Year: 2012

Bungee madness

by digby

I don’t get it:

A 22-year-old Australian thrill-seeker miraculously survived after her bungee cord snapped during a death-defying dive over crocodile infested waters in Africa on New Year’s Eve, according to local reports.

Erin Laung Worth told Australia’s Channel 9 that her feet were still bound together after she plummeted into the rapids below the 360-foot Victoria Falls bridge on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia.

“It went black straight away and I felt like I’d been slapped all over,” Worth told the station.

“It was quite scary because a couple of times the rope actually got caught on some rocks or debris,” the Aussie adrenalin junkie added.

“I actually had to swim down and yank the bungee cord out of whatever it was caught on to make it to the surface.”

This whole thing just escapes me. I guess it feels good when it’s over.

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Newt’s Free Market Heresy

by David Atkins

Newt Gingrich speaks heresy:

“Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that in fact the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation,” Mr. Gingrich said, “we find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job.”

At a campaign stop at the Don Quijote restaurant on the edge of downtown Manchester, Mr. Gingrich seized on one of Mr. Romney’s lines from the debate, when he said, in an effort to asert that he was not a lifelong politician, that he did not get into politics until he no longer had to pay a mortgage. Mr. Gingrich suggested his rival was out of touch with ordinary Americans.

“We want everyday normal people to run for office,” Mr. Gingrich said. “Not just millionaires.”

That’s not going to work out so well for Newt. Those are pretty words, but any capitalist knows that the whole goal of investment is to make lots of money off the surplus value of labor while cutting costs in order to provide greater value to shareholders. Entrepreneurship is beside the point, and job creation? Well, if an investor could produce greater profits by firing every employee and having gnomes do the work instead, they’d do it in a heartbeat.

Newt knows this, of course. He and all the other candidates have spent their lives in the service of destroying the middle class in pursuit of investor profits. Romney’s Bain Capital job cremation isn’t some sort of perversion of the free market. It’s the whole point of the free market.

But at least Newt understands that the real free market doesn’t exactly play well with actual voters. They know that their ideology is unAmerican even to their own primary voters, and they’re willing to actually admit it when it’s an intramural contest. Still, come June, they’ll all be singing the praises of Bain Capital and the “free market.”

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Tenther Pole Dancing

by digby

Rick Perry really is just letting it all hang out:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry doubled down on his claim that President Barack Obama is a socialist during Sunday morning’s GOP debate in New Hampshire.

“I make a very proud statement and a fact that we have a president that’s a socialist,” he said, in response to a question about whether he agrees with a 2011 editorial by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that said Obama should not be attacked as having un-American values.

The moderator asked if Perry agrees with that statement.

“I don’t think that our founding fathers wanted America to be a socialist country,” Perry continued. “So I disagree with that premise that somehow or another President Obama reflects our founding fathers. He doesn’t. He talks about having a more powerful, more centralized, more consuming and costly federal government.”

Perry said as governor he pushed for a stronger embrace of 10th Amendment, which says some powers should be left to the states rather than the federal government. “The states will considerably do a better job than Washington D.C. as led by this president,” he said.

He’s a Tenther all the way. And an idiot. You’d think he’d hit at least 15%.

But he does serve a purpose. By blithely calling Obama a socialist in presidential debates, he keeps the Democrats trying to prove they aren’t. And you know what that means. It’s a very effective ploy.

BTW: Apparently “tentherism” isn’t commonly understood in liberal circles. Here’s a good primer, more at the link:

When the right’s view of the Constitution was ascendant 75 years ago, basic protections such as a restriction on child labor were declared unconstitutional; laws banning discrimination were unthinkable; and Social Security was widely viewed as next in line for the Supreme Court’s chopping block.

