Month: October 2009

What Is This Market You Speak Of?

by digby

Reacting to my post from yesterday about Matthews and Brownstein talking about how we are all thrilled the stock market’s going up because our retirement income’s invested in equities, Krugman says:

what do you mean “we”, rich man? From here, sources of income among the second quartile of older Americans, that is, from the 50th to the 75th percentile:

Even in this group — which is above median, although not at the top — Social Security accounts for more than half of income. (It’s the great bulk of income among poorer retirees). Asset income is, by comparison, trivial. read on…

None of that is to say that people shouldn’t be saving more and if they’re saving for retirement, they need some growth and the market is one place to get it. But unfortunately, most people are still not saving, mostly for reasons beyond their control (like lack of money) so they will likely be just as dependent on social security as the current crop of retirees.

And I don’t think we baby boomers are going to be quiet about being poor. Just saying …

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Respecting The Bing

by digby

So, all the villagers still have their knickers in a wad over the White House making the apparently shocking charge that Fox News is not actually an unbiased news source. And the New York Times supposedly tries to get to the bottom of the feud:

Late last month, the senior White House adviser David Axelrod and Roger Ailes, chairman and chief executive of Fox News, met in an empty Midtown Manhattan steakhouse before it opened for the day, neutral ground secured for a secret tête-à-tête.

[…]

What both men took to be the start of a frank but productive dialogue proved, in retrospect, more akin to the round of pre-Pearl Harbor peace talks between the United States and Japan.

By the following weekend, officials at the White House had decided that if anything, it was time to take the relationship to an even more confrontational level. The spur: Executives at other news organizations, including The New York Times, had publicly said that their newsrooms had not been fast enough in following stories Fox News had been heavily covering through the summer and fall, to the White House’s chagrin — namely, the focus on past statements and affiliations of the White House adviser Van Jones that ultimately led to his resignation and questions surrounding the community activist group Acorn.

I suppose the White House could have sat back and allowed the Republican propaganda machine to literally set the news agenda based on the lunatic ravings of Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart, but it wouldn’t have been very smart. There is an awful lot at stake,after all.

And I would like to know why everyone thinks it’s normal that Roger Ailes is having so many high level “negotiations” with his competitors in the news business and ideological rivals in the government. Who the hell is he and why should people have to negotiate with him?

The truth is that I suspect Ailes made a very strong impression among the congnoscenti when he and Murdoch took on GE. That was a ballsy move. As I wrote at the time:

I still just can’t get past the fact that Roger Ailes went nuclear on NBC merely to protect Fox’s insane gasbags from insults.

The deal extends beyond the prime-time hour that Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly occupy. Employees of daytime programs on MSNBC were specifically told by executives not to mention Fox hosts in segments critical of conservative media figures, according to two staff members. The employees requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters.[…]
Frustrated by the refusal by NBC’s chief executive, Jeffrey Zucker, to halt the attacks on Mr. O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, personally instructed Mr. O’Reilly’s program to aim at Mr. Immelt, people familiar with the situation said. Peace talks, such as they were, resumed in the spring between G.E. and News Corporation executives. At a lunch in April, Mr. Ailes and Mr. Immelt agreed to tone down the attacks. It was not visible to viewers until after Mr. Immelt and Mr. Murdoch shook hands at an off-the-record conference sponsored by Microsoft in May and word of a cease-fire trickled down to both news divisions.[…]
In the months after, when MSNBC would say something that strained the agreement, Fox News would respond accordingly, and vice versa. In July, after Mr. Olbermann condemned Fox’s Glenn Beck for letting a guest assert that a terrorist attack in the United States might be a good thing, Mr. Beck booked a segment about G.E. and declared that a “merger between G.E. and the Obama administration” was “nearly complete.” After the detente was reported by The Times on Monday, the fighting resumed and Mr. Olbermann claimed there was no deal among the parent companies. That was met by heated skepticism among bloggers. Two days later, Mr. O’Reilly had his turn. His news hook: The Securities and Exchange Commission had fined G.E. $50 million on charges of misleading investors. And on Thursday, Mr. O’Reilly showed Mr. Immelt’s and Mr. Zucker’s faces and wondered how long they could allow “this barbaric display” — that is an Olbermann reference — “under the NBC News banner.”[…]
“At this point,” a Fox spokeswoman said Friday, “the entire situation is more about major issues at NBC and G.E. than it is about Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann.”

