Month: May 2012

Common Sense from the Dept of Justice

by digby

This would seem to be common sense for most people, I think, but it’s surprisingly common that state and local governments are claiming that citizens don’t have a right to photograph or videotape police in their official duties. (The most unitentionally hilarious rationale being that it violates the police officer’s right to privacy.)

It turns out that the US Department of Justice doesn’t agree. In fact, it strongly disagrees:

In a win for technology, citizen journalism, and our Constitutional rights, the U.S. Department of Justice has issued a letter to the Baltimore City Police Department reconfirming that photographing, video- and audio-recording on-duty police officers is a Constitutional right protected by the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

“Because recording police officers in the public discharge of their duties is protected by the First Amendment, policies should prohibit interference with recording of police activities except in narrowly circumscribed situations,” reads the DoJ’s letter (pdf). “More particularly, policies should instruct officers that, except under limited circumstances, officers must not search or seize a camera or recording device without a warrant. In addition, policies should prohibit more subtle actions that may nonetheless infringe upon individuals’ First Amendment rights. Officers should be advised not to threaten, intimidate, or otherwise discourage an individual from recording police officer enforcement activities or intentionally block or obstruct cameras or recording devices.”

The letter, which was brought to our attention via photojournalist Carlos Miller of PixIQ (who says in his bio that he’s been arrested three times for recording police), comes in response to a lawsuit brought forth by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Christopher Sharp, against the BPD, whose officers confiscated Sharp’s cellphone and deleted a video of police arresting his friend at the 2010 Preakness Stakes horse race.

After the DoJ first took interest in the lawsuit earlier this year, the BPD issued a seven-page General Order to officers stating that citizens have the “absolute right” to record police doing their duties, provided the recording does not violate any other laws, like obstruction of justice. Rather than stick to these principles, however, BPD simply adopted a broader interpretation of the law, which led to further crackdowns on recording. The DoJ’s most recent letter, issued on May 14, says that the BPD’s order does not go far enough to protect the rights of citizens.

They also say that the press has a right to film police too, shockingly enough.

I know it’s bizarre to think the anyone has to actually put this on paper, but apparently it does. The good news is that the DOJ did it. Huzzah.

Update: On the other hand … oy.

Empire Myopia

by digby

What do you suppose a country that is only willing to pay (top dollar) for a far flung military empire, domestic policing, prisons and border security look like? If the Republicans get their we’re way, it looks like we’re going to find out:

The House passed a defense budget Friday that exceeds the deal cut by Congress and President Barack Obama last summer, and that would have to be paid for with cash taken from poverty programs, health care and the federal workforce.

The National Defense Authorization Act permits $642 billion in defense spending next year. The White House has threatened to veto the bill, citing more than 30 changes to the budget it was seeking.

But the measure also adds $8 billion more than called for in the Budget Control Act that Congress agreed to last summer in exchange for raising the nation’s debt limit.

“We increase the spending for defense due to the priorities that we feel are most important and the constitutional requirement we have to provide for the common defense,” Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) said. “But we will cut in other areas of the budget so that we comply fully with the deficit reduction act.”

Those other areas were spelled out in the broader budget plan passed last week. Written by House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), it would cut more than $80 billion in federal retirement benefits, nearly $50 billion from Medicaid programs and more than $36 billion from programs to feed the poor.

I’ve always thought of the Military Industrial Complex as welfare for (middle-aged, educated white) guys. This would back up that claim:

Among other unasked for changes, the bill keeps aging aircraft and ships the military wants to phase out, keeps the Army and Marines at larger force levels and orders construction of missile defenses.

They don’t want it, they don’t need it, but the Republican donors want the profits and their conservative base voters want the very well paying, extremely high benefits jobs.

They like to say they hate Big Government, but that’s a lie. They love it. It’s just that they want to funnel the money to their own constituencies — and they want to build a police state that will keep everyone else in line in case they decide to do something about it.

It is true that many Democrats back all those programs too. But I think they do have more pressure coming from constituents to spend money on domestic items as well, so they’re forced to at least pay them lip service and offer token support. It’s not much, but it’s where we are these days in terms of choices.

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The human consequences

by David Atkins

Debates over budgets and big public policies are too often mired disembodied numbers and ideological rhetoric. It’s easy to overlook the all too human consequences of policy decisions. Consequences like this:

A woman is packing up her home after being served an eviction notice — a situation that drove her husband to commit suicide.

“I lost my husband and it hurts me like hell,” said Oriane Rousseau, whose husband, Norman, took his life Sunday after an eviction notice was placed on their front door.

Norman’s death has delayed the eviction but Oriane said it’s difficult for her to stay in the home where he died.