America’s right now wants nothing more than to revive this discredited theory of the Constitution. These conservatives are over-reading the Tenth Amendment, a provision of the Constitution that provides Congress’s power is not unlimited. So-called “tenther” conservatives are determined to use their twisted reinterpretation to shrink national leaders’ power to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub. They must not be allowed to succeed for three reasons:

Tentherism is dangerous. Monopolists seized control of entire industries during tentherism’s last period of ascendance. Workers were denied the most basic protections, while management happily invoked the long arm of the law when a labor dispute arose. Worst of all, Congress was powerless against this effort. And the Court swiftly declared congressional action unconstitutional when elected officials took even the most modest steps to protect workers or limit corporate power.

Tentherism has no basis in constitutional text or history. Nothing in the Constitution supports tenther arguments. And tenther claims are nothing new. Each of them was raised as early as the Washington administration, and each was rejected by George Washington himself.

Tentherism is authoritarian. Health reform, Social Security, and the Civil Rights Act all exist because the people’s representatives said they should exist. The tenthers express goal is to make the Supreme Court strip these elected representatives of power and impose a conservative agenda upon the nation.

The tenther agenda

In its strongest form, tentherism would eliminate most of the progress of the last century. It asserts that the federal minimum wage is a crime against state sovereignty, child labor laws exceed Congress’s limited powers, and the federal ban on workplace discrimination and whites-only lunch counters is an unlawful encroachment on local businesses. Many tenthers even oppose cherished programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Tenthers divine all this from the brief language of the 10th Amendment, which provides that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In layman’s terms, this simply means that the Constitution contains an itemized list of federal powers—such as the power to regulate interstate commerce or establish post offices or make war on foreign nations—and anything not contained in that list is beyond Congress’s authority.

The tenther constitution reads each of these powers very narrowly—too narrowly, it turns out, to permit much of the progress of the last century. As the nation emerges from the worst economic downturn in three generations, the tenthers would strip away the very reforms and economic regulations that beat back the Great Depression, and they would hamstring any attempt to enact new progressive legislation.

Maybe that whole agenda is too extreme to win a national election. But as long as it’s considered respectable for presidential candidates to believe it — and dismiss those who disagree as “socialists” — the rightward pole of our politics will continue to pull us way off center. This is a radical, right wing theory, as radical as it gets. And from Perry to Paul to Santorum to Gingrich to Romney, every last one of these would-be GOP presidents have adopted it at least to some extent. The two Texans, Perry and Paul, are true believers. They really do want to turn back the clock a hundred years.

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Getting the word out one traffic jam at a time

by digby

The freeway blogger hit LA on January 4th. Check it out:

The out-of-touch candidate

by digby

I think this says it all:

Mitt Romney suggested in today’s debate that only rich people should run for office, and then quickly celebrated the fact that he’d forced a rival to take out a loan against his house.

Romney said his father, Michigan Governor George Romney, had told him, “Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win an election to pay a mortgage.”

“If you find yourself in a position when you can serve, why you ought to have a responsibility to do so if you think you can make a difference,” he recalled his father telling him. “Also, don’t get in politics if your kids are still young because it might turn their heads.”

A few seconds later, he bragged about his run against Teddy Kennedy.

“I was happy he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me,” he said.

Really darling, if you have to worry about paying bills you have no business running for office. Needing money for your expenses distracts from your real job — delivering for your fellow millionaires.

I watched him last night and he really is bad. (I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch this morning’s yet.) Yes, he’s marginally better than the rest of them, but that’s a comment on them, not him. He doesn’t really say anything, his “passion” is stilted and phony and he’s stiff as a board.

Plus, he really proved last night that he isn’t in touch with the religious right base with his answer on birth control. He acted like it was insane to assume that anyone anywhere would like to ban it and didn’t seem to understand the connection between Griswold and Roe. And that’s just wrong. There’s a whole bunch of social conservatives for whom this is a priority of the first order and his dismissive attitude has to grate. Many of them believe that the pill is an “abortifacient” and believe it should be banned. Still other believe, as Rick Santorum does, that sex must be procreative regardless.

Now, it’s true that the vast majority of Americans don’t agree with this and use birth control without any thoughts to these issues, but Mitt’s still trying to get the votes of the GOP base and I would think that was seen as a slap in the face — a disregard of their very serious beliefs on this issue.

