Republicans against Northern Democrats. The Democratic Presidential nomination race reflected the vacillation between these two factions.

This three party system allowed the party that was moderate on any issue where there was no consensus among the three parties to prevail, moderating the process as a whole to some extent.

Today, after a process called "realignment" that has largely run its course, this isn't the case any more. There are few notable blocks of "moderates" in either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party in Congress who deviate from their party in a systematic way on a particular way. The Blue Dog faction in the Democratic Party has withered, as has the faction of Northeastern social moderate Republicans. We have a relatively pure party of the political left and a relatively pure party of the political right, and they are quite evenly matched on the national political scene.

The Majoritarian Legislative Process Has A Hidden Bias Against Moderation

Of course, some of the partisanship we see at the legislative level is a product not just of a two party electoral system, but is inherent in the legislative process itself. Legislative decision making generally involved for or against voting on politically controversial issues. Partisans get the results most to their liking when they favor proposals the secure majorities, but only the narrowest majorities possible. It is natural, in this context, for legislators to informally rank themselves from the political left to the political right, and for proposals that require legislators to form an allegiance with one side or the other to be common.

Thus, even in multi-party proportional representation system, governing coalitions that are clearly right leaning, or clearly left leaning are the norm. Governing coalitions like the Penteparti system of Italy, in which five mainstream parties formed repeated unstable and short lived coalitions in the political center in a calculated effort to exclude old school communists on the left, and old school fascists on the right, ar the exception, except in times of national peril from an outside force like the unity governments of the United Kingdom during World War II.

Moderates are more favored in a place like the U.S. Senate, that is not strictly majoritarian, with most proposals from the left or the right requiring supermajority support, than in the U.S. House, where majority rule prevails.

In order to favor the kind of moderate policies that voters in the political center favor, you need not only an electoral system that doesn't naturally generate a bimodal distribution of legislators, but also a legislative process that has stronger incentives to find supermajority, rather than mere majority support for legislation.

Supermajority Requirements Come At The Risk of Deadlock

Favoring supermajorities, however, comes at a cost. Any requirement that there be more than majority support for a measure in a single legislative body with ultimate say over the matter creates a risk that the system will be overconstrained and fail to produce action in situations where there is no acceptable status quo.

In the United States, recess appointment power and a strong Presidency prevent the status quo of all important positions in the government going unfilled for lack of a resolution to deadlocks between a nominating executive and a ratifying Senate. But, at both the state and at the federal level, it remains possible for a lack of an ability to reach consensus in a deterministic way on a budget bill to produce a government shutdown, something that House Republicans on one side, and Senate Democrats and the President on the other, have been dancing with in the lame duck session of the 2010 Congress and the current Congress.

Probably the most notable recent example of an overconstrained set of legislative rules in recent memory is that of the Iraqi Constitution, which requires supermajority support to choose a President and Prime Minister, at a time when there is stark disagreement between well defined factions that individually lack that supermajority (whose moderate unanimity the constitution attempted to coax). The result has been many months of government deadlock due to a lack of the required consensus. Afghanistan's constitution, notably, in contrast, was carefully crafted to allow the President to impose a budget and appointees in the absence of constructive disagreement by a legislative majority on an alternative (despite the fact that Afghanistan has less well defined factions in any case).

Supermajority Processes In Practice

The best examples of supermajority incentives in the legislative process are probably the adminsitrative law notice and comment process, and the Quaker meeting process, each of which hinges on having a "honest third party" receive input and try to formulate from the input a maximally popular (in the case of administrative rule making) or maximal consensus (in the case of Quaker meeting decision making) stance, by taking into account the details of the concerns expressed.

Monarchs, because they are well positioned to be that honest third party, can, if they are not politically tone deaf, secure support in the fact of partisan elected bodies, precisely by favoring the middle against partisan majorities, and favoring solutions that would secure supermajority support over those that would secure mere majority support.

I think that the Founders probably hoped (largely in vain) for that kind of dynamic to play out in the American political system, something that failed largely because the Presidential election system got locked into the two party dichotomy. It isn't implausible to think that if the Presidential election process could be redesigned to decouple it from partisan politics and instead have this office elected in a way that favored moderates, that a similar dynamic could be established, even without reform at the legislative level, through the veto power.

