Month: December 2009

Save Us President Daddy

by digby

Please just shoot me now. The media has gone insane. Suzanne Malveaux just asked Candy Crowley how the voters in 2010 are going to rank the president’s response to this failed terror attempt. It’s a stupid question, but the answer really takes the cake:

Candy Crowley: I think the fact that we have seen him for two days in a row is the White House recognizing that this is perhaps more important — the safety of the American people —than jobs at this point. It wouldn’t take much to rev up security moms who were so important in 2000 and 2004. So I think what voters judge is, sort of, the record. So it won’t be today, but then what did he do? How safe did he keep us?

That’s ridiculous. Did Candy wake up this morning and think it was 2003? The plane didn’t go down. Nobody died. The perpetrator is some young, screwed up loser who tried to set his pants on fire. The only “security mom” who cares more about that than the fact that she doesn’t have a job is a well paid television celebrity.

The press loves the boogeyman story because it makes them feel like crusaders for freedom and allows them to make common cause with macho right wingers. It’s far more exciting than dull stories about losers who don’t have jobs — you can see the exhilaration coming off of them in waves. They love it.

Case in point, Chris Matthews, who is ready to force everyone to be cavity searched in the ticket line:

Matthews: You know what when we get on an airplane, we give up all kinds of checks we don’t do by just walking down the street. I think we give up a certain amount of rights just getting on an airplane and I think you’ve got to recognize that your safety is tied up with everyone else on that plane’s safety and anybody else that gets hit on that plane. You don’t own the right to be on that plane because you’re getting on an airplane so you do have to yield some civil rights…And by the way, Cliff, you know it and I know it, they’re going to get smarter and smarter and sooner or later they’re going to get all kinds of people to do their dirty work for them. They’re the enemy. They’re going to use any means they can to get us. They’re out to kill us. Let’s be as smart as they are because they are already smart.

Run fer yer lives!

Apparently, Matthews thinks that there is some Koranic law that requires all attacks against America to take place on an airplane. If some terrorist with imagination succeeds in a mall or on a bridge will we have to submit to profiliong and screening there too? Sounds like it.(And if he thinks these would-be terrorists like Richard Reid and Abdulmutallab are super criminals, no wonder he’s petrified.)

Clearly, the security bureaucracy didn’t work. A number of people at various levels dropped the ball in letting this guy get through. But I suspect a lot of that is because they decided to rely on the stupid security theatre to scare off the bad guys rather than putting their efforts into tracking people like Abdulmutallab.

Unless we actually have a terrorist attack, I think we can feel fairly confident that the 2010 election will be about the economy. This failed attempt was a wake-up call, but it’s not the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor. And this media revival of Daddy Keep Us Safe is nothing but a cheap sideshow.

.

Why does Max Boot hate the troops?

As more U.S. troops roll into Afghanistan, they will conduct offensive operations that result in the capture of more Taliban over the next 18 months. That is not enough time to build Afghan courts and prisons and to train guards, judges and lawyers. Even in Iraq, the legal system has had trouble coping with all of the terrorists U.S. authorities have turned over during the past year. Some have been released and have gone on to commit fresh atrocities.

Such a situation, which exists on a much bigger scale in Afghanistan, is profoundly demoralizing to troops. If service members see a “catch and release” policy in effect, they are likely to either pull back or pull the trigger prematurely. Both possibilities are worrisome. The former means more enemy fighters on the loose; the latter sullies our troops’ honor, denies them the intelligence gleaned from interrogations and leads the remaining Taliban to fight harder.

Just as those many right wing arguments about how the CIA will refuse to protect the country if they aren’t granted immunity from prosecution or the claim that the troops will no longer report abuse if pictures of abuse is made public, Boot is saying that American soldiers will be demoralized and either fail to do their jobs or start killing people indiscriminately in Afghanistan if the US doesn’t break the law. This argument is insulting to the troops. They are all professional soldiers who understand their duty and they do not need the country to betray its principles because they have a hard job.

Right wingers often use the “feelings” of police and soldiers as a shield to excuse their authoritarian impulses. If Boot and his buddies want to argue for torture and indefinite detention, let them admit that they just don’t believe in the rule of law. Blaming the troops is cowardly.

.

