Another Republican who had no problem with scorched earth partisanship is now complaining when the crazies it spawned turned their poisonous tactics on her:
[Kay Bailey Hutchinson] lamented the growing political divisions that have run counter to cooperation and compromise. “There is a divide on people who want to achieve something — as Ronald Reagan said, ‘I’d rather have half a loaf than no loaf’ — and people who just want to blow things up.” As for the uncompromising demand for deep budget cuts and dwindling government, she said: “Do you really want to not have bridges and the highways that keep commerce moving?” Perry allies, going full tea party, skewered Hutchison as a Republican in name only (RINO). “In my opinion, there’s no such thing as a RINO. Noting makes me madder than a Republican who makes fun of someone who’s not exactly the way they are. If someone’s a Republican, they should be welcome in the Republican Party.”
Cry me a flippin’ river as Sarah Palin would say. These are your people Kay. You stood by and let them turn politics into even more of a sewer than they already were and never said a word. Perhaps you should have realized that you weren’t really a member of their club and that they would think nothing of turning on you the minute you were no longer the nice Republican lady who did as she was told. Oh well. Buh bye.
Q. It seems like photographing in public is becoming a crime.
A.Literally every day, someone is being arrested for doing nothing more than taking a photograph in a public place. It makes no sense to me. Photography is an expression of free speech.
Since 9/11, there’s been an incredible number of incidents where photographers are being interfered with and arrested for doing nothing other than taking pictures or recording video in public places.
It’s not just news photographers who should be concerned with this. I think every citizen should be concerned. Tourists taking pictures are being told by police, security guards and sometimes other citizens, “Sorry, you can’t take a picture here.” When asked why, they say, “Well, don’t you remember 9/11?”
I remember it quite well, but what does that have do to with taking a picture in public? It seems like the war on terrorism has somehow morphed into an assault on photography.
Q.What’s caused this?
A.It’s been a perfect storm. There’s 9/11, and now photojournalists who traditionally worked for newspapers are losing their jobs and becoming freelancers who may not have the backing of their news organizations. You have Occupy Wall Street, where police didn’t want some of their actions to be photographed. And now everybody with a cellphone is capable of recording very high-quality images. And everyone has the ability to upload and share them almost instantly. There is no news cycle — it’s 24/7 with unlimited bandwidth.
Q.What does a professional photographer need to know about their right to photograph?
A.If you’re out in public, you can take pictures. And you can report to your heart’s content. The problem is whether they know their rights or don’t know their rights and are willing to assert their rights.
Now, when I say that, that doesn’t mean that you can get up within two inches of a working police officer and stick your camera in their face. One of the things I prided myself on when I was a photojournalist was not affecting the situation. You want to be invisible. You get in, you get out, nobody gets hurt. You do your job, and that’s what your main responsibility is. It’s not to become the news story. Be respectful, be polite, act professional.
But even in certain cases when photographers have carried around the law and shown it to police officers and law enforcement, it hasn’t mattered.
Unfortunately, a lot of officers will say “because I said so.” It works for your mother, but it doesn’t really work for police. They have to be enforcing a certain law, and they can’t just make it up.
If you’re stopped on the street, stay calm. Be reasonable, be cooperative — as cooperative as you can. By cooperative, I don’t mean you have to show them your pictures when they ask. If you’re not getting anywhere ask to speak to a supervisor.
When all else fails, unless you’re willing to be arrested, you have to consider trying a different approach. Walk away, and see if you can get another angle. As news photographers, you’re there to break a new story, the last thing you want to do is stand around arguing with somebody while the images you want to take disappear.
For the general public, just be aware that this may happen to you. Tell them, “I’m on a public street, this is America, I can take pictures.”
We look at the images that come out of Syria and Libya where people risk their lives in order to get images out. Most of those images that we’ve seen are coming from citizens with their cellphones. They risk their lives, and we consider those efforts heroic. And yet in this country, somebody doing the very same thing is considered suspect. I have a real problem with that.
Yeah, I have a real problem with that too and so should you. They are trying to pass laws all over the country making it a crime to photograph the police — our public servants — in the course of their duties. That is no joke. If Americans don’t understand instinctively how un-American that is, then I think we can see just how far down the authoritarian rabbit hole we already are.
If you’ve got some spare change to help out Susie Madrak, Suburban Guerilla extraordinaire, today’s the day to throw it in the kitty. It’s hard out there for a blogger. It’s hard out there for a lot of people and Susie is good people. It’s insane that she’s unable to find a job. But I guess when you’re a woman of a certain age who’s been out of work for a while this economy is particularly cruel.