Nice little corporation you’ve got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.
Again, I am not defending GE. Their behavior is worse than cowardly and it should bar them from media ownership. But the thuggish behavior of Fox for the trivial purpose of protecting Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly strikes me as bordering on psychotic. These demagogues are out there every night fomenting revolution, inciting violence and assassinating the characters of everyone they consider an “enemy.” And their bosses are blackmailing those who criticize them for this with thinly veiled threats to unleash the wingnut mobs on the corporation and its executives.
And the corporation is capitulating. After all, GE is not without its resources. It could, presumably, unleash hell on News Corps the same way if it chose to play Ailes’ game. It’s not like Rupert Murdoch is beyond criticism. But they won’t because they know that Fox can mobilize its viewers in ways that NBC can’t — and the executives just don’t think freedom of the press is worth fighting for: it’s not a profit center.
This is a serious problem. If Ailes can shut down criticism of its network by blackmailing the corporations that own the others, then they are exerting a form of corporate power that far outstrips any other, at least in the political realm. Fox News, by successfully blackmailing GE, has sent a message. And the rest of the corporate owned media have undoubtedly received it. Don’t cross them — or their agenda — because there will be hell to pay. With the media in financial turmoil, that’s a powerful message indeed.One can’t help but notice that while the NY Times mentioned in passing that Limbaugh had commented on a supposed similarity between Obama’s health care logo and Nazi symbols (which was the most benign of such things he said all week) they didn’t mention the numerous examples of the Hitler imagery coming from Fox News or that Glenn Beck’s web site is credited with getting the mobs out in force.

Am I the only one who thought that the NY Times assigning a reporter to follow what Fox and the talk radio lunatics are saying simply because they “missed” the ACORN story was just a bit weird? The videos were entertaining and all, but the story was dripping with racial overtones and the substance simply wasn’t all that important. And yet the paper of record actually went to the trouble of issuing a mea culpa for missing it and promised to do better in the future.

If I were the White House I’d be very, very concerned about that too. Rupert and Roger are making a move to dominate the media agenda and they aren’t afraid to use muscle to do it. They are enemies, there’s simply no doubt about it. Roger Ailes is a Republican political operative, fergawdsake, who also happens to be a television genius and Rupert Murdoch is a conservative billionaire who seeks to dominate the media of the entire planet. If you don’t take them seriously, you are a fool — and all the Democrats and the political establishment had better wake up to what they are dealing with.

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Tearing Up The Contracts

by digby

Atrios points out that “if the government was tearing up union contracts and slashing wages, the equivalent story would be told from a different perspective.” In fact, it was. Explicitly:

Atlanta-based talk show host Neal Boortz told viewers on the Nov. 11 “CNN Newsroom” if the government were to bail out General Motors (NYSE:GM), then it should void the labor agreements some blame for getting the automakers in trouble in the first place.

“I did not say don’t bail them out,” Boortz said. “I did say, ‘Look – if you’re going to bail them out, void these union contracts. These union contracts are totally absurd and the benefits that they pay people that aren’t even working anymore, salaries that they pay people who aren’t working.”

There was a lot of that kind of talk going around, if you’ll recall. I especially appreciated Tom Friedman’s contribution in which he endorsed the idea of firing everyone in sight, “tearing up the union contracts” and then he suggested that the president “call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.”

Either him or John Galt. Or maybe Jesus.

But woe to anyone who suggests today that the “talent” at the top be required to sacrifice their gluttonous salaries as they continue to fail miserably. After all, they are the most productive people in the world, unlike those soft, shiftless factory workers, and if they aren’t paid what they think they’re worth they’ll stamp their little feet and hold their breath until they turn blue.

Update: A emailer writes:

And the American International Group is contractually obliged to make bonus payments of nearly $200 million in March 2010. The company has promised to try to reduce that amount by 30 percent. But once again, there is nothing Mr. Feinberg can do because those bonuses were already written into contracts — and there is a high likelihood that the bonuses will create another furor in Congress, just as they did earlier this year.