Whoda Thunk?

by digby

I’m frankly shocked that wealthy Republican operatives are making big bucks from the teabaggers. It seems so unlike them:

The political action committee behind the Tea Party Express (TPE) — which already has been slammed as inauthentic and corporate-controlled by rival factions in the Tea Party movement — directed almost two thirds of its spending during a recent reporting period back to the Republican consulting firm that created the PAC in the first place.

Our Country Deserves Better (OCDB) spent around $1.33 million from July through November, according to FEC filings examined by TPMmuckraker. Of that sum, a total of $857,122 went to Sacramento-based GOP political consulting firm Russo, Marsh, and Associates, or people associated with it.

OCDB, which built the Tea Party Express, is essentially a Russo, Marsh creation, as we’ve detailed. The PAC’s site was registered in July 2008 by Sal Russo, the firm’s founder. That site also lists Russo as the PAC’s “chief strategist.” Tea Party Express fundraising emails, sent by OCDB and obtained by TPMmuckraker, come from another Russo, Marsh employee, Joe Wierzbicki.

Just for good measure, legendary GOP bamboozler Howard Kaloogian is also on OCDB’s board, and has close ties to Russo, Marsh.

From July through November 2009, the firm received $832,403 from OCDB, according to the FEC records. An additional $8,500 went to Russo himself. And Wierzbicki took in $16,219.

Bamboozler is right. The last time we heard from Kaloogian he was passing off pictures of Istanbul as Baghdad and using them as proof that there was no violence in the city. He and Russo are Conmen R Us.

.

“A Mere Resistance To Comply May Not Be Enough”

by digby

The 9th Circuit issued what may be a landmark ruling on tasers, and not a moment too soon:

A federal appeals court on Monday issued one of the most comprehensive rulings yet limiting police use of Tasers against low-level offenders who seem to pose little threat and may be mentally ill.

In a case out of San Diego County, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals criticized an officer who, without warning, shot an emotionally troubled man with a Taser when he was unarmed, yards away, and neither fleeing nor advancing on the officer.

[…]

As lawsuits have proliferated against police and Taser International, which manufactures the weapons, the nation’s appellate courts have been trying to define what constitutes appropriate Taser use.

The San Diego County case is the latest ruling to address the issue.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit affirmed the trial judge’s ruling on Monday, concluding that the level of force used by the officer was excessive.

McPherson could have waited for backup or tried to talk the man down, the judges said. If Bryan was mentally ill, as the officer contended, then there was even more reason to use “less intrusive means,” the judges said.

“Officer McPherson’s desire to quickly and decisively end an unusual and tense situation is understandable,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote for the court. “His chosen method for doing so violated Bryan’s constitutional right to be free from excessive force.”

Some lawyers called it a landmark decision.

Eugene Iredale, a San Diego lawyer who argued the case, said it was one of the clearest and most complete statements yet from an appellate court about the limits of Taser use.

He said after Monday’s decision that courts will consider all circumstances, including whether someone poses a threat, has committed a serious crime or is mentally troubled.

“In an era where everybody understands ‘don’t tase me, bro,’ courts are going to look more closely at the use of Tasers, and they’re going to try to deter the promiscuous oversue of that tool,” he said.

[…]

“Certainly the officer should be able to articulate the reason the force (was used), and a mere resistance to comply may not be enough,” said Sheriff John McGinness.

It’s not. The idea that police can use it to subdue people at their discretion in order to make their difficult jobs easier is just wrong. The police can’t hit people over the head with a baton if they smart mouth them or refuse to immediately comply and they shouldn’t be able to shoot them full of electricity either. Just because it doesn’t leave marks doesn’t mean it isn’t cruel and brutal.

This issue will wend itself through the courts for some time. I would imagine we’ll see a Supreme Court ruling. Considering the current court, I’m sure Taser International hopes so.

h/t to bb

.

Cokie’s Law Enforcers

by digby

The wingnuts are ginning up a story about Max Baucus being drunk on the senate floor. And like the good little GOP boosting schlock meisters they are, the Politico is breathlessly reporting on “the controversy.”

Boehlert writes:

Yes, you read that correctly. Not only did Politico quote guiding lights such as Newsbusters and The Drudge Report, but Politico actually quoted a Facebook page comment posted by disgraced, page-chasing GOP Congressman Mark Foley, in which he attacked the ethics of another.

What more do you need to know about Politico these days?