So, if you’ve got some money to spare or, better yet, live in Philly and have a job available for a smart, hard-working mensch, Susie’s your girl.
In the latest example of the “having an utterly pointless debate between lunatic rightwingers and moderates is good for the country” trope, here’s Joe Nocera:
Ryan’s budget plan would reduce the size of government from the current 24 percent of gross domestic product to around 20 percent of G.D.P. The ax would fall most heavily on programs for the poor. As the opinion writer Matt Miller put it recently in The Washington Post, “Over time, Ryan’s ‘vision’ would decimate most federal activities beyond Social Security, Medicare and defense.”
Simply dismissing these ideas as crazy is a mistake. There are many people in the country who agree with Ryan — as they showed two years ago, when they elected 87 Republican freshmen, many of them Tea Party-backed political novices, to the House of Representatives, who went to Washington vowing to shrink the federal government.
This is cowardly writing, and Nocera knows it. What he actualy seems to be saying is, “Ryan’s ideas are screaming yellow bonkers, but a lot of people voted for them.” In other words, Nocera’s saying that it’s not crazy to dismiss these crazy ideas – they are, after all, you know, nuts, as David Stockman trenchantly describes on the same page – but we should be aware that lots of people have voted for them and therefore we should pay attention to the ideas and discuss them.
That doesn’t make any sense. I wonder whether or not people voted for the crazy ideas themselves or the packaging in which the ideas were wrapped, ie populist rage. I strongly suspect more the latter than the former. If so, then engaging Ryan merely provides his proposals a status they don’t deserve, moving them to the center of the discourse where they don’t belong. As those of us involved in fighting the good fight against creationism know, this is a hoary rightwing strategy called Teach the Controversy, a deeply cynical maneuver because, in reality, there is no controversy. But the point is to make creationism appear as equally valid as evolution. But scientists, to their credit, do dismiss creationism, and with very rare exceptions and only in specific ways, the best scientists don’t fall into the trap of engaging creationists over their ideas.
In short, Ryan’s incoherent Randian notions – they’re not even ideas – can and should be dismissed. Instead of having a debate, which merely elevates the status of his nonsense, we should mock him, jeer him, laugh at him, and react with disgust that our discourse has sunk to such a level that such garbage has been adopted as sober policy by a once-great political party.
But don’t dismiss the impact of the marketing and packaging that enabled Ryan’s stupidities to gain such traction.
Some folks have been trying to make political hay with the easy availability of union financial information. As noted in an earlier post, however, The Wall Street Journal’s methodology in “discovering” the levels of labor union spending was fatally flawed and painted a false (and politically advantageous) picture.
And now Steven Law, the president of American Crossroads, a Republican super PAC, is using ridiculous fictions to try to defend the activities of the Karl Rove-backed group, claiming that the hundreds of millions of dollars that American Crossroads will spend on the election will somehow be dwarfed by what unions will spend.
In an attempt to deflect attention away from the blatant attempts of American Crossroads and other right-wing super PACs to buy elections, Law claims that “neither side will have a financial advantage” in the presidential race that’s expected to break campaign finance records. Law says “groups on the left” tend to outspend right-wing and Republican interests, so “just achieving parity for us or something like that, hopefully even a small financial superiority to us is success.”
Gosh, I sure hope they can scratch up some change for the little Romney engine that could. Otherwise, the mighty Goliath that is the American Union Movement will stomp all over the frail little David of Corporate America and the struggling 1%.
Needless to say, these claims are utter bullshit from start to finish:
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, unions spent $85.9 million on the presidential election in 2008 for independent expenditures and electioneering communications, while conservative groups spent $244.1 million. Even before the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) ruling, unions were still vastly outspent.
I can’t even imagine what the numbers will be this time.
it does occur to me that the corporations are going to have a problem quite soon. It’s hard to imagine who their phantom moneybags boogeyman is going to be once they finish reducing union membership to the average number of people at a Cowsills reunion concert. I guess there’s always Hollywood.
Last month The Weekly Standard ran this cover, which I think it probably correct. Mitt Romney’s in the sidecar. (But he will get blamed when it goes over the cliff. Notice that he’s weighing down Ryan on the left …)
The Village wags are full of intrigue about Romney being mad at Kristol and aides making it clear that Romney was the guy who picked Ryan and all kinds of gossipy nonsense. Whatever.
