Month: October 2009

Firing Line

by digby

I realize that the left has completely abandoned the gun issue, but it’s still necessary to highlight the fact that guns are saturating our society and the natural consequences of doing such a thing.

Mayor Bloomberg has conducted an investigation into illegal gun sales that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end:

Ever wonder how criminals are able to get guns so easily? It’s depressingly simple. On any given weekend, at dozens of gun shows held in states across the country — criminals can buy guns from “private sellers” who are not required to perform background checks. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has identified gun shows as the source of more than 30% of all illegally trafficked guns in the country. Those are the guns most likely to be used in crimes — and to kill innocent people, including police officers. Today, New York City is releasing the results of a multi-state investigation into this activity: “Gun Show Undercover.” We sent investigators with hidden cameras to seven gun shows across Ohio, Tennessee and Nevada, and we found out just how easy it is for criminals and the mentally ill to walk in and buy guns — no questions asked. Our investigators told the private sellers that they “probably couldn’t pass a background check” — and at that point, the seller should have sent them away. Because even private sellers are prohibited by federal law from selling to those who they have reason to suspect could not pass a background check. Instead, 19 out of 30 private sellers made the sale.[Y]ou can watch our hidden camera videos and learn more about our investigation at www.nyc.gov/gunshow.

I had the very strange experience of witnessing the aftermath of a shooting in my own neighborhood a week or so ago. I heard the shots, saw the perpetrator zoom by in his vehicle right in front of my living room window, stood outside the crime scene tape observing victims being treated on the ground and the police conduct the investigations. I’ve never seen anything like that in my neighborhood before and I’ve lived here for over a decade. My 70 year old neighbor was shot in the crossfire. (My husband commented to the crowd that there are too many guns in this town and everyone looked at him as if he’d just said something sacrilegious, which I guess is true.)

This happened a few days before:

It was baby Andrew Garcia’s baptismal celebration the morning he was shot and killed*. Earlier and just a few blocks away at a city park, a large party was held for the 4-month-old child. It happened around around 1 a.m. on Sunday on Kittridge Street in Van Nuys. Andrew, his mother and a friend, who was pregnant, were sitting in a parked car outside a family friend’s house. The friend, 28-year-old Anna Contreras, was feeding Andrew while the father and Eric Ramirez, 18, stood outside. Two young men walking by got into a verbal exchange with them, which escalated with several shot gun rounds fired at the family. Ramirez and Contreras, were injured, but are expected to survive. And while Contreras’ unborn baby was unharmed, Garcia died with a bullet to the head.

We’ve all heard about what’s been happening in Chicago. It’s brutal.

There’s lots of anger and frustration out there right now. The zeitgeist is as angry and negative as I’ve ever seen it. Economic stress almost always leads to a rise in crime. The conservatives’ only answer to this problem is to allow business to exploit their customers even more than they already have and create an ever more authoritarian police capacity to “keep people in line.” The real answer is to find ways to ease the economic stress and get some of these deadly weapons out of the hands of criminals. You can probably guess which way this is likely to go.

But still, there is a need to shine a light on this out of control gun industry. I’m not a gun control absolutist, but the kind of activity that’s exposed in these undercover videos is far more unacceptable than somebody giving tax advice to phony pimps. This is a deadly business that’s killing innocent people.

One can only hope that this legitimate undercover investigation will get the kind of attention the ACORN videos did. It’s a matter of life and death.

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Predatory Rhetoric

by digby

In his WSJ column today Thomas Franks discusses something I’ve been mulling over myself the last few weeks: when did the conservatives decide that business and industry are delicate flowers that can’t possibly be forced to compete with anyone? It thought it was all “let the best man win?”