Indeed, I think it is a fair hypothesis that Governor Ritter's experience with consensus oriented politics as the norm from his days as a special interest advocate for Colorado's District Attorneys' Association may help explain a great deal of his approach to dealing with the Colorado General Assembly, in which he frequently cited process rather than substance oriented objections to legislation in veto messages.

Good legislators in the existing legislative process frequently try to craft such agreements in "smoke filled room" negotiations involving interested parties with a goal of reaching "kumbaya" (i.e. a consensus of the interested parties to support a bill). But, this kind of deal making and mutal accomodation reaching is ill suited to the formal legislative process.

Consensus or supermajority oriented politics are actually much more common than most people would think, indeed, it is the norm. This is because partisan caucuses and special interest groups much each reach consensus or something close to it in order to move boldly on legislative proposals. They tend to stay silent and refrain from acting in the absence of consensus.

Conclusion

In the absence of divided government (something that both the U.S. Congress and Colorado General Assembly are experiencing right now), there is little incentive to stretch beyond a majority supported compromise.

So, in American politics, voters are left between insisting that government function with deals negotiated between the left and right in exchange for a risk a damaging deadlock, within divided government, and government by a right of center, or left of center consensus with little to encourage it to be inclusive.

READ MORE - The Entrenched Politician-Voter Disconnect

Pakistani Politics Still Violent

"A Pakistani government minister who had said he was getting death threats because of his opposition to a controversial blasphemy law was shot to death Wednesday.

Shahbaz Bhatti was the only Christian member of the Cabinet in Pakistan, where 95 percent of people are Muslim. He served as the government’s minister of minority affairs....

The Taliban claimed responsibility. “(The) assassination of Bhatti is a message to all of those who are against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws,” said Ihsanullah Ihsan, a Taliban spokesman."

Two months ago, a governor of a Pakistan state — Salman Taseer — was murdered for the same reason.

From here.

How do you run a democratic civilian government when senior government officials who take positions on issues (never mind waiting around to see how the political and legal process resolved the dispute), that somebody else in the system doesn't like, are routinely murdered or executed?

It has been this way for a long time. Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951, after which the first President, Iskander Mirza declared martial law and discarded the constitution, which lead to his removal from office in a coup by General Ayub Khan, the same day, October 7, 1958.

Zulifikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan's People's Party became President after a democratic election on December 20, 1971, was replaced in a coup in July 1977, and was executed for complicity in a 1974 political murder on April 4, 1979.

President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq was killed when his plane exploded in August 1988. Suffice it to say that it certainly sounds like suspicious circumstance.

Benazir Bhutto (the late Zulifikar Ali Bhutto's daughter) became Prime Minister in 1988, was removed by the President based on corruption charges August 1990, returned to power October 1990, and was removed for more corruption charges November 1996.

A coup removed the civilian regime entirely over dissatisfaction with the decisions on military matter being made by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on October 12, 1999, and the leading General Pevez Musharraf declared himself to be President on June 20, 2001. Between then and 2007, he survived four assassination attempts.

More than 140 people died in a suicide bomber's unsuccessful attempt to kill Benazir Bhutto as she campaigned for President after eight years in exile on October 18, 2007, and she was successfully assassinated December 27, 2007 after a political rally, in which the leaders of the regime of Pakistan in power at the time is accused of being complicit.

Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari lead the Pakistan Peoples Party to an electoral victory Febraury 18, 2008, and after street protests and a threatened impeachment, General Musharraf stepped down in August, and Zardari was sworn in as President.

This, of course, just includes the highlights, without mentioning assassinations and assassination attempts on lower level figures, and a constant low level parade of other political killings and suicide bombings. For example, seven more famous political assassinations in Pakistan can be found here (many of which are discussed with more narration here.) I've also omitted multiple wars, some still in progress today. The separation of Pakistan from India was not bloodless. One bloody civil war split Bangladesh and Pakistan into separate countries in the 1970s. There have been wars with India over the Kashmir and out of general mutual antipathy. There have been subnational insurgencies and violent counterinsurgencies in the country's "frontier provinces" since 1958, and one of them is in progress right now.

