Month: April 2011

Hippie Cops?

by digby

If there is one thing that I thought would never change it was the symbiotic relationship between the conservative and the concept of “law and order.” I’m sure I’ve never seen a police derided as common rabble by the modern Republicans. They’ve been accused of corruption maybe — but members of the enemy tribe? I don’t think so.

So this is quite stunning:

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This class war is creating some very interesting challenges to the usual affiliations of the two parties, especially on the conservative side. Sure, some otherwise Democratic Wall Streeters might be defecting out of pecuniary self-interest, but that’s not unusual. They back both sides. (And how many of there are there? )

But cops? That’s a fundamental change in identity. But between the insistence that every drunk and nutcase should be allowed to carry automatic weapons anywhere they go and this new attack on their ability to negotiate decent wages and benefits, maybe they are seeing that these so-called
law and order types are really just a bunch of thugs.

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Getting ready for act three

by digby

Well hell, nobody could have ever predicted this:

Obama also told Boehner and Reid that the administration continues “to oppose efforts to use this process to further an ideological agenda on the issues that have nothing at all to do with reducing spending or reducing the deficit.” Republican budget hawks in the House, though, continue to push to ban funding for Planned Parenthood, the Environmental Protection Agency and other items. GOP leadership aides have said these legislative “riders” are necessary to get the bill through the House. If the riders are dropped, additional cuts will need to be found in order to get the bill through the House.

Gosh, I’m on pins and needles aren’t you? What ever do you suppose is going to happen?

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Serious People

by digby

This is classic:

Yes indeed, we need serious politicians like this:

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Sad little winky

by digby

Markos’ Saturday hatemailapalooza features what may be the best wingnut email I’ve ever read. And the thing is, the guy isn’t crazy. He’s just really stupid.

This excerpt is just … wow:

to leave you with a thought provoking meataphor, kos: women are known to have more powerful orgasms than men. GUESS WHO PROVOKES MEN TO ORGASM? liberal gays. GUESS WHO PROVOKES WOMEN TO ORGASM? conservative straights. you can suck dick, but i’m gonna eat out my wife’s cunt, KOS. you can eat that fucking jizz, but the POWERFUL CONSERVATIVES can bring a WOMAN TO LOSE CONTROL OF HER BODY. ponder upon that, and THINK before you disarm.

Well.

I have never gotten one quite that colorful, but I can attest to the fact that these general themes are constant among the wingnut emailers. When they send them to a woman, it’s usually about how we fat, hairy, smelly feminazis need to be gang raped to understand just how much we are missing, but you get the drift. One could jump to the conclusion that they have some very serious psychological issues, but that would be giving them too much credit for complexity. They are just morons. Really.

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Ivory Coast Massacre

by digby

I looks as though this is unraveling very quickly:

Soldiers of Ivory Coast’s rival leaders battled for the main city Abidjan on Saturday, clashing by the presidential palace and state TV offices in a conflict so brutal that 800 people have died in one smaller town alone. State television came back on air after fighting took it down for a day, showing Gbagbo looking relaxed and drinking tea, saying the pictures were from his city residence on Saturday. The International Committee of the Red Cross said at least 800 people were killed in intercommunal violence in the western Ivorian town of Duekoue this week. Catholic charity Caritas said scores of people were also missing from the town… Spokesman Patrick Nicholson told The Associated Press that Caritas workers visited Duekoue Wednesday.

He said one neighborhood was filled with bodies of victims killed by gunshots and hacked to death with machetes. He said those killed were civilians that included many refugees from fighting elsewhere in the country, where rival forces were battling over a disputed November election.

The ICRC said earlier this week that thousands have been killed or injured in post-election violence since November, which has driven up to 1 million people from their homes in Abidjan alone…

“We can hear shooting and see soldiers moving but there are also armed civilians running in the streets,” said Camara Arnold, a resident of Cocody, the neighborhood that is home to the state television building and Gbagbo’s residence.

Two white MI-24 attack helicopters belonging to the United Nations peacekeeping mission circled above central Abidjan’s palm-fringed lagoon, but did not intervene.

This would seem like the kind of thing you wouldn’t want to “stand idly by” for if large scale human tragedy and violence moved your conscience. But I’m fairly sure that it doesn’t meet the longstanding American doctrinal test of being a political crisis in a country in which we or our allies happen to have a large financial/strategic interest, so it doesn’t meet our definition of “humanitarian” intervention.

I know. It’s hard to sort these things out. Just because we only help when it’s in our interest doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get credit for doing it out of selfless generosity and deep concern for the plight of others. If it obscures the real motives for our actions and makes a mockery of both democracy and humanitarianism, that’s ok. We feel good about ourselves and that’s important too.

