Month: April 2009

Beck Dreck

by digby

I’ve had some complaints about covering the Glenn Beck Circus, under the assumption that he’s just a foolish irrelevant clown. I understand that and certainly hope that’s the case. But I think it’s foolish to fail to keep an eye on political phenomenons like this because nobody can tell the future. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

However, I’m an amateur at analyzing this particular freakshow. The professional is Dave Neiwert, whose new book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right couldn’t be coming out at a more propitious time. He wrote about the Beck show this week-end at Orcinus and it’s well worth reading to understand what Beck is doing. (Whether Beck’s fully conscious of it is another question, but the result is the same.)

Neiwert takes on Beck’s twisted history lesson in the particulars (Jonah Goldberg’s silly book as well.) And he quotes Beck’s favorite American Revolutionary to prove him an ass:

Even more to the point, perhaps, is Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice, which is essentially a treatise on the need for community sharing and consensual taxation:

It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal. …

Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund prod in this plan is to issue.

As for Glenn Beck’s oft-stated view that charities, and not government, should be taking care of the poor, here’s Paine’s view of that:

There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals. It is, however, but little that any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to be relieved is considered. He may satisfy his conscience, but not his heart. He may give all that he has, and that all will relieve but little. It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed.

The plan here proposed will reach the whole. It will immediately relieve and take out of view three classes of wretchedness-the blind, the lame, and the aged poor; and it will furnish the rising generation with means to prevent their becoming poor; and it will do this without deranging or interfering with any national measures.

Of course, Thomas Paine’s name is familiar to anyone who watched Friday. At the end of the same show, Beck tried to “channel” Paine with a right-wing rant that was all about inspiring Americans to rise up against the administration they just got finished electing. Why? Because they’re taxing us.

And the real Thomas Paine’s grave was registering the whirling on the Richter scale.

But hey, we’ve got “originalist” Supreme Court Justices telling students that Americans care too much about the Bill of Rights and should care more about a non-existent “Bill of Responsibilities,” so what else is new?

The Corporate Borg

by dday

The corporate lobbyists continue to line up to obstruct President Obama’s budget reforms. An excellent example is the proposed rollback of the privatization of the student loan industry, which has caused lots of consternation among… the private student loan industry (which, incidentally, got a bailout last year). They think direct government lending of student loans, which would save $94 billion dollars over a decade, would just be a terrible outcome for, well, them, and they’re leading a fight based on, get this, the fact that Pell grants would be mandatory and not subject to the whims of appropriators. “Make grants for higher education more uncertain!” certainly sounds like the stuff of popular outcry.

But even more telling are the cautions of Richard Gephardt with respect to health care reform. Gephardt, a longtime labor leader while in Congress, wants the Obama Administration and Congress to scale back their ambitions.

The caution comes from Richard A. Gephardt, a former Missouri congressman and a major figure in Democratic politics in his 28 years in the House and service as party leader. He put health coverage for all Americans at the center of his 2004 presidential bid, calling it “the moral issue of our time.”

Now Mr. Gephardt says universal or near-universal coverage cannot pass this year — and he is urging the White House to defer that goal until it enacts cost-saving reforms in health care delivery. Otherwise, he argues, the new president risks the same losing argument about paying for expanded coverage that stymied President Bill Clinton 15 years ago […]

“I feel so much now like déjà vu all over again,” said Mr. Gephardt, who now lobbies for corporate America on issues including health care. Universal coverage “is absolutely imperative, and it needs to be dealt with. But the way to get to it is to show that we can deal with some of these problems first.”

Gephardt may be correct about the difficulties of funding health care; he neglects to take into account the extreme desire of the public to reform the system, much more so than in 1993. But the half-disclosure comes in paragraph 17:

One old friend links Mr. Gephardt’s assessment to his lucrative new career as a lobbyist. “He’s advising a lot of big corporations,” said Tom Buffenbarger, president of the machinists’ union. “All he’s hearing is costs.”

You won’t find this in John Harwood’s article, but Gephardt’s lobby shop represents the US Chamber of Commerce, Goldman Sachs, and the government of Turkey, in which perch he lobbied to kill a resolution acknowledging the Armenian genocide that he once co-sponsored. Here’s a long article on all of Gephardt’s corporate ties.

In this respect, I see Washington as a kind of Roach Motel, where politicians of all ideological stripes walk in, but they don’t walk out without a sweet corporate gig and a mindset to protect the interests of the powerful over the people. A familiar story, of course, but at this crisis point, when those same corporate interests have just about sucked the Treasury dry, we need those defenders of the public and the common good, and cannot find them.

