Month: February 2011

Institutionalizing Structural Unemployment

by digby

Oh why pretend anymore? We have a permanent underclass and it’s growing and nobody gives a damn about the cause. Everybody’s just adapting:

The 65 or so tents that make up Tent City 3 are mounted on wooden pallets and set up in tidy rows. But there’s no hiding the contrast between them and the homes next door – colonial-style houses with big yards, some of which were planted with “no tent city” signs in the months before the encampment moved here in November.
More related to this story

Tent cities don’t typically enjoy a warm welcome anywhere. But in Seattle, where Tent City 3 and other similar camps have operated in an uneasy truce with officials for nearly a decade, there’s a plan to institutionalize the concept.

Seattle officials are considering setting up encampment on city property. Unlike current tent cities that are required to move every three months, this one would stay in one place, operate with the city’s approval and feature storage lockers and trailer-style facilities for showers and cooking. The proposal reflects the scope of Seattle’s homelessness problem and heightened political tension over the issue, which came to a head with the establishment in 2008 of an encampment dubbed Nickelsville – after former mayor Greg Nickels, who was criticized for his homelessness policies. Current Mayor Mike McGinn, who was elected in 2009, acted on the recommendation of a citizens review panel to propose a permanent encampment.

Maybe we should just call them refugee camps and then maybe cities could apply for UN aid.

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Doubling Down on the Super Crazy

by digby

Just in case you thought this lunacy coming from Beck, Gaffney and the rest would go away, I just got this link to David Horowitz’s Front Page magazine in my email.

Those of you who have been watching Glenn Beck, and particularly those who watched last night’s show will see that he is bringing before an audience of millions the message we have been sending from these sites for nearly a decade — that the global Islamic jihad against the West has formed a working alliance with the secular socialist left both at home and abroad. This “unholy alliance” as we called it was first clearly visible in the anti-American demonstrations opposing the Iraq War. These were mislabled “anti-war” demonstrations by the general media. If they were truly anti-war demonstrations there would have been protests at the Iraq embassy calling on Saddam Hussein to honor the Gulf War truce agreement he had signed and the seventeen UN resolutions that attempted to enforce those agreements. But there was not one such demonstration. Not one. We pointed out at the time that the steering committee of the largest coalition against the Iraq War — that is against toppling Saddam Hussein — included on its steering committee the Muslim Students Association, an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2003, we laid out the facts in an 80 page booklet edited by John Perazzo and me, called Who Is The Peace Movement? We have updated the information in our online encyclopedia of the left at www.discoverthenetworks.orgEverything we know about the collaborations of the Communist left with the Soviet police state, about the collaborations of the New Left with the Vietnamese and Cuban Communists, and about the committees of leftists in solidarity with the communist dictatorship in Nicaragua and the Communist guerillas in El Salvador told us that the current left would be in bed with the Islamic Nazis who now confront us. In 2005 I published a book — Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left — which described this uniting of domestic forces with the external threat, and four years later our Frontpage editor, Jamie Glazov followed it with United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror. We have devoted a section of our online encyclopedia of the left to “Radical Islam’s Alliance With the Socialist Left.” The unholy alliance between Islamo-Nazis and the American left described in these pages is the gravest threat our country has ever faced. Now Glenn Beck is bringing our warning and the facts on which it is based to millions of Americans in a series of radio and television shows that you don’t want to miss. They are readily available on the web here. Please copy the urls of his shows into your emails and send them to as many people as possible. The time to wake up America is now; the hour is late.

This is at least consistent. The Hate Radio gasbags are having a hard time figuring out their line on this — is the left aligned with Mubarak or is Mubarak a good guy who is fighting off the Muslim Brotherhood and their leftist allies? ( We know that who ever the bad guy is — authoritarian dictator or Islamic fundamentalist, American liberals are on their side.)

Update: But hey, with friends like these, it’s easy to see how they can make one side of that case:

Tony Blair has described Hosni Mubarak, the beleaguered Egyptian leader, as “immensely courageous and a force for good” and warned against a rush to elections that could bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power.

The former prime minister, now an envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, praised Mubarak over his role in the negotiations and said the west was right to back him despite his authoritarian regime because he had maintained peace with Israel.

But that view is likely to anger many Egyptians who believe they have had to endure decades of dictatorship because the US put Israel’s interests ahead of their freedom.

Oy vey. I’m beginning to wonder if Bush wasn’t Blair’s poodle.

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Joke or Poke?

by digby

I don’t know if this is a joke or a mistake or what, but it is an astonishing tweet from someone who calls herself a journalist:

Anderson Cooper: if your crew is getting beat up in riots in every country you go to-might that suggest UR the 1 doing something wrong?

