Month: February 2013

Due process just ain’t what it used to be

by digby

Mark Ambinder succinctly sums up tonight’s Isikoff scoop on targeted killing:

Even if the person is NOT actively planning terrorist attacks against the US, because of the nature of terrorist attacks in general, merely his membership in an organization that IS planning those attacks meets the requisite definition of imminence.

So, basically, imminence does not mean imminent. And membership in Al Qaeda is seen as tantamount to being in a car when someone decides to shoot someone on the street, even if the other occupant had no knowledge beforehand that the drive-by shooter would act. Accessory to murder, drone edition.

Also too, yes “due process” is now officially redefined to mean when a “high level official” in the White House decides something. Whither William Blackstone.

It never fails to amaze me how people will insist that the Presidency is a powerless office with no ability to do pretty much anything. And then there’s this.

For a more thorough report, Emptywheel will have the goods tomorrow.

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They’re getting crispy

by digby

Somebody needs to stop listening to Rush and drinking too much coffee:

Paul Guaschino was driving Friday when a fellow motorist spotted an “Impeach Obama” bumper sticker on the 62-year-old Connecticut resident’s vehicle.

According to cops, the other driver apparently did not appreciate the bumper sticker and “displayed his dislike by showing his middle finger.”

In response, Guaschino allegedly followed the other driver to a traffic light, where he exited his car–baseball bat in hand–and struck the trunk of the middle finger-waving driver. The second motorist “fled in fear of his safety,” police reported.

The cops have charged him, which is good.

But you have to love the irony of somebody exercising his freedom of speech, as he has every right to do, but gets enraged and violent when someone exercises theirs in response. I suppose it’s just intense frustration that, after all they’ve been told, the majority of the country doesn’t agree with them and actually thinks they’re jerks.

It’s easy to be jocular about an incident like this, which didn’t result in any bodily harm, but apparently that fellow who shot a school bus driver and kidnapped the little kid was also an angry “anti-government” type. These guys are always around, of course. But it seems as though they’e going into an active phase.

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Another good reason why religion should remain in its own sphere

by digby

Remember when everyone insisted that “abstinence only” was the only acceptable sex “education” in God Bless America? And remember how that turned out?

[B]y releasing the latest federal report on abstinence-only, Impacts for Title V. Section 510, Abstinence Education Programs: Final Report, from Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. late on a Friday, that is exactly what the Bushies are doing.

“After 10 years and $1.5 billion in public funds these failed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs will go down as an ideological boondoggle of historic proportions,” said James Wagoner, President of Advocates for Youth.

“The tragedy is not simply the waste of taxpayer dollars, it is the damage done to the young people who have been on the receiving end of distorted, inaccurate information about condoms and birth control. We have been promoting ignorance in the era of AIDS, and that’s not just bad public health policy, its bad ethics”.

“This report should serve as the final verdict on the failure of the abstinence-only industry in this country,” said William Smith, vice president for public policy of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS). “It shows, once again, that these programs fail miserably in actually helping young people behave more responsibly when it comes to their sexuality,” Smith continued.

In 1996, the federal government attached a provision to the welfare reform law establishing a federal program for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. This program, Section 510(b) of Title V of the Social Security Act, dedicated $50 million per year to be distributed among states that choose to participate. States accepting the funds are required to match every four federal dollars with three state-raised dollars (for a total of $87.5 million annually, and $787.5 million for the eight years from fiscal year 1998 through 2006). Programs that receive the Title V funding are prohibited from discussing methods of contraception, including condoms, except in the context of failure rates.

The abstinence only folks were very upset:

On a call yesterday organized by the Abstinence Clearinghouse, abstinence-only proponents were clearly rocked by the potentially ruinous news in the report. High profile abstinence-only advocate, Robert Rector, led the preemptive damage-control planning. He outlined several strategies the abstinence-only movement could use to rationalize the findings in the report saying, “The other spin I think is very important is not [program] effectiveness, but rather the values that are being taught,” Rector said. Whether or not these programs work is a “bogus issue,” Rector continued.

Right. It was never about teen pregnancy. It was about sex. As usual. In fact, they were happy to have teens get pregnant because childbirth is the appropriate punishment for the little you-know-whats.

