Month: January 2011

Nothing to see here folks …

by digby

This is an astonishing list of violent rhetoric and political violence over the past two years. In fact, it’s almost unbelievable.

Here’s just one week last summer, which culminated a week later with this shoot out with police:

July 2, 2010—The Wyoming Department of Revenue suspends sales tax collections at the state’s gun shows because of “increasing animosity” toward field tax agents. Dan Noble, director of the department’s Excise Tax Division, cites one particular incident at a gun show that “crossed the line” and says, “We tend to have more trouble at gun shows than any place … I have 10 field reps throughout the state, and every one of them has experienced some animosity … I don’t want to put my people at risk.”

July 3, 2010—Joyce Kaufman, a conservative radio hosts on WFTL in Florida, tells a crowd of supporters at a Fort Lauderdale Tea Party event, “I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendments rights was they gave me a Second Amendment. And if ballots don’t work, bullets will. This is the standoff. When I say I’ll put my microphone down on November 2nd if we haven’t achieved substantial victory, I mean it. Because if at that point I’m going to up into the hills of Kentucky, I’m going to go out into the Midwest, I’m going to go up in the Vermont and New Hampshire outreaches and I’m going to gather together men and women who understand that some things are worth fighting for and some things are worth dying for.”

July 6, 2010—Herb Titus, a lawyer for Gun Owners of America, tells Religion Dispatches, “If you have a people that has basically been disarmed by the civil government, then there really isn’t any effectual means available to the people to restore law and liberty and that’s really the purpose of the right to keep and bear arms—is to defend yourself against a tyrant.” Titus goes on to cite the “totalitarian threat” posed by “Obamacare” and “what Sarah Palin said about the death panels.”

You won’t believe how much of this there is out there. It’s swirling throughout the ether. It’s real.

Via Double Dutch Politics, recall the words of Nancy Pelosi just a little over a year ago:

I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because i saw this myself in the late 70s in San Francisco, this kind of rhetoric. … It created a climate in which violence took place. … I wish we would all curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements and understand that some of the ears that it is falling on are not a balanced as the person making the statements may assume.

Also recall this creepy response:

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Bit Of A Stretch

by digby

The intertubes are screeching with right wingers insisting that despite his obvious mental problems, anti-government rhetoric and Paulite goldbug obsessions, the fact that he cited “To Kill A Mockingbird” “The Communist Manifesto” and “Main Kampf” means that Jared Loughner is a left winger.

Let’s just say that we don’t really know much right now and anything’s possible, but the fact that he shot a Democratic congresswoman in the head argues just a little bit against that interpretation. It’s not as if there aren’t any right wingers in Arizona.

Update: James Fallows has a great piece on what “political” means when it comes to assassinations.

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The Shooter

by digby

So, this gunman has been identified and from his Youtube page it appears he a schizophrenic young man who’s been under the influence of extremist right wing rhetoric. Political assassins are often mentally ill — history’s full of them. So let’s not kid ourselves — it’s not a coincidence that he shot a congresswoman. His videos are full of right wing political gibberish and from what he said in his bizarre videos, it’s clear that all the looney tunes anti-government talk flying around the ether and an excessive gun culture fed into his paranoia.

What sparked his actions today are still unknown.

Here’s the last president who faced an outbreak of horrible political violence during his term and I think it holds up well today:

Before I begin today to talk about education and training, I’d like to say just a word or two if I might, before this audience of educators and people who believe in and appreciate the value of free speech, about where we are in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing and what we are going to do about the kind of America our children will inherit.

Yesterday Hillary and I joined tens of thousands of people in Oklahoma City, and of course millions of you all across the country, to witness the end result of abject hatred. I was there, as President, to represent all of you in the mourning. But also I felt that we were there, Hillary and I, as ordinary American citizens as well, as husband and wife, as parents, as neighbors of those people.

No words can do justice to how moving it was to be there yesterday. No words can do justice to the courage of those who worked in the rescue operation around the clock. And one person has already given her life in that endeavor. No words can do justice to the small acts of kindness and generosity, all the people in Oklahoma who won’t take money at the gas station or the local coffee shop or the barber shop or even at the airline ticket terminal for people who are there working to try to help them put their lives together.

But I will never forget, more than anything else, the faces and the stories of the family members of the victims. I was walking through the room shaking hands with them, and I saw a lady with her children who had been in the Oval Office just a few weeks ago as her husband left my Secret Service detail to go to what seemed to be a less hectic pace of duty in Oklahoma City. I saw the children of a man who was a football hero at the University of Arkansas when so many people who are now on the White House staff were friends of his. The young Air Force sergeant took out two pictures his wife had taken f me just 3 weeks ago when I visited our troops in Haiti. And she was one of those troops, but she came home because we wound down our mission there. And she married her fiance, and 3 days later she went to the Federal building to change her name. And so he had to give me the pictures his wife took. I saw three children, teenage children, with a woman and another child taking care of them. One of them had one of my Inaugural buttons on. Their mother died last year of an illness. Their father went to our Inaugural, and they asked me to sign the pin to their father who is still missing—three teenagers losing both parents.

