Month: November 2011

Remember when that psycho commander at Guantanamo insisted that prisoner suicides were a form of asymmetrical warfare? Well, it looks like that twisted logic has come home:

The videos taken by protesters, journalists and casual observers show UC Berkeley police and Alameda County sheriff’s deputies in riot gear ordering students with linked arms to leave a grassy area outside the campus administration building Wednesday. When the students didn’t move, police lowered their face shields and began hitting the protesters with batons.

University police say the students, who chanted “You’re beating students” during the incident, were not innocent bystanders, and that the human fence they tried to build around seven tents amounted to a violent stance against police.

But many law enforcement experts said Thursday that the officers’ tactics appeared to be a severe overreaction.

Both the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild said they had “grave concerns about the conduct” of campus police.

“Video recordings raise numerous questions about UCPD’s oversight and handling of these events, including whether law enforcement were truly required to beat protesters with batons,” the two groups wrote in a letter to campus officials.

In total, 39 people were arrested Wednesday; 22 were students and one was a professor, police said. All but one were taken to jail and released.

“The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence,” UC police Capt. Margo Bennett said. “I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”

It’s interesting how malleable the authorities can make concept of “violence”. Here’s another one from that former Gitmo commander:

Rear Admiral Harris is adamant that the people in his care are well looked after and are enemies of the United States.

He told me they use any weapon they can – including their own urine and faeces – to continue to wage war on the United States.

If throwing urine is an act of war then surely forming a human chain is a violent provocation.

Update: More on the Cal violence here.

Shirk your responsibilities. Please

by digby

Never say the White House isn’t persistent when it really wants something:

President Obama called the Democratic and Republican chairmen of Congress’s special deficit reduction supercommittee Friday and urged them to reach a deal, as the panel’s deadline for agreeing on a strategy to slash the nation’s debt rapidly approaches…

But he also carried another message: Congress should not undo the painful consequences for failing to reach a deal that were agreed to when the supercommittee was created in the August debt deal.

“The sequester was agreed to by both parties to ensure there was a meaningful enforcement mechanism to force a result from the Committee,” the White House said in a statement. “Congress must not shirk its responsibilities. The American people deserve to have their leaders come together and make the tough choices necessary to live within our means, just as American families do every day in these tough economic times.”

In a statement, the White House indicated that Obama was seeking an update on the process as a Nov. 23 deadline for cutting at least $1.2 trillion from the nation’s deficit over the next 10 years looms.

He urged them to strike a deal that would cut both entitlements and raise revenues.

The article says that the congress can’t undo the triggers without the president signing off, but that’s a smoke screen. There is no constitutional or statutory obligation in that agreement. They can pass or not pass whatever they want and all the president can do about it is veto or not veto.

At this point gridlock and election season are our friends. They don’t have to pass this piece of garbage, either through the supercommittee or the triggers if they fail to do that. And they shouldn’t.

*Also, too, that “family budget” analogy is still facile, insulting and wrong. It’s easily the most destructive thing the President has said in this whole debate.

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Animal Update 11/12

by digby

Last night we heard from the religious right about Occupy Wall Street. Today, the famed comic book artist Frank Miller weighs in for the macho terrorist hunters:

Everybody’s been too damn polite about this nonsense:

The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with unspeakable cowardice, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.

“Occupy” is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at anarchy, to the extent that the “movement” – HAH! Some “movement”, except if the word “bowel” is attached – is anything more than an ugly fashion statement by a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves.

This is no popular uprising. This is garbage. And goodness knows they’re spewing their garbage – both politically and physically – every which way they can find.

Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy.

Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.

And this enemy of mine — not of yours, apparently – must be getting a dark chuckle, if not an outright horselaugh – out of your vain, childish, self-destructive spectacle.

In the name of decency, go home to your parents, you losers. Go back to your mommas’ basements and play with your Lords Of Warcraft.

Or better yet, enlist for the real thing. Maybe our military could whip some of you into shape.

They might not let you babies keep your iPhones, though. Try to soldier on.

Schmucks.

