Month: September 2009

Dangerous Amputee

by digby

This is appalling:

The Merced Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division is investigating whether an officer twice used a Taser on an unarmed, wheelchair-bound man with no legs.

The man who was Tasered, Gregory Williams, 40, a double-leg amputee, spent six days in jail on suspicion of domestic violence and resisting arrest, but the Merced County District Attorney’s office hasn’t filed any charges.

Clearly, he didn’t understand the new unspoken “common sense” federal law which says that when in the presence of a police officer, you stop in your tracks, hold your head down, answer every question with a quick “yes sir” and do not move until they give you instructions, lest you get electrocuted on the spot. It has nothing to do with whether or not you present a danger to anyone — it has to do with whether or not the police officer is satisfied with your response, so best be very, very very obsequious and docile whenever you are in the presence of authorities, no matter what the circumstances. Otherwise, this country won’t be free.

There is video at the link.

A handful of residents in Williams’ apartment complex said they witnessed the incident and supported Williams’ charges. A short video clip, shot by a neighbor and obtained by the Sun-Star, shows Williams sitting on the pavement with his pants down, his hands cuffed behind his back.

[…]

Between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, Williams said, he and his wife, 28-year-old Demetrice Shaunte Phifer, were arguing when a marked Merced Police Department patrol car arrived at the couple’s studio apartment.

While one officer spoke with his wife, Williams said, another officer arrived and ordered him, “Go back to your house!”

Williams, who had his 2-year-old daughter Ginni in his lap, said he rolled his wheelchair back to his apartment.

The officer, who’s identified in the police report as John Pinnegar, approached him in the doorway of his apartment. Pinnegar said that his wife had accused him of striking her, which Williams denied.

Shortly afterward, police Sgt. Rodney Court and a worker with Merced County Child Protective Services entered the room, Williams said. “I’m trying to tell him nothing happened. We were just having an argument,” he said.

Pinnegar grabbed William’s 2-year-old daughter from his lap, handing her to the CPS worker. “I said, ‘What are you doing? I haven’t done anything!’ ” Williams said.

Williams said Pinnegar unholstered his Taser, jammed it into his rib cage and shocked him twice. Williams said he fell from his chair onto his stomach on the ground outside his doorway.

While he was down, Williams said, Court put his knee on his neck, and one of the officers then cuffed both of his wrists. At some point after he fell out of his chair, Williams said, his shorts slid down his legs.

With his hands cuffed behind his back, Williams said, he was unable to pull his pants up. He said police left him for five to 10 minutes in that position on the pavement, with his private parts showing as neighbors and onlookers watched.

Williams, a lifelong Merced resident who’s married with three children, said that both his legs were amputated in 2004 after he was diagnosed with deep-vein thrombosis that led to gangrene in both legs.

Doctors amputated both his legs below the knees when he was 34. Now only withered stumps of skin hang where his lower legs once were. He lost his job as a truck driver and now supports himself and his family from a Social Security disability allotment of $1,004 a month.

Obviously they had no choice but to shoot the man full of electricity. Otherwise, he might have kept on showing disrespect for the officers by protesting his innocence and we can’t have that or the whole system will fall apart.

*Obviously, I have no idea if the man hit his wife and if so, it was obviously wrong. But two wrongs don’t make a right — and tasering an unarmed man in a wheelchair is completely unnecessary in order to take him into custody.

And, by the way, the man spent six days in jail before they released him without filing charges.

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Health Care Update

by dday

Looks like lawmakers are gradually expanding the puny subsidies in the Baucus health care bill:

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, said Monday that he would modify his health care bill to provide more generous assistance to moderate-income Americans, to help them buy insurance.

In addition, Mr. Baucus said he would make changes to reduce the impact of a proposed tax on high-end health insurance policies.

Mr. Baucus, Democrat of Montana, disclosed his plans in an interview a day before the committee is to begin meeting to debate and vote on the sweeping legislation, which is intended to remake the nation’s health care system and guarantee insurance for millions of Americans.

Mr. Baucus said the changes showed that he had heard the criticism of his bill from colleagues, who asserted that many people would be required to buy insurance who could not afford it — even with federal subsidies to help defray the cost of premiums.