Xe Services, which is currently embroiled in revelations related to the arrest of a U.S. CIA contractor who used to work for them, was accused in 2009 of having conducted political assassinations of its own without Presidential approval. This is in addition to the many Presidentially authorized CIA assassinations of people believed to be involved with the Taliban, mostly with drone deployed missiles, pursuant to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force by Congress following 9/11.

Pakistan is not Yemen. It is a developing country with a viable middle class and more than a hundred million people, with one of the oldest histories of civilization in the world, and a substantial GDP, that has nuclear weapons, not a sparsely populated poor nation in the middle of a desert. In theory, it is a nation of Muslims who have a lot in common with each other in a "nation-state" sense.

Even without any new provocations, it would take a lifetime just to settle the scores for all the political killings that have occurred so far. A simple change of President pursuant to election results in the ordinary manner, without assassinations, impeachments or coups, that takes place in the United States every four to eight years, most of the time, is almost unprecedented in Pakistan.

As much as we can become concerned with minor happenings in Pakistan, the very basics of orderly, peaceful civilian government of any kind seem elusive.

READ MORE - Pakistani Politics Still Violent

Intervention. Why not?

I am watching Aljazeera Arabic, which is calling people in Tripoli on the telephone and asking them what is going on in the capital. The replies are poignant in their raw emotion, bordering on hysteria. The residents are alleging that the Qaddafi regime has scrambled fighter jets to strafe civilian crowds, has deployed heavy artillery against them, and has occupied the streets with armored vehicles and strategically-placed snipers. One man is shouting that “the gates of Hell have opened” in the capital and that “this is Halabja!” (where Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ordered helicopter gunships to hit a Kurdish city with sarin gas, killing 5000 in 1988).

Two defecting Libyan pilots who flew to Malta confirmed the orders to strafe the crowds from the air and said that they declined to obey the order. Other pilots appear to have been more loyal.

From here.

The U.S. has the capability to deploy fighter aircraft in the region and stop this from happening. It also has a deep history of disrespect for Libyan sovereignty from the Marines sent to Tripolli in the Revolutionary era to the bombing of a Libyan chemical plant in mine. Does Ghadaffi deserve sovereign respect vis-a-vis democratic protesters from a nation like the United States that was founded on revolutionary overthrow of tyrrany? Would a single show of force in this instance establish a credible threat that would influence the behavior of dicators elsewhere even without its actual exercise? We could tell nervous monarches that we distinguish between legitimate monarchies and dicatorships.

Why not? Unlike leaders of regimes in Egypt and Bahrain, we have no history of Libyan cooperation with the U.S. We wouldn't necessarily have to take down the entire regime. There are locals on the ground who could do that. We could simply shut down one military tactic of the regime in order to show disrespect and emasculate that regime in a case where it is clearly engaging in a gross, mass violation of human rights of the worse magnitude. Perhaps we could bomb Ghadaffi's house while we were at it.

It isn't as if the U.S. has some long tradition of non-intervention in Middle Eastern affairs to defend after two U.S. initiated wars in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Also, the extingency of an unfolding situation could justify not seeking a broad diplomatic coalition. The War Powers Act permits U.S. Presidents to make brief military interventions without Congressional approval.

READ MORE - Intervention. Why not?

A New Era In Egypt

"President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down as president of the republic and has assigned the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to run the affairs of the country," Suleiman said. "May God help everybody."

While Egyptians applauded themselves for toppling Mubarak, his fate was sealed by the military, whose leaders had promised not to use deadly force to put down the rebellion.

Earlier in the day, Egypt's military chiefs said they would guarantee a transition toward "free and honest" elections. But Suleiman's statement left unsaid how that would work, and who precisely would take charge in the interim.

In a televised statement Friday night, the military pledged that it would not act as a substitute for a "legitimate government" following Mubarak's resignation and would take steps to meet the people's aspirations. Reading the statement, a military spokesman praised Mubarak for his contributions to Egypt and hailed protesters who have died in the anti-Mubarak demonstrations.

Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces includes the top service commanders led by Lt. Gen. Sami Enan, the armed forces chief of staff.

From here.

