Month: April 2010

Mainstream Conservatism

by digby

Jim Galloway at the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports on the latest attempts by the Georgia legislature to protect us from this ever encroaching federal government:

Last Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee entertained SB 235, the bill sponsored by Sen. Chip Pearson (R-Dawsonville) to prohibit the involuntary implantation of microchips in human beings.

In Gov. Roy Barnes’ stump speech, the bill has become a routine example of the Republican tendency to attack problems that don’t exist, and ignore the ones that do. Besides, Barnes argues, if someone holds him down to insert a microchip in his head, “it should be more than a damned misdemeanor.”

Three states have instituted bans, and others have considered the legislation. In Virginia, a bill supporter declared microchips to be the “666″ mark of the beast referred to in the Book of Revelation.

Pearson has said his motivation isn’t biblical or religious – that he is simply working in advance of technology’s next assault on personal privacy. Not unlike limiting the uses of DNA testing by health insurance companies, he argues.

At the House hearing, state Rep. Ed Setzler (R-Kennesaw), who is shouldering the legislation in the House, spoke earnestly for better than a half hour on microchips as a literal invasion of privacy.

He was followed by a hefty woman who described herself as a resident of DeKalb County. “I’m also one of the people in Georgia who has a microchip,” the woman said. Slowly, she began to lead the assembled lawmakers down a path they didn’t want to take.

Microchips, the woman began, “infringe on issues that are fundamental to our very existence. Our rights to privacy, our rights to bodily integrity, the right to say no to foreign objects being put in our body.”

She spoke of the “right to work without being tortured by co-workers who are activating these microchips by using their cell phones and other electronic devices.”

She continued. “Microchips are like little beepers. Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission,” she said.

It was not funny, and no one laughed.

“Ma’am, did you say you have a microchip?” asked state Rep. Tom Weldon (R-Ringgold).

“Yes, I do. This microchip was put in my vaginal-rectum area,” she replied. Setzler, the sponsoring lawmaker, sat next to the witness – his head bowed.

“You’re saying this was involuntary?” Weldon continued.

The woman said she had been pushing a court case through the system for the last eight years to have the device removed.

Wendell Willard (R-Atlanta), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, picked up the questioning.

“Who implanted this in you?” he asked.

“Researchers with the federal government,” she said.

“And who in the federal government implanted it?” Willard asked.

“The Department of Defense.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

The woman was allowed to go about her business, and the House Judiciary Committee approved passage of SB 235.

A friend tells me that there has been a long lived right wing email chain letter that warns people about this very thing.

Ok, so this poor lady is literally delusional. But how do we explain the Republican politicians who are willing to use these delusions for political purposes?

Meanwhile, all the conservative protectors of the constitution who are having a full blown hysterical fit over non-existent encroachments of the federal government have nothing to say about this:

Earlier this week, Arizona lawmakers passed anti-immigration legislation that is unique in its stringency and harshness. The bill would strongly encourage police officers to engage in racial profiling by ordering them to check the status of people they merely suspectsuspect of being in the U.S. illegally. Even legal immigrants, in a move that harks back to fascist Europe, would be required to carry their papers at all times or risk arrest.

If the state of Arizona turns into a totalitarian police state, it’s not a problem. It’s only if the Feds regulate the health care market that we need to worry.

And as Atrios points out:

This Arizona law would be less crazy, though still offensively bad, if we actually, you know, had “papers,” but we really don’t. Lots of people don’t have passports, and no one carries them around. Birth certificates are generally locked away somewhere.

Moreover it pretty much scratches the fourth amendment. If they are allowed to stop anyone purely to find out if they are immigrant, well, in practical terms that means that probable cause is no longer operative. But I’m guessing unless a cop ends up confiscating somebody’s gun, none of the patriotic defenders of the constitution give a damn about that.

And, by the way, just in case anyone thinks the crazies on the right have no clout, get a load of the guy who got this thing passed:

The Arizona Senate passed one of the most stringent immigration laws in the country on Monday, marking a new level of influence for a Republican state senator who not long ago was seen by many as an eccentric firebrand.

