Month: March 2012

Virtually Speaking Thursday

by digby

Blogtalk Radio

Call in(646) 200-3440

Hr 1- VS A-Z. Jay Ackroyd & Stuart Zechman. This week in liberalism.

Hr 2 – Jay’s guest is William K. Black, white-collar criminologist, former financial regulator and author of “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One” talks with Jay about the banksters. Read Bill here and here.

Should be good.

.

Stopping the Obama Kill Doctrine

by David Atkins

By now it seems fairly clear: neither Republican nor Democratic administrations take basic civil liberties terribly seriously. It’s pretty scary. The Bush Administration saw the elevation of torture and unlimited warrantless wiretapping to open national public policy. The Obama Administration has apparently now made extrajudicial killings part of its national public policy apparatus, so much so that FBI Chief Mueller is too confused–or refuses–to say whether the President has the authority to assassinate civilians on U.S. soil.

Now, it’s important to have some historical perspective on these things. There can be little doubt that during the Cold War and during other conflicts, our various secretive spy agencies have been conducting targeted killings, probably including American citizens. And there have been far more egregious civil rights abuses in the past. The nation did, after all, survive slavery, the Japanese internment camps, Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. It survived John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, and Nixon’s indiscriminate lawbreaking. And it will likely survive this. There is a tendency on the left to assume a gradual decline in civil liberties from some mythic high point, leading inexorably to a fascist state. More realistically, the nation goes through phases wherein it feels more or less threatened, and presidents tend to grab power accordingly in order to neutralize “the threat.” The threat subsides, and the nation goes back to pretending that totalitarianism is a trend that can only happen to other people.

What’s a little different about this time, though, is the openness of it all. In most of the nation’s other cases of civil liberties abuses, the abuses were conducted secretively, during times of fully armed conflict, against targeted minority groups, or some combination of the above. The Bush and Obama Administrations’ abuses are more disconcerting considering that, granted the need to act against Al Qaeda after September 11th, we have conducted wars more of choice than necessity, not involving conscription. Our killings policies are not being conducted secretively by people who know they’re illegal but feel they must act in defense of country regardless, but rather shockingly openly. And the target universe is not some currently despised minority group–bad enough, of course, but at least theoretically temporary and irrational–but rather the entire civilian population for an indiscriminate period of time. Openness is usually good thing. But open law-breaking is not. One should hope that people engaging in criminal activity–even if they believe they’re doing so for the right reasons–at least have the good grace to do so under cover of darkness, rather than attempt to openly justify clearly illegal actions based on specious legal reasoning.

But the other problem that should be fairly obvious by now is that despite the shocking nature of what is going on, most Americans simply do not care. Most Americans don’t know who Anwar Al-Awlaki was. When they do find out, most don’t care that he was killed.

I admit to sharing in this lack of emotional grievance myself. As I explained before, I don’t shed tears for Al-Awlaki. I understand at a rational level that his killing sets a terrible precedent for Presidential power. But I don’t care any more about him for having been born on American soil, than I do about Osama Bin Laden. Osama Bin Laden was never tried in any American court, and the only evidence we have as to his guilt comes from his own admission in addition to the statements of various government officials in multiple countries. I celebrated Bin Laden’s demise. I see no reason to disbelieve that Anwar Al-Awlaki recruited terrorists and encouraged them to engage in terroristic acts. I wouldn’t shed a tear for his death had he been born in Yemen, and I don’t shed a tear for his death knowing he was born in the United States, either. The fact that he was hiding in Yemen, deliberately avoiding capture, also makes it harder to argue that the United States should have conducted a dangerous military raid to capture him, giving him more protection than any foreign-born target would have had.

But at a rational level, of course, we are a nation of laws. Once you allow openly for extra-judicial killings of citizens abroad (regardless of their guilt) simply based on Presidential say-so, there’s no real legal line that stops anywhere short of the unthinkable nightmare of targeted killings on U.S. soil for political reasons. It’s all a matter of trust at that point. No one sane believes the Obama Administration would do such a thing, but that’s not important: what’s important is the precedent being set for future Administrations that would indeed like to have that sort of power.

But what would it take to get people to care? To make people understand that this is a real problem that has to be dealt with, and that American presidents must not be given this sort of authority?

The answer is, as I’ve said before, a much stronger framework and enforcement of international law.

Right now, your average American is presented with a binary choice: 1) let guys like Al-Awlaki do their thing with impunity, or 2) give the American President the authority to do something about it since no one else will. Given those two choices, most Americans are more than happy to go with option two, whether it’s a Republican or Democratic president.