Maybe it won’t matter, but church goers are the foot soldiers in any Republican election. He may have to distance himself from them to appeal to the middle, but it’s odd for him to blatantly insult them in a GOP debate. Frankly, from what I saw, it was a genuine lack of understanding about this, not a political calculation. He’s just not tuned into his base. Which explains why they can’t stand him.

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Kathryn Lopez says that Rick Santorum is misunderstood. He’s not really “coming for your birth control.” He just doesn’t think you have a right to use it:

What Santorum has said is that the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut — which dealt with a case that was a Planned Parenthood official’s stunt — was a bad precedent and bad law. It created a constitutional right for married persons to use contraceptives. Writing for the majority, Justice William O. Douglas declared that ”specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance,” and that “various [of these] guarantees create zones of privacy.” That would be the basis for the Roe decision eight years later, which relied on a similar constitutional stretch.

Santorum’s is a perfectly sound opinion. Why is it such a threat that some feel the need to make his position into something much more than it is

Why is it a sound opinion? I don’t know. She doesn’t say.

What she does say is that Santorum has the courage of his convictions and that he is willing to talk about them.But don’t worry, just because he said he was going to talk about these issues from the presidential bully pulpit and make it part of the national conversation doesn’t mean that he’s going to have anationwide lecture because he won’t propose any legislation. So that’s good. Plus he’d be a “friend to sex-ed programs that don’t give out condoms.” (I’m fairly sure that’s right.)

She doesn’t mention the other thing that Santorum said, which is that he thinks states have a right to ban birth control. So, while she may be technically correct that Santorum will not personally be rummaging around in your nightstand, he’s perfectly willing for others to do it. Indeed, he explicitly said they should.

But here’s what interests me the most about Lopez’ piece:

There’s something else worth noting. While it wouldn’t be wise for the president of the United States to launch a lecture campaign (we get way too much of that from the current president) on so intimate an issue, Santorum’s view is not as fringy as it is often portrayed. Obviously, Santorum is informed by his Catholic faith on this issue, but, in recent years, we’ve had the testimony of women who realize the damage contraception has done in their lives and relationships. A New York magazine cover story marking the anniversary of the Pill included the following:

One anxiety — Am I pregnant? — is replaced by another: Can I get pregnant? The days of gobbling down the Pill and running out to CVS at 3 a.m. for a pregnancy test recede in the distance, replaced by a new set of obsessions. The Pill didn’t create the field of infertility medicine, but it turned it into an enormous industry. Inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary side effect.

She’s mischaracterizing the (very silly) article, which suggested that using birth control is causing infertility — because women are waiting too long to get pregnant. It’s idiotic but I’m guessing it’s the next big paternalistic ploy by the forced childbirth brigades — too many dizzy gals are damaged by waiting too long to conceive that the choice must be taken out of their flighty little hands.

She goes on to complain about having to pay for birth control — which is going to be the hook these zealots will use to whittle away at women’s access and then ends with this:

In this campaign, Rick Santorum has not been lecturing us about so-called social issues. But he gets asked about them, and he answers honestly. Can’t we be honest about what he is saying?

Here’s what he’s saying (go to the end):

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“The state has a right to [make a law outlawing the right of married people to use birth control], I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.

And he explained very thoroughly elsewhere that he believes birth control is wrong unless sex is procreative it “becomes deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure.”

Dangerous Nutcases

by David Atkins

TPM has the New Hampshire GOP debate whittled down to 100 seconds:

I must admit that last night was only the third GOP debate I’ve actually sat down to watch the whole way through this cycle. Listening to a bunch of sociopaths sound more and more heartless and insane with each passing month is an enjoyable spectacle for some. For me, it’s just another push on the Overton Window taking the country down yet another notch on its core morality scale.

That any of these fools has even an outside shot at the Oval Office really says something about the depths to which the country has sunk.