There is quite an argument going on in the comments. But I think this comment is the most entertaining:

The Occupiers are astroturf concocted by the white house and big left. and is composed of child molesters, rapeos, escaped mental patients, anti-semites and trust fund babies. They have no coherent message. But because they want more government regulations which favors the state and the very people they think they’re protesting against, they are nothing but tools of the very elites they claim to oppose.

The media’s embrace of them, as well as cities run by corrupt kleptocrats, shows just what a sham the whole thing is. Contrast that to the way the press and cities have treated the tea party and you see how dishonest the whole charade is.

Boy this country is getting very, very confused …

I blame the internet.

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The Rick Perry Reel
by David Atkins

Via TPM, this is the man Republicans elected to govern the biggest Red state in America, and who once led the GOP field for President of the United States.

Something is seriously wrong with this country. Or at least parts of it.

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Losing its bloom?

by digby

In case you were wondering if the religious right was going to join the Occupy Movement in solidarity with the poor and disenfranchised as Jesus would have done, think again. Via Right Wing watch, here’s the Family Research Council requesting that their members pray for the movement to fizzle:

The expanded Wall Street Occupation is endorsed by labor unions, liberal mayors, governors, the White House, the American Nazi and Communist parties, ACORN, Hollywood enertainers [sic] and a long list of supra-liberal and liberal groups, not the least of which is the liberal media.

Encampments in major cities, including Washington, DC, are not only a nuisance, a health hazard and an embarrassment [sic] to thinking Americans, they are increasingly becoming violent. Ideological anarchists intimidate and abuse bystanders, damage automobiles, jump on and in front of moving vehicles, urinate and defacate [sic] on private and public property, go naked and perform sex acts in public, produce tons of garbage that taxpayers have to collect and haul away, etc.

Yet the mainstream press, which villainized [sic] the Tea Party movement, after long ignoring it, flagrantly idealizes the Occupiers and ignores the damage and ugly crimes happening in most places where an occupation is in progress. Fortunately the movement is “losing its bloom,” and beginning to die out. The honeymoon among these diverse activists may be coming to an end.

May the movement simply fizzle. May God protect those who live nearby and must encounter these raucus [sic] groups. May God harvest souls for Christ from among them just as He did discontented youth in the Jesus Movment of the 60’s and 70’s (1 Sam 22:1-2; 2 Chr 15:4-7; Ps 18:40-50; Is 42:14-18; Lk 19:39-40; Rom 8:15-16; 10:20).

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Confusing Sistah Soljah

by digby

Uh, Mitt. I think you’re taking the concept of “Sistah Soljah” a little bit too literally here:

Mitt Romney floated an eyebrow-raising suggestion on Veterans Day: privatize veterans’ health care.

Speaking with a dozen vets in an occasionally emotional roundtable discussion in South Carolina Friday, the GOP presidential contender sympathized with the service members’ difficulties obtaining treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which one vet described as “adversarial.”

Romney, who has already proposed privatizing Medicare, suggested that maybe giving wounded warriors an outside option would force VA health bureaucrats to be a little more responsive.

“When you work in the private sector and you have a competitor, you know if I don’t treat this customer right, they’re going to leave me and go somewhere else, so I’d better treat them right,” Romney said. “Whereas if you’re the government, they know there’s nowhere else you guys can go. You’re stuck.

Sometimes you wonder if there would be some way to introduce some private-sector competition, somebody else that could come in and say, you know, that each soldier gets X thousand dollars attributed to them, and then they can choose whether they want to go in the government system or in a private system with the money that follows them,” said Romney. “Like what happens with schools in Florida, where people have a voucher that goes with them. Who knows?”

See Mitt, the “Sistah Soljah” is designed to kick one of your party’s constituent groups in the teeth in order to prove you are “independent” and appeal to the middle. Nobody but the most extreme free market zealots want to privatize the VA. Hardcore conservative Veteran groups like the VFW don’t even support it.

But kudos for choosing Veterans Day to talk about it. Your position as the most ideologically incoherent candidate in American history is intact.