.

Pesticide Makers To Michelle Obama: Please Grow Tasteless, Chemically-Soaked Food

by tristero

Looks like pesticide makers have been spraying themselves silly with their own products: Their brains have rotted. Go ahead, read the letter The Mid America CropLife Association (MACA) sent to Michelle Obama. It would be funny if it weren’t for the simple fact that it’s not in the slightest bit funny, given the unbelievably unhealthy way we Americans typically grow, distribute, and consume our food:

As you go about planning and planting the White House garden, we respectfully encourage you to recognize the role conventional agriculture plays in the U.S in feeding the ever-increasing population, contributing to the U.S. economy and providing a safe and economical food supply.

For some reason or another, the letter fails to mention the latest recall of pistachios or a recent report that food safety is no longer improving:

Roughly 76 million people in the United States suffer foodborne illnesses each year, 300,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die, according to C.D.C. estimates. Children younger than 4 are sickened by food more than those in any other age group, but adults over age 50 suffer more hospitalizations and death as a result of food-related infections.”

It should be mentioned that most of the food safety issues are the result of growing food industrially, as monocultures, not simple organic gardens like the one at the White House. And pesticides used in the vast quantities in which they are used to maintain these artificial monocultures contribute in numerous ways to undermining the quality of our food. See The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan, for example.

Never mind. They were so proud of their letter that they forwarded it to their supporters with a cover letter that asked:

Did you hear the news? The White House is planning to have an “organic” garden on the grounds to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the Obama’s and their guests. While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder.

You can sign a petition to oppose these creeps here. I strongly suggest you do.

“An Unfortunate Situation”

by digby

Teenager wasted:

A Detroit teenager who police say fled a traffic stop Friday died after being subdued with a Taser. He is the second Michigan teen to die following a Taser stun in less than a month.

Warren Police say they don’t know why the 15-year-old bailed out of a Dodge Stratus he was riding in during the stop on Eight Mile near Schoenherr, leading officers on a half-block chase that ended in an abandoned house on Pelkey in Detroit.

The car was stopped for having an expired license plate.

In the scuffle, officers shocked the teen one time with a Taser, police said. Shortly after, he became unresponsive and died.

Warren Police defended their call to shock the teen, who they later learned suffered from asthma and took antidepressant drugs. “It’s an unfortunate situation,” Warren Deputy Police Commissioner Jere Green said. “Our officers are shaken by it; they are upset. They are humans just like anybody else.”

[…]

The Detroiter, whose name wasn’t released Friday, is the second Michigan teen in less than a month to die after being zapped by a Taser. Bay City Police tasered 15-year-old Brett Elder last month after he tried to fight with them. He died shortly thereafter.

[…]

Green said his officers followed department policy.

“Research indicates it (a Taser) wouldn’t cause death in itself. It’s a nonlethal use of force,” Green said. “Everything we did was within policies and guidelines. All of our actions were appropriate.”

Dr. Stephen Gasper, a senior resident in emergency medicine at Beaumont Hospital of Royal Oak, said it’s very rare that Tasers cause a death.

“Usually there’s something else going on,” he said.

Exactly. The kid would have died at that moment from his asthma and depression anyway. The 50,000 volts had nothing to do with it.

Just ask Taser International; they’re the ones who do the research. I’m sure they would say these 15 year old kids suffered from “excited delirium “

Conflict Of Interest

by digby

Howie Klein asks an important question: why hasn’t the last GOP activist/donor/hack/shill on the Minnesota Supreme Court recused himself from the Senate race question? Two other justices did.

Imagine what Ben Ginsburg would have done with that if the shoe were on the other foot ..?

Pragmatic Princples

by digby

Greenwald is obviously the go-to source analysis pertaining to the Obama administration’s approach to the national security civil liberties issues. If you aren’t following the story daily you are missing out on some of the most incisive writing out there —- and also the most disturbing. Today’s rundown of the administration’s decision to appeal the Bagram decision was so depressing (especially the moving Senate floor speech he excerpts of Obama forcefully arguing against what he is now supporting.)

He writes:

Back in February, the Obama administration shocked many civil libertarians by filing a brief in federal court that, in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue — the Obama DOJ argued, as The New York Times’s Charlie Savage put it, “that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.” Remember: these are not prisoners captured in Afghanistan on a battlefield. Many of them have nothing to do with Afghanistan and were captured far, far away from that country — abducted from their homes and workplaces — and then flown to Bagram to be imprisoned. Indeed, the Bagram detainees in the particular case in which the Obama DOJ filed its brief were Yemenis and Tunisians captured outside of Afghanistan (in Thailand or the UAE, for instance) and then flown to Bagram and locked away there as much as six years without any charges. That is what the Obama DOJ defended, and they argued that those individuals can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind — as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo.