“Affordability — that, I think, is the primary concern,” Mr. Baucus said. “We want to make sure that if Americans have to buy insurance, it’s affordable.”

Affordability to Baucus means reducing the limit of policies from 13% of total income to 12% of total income, through subsidies up to 400% of the poverty level. That’s at least a start, though still short of what’s in the House bills.

As it says above, responding to changes Baucus will reduce the impact of taxing insurance companies, basically by raising the threshold when plans start to hit the tax. But this is paradoxical. Raising the subsidy levels costs money. Raising the tax threshold takes away money. Lawmakers want the bill to protect more people on affordability while taking away some of the money that would pay for those protections. There is a late and familiar entry here, however, and that’s Jay Rockefeller’s idea to add back in a variation of what the Obama Administration sought all along:

In fairness to Rockefeller, he’s got some ideas along those lines.

He’s said many times he would be perfectly happy with the sort of financing they have in the House–i.e., a straight-up tax on the rich. And while such a scheme might have trouble in the Senate, Rockefeller is trying gamely to intorduce a more scaled-down version.

Among the amendments he’s introduced for this week’s Finance Committee hearings is a proposal to cap the deductability of charitable contributions at 35 percent–which would, in effect, reduce the deductability of contributions that very, very wealthy people make to charities. It seems to be a version of what President Obama proposed at the beginning of this process, an idea that still has a lot of merit even though many Senators rejected it out of hand.

Would they reject it again? Maybe not in scaled-back form, which might be enough. In the end, the most likely solution to the funding problem is some sort of combination strategy–a tax that hits expensive health benefits, a tax that hits the wealthy, and, maybe, some sort of tax sugary drinks or tobacco. The new Rockefeller proposal, according to Capitol Hill sources familiar with it, will probably raise about $90 to $100 billion–which is a decent chunk of change and could pay for a lot of new subsidies.

The President wanted to roll the charitable deduction credit back to 28% – exactly where it was during the Reagan Administration, at a savings to the government that could easily top $300 billion over ten years, enough to make the subsidies big enough to make health care truly affordable for everyone. And it would only hit those who make enough money to take advantage of the charitable deduction to begin with. It’s really a no-brainer.

Of course, there are more areas of conflict in the bill beyond affordability and financing. There are various amendments in the Senate Finance Committee to add a public option, as well as Olympia Snowe’s amendment to add a trigger, and a weak trigger to boot. Obama went on the record saying “I absolutely do not believe that (the public option is) dead,” although his close colleague Dick Durbin said today that only a “variation” of it could make it through the Senate. Nancy Pelosi continued her public statements that the public option must be included to pass the House, though House liberals, wary of a bait and switch, asked the Speaker to stand with them when the bill reaches a conference committee. Jerry Nadler reiterated the seriousness of the threat from the progressive side:

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said Monday he is optimistic that any healthcare bill from the House will include a public (or “government-run”) option, and are undertaking a whip count to test lawmakers’ commitment to that measure.

“The public option is still very much alive only because the progressives have stood together and held our ground and said that, regardless of what the President or Leadership says, we won’t vote for any bill [without] a public option,” Nadler said in a chat online hosted by the liberal AMERICAblog.

Nadler told the blog that 60 lawmakers had pledged to vote against any healthcare bill lacking the public plan, and that liberal Democrats are “undertaking a whip count now to see how firm these pledges are.”

While affordability and financing may come to some compromise position that is at least passable, the statements above show that there’s no such middle ground for the public option. This may vex the White House, but they will eventually have to show their cards.

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TMCP To The Rescue

by digby

Todd Gitlin muses on the current state of GOP lunacy and points out that their main hope is for Bush levels of Obama failure. But he sounds a cautionary alarm, noting that in spite of all the hoohah about progressive realignment, the margins remain frighteningly small:

Read this fine piece of 2008 campaign analysis by Andrew Gelman and John Sides; and also the various comments, and Gelman’s and Sides’ responses. Gelman and Sides on 2008:

[V]oting behavior did not change that much. Obama did win states that Democrats had not won in a while, and demographic trends suggest that Democrats have a chance to win those states in the future. But there were only small shifts in state-level vote margins. Two thousand-eight looked a lot like 2004 and did not signal any wholesale change in partisan loyalties or party coalitions. Moreover, it does not appear that Obama “realigned” specific groups of voters. The widespread fixation on carving the electorate into its constituent groups misses the crucial fact that Obama did better than Kerry in nearly every possible demographic: rich, poor, white, black, Protestant, Catholic, men, women….Voters of all stripes were displeased with the economy and President Bush and so voted for the opposing party’s nominee.

