Month: January 2013

Headline ‘O the Day

by digby

…from FoxNation:

No Liberals Allowed: Group To Build ‘Live And Let Live’ Community

I’m fairly sure they actually think that makes sense.

*I wrote about this big idea a while back.

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Dispatch from the LOD*

by digby

Golly, what a great idea:

Hopes for overhauling the federal tax system are fading in Washington, but in some state capitals, tax reform experiments – some far-reaching – are fast taking shape.

Across the U.S. South and Midwest, Republicans have consolidated control of state legislatures and governorships, giving them the power to test long-debated tax ideas.

Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, for instance, called on Thursday for ending the state’s income tax and corporate taxes, with sales taxes compensating for lost revenue.

A similar plan is being pushed by Republicans in North Carolina. Kansas, which cut its income tax significantly last year, may trim further. Oklahoma, which tried to cut income taxes last year, is expected to try again.

“When it comes to getting pro-growth tax reform done this year, the only real opportunities are at the state level,” said Patrick Gleason, director of state affairs for Americans for Tax Reform, the Washington-based anti-tax lobbying group headed by small-government conservative activist Grover Norquist.

His group and other conservative pressure organizations, such as Americans for Prosperity, have targeted state capitals for tax reform campaigns.

Cutting income taxes and shifting the overall tax burden to consumption through higher sales taxes is a long-standing goal of some tax theorists. Critics argue that approach is regressive and unfairly burdens the middle class and the poor, who spend more of their earnings on items subject to sales tax.

Nicholas Johnson, a state tax expert with the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, gave the chances of sweeping tax changes taking hold a low probability.

Still, he said he worried the efforts in the states could move the tax discussion in a direction harmful to middle- and low-income taxpayers and make balancing state budgets harder.

“Even if this is too radical, if it makes other radical schemes seem more reasonable, that’s worrisome,” he said.

Funny how that works.

This is what I hate about our governmental scheme. It makes it possible for the reactionaries to spread out and regroup in 50 different places when their scams lose momentum in Washington. And yes, I know that it can work to advance progressive causes as well, but I’m guessing the right has about a five to one advantage at pressing their agenda on a state level than the left.

One thing you have to give them credit for: no matter what they pull, it serves their higher purpose. After all, they are going to get rid of a tax that poor and middle class people are not terribly burdened with and replace it with one they will see every time they buy their necessities. I have a sneaking suspicion that isn’t going to endear them to government. Even if it blows back on some GOP politicians in the short run, in the long run it will reinforce the notion that government sucks.

Funny how that works too.

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Waiting for the right moment

by digby

So Rahm is touting gun control now:

In 2009 while serving as Obama’s chief of staff, Emanuel reportedly told Eric Holder to “shut the f–k up” after the attorney general suggested reinstating the assault weapons ban — which expired in 2004. Emanuel’s profanity-laced frustration with Holder was detailed in Daniel Klaidman’s book, “Kill or Capture.”

Gun-safety groups and political scientists say Emanuel has always had an interest in pushing appropriate gun restrictions. But Emanuel also knows timing is everything in politics, the experts say.

“Based on his political record it would suggest that as Obama’s chief of staff, he made a judgment that emanated more from politics than policy,” said Robert Spitzer, the author of “The Politics of Gun Control” and a professor at the State University of New York at Cortland.

In 2009, Spitzer continued, Emanuel was likely more focused on Obama’s primary goal of passing healthcare reform and calculated that there weren’t enough votes to pass gun laws.

“There’s always an element of Emanuel that has his finger” to the political winds, Spitzer said. Now though, Emanuel “has a constituency that would be supportive to gun control.”

That’s the way politicians have to think on topics that are controversial, says Kristin A. Goss, an assistant professor of public policy at Duke University and the author of “Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America.”

“You have to sort of wait for the political stars to align,” Goss said.