For instance, it is critical for General Motors to be able to break its contracts with both its unions and its dealers. It needs to dramatically reduce its legacy benefits, perhaps even eliminating health care benefits for union retirees. It needs to close plants. It needs to pay its workers what Toyota workers are paid in the United States — and not a penny more. It needs to reduce the number of brands it sells — which means closing down thousands of dealerships, which is difficult to do because of state laws that protect car dealers. When General Motors shut down Oldsmobile, it cost the company more than $1 billion to buy out the Oldsmobile dealerships across the country. If it slims down its dealerships from 7,000 to a more appropriate 1,500, it will cost many times that amount.

Your Daily Grayson

by digby

From TPM:

I just spoke with Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), and he stood by his “Names of the Dead” Web site, which is meant to memorialize the people who have lost their lives because they didn’t have health insurance — and which was promptly flooded with joke names, and criticized by the GOP for allegedly violating campaign finance law. Grayson said that the site is being done in the spirit of other great memorials that are all around Washington — to honor the dead who have lost their lives for a lack of insurance, and to make people think about the issue. “I can’t really tell you how I first got the idea for it. But I can tell you there are many memorials that are very moving. They’re all around D.C., and everyone who visits D.C. gives some thought to the people we lost,” said Grayson. “And I think this is a very fitting way to show these people that we respect them and we miss them. We miss them, and we love them. The people who are gone because they didn’t get the health care they needed are just as important as everyone else. And the fact that certain elements of the political spectrum deny their existence only makes it that much more important that we remember them by naming them and honoring them.” “I meant what I said in my floor speech,” Grayson also said, explaining: “That the best way to honor them is to make sure that everyone in America has the health care they need, and that the list itself, the need for the list, is a thing of the past.” Grayson dismissed the GOP’s attacks on the site, as being legally groundless. “Just so you know, they haven’t filed any sort of complaint, nor does any complaint like that have any validity,” Grayson said of the GOP’s attacks. He also said that his staff checked with the Majority Leader’s office, and they said it was fine. The site is paid for by Grayson himself, and not with any funds from his campaign committee or his House office. “Do we always have to let the other side set the agenda?” said Grayson. “What I’ve done here is to set up a memorial to honor the people we’ve lost. Isn’t that more important than xeroxing the latest NRCC rant?” Regarding the prank names, Grayson said: “Well, this is typical of the Republicans. They show no respect, even for the dead.”

If you haven’t figured out what you are going to go as for Halloween, I’d suggest going as … a Republican:

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Watching The Show

by digby

Ron Brownstein just said on Hardball that we all have a tremendous ambivalent relationship with Wall Street because we are all dependent on the stock market for our retirement savings, to which Chris Matthews replied:

Matthews: We all are. I watch it every night on this show, I watch the market reports and I want it to go up. And by the way, back when I didn’t have any money, I wanted it to go down. Screw those guys. They’re making money.

Brownstein: people feel better that the DOW’s at 10,000

Chris let his fancy Irish lace slip show a little bit there, didn’t he?

Most people are happy that the Dow is rising again because it’s considered a leading indicator. But for middle class people in their 50s and 60s who managed to save for retirement, it’s a rueful and wary eye they are keeping on the market right now. Between their house losing half of its value and their retirement accounts taking a stomach churning nosedive, they would love to enjoy this stock market rally, but they have a long way to go before they are back to where they expected to be at this point in their lives. They’re watching, but I don’t think there’s all that much pleasure in it quite yet.

Guys like Matthews, who makes five million dollars a year, love to watch the market. I’m sure he has an account that he “plays with.” But he isn’t all that personally affected since people like him have so much money they invest in safe and secure bonds. He’s set for life. He doesn’t need those equity returns. For him the market is fun, kind of like going to Vegas.

But most people in the country are dealing with something far more immediate. They have an average of about 10 Grand in their 401ks if they have anything at all and their mortgages are crashing all around them. They are far more interested in whether there are any jobs, right now, since they need money to pay their immediate expenses. Watching the market is about as relevant to their problems as watching the space shuttle.

This, on the other hand, is like watching a train wreck for millions of people who are desperate for a check:

More Americans than forecast filed claims for unemployment benefits last week, a reminder that the labor market will be slow to recover.