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Welfare Kings

by digby

I love history don’t you? Here’s a stirring story of an American entrepreneur of yore:

In the second half of the 19th century, America was in the grip of a massive railroad boom. Boosted by eager investors, lucrative subsidies and free land, railroads sprung up connecting every corner of the United States without much thought for demand or necessity…

Dutch investors were heavily involved in several railroad lines in the North Texas area, including the Fort Worth and Denver Railway Company, which had spawned Quanah in 1887 and owned just about all the land in town. County records show Harry provided advertising services and worked directly for the Fort Worth and Denver for nearly 20 years, sometimes receiving payment in the form of land transferred directly from the legendary railroad builder Grenville M. Dodge, who helped lay the Union Pacific and more than a dozen other lines across the country.

Fascinating. Jonathan at ATR writes:

So, first the government kills the Indians. (In fact, before Grenville Dodge was a railroad magnate he was a general in the U.S. Army, and Wikipedia tells me that he ordered the punitive Powder River Expedition against the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1865.)

Then the government hands over the land for free to the railroads, along with giant subsidies of other kinds.

Then the railroad owned by one of the guys who killed the Indians hands over some of the free land he got from the government to Harry …

Who’s Harry? Why it’s Harry Koch, the grandfather of libertarian moneybags, David and Charles Koch. You remember them. The one’s who insist that “government handouts” are unAmerican?

“No political system can possibly guarantee either a national economic security or an individual standard of living. Government can guarantee no man a job or a livelihood,” Harry Koch wrote on February 1, 1935, nine months before Charles Koch was born.

But there’s nothing wrong with the government stealing land and doling the proceeds out to its rich friends, right? Isn’t that what it’s all about?

Read the whole article about old Harry. It’s fascinating. Turns out that propaganda and manipulation is a genetic trait.

Update: Has anyone ever asked Judge Originalist about all these “takings”? He seems to have a real problem with it now, but this country has a long history of stealing huge swathes of land from indigenous people. How does he square that?

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The Ratchet Effect
by David Atkins

Kudos due to Digby and Atrios for keeping a keen eye on the planned cuts to middle class benefits, made in exchange for cuts to wealthy benefits that will quietly disappear when the bright spotlight is off after the Presidential election.

This phenomenon is part of what Hacker and Pierson refer to as a ratchet effect: one in which the institutions of government are squared more and more firmly against the interests of the 99%, usually through policies made through toothless “compromise” measures. Think big tax cuts for the wealthy with “expiration” dates that are never really meant to expire, in exchange for little-noticed middle-class tax cuts that barely make a dent. Or trading short-term unemployment benefits and treaties for long-term tax cut extensions. Or changing the structure of Medicare and Social Security in exchange for closing easily re-insertable and malleable loopholes in the tax code. Or handing over the entire health insurance market to private industry in exchange for more universal coverage that continues to increase in cost regardless. Or the recent institutional acceptance of the 60-vote filibuster threshold, which makes real reform to help the 99% almost impossible, but is accepted by Democrats partly because it helps them stop things like Social Security privatization should Republicans take a Senate majority–without realizing that Social Security and programs like it will die a death of 1,000 cuts without institutional reform.

The provisions that hurt the 99% usually stay in effect permanently, while the provisions that hurt the wealthy quietly disappear. As I said a while back about the debt ceiling:

The longest-lasting impact of this whole farce has been to create yet another structural impediment to progressive change in Washington. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson describe this sort of thing in their tremendous new book Winner-Take-All Politics as a “ratchet effect”: hidden, arcane structural effects whose result is to create nearly unstoppable advantages for big business, and insurmountable obstacles economic justice for the American People. Other ratchets include the filibuster, unequal vote apportionment in the Senate, “phased out” tax cuts that never really phase out, changes to the way unemployment is calculated, etc.

Now the debt ceiling can be added to that list as perhaps one of the biggest, most important such ratchets of all time.

These ratchets are the tools of the GOP terrorist trade. If Democrats are actually serious about countering this sort of terrorist activity instead of just talking about it, they will move to eliminate as many of these structural hurdles as possible. That should already have happened with the broken filibuster rule, but Senate Democrats didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger on it.

What is being prepared in the deficit commission is yet another ratchet. The cuts taken by the poor and middle class will become permanent fixtures of the landscape, while the minor haircuts taken by the rich will disappear. And all the “Serious People” will golf clap at the “compromise.”