Then the Republican strategy is nothing more or less than this: to make sure that Obama fails. For the GOP to become a national party, Obama’s record must be littered with Waterloo moments. The years of the bloating financial bubble must be forgotten, and the jobless recovery pinned on Obama. The only health reform that passes must be one that seems to hurt more people than it helps. The under-30 voters who went for Obama by 2-1 must be scared witless.

This sounds right to me. It’s hard to know if the political zeitgeist will be that bad, but what’s most frightening about the possibility is that public opinion tends to lag quite a bit behind the reality. So even if things turn around pretty quickly now, and health care reform is actually beginning to work, it may not be in time for people to notice before they vote.

Gitlin goes on to note the one thing for which we can be grateful: the utter dearth of decent Republican candidates. Thank goodness for that, right? Well, I’m not so sure about that. In response to my post this morning on Afghanistan, reader Sleon writes in with an op-ed by The Man Called Petraeus. He adds this:

Were Obama to summon the courage and good sense to reply to the generals, “Bullshit, there is no winning Afghanistan” and order a withdrawal, the Right will make the flap over the Missile Defense cancellation seem like a storm in a teacup and we’ll be hearing a lot about abandoning Western Civilization. If he doesn’t, we’ll spend billions for years, and a lot more people will die. Either way look for a “Draft Petraeus” movement to surface within the Republican party for 2012 and this man is smarter than MacArthur and not so principled as Eisenhower.

Yup. Both dday and I have been tracking that possibility for a while and I would guess it’s getting more likely. (If he retires soon, I’m going to take out a bet.) The scenario is that a nation battered by long term economic woes and an expensive but low level war, blames both parties for their inability to fix their plight (all the while screaming about government interference!) and gratefully turns to a straight shooting military man who “knows how to get things done.” (In another era, it might have been a businessman, but they are out of fashion these days.) TMCP is the obvious guy. He’s very, very good.

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The Three Faces Of Glenn

by dday

Mitt Romney went to the Values Voters Summit and slammed the bailouts this weekend, after offering them support not just at the time, but at the Conservative Political Action Conference back in February.

So what. Mitt Romney flip-flopped on an issue? Call the Guinness people, I think he’s actually set the record now.

No, the real interesting trip down memory lane today is that Glenn Beck favored the bailouts a year ago, when TARP was being debated in Congress:

But these are anything but normal times. I thought about it an awful lot this weekend, and while it takes everything in me to say this, I think the bailout is the right thing do.

The “REAL STORY” is the $700 billion that you’re hearing about now is not only, I believe, necessary, it is also not nearly enough, and all of the weasels in Washington know it.

Now THAT is an interesting reversal. Before popping up on Fox News and into every teabagger’s hearts, Beck basically ran a Morning Zoo-type radio show and had an unremarkable stint on CNN Headline News. He definitely had an affinity for right-wing radicals and some of their craziest beliefs, but it was scattershot, and at odds with his deep statist leanings and love for George Bush’s tactics in the war on terror. He repeatedly called Ron Paul “a crackpot on so many issues” and prefaced every discussion of him by saying “I don’t agree with Ron Paul on everything–not by a long shot.” Here’s Beck essentially calling Ron Paul supporters terrorists:

“It’s really not the way I would go, tying in my movement with a historical terrorist attack, especially in post-9/11 America.”

This is the guy who put together a rally on September the 12th.

Beck saw a movement stirring on the furthest reaches of the right and got out in front of it. Before that he was pretty firmly behind his beloved President in bailing out the top banks.

The difference is that now, the political energy on the right is with the teabaggers, and it makes sense to Beck to capitalize on that energy. But he has nothing approaching a coherent worldview. Whatever gets the most eyeballs.