During a debate last week over two Democratic proposals for a health-care bill featuring a “public option”—a government-run alternative to private health insurance—the senator announced he opposed the idea because, as he put it, “Government is not a fair competitor. . . . It’s a predator.” The word “predator” seems to have become something of a Republican talking point. Mr. Grassley’s colleague from South Dakota, John Thune, went on the record in July to warn that, when government goes into business, it “becomes not a competitor but a predator.” Have these two august men of the right secretly become fans of Mr. Galbraith, one of our leading liberal economists? If so, they need to go back over “The Predator State” a second time. Although they have snapped up Mr. Galbraith’s catchy title, they have misunderstood his message. What makes government predatory, Mr. Grassley seems to believe, is its public-mindedness. Were government to offer health insurance to everybody without the industry’s many devices for excluding risky individuals, some seem to fear, it might be able to offer consumers a price too fair for the profit-minded sector to match. This is a curious reversal for a movement that ordinarily celebrates Darwinian struggle and the destruction of the weak by the strong. Just think of the conservative caricatures that must be inverted for this argument to work: All those soft liberal bureaucrats? Ferocious man-eaters. The welfare state? Law of the jungle. And the actuarial-minded hardliners of the insurance biz, the ones who deny your claim or cancel your policy? A gentle but endangered species that needs our nurturing, sort of like panda bears.

He goes on to point out that Galbraith’s book is (naturally) being completely misrepresented by these Republicans as it’s theme is actually the takeover of the government by corporate interests, but never mind.

You have to give these Republicans credit for constantly finding ways to misdirect the public from a natural anger at the big corporate interests that have been benefiting at their expense, to the government which is trying to mitigate the disaster these interests have made of the US economy. They are nothing short of geniuses when it comes to twisting the other sides’ effective rhetoric to their own uses. But I honestly didn’t think they’d be able to find a way to use their patented victimology to protect businesses like insurance in this economic horror show. To make the unregulated sharks of finance and insurance the prey of the laid back “do your own thing” laissez faire government of the past couple of decades is chutzpah t0 the nth degree. I fully expect to hear dittoheads calling up Limbaugh and whining about how the government is hurting the average Joe by forcing insurance companies to insure them.

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Shameless

by digby

I don’t know how these guys can say this stuff with a straight face. First the party which has relentlessly tried to destroy Social Security and Medicare for over decades is now shedding crocodile tears about how the Democrats aren’t “protecting the seniors.” And now this:

In recent days, GOP leaders have focused their crosshairs on the individual mandate, a key component of an effective health care reform bill. FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey (R-TX) attacked the mandate as a “healthcare industry boondoggle”, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) called the mandate a “stunning assault on liberty,” and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) delayed the committee mark-up by questioning the mandate’s constitutionality.

The addled odd duck from Iowa, Chuck Grassley has joined the fray as well. But guess what? Republicans were all for it before they were against it:

The mandate is going to be unpopular especially if the subsidies are inadequate and there’s no affordable public option, so you can see the political temptation to go after it. But Republicans love to mandate that people pay private interests money, it’s paying it to the government they can’t stand. They certainly weren’t arguing against forcing people to pay for private insurance until now.

You would never go broke betting on Republican hypocrisy.

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As Sure As God Made Little Green Apples

by dday

Today on Hardball, Ike Skelton advanced a familiar argument in Washington, not just now but over several decades, about the presumed consequences of failure that are always brought out as an argument for escalating warfare and continued foreign policy intervention:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well let me ask you about the moral question, Mr. Skelton. The question is, and you’re chairman of the (House Armed Services) Committee, and you do make strategy, because we have a co-equal branch that you represent. The question is, we had a moral case to go in there and punish the people who attacked us and to knock them out of power. But today are we fighting the people who attacked us on 9/11? Are the Taliban forces attacking us now the people who attacked us on 9/11?

IKE SKELTON: What will happen if the Taliban regains hold in either part or all of Afghanistan, just bet your bottom dollar, as sure as God made little green apples, the Al Qaeda terrorists will go back in there and have a safe haven from which to plan, plot and attack America and American interests, wherever they may be. And consequently we have to finish the job. The job should have been finished back in 2002, and put the resources there were put into Iraq, and sadly they were not. And now the war really begins as a result of President Obama giving a strategy speech. And hopefully he will listen to the recommendations of his commanders.

This is a lie, and I can prove it.