Initial jobless applications rose by 11,000 to 531,000 in the week ended Oct. 17, from a revised 520,000 the prior week that were the fewest in nine months, the Labor Department said today in Washington. The number of people collecting benefits fell, while those receiving extended benefits increased.

Economists project the unemployment rate will reach 10 percent by the first quarter of 2010, underscoring the risk to consumer spending, the biggest part of the economy. Companies cutting costs remain reluctant to hire, even as they’ve eased dismissals from levels seen earlier this year.

“Until demand turns around, businesses have to continue to cut costs,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at Maria Fiorini Ramirez Inc., a New York forecasting firm. “We remain pessimistic on consumer spending.”

Meanwhile, back at the palace:

Legislation to extend unemployment benefits is stalled in the U.S. Senate amid a partisan dispute over how to finance the plan, among other issues.

Republicans are blocking the measure that would extend benefits by as much as 20 weeks because they want votes on several amendments, including on how to pay for the $2.4 billion measure so it doesn’t add to the federal budget deficit. Democrats plan to finance the aid by extending an employer payroll surtax due to expire at the end of this year.

“We have wanted to do this for weeks and they won’t let us,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, told reporters yesterday. “We talk about doing something for economic recovery to stimulate the economy — who is going to spend the money more quickly than somebody who is out of a job, doesn’t have income? That’s what the unemployment check’s about.”

Reid late today took the first procedural steps aimed at forcing a vote on the unemployment bill.

The Republicans are evil to be doing this. There’s no other way to look at it. Reid’s going to have to break their filibuster and apparently he’s taking steps to do that.

Too bad about the more than five million unemployed workers who are literally out of money and are waiting for their benefits to be extended. I wonder how many of them are sitting at home watching Chris Matthews for the first time in their lives and wondering what planet these people on their TV are from.

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Did Something Happen On The Way To The Debacle?

by digby

Ben Nelson is depressed:

If this is accurate, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) gets a medal for prescience and Sen. Olympia Snowe’s decision may be made for her. Two high profile conservative Democrats are saying they hear that Senate and White House health care negotiators are leaning toward including the public option in the base bill that they bring to the Senate floor.

“I keep hearing there is a lot of leaning toward some sort of national public option, unfortunately, from my standpoint,” said Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE). “I still believe a state-based approach is the way in which to go. So I’m not being shy about making that point.”

“What I’m hearing is this is the direction of the conversation,” said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND).

Reid’s office is not commenting on the speculation. But if Nelson and Conrad’s understanding is correct it would be bombshell news.

I actually don’t think it’s a bombshell. Everything indicates that a public option is the smart move politically and substantively. The Village thought it was dead because they assumed that because a bunch of insane wingnuts disguised as normal, white Real Americans were shrieking at the top of their lungs, that “the people” had spoken. But the people have always been for a public option and the numbers aren’t going down.

This is the same mistake they made about the Clinton impeachment. They assume that the whole country is bat shit crazy when only a portion of it is. And they try to identify with that lunacy and build their narratives around it. But politicians have to deal with actual voters and they do surveys to figure out what they really think. And when the numbers are as consistent as they’ve been for the public option, over months of controversy and nay saying, they have to take them into consideration. The villagers were stunned when the senate didn’t convict Clinton, and even more stunned when he didn’t resign. And one of those things probably would have happened if the people weren’t more sane than the villagers and the wingnuts on the subject and recognized it for the silly witch hunt it was.

Now, it’s not always that easy, of course. Politicians also answer to the wealthy owners of America, which means that the people’s wishes are only one small factor. (The democracy thing sure is adorable.) But in this case, the owners of America are all over the place and the costs associated with both keeping the status quo and passing a plan that will fail are very, very high for them as well as the people. The economy is terrible and people are suffering and desperately looking for some sign of relief. The Republicans made themselves irrelevant. Therefore, this calculation is not so simple and the opportunity is greater.

I have always held out quite a bit of hope that the public plan could be included in the bill and still do. But I can’t tell the future and neither can anyone else — I can’t say if it’s going to be adequate to stave off failure and I don’t know if the subsidies are going to be enough to make any plan affordable to the vast majority of the uninsured. But the political calculation has always favored putting it in because reform will almost definitely fail if they don’t. The fact that liberals stayed focused and relentless on the issue required the media to keep asking the question in public opinion polling and keeping the issue on the forefront of the agenda long after the establishment just wanted it to go away. It’s been a demonstration of a good progressive strategy.