Passage of the law, which would, among other things, allow the authorities to demand proof of legal entry into the United States from anyone suspected of being in the country illegally, testified to the relative lack of political power of Arizona Latinos, and to the hardened views toward illegal immigration among Republican politicians both here and nationally.

As if to underscore how the political landscape will be changed by the law, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who had refused to back the most extreme anti-immigration measures, came out in support of it just hours before its passage.

“I think it is a good tool,” said Mr. McCain, who is being challenged in a primary by a conservative former congressman who is thumping him on immigration. Mr. McCain added that he believed the bill reflected frustration that the federal government had not done enough to secure the border and enforce immigration law.

The state senator who wrote the law, Russell Pearce, had long been considered a politically incorrect embarrassment by more moderate members of his party — often to the delight of his supporters. There was the time in 2007 when he appeared in a widely circulated photograph with a man who was a featured speaker at a neo-Nazi conference. (Mr. Pearce said later he did not know of the man’s affiliation with the group.)

In 2006, he came under fire for speaking admirably of a 1950s federal deportation program called Operation Wetback, and for sending an e-mail message to supporters that included an attachment — inadvertently, he said — from a white supremacist group.

But Mr. Pearce, 62, cannot be dismissed as just the party’s right-wing fringe. As chairman of the Senate’s appropriation committee, he controls whose bills are financed, and he has shown an uncanny knack to capitalize on this border state’s immigration anxiety.

Nope. He’s pretty mainstream these days.

h/t to JS
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Her Only Regret

by digby

What with all the memorials surrounding the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and the current concerns surrounding the rise of the militia and “Patriot” movements, it’s probably also a good time to revisit one of the more infamous comments from right wing darling, Ann Coulter:

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

Oh, and while we’re debating about whether or not hate radio incites people to violence, perhaps recalling this will clarify things:

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh is sparking controversy again after he made comments that appear to call for riots in Denver during the Democratic National Convention this summer.

He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens.

“Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats,” Limbaugh said during Wednesday’s radio broadcast. He then went on to say that’s the best thing that could happen to the country…

…Limbaugh said with massive riots in Denver, which he called “Operation Chaos,” the people on the far left would look bad.

“We do, hopefully, the right thing for the sake of this country. We’re the only one in charge of our affairs. We don’t farm out our defense if we elect Democrats … and riots in Denver, at the Democratic Convention will see to it we don’t elect Democrats. And that’s the best damn thing that can happen to this country, as far as I can think,” Limbaugh said…

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Cruel And Unusual

by digby

I am a big animal welfare advocate so I am disgusted that any human being would take pleasure in the suffering of animals or consider it entertainment. As a child I had nightmares for years after seeing a trained bear in a third world country. It’s a horrible image that remains in my head today. But I also think the first amendment is pretty sacrosanct and that prohibiting things purely on the basis of the depiction of awful acts on film or in literature, rather than the awful acts themselves, is very, very problematic.

So, I can’t reasonably argue with today’s Supreme Court decision to overturn the ban on videos of animal cruelty on the merits. What I don’t get is this logic from Justice Roberts:

He acknowledged that some sorts of speech — among them obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement and speech integral to criminal conduct — have historically been considered outside the protection of the First Amendment. But he rejected the government’s analogy to a more recent category of unprotected speech, that trafficking in child pornography, which the court in 1982 said deserved no First Amendment protection.

Child pornography, he said, is “a special case” because the market for it is “intrinsically related to the underlying abuse.”

But videos of animal cruelty aren’t intrinsically related to the underlying abuse? That makes no sense. Roberts argues that the law prevents depictions of hunting:

Since all hunting is illegal in the District of Columbia, for instance, he said, the law makes the sale of magazines or videos showing hunting a crime here.

“The demand for hunting depictions exceeds the estimated demand for crush videos or animal fighting depictions by several orders or magnitude,” he wrote.

But the fact is that the laws against child pornography have far more often been used for absurd purposes than any arrests of someone for buying the latest copy of Hunting and Fishing Magazine. Just this week we had this:

Three Greensburg Salem students who allegedly sent nude or semi-nude photographs of themselves via their cell phones and three male students who received the photos are facing pornography charges.