“I don’t want this to happen to anybody. This is horrible. I lost my husband. I lose my pets, I lose my house, I lose my furniture, everything…for nothing,” Rousseau said.

The family bought the home 13 years ago and used their life savings to put 30 percent down.

In 2006, their dream home became a nightmare. The family said they were talked into a new loan, an adjustable rate mortgage. Then, the couple was accused of not paying their mortgage. But Rousseau showed CBS2 News a cashed cashier’s check used to pay Wells Fargo Bank.

The family then applied for loan modification. Rousseau said they were told not to make payments because it would disqualify them. Then, a letter of default arrived. Rousseau said they were told to ignore the letter — it was part of the loan modification process. In late 2010, the family found out their loan modification had been denied and that the bank was selling their home.

“I had the money…I had the money. I had everything to make that work,” Rousseau said. They were given two days to reinstate their loan but the Rousseau family couldn’t come up with the cash in time. “[Norman] was fighting tooth and nail, everything that he could do,” Rousseau said of her husband.

The home sold on Nov. 22, 2010, but their attorney got them a stay, which was later dissolved. Last week, the bank told the family they had five days to get out of their home. Norman bought a motor home so his wife and his stepson wouldn’t get turned out onto the streets. “He was a family man. He cared for his family a lot. He was so worried where we were going to go,” Rousseau said.

The motor home stopped working as soon as Norman drove it to their house. The family had run out of options. The next day was Mother’s Day and, that morning, Norman shot himself in the couple’s bedroom.

But help is one the way for in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars for struggling homeowners across the country! Oh, wait. No, it’s not. What little there is, is being used to plug budget holes left by decades of tax cuts, mostly for the richest one percent.

But hey, no problem. I’m sure these people were just moochers and looters who just wouldn’t do what it takes to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. If they would rather die, then they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

The professional right

by digby

We can only dream of a “professional left” that is as influential and connected as this:

Thirty minutes.

That’s roughly the time it took for conservatives to jump all over Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his leadership team after the GOP’s game plan for dealing with President Barack Obama’s health care law leaked to the media.

Their gripe? Republicans would try to replicate popular parts of Obama’s health care law if the Supreme Court overturns the law this summer.

Rather than sending out news releases or rushing to cable TV for a rant, conservatives blasted House Republican leadership on a private Google email group called The Repeal Coalition. The group is chock- full of think tank types, some Republican leadership staffers, health care policy staffers and conservative activists, according to sources in the group.

The behind-the-scenes fight among Republicans richly illustrates why House GOP leadership is so cautious, sensitive and calculating when it comes to dealing with the conservative right. POLITICO obtained the email chain, the contents of which show that health care reform remains just as emotional an issue as ever.

Wesley Denton, an aide to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), questioned whether the “GOP now against full repeal?”

“Should we change the name of this [listserv] to ‘partialrepealcoalition’ or ‘someofobamacareisprettygood’?” Denton wrote to the group.

Brian Worth, a GOP leadership staffer responsible for coordinating with outside groups, shot back that “the House has already passed a full repeal bill.”

“Has the Senate passed that bill yet?” Worth asked Denton, in the email chain.

Russ Vought, a former House Republican staffer who is now at Heritage Action for America, bluntly said, “that has absolutely nothing to do with it.” The “House GOP is going to cave after winning an election on full repeal … and before winning the next election to finish the job.”

“Unreal,” he said.

It’s undoubtedly true that the Republican base wants full repeal of Ohbaaaamacare. But it’s far from clear that the voters as a whole agree. Of course, the perennial problem is that there isn’t a critical mass of people who have or will benefit from the reforms since most people are covered by their employer and therefore have little stake in them (unless they lose their jobs or decide to go out on their own.) So, healthcare remains an abstract issue for many people — perhaps even a majority who won’t feel it if the reforms are repealed.

It’s very hard to know how that would go, although I think they may be biting off more than they can chew if they go this far:

Avik Roy, a Forbes columnist and Manhattan Institute scholar, wrote to the email group that forcing insurance companies to cover folks with pre-existing conditions “would destroy the private insurance market.” Congressional Republicans also want to keep closed the Medicare “donut hole” — Washington-speak for a gap in Medicare’s prescription drug coverage that requires seniors to pay more out of pocket for medicine. Roy said that much-maligned gap in coverage — eventually closed in the Democrats’ law — has “actuarial importance in preventing wasteful drug spending.”

”Brian, if you or someone else can explain the policy rationale of these provisions, I’d love to hear it,” Roy wrote to the email list.

He’s right that the pre-existing condition provision is problematic if they repeal the mandate. It’s actuarially important to let these people die if they can’t afford insurance. (There is a body of thought that says it isn’t needed.) And the donut-hole does hold down government spending because it lays it on the backs of patients.