That doesn’t guarantee that it’s going to happen. There are egos and sell-outs and traitors galore in the congress and the White House and I think it’s clear that these things don’t always take a logical path. But the fact that it’s still alive at this stage is a hopeful sign. If the liberals stay together it’s going to be a gut check for the conservative Dems instead of them — which “centrist” Democrats are willing to tank the country’s best chance to reform the health care system in decades?

It’s not 1994, and the Republicans are a mess. There is no political upside to doing their dirty work for them like there was back then. There’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

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Low “T” Baggers

by digby

Somebody needs to call Glenn Beck immediately. Obama is trying to kill Republicans:

Republican men nationwide may have experienced a drop in testosterone levels the night Barack Obama was elected president, according to the results of a small study that found another link between testosterone and men’s moods. By taking multiple saliva samples from 183 young men and women on election night, researchers found that the testosterone levels of men who voted for John McCain or Robert Barr dropped sharply 40 minutes after Obama was announced the winner.

[…]

Low testosterone levels in men are linked to increased risk of premature death.

First, they lower their testosterone so they don’t feel like procreating, then they kill them. It’s all there. What else do we need to know?

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White Like Me

by digby

It was once “their” country?

In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. . . .They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates. . . . They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama. They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks. America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.

That’s Pat Buchanan — speaking about the white working class.
I’m afraid if the white working class ever thought it was “their” country, they were fooling themselves. It has always been owned by the white upper class, who have also always manipulated the prejudices of the white working class into believing that they are being threatened by the exotic “other.” Keep the rubes fighting among themselves and maybe they won’t notice that they are being screwed sideways by the Master of the Universe.
That’s why the conservatives are working so hard to keep people looking at the government as the cause of all their problems, a government that they insist no longer works for Real Americans and instead takes their hard earned money and gives it to the undeserving racial minorities and feminazis who don’t know how to keep a man. It’s a sad scam that’s always pulled out in times of economic stress to misdirect the folks so they don’t get too focused on the wealthy.
Buchanan is one of the most obvious practitioners of this, but it plays itself out in other ways in the media, with gasbags like Matthews and Russert (when he was alive) fetishizing their own self-image as working class white ethnics. Multi-millionaire celebrities pretending to be average working stiffs is offensive enough — as if “working class” is only an identity, not an economic circumstance — but when they project their own self-interest as being the interest of the “working class” it is laughable. Or it would be laughable if it weren’t so evil.

via Salon

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Golden Years

by digby

Elizabeth Bumiller wrote a typically shallow puff piece about the non-existent Golden Years in Afghanistan in the NY Times yesterday. Evidently, it was once just like Omaha Nebraska (except for all the infrastructure, education, wealth and personal liberty.)

Howie dispatches Bumiller as only he can — and you really should read it: he was there during these “Golden Years.” But he also talks about the reality on the ground today, citing another article by Johann Hari in The Independent.

As we saw on the weekend, McChrystal is doing what blinkered military leaders always do: demanding more troops while preparing to blame his inevitable failure of a stab in the back by politicians unwilling to allow the military win by fighting a war of extermination.

Every military counter-insurgency strategy hits up against the probability that it will, in time, create more enemies than it kills. So you blow up a suspected Taliban site and kill two of their commanders – but you also kill 98 women and children, whose families are from that day determined to kill your men and drive them out of their country. Those aren’t hypothetical numbers. They come from Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, who was General Petraeus’ counter-insurgency advisor in Iraq. He says that US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa’ida leaders, at the expense of more than 700 civilian lives. He says: “That’s a hit rate of 2 per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It’s not moral.” It explains the apparent paradox that broke the US in Vietnam: the more “bad guys” you kill, the more you have to kill.

There is an even bigger danger than this. General Petraeus’s strategy is to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan. When he succeeds, they run to Pakistan– where the nuclear bombs are.