And look how beautifully they’ve finally aligned for him:

Chicago Homicides Outnumber U.S. Troop Killings In Afghanistan

But even that wasn’t enough, was it? The mayor of Chicago waited until various madmen mowed down a congresswomen and her constituents, an audience in a darkened movie theater, a church full of worshippers and classrooms full of first graders among literally thousands of other preventable gun deaths before he felt it was a good time to bring up gun control. Until we racked up a huge body count of innocent people, it was best to STFU and elect as many government officials of both parties who would oppose any kind of gun control.

That’s what people in the beltway call “pragmatism.” I call it immoral.

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The “Hitler passed gun control” myth. Also wrong.

by David Atkins

The NRA and their allies throw out so much bullshit in order to increase sales of guns to their shrinking but deeply paranoid customer base that it’s hard to sort fact from fiction, even for careful students of politics and public policy. One of the less intelligent but more prevalent right-wing stories frequently used to attack gun control advocates is that the Nazis also confiscated guns. The idea being that gun control and confiscation is the first step on the road to totalitarian tyranny–conveniently ignoring the fact that every other decent industrialized democracy with gun control in the world has not, in fact, fallen in despotism and the slaughter of millions in recent memory.

So as arguments go, it’s foolish and irrelevant. But even I had believed it on the factual merits. But it turns out, like so many monsters dredged from the rightwing swamp, that not even the basis on the argument is true on the merits. Alex Seitz-wald explains:

University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.

The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.

So Hitler actually relaxed gun ownership laws.

Now, it’s true that Jews and other minorities were prevented from having access to firearms, no doubt as a way to stop them from fighting back. One of the more disgusting rightwing memes out there, in addition to the if slaves had been armed they wouldn’t have been enslaved theory, is that if the Jews had been better armed they could have defended themselves from the Holocaust. The resistance of the fairly well-armed Warsaw Ghetto is often cited. Yeah, about that:

Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.

Proponents of the theory sometimes point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano put it, “those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.” But as the Tablet’s Michael Moynihan points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps.

Bottom line: the Warsaw Ghetto resistance didn’t work. It never had a prayer of working. Those who fought back should be celebrated for their bravery, but the example shouldn’t be used as a matter for public policy. The denizens of the Warsaw Ghetto faced the worst of the Nazi wrath for their trouble. And the exact same fate would befall any pathetic armed resistance against U.S. armed tanks, air forces and trained military personnel if, heaven forfend, a dictatorship were to arise here. Gun control or lack thereof would make little difference to those in charge–which is why it’s critically important to engage the ugly business of political checks and balances to make sure it never happens. One good way to stop the rise of despotic dictatorship would be to stop the austerity train in its tracks, since austerity and economic shock are the single biggest causes of the transformation from democracy to autocracy.

And what about left-wing dictatorship and gun control?

“As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.”

Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous. “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.

He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”

Not unusual. Right wingers are not only morally askew, they’re also famously ignorant of science and history.

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Saturday Night at the Movies


A shameless filler piece about movie award season

By Dennis Hartley

The emperor has no clothes…see?

Some readers have taken me to task over the years regarding my ambivalence toward the Oscars, the Golden Globes, Independent Spirit, People’s Choice, Healthy Choice, USDA Top Choice, blah blah, woof woof. I don’t normally go out of my way to “cover” any of those events, because…well you know, I’m an artist, man, not some chuckle-headed entertainment reporter (you buying this crap?). I guess I’m one of those silly people who perceive the cinema as an art form, not a competitive sport or a popularity contest. And I’m no conspiracy theorist, but considering over 650 first run theatrical features were released domestically in 2012, why does it seem (once again) that all the awards shows appear to draw their nominees from the same tiresomely over-hyped handful of titles? What is Hollywood…Congress!? Alright, I’ll fess up. The week got away from me, and I don’t have any new films to review, so I’m killing time until next week. (Awkward silence). So…what about that weather we’ve been having? How about those Seahawks?