This calculus doesn’t end at Islamist terrorists, either. The recent explosion of Youtube attention to murderous bastard Joseph Kony provides another such example. The situation in Uganda with Kony is more complex than is often understood, but it remains nothing short of pathetic that the international community hasn’t found itself able to do anything about Kony. Nor would almost anyone but a few concerned civil libertarians be terribly concerned if the President ordered the man’s assassination by SEAL squad or drone missile alike, despite the clear violations of international law that such an action would entail. No, most would doubtless celebrate. Does that mean the President should do such a thing? Of course not. What it means is that the enforcement of international law to deal with people like Kony and Al-Awlaki–or Dick Cheney, for that matter–needs to be far, far stronger. It needs to have teeth. And it needs to have inherent legitimacy.

Because as long as the only choices available are allowing 1) evil people to operate indiscriminately with a pseudo-isolationist policy, or 2) giving the American President carte blanche to take whatever action he or she sees fit, most Americans are going to pick option number two every single time. And they’ll figure that like Lucius Cincinnatus or Christopher Nolan’s incarnation of Batman, the President will give up his authority once the “threat” has subsided.

If that sounds as scary to you as it does to me, then the answer isn’t to point to the Constitution screaming “Rule of Law!” It doesn’t work for the tea party types who oppose universal healthcare, and it’s not going to work for civil libertarians. The answer is to build stronger international institutions that can deal with people like Kony and Al-Awlaki appropriately, such that it would be as much an overreach of Presidential power and jurisdiction to take such an action, as it would be for your local sheriff to attempt to arrest Bin Laden in Pakistan.

As with so much else, the answer lies not in a backward retreat toward isolationism and reverence for nation-state constitutions, but rather in a forward advance toward a more tightly bound and accountable international community.

.

How libertarians and liberals help the anti-pot lobby

by digby

One of the most pernicious laws ever passed in this country was the one that allowed police agencies to reap the benefits of the asset forfeiture laws. In an age of low taxation they’ve pretty much made cops into bounty hunters. There have been many examples of innocent people having their property wrongfully confiscated, including this famous case.

International Women’s Day: this ain’t my first time at the rodeo

by digby

Today is International Woman’s Day — in which we celebrate half the people on earth with a day.*

That’s nice I guess, but these ideas for “celebrating” seem just sad. When half the population of the United States is only represented by 16% of the leadership and cartoons like this appear in major US newspapers:

… well, eating cupcakes and wearing red lipstick to make a political statement just seems … depressing.

I think on this day I’m going to celebrate International Women’s Day with this message to the misogynists and the women who love them (lifted from this great post by Ann Friedman)

h/t to @terkelrage

“I’m not certain if that’s addressed or not”

by digby

There’s been a lot of talk about this week’s Eric Holder speech in which he absurdly attempted to split hairs between “due process of law” and “judicial process” (and which, unless you believe that it’s reasonable for “the law” to reside in the decision of the president, flies in the face of the reasons our forefathers fought a revolution and wrote down a constitution in the first place.) I can’t speculate about the motives for this ratcheting up of executive imperial power, but let’s just say that it’s clear the office of the president, regardless of party or ideological bent, will always seek to expand its power as much as it can. In fact, George Washington may have been the only one who didn’t — and now we’re in the process, apparently, of restoring the crown that he refused.

This new iteration of presidential power takes it to a new level, however. We are now talking about a President’s ability not just to “say what the law is” as disgraced President Nixon once declared. It’s that he has the power to unilaterally order a citizen killed, without any of the due processes that have been developed over centuries. And despite their assurances, this isn’t necessarily confined to some far away overseas “battlefield”. Get a load of this from Jonathan Turley:

[T]he only limits stated by the Administration have been self-imposed standards and what Holder calls “due process” — expressly excluding “judicial process.” Now, FBI Director Robert Mueller has entered the fray. On Wednesday Mueller was asked in a congressional hearing whether the current policy would allow the killing of citizens in the United States. Mueller said that he simply did not know whether he could order such an assassination. It was the perfect moment to capture the dangerous ambiguity introduced into our system by this claim of inherent authority. I can understand Mueller deferring to the Attorney General on the meaning of his remarks, but the question was whether Mueller understands that the same power exists within the United States. One would hope that the FBI Director would have a handle on a few details guiding his responsibilities, including whether he can kill citizens without a charge or court order.

Mueller was asked whether the same criteria used to kill Americans abroad also would apply in the United States and whether the President retained the “historical” right to order such assassination on U.S. land. When asked this basic question by Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.), Mueller said that he was simply unsure where the President’s authority would end, if at all, in killing citizens: “I have to go back. Uh, I’m not certain whether that was addressed or not” and added “I’m going to defer that to others in the Department of Justice.” He appeared unclear whether he had the power under the Obama Kill Doctrine or, in the very least, was unwilling to discuss that power.

This is the head of the FBI. And he’s a former US Attorney to boot. I’m fairly sure he knows the “traditional” answer to that. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that he hasn’t been copied on the Top Secret memos that legalized the presidential kill orders, so he’s no longer clear on the current policies.

