Month: April 2012

Poor little Teddy

by digby

So the Nuge is blubbering like a little baby over his concert at an Army base being cancelled due to his threats of violence:

Nugent told The Associated Press this week that his words were not intended as a threat against the president.

“To think that there’s a bureaucrat in the United States Army that would consider the use or abuse of First Amendment rights in determining who is going to perform at an Army base is an insult and defiles the sacrifices of those heroes who fought for the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights,” Nugent said.

Nugent said he had received messages of support from troops and noted that the Secret Service had met with him and closed its case about the remarks.

“There is nothing in my spoken word or written word that could be even wildly considered by any stretch of the imagination to be a threat to anyone,” Nugent said.

Asked to clarify the remarks at the NRA convention, Nugent said: “A whole bunch of us … believe … we are in danger of being improperly and criminally jailed – I mean criminally on the part of the government.”

Earlier in the week, Nugent pleaded guilty to transporting a black bear he illegally killed in Alaska, saying he was sorry for unwittingly violating the law.
[…]
Nugent said the prosecution in U.S. District Court was the result of a “witch hunt” by federal officials over his activism.

“We the people are turning up the heat,” he said. “And that’s why I’m being singled out by certain fish and game agencies and certain U.S. attorneys.”

Typical wingnut, but words but whines and cries when he’s held to his own standards. I guess he thinks he has the God given right to threaten and kill whomever and whatever he wants.

It’s important that people realize that his last little clown show was far from his first. Maybe he doesn’t think this sounded like a threat, but when you combine it with this, it sure sounds like it:

I was in Chicago last week I said, “Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these, you punk!” Obama, he’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on one of my machine guns. Let’s hear it for them.

I was in New York and I said, “Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset you worthless bitch.”

Since I’m in California, I’m gonna find Barbara Boxer she might wanna suck on my machine guns. Hey, Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these you worthless whore.

I’m guessing somebody in the US Military was informed of these previous threats and decided it wasn’t a good idea to allow him appear on base. It’s a common problem when a Democratic president is in office. You’ll recall that when Clinton was in office, there were similar issues:

Mr. Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, created a furor by saying that President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief, he told The News and Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh: “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.”

Mr. Helms said soldiers disliked President Clinton because he had avoided service during the Vietnam War, supported homosexuals in the military and had reduced military spending.

It’s always something.

By the way, if you haven’t heard Hannity excusing Nugent’s tirade, you should. What a little jerk.

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Screwed straight?

by digby

I’m sure that Monica Crowley and the rest of the right wing comedy troupe think this is just another of their hilarious jokes and we should all lighten up, but I think it’s horrifying. From Jezebel:

Cleveland radio personality Dominic Dieter, a surely sonorous voice that squawks to every morning to listeners of the Rover’s Morning Glory Show on “The Buzzard” 100.7 FM WMMS, gave a father who wrote to the station worrying about whatever to do about catching his daughter kissing another girl some of the worst advice ever, facetious or otherwise. Dieter responded to the letter on-air, telling the father, “You should have one of your friends screw your daughter straight.”

I wouldn’t call that advice. I’d call it incitement to a criminal act. Which is what it is:

Corrective rape is the use of rape against women who violate social norms regarding human sexuality and gender roles, often lesbians but sometimes gay men, with a goal of punishment of abnormal behavior and reinforcement of societal norms. The crime was first identified in South Africa where it is sometimes supervised by members of the woman’s family or local community, and is a major contributor to HIV infection in South African lesbians. Corrective rape has also been known to occur in Thailand, Ecuador, Canada, the United States, and Zimbabwe. Corrective rape and the accompanying violence can result in physical and psychological trauma, mutilation, HIV infection, unwanted pregnancy, and may contribute to suicide.

This is a very specific crime against LGBT people. But I’ve always gotten a similar feeling from the oft told “joke” about how some woman men don’t like “needs to get laid,” or “needs a good fucking.” You can interpret it as saying that a woman is unhappy because she isn’t getting any sexual pleasure, and I’m sure there are those who mean it that way. But far too often there’s a coercive, violent tone that sounds an awful lot like she needs to be raped to teach her a lesson of some sort. Maybe you have to have someone say directly to you to get the full effect.

In any case, this radio creep is beyond the pale. Encouraging a man to have one of his friends rape his daughter to stop her from being gay is so wrong on so many levels that I honestly can’t see how any decent person could excuse it.