Anyway, in the wake of the Oscar nominations earlier this week, and what with the Golden Globes coming up this Sunday, I figured this was as good a time as any to at least acknowledge the kickoff of the award season (if a bit grumpily). Of course, the People have already spoken (exactly who are these “people” anyway…no one has ever provided an explanation adequate to my satisfaction). I’m sorry to report that I somehow missed all three of the People’s Choice Awards movie winners (The Hunger Games, Ted and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Shame on me! Bad! Bad critic!). As for the Oscars, per usual, I’m shamefully forced to admit that I haven’t seen the majority of this year’s Best Picture noms. I’ve only seen two (I know, I know…I should have my critic’s license revoked immediately)-Zero Dark Thirty (which I reviewed last week) and Argo (which I didn’t get around to seeing until recently; a decent film, but Wag the Dog did it first and better). What can I say? The Academy has their own little “best of 2012” list, and I have mine…and in this democratized internet age, who’s to judge which list is the more valid?

Of course, I’ll still be watching the Golden Globes this weekend (he says sheepishly, after bloviating for two paragraphs about his haughty disdain for all this bread and circus nonsense). It’s kind of like that old Woody Allen joke about the elderly Jewish women at a restaurant, where one says to the other, “Oh, the food here is terrible!” to which her dining companion empathetically replies “I know! And such small portions!” You see, in my house, yelling at the television is a competitive sport; so I look at this as part of my training for the Oscar telecast. So for those of you who do care about such things, I will leave you with some links to Golden Globe nominees I reviewed in 2012. Erm…enjoy?

Zero Dark Thirty (Nominated for best picture drama, actress, director and screenplay)

The Master (Nominated for best actor, supporting actor and supporting actress drama)

Skyfall (Nominated for best original song)

Hyde Park on Hudson (Nominated for best actor comedy)

Saturday Night at the Movies archives

Good guys ‘n bad guys

by digby

Rick Perlstein is now blogging over at The Nation in case you didn’t know. And his stuff is as wonderful as ever.

I particularly enjoyed this piece on the evolution of the NRA — and the modern conservative movement worldview:

In 1977, [Harlan]Carter’s faction packed the national convention in Cincinnati and effected what one of the ousted officials called a “gentlemanly bloodbath.” Said one of the coup plotters, “People who are interested in conservation can join the Sierra Club. If they’re interested in bird-watching there’s the Audubon Society. But this organization is for people who want to own and shoot guns.” Immediately the announcement went forth: “the National Rifle Association is cutting back on its conservation and wildlife programs to devote most of its energies to fighting gun control.” The next year Jack Anderson followed up: “the most extreme of the extremists have formed a tight little clique which pulls strings inside the organization. They operate with great mystery and secrecy, referring to themselves cryptically as the Federation. Let a timorous official show the slightest weakness, and his name will go down on the Federation’s secret ‘hit list.’ ”

That 1977 coup has been widely written about of late. What most of us don’t know about, however, is Ronald Reagan’s role in laying the ideological groundwork for the historical transformation.

In 1975, after eight years as governor of California, Reagan took a job delivering daily five-minute radio homilies on the issues of the day. By June of that year he was on some 300 stations. And that month, in that frighteningly persuasive Ronald Reagan way, he addressed himself in a three-part series to a new proposal by Attorney General Edward Levy to pass a gun control law specifically targeted at high-crime areas. What follows are never-before-published Reagan quotes from my own research listening to dozens of these broadcasts archived at the Hoover Institution at Stanford for the book I’m working on about the rise of Reagan in the 1970s. They show Reagan bringing the NRA hardline faction’s worldview to the broader public.

“Now, that’s funny,” he said of Levy’s proposal. “It seems to me that the best way to deter murderers and thieves is to arm law-abiding folk and not disarm them…. as news story after news story shows, if the victim is armed, he has a chance—a better chance by far than if he isn’t armed. Nobody knows in fact how many crimes are not committed because criminals know a certain store owner has a gun—and will use it.” So the attorney general of the United States, Reagan said, “should encourage homeowners and business people to purchase them and learn how to use them properly.”