Greensburg police have filed petitions with Westmoreland County juvenile authorities charging the three high school girls with manufacturing, disseminating or possessing child pornography. Three high school boys found with the photos on their cell phones are charged with possession of child pornography, police said Monday.

Police said more charges are possible because they believe the photos may have gone to others.

Media reports across the nation have documented the teen trend of sending nude or semi-nude photos from cell phone to cell phone, called “sexting” instead of “texting.”

Westmoreland County District Attorney John Peck said minors can be charged with sending or possessing child pornography, despite their age.

I’m not arguing for child pornography. But this is clearly not what the law intended. Yet, Roberts seems to think this child pornography exception to the first amendment is reasonable while the one depicting animal cruelty would not be. It’s intellectually inconsistent. Of course First Amendment jurisprudence always has been inconsistent so there’s no surprise. But to mention two extremely similar cases in the same breath and come up a completely different rationale for each seems particularly capricious to me.

Of course, John Roberts also believes that non-human corporate entities have more free speech rights than teenagers who write the words “bong hits for jesus,” so capricious
probably isn’t the right word for it.

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Chump Change

by digby

The banking lobbyists are swarming all over the hill throwing money around like confetti. They are evidently most intent upon stopping the new regulations around derivatives (although I always wonder when everyone knows something like that if it isn’t a smokescreen.)

But the numbers involved are very telling. Jamie Dimond of Chase is quoted as telling his people that they could lose from 700 million to 2 billion dollars if this goes through. That’s a lot of money. But then just yesterday I read that Goldman is paying out 5 billion in bonuses just for the first three months of the year. Meanwhile:

A main weapon being wielded to fight the battle is money. Agriculture Committee members have received $22.8 million in this election cycle from people and organizations affiliated with financial, insurance, and real estate companies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

When you look at all the numbers, it’s amazing just how little our representatives sell themselves for. What a deal.

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Disengagement

by tristero

There are many interesting ideas in this post by Julian Sanchez, and it’s generated a good deal of discussion. If you want a good general response to Sanchez, you should read the great Billmon’s riff. I’m going to turn a few of Sanchez’s ideas on their head, especially the notion of “engagement.”

What got me interested in Sanchez’s post was this excerpt:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile.

Really? I have a great deal of interest in understanding – and exploiting – the fragilities of the “conservative media ecosystem” and the last thing I’ve found it to be is especially fragile.

Sanchez immediately, and tellingly, veers off-topic to discuss China’s media ecosystem but Billmon gives some examples:

… in a free society, those two conditions [the active participation of the victims of rightwing propaganda and “reality must not push bag too vigorously”] cannot be maintained perpetually and indefinitely (knock on wood), which may explain why the conservative movement in the US has shown a tendency to crash and burn whenever it runs into realities (the 1991 recession, the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial meltdown, etc.) that can neither be assimilated by the false conservative reality nor fully denied by its inhabitants — thus puncturing the doublethink bubble.

If these are examples of fragility, then the window of time during which we can exploit its weakness is extremely limited. The 1991 recession is a long time ago, the ongoing tragedy Bush created in Iraq was rapidly disappeared and is now all but invisible, except for the ritual, and usually deliberately false, announcement that an Al Qaeda leader has been killed; Katrina is no longer important (despite the fact that it is: NOLA has hardly recovered from the double whammy of a natural disaster catastrophic engineering disaster and the Bush administration’s criminal negligence); and the 2008 financial meltdown (aided and abetted by movement conservatives) is now owned lock, stock, and rotted-fish barrel by the Obama administration.

While it’s useful to know that there is very little time to take advantage of the rightwing media’s fragility, this is neither a particularly new, or powerful, insight. More interesting to me is Sanchez’s description of engagement. I am aware that I read it very differently than Sanchez intended. That is because he is interested in understanding infighting among movement conservatives while I am only interested in fomenting it. Also, Sanchez wishes to increase the intellectual heft of modern conservatism while I think that it is impossible and want simply to marginalize it.