I wonder if libertarians will take a closer look at the guy who has appointed himself the public face of their movement.

…Here’s a Paul supporter video that has the very clips of Beck supporting the bailout:

This look at the early life of Beck is also fascinating.

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Hammer and Tickle

by digby

Does anyone else find it odd that the Obama administration consistently uses the most hardball, down and dirty, tough guy tactics when it comes to Democratic Party electoral politics but pleads that it is required to observe every arcane, institutional ritual when it comes to legislation?

I guess we are supposed to believe that the president who is powerless to bend his own Democratic congressional majority on the signature progressive legislation of the past 60 years is the same president who goes around the country acting like Tony Soprano when it comes to deciding who gets to run for office and who doesn’t.

Of course, those two different approaches aren’t inconsistent at all if the president’s own goals are being served in both situations. And it certainly does show that the closer one gets to the fundamental basis of democracy — elections — the more the powers that be feel the necessity to bring the hammer down. Interfering with the working of the ruling elite however, simply isn’t done.

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Fun With Wingnuts

by digby

Mike Stark went to the Values Voter “Summit” and chatted up the participants about John Ensign, Mark Sanford and David Vitter. They were not amused:

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The Best And The Brightest: Millenial Edition

by digby

Read these and weep. First you have Bob Woodward reprising his earlier role as warmongering hagiographer. Then you have an excellent piece written by the man who wrote Imperial Life In The Emerald City (which, now that I think about it, was the cartoon version of The Best And The Brightest.)And then, dear God, there’s this bucket of cold water, which makes me think we are dealing with a whole new level of hubris. Finally, here are two pieces by Spender Ackerman, who you need to bookmark right now if yo0u haven’t already.

If you haven’t gotten out your dog eared copy of TBATB, do it now and read it through. We are about to go through the looking glass with a man named McChrystal.

The military is obviously turning up the heat in Washington to get us into a much bigger war in Afghanistan and it’s being done the usual way, with lies and leaks and back stabbing and grandstanding. And the politics are as confused as ever.

For me, this one is easy. Afghanistan is the most unlikely place to win a war on the planet. To apply the lessons learned in Iraq (such as they were) to this country seems insane to me — especially the concept of “counter-insurgency,” so beloved by the McChrystalites, which is being bizarrely misapplied. But more important than that: whenever you hear people saying that the primary purpose in continuing a war is because “to leave would send the wrong message” and declaring that “perceptions” are the reasons for continuing a slaughter, you know you are in Pentagon NeverNever land.

Escalation is a bad idea. The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides when they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.

There have been many campaign promises “adjusted” since the election. There is no reason that the administration should feel any more bound to what they said about this than all the other committments it has blithely turned aside in the interest of “pragmatism.”

Update: Oh what fun. NRO sent over a bunch of robots who thought it was fun to swing their tiny little appendages around in the comment section (which is now closed and the insults deleted. My house, my rules, no urinating on the furniture.) You didn’t miss much other than a bunch of bullshit about Dhimmicrats etc.

I have always believed that The Good War was a myth and that the Democrats used it as a political weapon. I’ve written about it plenty in the past. But why these bloodthirsty wingnuts should take issue with that and conclude that I’m therefore responsible for the deaths of American soldiers is beyond me.

After all, the Democrats were all for the war — just like they were. The only problem the right had with it was that the Democrats criticized George W. Bush for not being enough of a warmonger on Afghanistan. They weren’t pacifists. They were just liars and political opportunists. And now the Republicans and the Democrats are all potentially on the same team, pulling for a bigger and better and longer war in Afghanistan. Huzzah! Post partisan comity is at hand.

But these people are apparently confused about what they are supposed to believe under these new circumstances. Do they want to escalate the war or do they want the Democrats to “come clean” and get out? I can’t really tell. They’re so programmed that they launch into Bushian gibberish at the mere mention of the Democrats not “really believing” in the war, like that makes some sort of substantial difference. Am I to conclude that these wingnuts therefore disagree with the Democrats and want to withdraw? Or do they think we should stay? (Or is it that they only want wars to be supported by Republicans, who “really believe” in what they are doing? Heh.)