He concluded that first broadcast foreshadowing so much NRA rhetoric to come: “After all, guns don’t make criminals. It’s criminals who make use of guns. They’re the ones who should be punished—not the law-abiding citizen who seeks to defend himself.”

So, despite the fact that Reagan was far less than the perfect wingnut his worshippers believe, in this he was the real thing. He was the first cheerleader for modern American gun culture. And it sounds as if he had quite an influence.

And that makes sense. After all, he came from Hollywood where our great cowboy myth was created. Perlstein shows just how thoroughly the right has absorbed that simplistic message:

Good guys, bad guys, never the twain shall meet—despite all the evidence, which I’m sure was available even then, that the people most likely to be victim of a gun in the home are people who live in that house. Or the moral evidence of the entire history of the human race: that the boundaries between “good people” and “bad people” are permeable, contingent, unknowable; and that policy-making simply can’t proceed from the axiom that one set of rules can exist for the former, and one for the latter.

Conservatives don’t think that way. For them, it’s almost as if “evildoers” glow red, like ET: everyone just knows who they are…

Most of you were here after 9/11 I assume? I think we all know what happened.

Q: Mr. President, I’m sure many Americans are wondering where all this will lead. And you’ve called upon the country to go back to business and to go back to normal. But you haven’t called for any sacrifices from the American people. And I wonder, do you feel that any will be needed? Are you planning to call for any? And do you think that American life will really go back to the way it was on September 10th?

George W. Bush: Well, you know, I think the American people are sacrificing now. I think they’re waiting in airport lines longer than they’ve ever had before. I think that — I think there’s a certain sacrifice when you lose a piece of your soul. And Americans — I was standing up there at the Pentagon today, and I saw the tears of the families whose lives were lost in the Pentagon. And I said in my talk there that America prays with you. I think there’s a sacrifice, there’s a certain sense of giving themselves to share their grief with people they’ll never, maybe, ever see in their lives.

So America is sacrificing. America — I think the interesting thing that has happened, and this is so sad an incident, but there are some positive things developed — that are developing. One is, I believe that many people are reassessing what’s important in life. Moms and dads are not only reassessing their marriage and the importance of their marriage, but of the necessity of loving their children like never before. I think that’s one of the positives that have come from the evildoers.

The evil ones have sparked an interesting change in America, I think — a compassion in our country that is overflowing. I know their intended act was to destroy us and make us cowards and make us not want to respond. But quite the opposite has happened — our nation is united, we are strong, we’re compassionate; neighbors care about neighbors.

The story I talked about earlier was one that really touched my heart, about women of cover fearing to leave their homes. And there was such an outpouring of compassion for people within our own country, a recognition that the Islamic faith should stand side by side, hand to hand with the Jewish faith and the Christian faith in our great land. It is such a wonderful example.

You know, I’m asked all the time — I’ll ask myself a question. How do I respond to — it’s an old trick — how do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am — like most Americans, I just can’t believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we’ve go to do a better job of making our case. We’ve got to do a better job of explaining to the people in the Middle East, for example, that we don’t fight a war against Islam or Muslims. We don’t hold any religion accountable. We’re fighting evil. And these murderers have hijacked a great religion in order to justify their evil deeds. And we cannot let it stand.

This is the basis of the modern conservative ethos: good guys vs bad guys. White hats vs black hats. The righteous vs “the evil ones”. The question is, which side of the line do they think you and I fall on?

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No more bargaining chips

by digby

So that’s that:

Stunning news from WaPo’s Ezra Klein: The Treasury is ruling out the use of a trillion dollar platinum coin to break the debt ceiling impasse.
Klein writes:

That’s the bottom line of the statement that Anthony Coley, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, gave me today. ”Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” he said.