Thursday night, Mubarak, the 82 year old man who had been dictator of Egypt for thirty-one years pledged to stay in office until regularly scheduled elections in September, something that the Egyptian military had reaffirmed that he would do Friday morning. But, when this, along with Mubarak's appointment of a Vice President after leaving himself without a successor for years, and Mubarak's pledge that his son would not run for President after him fell flat, the military apparently intervened, got the newly appointed Vice President to announce a "resignation," and shipped Mubarak and his wife to a resort as close to the Saudi Arabian border as one can get without leaving the country. Eighteen days of street protests, triggered by the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, had secured a new regime. With Mubarak finally gone, the crowds were pleased for once.

Mubarak is gone, not only because the people rose up, but because the Army refused to back him up any longer. When the protests began, police killed several hundred protesters. But, the Army refused to fire on its own people and got the police to back off as well.

Recent Political History In Egypt

Egypt's recent political history can be summed up as follows: Egypt, then a tributary state of England under King Farouk (England became its colonial ruler in 1882 and granted increased independence in stages in 1914, 1922 and 1936) declared independence in 1951. King Farouk was ousted in an uprising in 1952 that left Lt. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser in charge, a position that was ratified in a democratic process thereafter. Under Nasser, from 1958 to 1961, Syria and Egypt were joined in the short lived United Arab Republic from which Syria seceded. Nasser's Vice President, Anwar Sedat replaced him when he died in 1970. Sadat was assassinated from Muslim extremists in the Army in 1981 when he was replaced by Hosni Mubarak who was in turn replaced today. No Egyptian leader in living memory has ever left office voluntarily or via a democratic election.

But, there is good reason to be optimistic and believe that the military junta in Egypt will promptly hold free and fair multi-party elections, that democratically elected representatives will form a civilian government in Egypt, and that Egypt will start to have a Western style parliamentary republic with an Islamic flavor. There is also good reason to expect that in the short term, that the new civilian Egyptian government will be too preoccupied with domestic affairs to consider international military adventures such as threats to Israel.

Eygpt is not the country that it was when Mubarak seized power three decades ago. It has a military more interested in running its business ventures than fighting foreign wars, so long as domestic tranquility can be maintained. Like many nations in the developing world, it has not been so closed that its people are unaware of what kinds of governments and political developments prevail in the larger world, its businesses are actively engaged in foreign trade and millions of Egyptians work abroad where they have experiences that they can relate to friends and family when they come home. Unlike some countries in the region, Egypt has a genuine middle class that gives it economic clout apart from oil revenues. Egypt has lacked free and fair elections, and it has faced strict state of emergency restrictions on political activity for a very long time, but despite those limits, a vigorous civil society has developed. Many of Egypt's senior military officers, through exchanges begun after the Camp David accords in 1979, have spent time in the United States mingling with American military officers. The protests that brought down the regime were facilitated, in part, via Facebook and were triggered by widely available news coverage on networks like Al-Jazzeria, of the uprising in Tunisia.

One party rule may have seemed like a pretty good idea at the time when it became the norm in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and elsewhere across the non-monarchies of the region. It may even be that truly democratic parliamentary democracy was an unrealistic expectation at that point. One party rule was working in the Soviet Union and China, and it wasn't yet clear that the leaders of the one party states would themselves be entrenched indefinitely. But, by the time that Tunisia set off the current round of democratic uprisings, this form of government had been discredited after decades of experience in newly independent nations around the world. Muslims in Turkey, Albania, Iraq (and before that, Iraqi Kurdistan), Palestine, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Jordan and Iran were all trying to conduct at least partially democratic government with at least intermittent success. Certainly, the notion of a Muslim nation with a parliamentary democracy was no longer considered an oxymoron.

What Next?

The Egyptian Army's best model may be Turkey, where the military sees itself as the guarantor of a secular, democratic state and has been successful more often than not.

I expect that the civilian constitutional order that comes into being in Egypt won't be a very creative one. The Army and civil service will probably continue uninterrupted. The restrictions on civil liberties imposed via "emergency rule" during Mubarak's regime will end. The existing non-democratically selected President and parliament of Egypt will probably remain, but with multi-party democratic elections (modeled on the proportional representation systems found in most of the world rather than the two party single member ditrict system of the United States) and somewhat different respective powers.

What About Israel?