We know right now that there are no signs of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. As long as we’re listening to the commanders, General Petraeus said this back in May, and so has General McChrystal just last month. Both of them maintain that Al Qaeda maintains undefined “links” to insurgents, but they aver as an absolute that Al Qaeda forces are not in the country, having moved to areas of western Pakistan and the border region. Just today, the President said that Al Qaeda has less than 100 core fighters overall and has “lost operational capacity,” and that their presence has diminished significantly in Afghanistan.

And yet, we know right now that the Taliban may control as much as 80% of Afghanistan. This report by the International Council on Security and Development from September of this year authoritatively estimated this:

The Taliban now has a permanent presence in 80% of Afghanistan, up from 72% in November 2008, according to a new map released today by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS). According to ICOS, another 17% of Afghanistan is seeing ‘substantial’ Taliban activity. Taken together, these figures show that the Taliban has a significant presence in virtually all of Afghanistan.

“The unrelenting and disturbing return, spread and advance of the Taliban is now without question,” said Norine MacDonald QC, President and Lead Field Researcher for ICOS.

Previous ICOS maps showed a steady increase in the Taliban’s presence throughout Afghanistan. In November 2007, ICOS assessed that the Taliban had a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan, and in November 2008, using the same methodology; the result was a finding of a permanent Taliban presence in 72% of the country.

The new map indicates that the Taliban insurgency has continued to expand its influence across Afghanistan. “The dramatic change in the last few months has been the deterioration of the situation in the north of Afghanistan, which was previously one of the most stable parts of Afghanistan. Provinces such as Kunduz and Balkh are now heavily affected by Taliban violence. Across the north of Afghanistan, there has been a dramatic increase in the rate of insurgent attacks against international, Afghan government, and civilian targets“, stated Mr. Alexander Jackson, Policy Analyst at ICOS.

If you don’t like the ICOS report’s meaning of “permanent presence,” then there’s this Afghan government map from August showing half of Afghanistan either under high risk of attack by insurgents or under “enemy control,” particularly in the Pashtun south. There are a multitude of indicators showing that the Taliban controls territory inside Afghanistan.

So the Taliban has been in control of at least half the country for at least two years, more than enough time for Al Qaeda to pack up from the border region and reinstall themselves into these safe havens. Skelton stated specifically that if the Taliban regains hold in “all or part of Afghanistan,” Al Qaeda would return to plot attack. Well, the Taliban control lots of the country. But Al Qaeda aren’t there. They don’t need to be.

This persistent lie about Al Qaeda’s aims in the region underpins the entire case for escalation, just the way the domino theory underpinned consistent troop buildup in Vietnam. And yet nobody in the media, up to and including Chris Matthews today, has bothered to challenge this basic falsehood. Nobody has asked the question, “If Al Qaeda is so desperate to find a safe haven, why haven’t they returned to Afghanistan now, when the Taliban controls large swaths of the country?” It’s not like they aren’t under as much threat from drone attacks in Pakistan as they would be in Afghanistan.

There are also the points to be made, that the Taliban was ejected from the country the last time they gave Al Qaeda safe harbor and wouldn’t appear likely to do so again, and that this Taliban is a home-grown movement with little influence from foreign fighters, and that the whole idea of “safe havens” in a world where terror attacks have been planned from inside Spain, Germany, Britain and even the United States is a false one. But accepting this argument on its own terms, and putting aside these points, it’s still undermined by the facts.

Will anyone present these basic facts to the “serious foreign policy” dittoheads when they go on and on with a demonstrably false argument about safe havens and how we must send as many troops as possible into danger or we’ll all be killed in our beds?

Advertising For Free On The Back Of A Tragedy

by tristero

By now, many of you have already read this fantastic piece of investigative reporting by Michael Moss of the New York Times, about how seriously lax the inspections are for ground beef products in this country, and the terrible consequences. If not, please read the entire article: it really is that good.

While there is much that you will find far more immediately important, and enraging, I want to focus on two parts of the story that probably won’t get much attention elsewhere. They point to an issue that goes far beyond the immediate subject, as important as it is, and to the reform of a mainstay of the ever more inadequate he said/she said model for objective journalism. Cargill is the manufacturer of the burger Stephanie Smith ate that contained E. Coli (which means that feces were permitted to touch the meat which then wasn’t adequately sterilized ). Greater Omaha is one of the major suppliers of the meat that went into that burger:

Cargill, whose $116.6 billion in revenues last year made it the country’s largest private company, declined requests to interview company officials or visit its facilities. “Cargill is not in a position to answer your specific questions, other than to state that we are committed to continuous improvement in the area of food safety,” the company said, citing continuing litigation.