The good news is that some school districts learned from that ridiculous experiment:

The teen pregnancy rate in New York City dropped by 27 percent over the last decade, a statistic that city officials credit to teen’s expanded access to contraception.

The city’s health commissioner, Tom Farley, told the New York Daily News that the data shows two concurrent trends. More adolescents are choosing to use birth control, and more of them are also delaying sexual intercourse. That’s partly because New York is one of the 21 states that allows all minors to have access to contraceptive services — and two years ago, the public school system began a pilot program to provide Plan B to public school students in districts with high rates of unintended pregnancy:

The city has worked to make it easier for kids to get birth control — giving out condoms at schools and making birth control and the morning-after pill available in some school clinics, a sometimes controversial move.

Farley said the numbers show that strategy is working.

“It shows that when you make condoms and contraception available to teens, they don’t increase their likelihood of being sexually active. But they get the message that sex is risky,” he said. […]

Again … duh. Young people have sex is hardly novel. But our modern society has decided that people shouldn’t be raising children at 14 and 15 anymore and we have the technology to make sure they don’t. Teenagers will always do the deed. Biology will out a good part of the time. But it doesn’t have to sentence them to parenthood before they are ready. Anyone with a lick of common sense and decency would want them to have every tool at their disposal to prevent that.

Unfortunately, there still remain unacceptably high rates of teenage pregnancy among racial and ethnic minorities. But their rate of unplanned pregnancy is lowering as well. It’s having an impact.

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Could gun background checks get through the GOP House?

by David Atkins

If you were to ask me what I thought the chances might be of any gun control legislation making it through the GOP House, I’d be inclined to say “slim to none.” But then again, I thought the same thing about John Boehner violating the Hastert rule to push through tax increases on the wealthy and a debt ceiling raise without serious cuts to social services. I didn’t think the GOP was weakened and fractured to a point where such a thing could happen and John Boehner could survive as Speaker. I was wrong. One of the few who did get it right was Greg Sargent of the Washington Post. Since I believe in pundit accountability and credit due for those who get it right, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the possibility of getting some basic gun control through the House as well. Here’s Sargent:

If any proposals in Obama’s gun package are to have any chance of passing the House, he’ll need to win over Republicans like Rep. Scott Rigell of Virginia. He represents one of 16 districts held by Republicans that were carried by Obama in 2012 — the swing area of Virginia Beach — potentially making Republicans like him, and others from suburban and swing districts, gettable.

It turns out Rigell does support a key element of Obama’s gun package — in an interview with me, he called on the House GOP leadership to allow it to come to a vote. And Rigell, a gun owner, staunch defender of the Second Amendment, and lifelong NRA member, is seriously considering supporting a second major Obama gun proposal.

Tomorrow, Rigell and a bipartisan group of House members will introduce the Gun Trafficking Prevention Act of 2013, which would stiffen penalties on people who buy firearms for the purpose of transferring them to someone who is prohibited from possessing one, and stiffens penalties for so-called “straw purchasers” who knowingly mislead Federal Firearms Licensees. A similar initiative has been introduced in the Senate, also with bipartisan support, and this idea is a major piece of Obama’s proposal.

The hope is that it will be very hard for the House GOP leadership to oppose a vote on this initiative, because it is widely favored by law enforcement groups and it doesn’t infringe on rights of the law abiding in any way; it only tries to prevent guns from falling into the hands of criminals…

Rigell also said he was open to supporting Obama’s proposal for universal background checks, though he said he hasn’t made a final decision. “I certainly see the merits of that,” he said.

The House GOP leadership has not said whether it will allow votes on either the trafficking or background check proposals. So it needs to be reiterated that these are both no-brainers that don’t infringe on the rights of the law abiding and are supported by law enforcement. Hopefully we’ll soon see more leadership like that shown here by Rep. Rigell from a handful of other House Republicans.

As unlikely as it might seem that these two proposals could ever get through the House, it is premature to write them off as completely dead. And if they both pass, that would constitute passage of two thirds of Obama’s gun control agenda — and would amount to a major achievement, with or without any assault weapons ban.

Again, normally I would say Sargent was being wildly optimistic. But it’s also possible that the GOP realizes it’s in enough hot water on this issue that something must be done. It won’t be a ban on assault weapons, but background checks would be an excellent start.