But good luck with the politics. They might be able to get away with eliminating the pre-existing condition coverage, because Americans seem to have become hardened to hard luck stories and frankly don’t care enough about strangers to want to do anything about a problem that doesn’t affect them directly. But the donut-hole will ignite the seniors, something the Republicans are loathe to do. It’s become their voting base.

The “professional right” is nonetheless very effective:

It’s another turn of the screw for a Washington that is influenced by deep-pocketed, high-profile legislative-action groups. From Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform to Heritage Action to Club for Growth, these groups are frequent judges of Republican Washington and aren’t afraid to speak out against fellow conservatives.[…]

The speaker issued a statement Thursday to reaffirm his support for full repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

“The only way to change this is by repealing ObamaCare in its entirety,” Boehner said in the statement. “We voted to fully repeal the president’s health care law as one of our first acts as a new House majority, and our plan remains to repeal the law in its entirety. Anything short of that is unacceptable.”

Impressive.

Thomas Keller

by tristero

I fully agree that Thomas Keller’s primary focus must be on his art, but there is nothing “brave” about it. It’s simply the attitude you need to achieve greatness, whether it’s in music, food or any other endeavor that requires careful attention to detail and finely-honed discernment.

However, Keller’s example – a preference to serve Manhattan diners the superb oysters of Stonington, Me vs decent oysters from Long Island – so completely misses the point that it represents a willful ignorance of what the actual problem is. After all, Stonington is not that much farther from Manhattan than Long Island. The real problem is the ecological (not to mention culinary) stupidity of flying crummy garlic from China into NY supermakerts vs delivering great garlic to our groceries from New York State.

Multiply that kind of utterly pointless globalization and degradation of food quality times thousands of food products times nearly every community in every state and you have an aesthetic, environmental, and moral disaster on your hands.

Keller has nothing whatsoever to do with this absurd, wasteful behavior. And, he is, of course, right that he only feeds a few handfuls of people each day so nothing in his personal behavior has that much global impact. He is, pure and simple, a very great chef whose personal example and recipes have revolutionized what food means, even for those of us who will never be able to afford to eat at his restaurants.

In short, Thomas Keller is a genuine food elitist. And that’s my point:

It is because Thomas Keller is a food elitist that he should know better than to make such careless remarks, remarks that can easily be construed as condoning the worst kind of aesthetic and civil vulgarity.

RIP Donna Summer

by digby

From her lips …

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“Speaking for those women who could never imagine they’d have to make this choice”

by digby

First, they demonized it after 24 weeks, with a “partial birth abortion” propaganda campaign that educated people to believe that women were commonly having late term abortions because they “changed their minds” (or perhaps just for fun.)That was never true. In fact, the vast majority of late term abortion were for tragic medical reasons. But it worked.

Defending Krugman from Yves Smith

by David Atkins

Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism has a long piece today bashing Paul Krugman for his post about Americans Elect.

Yves Smith is upset with Krugman for supposedly praising the Obama presidency and touting deficit cuts. While I’m sure that Krugman can adequately defend himself, the criticism here is simply bizarre. Here’s Smith:

Paul Krugman’s partisanship has become so shameless that we are giving him the inaugural Eric Schneiderman Decoy Award for his post “Things Fall Apart“. The Schneiderman Decoy Award goes for exceptional achievement in turning one’s good name over to particularly rancid Obama Administration initiatives.

Krugman’s post didn’t merely contain some cringe-making fawning over Obama; it was egregiously incorrect on the development that prompted the post, that of the death of Americans Elect, a shadowy group that had was out to sponsor a Presidential candidate. It’s hard to believe that Krugman does not know the orientation and aims of this failed effort…

And why does Krugman want us to believe this “centrist” organization was doomed? Not because it was a vehicle for deficit hawkery that would get traction only if Bloomberg took up its mission, but because all sensible real centrists will of course vote for Obama…

There is another sneaky bit in this. Notice Krugman’s endorsement of deficit reduction (at least in part) by spending cuts, rather than via increasing growth? And also keep in mind that when the private sector delevers, unless the country runs a trade surplus, the government sector has to run a deficit to accommodate the desire of households and businesses to save. Krugman hopefully knows better than this. So why is he now starting to talk what sounds like austerity lite?

The Dems are tying to put together a Grand Bargain once again. There is apparently a push to get a deal done before the election but the folks I consider credible don’t see that happening. There is a possibility that we hit the deficit ceiling pre-election, which each party is likely to use to scapegoat the other, but odds favor the Administration coming out the loser. So in addition to the usual Obama hagiography, Krugman is also seeding the idea that a deficit cutting deal would be a good move.

Paul Krugman endorsing austerity and cuts to social services? That would indeed be news. So what did Krugman actually say?