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A profile in media courage

by David Atkins

All of Washington D.C. yesterday was obsessed with what has derisively become known as “Nerd Prom”: the White House Correspondents Dinner. Unless Stephen Colbert is involved, it’s typically a bleak and self-important affair.

But speaking of Stephen Colbert, there was a much funnier and better event, which Digby posted about earlier in the week, the Time 100 dinner. Stephen Colbert had the honor of delivering remarks–and per his usual, he didn’t mince words:

Also, Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke is here tonight. Also an instant, instant feminist icon. Famously tested, testified before Congress, that Georgetown, a Catholic institution,should be required to provide insurance coverage for her birth control.

Now, TIME 100 honoree, his eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan disagrees — sir, lovely to see you again.

Of course, now some, some critics have said in response to this that if the Catholic church’s insurance does not cover Sandra Fluke’s birth control, it shouldn’t cover Cardinal Dolan’s Viagra.

Oh, no, no, no. Oh, no, no, no, that’s called celibacy plus. That’s how the pros do it. Because chastity is one thing, but it shows true commitment to uphold your vows when you are sporting a crook you could hang a miter on. Oh, wow, see you at mass on Sunday, sir?

The best shots were taken at David Koch, who was sitting right there in the front section:

Of course, all of us should be honored to be listed on the TIME 100 alongside the two men who will be slugging it out in the fall: President Obama, and the man who would defeat him, David Koch.
who
Give it up everybody. David Koch.

Little known fact — David, nice to see you again, sir.

Little known fact, David’s brother Charles Koch is actually even more influential. Charles pledged $40 million to defeat President Obama, David only $20 million. That’s kind of cheap, Dave.

Sure, he’s all for buying the elections, but when the bill for democracy comes up, Dave’s always in the men’s room. I’m sorry, I must have left Wisconsin in my other coat.

I was particularly excited to meet David Koch earlier tonight because I have a Super PAC, Colbert Super PAC, and I am — thank you, thank you — and I am happy to announce Mr. Koch has pledged $5 million to my Super PAC. And the great thing is, thanks to federal election law, there’s no way for you to ever know whether that’s a joke.

By the way, if David Koch likes his waiter tonight, he will be your next congressman.

It’s been said a million times at this point, but Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have more courage and honesty than 2/3 of the so-called “liberal” Democratic establishment. They’re not afraid of David Koch’s or Jamie Dimon’s cash, and they’re not afraid of not getting invited to cool cocktail parties.

And just for the record, let the conspiracy types who claim that our press cowardice is all the result of corporate media ownership note: Viacom runs Comedy Central, and General Electric Comcast owns MSNBC. Maddow, Stewart and Colbert feel fairly free to do their thing, anyway. There may be nefarious control to a certain extent, but by and large the rest of the traditional press don’t get off so lightly. They’re simply cowards, “respectable” straight-laced cardboard caricatures humbled at every turn by the brilliance and courage of a couple of comedians and a comparatively neophyte unabashed lesbian TV personality on the 3rd most watched cable news channel.

That should embarrass them. But I guess it doesn’t.

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Guilty until proven innocent

by digby

I wrote about this case earlier, but the jury was still out on whether he was going to be compensated. It’s now in, and it’s good news:

The City Council approved a $250,000 settlement Wednesday to a man mistaken by police as a tagger and was hit with a stun gun over and over.

A jury wanted the city to pay for a police officer using excessive force.

Police took down Dan Halsted while he was just innocently walking home. The officer stunned Halsted five times with a Taser in the back because he thought he sprayed some graffiti.

Halsted was tackled by a Portland police officer in the Northeast Portland neighborhood of Sullivan’s Gulch four years ago.

“I was walking home and all of a sudden a flashlight came on in my eyes and I stopped, and I heard a voice say, ‘Get him!’ And I heard footsteps coming at me, so I turned and I ran.”

In the pitch dark, Halsted thought he was being jumped.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “I was screaming to call the police the whole time, and I didn’t realize this was the police because they never identified themselves at all.”

Police had mistaken Halsted for a tagger who hit a nearby building.

“The arresting officer in his police report, he made up a whole other story and said that I had been running down the street with a couple other people.”

That’s the same thing the officer testified to in court when Halsted sued. In reality Halsted had been with friends at the Rose and Thistle Restaurant and was never charged with any crime.

“The whole event was terrifying, but I think the scariest part was their story afterwards – making me sound like a criminal. I think that was the scariest part,” he said.

It’s shocking to me that the city actually contested this case, but they did and they lost. Thank goodness.