…

Greater Omaha did not respond to repeated requests to interview company officials. In a statement, a company official said Greater Omaha had a “reputation for embracing new food safety technology and utilizing science to make the safest product possible.”

There are several ways to read these remarks, but I look at the publishing of them primarily as free advertising. They are hyping their company’s quality; that is all these statements are saying.* And they are hyping their company in direct response to a tragedy in which they are implicated and to which they will not respond, for whatever reason.

When you think about it that way, there really is no reason why any news organization should provide free advertising to an organization that deliberately refuses to discuss plausible charges of wrongdoing. Yet, the Times felt obligated to include them because they are the only official response they could get. And thus, they inadvertently did the company’s bidding.

This goes on all the time but it should stop. If a company won’t officially address an issue, that does not give them the right to say anything and have it published. In this case, I would suggest handling the denials thus:

Cargill, whose $116.6 billion in revenues last year made it the country’s largest private company, declined requests to interview company officials or visit its facilities. The company citing continuing litigation, issued a statement that did not directly respond to any of the specific issues in this case.

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Greater Omaha did not respond to repeated requests to interview company officials. In a statement, a company official did not address the specific issues related to Stephanie Smith’s E. Coli-related illness.

At the very least, a “no-free advertising” policy for corporations that won’t talk to the press would make it far more difficult for them to pollute our discourse with mealy-mouthed propaganda when serious, and tragic, issues are at stake.

*Yes, of course, I regret the necessity of giving them more free advertising by reproducing their bullshit here; hopefully the context and the point being made outweighs the hype issue ).

Man Of The People

by digby

The rich people, anyway:

As autumn sets in, the progressive agenda on which Barack Obama rode to victory last November has stalled, even with Democrats controlling every branch of government. Key aspects of healthcare reform, like a public option, appear dead; climate change legislation, having narrowly passed the House in June, awaits an uncertain fate in the Senate; the Employee Free Choice Act and financial industry reforms have gone off the grid. Behind all these setbacks is a pattern: with little outright opposition, corporate interests have insinuated themselves into the legislative process to co-opt attempts at reform. As a result, the big-ticket items are rotting away, key provisions have been removed and bills are being weakened beyond recognition behind closed doors. Certainly there are still those in Congress willing to stand up to pressure from lobbyists–like Cummings, who, after meeting with Gephardt and the Goldman Sachs executives, sent his letter anyway, launching an investigation by TARP inspector general Neil Barofsky. But the broader momentum is with the corporate interests, thanks to players like Gephardt who have escorted them to the bargaining table. In a town where everyone seemingly has a price, Gephardt has distinguished himself, selling his reputation as a pro-labor, pro-universal healthcare, pro-environment expert and advocate to his new corporate masters, giving their efforts to kill and maim reforms a familiar, friendly face in the Democratic establishment. As a result, Gephardt has become a highly sought-after and very effective lobbyist. He has also betrayed nearly every principle he once claimed to hold. When Gephardt ran for president in 1988, his ads claimed he had “defeated the strongest lobbying effort in history,” and even in his waning Congressional years, he hardly seemed a defender of lobbying. “I’m running for president because I’ve had enough of the oil barons, the status-quo apologists, the special-interest lobbyists running amok,” he proclaimed in February 2003. By January, his run for the presidency was over; a year later, he gathered with friends in St. Louis for a retirement party. Many politicians and celebrities paid homage: via video, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter lavished praise on him, and sportscaster Bob Costas called him “the best president America never had.” When a reporter asked Gephardt about his plans for the future, he said he was going to spend some time with his family and consider a couple of employment opportunities. On January 1, 2005–before Gephardt’s term had even expired–the Congressman’s son-in-law signed papers to form a consultancy firm based in Delaware called Gephardt and Associates (now the Gephardt Group). But for most of 2005 it lay dormant as Gephardt joined corporate boards and advised a few big-name companies. Banned from lobbying Congress for a year, he soon discovered there were places outside Washington that needed influencing. Like California: when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger introduced legislation that would have opened the door to increased infrastructure privatization in January 2006, Democrats in the legislature balked. So Goldman Sachs, standing to benefit from these policies, sent Gephardt as an emissary to Sacramento, hoping to persuade the state to monetize infrastructure by levying tolls and then leasing roads to private investors for decades. “I’ve done some work with Goldman Sachs in their capacity as adviser to both the City of Chicago and now the State of Indiana,” Gephardt told California lawmakers at a February 14, 2006, hearing, before extolling the virtues of infrastructure privatization if “negotiated properly.”