Egypt and Jordan have both committed to making democratic reforms, although the extent of these reforms in each nation is still in flux. This may make the time ripe for rethinking the relationship between the Israel, the Palestinian territory of Gaza, and the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, each of which have weak civilian elected self-government.

Revelations from Wikileaks show that Israel is not really interested in a peace deal with the Palestinians, rather than the other way around as conventional wisdom had long held. What Israel does need is a guarantor that the Palestinian territories won't be used as based of operations for attacks against it. Prior to the latest reforms, Israel has relied on Jordan and Egypt to be neutral towards it and prevent undue smuggling across the border, and the monarchy and dictatorship in these nations respectively have not made them very attractive regimes to the Palestinians. But, should Jordan and Egypt become successful functioning democracies, there may be room for a win-win-win solution if the West Bank merges with Jordan and the Gaza Strip merges with Egypt.

Jordan and Egypt both have regimes that are more competent than either of the Palestinian territories, and hence more able to suppress attacks against Israel from those territories than the current regimes in Palestine, and Jordan and Egypt both have more of an interest in doing so than the Palestinian territories standing alone. As democracies that actually work, Palestinians may now find their neighbors more desirable political entities to be a part of than their own marginally democratic and incompetent locally elected governments. Links to these nations would make possible the levels of trade that would allow the West Bank and Gaza to have functioning economies; something that is impossible in embargoed international aid supported states. Also, Jordan may be better able to negotiate Israeli withdrawal from its West Bank settlements and better able to protect that territory from further Israeli encroachment than a semi-sovereign autonomous Palestinian government within Israel. Jordan and Egypt would each gain territory and people, the classic measures of sovereign clout. Also, from an Israeli perspective, while Middle Eastern historical memory may be long, an end to a distinct Palestinian political entity recognized on the international scene may eventually defuse Palestinian nationalism - a generation from now, the children of today's Palestinians may seem themselves as Jordanians and Egyptians respectively.

Some Recent History of Coups

Military coups, which is what the events in Egypt amount to so far, however, characterized, are neck and neck with elections as the most common means by which countries secure new leaders in most of the world. Sometimes they support popular uprisings against dicators, sometimes they suppress democratic governments.

Coups have been the norm for Egypt's neighbors not fortunate enough to have monarchies. Libya's current leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi seized power in a coup in 1969 and is still in power there. Syria's Baath party took power in a 1963 coup, in a regime that installed Hafez al-Assad as President in 1971, a post he continued to hold until his death in 2000 when his son Bashar al-Assad succeeded him and remains in power today. In Sudan, a revolutionary council declared independence and installed Gaafar al-Mimeiry as President until he was replaced in a 1985 coup, followed by a 1986 democratic election, followed by the 1989 coup that installed its current leader General Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir. Algeria won independence in 1962 with a democracy that lasted until a coup in 1965 that installed Houari Boumedienne who ruled until his death in 1978. Demonstrators with Army support backed a coup in Ethiopia that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, with succession handled via coups and uprisings until Ethiopia's first multi-party general elections in 1995. Iraq's King Kaisal was killed in a 1958 coup, after which the Baath party gradually gained control' Saddam Hussein became President as the Baath party leader and ruled Iraq as a dicator from 1979 until 2003 when he was deposed in the U.S. invasion.

Coups aren't so far in the past even in Europe and the developed countries of Asia.

Portugal has a military coup in 1974. Spain has had continous democratic government only since 1977 and had a coup attempt that was put down by King Juan Carlos in 1981. Greece had a coup in 1967 and Cyprus had one in 1974. Turkey had coups in 1960 and 1980 and the military remains a powerful political force there, primarily as a guarantor of secular government. The military attempted to remove Mikhail Gorbachev in a coup in 1991, which was foiled with the help of Boris Yeltsin.

South Korea's initial authoritarian leader, Dr. Sygnman Rhee, installed in 1948 was forced out by an uprising in 1960 which was followed by a 1961 coup that installed General Park Chung Hee who retained power until he was assassinated by the chief of the Korean CIA in 1979 when a military coup installed General Chun Doo Hwan, the head of military intelligence, and he ruled until pro-democracy demonstrations in 1987 pushed him to conduct democratic elections that installed his ally Roh Tae Wood. Chun and Roh were convicted of mutiney, treason and corruption in 1996, after Roh was replaced in a new election in 1993, but were pardoned in 1997.