This should be every American’s worst nightmare because it could so easily happen to any of us. You’re walking down the street, completely innocent of any wrongdoing, and you get tackled, repeatedly hit with electro-shock and beaten by people you assume are criminals. The more you fight for your life, the worse it gets. And they turn out to be police, who then turn the full force of the state against you to cover their mistake.

We’re seeing this sort of thing played out in various ways a lot lately, aren’t we? I suppose this fellow should be grateful to be alive. If he weren’t, nobody would be the wiser, would they?

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Pink Elephants

by digby

Why do I get the feeling that the GOP convention this year is going to be the bizarroworld version of the 2004 Democratic convention?

The Republican “Young Guns” brand is heading into new territory—women.
The YG Network is launching YG “Woman Up,” riffing off of the term “man up,” in an effort to better communicate conservative policies to women…

YG Network Policy Director Mary Anne Carter said the women’s initiative is a good fit for the Young Guns because it is about taking a new approach to issues, including areas like moving to a flexible work-week.

“It’s a new way of looking at things, a fresher approach,” Carter said. “It’s center-right solutions to a broader audience that most certainly would include women.”
This is just the latest initiative by the YG Network, which also recently launched an energy and conservation project.

The new project, YGW, has a six-figure investment for launch and a target budget in the mid-seven figures, according to senior adviser Brad Dayspring. He declined to comment on who put up the funding.

In addition to running issue ads this election cycle, the group plans to have a major presence at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. While the programming is still under development, Carter said they plan to showcase women from across the country.

“There are real women superstars and we want to take advantage of that,” Carter said.

I have a picture in my mind of Mitt Romney striding to the podium to the melodious sound of “I am woman, hear me roar” blasting over the speakers. It should be fun.

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Faith-based retirement

by digby

This is an excellent column by Joe Nocera in the NY Times relating his own realization that he will not be able to retire. It’s a very familiar tale to me:

Like millions of other aging baby boomers, I first began putting money into a tax-deferred retirement account a few years after they were legislated into existence in the late 1970s. The great bull market, which began in 1982, was just gearing up. As a young journalist, I couldn’t afford to invest a lot of money, but my account grew as the market rose, and the bull market gave me an inflated sense of my investing skills.

I became such an enthusiast of the new investing culture that I wrote my first book, in the mid-1990s, about what I called “the democratization of money.” It was only right, I argued, that the little guy have the same access to the markets as the wealthy. In the book, I didn’t make much of the decline of pensions. After all, we were in the middle of the tech bubble by then. What fun!

The bull market ended with the bursting of that bubble in 2000. My tech-laden portfolio was cut in half. A half-dozen years later, I got divorced, cutting my 401(k) in half again. A few years after that, I bought a house that needed some costly renovations. Since my retirement account was now hopelessly inadequate for actual retirement, I reasoned that I might as well get some use out of the money while I could. So I threw another chunk of my 401(k) at the renovation. That’s where I stand today.

Unlike him, I had periods of unemployment and career changes and some of my friends had health problems that led us to a similar place. But even among professionals and otherwise successful people — not to mention the middle and working class toilers who never had any money to save in the first place — this is the story of many of my generation. I’m certain we were all terrible people who should have been much better savers and not made the decisions we made. Looking back I’m sure many of us would do it differently. But it is what it is.

And what it means is that we can’t afford to retire. Which is bad. We will be clogging the workforce long after we want to be in it and that’s not healthy.

Nocera goes on:

When I related my tale recently to Teresa Ghilarducci, a behavioral economist at The New School who studies retirement and investor behavior, she let out the kind of sigh that made it clear that she had heard it all before. The sad truth, she told me, is that I’m the rule, not the exception. “People have income shock, like divorce or loss of a job or a health crisis,” and those crises tend to drain retirement accounts, she said.

But even putting income shocks aside, she said, most human beings lack the skill and emotional wherewithal to be good investors. Linking investing and retirement has turned out to be a recipe for disaster.

It works out well for some and badly for others. Unfortunately, there are far more for whom it hasn’t worked out and who will be working and/or living very meager existences on whatever’s left of Social Security until they die. That isn’t a good situation for anyone, especially their kids. I’m guessing we’re about to see a big spike in elder poverty when the congress inevitably “compromises” and agrees that we must destroy Social Security in order to save it.

I suppose we deserve it for our failures. But I think most people, even the “deserving” rich ones, are surprised by how life unfolds in ways they don’t expect. Anything can happen, even to very responsible people. You just don’t know.