(If you had any notion that Goldman Sachs is just another Wall Street firm, you haven’t read this.)

Dick “son of a milkman” Gephardt was once the great working class hope for the Democratic Party, believe it or not.

I’m not sure how you can control this. It seems unlikely that you can pass laws that make it impossible for former officials to work as lobbyists forever and even then much of this stuff is done unofficially anyway. It seems to me that the only thing that might work would be publicly financed campaigns and even then the class solidarity and future rewards for whoring for business would still exist. It’s a conundrum. Politicians in America all believe they deserve to be rich. Hell, everyone in America does.

One thing that should be done is that Democrats of all stripes should stop pretending that Democrats are anything more than slightly better than Republicans on these issues and only because they have to include unions and the working poor in their coalition in order to get elected. And even then it doesn’t keep them from quietly selling themselves to highest bidder while they’re still in office. Once they’re out, they immediately pull on a metaphorical micro-mini and start trolling K Street for Johns.

h/t to BC.

The New Debate

by digby

I just saw one of the most disgusting stories on CNN that I have ever seen: they are actually debating whether or not we should let illegal immigrants die now.

They tell the story of a young man who was brought here by his parents at age 14 and has been working ever since then. He has kidney failure and needs dialysis, which he has been getting as a charity case up until recently. Now they are cutting him off and unless he can find a private clinic that will take him he’s in big, big trouble.

The reporter asked him why he should get treatment since he isn’t a citizen, (at which point I’m screaming “because he is a human being!“) and he showed her his pay stubs going back to when he was 15 — which showed that he’s been paying taxes just like the higher orders.

Then the reporter calmly said, “he has about eleven days and then he’ll die.” Wolf Blitzer asked the reporter to keep us posted on what happens, so that’s good.

It appears that it’s now perfectly acceptable to debate whether or not people should die for lack of care in the richest country in the world. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Once a society accepts torture, it’s only a matter of time before it drops this pretense about every person being precious entirely. Now we can get down to the nitty gritty and start talking openly and honestly about which people deserve to live and which ones don’t.

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Chasing The Nut Beat

by digby

As you know, under criticism for allegedly failing to “expose” ACORN, The NY Times recently made (yet another) commitment to following the buzz generated on the right wing noise machine. Eric Boehlert (hopefully wearing a hazmat suit) dove into the toxic wingnut swill that passes for “buzz” and documents all the great “tips” the editor assigned to that beat would have gotten last week. Among other things, there was the great joy Real Americans apparently felt when the US failed in its Olympic bid. But this really takes the cake:

And then there was the stellar work produced by Andrew Breitbart, the self-styled leader of today’s conservative “journalism.” His site last week claimed to have uncovered a video of community organizers praying to Obama. Talk about “buzz”! Obedient right-wing bloggers such as Malkin, Atlas Shrugs, RedState, Stop the ACLU, HotAirPundit, Sundries Shack, along with cable TV talkers Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs, immediately piled on, openly mocking a group of mostly African-Americans activists as they gathered in prayer. (If second-graders aren’t off-limits from being called “Obama-worshiping drones” by members of the right-wing media, why would people amidst prayer not be ridiculed, right?) One right-wing site accused the organizers of “blasphemy,” and lots more shrieked as loud as they could about how the devastating video confirmed that loony liberals were falling for the Cult of Obama. RedState: “Speechless.” Hot Air Pundit: “Difficult to watch.” Stop the ACLU: “It’s a cult.” HotAirPundit: “Shocking Video.” Slight problem: When some sane people outside of Breitbart’s (hate) circle actually watched the video, they realized that the community organizers who gathered weren’t saying “Obama.” They were saying “Oh God,” which is typical when people are in prayer. So, yeah, that was a hiccup. Meaning, the only reason Breitbart posted the video was in order to smear liberal activists in prayer because he thought they were saying “Obama.” That was the whole point of the video. But Breitbart bungled the audio, which meant the smear collapsed, even some right-wing bloggers, such as … well, pretty much all them, never bothered to correct their original posts in which they called the organizers out as creepy cult members. But Times editors please take note — huge buzz!

Breitbart has some, shall we say, issues. No news organization should ever apologize for not taking him seriously.

At this point, if I were in the UFO, alien abduction crowd I’d be pissed that I wasn’t getting equal time. They should make a big stink about it so the NY Times is forced to assign an editor to cover the “flying saucer beat.”

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Like Poison To The Discourse

by dday

Robert Gates has now added his opinion to the debate over the public comments of Gen. Stanley McChrystal on Afghanistan:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Monday that President Obama’s advisors should keep their guidance private, in effect admonishing the top commander in Afghanistan for publicly advocating an approach requiring more troops even as the White House reassesses its strategy.

The comment by Gates came a day after Obama’s national security advisor, James L. Jones, said that military commanders should convey their advice through the chain of command — a reaction to Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s public statements in support of his troop-intensive strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan.

The exchanges suggested some disarray in the Obama administration’s attempts to forge a new policy on Afghanistan and underscored wide differences among top officials over the correct approach.

I don’t know that the comments suggested anything but the plain fact that the media treats generals like heroes whose pronouncements should never be questioned, unnecessarily distorting policy debates about foreign policy. News outlets are never going to be good at figuring this out because they try very hard not to understand the impact they have on political debates. But simply put, McChrystal makes a public statement for more troops, and the narrative immediately becomes “will the President go against the advice of his generals? How COULD he?” So a policy of not allowing that narrative to form seems perfectly reasonable, especially because generals have a narrow focus on their own area of responsibility and are not supposed to have a big-picture approach, and furthermore because they have a very explicit chain of command for recommendations of this types. McChrystal probably knows how this works and is using the system to his advantage, but his is not the first sin. It’s a media failure to properly contextualize in favor of a yen to sensationalize.

Nancy Pelosi parroted Gates last night, so it’s a full-on talking point, but again, her target is McChrystal instead of the media process that turns McChrystal into a deity. That’s probably because it’s impossible to get the media to understand their personal failure, so you have to shut down the debate entirely. And now, of course, the gossip-mongers on cable news are headlining: “Gates and Pelosi SLAM McChrystal,” turning it into a personality-based he-said/she-said, when if they were the least bit responsible about handling public comments from leaders of the military this wouldn’t even be a problem.

And Americans have subconsciously figured out how this all ends: it doesn’t. Because we cannot have a serious debate on anything in this country without it devolving into bitchy gossip and meta-critiques of how things “play” politically, tough decisions just don’t get made. And so 68%, in this poll, said America will not win or lose the war in Afghanistan; it will just go on without resolution.

Tragically, people have actually gotten USED to this outcome.

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Blue Dogging Blanche

by digby

I’m sure you all recall Blue America’s ad campaign to persuade Blanche Lincoln to support the public option. Now that she has become one of the pivotal votes, we are taking another shot at it and running the ads all over Arkansas for two weeks on every cable news show known to man (except FOX.)

We don’t know what Lincoln’s going to do. She, along with Conrad and Baucus, are the only Democrats to vote against all forms of the PO in the Finance Committee. It’s hard to imagine that she’s going to vote for a plan that contains one on the floor. But there is no reason that she shouldn’t allow her party to have an up or down vote even if she votes no in the end. It’s all about cloture at this point and we need to keep the pressure on.

You can view the ads and donate here if you’re so inclined.

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