I don’t think it will happen, but I’d love for Greg to prove me wrong once again. If I’m right, this issue will be used across the country to clobber Republicans in 2014. If I’m wrong, then it will mean a Republican Party in full damage control and retrenchment mode.

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Do shooting victims even exist? Is anyone ever responsible?

by digby

Sheesh, what a story:

Former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle and his neighbor Chad Littlefield took former Marine Eddie Ray Routh to a Texas gun range to help him, but for some reason Routh allegedly turned his gun on his two mentors, killing them both, police said today.

ABC News affiliate WFAA-TV in Dallas reported that investigators said Routh, 25, was recovering from post traumatic stress disorder, but police today said they could not confirm that.

Routh, a corporal in the Marines from June 2006 to January 2010, was deployed to Iraq in 2007 and Haiti in 2010, according to the Pentagon. His current duty status is listed as reserve.

“Apparently Mr. Kyle works with people that are suffering from some issues that have been in the military and this shooter is possibly one of those people, that he had taken out to the range to mentor, to visit with, to help him, you know, that’s all I can tell you,” said Erath County Sheriff Tommy Bryant.

“Kind of have an idea that maybe that’s why they were at the range, for some type of therapy that Mr. Kyle assists people with, and I don’t know if it’s called shooting therapy,” Bryant said. “I don’t have any idea but that’s what little bit of information that we can gather so far.”

Ron Paul is on the right wing hit list for his reaction to this:

Ron Paul Smears Murdered US Sniper

“Chris Kyle’s death seems to confirm that ‘he who lives by the sword dies by the sword,’” Paul tweeted. “Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn’t make sense.”

Mother Jones Editor Clara Jeffrey made the mistake of making the obvious observation on twitter and got hammered by psychopaths for even thinking it.

I have no idea whether this is usually considered a good treatment for PTSD. It seems to defy common sense, but I could see how it might considered some form of exposure therapy.

What is clear is that the people who deeply admire the Navy SEAL and sniper Kyle are treating this as if it were some kind of unpreventable tragedy, as if he had been caught in a tornado or died of leukemia. They are in deep mourning but don’t seem to see any human agency in any of it, from the victim’s use of guns for psychological therapy to the act of the shooter who was, after all, a veteran and victim of PTSD. Every element of this event is wrapped in right wing orthodoxy to such an extent that they cannot find any way to level responsibility or even explain the brutal double murder of two innocent people by another human being.

A gun proliferation activist and PTSD counsellor put a lethal weapon in the hands of a mentally ill person and had it turned on him. Surely somewhere along that line of events, there must be somethingthat a decent society could have done to prevent that from happening.

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Destroying human dignity one pop tune at a time

by digby

Here’s Kathryn Jean Lopez on those whores Michelle Obama and Beyonce. As Tbogg would say, “bless her heart”:

I don’t want to linger on this, but last night’s Super Bowl half-time show was ridiculous — and gratuitously so. Watching Twitter, it was really no surprise that men made comments about stripper poles and putting dollar bills through their TV sets, was it? 

Why can’t we have a national entertainment moment that does not include a mother gyrating in a black teddy? 

The priceless moment was Destiny’s Child reuniting to ask that someone “put a ring on it.” As I mentioned on Twitter last night, perhaps that case might be best made in another outfit, perhaps without the crotch grabbing. 

It seems quite disappointing that Michelle Obama would feel the need to tweet about how “proud” she is of Beyoncé. The woman is talented, has a beautiful voice, and could be a role model. And she is on some levels — on others she is an example of cultural surrender, rather than leadership. 

When I saw the first lady’s tweet, I couldn’t help but think of the president talking about abortion in terms of his daughters’ freedom. I so want the Obamas to be leaders on building a culture of marriage and fatherhood and human dignity. Their actions seem to be telling me to get over my delusion.

Right. By praising a singer on twitter and talking about their daughters’ freedom, that longtime happily married couple with two lovely children are personally destroying marriage, fatherhood and personal dignity. What could be more obvious?

Still, if Kathryn Lopez is offended by Beyonce and Destiny’s Child telling prospective beaus they’d “better put a ring on it,” I can only imagine what she must she think of this horrible mother of four?

Yes I know, Loretta Lynn is just another urban coastal elite destroying the very foundation of American morality with her slutty songs. Since 1975. Waddaya gonna do?