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I must admit that I would rather watch this Royal Wedding on a loop for the next three days than spend even one minute watching the political press drool all over reality TV stars and B-list rockers at this pathetic “Nerd Prom” this week-end. Unless Colbert is officiating it is just depressing:

This weekend is the biggest socio-political event of the year in DC. Socializing and politics always go hand in hand here, but this weekend is different. The White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner Saturday night has morphed into a creature all its own, an amalgam of DC, NY and Hollywood elites that has come to dominate the calendar of the Federal City (as distinguished from the non-governmental and more down-to-earth Washington). I’m not sure there’s anything else that captures so completely the way the modern DC operates and conceives of itself as this weekend does. A glimpse of WHCA dinners past

Seriously, at least the Brits have the excuse of centuries of history and a long tradition of such pomp and circumstance. And the royals are merely expensive celebrities, they don’t have any real power, unlike some of the celebrity reporters and pundits who celebrate themselves at this rather sad yearly event.

Pick your poison:

Just don’t call it class war

by digby

When a Republican clutches his pearls and sniffles about “divisiveness” remember this:

The latest Republican plan to reconcile the budget and preserve defense spending extracts even deeper cuts from programs to help the poor and Americans still reeling from the recession.

Although spending levels for the budget were set in the Budget Control Act passed last summer in the deal to raise the nation’s debt limit, Republicans are pushing ahead with another plan that cuts more while trying to prevent the beginning of $600 billion in cuts over 10 years to the growth of the defense budget.

They are doing so because the Super Committee, which was supposed to find $1.2 trillion in cuts on which everyone could agree, failed, leaving the slashing up to a pre-agreed sequestration plan that extracts half the savings from the military.

Unless Congress acts, the sequestration begins at the start of 2013. Democrats in the Senate are arguing that the Budget Control Act counts as a budget, and therefore they won’t take up debate on a spending plan for 2013, much less address Rep. Paul Ryan’s House budget resolution.

So instead, the House has embarked on a seldom-used reconciliation process. Its aim is to have at hand an alternative to the sequestration on the theory that the Senate will not want to allow the defense cuts either, and won’t have its own plan.

In a memo sent to members Wednesday instructing them how to write their reconciliation bill, Republicans picked a number of targets, including extracting $80 billion from federal workers and $44 billion from health care. In all, it identifies $78 billion to cut in 2013, and details around $300 billion over 10 years.

But the memo spends the most time targeting the exploding cost of food stamps, on which more Americans rely than ever, at greater expense to the government than ever before.

If people were paying attention to the details, which they aren’t because they have lives, they would see that the Republicans are very systematically pitting constituencies against each other in all these legislative showdowns. Just this past week they defined the choice as being between raising student loan rates and health care. Here, it’s between defense cuts and food stamps. (A no brainer for liberals, but watch the conservadems on this — they’re likely to go the wrong way.)

This is wedge legislating. It’s smart, especially at a time like this where the whole political system seems like a toxic mess to most people and they only hear certain buzzwords, at best. The point is to make sure that somebody in your opponent’s coalition feels like they’re getting screwed by their own people. (And I’m pretty sure you know who that “somebody” usually is.)

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Savvy Protection Racket

by digby

Here’s one for the shocker of the century file:

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase and the industry’s regulation-basher in chief, has called for a sit-down next week between the heads of four of the nation’s biggest banks — JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley — and Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

The purpose of this friendly get-together will be to express the banks’ displeasure about financial regulation, particularly a Fed plan to limit the banks’ exposure to derivatives tied to the credit of foreign governments and other banks.

According to the WSJ:

bankers will tell regulators that the rule is based on “unrealistic” standards and could foster “potentially destabilizing” market shifts, according to two draft letters reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

In other words: Nice economy you’ve got there. Shame if anything should happen to it.

I guess we know who’s in charge here. And it isn’t the people of the United States.

We’ve been here before actually. And the government whiffed. Recall President Obama’s words back in 2009:

“It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger,” President Obama said on Thursday of the banks he’s chosen to bail out. “You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk [to] them, ease that finger off the trigger.”

You can’t help but wonder how different things would be if President Obama had shown the same kind of “resolve” and “courage” everyone lauds him for showing in his order to assassinate Osama bin Laden, with the “savvy businessmen” on Wall Street. We’ll never know, unfortunately. They’re going to keep blackmailing the nation — the world — as long as they can get away with it.

Read the whole article to find out just how reckless these people are being. All over again.

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