When it comes to engagement, I view it – within the context of our current public discourse – in purely operational, of if you prefer, in thoroughly cynical, terms. In short, engagement, and disengagement, are tactics for gaining power. Engagement with the conservative movement’s ideas is not possible because the conservative movement has no genuinely serious ideas (something Sanchez, at least in the present post, all but admits). In 21st Century America, engagement is a tactic, it is simply a discourse with two objectives, neither of them having anything remotely to do with a search for truth or good solutions: the attainment and retention of power.

Privileging the power aspects of engagement – as opposed to privileging the concept that it is an unfettered exchange of honest minds – is a notion so illiberal that many smart liberals – eg, Bob Somerby – react with howls of fury when other liberals – eg, Maddow, one of Bob’s pet peeves – mock, denounce, and otherwise refuse to engage the rightwing by respecting either rightwing political operatives or their victims/participants – that is, the people they are so successfully duping. What Maddow gets that Somerby doesn’t is that there is nothing serious about what the right says, except their will to power. You can engage until you’re blue in the face, and all you will do is lower yourself to their level and raise them to yours.*

In the following passage, Sanchez is interested, among other things, in prodding the likes of AEI and Fox News to strengthen conservatism by acting more intellectually secure; rather than exiling David Frum, or merely dismissing the NY Times as too liberal to consider seriously, he is urging movement conservatives to engage them by welcoming their disagreement and arguing honestly and openly with them.

Good luck with that, Julian. But if we look at what Sanchez has written in a more general way, as simply a critique of the tactics of engagement and disengagement, and then apply what he says to the problem of how liberals should engage (or not), we find that he is both very insightful but also, at least in one important detail, quite mistaken:

The more successfully external sources of information have been excluded to date, the more unpredictable the effects of a breach become. Internal criticism is then especially problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal. It’s not just that any particular criticism might have to be taken seriously coming from a fellow conservative. Rather, it’s that anything that breaks down the tacit equivalence between “critic of conservatives and “wicked liberal smear artist” undermines the effectiveness of the entire information filter. If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it sincerely—maybe even when it comes from the New York Times. And there is nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled by anger than a conversation. A more intellectually secure conservatism would welcome this, because it wouldn’t need to define itself primarily in terms of its rejection of an alien enemy.

To repeat, I am reading what Sanchez writes here in the most general way possible, as observations about how engagement and disengagement work as tactics. Further, I reject his moral judgements because I see engagement not as a moral imperative but, when dealing with the rightwing, simply as a tool, with as much moral valence as a screwdriver.** As engagement is not necessarily a moral good if it provides status to a movement or person who doesn’t deserve it, disengagement is not necessarily bad if it clears the intellectual space so that a real conversation can take place. In other words, just as you don’t waste your time arguing whether there was a UFO behind the Hale-Bopp comet, you don’t squander the time discussing healthcare reform arguing about death panels.

What Sanchez gets right is that engagement elevates the status of the engaged idea (and the people engaged). That is why movement conservatives keep on demanding that liberals “engage” with them and, then when we do, they use the opportunity to laugh, mock, denounce, and revile. That is also why I began publicly insisting, since 2002, that rather than “engage” advocates of the Bush/Iraq insanity, we laugh at them, ie, refuse to take them seriously. We didn’t – or rather, the media approved pseudo-liberal voices didn’t, and the rest is not history so much as an ongoing tragedy that our grandchildren will still be trying to cope with.

What Sanchez gets wrong, at least as far as I’m concerned – ie, as someone who neither seeks to, nor will engage neo-fascist movement conservatives beyond mockery and the expression of contempt – is the issue of insecurity. I, for one, am quite secure about the quality of my ideas. I am, however, quite terrified at the political insecurity not merely of liberal ideas, and not only of liberal politicians, but of liberal democracy itself. I mean that in the broadest sense of the term: what is sometimes called a democratic government, or more pretentiously, “the Enlightenment project,” ie, a society that privileges reason over adherence to any specific religious creed, a society that governs itself rather than one that is constructed as the personal property of a single member of an aristocratic class.

I’m quite certain about the high intellectual quality of liberalism and the notion of a democratic republic. I am extremely uncertain, to paraphrase Franklin, about whether or not we can keep it.