I could go on and on and on. I say to all of you, first we must complete the rescue effort and the recovery effort. Of course, we must help that community rebuild. We must arrest, convict, and punish the people who committed this terrible, terrible deed, but our responsibility does not end there.

In this country we cherish and guard the right of free speech. We know we love it when we put up with people saying things we absolutely deplore. And we must always be willing to defend their right to say things we deplore to the ultimate degree. But we hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable. You ought to see—I’m sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.

Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences and that freedom has endured in this country for more than two centuries because it was coupled with an enormous sense of responsibility on the part of the American people.

If we are to have freedom to speak, freedom to assemble, and, yes, the freedom to bear arms, we must have responsibility as well. And to those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia, I remind you that we have freedom of speech, too, and we have responsibilities, too. And some of us have not discharged our responsibilities. It is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.

If they insist on being irresponsible with our common liberties, then we must be all the more responsible with our liberties. When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them. When they talk of violence, we must stand against them. When they say things that are irresponsible, that may have egregious consequences, we must call them on it. The exercise of their freedom of speech makes our silence all the more unforgivable. So exercise yours, my fellow Americans. Our country, our future, our way of life is at stake. I never want to look into the faces of another set of family members like I saw yesterday, and you can help to stop it.

Our democracy has endured a lot over these last 200 years, and we are strong enough today to sort out and work through all these angry voices…

… you never know who’s listening.

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Arizona Tea

by digby

Just in case anyone’s not been following what’s been happening in Arizona tea party politics, here’s a little something that will give you an idea about their general outlook:

That’s Ray Stevens, country music star.

They’re very, very, very upset.

Update: Here’s a little bit of rhetoric from Giffords’ Tea party opponent in the last election. Awesome fellow: Her opponent’s campaign was more than a little gun-centric.

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Horror

by digby

You’ve probably heard that Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot today along with what’s being reported as as many as 11 others at a political event in Tuscon. They apparently have the shooter in custody.

We have no idea what the motivation for this is and whether it’s political. But one cannot help but recall that she had been threatened as have others over her health care vote.

We’ll know soon enough.

Update: Reports from Reuters and NPR are that Representative Giffords has died. Awful, awful, awful …

RIP.

Update II: it’s now being reported that she is still in surgery, not deceased. Oy …

Best to remain skeptical of everything right now. Let’s just say that America’s shooting gallery has a problem and leave it at that for the moment.

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The GOP Jobs Program

by digby

A headline this morning at Roll Call reads:

Cantor: Replace Health Care Law to Help Economy

Before everyone goes ballistic bringing out CBO scores and rending their garments about how dishonest and ridiculous this is, let’s remember that all issues are going to be framed by the GOP as “jobs” issues going forward. Tax cuts are about jobs. De-regulation is about jobs. Cutting spending is about jobs. Destroying social security is about jobs. Most importantly, they are going to insist that “the deficit” is about jobs — indeed, they’ve already succeeded in convincing a fair number of Americans that the deficits caused the recession.

Their usual agenda will now be framed as a jobs program and everything the Democrats do will be framed as “job-killing.” The Dems need to recognize this and figure out how to beat the frame rather than screaming hysterically each time they come up with one of their ridiculous claims. The one who is sputtering is the one who is losing.

I would have though that they could use “the party of No” line, insisting that the economy would have been fixed if the Republicans had co-operated, but I’m guessing that the recent victory laps about the most consequential congress since the nation was formed will render that ineffective. But they’d better come up with something, because framing everything is terms of jobs is a very smart move, even if the substance is absurd. Sadly, I think a lot of people are prepared to believe anything at this point.

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“We either live together or we die together”

by digby

These people are putting it on the line:

Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.

Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.

“This is not about us and them,” said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly. “We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together.”

In the days following the brutal attack on Saints Church in Alexandria, which left 21 dead on New Year’ eve, solidarity between Muslims and Copts has seen an unprecedented peak. Millions of Egyptians changed their Facebook profile pictures to the image of a cross within a crescent – the symbol of an “Egypt for All”. Around the city, banners went up calling for unity, and depicting mosques and churches, crosses and crescents, together as one.

That should open some people’s eyes.

h/t to @chrishayes

Who Do You Trust?

by digby

Following up the post below, Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution reminds me of this post, which featured the following:

That seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?