What went wrong? Well, there actually is a large constituency in America for a political leader who is willing to take responsible positions — to call for more investment in the nation’s education and infrastructure, to propose bringing down the long-run deficit through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. And there is in fact a political leader ready and willing (maybe too willing) to play that role; his name is Barack Obama.

So why Americans Elect? Because there exists in America a small class of professional centrists, whose stock in trade is denouncing the extremists in both parties and calling for a middle ground. And this class cannot, as a professional matter, admit that there already is a centrist party in America, the Democrats — that the extremism they decry is all coming from one side of the political fence. Because if they admitted that, they’d just be moderate Democrats, with no holier-than-thou pedestal to stand on.

Americans Elect was created to appeal to this class of professional centrists — which meant that it was doomed to go nowhere.

Krugman calls the President too willing to accept austerity measures. He mocks the pseudo-centrists. He points out that the Democratic Party is in part centrist party aligned with the Thomas Friedmans of the world as it is. If they want a candidate to vote for, they already have one.

None of that is to endorse austerity. It’s to point out that there is, in fact, no real political constituency for their backward policies that isn’t already occupied by the President–for better or for worse.

What has Smith truly incensed is that Krugman is being too partisan. In this both Smith and the plutocrats at TED have something in common. Smith is annoyed that Krugman is not calling a pox on both houses and describing the two parties as functionally equivalent. That rather than condemning the President outright for pushing austerity-lite, Krugman is suggesting to the small band of centrists that they already have a candidate to vote for, while forcing them to take a good look at the austerity-on-steroids of the Paul Ryan types and put the “extremism” label where it belongs.

Well, on that count Mr. Krugman and I are guilty as charged. We’re not so intellectually dishonest as to claim that the two parties are equivalently bad, no matter how much distaste we may have for the President’s deference to austerity-lite and eagerness to bend over backwards to refute conservative mythmaking.

As bad as the Tom Friedmans of the world are, they’re not Paul Ryan. Moreover, there is a large faction of the Democratic Party that is genuinely progressive, and that continues to push its message forward via actions like the People’s Budget. It serves a distinctly progressive purpose to chide the fools like Tom Friedman over their implicit rejection of “both sides”. After all, if the President is appropriately seen as occupying the “center” rather than the “left,” then that carves out room for the real “left” to be heard. As opposed to trashing Paul Ryan and the President with an equivalent brush, which is both untrue and more importantly makes anyone not already converted to the progressive message simply stop listening.

Paul Krugman understands his politics here. He understands his audience. And he’s being savvy about his tactics. One could wish the same were true of everyone.

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“So many words. So little meaning”

by digby

Where is Joseph Heller when you need him?

Once you’re on a watch list, you’re entirely at the government’s mercy if you want to get off. We’ve challenged this regime in federal court on behalf of fifteen U.S. citizens and legal residents who were not allowed to board flights but have never been given any explanation or opportunity to object. On Friday, my colleague Nusrat Choudhury appeared before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to argue that placing our clients on the No Fly List without providing them any opportunity to confront and rebut the “evidence” against them is unconstitutional.

You can listen to the argument here. I’m always a little amazed when intelligent and collegial government lawyers stand up in court to defend the indefensible, but even by those standards, Friday’s hearing stood out. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski had a simple question for the government attorney: what would you do if you found yourself on the No Fly List? After some hemming and hawing, the attorney said that he would seek “redress” from the Department of Homeland Security – even though DHS does not place people on the No Fly list and has no authority to remove them (that’s the FBI’s job). Because, the lawyer conceded, DHS would not be able to confirm or deny whether he was on the list, he would then seek review in a federal appellate court. And what would the court be able to do?, asked Judge Kozinski. Not much, said the government lawyer. In fact, the lawyer would not even concede that a federal court possessed the authority to order someone removed from the No Fly List.

In other words, according to the United States government, the only redress that is available to a watch-listed citizen is to hope that some government bureaucrat will correct a mistake or change his mind. Judge Kozinski seemed frustrated by the government’s equivocation. “So many words,” he said during an earlier exchange. “So little meaning.”

Yes. He could ha

QOTD: Mitt Romney

by digby

Via Greg Sargent:

“I’m not familiar precisely with what I said, but I’ll stand by what I said, whatever it was.”

And this was in answer to a question about whether he agrees with his earlier remarks that Obama was trying to make America a less Christian nation.

Does it seem like a smart move for the first Morman nominee to the presidency to get into the religion thing? I mean, there are those who think that the secretive Mormon religion with all it’s odd rituals and unusual beliefs about Jesus in America (and Mexico)are off the beaten path.

I would have thought that it’s better to leave the “who’s the better Christian” argument out of it this time out. Apparently not.

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