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By Dennis Hartley














It gets better: Tomboy

“You’re different from (the other boys),” says Lisa (Jeanne Disson), sans any trace of irony in writer-director Celine Sciamma’s coming-of-age tale, Tomboy. She is talking to her new friend Michael, who recently moved into her neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris; the boy on whom she’s developing a crush. Indeed, there is something “different” about Michael. It’s a possibility that Lisa, with the insouciance of a starry-eyed pre-pubescent in the thrall of puppy love, would likely never ponder (hence an absence of irony). “Michael” is the self-anointed nom de plume of a girl…named Laure (Zoe Heran).
Laure lives with her loving parents (Sophie Cattani and Mathieu Demy) and precocious little sister, Jeanne (Malonn Levana). Mom is very pregnant and resting up these days, so we see Laure spending a lot of time with her dad, who is patiently teaching her how to drive in the film’s opening. Although dad is retaining control of the accelerator and brake (after all, Laure is only ten), we glean that she has a fearlessness and assured sense of “self” belying a ten year-old (and in a subtle way, challenging traditional societal expectations of gender behavior). This is especially apparent in a wonderfully observed scene where Laure (in her guise as Michael, who she hides from her family) watches the neighborhood boys playing soccer, carefully studying their body language and mannerisms. She is particularly bemused by their propensity for serial spitting, and taking pee breaks en masse (you know, typical males…spraying everywhere). Soon, “Michael” is on the field; shirtless, spitting and generally displaying appropriately surly behaviors. But for how long can Laure pull this off? It’s late summer, and a new school year looms; surely her parents won’t register her as Michael (and what about roll call, or gym class?).
Although it may appear on paper that this story holds all the dramatic tension of an Afterschool Special, it is precisely the lack of drama (or, as Jon Lovitz used to exclaim on SNL…”ACT-ing!”) that makes Tomboy one of the most naturalistic, sensitive and genuinely compassionate films I’ve seen about “gender confusion”. What’s most interesting here is that it is not the protagonist who is “confused”. Laure knows exactly who (she?) is; this is not so much about the actions of the main character as it is about the reactions of those around her (and perhaps the viewer as well). There is one thing the director seems to understand quite well, and that is that you can learn a lot about a society’s mores by watching its children at play; Sciamma devotes large chunks of screen time to simply allow us to observe kids doing, well, what kids do when they get together.
Tackling the subject of childhood sexuality is always a potential minefield for a filmmaker, which is probably why so few venture to go there (the last film I saw that handled it with such deftness was Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know ). Thanks to the combination of an unobtrusive (if leisurely) approach, even-handed direction, a perceptive screenplay (by the director), and extraordinary performances by the child actors (especially from Heran, who vibes like a Mini-Me Jean Seberg with her pixie hairdo) I was transported back to that all-too-fleeting “secret world” of childhood. It’s that singular time of life when worries are few and everything feels possible (before that mental baggage carousel backs up with too many overstuffed suitcases). And it’s a lovely ode to self-acceptance…which is a good thing. Any ten-year old can tell you that.
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Elton Gallegly retiring

by David Atkins

My local 25-year Republican House incumbent Elton Gallegly (CA26) is retiring. Never heard of him? Not surprising. In his 25 years, he’s been one of the least accomplished representatives in Congress, earning almost his entire reputation on anti-immigrant rhetoric, which earned him a his recent appointment Chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement.

He is retiring due to last year’s redistricting in California, which turned his ultra-safe seat into a Ventura County district with a 6% Democratic registration advantage. Gallegly has never had much of a work ethic, so it’s not surprising he’d rather ride into the sunset than face a tough re-election bid. It’s no lock for Dems, though–the new district barely voted for Meg Whitman over Jerry Brown in the last election. There are already five Democrats who have announced their intention to join the race, the biggest names among them being 1st District Supervisor Steve Bennett and Moorpark City Councilmember David Pollock. On the Republican side will likely be the execrable, virulently anti-tax and pro-polluter state senator Tony Strickland, with another Republican or two likely to join the field as well.