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Out of Touch? Nah, They’re Just Better Than Everyone Else

by digby

Begala and Matalin on Biltzer this afternoon:

Blitzer: In an interview the other day with the New York Times, the president said about his press secretary Robert Gibbs, Paul let me read it to you:

He said “We’ve been on this ride together since I won my Senate primary in 2004 … He’s had a six-year stretch now where basically he’s been going 24/7 with relatively modest pay.”

Now realtively modest pay has caused a bit of a stir out there. We’ve checked and he’s getting 172,200 dollarsa year. The president says that’s relatively modest. the bureau of labor statistics says the mean annual salary in the US is 42,000 dollars. the question is, is the president out of touch? Is he giving the impression that he’s out of touch when he says someone making 172,000 a year is getting a relatively modest salary?

Begala: It that adverb, it’s that modifier “relative.” The president is exactly right. I’m going to defend him on this. Robert Gibbs is an astonishingly powerful man who’s been serving our country. And yeah that’s a good paycheck, it really is. 172 grand? But just to put it into context, the chief flack for Goldman Sachs makes over a million bucks a year, just for being a spokesman for an investment bank! Sarah Palin, some obscure pundit on some other channel, makes ten to fifteen million a year if you add in the coloring books that she publishes.

Gibbs should be in that range. It’s a relatively small amount compared to what he could or should be making in the private sector.

Blitzer: What do you think Mary?

Matalin: I think the president is out of touch, but not for that statement. These jobs, if you take them apart, that salary is little more that three times, maybe four times than the average salary. But he’s not working an average job, he’s not working at an average government job. He really is working, and Paul did this too in the Whiter House, you really do work three shifts a day. You work 24 hours a day. You eat lunch at your desk. There’s many days when you are lucky if you can get to the bathroom. And when you do that for a sustained period, your brain starts to bubble away. So I think it’s a little unfair to attack the president on this, I do.

Blitzer: But does the impression, I guess … what folks out there … take a look at nearly 10 percent unemployment right now, and the president is saying spomebody making 172,000 dollars a year is relatively modest, the impression you get is that the president coulod be out of touch with average folks out there around the country Paul.

Begala: But, but, I do think … again, it’s that word “relatively.” You know a factor in a campaign, in what was otherwise a terrific interview with pastor Rick Warren, John McCain was asked by Pastor Warren what constitutes rich, McCain said “five million dollars a year.” Now he was kind of joking, to tell you the truth. It doesn’t mean John McCain’s out of touch. He was trying to make a point that he wasn’t trying to tax anybody. The President’s trying to make a point here — he’s not trying to say that 172 thousand dollars a year is not a good paycheck. But compared to what the guy could be making… And, as Mary points out, if it’s a hourly wage, then Gibbs is probably making about fifty cents an hour.

Blitzer: And we know he’s working hard and deserves to take some time off because he’s been working hard all these … but, I’ll, Mary, I’ll let you have the final thought.Was the president correct when he said this is a relatively modest paycheck.

Matalin: Uh, uh, I’ll go to your other question which is he …

Blitzer: No no, answer that one…was he right when he said, “this is a relatively modest paycheck.”

Matalin: To the average American it’s a good paycheck. For those kinds of jobs, and those hours, it is minimum wage. That’s how hard those jobs are.

Blitzer: We’ll leave it at that guys.

I’ll just let that sit there for a minute. Read it again, keeping in mind that Robert Gibbs is the presidential press secretary. According to these guys the job is right up there with curing cancer for sheer importance to the future of mankind.

Look, you can’t blame these two. They are both glugging from the same taxpayer trough half the time and have a big investment in believing that what they do is so special and so unique that they are just a little bit better than lesser people who toil at less exalted labor.

And evidently, they truly believe regular people don’t eat lunch at their desks and work long hours and have huge responsibilities. Or if they do, they are in very important jobs like media and investment banking where people are paid what they are “worth.” Indeed, they seem to believe it’s actually a huge sacrifice that someone should have to work for a mere 172k a year(plus BIG perks) even for just a few years until they can cash out like Gibbs is about to do and start making a decent salary of five million dollars a year or more.

This is one of the most revealing conversations Wolf Blitzer accidentally ever led. (Judging from their discomfort toward the end, I’d have to guess they wish they had been asked something else.) And it pretty well confirms for me that they are beyond “out of touch” — they are living in their own universe. If they are comparing public servants to million dollar celebrities rather than average Americans then it says everything you need to know about why they have placed all their faith in the magical markets to fix things. In their America, that’s how it works.

Walter Shapiro wrote about this yesterday and made an excellent point:

Obama’s sympathetic comments about Gibbs’ financial sacrifice illustrate that populism remains an abstraction for the president, despite the persistence of the worst economic downturn since the Depression. In the world of Obama (or Clinton or either Bush), it is par for the course that William Daley, the new White House chief of staff, served as Midwest chairman for JP Morgan Chase between his stints in government. Or that Rahm Emanuel made $16 million as an investment banker during the three years between his departure from the Clinton White House and his 2002 election to the House.