Jay Newton-Small

Weird, don’t you think?

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On The Ground In Tahrir Square

by digby

If you’re like me you’ve been watching this surreal footage of men on camels and horses beating the Egyptian anti-government forces with whips and bats with a mixture of awe and horror. But nothing evokes the feeling of the scene like this story from journalist Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

The protesters pushed back the pro-Mubarak crowd. Some of their charges (it really looked like a Civil War battle charge designed to overrun an enemy position) were so intense that I feared for the pro-government crowd’s safety. That worry rapidly vanished. The pro-Mubarak group turned out to have great strategic depth, reaching all the way back to the Nile and beyond, and with sheer numbers it pushed forward, gradually rushing past the protesters and me. The Mubarak forces screamed “Yes Mubarak,” and the protesters alternated between “Leave!” and “God is Great!” — with the latter noticeably favored during moments when the protesters had the initiative. The injured were carried back, most with bloody head wounds. Seven middle-aged men stood in prayer next to a tank during the height of the stone-volleys, remarkably placid-looking, like the string quartet fiddling as the Titanic went down.

Gradually, near the entrance to the Egyptian Museum, each side began to realize that neither faction would be overrun completely. Entrenchment began, and a no-man’s-land of about a hundred yards opened up. I stood there in the middle, taking video, dodging rocks coming from the side I could see and holding my notebook to cover the side I couldn’t. Then, right by the Egyptian Museum entrance, five men in plainclothes grabbed me, hit me three times, twice in the back and once in the chest, and brought me toward the Museum itself. They grabbed my video camera and still camera, shouting “memory card,” and tried to break it when they couldn’t figure out how to remove it. Then two of them grabbed my arms and ejected me from the square, onto the Nile corniche, which was so calm that the first person I met was a newspaper journalist who had to ask me whether we were among Mubarak supporters or protesters.

I don’t know whether he stayed, but if he waited another half hour his uncertainty about the sentiments of the crowd around us would evaporate. The pro-Mubarak group flooded the square, and its strategy became clear: All the entrances to the plaza were being probed and, if found lightly defended, overrun. I was now on the outside among the forward surge; no one was permitted to leave, but a trickle of captured protesters came out, each surrounded by at least a hundred screaming Mubarak supporters, and being beaten so intensely that I couldn’t see their faces, only a circle of waving sticks and fists, raining down on whatever unfortunate was at the center. One female protester was brought out, thrashed, and delivered to a military unit inside the Egyptian Museum grounds.

read the whole thing.

Keep in mind that the Egyptian police are well known to infiltrate protests and create their own in order to keep up a pretense of free speech and dissent. They are good at this.

The other day I wrote a post featuring the impressions and photos from photographer David Degner at BagNewsNotes in which he wrote:

“So, what is so significant about the photo from Wednesday is that it possibly represents the last vestige of the old paradigm, of the exploitative tactics with policemen in a circle letting a show of protest go on. As of now, that system is gone. You do have to walk around the tanks to get into Tahrir Square right now, but once you’re in, it’s a free game. You can say anything you want. You can lead chants. It’s completely different.”

It’s possible that the old “show protests” are over. But it appears a new one’s taken their place.

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Say What?

by digby

When did it happen that the most idiotic people in the United States felt that they were the one’s most qualified to lead us? Is it the fault of the “self-esteem” movement? Walmart? Sellavision?

Here’s the latest from one of the most powerful people on the planet:

“The consensus behind the climate change bill collapsed and then further deteriorated with the personal and political collapse of Vice President [Al] Gore,” Kirk told Greenwire.

Huh? TPM explains:

He’s probably referring to this: in 2009, a massage therapist in Oregon went to the police and accused Al Gore of sexually assaulting her three years previously. Gore ultimately wasn’t prosecuted. Soon thereafter, he and his wife divorced separated. Still it’s hard to figure how whatever happened that night in 2006 has any bearing on the greenhouse effect.

Yeah, it’s hard to figure.

This is quite typical of a certain mindset that says you can discount someone’s work if their personal lives are questionable. It’s why people who want to shut down whistleblowers always focus on their personal issues to discredit them. But this is just ridiculous. Gore really does seem to have been ti victim of a hoax in those accusations and if divorce is enough to ruin someone’s credibility then half the Senate should be dismissed.

Not to mention that this is just embarrassingly moronic on every level.

I’m frankly more worried about this planet being in the hands of human beings over the next year than I am about long term climate change at this point. It’s a miracle we haven’t blown ourselves up.