To justify these risks, the proponents of the escalation need highly persuasive arguments to show how their strategy slashed other risks so dramatically that it outweighed these dangers. It’s not inconceivable– but I found that in fact the case they give for escalating the war, or for continuing the occupation, is based on three premises that turn to Afghan dust on inspection.

Argument One: We need to deprive al-Qa’ida of military bases in Afghanistan, or they will use them to plot attacks against us, and we will face 9/11 redux. In fact, virtually all the jihadi attacks against Western countries have been planned in those Western countries themselves, and required extremely limited technological capabilities or training. The 9/11 atrocities were planned in Hamburg and Florida by 19 Saudis who only needed to know how to use box-cutters and to crash a plane. The 7/7 suicide-murders were planned in Yorkshire by young British men who learned how to make bombs off the internet. Only last week, a jihadi was arrested for plotting to blow up a skyscraper in that notorious jihadi base, Dallas, Texas. And on, and on.

In reality, there are almost no al-Qa’ida fighters in Afghanistan. That’s not my view: it’s that of General Jim Jones, the US National Security Advisor. He said last week there were 100 al-Qa’ida fighters in Afghanistan. That’s worth repeating: there are 100 al-Qa’ida fighters in Afghanistan. Nor is that a sign that the war is working. The Taliban or warlords friendly to them already control 40 per cent of Afghanistan now, today. They can build all the “training camps” they want there– but they have only found a hundred fundamentalist thugs to staff them.

…Argument Two: By staying, we are significantly improving Afghan human rights, especially for women. This, for me, is the meatiest argument– and the most depressing. The Taliban are indeed one of the vilest forces in the world, imprisoning women in their homes and torturing them for the “crimes” of showing their faces, expressing their sexuality, or being raped. They keep trying to murder my friend Malalai Joya for the “crime” of being elected to parliament on a platform of treating women like human beings not cattle.

But as she told me last month: “Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords.” Outside Kabul, vicious Taliban who enforce sharia law have merely been replaced by vicious warlords who enforce sharia law. “The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women,” she said. Any Afghan president– Karzai, or his opponents– will only ever in practice be the mayor of Kabul. Beyond is a sea of warlordism, as evil to women as Mullah Omar. That is not a difference worth fighting and dying for.

Argument Three: If we withdraw, it will be a great victory for al-Qa’ida. Re-energised, they will surge out across the world. In fact, in November 2004, Osama bin Laden bragged to his followers: “All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen [jihadi fighters] to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written “al-Qa’ida” in order to make generals race there, and we cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses– without their achieving anything of note!” These wars will, he said, boost al-Qa’ida recruitment across the world, and in time “bankrupt America”. They walked right into his trap.

This is the kind of stuff Americans should be digesting and considering while Obama gets bullied into escalating an unwinnable, tragic war that he knows is a catastrophic mistake in the making. But the Independent is a British daily and, instead, Americans are reading Mother Goose stories in the NY Times by lightweights like Bumiller, who spent 2001 until 2007 with her head stuck up Karl Rove’s ass.

Digesting this is tough going, but it needs to be done. The politics of this are tough and they should be. But consider that our recent swashbuckling Republican Prez, Junior Bush, was destroyed largely because of a misbegotten war, even after 9/11. Does anyone believe that it can’t happen to a Democrat?

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Teaching The Kids A Lesson

by digby

Following up on my post earlier today about the new “warning label” on the tasers, here’s some rather disturbing news on the same subject:

OKLAHOMA CITY — The Board of Juvenile Affairs on Friday moved ahead with plans for legislation and rules to allow the use of pepper spray and Taser devices in secure facilities.

[…]

Rep. Wade Rousselot, D-Okay, said he intends to sponsor legislation that would allow OJA staff to use chemical spray and or Tasers to protect themselves and obtain control of juveniles in a facility.

“What you are looking at is an effort to address symptoms rather than root causes,” said Jon Trzcinski, a former OJA employee who is now a consultant.

He urged the agency to look at what is causing the violence, which could involve the classification system, staffing levels or staff training.

In some cases, people go into cardiac arrest after being the target of a Taser gun, Trzcinski said, noting the agency could open itself to lawsuits with costly settlements.

“Tasers, in my opinion, have no place in a juvenile facility,”

No kidding.

But using electricity on prisoners has a long history and one on which the United States particularly distinguishes itself.

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