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Lying and Triggers and Fear, Oh My!

by digby

You just have to love these Republicans. They can contradict themselves in the same sentence and then deny that they even opened their mouths:

“People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts,” Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring said. “With all due respect, what the congresswoman is saying is simply untrue — Eric has made clear for months that he is committed to ensuring the long-term viability of these programs by addressing their solvency issues now.”

“What’s indisputable is that doing nothing — which seems to be the position of the president, his party’s leaders, and Congresswoman Schakowsky — will ensure these programs remain on a path to bankruptcy, resulting in a debt-fueled economic crisis,” he added. “We should be able to debate different solutions for preserving Social Security and Medicare for future generations based on intellectual honesty, not demagoguery and fear campaigns. If the congresswoman and Democrats wants to hold press events about linguistics or syntax, that’s her prerogative, but outside of Washington, Americans want to hear the truth about our fiscal situation and what their elected leaders are doing about it.”

Oooh. Linguistics and syntax! Intellectual honesty, not demagoguery and fear campaigns.What a good idea:

Well, Cantor isn’t Palin or Beck, right? We should probably take him at his word that he is deeply sincere in his promise to preserve Social Security, despite saying that it “cannot exist.” And this should give you all thew reassurance you need:

Dayspring also pointed to another Cantor statement that clarifies that he does think changes to entitlements need to be made.

“Republicans in the House are going to look to the budget coming out of Paul Ryan’s Budget Committee that will deal with entitlements. We’re going to put it out there,” Cantor said.

“We’re going to say we’re protecting today’s seniors and those nearing retirement. But for those of us 54 and under, we’re going to insist to go and deal with the fact that if these programs are going to be around, they’re going to have to look a lot different. That’s the plain and simple fact of it,” he added.

Ok, maybe he just misspoke when he said the programs “cannot exist.” He meant “reform” and “fixing.” It could happen to anyone. Except it’s not the only time he’s said it. Isaiah Poole at campaign for America’s Future looked it up:

I scanned some recent quotes of Cantor speaking about Social Security. And everything that I could find with any level of specificity is along the lines of what Cantor is quoted as saying to the Stanton, Va., News Leader earlier this month.

On the federal level, House Republicans plan to introduce in the coming weeks a budget plan for the next fiscal year that would reduce spending in all areas — including entitlements. Medicaid, and particularly Medicare and Medicaid benefits promised to retirees, make up nearly half of federal expenditures, but have been politically difficult to cut. Under the Republican plan, people 55 or older would get the Social Security and Medicare they expect. Those younger would not, Cantor said. “For everyone else, 54 and younger, I think we are realizing that we’ve got to face facts,” Cantor said. “The money’s not there.”

I think we can feel fairly confident that when someone like him says “the money’s not there,” he’s not angling for a tax hike, don’t you? He’s talking about ending it. (And I don’t have to tell anyone who reads this blog that he’s lying about the fact that the money’s not there, right?)

The House Randians are trying to be clever right now put in some “triggers” and other booby traps so they don’t have to go first on SS but can have it both ways if the bipartisan Senate Gang of Slashers and the White House can come to an agreement:

Sources on Wednesday provided The Hill with details of the resolution being crafted by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), due out next week. Instead of cutting Social Security, they said, the resolution would set up triggers to force program trustees to take some actions to shore up the program in the future.

That’s dicey for both sides, of course, but it’s extremely dicey for the Democrats. It’s possible the country will reward the Party for being willing to engage in “tough love” and kill its own best rationale for existing, but I wouldn’t count on it. Remember, welfare reform only hit a small number of marginalized people and happened in a time of great economic prosperity. This hits everyone at a time when the entire middle class is insecure.

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“This is the end”

by digby

I don’t know what to say about the horror in Afghanistan. This post at UN Dispatch from Una Moore, a UN aid worker in Kabul, says it all:

Foreigners have been killed in Afghanistan before, and today’s attack was not the first fatal attack on UN staff. But it was different than previous fatal attacks. Very different. The killers were ordinary residents of a city deemed peaceful enough to be one of the first places transferred to the control of Afghan security forces. The men who broke into the UN compound, set fires and killed 8 people weren’t Taliban, or henchmen of a brutal warlord, or members of a criminal gang. They weren’t even armed when the protests began –they took weapons from the UN guards who were their first victims. Foreigners committed to assisting in the rebuilding of Afghanistan have long accepted the possibility that they might die at the hands of warring parties, but this degree of violence from ordinary citizens is not something most of us factored into our decision to work here. Tonight, the governor of Balkh province, of which Mazar-i-Sharif is the capital, is telling the international media that the men who sacked the UN compound were Taliban infiltrators. That’s rubbish. Local clerics drove around the city with megaphones yesterday, calling residents to protest the actions of a small group of attention-seeking, bigoted Americans. Then, during today’s protest, someone announced that not just one, but hundreds of Korans had been burned in America. A throng of enraged men rushed the gates of the UN compound, determined to draw blood. Had the attackers been gunmen, they would likely have been killed before they could breach the compound. I was sharing a meal with aid worker friends when I heard the news. Phones began buzzing. Security officers were demanding that my friends return to their compounds immediately. Cars had already been sent to retrieve them. Lockdown was in force. This is not the beginning of the end for the international community in Afghanistan. This is the end. Terry Jones and others will continue to pull anti-Islam stunts and opportunistic extremists here will use those actions to incite attacks against foreigners. Unless we, the internationals, want our guards to fire on unarmed protestors from now on, the day has come for us to leave Afghanistan.