But I was struck by this typically whiny lament by Paul Ryan in that cover story:
The longer the session continues, the more aggressive Ryan’s opponents [Rob Zerban supporters] become. Inevitably, Ryan supporters begin to shout back at them on his behalf. Ryan admonishes both groups. “People, it doesn’t make sense to start yelling at each other,” he says. And moments later: “It doesn’t work if you yell at each other. It’s just not polite.” On four separate occasions, Ryan calls for civility, but he knows better than to expect it.
“They will organize protests, talking points—sometimes they try to shout you down and get dragged out by the police. That’s their goal—to get pulled out, to disrupt,” he says later, sitting in the back seat of a large black SUV lumbering across south-central Wisconsin five days before the Democratic gubernatorial recall primary. “Wherever there’s one of us—Scott Walker, Sean Duffy, Jim Sensenbrenner, [state representative] Robin Vos—doing something, they go and find it and protest and picket us. So it’s all about agitating, polarizing—sort of Alinsky stuff—conservatives and Republicans, because of these recalls, because of the presidential.”
Poor, poor Republicans. So polite and civil and treated so disrespectfully:
Yes, those Democrats are real Alinsky agitators. Oh wait. That was Bob Inglis, a Republican, who had the nerve to say the Tea Partiers in that crowd should turn off Glenn Beck. You can see how civil they wre. In fact, they were so civil they took him out of office altogether.
How about this one:
Very civil.
I don’t happen to think that’s wrong. They are all citizens and they have a right to show up at public meetings and confront their representatives. What makes me see red is the insipid, hypocritical whining and crocodile tears from the likes of Paul Ryan after what his followers pulled in 2010. Seriously, they’re complaining about the misbehavior of Democrats at Townhall meetings?
This is the footage of the “Alinskyesque” strategy that best represents both the Tea Party and Paul Ryan’s Randroid worldview that guides them:
It still makes me sick to my stomach every time I see it.
If you’ve got a couple of bucks to spare, throw it here to help StopPaulRyan
Giving some paid sick days to workers is good for everyone
by digby
Long ago in a former life, when I worked in the pink collar ghetto, I sat in very close quarters with about eight office workers in which the same cold cycled around through the group for more than six months. It was miserable. We were either getting it, had it or were just getting over it. None of us had adequate sick leave so we didn’t use what little we had it for fear it would be gone when we got “really sick.” On another job working in a restaurant, I saw sick people pass around germs so liberally that it made me learn to cook so I could eat at home. Again, no sick leave and wages so low that we couldn’t afford to lose a days pay.
Activists for working people (and general decency), like the Working Families Party in New Yorkare trying to change this:
Advocates are turning up the heat on City Council Speaker Christine Quinn over a bill mandating paid sick days for employees — attempting to turn her opposition into a political liability as she runs for mayor.
More than a dozen groups backing the measure will target half a million New Yorkers by e-mail Monday, asking them to push Quinn to allow a vote on it. They’re also planning to hit 100,000 “prime” Democratic voters with door-knocks and literature highlighting her position. The Working Families Party is pushing the effort along with liberal groups like MoveOn.org.
Quinn says the bill, which requires that a worker get at least five paid sick days a year, would hurt small businesses. “With the current state of the economy, and so many businesses struggling to stay alive, I do not believe it would be wise to implement this policy … at this time,” she said.
A poll earlier this year found 62% of Democratic voters were less likely to vote for a mayoral candidate who opposed the plan.
I’m getting so tired of hearing politicians evoke the name of “small business” to justify horrible working conditions. I know the economy is tough. But they’ve got to stop taking it out of the hides of the working poor.
This informational web-site lists all the good reasons for businesses to provide sick days, including the fact that it’s not a budget buster and actually increases productivity. (Believe me, a sick employee is not working to full potential. Duh.) But I have to say that this one reason that should make every New Yorker back this measure:
Workers without paid sick days are heavily concentrated in jobs that require a high level of interaction with the public — the people who serve and prepare our food, look after our children and care for the elderly. When those workers feel compelled to come to work sick, it’s not just their health that’s at risk — it’s all of us.
One in eight food service workers reports having come to work sick twice in the last year, with symptoms including vomiting and diarrhea.
In nursing homes with paid sick days, patients are 60% less likely to contract infections from the staff.
During the H1N1 epidemic, 8 million Americans came to work while infected with the swine flue virus, and infected another 7 million people.
According to the Center for Disease Control, out of 21 million ‘norovirus’ outbreaks (a common food-borne virus) annually, roughly half are caused by ill food workers.
This is a public health issue and the public should be concerned.