These right wingers are a lost and defeated little minority these days so I suppose it’s to be expected that they make no sense, but this is ridiculous. Here I put out the hand of friendship and agree that the Democrats are just as full of it as the Republicans when it comes to Afghanistan and they call me a traitor. There’s just no pleasing some people.

The conclusions they come to about Democrats not liking shooting wars and hating the soldiers and the rest is truly laughable when you look at the record. The fairer characterization is that Democrats back every stupid war that comes down the pike. The only question is whether or not they are doing it for craven political reasons or if they really believe in it. Either way, the idea that Democrats are reflexively anti-war is nuts. If there’s one thing you can almost always count on is that they will be there smartly saluting whenever the military establishment says boo.

As for Afghanistan, I knew we were going in no matter what the minute the World Trade center was hit and didn’t waste my breath arguing against it. It would have been like arguing against the sun coming coming up. And I suppose I could have guessed that we’d still be there eight years on, but it seemed unlikely after the Soviets got their asses handed to them there just a few short years ago.

But God help me, whatever happened, I didn’t think I’d have to listen to the same tired crap about “hearts and minds” and “sending messages” and “dominoes falling” for yet another time in my life. But here we are again, with the wingnuts screeching incoherently about treason and hating the troops like they just invented the argument and the Democrats trying to figure out ways to deal with the whole mess on the margins. It’s groundhog day, except that people actually die …

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Winger Wizardry

by digby

Over at Red State, some right wing Alaskan pol thinks politics were invented the day he read Saul Alinksy and tells quite a heroic tale about how he personally destroyed Democrats for fun and profit. He seems to think this is particularly brilliant:

We really won’t have to off many Members of Congress before they begin to distance themselves from Comrade Obama. Safe districts make some of them ideologues and they can get away with it, but Pelosi and Obama can’t assemble a majority from the true lefties in Congress. We have to target the vulnerable Members from red and purple districts.

I don’t think anyone’s thought of that before, so I sure hope nobody sends that to Michael Steele or we could be in real trouble.

Now this, this, is a plan:

It would also be a good thing to find some true Lefty member with some personal vulnerability and hound him or her from office.It would be well if some governors would recognize that we are in an existential battle with these people, so maybe some state law enforcement in states we control can take an interest in any Democrat Members of Congress from that state. Hear me, Southern governors?

I’m sure Ex-Alabama Governor Siegelman would be happy to consult.

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2 Old 2b A Kewl Kid

by digby

But that doesn’t stop privileged village insider Ron Brownstein from being a snotty little twit:

“Howard Dean is becoming living proof that health care reform should offer a universal entitlement to Valium.”

Hahahahahahaha! Dean is just so stupid, getting all excited about stupid stuff like wars and health care and stuff. Doesn’t he know that the only thing that wealthy elites are supposed to get upset about is torture prosecutions and blow jobs?

h/t to bb

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Close Your Eyes And Think Of Gary Bauer

by digby

According to Tom Coburn’s chief of staff, if you are turned on by naked pictures of the opposite sex it means you’re gay. Of course, if you’re turned on by pictures of the same sex it also means you’re gay. I guess that means that if you are turned on, you are gay. And we know that’s bad. So basically they say you shouldn’t get turned on.

Now, I may be getting politically incorrect here. But one — It’s been a few years, not that many, since I was closely associated with pre-adolescent boys, boys who are like 10 to 12 years of age. But it is my observation that boys at that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it. And that’s a good instinct. After all, homosexuality, we know, studies have been done by the National Institute of Health to try to prove that its genetic and all those studies have proved its not genetic. Homosexuality is inflicted on people.

I had a very good friend who was in the homosexual lifestyle for a long time and then he had a religious conversion in the eighties… And he and I had good conversations about, about the malady that he suffered. And one of the things that he said to me, that I think is an astonishingly insightful remark. He said, “all pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards. Now think about that. And if you, if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants.” You know, that’s a, that’s a good comment. It’s a good point and it’s a good thing to teach young people.

So, if you don’t want your son to be gay, tell him that reading Playboy is something only gay boys do. And since boys don’t want to be gay, they won’t read it. And then they will be straight. Or something.

These people are very, very confused.

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