Last month, a federal judge emphatically rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale of Boudemiene applies every bit as much to Bagram as it does to Guantanamo. Notably, the district judge who so ruled — John Bates — is an appointee of George W. Bush, a former Whitewater prosecutor, and a very pro-executive-power judge. In his decision (.pdf), Judge Bates made clear how identical are the constitutional rights of detainees flown to Guantanamo and Bagram and underscored how dangerous is the Bush/Obama claim that the President has the right to abduct people from around the world and imprison them at Bagram with no due process of any kind

[…]

As Judge Bates noted, the prisoners shipped to Bagram actually have even fewer rights than the Guantanamo detainees did prior to Boudemiene, because at least the latter were given a sham Pentagon review (the CSRT tribunal), whereas the U.S. Government — under both Bush and Obama — maintain that Bagram prisoners have no rights of any kind.

In the wake of Judge Bates’ ruling that foreign detainees shipped to Bagram at least have the right to a hearing to determine their guilt, what is the Obama DOJ doing?

They are appealing.

By now it’s clear that the Holder DOJ is going to keep at least some of the legal pillars of the Bush GWOT regime in place, but that’s not entirely surprising. All new presidents of either party tend to support the powerful entrenched bureaucracies and rarely give up power once obtained. (Many of us made that point when people reduced the argument to the necessity of electing a Democratic president.) However, it’s profoundly disappointing that the administration is actually seizing more executive power in the case of the states’ secrets argument and perpetuating a lawless prison regime outside our borders.

Perhaps there is some sophisticated legal strategy involved in Obama DOJ reasserting the Bush administration’s policies but it’s hard to see where the principled constitutional lines are drawn. And without the constitutional principles it’s all just more of the same.

I continue to wonder where Marty Lederman is in all this since he went to the Justice department. There is nobody who was more critical of these same policies during the Bush years and for whom I have more respect. But I wonder if he is using his thorough analyses of the Bush policies to end them?

In the wake of the Boumadiene decision he wrote:

As I noted below, the two most important questions the Court did not answer are:

(i) Would habeas rights extend to alien detainees held in foreign locations other than GTMO (such as Bagram)?

and

(ii) What is the substantive standard for who may be indefinitely detained?

The Court was not, however, completely silent on these questions; it provided hints about how they might be resolved. In this post and the next, I’ll try to identify those hints. Please note: I am not suggesting that the Court issued any holdings, or that the hints are determinative of how the Court will ultimately resolve the questions. They’re merely tea leaves, albeit very carefully considered tea leaves that government officials, lower court judges, lawyers, and presidential candidates would be advised to parse carefully.

So, as for the first question: Would habeas rights extend to alien detainees held in foreign locations other than GTMO? That is to say, can the military avoid the impact of Boumediene simply by detaining or transferring all alleged alien enemy combatants to a different facility, such as at Bagram?

Short answer: No.

But that doesn’t mean that habeas will be available wherever and whenever the military detains alleged combatants.

It will not be available, for instance, in the first few days or weeks of detention at a facility close to a field of battle or in “an active theater of war.” The military must be given deference to utilize “reasonable screening and initial detention,” even if only “under lawful and proper conditions of confinement and treatment and “for a reasonable period of time.”

More broadly, the Court suggests that habeas rights will be circumscribed, perhaps even denied, if and where the government demonstrates that such proceedings would “divert the attention of military personnel from other pressing tasks,” or where the government presents “credible” arguments that the proceedings would “compromise[]” a “military mission.” Moreover, the Court suggests that habeas rights would be more limited or dubious where adjudicating the petition “would cause friction with the host government.”

In all of these cases, Justice Kennedy emphasizes, a “relevant consideration in determining courts’ role” is “whether there are suitable alternative processes in place to protect against the arbitrary exercise of governmental power.” Where there are no such adequate alternative protections against arbitrary governmental power, habeas rights will not be denied simply because of the foreign location: “[C]ivilian courts and the Armed Forces,” after all, “have functioned along side each other at various points in our history.”

Most importantly, the Court strongly implies that if, as in this case, the government chooses a foreign detention facility for the very purpose of avoiding judicial review (or perhaps even if the military retains a prisoner at a battlefield locale for the same reason), the Court will not look kindly upon such efforts. As I noted below, I believe the single most important sentence in the opinion might be this one: “The test for determining the scope of [the Suspension Clause] must not be subject to manipulation by those whose power it is designed to restrain.” The political branches will not be permitted “to govern without legal constraint” or to “have the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.”