UPDATED: Of course Politico makes zero effort to relay to readers if the right-wing attack on Baucus carries any weight. If it’s, y’know, true. That’s not Politico’s job. Politico’s job is simply to alert the rest of the world to whatever, or whoever, is “under fire” from conservatives.

Yes, Mark Foley’s Facebook scribblings are used in the article as an illustration of prim outrage at Baucus’ personal life. I know.

And I have no idea if he was drunk, but the fact is that Baucus always slurs his words and speaks in a meandering fashion. It’s just how he talks. As anyone who has ever heard Susan Collins knows, there’s no requirement that Senators be good speakers.

*Cokie’s Law

Round ‘Em Up

by digby

Here we go again:

Gallagher: But guys, let’s look at the inevitable, the 800-pound gorilla in the room. How about we scrutinize young Middle Eastern men to stop this.

What happens when El Al Airlines, the airline run and operated by the state of Israel, if a Palestinian tries to board that plane? Do you think he goes through an extra degree of security? Well, let’s do that with Muslims, let’s do that with anybody named Abdul or Mohammad or Ahmed, let’s take them and put them in a room and make sure they don’t have explosives sewn into their underwear.

If you add in Africans (as you must by this logic) that’s about half of the global population right there. But then how do we know that some guy named Bob isn’t a Muslim? Or that some young woman named Samira isn’t a terrorist? It gets really complicated. The only profiling that will really work is to not let anyone in the US at all and to require all US citizens to wear designations on their clothes to indicate which religion they are. Anything short of that just won’t get the job done.

Alternatively, we could invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.

Short of that, I would guess we’re going to have to continue to do the delicate balancing act between security and civil liberties and sharpen up the huge unwieldy anti-terrorist bureaucracy. As someone who was once lauded as a super-hero terrorist fighter always said, “it’s hard work.”

.

Ineffectual Cheerleading

by digby

In case you were wondering what the Republicans have in mind:

On “Meet The Press” this morning, Newt Gingrich praised the Tea Party movement and their response to the push for healthcare reform and told David Gregory, “every Republican in 2010 and 2012 will run on an absolute pledge to repeal this bill. ” (He also added that the GOP cannot be the “Party of No.”)

Gingrich still has serious weight among the conservative base—he was responsible for “Drill Here, Drill Now” and the House Republican response to the first bailout (they proposed cutting capital gains taxes instead of saving the financial system)—and, as the plight of Arlen Specter and Charlie Crist have made clear, the only way out of a Republican primary is to avoid any hint of moderation.

and…

“I’d like to pick up on what Sen. DeMint says about the process. I think the process was very bad. But the process was really caused, in large measure, by the refusal of the Republicans to deal in any way,” said Specter.

“Sen. DeMint is the author of the famous statement that this is going to be President Obama’s ‘Waterloo,’ that this ought to be used to break the president,” said Specter, referring to the political battle over health care. “So that before the ink was dry on the oath of office — and I know this, because I was in the caucus — the Republicans were already plotting ways to beat President Obama in 2012.”

Whether it will work is certainly up for grabs. But they will be running against health care (very possibly calling for its repeal) and if the Democrats are relying on the public seeing through their propaganda and recognizing what a wonderful reform it’s going to be a few years down the road, they’d better come up with a plan B. It is going to be a difficult sell — this country is in a very bad mood and doesn’t want to hear happy talk. The Republicans are going to stoke that bad mood and Democrats are not going to be very effective in combating it if they rely on vacuous cheerleading. If anything, that makes people even angrier.

.

Trained Citizens

by digby

There’s a bit of a hissy fit building about how the Obama administration is inappropriately taking credit for the citizen thwarted terrorist attempt. Oy vey.

Jake Tapper points out that such citizen initiative was once considered the result of a brilliant Bush administration anti-terrorist strategy:

In a press conference on January 17, 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft made a similar claim about shoe-bomber Richard Reid.‬‪

“Throughout the war on terrorism, our military and intelligence officials have made a concerted effort to share appropriate information with the public in order to enlist their assistance,” Ashcroft said. “We’ve asked citizens to be vigilant, to be alert to any possible threat. The success of this strategy was made clear by yesterday’s indictment of Richard Reid, who may very well have succeeded in destroying American Airlines Flight Number 63, as the indictment charges, had it not been for the courage and attentiveness of the citizen passengers and crew.”‬‪

In fact, there was a time when Bush was saying “Let’s Roll” in his speeches as if he were the one to have inspired the phrase.