There is no excuse for Afghan religious extremists to kill UN aid workers because some other religious extremist in Florida decided to burn a book. On the other hand, there is no excuse for a major faction of one of the political parties in America to fan the flames of religious extremist in Florida for cheap political gain — they bear some share of the blame for this too. They created the public space for this bigotry with their stupid mosque protests and congressional hearings and there’s a price to be paid when that kind of ignorance and intolerance is given credibility by major players in our political system. Those UN workers paid that price today.

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Got Liberalism?

by digby

Joe Conason:

As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has demonstrated—with startling graphs that can be found on his organization’s website at http://www.cbpp.org/—the Democratic position on cutting this year’s budget has shifted markedly toward meeting Republican numbers over the past several weeks.

Since last December, when the Republicans reneged on last year’s budget deal and threatened a Senate filibuster, they have kept increasing the pressure for greater cuts—and the Democrats have repeatedly sought to reach a compromise despite their misgivings about slashing federal spending in a stalled economy.

Indeed, at the moment, President Obama seems to be willing to accept additional cuts of $23 billion in his own proposed 2011 budget. That would mean overall cuts of $74 billion, which, as Greenstein notes, is precisely the amount that House Republican leaders agreed to pass in early February. But the Republicans have escalated their demands significantly over the past two months, reflecting the Tea Party slogan of “no compromise” with the president and the Democrats.

It’s very rude to say I told you so, but, well, I told you so. And I would imagine they’ll find a way to throw some scrap the liberals’ way and then instruct us all to overlook the 75 billion dollars in cuts because of it.

This is absurd. We have to put huge amounts of energy into getting the Democrats not to agree to do things we should be able to take for granted they won’t — like Planned Parenthood funding — and when they “come through” that’s supposed to be a big victory. It’s intensely frustrating.

No Democratic president should sign on to draconian cuts in government spending when he’s got nearly 9% unemployment, a housing crisis that isn’t getting any better and is engaging in wars of choice that nobody really understands. This is not liberalism in any sense that we have ever known it before.

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Wringing Out The Excesses

by digby

Because they’re so good at their jobs compared to everyone else:

Households across the country are still feeling the effects of the Great Recession, with unemployment falling very slowly, while foreclosures are still increasing, along with poverty rates and oil prices. However, one group of Americans is doing very well — corporate CEOs, whose pay is returning to pre-recession levels:

At a time most employees can barely remember their last substantial raise, median CEO pay jumped 27% in 2010 as the executives’ compensation started working its way back to prerecession levels, a USA TODAY analysis of data from GovernanceMetrics International found. Workers in private industry, meanwhile, saw their compensation grow just 2.1% in the 12 months ended December 2010, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Median CEO pay is 9 million dollars a year.

And you have to admit that they really are good at their jobs if their job is strictly defined as a rising stock price. They’ve all done very well at that. But one can’t help but wonder on what rational basis these stocks are rising if the only people in the country with any money to spend are in the top 1%. (In fact, when stocks rise precipitously without any fundamental basis, we usually call that a bubble.)

It’s very hard to see how this is sustained if the rest of the country isn’t sharing in the wealth. On the other hand, the unemployment rate dropped again this month to a mere 8.8% (which reminds me of the Japanese earthquake — they are regularly having 6.9 aftershocks right now, which normally would be considered huge, but because they are compared to the Big One, seem like nothing.) Still 8.8 is better, although the underlying numbers are full of warnings and disappointments. Following the Reagan blueprint as they admit they are, the government and business are simply wringing the excesses out of the economy by squeezing the hell out of the middle and working classes and rewarding the wealthy. I guess that’s just how it’s done these days.