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Look At the Shiny Object

by digby

Yesterday Debbie Wasserman-Shultz came out swinging against the latest GOP assault on women, calling the new requirement that only those who are the victims of “forcible” rape be entitled to government funded abortion, “violence against women” and she’s right. This is a strong element of the abortion debate and it gets to the very essence of the anti-abortion argument, namely that pregnancy is God’s punishment for female sexuality. (That’s so twisted, it’s hard to even wrap your mind around it.)

But I suspect the heinousness of this latest attack is no accident. The conservatives understand the art of negotiation and I think they have put this provision in there for the express purpose of creating a firestorm, drawing the attention of the pro-choice groups and then “reluctantly” giving it up in exchange for the Democrats giving in on all the other, less sexy, changes they really want. Changes which will restrict abortion for far more people throughout the country than this rape redefinition ever would.

The fight to extend the Hyde Amendment and make the permanent law of the land has been going on for more than 30 years. It has been a hard fought battle, with the forces for women losing in increments, over and over and over again, mostly due to the fact that they’ve been used as bargaining chips in “more important” battles. Frederick Clarkson wrote a great piece about this battle a while back at Religion Dispatches which is well worth reading in its entirety, if you aren’t aware of this history:

Prior to Hyde, about a third of all abortions performed in the United States were for poor women on Medicaid. “No other medical procedure was singled out for exclusion,” the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF) reported in 2005. “Today, 33 states have followed suit, prohibiting state Medicaid funding [for abortion] as well.” All but one of these states (South Dakota) follows the Hyde exceptions of rape, incest, or life endangerment. The report details the disproportionate burdens placed on disadvantaged women, and observes that “women of color disproportionately depend on such coverage, making abortion funding a matter of racial justice as well as economic justice and women’s rights.” But the federal restrictions did not stop there. Over the years, Congress has also legislated against access to abortion services for women in the military and Peace Corps, disabled women, residents of the District of Columbia, federal prisoners, and women covered by the Indian Health Service. Indeed, it could be argued that except for the legal right to an abortion, federal policies constitute the greatest abortion reduction program of all. “Prior to 1996,” states the NNAF report, “legal immigrants and US citizens were equally eligible for Medicaid.” But the 1996 welfare reform law signed by President Clinton required a five-year waiting period before most new legal immigrants could even apply. Less than half of the states fill in the five-year gap with their own funds, and nine states permanently deny Medicaid coverage to non-citizen residents. Defenders of abortion rights might legitimately worry that “conscience clauses” could also be said to have a venerable history. The original conscience clause legislation passed in 1973 in the wake of Roe states, according to the Congressional Research Service, that public officials may not require individuals or entities who receive certain public funds to perform abortion or sterilization procedures, or to make facilities or personnel available for the performance of such procedures, if such performance “would be contrary to [the individual or entity’s] religious beliefs or moral convictions.” This provision has allowed even major medical facilities (such as Roman Catholic hospitals) to refuse to deal with abortions without jeopardizing their ability to receive public grants and contracts or affect their tax-exempt status. A new rule promulgated late in the Bush administration expanded and particularized the exemptions, stating that health workers may even refuse to provide information or advice regarding abortion. The Obama administration has rescinded the Bush rule, but says it plans to leave some kind “reasonable” exemptions in place.

It points out that with Obama’s startling public comments that Hyde is “tradition”, a consensus rather suddenly formed among DC liberals that this battle was no longer on the agenda. I know that when I heard it, I felt a sick feeling in my stomach — the feeling you get when you know that the goalpost has just been moved halfway down the field. The “tradition” is one of Democrats selling out women over and over again. Read Clarkson’s piece to see how the health care bill did it again.

So now we are dealing with a new congress that is determined to pick up where the health care bill left off. And it appears that the Democrats are getting distracted by the bright shiny object and failing to engage on the real issue the Republicans are targeting, which is a further restriction on abortion rights and the final codification of Hyde. And as usual, I have to wonder if they can possibly be this dumb or if they are preparing to cave as part of their ongoing quixotic strategy to find “common ground” going into 2012. Indeed, considering the president’s comments about “tradition” I have to think he would be more than willing to entertain a bipartisan agreement on this issue. There is no reason to believe that he won’t sign the bill. (Of course, he and the Democrats can heroically take credit for ensuring that there was no “rape” provision, so we’ll all be asked to cheer our team for the good work they are doing on our behalf.)