But this isn’t hard, really. As Jonathan Turley concluded:

For civil libertarians, the answer should be easy: “Of course, I do not have that power under the Constitution.”

I think he would be safe in saying that. I suppose the problem is that his job might not be.

Update: Credo Action has a petition going to ask Attorney General Holder to release the secret memos. C’mon, they have to know they’ll come out sooner or later.

And nothing bad happened to John Yoo, so why should they care? (Funny how that works, isn’t it?)

Ratcheting up the crazy

by digby

This is the conservative movement in 2012:

I don’t know that these professional right wingers even believe what they’re saying, but the hysteria ramps up a little bit more every single day. It’s not so much that every Republican believes this crazy garbage. It’s that the craziest ones do — and there are a lot of them.

Of course, it’s not exactly new, is it?

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.…What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence.…The laws of probability would dictate that part of…[the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.

That was Joseph McCarthy in 1951. That may seem like a long time ago, but look at it this way: it’s the year Sting was born. A long time ago, but not that long. People’s lives were ruined and the world was a very dangerous place because of it.

It seems as though these folks are just another clown show. And perhaps they are. Let’s hope so.

BTW: If you haven’t seen this video of the man Malkin says is her new inspiration, take a look at it.

And it’s always worth taking a look at this every once in a while. Just as a refresher.

.

Do government “elites” make our decisions?

by David Atkins

While the climate crisis keeps getting worse, at least public opinion is starting to move in the right direction:

After several years of finding that fewer and fewer Americans believed in man-made climate change, pollsters are now finding that belief is on the uptick.

The newest study from the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, which is a biannual survey taken since fall 2008 and organized by the Brookings Institute, shows that 62% of Americans now believe that man-made climate change is occurring, and 26% do not. The others are unsure.

That is a significant rise in believers since a low in spring 2010, when only about 50% of Americans said they believed in global warming, but still down from when the survey first began, when it was at around 75%. The pollsters talked to 887 people across the country.

What’s caused the sudden rise? Mostly the weather.

“People, for good or for bad, are making connections in what they see in terms of weather and what they believe in terms of climate change,” said Christopher Borick, co-author of the survey. He is an associate professor of Political Science and director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Pennsylvania. His co-author is Barry Rabe, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a professor at the University of Michigan.

The news is a week old, but it’s significant. There hasn’t been a major, dedicated push of the Inconvenient Truth mold to shape public opinion. It’s mostly just changing weather patterns influencing people’s opinions. A few cold snaps, and it will likely change back again.

Scientific studies and actual data, meanwhile, don’t seem to matter to very many people. It was more about their local weather phenomena:

This shows how fickle public opinion can be. For instance, when people who say they believe in climate change were asked if the idea of “drought” affected their decision, their answer depended on their own experience. If they lived in places like Texas, Oklahoma and the South, they were about 15 to 17 points more likely to say drought affected their beliefs than other believers in Pennsylvania or New Jersey.

The danger, of course, is that neither individual weather events nor even an entire season of strange weather are any indication of long-term trends. Those who believe that the planet is warming did say that factors beyond weather, such as polar bear decline, did affect their decisions. In general, however, scientific studies weren’t high on the list of influences among people polled.

“People specifically pointing to scientific studies only make up about 1 in 10 of the population,” said Borick. “That doesn’t meant that science doesn’t weigh in, but it tends to be down the list of factors. And significantly behind things like observations of warmer temperatures in their home areas.”

As anyone halfway versed in the problem of climate change knows, we’re already past the point of no return on runaway greenhouse gases. If the world waits to act until everyone in every locale realizes there’s enough of a problem to ask their government to do something, it will already have been way too late. It will be game over for billions of people, and likely for civilization itself as we know it.

If federal decision-making reverts to states as the Republicans would so dearly like, then states that happen to have droughts will start to decide that maybe they might want to to take climate change more seriously, while states with big cold snaps might do the opposite. And then, of course, there’s the effect of paid climate deniers, who have greater degrees of ideological control over the conservative base (which happens to coincide with drought-stricken areas, dampening enthusiasm for tackling climate change.)

And this is why we have a representative democracy. This is why we hire educated individuals to spend their lives in the creation of public policy. Because it shouldn’t be up to the average person to ask themselves “is it hot today?” and then use that criterion to make public policy. The best science should inform the decisions of wise policy makers, who are then prepared to make those decisions to look out for the longer term health of the public.

Of course, there’s a problem with that idea, and it’s obvious in economics. Even science is subject to corrupting influences and academic fads, as has become evident in economics. Austrian and Friedmanist economics are pseudoscience based on utopian anti-inflationary theory and a demonstrably false rational actor model. Yet they’ve taken the world by storm, leading to the upper tier of educated elites demanding austerity all across the globe.