[…]

There was an era (personified by the likes of Truman and Sam Rayburn in the 1950s) when a high-level career in public service and an upper-middle-class income seemed reward enough. These bygone values endure among many in the military and the federal judiciary — not to mention among the underpaid denizens of the White House briefing room. But too often power players in Washington believe that if they see the president every day, appear on television and have a permanent seat on Air Force One, they are entitled to get rich as soon as they leave government.

When it comes to personal money, there is a sense in Washington that what happens within the Beltway stays within the Beltway. But voters are not dumb, even if more than 90 percent of them survive on less than $172,000 a year. What happens in government is not the only trigger for populist outrage. For it is equally easy to become enraged by career arcs after government.

You know, for me it’s even beyond the lack of empathy and common touch. It’s the political malpractice that I can’t get over. Are these people really so insulated in green rooms and limousines and fat cat fundraisers that they have no idea they sound like total assholes? Huge numbers of people in this country are living in economic terror right now, wondering if they are going to have a roof over their heads next month. They’d love to eat lunch at their desk — in fact, they’d love to have a desk. And these idiots are trying to tell us that 172k a year is minimum wage?

I’d like them to tell it to this guy who was featured on a CNN segment just a short while before the pampered celebrities were asked about what a “relatively modest” paycheck is:

I felt like crying right along with him. And then a few minutes later, I felt like throwing up watching the so-called populist Democrat Paul Begala and his sister in arms the cruel PR flack Mary Matalin sit there and tell America that Robert Gibbs is worth so much more than that man and whining that he’s underpaid by only making 172,000 a year. Completely clueless. They live in another world.

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Slogan = Strategy

by digby

Stephen Pearlstein writes about the new GOP meme under a headline saying that “the canard” should be killed. But it’s actually more than a canard:

Republicans these days can’t get through a sentence without tossing in their new favorite adjective, “job-killing.” There’s “job-killing legislation,” in particular the health-care reform law. And “job-killing regulations,” especially anything coming out of the EPA and the IRS. Big deficits are always “job-killing,” which might come as something of a surprise to all you Keynesians out there, along with the “job-killing spending binge” and even “job-killing stimulus projects.” President Obama, we are told repeatedly, runs a “job-killing administration” with a “job-killing agenda” carried out by, you guessed it, a “job-killing bureaucracy.” In the fevered Republican imagination, the entire federal government is a “job-killing machine” or – my personal favorite – a “job-killing beast.” And if you’re a Republican, it is now a violation of House rules to utter the word “taxes” or “tax increase” on the chamber floor without the “job-killing” prefix. (Okay, I’m exaggerating – but only slightly.) Type “job killing” into Google and you’ll get more than 1.2 million hits. On the Factiva news database, it comes up 11,115 times during 2009 and 2010, compared with 1,373 times during the previous two years. A Republican talking point, a Fox News broadcast or a Chamber of Commerce press release is now incomplete without it.

They have been pushing this for some time and it’s far more than just a slogan. They telegraphed what it really is — with a big assist from the media as you will see — last month:

ALEX CASTELLANOS, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Priority No. 1 for the Republicans is going to be an agenda for jobs and growth, and that’s what they’re going to try to put, I think, on the table.

BLITZER: Does that mean repealing the health-care law?

CASTELLANOS: I think the health-care law is going to be part of that, but it’s not going to be, I think, what you see on day one. We don’t want to fall in the same traps, I think, the Democrats did, which is they spent the year they should have been talking about the economy talking about health care. We don’t want to flip that problem on its head, but…

BORGER: But they are going to…

(CROSSTALK)

CASTELLANOS: … smarter than…

BORGER: They are — they’re going to call for the repeal of health care.

CASTELLANOS: Sure, they’re going to call for the repeal of health care. And it’s going to be a big vote.

BORGER: The job-killing health-care bill.

(CROSSTALK)

CASTELLANOS: And it will pass the House and it won’t pass the Senate, and then there will probably be a series of test votes throughout the year, repealing the parts that you don’t want to keep, keep the parts that work. Veterans, things likes that. Deductibility.

But it’s really going to be who gets to keep the focus on the economy, on jobs and growth. But first, whether it’s the president or John Boehner, the first one to put something on the table called a strategy for jobs and growth and how we’re going to compete with China is going to win.

Their “jobs strategy”, if you want to call it that, is the slogan — call all taxes, programs and regulations “job-killers” and say they want to repeal them. The worst thing that happens is that they actually succeed in getting the president to sign on to their agenda. And either way, they blame him for an economy they are betting will remain anemic through 2012.

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