We should have a national policy, but that’s obviously impossible. I’m sure there are states in which it’s a “cultural tradition” for people to get poisoned in restaurants, stores and nursing homes and we wouldn’t want to inflict our competing “values” on them. But New York is the most populous city in the nation and people from all over the country and the world come there to work and enjoy its culture. It’s a good idea to pass a practical measure such as this to ensure that illnesses aren’t passed around to workers and customers alike. And who knows? Maybe it will start a trend and someday we’ll all care about worker’s rights and public health.
If you’d like to add your name to those who are trying to persuade the Speaker of the New York City Council to allow this to come to a vote, you can go here.
Ryan dogwhistles “catch and release” and “anchor babies”
What a slick little wingnut:
Notice that he smoothly uses the term “catch and release” and when a constituent objects, asking whether he’s “talking about fish or human beings”, and his wingnut fans explode, he deftly turns it into a lecture about civility. And then uses the term again, along with the other loaded phrase “anchor babies”, which his fan had said were “dropped” rather than born.
This guy is good at navigating these shoals, but there’s no doubt which tribe he identifies with. It’s the gift of a talented dog whistler.
Following up on the RFK speech below, this seems all the more hideous. After all, RFK was speaking over 40 years ago:
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has released investigative findings determining that children in predominantly black Meridian, Miss. have had their constitutional rights violated by the Lauderdale County Youth Court, the Meridian Police Department, and the Mississippi Division of Youth Services in what civil rights investigators allege is a school to prison pipeline with even dress code violations resulting in incarceration. […] “The system established by the City of Meridian, Lauderdale County, and DYS to incarcerate children for school suspensions ‘shocks the conscience,’ resulting in the incarceration of children for alleged ‘offenses’ such as dress code violations, flatulence, profanity, and disrespect.” The Justice Department findings letter noted. Describing the “school-to-prison pipeline” the Justice Department findings letter noted of the alleged abuses by the police, “By policy and practice, [the Meridian Police Department] MPD automatically arrests all students referred to MPD by the District. The children arrested by MPD are then sent to the County juvenile justice system, where existing due process protections are illusory and inadequate. The Youth Court places children on probation, and the terms of the probation set by the Youth Court and DYS require children on probation to serve any suspensions from school incarcerated in the juvenile detention center.”
Needless to say, these kids are almost all black and/or disabled. Lovely.
I’m sure the sovereign state of Mississippi will scream bloody murder. After all, they have different cultural traditions down there and this federal “one-size-fits-all” bill of rights interferes with their freedom to be racist assholes. But it’s good to see the DOJ making the effort.
Update:Well hell. Apparently, states all over the country are waging war on disabled and misbehaving kids:
To discipline misbehaving students, public schools in Ohio and Florida regularly send children to “seclusion” — isolation in a locked cell-like room, old office, or closet, NPR’s State Impact reports. Many of these children are special needs students and their parents are not always told of this disciplinary practice.
Ohio schools — where seclusion is almost completely unregulated — sent students to seclusion rooms 4,236 times in the 2009-2010 school year. Sixty percent of these students had disabilities.
Florida schools secluded students 4,637 times in 2010-2011 and 4,193 in 2011-2012. 42 percent of seclusions were for pre-K through 3rd graders. In the 2011-2012 school year, 300 seclusions lasted more than an hour. The state has just three stipulations for using seclusion rooms: teachers may not choke or suffocate students, the room must be approved by a fire marshal, and the lights must be left on.
That’s very big of them.
A joint report by StateImpact and Columbus Dispatch report found rampant abuse and lack of training of the punishment, which is meant as a last resort to deal with violent children:
But last school year, one Pickerington special-education teacher sent children to a seclusion room more than 60 times, district records show. In nearly all of those incidents, the children were not violent. Often, they were sent to the seclusion room for being “mouthy,” or whining about their school work.
Pickerington Special Education Director Bob Blackburn said the teacher in that classroom was new and that someone in the district has now taught her the right way to use the seclusion room.
Other Pickerington teachers misused the rooms, too, though. In another classroom, children were secluded more than 30 times last school year. Two-thirds of those instances involved misbehavior and not violence, district records show.
Far from benefiting violent or rowdy students, seclusion has been found to be deeply traumatizing, sometimes leading children to hurt or kill themselves. In one special education school in Georgia, a 13-year-old boy hung himself in a seclusion room in November 2004.