In my view, if there is to be any chance that this “compromise” doesn’t happen, pro-choice groups should not play this game at all. They should not play their designated role in this as Wasserman-Shultz did yesterday and instead demand that Hyde be rolled back completely. It is an unconscionable exception to every other law in this land in that it allows individuals and institutions to decide their “consciences” don’t allow them to pay taxes for a specific program. (The irony of this happening at the same time that liberals are fighting like wildcats for the health care mandate is more than I can take.)

Frances Kiesling made the case during the health care reform battle:

But the immediate take away is the cold hard fact that our biggest and most costly defeat since 1973 was the enactment of the Hyde Amendment and our lack of a total, uncompromising commitment to overturning it. If nothing else happens as a result of this defeat, complete and total dedication to overturning Hyde must be the centerpiece, indeed the single objective of our movement. It is not clear if the effect of the Stupak Amendment will be that the door will close on ever restoring federal funds for abortion, but every effort to make sure that does not happen must be made. We must convince enough people that the only immorality is using poor women as a way of expressing one’s moral outrage. Either we all have the right to choose or none of us has it.

The pro-choice groups got rolled in that battle. And perhaps it’s foolish to think it won’t happen again given the history. But it doesn’t have to. If enough pressure were brought to bear on this, they could keep this from being another bipartisan sell-out of a core Democratic constituency.

In any case, don’t be fooled by the shiny object. This is just another example of Republicans knowing how to negotiate. The question is whether or not it’s a real negotiation or a kabuki dance where the Democrats are only playing the role of the outraged fool.

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Neocon Ghosts

by digby

Just this morning I wrote about something I thought was was a silly fringe conspiracy theory about Obama being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. I spoke too soon. Apparently, famed neocon Frank Gaffney, original PNAC founder and respected enough figure to appear on television frequently, serve on boards and speak at mainstream gatherings, believes that the government has been infiltrated to the very top:

After his speech, ThinkProgress caught up with Gaffney to probe his conspiracy further. Echoing the McCarthyist anti-communist rhetoric of the 1950s, Gaffney told us that there were already people in the federal government doing the bidding of “stealth jihadists.” When we asked Gaffney to name names, he pointed to President Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano:

TP: Do you think [Sharia law] has already infiltrated the federal government? GAFFNEY: There are questionable people who are sympathetic to the program of the stealth jihadists who have influence with the United States government. Some I think are actually working for it, but for sure people who are persuaded that the folks that they need to work with to reach out to the Muslim-American community, for example, who incessantly turn to Muslim Brotherhood organizations for that purpose, are a very real problem. TP: Can you name a few names, for instance in the federal government? GAFFNEY: John Brennan. John Brennan is the Homeland Security Advisor for the President of the United States TP: He’s complicit in this creep of Sharia law? GAFFNEY: He’s absolutely daft on what the nature of the threat and is insistent upon using Brotherhood-front organizations as sources of information and as vehicles for reaching out to the Muslim-American community. Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, has said that these sorts of groups are “sources of wisdom,” as he puts it, to the United States government. Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is incessantly meeting with Muslim Brotherhood front organizations and I think has in the past, if not today, employed people who are associated with them.

Gosh, they don’t look like terrorists.

Nobody can say he’s a partisan paranoid witch hunter, however. This is from a few weeks ago:

With the Conservative Political Action Conference under fire for allowing participation by a homosexual activist group called GOProud and for a financial scandal in which some $400,000 was misappropriated under the watch of current leadership, Frank Gaffney, a leader of the conservative movement for the last 30 years, charges that CPAC has come under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is working to bring America under Saudi-style Shariah law. Gaffney, deputy assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, is founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and co-author of the new book “Shariah: The Threat to America.” He told WND that Islamism has infiltrated the American Conservative Union, the host of CPAC, in the person of Washington attorney and political activist Suhail Khan and a group called Muslims for America. Khan is a member of the ACU board and, according to Muslims for America, will assist the group’s presence at CPAC during the 2011 meeting Feb. 10-12. Gaffney also accuses another ACU board member, leading conservative political organizer Grover Norquist, of helping the Muslim Brotherhood spread its influence in the nation’s capital.

Apparently, Gaffney was into the Muslim brotherhood before the Muslim brotherhood was cool. I’m sure this Egyptian uprising will up his speaking fees considerably.

Of course, he’s always been a loon. Recall his views on Al Jazeera:

Gaffney: We’re talking about a news organization, so called, that is promoting bin Laden, that is promoting Zawahiri, that is promoting Zarqawi, that is promoting beheadings, that is promoting suicide bombers, that is other ways enabling the propaganda aspects of this war to be fought by our enemies, and I think that puts it squarely in the target category.