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Chart ‘o the day

by digby

From Brandon Friedman:

In nearly eight hours of interrogation and testimony, Israel and its interests were referred to by the Senate Armed Services Committee a total of 106 times. On the other hand, there were a mere 24 references made to Afghanistan and the Americans fighting there—most by Democratic Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the committee.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan—where the U.S. frequently targets militants with drone-launched Hellfire missiles—barely merited mention at all.

It’s difficult to interpret this message any other way: the Senate Armed Services Committee—particularly its Republican membership—is more concerned with the apparent American defense secretary’s relationship with Israel than with the future of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the fate of U.S. troops engaged in both locations.

We are approaching a host of critical and delicate decisions on how many — and how fast — U.S. troops should be pulled out of Afghanistan. Yet, after more than a decade at war there — and nearly 2,100 U.S. lives lost — the people charged with overseeing the operation seem no longer interested.

Hagel was nominated to be the Secretary of Defense and he was hardly asked about the hot war that US military personnel are still fighting. Instead they were obsessed with Hagel’s thoughts on Israel, which is something about which he will have very little influence. I’m afraid that’s the sort of thing that you have to look to the White House itself for guidance.  There’s a lesson in this.  It was just a few years ago that it would have been considered heresy (and hatred for the troops) to have ignored the theater where American forces are still ostensibly fighting the GWOT. Today, it’s an afterthought at best.

Until it isn’t.  Regardless of these particular political cross winds, never forget that it takes almost nothing to turn the country back to its preferred wartime status.  We’ve been fighting something and someone ever since World War II and I’m afraid we’ve got a long way to go before that changes.

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GOP leaders are now trying to kill their Frankenstein monster

by digby

Ok, now this is getting fun:

Karl Rove, fresh off the multi-million dollar disaster that was 2012, has launched a new initiative, The New York Times reported Saturday. Known as the Conservative Victory Project, the group, a spin-off of Rove’s American Crossroads, will help recruit establishment Republicans, as well as defend Senate incumbents against challenges from more conservative candidates.

The aim, in a nutshell, is to push back against the Tea Party and bring the GOP’s nominating process back under the control of the party’s Washington power-brokers. In recent cycles, Tea Party-backed Senate candidates have won the Republican nomination over more moderate GOPers, only to be defeated in the general election. In several cases—think of Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remarks—they’ve been done in thanks in part to campaign trail slip-ups that more seasoned candidates might have avoided.
But the news has triggered a full-blown revolt among conservative activists, both inside and outside Washington.

“Because of the bad results of the 2012 cycle, I kind of feel like we’re in a state of gang warfare,” Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a grassroots advocacy group aligned with the Tea Party movement, told MSNBC.com, adding: “The establishment is circling the wagons, and they’re trying to protect their own.”

Kibbe argued that the the energy in today’s GOP comes from the very Tea Party-backed candidates, like Rand Paul and Mike Lee, that Rove has opposed in the past. “What Rove is proposing is a recipe for failure,” he said.

Karl Rove was instrumental in creating this monster. Now it’s got a mind of its own.

It’s hard to know how this will play out. The Tea Party is really just the re-branding of the far right of the Republican Party. But it may just be that the establishment made a mistake in doing that. They don’t see themselves as Republicans anymore. They see themselves as a distinct movement that wants to explicitly run the Republican Party.

The wingnuts have always had real power within their Party but they didn’t know it. Now they do. And they have spent the last 30 years having people like Karl Rove rev them up and expand their egos into believing they represent a majority of Americans and have a responsibility to hew to their principles no matter what. It was a good way to market conservatism. But it was never true.

Howie has more. Much more.
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Why do they love austerity so much?

by digby

Gaius Publius at Americablog discusses Paul Krugman’s column this morning, in which the shrill one very unpolitely points out that austerity has been a failure in every instance where it has been tried.
Gaius has a theory why it is still being pushed in various quarters in Europe and the Unites States:

This is what James Galbraith calls “the predatory state” — and he means that economically. The predatory state is a state that enables and is controlled by economic predators, extremely wealthy vampires who feed on their fellow citizens. Galbraith (my emphasis):

That the looming debt and deficit crisis is fake is something that, by now, even the most dim member of Congress must know. The combination of hysterical rhetoric, small armies of lobbyists and pundits, and the proliferation of billionaire-backed front groups with names like the “Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget” is not a novelty in Washington. It happens whenever Big Money wants something badly enough.