Indonesia won independence in late 1949 and elected President Sukarno in 1950; he suspended parliament in 1960, made himself President for life in 1963, thwarted an attempted coup in 1965 and was forced out by the Army in 1967 when General Suharto took power and ruled for the next thirty one years. Protestors ousted him in 1998, and his Vice President ran democratic elections that installed a successor in 1999. The new President was impeached for corruption and incompetence in 2001 when Megawati Sukranoputri, the daughter of Sukarno became Indonesia's President. She was replaced by a retired general, Susilo bamabang Yudhoyono in a democratic election in 2004. Indonesia's two successive democratic elections makes it arguably one of the most democratic predominantly Muslim nations in the world.

Bangladesh, after securing independence from Pakistan in 1971 had a coupl in 1975, an unsuccessful coup that caused the death of the incumbent President in 1981, and a military backed caretaker government in 2007, interspersed with democratic elections.

After being separated from India in 1947, Pakistan had a coups in 1977 and 2001 which put president Musharraf in place, after which he ruled until a threat of impeachment by parliament led by his assassinated political opponent's widower (who herself was the daughter of the President who was outsted in the 1977 coup and executed by that regime in 1979) ousted him in 2008.

Of course, the historical record makes clear that many coups, even when fueled by popular uprisings, do end up evolving into new dicatorships, even if ratified in genuine democratic elections the first time around. But, given that the alternative had been a likely transfer of power to Mubarak's son in an emerging monarchy, it is a risk that it is worth Egyptian's effort to take.

READ MORE - A New Era In Egypt

Questioning Patriotism For Fun and Profit

Liberals already control many aspects of American life, and they have undue influence on the Internet. . . . people who use e-mail or other services from companies such as Google, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple are unwittingly helping the liberals. These companies are, and will continue to be, huge supporters of those who are damaging our country.

The influence of these companies also extends internationally, where the liberal grip on the Internet has been demonstrated anew in the turmoil in Egypt. There, according to media reports, it is playing a key role in stirring up the mass protests that are clogging the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities such as Alexandria and fueling demands for the immediate ouster of President Hosni Mubarak . . . the movement is being manipulated by those who favor a hard-line, Iranian-style, Islamic theocracy. . . . Google executive Wael Ghonim, just released from 12 days of Egyptian detention, confirmed that he was responsible for the Facebook page that ignited "the revolution of the youth of the Internet."

This is the same Google where CEO Eric Schmidt is a personal friend of President Barack Obama. . .

Is that where you want your money to go? I didn't think so, so I started the very first conservative e-mail service provider. . . . Your purchase will help me promote true Reagan values to win back our country in 2012.

Liberals have gone too far to influence the Internet and the political process.

- Michael Reagan, son of President Ronald Reagan, professional pundit, and newspaper columnist (Source: Aurora Sentinel, February 9, 2011, page 9.)

Who knew that it was unpatriotic to financially support Internet companies by having a free gmail, hotmail, or yahoo e-mail account?

Who knew that there was a Democratic and a Republican way to provide e-mail accounts?

Who knew that preventing traffic jams was more important then ending dictatorships?

Who knew that it was unpatriotic for a private American corporation to support democracy in a totalitarian state?

Who knew that you could get paid for writing a newspaper column that is an infomerical for your own business?

Who knew that liberals control American life and the Internet too?

What Did Reagan Say?

What are "true Reagan values" anyway? What did Ronald Reagan had to say on the subject of religious people taking the streets to secure democracy with the help of shared information from Internet that his son is so wary of?

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Then again, some of Reagan's messages on the issue can be interpreted in more than one way:

The greatest security for Israel is to create new Egypts.

READ MORE - Questioning Patriotism For Fun and Profit

Egypt and Yemen on Fire

Inspired by the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, masses of protesters are filling the streets to try to unsettle the regimes of Egypt and Yemen.

Egypt has an authoritarian dominant party system in which President Hosni Mubarak has been President for thirty years and has hinted at installing his son as a successor, although Egypt has remained engaged with the world and had some semblance of a normal economy, rather than withdrawing from the world as Albania and North Korea did.