As long as we continue to engage modern conservatives and take their ideas seriously, we continue to provide them intellectual and political status they neither deserve nor should have. Again: you don’t argue theology with a Bible thumper who tells you the world was literally created in 6 days. Not even William Jennings Bryan was so ignorant and stupid. You laugh at him. And you most certainly make sure he gets nowhere close to obtaining a seat on a local school board, let alone hold national power. And, as Howard Dean so intelligently understood, you challenge the rightwing and Republicans everywhere.

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*Whether Maddow is good at “disengaging” conservatives is a separate question. While some of Somberby’s criticisms are well-taken, on the whole, I think she does a very good job. But I agree with Bob about this: liberals need to get a lot better about understanding how to describe our ideas and confront the right. There are many ways to disengage them. As great as it is, the approach Stewart, Colbert, and Maddow uses is hardly the only one. Nor is it sufficient.

** Someone is bound to maliciously misread this as implying that I am not interested in intellectual engagement. So let’s say this very slowly and clearly: Nothing could be further from the truth. I crave intellectual engagement with people and ideas I disagree with. But the modern conservative movement does not have any ideas it takes seriously other than the will to power. Therefore they cannot be engaged. However, with enough effort, the conservative movement can be returned to the margins of American public discourse. Until that happens, genuine engagement with real ideas is impossible on a national level, a lesson Obama is learning the hard way.

“We Are Done Backing Up”

by digby

I can’t help but feel a little sorry for this guy. He’s a sad old thing. But why couldn’t he find meaning in his life mentoring poor kids? Why do these people find so much meaning in this faux macho, nihilistic silliness?

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Where On Earth Did They Get This Idea?

by digby

Chris Matthews was very confused about all this socialism talk today:

Chris Matthews: … These are sort of middle of the road solutions. Why is everybody calling it socialism?

Richard Wolfe: It has nothing to do with socialism. Any basic study of socialism will tell you this is way far away from that. This idea that the governments taking over everything is kind of a mushball of the auto situation and the banks and the recovery act. And as the president says, a third of that money went in to taxes which these folks ought to be supporting. This had been a very effective caricature, it’s been spread, as you know through the right wing echo chamber. But I don’t know that this has got anything to do with what this administration’s doing.

Let’s just put to rest once and for all this notion that the “socialist” meme has anything to do with auto-bailouts and stimulus packages. This mantra came from the Republican Party and it started long before Obama was elected.

Here’s a little blast from October of 2008:

“This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing,” Todd Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally outside St. Louis. “It’s a referendum on socialism.” “With all due respect,” Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, “the man is a socialist.” At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned against Obama’s tax proposals. “Friends,” she said, “now is no time to experiment with socialism.” And McCain, discussing those proposals, agreed that they sounded “a lot like socialism.”

This was fairly typical:

KBYR talk radio host Eddie Burke admits he is a conservative and a “Palinista.”

But on Wednesday Burke resorted to name calling when he found out Alaska Women Reject Palin planned to host a Saturday rally.

“They’re a bunch of socialist maggots, that’s what I’m going to call them — socialist maggots, that’s what they are, a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots,” said Burke.

For some reason nobody seemed to have thought that stuff could possibly be taken seriously back in the campaign. It was a new dawn. But it was out there being flogged by the highest levels of the GOP.

In fact, you may recall this from 2004:

“John Kerry is a French-speaking Socialist from Massachusetts, who is more liberal than Ted Kennedy.” Senator Trent Lott at the Neshoba County Fair.

Or this, from four years before that:

During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” a young woman asked him why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.” The exchange continued:

Young woman: Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and stuff?

McCain explained that he thought people had a obligation to give back a little if they did well, but that was in his “maverick” incarnation. He’d be drawn and quartered by the baggers for saying that today. But the question was asked. In fact, they’ve been throwing around the “s” word on the right for over a century and I would guess not 5% of them have ever had a clue about what it really means.

For some reason, progressives thought they were just being quaint when they said this stuff last fall. They really mean it. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with Democratic party policies. This is a faith based tribal assumption that has no literal meaning. It’s just a primal war cry.