Incidentally, when it comes to enforcing austerity measures, negative polling doesn’t seem to matter much to policy makers, who insist that they must look to economic long-term health to reduce deficits, even at the expense of short-term pain. This, even though the “science” on reducing deficits is bunk.

And yet, make the same argument about climate change and politicians quiver in fear.

So in the end, it’s not really about whether educated government elites make these decisions or not. Austerity policies benefit the ultra-wealthy. Anti-climate change policies don’t–at least, not right now. A rational person might point out that that, and nothing else, is the only real basis for how decisions get made.

.

QOTD

by digby

Sarah Palin:

“Who can best bust through that radical left’s kind of dispensation and desire to mistreat those who are defenseless, mistreat those who perhaps have some disadvantages by making them more beholden to government? Who best can contrast themselves from that? I thought who best could do that [and] my own personal opinion is, the cheerful one, is Newt Gingrich. I have appreciated what he has stood for, stood boldly for.”

.

Dictator logic

by digby

From TPM:

“Going with that logic, according to our own Health and Human Services Secretary, it isn’t far-fetched to think that the President of the United States could say, we need to save health care expenses — the federal government will only pay for one baby to be born in the hospital per family, or two babies to be born per family. That could happen. We think it couldn’t?

Co-host Amy Holmes then asked: “Congresswoman, are you suggesting that this administration, or a next administration, would actually advocate a one-child policy like Communist China?”

Bachmann responded: “What I’m saying is that now that we know the President of the United States unilaterally can tell insurance companies, you must offer the morning-after abortion pill, you must offer sterilizations, you must offer contraceptives free to the recipients of those products, because we tell you to — which means they’re effectively setting the price, as well — that says that whoever the health care dictator, could conceivably make that order, as well.

“There’s nothing that this president, one person, would be limited from doing. That’s how profound that is. I’m not saying that he is going to do it. I’m saying that he has the power and the authority to do it. We don’t want anyone to have that level of authority.”

What in the hell is this lunatic talking about? Seriously, how can she be elected to congress with this sort of lying and/or ignorance?

Think about it. Because the Obama administration is requiring that insurance companies offer no cost contraception coverage (along with other preventive health services) they are dictators who could decide that the government would “only pay for one baby to be born in the hospital per family, or two babies to be born per family.” Ok. We’ve already discussed the difference between regulating the private sector and the Big Brother Health Care that only exists in their fever dreams.

But these are the people who are going on and on about how it’s wrong for the government to pay for women’s birth control. If you want to have all that sexy sex, pay for it yourself! The government doesn’t owe you a thing. Except paying for your childbirth apparently, which last I heard the Republicans were totally against. These are the same people, by the way, who whined and rent their garments for decades about women on welfare having too many children on the government’s dime and finally succeeded in pretty much ending the program. And these are also the same people who still want to demolish Medicaid, which does what? That’s right, it pays for maternity care for low income women.

So I guess in a way, she’s right. The government could dictate how many children it would be willing to pay for. The problem is that it will happen at the hands of a conservative government led by people like Michele Bachman. It’s pretty much already written into the Republican Party platform.

I think it was Palin who came up with death panels. Maybe Bachman can get the forced abortion dictator meme going. There are certainly plenty of people willing to believe it — mostly because normally they’re all for it themselves.

Update: I’m reminded by @Ed_Kilgore that it wasn’t Palin who came up with “Death Panels.” It originated with Bachmann and Betsy McCaughey popularized it.She’s a messaging genius.

How about a female personhood amendment?

by digby

We know that men are people and that corporations are people and that institutions have consciences. But recent events have seriously brought into question whether women can claim the same. Jessica Winter of Time sets out to find the answer:

All my adult life, I’ve been pretty sure I’m a sentient, even semi-competent human being. I have a job and an apartment; I know how to read and vote; I make regular, mostly autonomous decisions about what to eat for lunch and which cat videos I will watch whilst eating my lunch. But in the past couple of months, certain powerful figures in media and politics have cracked open that certitude.

You see, like most women, I was born with the chromosome abnormality known as “XX,” a deviation of the normative “XY” pattern. Symptoms of XX, which affects slightly more than half of the American population, include breasts, ovaries, a uterus, a menstrual cycle, and the potential to bear and nurse children. Now, many would argue even today that the lack of a Y chromosome should not affect my ability to make informed choices about what health care options and lunchtime cat videos are right for me. But others have posited, with increasing volume and intensity, that XX is a disability, even a roadblock on the evolutionary highway. This debate has reached critical mass, and leaves me uncertain of my legal and moral status. Am I a person? An object? A ward of the state? A “prostitute”? (And if I’m the last of these, where do I drop off my W-2?)

Read on as she attempts to find the answer.

This piece is amusing and very on point. But it’s also vaguely unnerving considering the events she chronicles. It’s not nearly as ridiculously satirical as I might have hoped.