Big Money has been gunning for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for decades – since the beginning of Social Security in 1935. The motives are partly financial: As one scholar once put it to me, the payroll tax is the “Mississippi of cash flows.” Anything that diverts part of it into private funds and insurance premiums is a meal ticket for the elite of the predator state.

By “elite” of the predator state, Galbraith means “owners” of the predator state, the top predators themselves. It’s that predatory feeding that produces policies, promises and pronouncements like these that Krugman describes:

Not only have we been ruled by fear of nonexistent threats, we’ve been promised rewards that haven’t arrived and never will.

They’ll say and do anything to get at more dollars; they’ll destroy the planet’s ability to support life itself, all for more dollars. Look again at the chart above. They’ve been looting the country, the government, the schools, the pension plans, your wages, the equity in your home, everything they can get their hands on since Reagan Days. Their only goal — All your money are belong to us. These are true monomaniacs, in the clinical sense.

So yes, they’re self-deluded. But like every feral beast, they also know where the food is. That food is us unless we stop them. And stopping them starts (in my most humble opinion) with naming them and shaming them.

I only wish the naming and shaming would be enough. Unfortunately, we are living in a world of alternate narratives in which everyone chooses their own heroes and knaves and I’m afraid that our own little cult of austerity nay-sayers and 1% shamers will only be vindicated (if we ever are) long after we are dead. Still, we should name names (and he does) if only for the record.

Meanwhile, it’s up to us to do what we can to mitigate this problem. Call your congressperson and tell him or her that you want them to repeal the sequester. Period. We have already enacted 2.3 trillion in budget cuts at exactly the wrong time and the economy contracted in the last quarter. We certainly don’t need to do any more cutting. We need more spending.

(And exchanging cutting in the near term for long term cuts to Social Security and Medicare is not going to help. If we are dealing with a problem in demand, then telling near term retirees and retirees that they are facing cuts down the road to their already subsistence level incomes is hardly likely to result in a surge in spending. Just saying.)

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Environmental stories can’t be business as usual anymore

by David Atkins

The New York Times covers one of the biggest but most underreported battles in California right now: the war over fracking and oil. The story covers the usual contours, of course: pro-drilling developers hoping to turn California into Saudi Arabia West on the one hand, and environmentalists looking to preserve natural heritage and prevent pollution and ground contamination on the other. The typical, boring and predictable template is laid out, for instance, in this section:

But the oil companies’ plans for the Monterey Shale are already drawing increasing scrutiny from environmental groups. Though oil companies have engaged in fracking in California for decades, the process was only loosely monitored by state regulators.

The Monterey Shale’s geological formation will require companies to engage in more intensive fracking and deeper, horizontal drilling, a dangerous prospect in a seismically active region like California, environmental groups say.

Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, are suing the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Conservation to prevent the opening up of further land to oil exploration and to enforce stricter environmental practices.

“If and when the oil companies figure out how to exploit that shale oil, California could be transformed almost overnight,” said Kassie Siegel, a lawyer at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Fracking poisons the air we breathe and the water we drink. It is one of the most, if not the most, important environmental issue in California.”

But two key words are missing from the coverage of the article: climate and change.

This isn’t about environmentalists versus energy extractors. Absent climate change, we could have a nice back and forth about the perils of contaminants, the dangers of pollution, the value of the natural landscape, etc. These are well worn arguments and compromises could be achieved. At worst–at very worst–a generation of local residents would die of cancer and horrible diseases, a lot of oil and natural gas would be used, the environment would be degraded but would eventually recover, and life would go on.

But those are not the stakes. As high as those stakes are, the real stakes are much, much higher. The world’s climate is already reaching a tipping point–a point beyond which life as we know it on Planet Earth may not be possible within just a lifetime or two. We simply cannot afford to burn another 15 billion barrels of oil’s worth of previously unavailable CO2 into the atmosphere. That carbon needs to stay in the ground, and it needs to stay there indefinitely–fracking or no.

Those are the stakes, and there is no compromise to be had.

It’s deeply disappointing that the Times doesn’t seem to understand that climate change means environmental stories aren’t business as usual anymore.

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