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Aaaaah

by digby

….now it all makes sense:

After the Security and Exchange Commission accused Goldman Sachs of fraud, numerous right-wing media figures have accused the Obama administration of attempting “to destroy Goldman Sachs” in order to “shift public opinion” in favor of financial reform. Simultaneously, conservative media have also falsely claimed that the financial reform legislation creates a “permanent bailout fund,” which is “the payoff” Wall Street “has been waiting for.”

Cognitive dissonance is a feature not a bug.

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Stand Against The Forces of Fear

by digby

President Clinton gave this speech in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. It was widely lauded at the time for helping to heal the nation:

Thank you very much. Governor Keating and Mrs. Keating, Reverend Graham, to the families of those who have been lost and wounded, to the people of Oklahoma City, who have endured so much, and the people of this wonderful state, to all of you who are here as our fellow Americans.

I am honored to be here today to represent the American people. But I have to tell you that Hillary and I also come as parents, as husband and wife, as people who were your neighbors for some of the best years of our lives.

Today our nation joins with you in grief. We mourn with you. We share your hope against hope that some may still survive. We thank all those who have worked so heroically to save lives and to solve this crime — those here in Oklahoma and those who are all across this great land, and many who left their own lives to come here to work hand in hand with you.

We pledge to do all we can to help you heal the injured, to rebuild this city, and to bring to justice those who did this evil.

This terrible sin took the lives of our American family, innocent children in that building, only because their parents were trying to be good parents as well as good workers; citizens in the building going about their daily business; and many there who served the rest of us — who worked to help the elderly and the disabled, who worked to support our farmers and our veterans, who worked to enforce our laws and to protect us. Let us say clearly, they served us well, and we are grateful.

But for so many of you they were also neighbors and friends. You saw them at church or the PTA meetings, at the civic clubs, at the ball park. You know them in ways that all the rest of America could not.

And to all the members of the families here present who have suffered loss, though we share your grief, your pain is unimaginable, and we know that. We cannot undo it. That is God’s work.

Our words seem small beside the loss you have endured. But I found a few I wanted to share today. I’ve received a lot of letters in these last terrible days. One stood out because it came from a young widow and a mother of three whose own husband was murdered with over 200 other Americans when Pan Am 103 was shot down. Here is what that woman said I should say to you today:

The anger you feel is valid, but you must not allow yourselves to be consumed by it. The hurt you feel must not be allowed to turn into hate, but instead into the search for justice. The loss you feel must not paralyze your own lives. Instead, you must try to pay tribute to your loved ones by continuing to do all the things they left undone, thus ensuring they did not die in vain.

Wise words from one who also knows.

You have lost too much, but you have not lost everything. And you have certainly not lost America, for we will stand with you for as many tomorrows as it takes.

If ever we needed evidence of that, I could only recall the words of Governor and Mrs. Keating. If anybody thinks that Americans are mostly mean and selfish, they ought to come to Oklahoma. If anybody thinks Americans have lost the capacity for love and caring and courage, they ought to come to Oklahoma.

To all my fellow Americans beyond this hall, I say, one thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil. They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life.

Let us teach our children that the God of comfort is also the God of righteousness. Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind. Justice will prevail.

Let us let our own children know that we will stand against the forces of fear. When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death, let us honor life. As St. Paul admonished us, let us not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Yesterday Hillary and I had the privilege of speaking with some children of other federal employees –children like those who were lost here. And one little girl said something we will never forget. She said, we should all plant a tree in memory of the children. So this morning before we got on the plane to come here, at the White House, we planted tree in honor of the children of Oklahoma.

It was a dogwood with its wonderful spring flower and its deep, enduring roots. It embodies the lesson of the Psalms — that the life of a good person is like a tree whose leaf does not wither.

My fellow Americans, a tree takes a long time to grow, and wounds take a long time to heal. But we must begin. Those who are lost now belong to God. Some day we will be with them. But until that happens, their legacy must be our lives.

Thank you all, and God bless you.

Unfortunately, the same voices of hate still spew their bile, and have been joined by many more. There’s one in particular who hasn’t missed a beat.