Mother Jones has helpfully supplied some of their great charts explaining the dystopian hellscape known as the Ryan Budget. I think these two are especially illustrative of his worldview:
According to this polling done by Democracy corps late last month, if the Democrats make that case (and don’t get caught up in “balanced approach” mumbo jumbo bullshit) they will take the voters that Mitt Romney and the Republicans need to win:
The President starts out with a 3-point margin against Mitt Romney, 49 percent to 46 percent. When asked to judge the two candidates in a very narrow way—Romney’s support for the Ryan budget because it reflects his values and Obama’s opposition because of what it would do to the most vulnerable—the vote shifts. Obama wins a majority of voters (51 percent) and his margin more than doubles to 8 points (51 to 43 percent.) This is a significant finding.
The Ryan budget’s impact on the most vulnerable is powerful among key swing voters, including unmarried women, who shifted a net 10 points toward Obama, the Rising American Electorate (net 3-point shift), and independents (net 9-point shift). Even conservatives were swayed, shifting a net 13 points toward Obama.
Among those who heard an even split of facts about the Ryan budget – including ones about cuts to programs aimed to help mostly lower and working class families – the shift is even more pronounced. With this group of voters, Obama leads Romney by 9 points, 52 to 43 percent, the largest margin of any of the groups in our experiment. It’s clear that focusing on what the Ryan budget does to the most vulnerable Americans can pay dividends for Obama.
This values argument is worth having. If the Dems can stop trying to convince everyone that their 10 point plan is really a lot better than Ryan’s 14 point plan because sub-section A part B specifically addresses the cost curve as it affects the baseline scenario blah, blah blah, they might not end up making things worse after all.
This sort of thing isn’t Obama’s strong suit. He’s brilliant at soaring, inspirational rhetoric, but not much inclined to speak about his values and illustrating them in ways that people can understand. (Indeed, he quite openly sold himself in 2008 as a technocrat who only cared about “what worked.”) But he can do it if he tries — and certainly individual Democrats around the country can make this case.
This result does my heart good to tell you the truth. If you listen to Villagers, the American people are a bunch of selfish pigs who refuse to sacrifice. (These are all millionaire celebrities who won’t have to go through other people’s garbage to collect cans when their social security fails to buy them enough food to eat, but somehow they feel qualified to scold the rest of us about ourselfishness.) It’s very reassuring to hear that most Americans still care about children and the elderly and other vulnerable citizens.
This genuinely surprised me, I must say:
Even conservatives were swayed, shifting a net 13 points toward Obama.
Ayn Rand hasn’t won this thing yet. If someone, anyone, makes the case for decency, compassion, empathy and the common good, apparently there are enough decent people left in this country who are ready and willing to hear it. The question is whether the Democrats are so far gone they’ve lost the vocabulary to talk about it.
[I]f we seem powerless to stop this growing division between Americans, who at least confront one another, there are millions more living in the hidden places, whose names and faces are completely unknown – but I have seen these other Americans – I have seen children in Mississippi starving, their bodies so crippled from hunger and their minds have been so destroyed for their whole life that they will have no future. I have seen children in Mississippi – here in the United States – with a gross national product of $800 billion dollars – I have seen children in the Delta area of Mississippi with distended stomachs, whose faces are covered with sores from starvation, and we haven’t developed a policy so we can get enough food so that they can live, so that their children, so that their lives are not destroyed, I don’t think that’s acceptable in the United States of America and I think we need a change.
I have seen Indians living on their bare and meager reservations, with no jobs, with an unemployment rate of 80 percent, and with so little hope for the future, so little hope for the future that for young people, for young men and women in their teens, the greatest cause of death amongst them is suicide.
That they end their lives by killing themselves – I don’t think that we have to accept that – for the first American, for this minority here in the United States. If young boys and girls are so filled with despair when they are going to high school and feel that their lives are so hopeless and that nobody’s going to care for them, nobody’s going to be involved with them, and nobody’s going to bother with them, that they either hang themselves, shoot themselves or kill themselves – I don’t think that’s acceptable and I think the United States of America – I think the American people, I think we can do much, much better. And I run for the presidency because of that, I run for the presidency because I have seen proud men in the hills of Appalachia, who wish only to work in dignity, but they cannot, for the mines are closed and their jobs are gone and no one – neither industry, nor labor, nor government – has cared enough to help.
I think we here in this country, with the unselfish spirit that exists in the United States of America, I think we can do better here also.
I have seen the people of the black ghetto, listening to ever greater promises of equality and of justice, as they sit in the same decaying schools and huddled in the same filthy rooms – without heat – warding off the cold and warding off the rats.
If we believe that we, as Americans, are bound together by a common concern for each other, then an urgent national priority is upon us. We must begin to end the disgrace of this other America.
And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year. But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