Meanwhile, as we’re all clapping louder and louder for the confidence fairy, let’s take a look at the toll this sort of thing takes on average people for just a second:

A separate report being released Friday tries to go beyond traditional measurements like the poverty line and minimum wage to show what people need to earn to achieve a basic standard of living. The study, commissioned by Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit group, builds on an analysis the group and some state and local partners have been conducting since 1995 on how much income it takes to meet basic needs without relying on public subsidies. The new study aims to set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies. “We wanted to recognize that there was a cumulative impact that would affect one’s lifelong economic security,” said Joan A. Kuriansky, executive director of Wider Opportunities, whose report is called “The Basic Economic Security Tables for the United States.” “And we’ve all seen how often we have emergencies that we are unprepared for,” she said, especially during the recession. Layoffs or other health crises “can definitely begin to draw us into poverty.” According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year — or just above $14 an hour — to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. A single worker with two young children needs an annual income of $57,756, or just over $27 an hour, to attain economic stability, and a family with two working parents and two young children needs to earn $67,920 a year, or about $16 an hour per worker. That compares with the national poverty level of $22,050 for a family of four. The most recent data from the Census Bureau found that 14.3 percent of Americans were living below the poverty line in 2009. Wider Opportunities and its consulting partners saw a need for an index that would indicate how much families need to earn if, for example, they want to save for their children’s college education or for a down payment on a home. “It’s an index that asks how can a family have a little grasp at the middle class,” said Michael Sherraden, director of the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, who consulted on the project and helped develop projections for how much income families need to devote to savings. “If we’re interested in families being able to be stable and not have their lives disrupted and have a little protection and backup and be able to educate their children, then this is the way we have to think.”

The numbers will not come as a surprise to working families who are struggling. Tara, a medical biller who declined to give her last name, said that she earns $15 an hour, while her husband, who works in building maintenance, makes $11.50 an hour. The couple, who live in Jamaica, Queens, have three sons, aged 9, 8 and 6. “We tried to cut back on a lot of things,” she said. But the couple has been unable to make ends meet on their wages, and visit the River Fund food pantry in Richmond Hill every Saturday. With no money for savings, “I’m hoping that I will hit the lotto soon,” she said.

And it isn’t temporary. For every year that someone is unable to go to college or save for retirement or take care of their health, the cost down the road increase. “Wringing out the excess” really means keeping many people poorer for life.

That’s why I get livid to the point of violence when I hear these fat cats complaining about public employees living high on the hog on their 40k a year salaries. It’s quite clear they have absolutely no idea what it takes to live a decent life with a tiny bit of financial security in this country. Or, if they do, they think of us a peasants who don’t deserve any better.

Tara the medical biller and her family are doing everything you’re supposed to do. And they are having to go to food banks because there just isn’t enough money even though they both work full time jobs. There’s something wrong with that.

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American Justice

by digby

If the Tea Party truly adhered to the founders’ suspicion of government, they could easily find common ground with liberals on issues like this:

A bitterly divided Supreme Court on Tuesday tossed out a jury verdict won by a New Orleans man who spent 14 years on death row and came within weeks of execution because prosecutors had hidden a blood test and other evidence that would have proven his innocence.

The 5-4 decision delivered by Justice Clarence Thomas shielded the New Orleans district attorney’s office from being held liable for the mistakes of its prosecutors. The evidence of their misconduct did not prove “deliberate indifference” on the part of then-Dist. Atty. Harry Connick Sr., Thomas said.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized her disapproval by reading her dissent in the courtroom, saying the court was shielding a city and its prosecutors from “flagrant” misconduct that nearly cost an innocent man his life.

“John Thompson spent 14 years isolated on death row before the truth came to light,” she said. He was innocent of the crimes that sent him to prison and prosecutors had “dishonored” their obligation to present the true facts to the jury, she said.
[…]
In 1999, when all his appeals had failed on his conviction for the murder of a hotel executive, Thompson was scheduled to be put to death. But a private investigator hired by his lawyer found a blood test in the police lab that showed the man wanted for a related carjacking had type B blood, while Thompson’s was type O.
[…]
With the new eyewitness reports and other evidence that pointed to another man as the killer, Thompson was quickly acquitted of all the charges in a second trial. He won $14 million in damages in a civil suit against the district attorney.

In rejecting the judgment, Justice Thomas described the case as a “single incident” in which mistakes were made. He said Thompson did not prove a pattern of similar violations that would justify holding the city’s government liable for the wrongdoing. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined to form the majority.

However, Thompson’s lawyers showed that at least four prosecutors knew about the hidden blood test. They also showed evidence of other, similar cases in New Orleans in which key evidence was concealed from defense lawyers.

Conservatives only mistrust government when it comes to spending money on people they don’t like. When it comes to the power of life and death it always gets the benefit of the doubt.

The American Revolution wasn’t only about tea and taxes. It was about the power of the government to railroad innocent people into jail and execute them. It’s impossible for any institution to be perfect (which is one excellent argument against the death penalty) but when they have been found to have consciously committed a horrible injustice like this they should be held accountable.

But then, nobody who isn’t rich or powerful is held accountable for much of anything in this country. It could make a person cynical after a while.

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