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Loophole delusion

by digby

I’m glad to see that we are finally going to take a look at what the holy grail of tax reform — “cutting tax expenditures” — is really all about. I’ve been somewhat pathetically waving my arms about this for many months now, from the time I first saw Saxby Chambliss and Mark Warner giving each other goo-goo eyes about it on CNN last spring. Now that it’s becoming part of the Supercommittee discussions, the real agenda behind it is rising to the surface.

Atrios explained the problem with all this earlier today as only he can:

If we agree to scrap some stuff that benefit middle class people in exchange for scrapping some stuff that benefits rich assholes and corporations, next year the lobbyists will be back. And who has the better lobbyists?

Exactly. This is not a fair fight.

It’s still a question as to whether or not the Teabag faction will give up their ideological purity for a long term win on this, but there can be no doubt that they are about to be offered one.

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Setting the terms of the debate

by digby

One of the saddest comments on our media is the fact that CNN replaced former heavyweight scourge of Wall Street Eliot Spitzer with vapid Wall Street cheerleader Erin Burnett. It says everything we need to know about our current problems.

Roxanne Horesh and Sam Bollier of Al Jazeera caught up with Spitzer recently and asked him some questions about the economy and politics. Here are a couple of interesting exchanges from the interview:

Obama has consistently called for more regulation of banks since 2008, but his administration has failed to prosecute anyone in connection to the financial crisis. Why do you think that is?

The president embraced a very status quo vision of Wall Street. He did not lead an effort to fundamentally reform the way our financial sector operates. He put Tim Geithner in as Treasury Secretary, and Geithner and [National Economic Council director Lawrence] Summers together were very much status quo voices.

Now when it comes to prosecutions, look, I’ve got to presume the good faith on the part of the Justice Department. But I’m disappointed, as everybody else is. When I was attorney general, we managed to bring cases. Frankly, I wish we’d brought more. People ask me over the years, “Were you too tough on Wall Street?” And my answer is “no, just the opposite”. We should have been tougher. Because look at what has happened and look at the sensibility on Wall Street, which is that gee, things are back to normal.
[…]
In a Slate.com column, you mentioned the importance of investing in young Americans. What do you see as the best way for the current administration to invest in the young?

One is increased investment in education. Intellectual capital is going to be the competitive playing field of the next century. We also need to invest in the infrastructure of our economy. We need a massive investment in energy to release ourselves both from the environmental concerns of global warming, but also from, frankly, the trade deficit that results from our exporting huge amounts of dollars overseas.

I would also support a major jobs programme. If you take the $100bn we’re spending in Afghanistan and divide it by $20,000 a year that you could pay people, you could hire 5 million people.

Do you think that such a bill would have a chance passing congress as it is comprised today?

Absolutely none at all, but the role of the president is to set the terms of debate. And part of the problem with President Obama is that he has been so muted and hesitant in his willingness to confront these major issues. He hasn’t even come out with a serious mortgage reform proposal. We haven’t dealt with the mortgage crisis and we haven’t dealt with the jobs crisis. Those are the two major impediments holding back our economy.

I think that last is is important. It’s recently become an article of faith among establishment liberals in Washington that the presidency is a weak office and that the president was so hindered by congress that nobody should have expected him to achieve much of anything. But for a lot of disillusioned liberals around the country, this is mighty thin gruel considering the president rode into office on a sweeping promise to change that very dynamic. I don’t think that was ever possible, and never believed it, but many of his followers certainly did and are somewhat understandably disappointed that it didn’t happen.

But for me the problem isn’t that he failed to fulfill a utopian campaign promise, which he didn’t. And I understand that he was faced with an epically intractable opposition, which I expected. It’s what Spitzer said. The president isn’t all powerful and he can’t singlehandedly make things happen. But because he can get the attention of the press and is seen by the public as the face of government he has tremendous power to set the terms of the debate. As has been endlessly documented, he didn’t really do that.

There are many theories as to why that is, but I think it refutes a fair piece of the prevailing notion that the presidency is an inherently weak office. There’s more to politics than legislative wrangling — or at the very least, the degree to which it can be wrangled is often based on the parameters of the debate, which the president has huge power to affect.

The whole interview is interesting. Spitzer doesn’t rule out a return to politics. Unfortunately, I don’t know if he’ll be allowed to.

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