California recently moved to a top-two primary system, which means that the general election could be between any two candidates regardless of political party. It will be one of the most watched and hotly contested House races of the 2012 cycle, with significant consequences for immigration and tax policy in the U.S.

Tony Strickland and his wife Audra have taken some hits to their reputations over the last few years, but they’re still formidable opponents. If Tony wins, he will quickly become one of the loudest and most detestable voices for the GOP’s Objectivist agenda. Supervisor Bennett, by contrast, has done amazing work locally to increase access to education and healthcare, developed and passed some of the strongest anti-sprawl legislation in the country, and stringent campaign finance reform laws.

It will be a classic clash of values and priorities, and I look forward to being right in the middle of the fight.

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Dispatch from torture nation: execution by pepper spray

by digby

No this isn’t a story from North Korea or Pinochet’s Chile. I swear:

It has been two and half years since 62-year old Nick Christie was tortured and pepper-sprayed to death by police at the Lee County Jail. Although the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, the law enforcement officers who kept him strapped naked to a chair and then pepper sprayed him until he died have not been charged in his death.

On January 20, 2010, the Injury Board’s National News Desk reported that Nick Christie’s wife, Joyce Christie, and her son, were planning to file a federal lawsuit because the police violated her husband’s constitutional rights. The article describes what allegedly happened when Christie was arrested for trespassing:

Christie, 62, was arrested last March after traveling from Ohio to Fort Myers while suffering, what his widow describes as a mental breakdown. Arrested twice for disorderly conduct and trespassing, Nick Christie was pepper sprayed ten times over the course of his 43-hour custody.

Suffering from emphysema, COPD, back and heart problems, the jail staff said his medical files were not available or immediately sought at the time of his arrest. But DiCello says Christie gave his medical history and list of medications to the jail days earlier during his first encounter with law enforcement.

His medication list was found in the back pocket of his pants when Christie’s personal effects were returned to his widow.

Sometime between the time he was arrested on March 27, 2009 around 2:00 p.m., and March 31 at1:23 p.m. when he was pronounced dead, Christie had been sprayed with ten blasts of pepper spray, also known as OC (Oleo-resin Capsicum), which is a derivative of cayenne pepper.

The officers involved in the incident say that Christie was “combative, despite the fact he was restrained in a chair so he allegedly wouldn’t spit at his jailers.” However, other inmates on the cell block tell a different story. They say that there was excessive use of pepper spray, his whole head was turning purple, he was gasping for air and was telling the officers that he couldn’t breathe and that he had a heart condition. (source: Injury Board)

According to the medical examiner, the death was a homicide caused by the stress that the restraints and repeated use of pepper spray placed on his heart. However, the State Attorney’s office decided there was no wrongdoing, therefore the officers involved in the incident were never charged in the homicide.

Clearly they tortured the man to death. I just don’t see any other way of looking at this.

But we don’t have a problem with that in our country, particularly when the victims refuse to “stop resisting” the robotic mantra used by cops all over the country to excuse beating, spraying with chemicals and electrocuting citizens. The mentally ill, foreigners and inebriated have a particularly hard time since they can’t immediately absorb their “orders” to immediately comply from the police. Doing it when they are already in custody is unfortunately not all that unprecedented.

Every American had better hope they never get sick, particularly both mentally and physically, and find themselves in the hands of the authorities. There’s a chance they won’t come out of it alive. I’d prefer they just shoot me down immediately rather than pepper spray me to death. But that’s just me.

BTW: Here are the OSHA guidelines for pepper spray:

Emergency First Aid Procedures Inhalation: Remove to fresh air. If Breathing is difficult, give oxygen / seek medical attention.

Eye Contact:Remove contact lenses. Rinse thoroughly with cool water. If irritation persists, seek medical attention

Skin Contact: Wash exposed area with mild soap & water. If irritation persists or worsen, seek medical attention.

Ingestion: Give cool water. If condition persists or worsens, seek medical attention.

That’s assuming a healthy worker, not under stress or in restraints.

Update: And then there’s “hazing”

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