Whether the best way to do it is with bombs or through other means is something we could discuss, but I think it’s fair game, under these circumstances, given the way it conducts itself.

He’s got a little problem with Arabs…

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Weather day

by digby

Good God:

Thousands of residents fled their homes and crammed into shelters in northeastern Australia as a cyclone described as the most powerful in the country’s history and with a 650 km (400 mile) wide front barreled toward the coastline on Wednesday.

“We are facing a storm of catastrophic proportions,” Queensland state premier Anna Bligh said after Cyclone Yasi was upgraded to a maximum-strength category five storm.

It is expected to hit the coast on Wednesday evening, packing winds in excess of 280 km (175 miles) per hour. The weather bureau predicted it would be the strongest ever to hit Australia, Sky TV reported…

The cyclone is 650 km off the coast of northeastern Australia and is expected to make landfall at 10 pm (1200 GMT) on the Queensland coast between Cairns and Innisfail. Its strength is on a par with Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.

This is on the heels of a once in a century flood just weeks ago in Brisbane.

Meanwhile, in the northern hemisphere:

A new study has found that the water flowing into the Arctic from the North Atlantic is at its warmest level for more than 2,000 years.

This could endanger polar bears, which need the ice in order to survive.

Scientists at the University of Colorado in Boulder examined tiny plankton-like organisms on the seabed of the Fram strait, which is the main carrier of ocean heat to the Arctic.

They found that back then the temperature in the Arctic water was on average 3.4C (38F), but that has now gone up to 5.2C (41F).

Higher temperatures ‘are presumably linked to the Arctic amplification of global warming’, the study concluded, adding that global warming ‘is most likely another key element in the transition to a future ice-free Arctic Ocean’.

Whatever. Science is bullshit. Republican congressmen proudly tell us so:

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Ugly American

by digby

I have been scolded once too often about my use of intemperate language comparing right wingers and their policies to authoritarian dictators and Islamic extremists, so I will leave it to @AdamSerwer to do it for me:

Radical cleric calls for ethnic cleansing http://bit.ly/hiL94u

What’s that?

“I cannot imagine as an American being told that I could not live in certain places in America because I was Christian, or because I was white, or because I spoke English,” Huckabee said. “I would be outraged if someone told me that in my country, I would be prohibited and forbidden to live in a part of that country, for any reason.” Huckabee was attending a cornerstone-laying ceremony for a new neighborhood on the Mount of Olives in east Jerusalem — a disputed territory in the Middle East that Huckabee says should belong to Israel. East Jerusalem and the adjacent West Bank aren’t recognized as Israeli land by most of the international community; Israel annexed East Jerusalem shortly after the Six Day War, while the remainder of the West Bank — where there are numerous Israeli settlements — remains under military administration.. Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Huckabee said, should settle in “territory that [is] in the hands of Muslims, in the hands of Arabs,” as determined by the “international community.”

Maybe we could just have Huck and Helen Thomas settle this with a cage match?

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Thanking The Owners

by digby

It seems like only yesterday that Dick Cheney was conducting meetings on energy policy with only members of the industry in attendance. It caused quite a stir for a while but in the end it was determined that there’s nothing wrong with a Republican White House openly whoring for its patrons. (Democrats, as we learned previously, are not even allowed to offer theirs a cup of coffee.) That’s just how it works.

But Darrell Issa, the new scourge of White House secrecy, has taken this to a new level:

In December, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) outsourced his job to business lobbyists when he sent letters to over 150 trade associations and companies, asking them to outline which Obama administration regulations he should target as chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He sent the letters to a wide array of fossil fuel producers, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers, telecommunications companies, and other interests. Issa has repeatedly refused to share the responses he received from these industry leaders, even with Democrats on his committee, though he promises to do so soon. While Issa drags his feet, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the ranking Democrat on Issa’s committee, has sent letters to each group asking for a copy of the responses, noting that “[w]ithholding Committee records is not only a violation of House rules, but a waste of time that could have been avoided with the smallest degree of bipartisan cooperation.” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has also made the same request of the companies and trade groups, and received 33 voluntary responses. Many heavy-hitting business interests like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Monsanto Corporation, and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers declined to reply to CREW. But a review of the companies that did voluntarily respond illustrates a concentrated industry push to combat regulations on everything from lead paint standards to EPA emission rules to fire testing of mattresses.

Read on for the details.

I’m sure Issa has only good intentions and that his own secrecy is perfectly reasonable. Certainly, committee chairmen should always ask for their party’s campaign donors’ wish list as their the first act upon taking office. I think this is what they call “free markets.”

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