In Yemen, President Ali Abdallah Saleh, is "a strongman who has ruled this fractured country for more than 30 years . . . His current term expires in two years, but proposed constitutional changes could allow him to hold onto power for longer." Despite Saleh's authoritarian policies, however, a substantial part of Yemen is beyond the government's control.

Police responses have been violent in Egypt, but the response has not yet escalated to that level in Yemen.

It is hard to tell if we are replaying something like Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, or for those with a longer run view, Europe's revolutions of 1848, or instead are seeing something like 1989 when the Soviet system fell apart.

Indeed, assuming that Tunsia's revolution is now irreversible, the fear may be that Egypt or Yemen may be to Tunsia what Tiananmen Square was to the fall of the Soviet Union, a disasterous crackdown spawned by success elsewhere.

On the other hand, if revolutionaries succeed in Egypt and Yemen as they appear to have prevailed in Tunisia, this could mark the end of an epoch of strongmen in a wide spawth of the world. Iraq, of course, already lost its long time strongman by very different means, and Sudan, while not actually shedding its twenty year old strongman's authoritarian regime is in the process of ceding much of its territory in South Sudan. Serbia hardline regime, likewise, lost Kosovo.

It isn't clear if there is any likelihood that this wave of revolutions will spread to similar regimes in Libya (whose strongman has been in place for four decades), Syrai (where dictatorship is in a second generation), Sudan, other African regimes, or to the monarchies of Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, or Oman.

Algeria's regime, with doubtful democratic credentials between years of violent insurgencies by popular Islamists against a secular military linked regime, truces to resolve the struggle, and popular uprisings has probably doesn't have the same level of pent up frustration that its neighbors share.

Turkey, Albania, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, while all having flawed, troubled, intermittent or untested democracies, have also established the precedent that political systems in which civilian officials chosen in genuinely contested elections are possible in predominantly Muslim countries. None of these nations have really achieved "mature democracy" status, but Islamist factions have as often been a force for democratization as they have been barrier to democracy in these nations. This undermines the long standing argument in foreign policy circles that Islam, or at least Islamists movements were incompatible with democratic government.

It is a time to hope for the best and fear for the worst. In the meantime, understandably, oil prices are surging, which means that these events half the world away, will have a direct effect on ordinary Americans.

READ MORE - Egypt and Yemen on Fire

Should Parents Get A Vote For Their Children?

I'm regularly observe that many of the problems of capitalism arise from it doing its job too well. Capitalism tends to reward those who produce in proportion to the value of what they produce, and denies rewards to those who do not. The trouble is that lots of people in our society don't produce enough to live a decent life, often through no fault of their own, and some other system not designed to maximize productivity needs to be in place to address this issue.

Our political system is much the same. If you look at who is suffering and who is thriving in the American political system, you see a pattern. Groups of people who vote reliably do well. Groups of people who vote rarely or not at all do poorly. Our political system does a quite decent job of translating the preferences of people who vote into policies that favor them. But, just as capitalism ruthlessly ignores the wants and needs of those who do not produce, our political system ruthlessly ignores the wants and needs of those who do not vote.

For example, the United States has one of the weakest welfare states in the developed world. Its unemployment system is a pathetically stingy. Everyone else in the developed world had universal health care decades ago, and we will be lucky to get some reasonable approximation of it by 2014 when the health care reform takes effect. We have proportionately more people who are poor, and are less generous towards the poor than other developed nations. The portion of the cost of getting a higher education paid by the student (which makes higher education unavailable to many poor students) in the United States is greater than almost any other developed country in the world. Few countries in the world have less social class mobility.

This is not a coincidence. For seniors, who vote extremely reliably, we have had universal single payer health care and a minimum income system that keeps almost everyone out of poverty for many decades. But, for young adults, who vote least reliably, and for children, who are prohibited by law from voting, our social safety net is very weak. While government fiat means that we have very few poor seniors (who, if they are poor at that point arguably are themselves to blame for their situation to a great extent), the poverty rate for children in the United States is far in excess of the poverty rate for the nation as a whole, despite the fact that almost everyone agrees that children, who after all cannot choose their parents, have done nothing to deserve their lot in life.