NOTE: In general, and as the above discussion should make clear, Justice Kennedy stresses that the question will in each case be determined by a “functional approach” involving multiple factors and, especially, “practical concerns,” rather than by any formalist rules.

During the Bush years Lederman’s position couldn’t have been clearer that detainees such as those who applied for habeas corpus at Bagram clearly were, should be subject to the writ. Read his posts in this fascinating exchange if you doubt me. He even suggested that the Bagram prisoners, who he admits have been held in the absolute worst of conditions, should be sent to Guantanamo where at least they’d have some rights. It’s very difficult to believe that he would endorse this appeal.

(If it turns out that Lederman constructed an argument for the administration to appeal to Justice Kennedy on the basis that Bagram detainees can be held indefinitely without any due process because of “practical concerns,” vis a vis his analysis above, it will be profoundly distressing. But it’s possible.)

There has been a lot of chatter about this George Packer article arguing that Obama is a principled pragmatist who takes whatever path he can find to reach his liberal goals. Perhaps he’s right about that and perhaps that’s a successful approach to governing. But Obama isn’t exactly the first one to do such a thing when it comes to dealing with the congress — it’s the necessary sausage making that all successful presidents employ.

But this will not work on constitutional issues, and certainly not politically. You can’t split the baby and argue that because you’ve promised to close Gitmo and have repudiated “extraordinary” rendition you are being “pragmatic” and offering the other side some of what they want by asserting a right to indefinitely hold innocent people locked up at Bagram. These are not issues on which compromise is possible and being pragmatic in this regard results in incoherence and a diminishment of moral authority.

I know it’s hard to navigate this issue. Bush and Cheney booby-trapped the national security issue in dozens of different ways. But they have to do it. If the administration continues to validate this idea that the United States is so “exceptional” that it’s exempt from human rights treaties, the Geneva Conventions, and it’s own constitution it will be impossible to ever recapture even the (mostly unrealized) ideal of a country of laws and not men.

What We Need

by digby

Obviously, there has been a lot of chatter about the demise of the newspaper industry recently, mainly because of … the demise of the newspaper industry. This exchange between Markos and Alex Baldwin yesterday sparked this comment from Atrios:

I think what happens in these discussions – and I’ve been guilty of it myself – is the conflation of a few different issues. One conversation is about how newspapers could change, perhaps shrugging off certain somewhat odd constraints, to be a more appealing product. That’s the subscriber side. Another conversation is about the various reasons, other than declining readership, for declining advertising revenue. Still a third conversation is about all the awesome things newspaper organizations coulda shoulda and maybe still could do to improve their internet business model.

And Markos is referencing a fourth conversation,the quietest one, about how some of the companies who own newspapers are in trouble not because the business models are in trouble, but because they just made stupid fucking business decisions.

I like newspapers. I certainly read a lot of them, always have. But I don’t actually care a whole lot about their businesses. The history of newspaper ownership and their relationship to advertisers is hardly one to make one nostalgic for the good old days. It’s always been compromised and this is just the latest chapter in many sordid tales of newspaper malfeasance.

But I was interested in this essay by Clay Shirky, which made the rounds a few weeks ago, called Newspapers and Thinking The Unthinkable. I urge you to read it all, but I think this captures the essence of his thesis, which is pretty obvious although you rarely hear anyone say it:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead. When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work. We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past. For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Let’s hope so.
That process has actually been underway for some time and though it’s worrying that something bad could happen during the transition, the truth is that many, many bad things happened at the hands of plutocrat publishers over the years, not the least of which was a bunch of wars. So, I’m not fretting and even though I confess to loving the New York Times on Sunday and depending greatly on newspapers to do what I do, I agree with Shirky that society needs journalism not newspapers. When you look at it that way, it’s entirely possible that this new era will be a decided improvement over what we’ve known.
Update: Avedon Carol has some interesting thoughts on this issue as well.

Swashbuckling Heroes

by digby

You can probably forget any kind of other news today. There aren’t any details of the operation yet, but this is probably going to be something out of an epic yarn:

An American ship captain was freed unharmed Sunday in a swift firefight that killed three of the four Somali pirates who had been holding him for days in a lifeboat off the coast of Africa, the ship’s owner said.

Apparently, they (Navy Seals?) boarded the ship and killed the pirates and rescued the captain. It’s hard to believe it’s 2009.