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Hounding Huckleberry

by digby

The teabaggers really don’t like Huckleberry. And it’s not because of any rumors about his sexual orientation mind you — they’ll tell you they don’t care a whit about anyone’s private life. They hate him for selling out the country —- because he’s being blackmailed for being gay.

Regardless of the truth about Huck’s sexual orientation, it should be noted that this is a favorite rightwing trope — the closeted gay person being blackmailed by commies (inside and outside the government):

In the 1950s, more bombshells were to detonate in the overall offensive against the “Lavender Menace,” which had become a foil for the right-wing in the domestic Cold War.

In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two gay double-agents working in British intelligence, fled to the Soviet Union. This was grist for the mill, linking homosexuality with communist “treason.”

In 1952, worldwide publicity accompanied the entrapment and arrest of British mathematician and computer innovator Alan Turing. He was one of 1,686 men rounded up and charged with “gross indecency with males.” Turing had risen to fame during World War II after he deciphered a Nazi secret code.

Turing was sentenced to a year of hormonal treatments, which reportedly caused impotence and breast development, and became the target of British government scrutiny as a potential “subversive.” He killed himself two years later, at the age of 41.

In the U.S., transphobia also took center stage in 1952. When Christine Jorgensen’s plane touched down carrying her home from Denmark, where she’d sought hormonal and surgical help with sex reassignment, 300 reporters surged forward, shouting questions as flash bulbs popped.

She became the brunt of a dehumanizing and degrading campaign from the bully pulpits of radio, newspaper and television.

And that same year, even cold warrior Sen. Joseph McCarthy was publicly baited as a homosexual…

After the 1952 election, in which the Republicans won back Senate control, McCarthy took over as chair of the Investigations Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations. He hired 25-year-old attorney Roy Cohn as his chief counsel. Cohn in turn recruited David Schine, later rumored to be his lover, to become chief consultant.

Cohn had close contacts within the FBI. That was important for McCarthy, who reportedly worked hand-in-glove with J. Edgar Hoover’s bureau between 1950 and 1953.

One of Hoover’s agents, William Sullivan, later conceded, “We were the ones who made the McCarthy hearings possible. We fed McCarthy all the material he was using.”

This information sharing was covert and quite illegal. Although bound by law to share information only with the executive branch, the bureau had also reportedly leaked background checks to Congress.

Hoover was said to have recommended Roy Cohn for the post with McCarthy because he was impressed by the young attorney’s railroading of Communist Party members Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair on charges of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Hoover himself has been rumored to have had a long-term affair with an assistant, Clyde Tolson.

“As McCarthy’s henchman and chief counsel he [Cohn–LF] was responsible for grilling suspected communists on their own sexual tendencies and on whether other people had ‘homosexual tendencies.’ Cohn and McCarthy subpoenaed gay men in the arts and threatened to out them if they did not produce a list of ‘suspected Communists.’ (wikipedia.com)

McCarthy had made a name for himself as point man for a far right-wing current that attacked the Truman administration for the “loss” of China from imperialist exploitation after the monumental Communist-led revolution there.

But when McCarthy leveled his guns at the Eisenhower administration for not being “tough enough” on communism, he got his comeuppance. That was when he found himself in the cross-hairs of the anti-homosexual witch hunt.

In 1952, journalist Hank Greenspun wrote a column about the ambitious senator which could not have found its way into print without powerful support. It said that “Joe McCarthy is a bachelor of 43 years. … He seldom dates girls and if he does he laughingly describes it as window dressing. It is common talk among homosexuals in Milwaukee who rendezvous in the White Horse Inn that Senator Joe McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities.” (Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 25, 1952)

There are lessons in that and they’re all bad.

This is something in the right wing DNA —- the guy who went after Graham in that video wasn’t even born when that was coming down. They just instinctively go there.

In this day and age it’s hard to feel a lot of sympathy for people like Graham if they are gay and voting against the interests of gay people. Even just being a Republican and gay makes them difficult to defend. But the fact is that if Graham is pretending to be Rahm’s bff, it’s not because he’s being blackmailed for being gay. It’s because he’s doing what he’s assigned to do: make the legislation as bad as he can make it.

They really should have a little more respect for Huck. He’s one of their most effective saboteurs.

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