Frankly, no administration can take credit for this. Citizens act in these situations because they value their lives and the lives of others. I suppose you can call that an “anti-terrorism strategy,” but most people would simply call it survival.

.

Heathens

by digby

Can someone please explain to me why this is a story?

The Obamas have attended Sunday services in Washington three times this year — once at the predominantly African-American 19th Street Baptist Church, and twice at St. John’s Episcopal Church across Lafayette Square from the White House. Asked at Tuesday’s White House briefing whether the First Family is still searching for a local church to join, press secretary Robert Gibbs responded: “The President has attended fairly regularly up at Camp David a church that he’s comfortable in and has enjoyed attending.” (See pictures of Obama meeting Pope Benedict XVI.) The church at Camp David is Evergreen Chapel, a nondenominational body currently led by Chaplain Lieut. Carey Cash. Each week, regardless of whether the President is on-site, Evergreen Chapel holds Christian services open to the nearly 400 military personnel and staff at Camp David, as well as their families. The Bush family spent eight straight Christmases at Camp David, in large part because of the retreat’s privacy, and were regular attenders of the chapel’s candlelight service on Christmas Eve. Other Presidents and their families have opted to stay in Washington for the holiday. The Clintons traditionally went to midnight mass at the Washington National Cathedral and woke up in the White House on Christmas morning before heading south for vacation. President Reagan also remained in Washington over Christmas — reportedly so members of the Secret Service could be near their families — although Reagan didn’t venture out to a local church service. The Obamas have celebrated Christmas in Hawaii, where the President grew up, nearly every year since the girls were born. But while Obama can still visit his favorite shaved ice joint and body-surfing spots, he doesn’t have a childhood church home to attend. His mother wasn’t a churchgoer, and Obama writes in “Dreams of My Father” that his grandparents took him to church infrequently.

So those awful Obamas didn’t attend church On Christmas eve like every good American must do. Instead they were in some “foreign-like” place where the only so-called church Obama ever attended was some illegitimate, left-wing institution that no Democrats are allowed to attend if they want the approval of the Religion Industrial Complex:

The one church in Hawaii with which Obama does have a family connection is unlikely to be the place where the First Family would worship on Christmas Eve. As a child, Obama occasionally attended Sunday school classes at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, and his family held a memorial service there for his grandmother last Christmas. Conservative critics were quick to point out that the First Unitarian Church has a controversial history — in 1969, the church offered sanctuary to servicemen who refused to go to Vietnam. The refuge was brief, however, as military police invaded church grounds to arrest the soldiers.

Well that tears it for me. The Obamas are also very selfish and thoughtless for making their Secret Service detail go to Hawaii in December. What horrible people. Obviously, they are Muslims.

.

Calling For A Rewrite

by digby

Oh for gawds sake:

Would you like to come on a trip to a magical imaginary world? Well then, join Rahm Emanuel and his reporter sidekick Jonathan Weisman aboard this Wall Street Journal article:

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been telling Democrats a win on the health issue will reverse the slide in public opinion, just as passage of another controversial proposal, the North American Free Trade Agreement, lifted President Bill Clinton in the polls… In an interview Friday, Mr. Emanuel expressed little concern for the president’s standing with the Democratic base. Mr. Emanuel said the liberal wing of the party is already coming back to the fold.

This would be a bizarre thing for Emanuel to be telling other Democrats under any circumstances: NAFTA passed at the end of 1993 in Clinton’s first year, and then in 1994 the Democrats promptly lost control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate—the House for the first time in forty years. You wouldn’t think hearing Emanuel compare today to that would really get Democrats to break out the champagne.

Read on for the full details of just how ridiculous this is.

There is an awful lot of historical nonsense being spread around these days on all sides but this one really takes the cake. NAFTA was the quintessential DLC experiment and is the worst possible example of Clinton’s legislative success at this particularmoment. It was a business elite wet dream, advocated by the party of the working class against the interests of its own constituents. And the numbers in the links above show that it was actually quite unpopular and that whatever small bump Clinton got (probably for his “bipartisanship” more than anything else) were ephemeral. After all, he lost both houses of congress in the next election. I think Rahm should probably be careful about drawing such comparisons right now. They don’t exactly inspire confidence.

.