With this, the White House has now ruled out the two best options for preventing a default in the event that the House GOP refused to life the debt ceiling. The White House has been quite adamant that the other alternative (invoking the 14th Amendment) is not acceptable.

So now the stakes are high, as The White House has refused to negotiate with the GOP on a debt ceiling hike.

What bargaining chips does The White House hold? Unclear.

Not unclear. They now have no bargaining chips and see no good reason to even pretend they have some.

Sooo, either the administration is going to hold on with more steely-eyed grit than they’ve ever shown before to try to get the Republicans to blink (which considering past negotiations, one could not blame the GOP for scoffing at) or they are eager to engage in more high stakes deficit reduction “negotiations.”

Golly, I wonder what’s going to happen?

Greg Sargent reported the other day that the Republicans have been hedging on the debt ceiling and that this emboldened the White House to hold fast and make no concessions. I replied:

It sure sounds like Boehner and McConnell are hedging to me too. If they are,then that means any more “offers” from the Democrats to make a “big deal” are offers the Democrats want to make, not ones they have to make.

I’m not sure withdrawing the threat of the coin or the 14th Amendment remedies qualifies as an offer in that context. But since they’ve thrown away their only bargaining chips before they even started, it’s fair to say that anything they agree to from now on should be seen as something they wanted, not something they needed.

But I’m sure that Ruth Marcus and David Gergen will be greatly impressed by their seriousness and maturity and that’s really all that matters.

Update: Krugman

Tasers don’t rob people, people rob people

by digby

… and therefore protected by the 2nd Amendment? Because as much as I hate the idea that cops have these things, the idea that it’s ok to sell these torture devices to the general public is truly astonishing:

I was at the bus stop on the phone and he walked past me and we looked at each other. Next thing I know there is a taser on my face, on the side of my cheek. He tased me twice on the side of my face and then on my chest yelling give me your phone. The phone dropped and then he started grabbing my purse but I wouldn’t let go. I was screaming and people came out from the neighboring restaurants, shops and he ran down the street. He jumped in a Lexus (I think) SUV and a woman got his license plate number.

I suppose they’ll use the the same defense they always do. It was much better for her to be tasered than it was for her to be shot with a gun. Therefore, we should be happy that criminals have tasers.

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No need for geniuses

by digby
I didn’t know Aaron Swartz personally, but I certainly knew of him, through friends and acquaintances and, of course, his work. It’s immeasurably sad to see someone so brilliant and so young choose to end his own life.

I’m not sure anyone is capable of figuring out all the elements that go into making such a final decision. But I’m pretty sure that one of the main ones was the fact that he was being pursued with single-minded, Javert-like obsession by the US Justice department over an alleged crime that hurt no one and which was not even being pursued by the alleged victim.

If you’re unfamiliar with what they were doing, this will fill you in on the details. I suspect it was this that animated their idée fixe, more than anything:

…the feds found someone with enough “hacking” activity under their belt that they feel comfortable turning the defendant into an “example.”

That’s how they roll. As we’ve seen with RIAA, the Manning case and Wikileaks, the government seems to be overreacting to “computer crime” much like the authorities in the Salem Witch trials overreacted to some hysterical teen-age behavior. One can only assume that they fear the penetration of their “secrets” as something akin to being possessed by the devil. But the fact is that we are supposed to be a democracy in which the government works for us, not the commercial enterprises and national security apparatus that apparently has the government obsessively chasing citizens who have the talent and the ideals to expose their crimes and shortcomings.

This is a very ugly, very shameful episode. I hope the US Attorney who decided that this was a worthwhile pursuit sleeps well tonight. It’s not as if the world needs idealistic geniuses, right?

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The magic coin

by digby

Chris Hayes explains:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Also too Paul Krugman on Bill Moyers:

It’s hard for me imagine the president or the Democrats having the nerve to do this, but it’s possible they’ll have no choice. The Republicans are so nuts they may demand things that the Democrats literally cannot deliver.

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