Pedatricians are among the worst paid physicians in our medical system, and pedatric physician specialties face chronic shortfalls. Foster care conditions (and the conditions in the orphanages that were common place before foster care almost completely replaced it) are routinely dismal, with victimization rate of those within them rivaling those of prisons (which are populated by another class of people who cannot vote).

It is probably not coincidental that the low participation rate in American elections, one of the lowest in the world of any democracy, whether or not it is in a developed country, with non-participation disproportionately found among the less well off and less well educated and the young, has elected officials who have produced one of the world's weakest social safety nets.

For this reason, I have long been inclined to think that systemic efforts to improve voter turnout are the key to progressive change in American public policy. There is no reason that the United States shouldn't be able to secure the kind of voter turnout among eligible voters that is found in Australia or France.

But, even improved turnout among eligible voters would not solve the problem that American public policy systemically neglects children, although it might improve it somewhat because parents with minor children are disproportionately non-voters.

Now, of course, while one could low the voting age, there are certainly limits to the extent to which that can work. Two year olds simply aren't equipped to evaluate political candidates.

But, there is an easy alternative. Parents while children who can't vote could be given the right to vote on their behalf. There a few ways that this could be handled, mostly relating to which parent should have that right. But, they are hardly insurmountable. For example, each parent could get an additional half a vote per child not eligible to vote.

This would be the last frontier in truly universal sufferage, and many lower income parents might find it worth their while to vote simply because they got a greater say, solving the turnout problem in part as well.

Would it work? I'm not aware of any place that has tried. But, there is certainly a strong argument to be made that notwithstanding the flaws of the political campaign process, lobbying, and so forth, that almost all democracies do a reasonably good rough justice job of representing the people who vote, and that improving voter turnout and expanding the franchise to appropriately give weigh to the interests of children would shift the public policies that those democracies produce accordingly.

READ MORE - Should Parents Get A Vote For Their Children?

Dish Soap Secretly Reformulated

This summer, detergent makers took phosphates out of their detergents. Seventeen states banned phosphates from dishwasher detergents because the chemical compounds also pollute lakes, bays and streams. They create algae blooms and starve fish of oxygen.

The result is a noticable reduction in the effectiveness of dishwashers at getting dishes clean.

I understand the importance of reducing the amount of toxic material that goes into our waterways. Apparently, they were removed from laundry detergents years ago. We will learn to live without them. I also understand that it can be commercially impracticable to offer different versions of a mass produced consumer product in different states.

But, it is really unconscionable for Procter and Gamble and other dishwasher detergent companies to make a major reformulation of a product used by many tens of millions of people every day that significantly changes its functionality for the consumer without boldly and prominently disclosing that to the general public. This should have been something that everyone knew about before it happened and that everyone with a dishwasher was innundated with suggestions for adjusting their daily habits to managing. Instead, no one I know was aware that this had happened until today, several months after the change took place. Many people, like the woman interviewed for the story, simply started to see a change in how clean their dishes were coming out of the dishwasher and assumed that their dishwasher was broken.

The cardinal rule for managing change is to do so democratically. You need to involve everyone affected and everyone needs to know about it. Not everyone has to agree. But, everyone needs to know and have an opportunity to comment.

Living in a large metropolitan area, my life is full is mysteries and half finished bits of stories. An ambulance rushes bye to some emergency that will change someone's life forever, but will never receive even a paragraph's mention in the newspaper or TV news. You overhear an intense conversation on a light rail trip that never gets resolved. Businesses in your neighborhood open and close without explanation. My daughter's middle school was locked down this morning based upon a threat that was received yesterday, according to a Robocall that I received from the Denver Public Schools this morning. But, I'll probably never hear another word about what happened or why.

Only a true policy wonk can personally have any real sense of what is contained in the roughly six hundred bills introduced in the Colorado General Assembly every year, all of which are processed in a short 120 day session, and it is a real challenge to follow even the bills in one committee despite live Internet feeds of committee procedings and online bill status indexes updated daily. Ad city council and Congress, and one can only hope that intermediaries that you trust will tell you how the laws are changing. And, I have the privilege of living in Denver where the structure of the government is far more streamlined than it is in most places because we have a conslidated city and county government with a school district that has contiguous boundaries.

But, when something actually does directly change your life, even in little ways, you would really like to know what is going on.

READ MORE - Dish Soap Secretly Reformulated