Happy Easter

by digby

Even though society fetishizes Christmas, for Christians this is really the big one. And while I’m not religious, the spring, rebirth, resurrection symbolism of Easter makes it my very favorite of the religious holidays. (Plus the chocolate. )

For those of us who aren’t going to church today, perhaps we can revel in the fact that Rick Warren is getting criticized from both sides for lying about his support for Prop 8 and is said to have canceled an appearance on Stephanopoulos this morning. Hallelujah.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Take me to the river

By Dennis Hartley

Stygian journey: Paulina Gaitan in Sin Nombre

Every now and then a debut film comes along that has a voice. And when I say “voice”, I mean that the director’s confidence and clarity of cinematic vision has a tangible presence-from the very first frame to the closing credits. Maybe I’m a little jaded, but it doesn’t happen that much these days. So when I saw Cary Fukunaga’s amazingly assured first feature, Sin Nombre, it “…made my big toe shoot right up in my boot,” (as Little Richard described his reaction the first time he ever saw Jimi Hendrix perform on stage).

Defying all expectations, this modestly budgeted, visually expansive gem hinges on a simple narrative, but is anything but predictable. It’s an adventure, yet it is informed by an almost meditative stillness that makes the occasional frisson that much more gripping and real. It delves into gang culture, but it isn’t a movie about gangs. It has protagonists who are desperately attempting to immigrate to the United States by any means necessary, yet this isn’t yet another earnest message film about “the plight” of illegal immigrants. It’s a “road movie”, but the future’s uncertain-and the end is always near.

The film is basically comprised of two stories, which eventually merge as one. One story begins in Honduras, centered around a headstrong teenaged girl named Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) who joins her long estranged father and uncle as they journey to Mexico, where they plan to ride the rails as far north as possible before making a final dash across the border to America, where dreams of milk and honey await in New Jersey (they hope). Sayra’s father hopes to use their time together on the road to become reacquainted with his daughter. Sayra, who seems to be working through some abandonment issues, is polite but set on keeping a cool distance from his belated attempts at offering fatherly advice and exerting parental authority. Still, Sayra, her father and her uncle begin to form a family unit, precipitated more by circumstance and necessity than by genuine affection.

Another type of extended family unit is examined in the film’s companion narrative, which takes us to the southern Mexico state of Chiapas, and is centered on a local chapter of the notorious “MS-13” gang. We are introduced to the group by witnessing a brutal initiation rite, a 13-second long “beat down” on a disturbingly young inductee nicknamed “El Smiley” (Kristian Ferrer). Punches and kicks are soon replaced by congratulatory hugs, as Smiley is welcomed as a “brother” by his new homies, and anointed a “son” by the leader, “Lil Mago” (Tenoch Huerta Mejia). We also meet Willy, known to his homies as “El Caspar” (Edgar Flores) who is Smiley’s sponsor, and a de facto big brother figure to the young boy. While he is a dedicated and respected member of the gang, Willy gives us glimpses of a creeping disenchantment with gang life; we sense that he dreams of a better life. He also has something that appears to be lacking in his fellow homies-a genuine heart and soul. This pang of conscience leads to a fateful conflict with Mago, a repugnant sociopath who will accept nothing less than unquestioning, blind obedience from his underlings. Circumstance puts Willy in the same train yard where Sayra and her relatives await to jump a train that will take them north; and thusly their stories converge.

While this is a very human story, containing all the elements of classic drama (love, hope, betrayal, revenge, personal sacrifice), it is also very much about geography, and the elegiac tone that it evokes for what is essentially a harrowing tale. As the train whistle stops its way the length of Mexico, that country’s rugged beauty is captured in gorgeous “golden hour” hues by cinematographer Adriano Goldman. Goldman’s work here started to remind me of the great Nestor Almendros, who did the magnificent photography for Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven. In fact, I found myself flashing on Malick’s film a lot (the Texas prairies used as backdrop in Days of Heaven are in the same neck of the woods, and some story elements and the protagonist’s point of view are reminiscent of that film, too). Whether or not Malick was a conscious influence on Fukunaga is a moot point, because this film stands on its own. Besides, one could have worse influences.

For an unknown cast (many acting in a film for the first time), there are an astonishing number of outstanding performances. I think this adds to the naturalistic, believable tone of the film. My film going companion, who is a native of Mexico (she’s from Colima), was quite impressed by that element, and seconded the motion that the milieu was muy autentico. Sin Nombre is another rarity these days-it’s meant to be seen on the big screen.

Previous posts with related themes:

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada/El Norte

Gomorrah