Month: July 2013

The lessons learned

by digby

This:

There’s fear that the verdict will embolden vigilantes but that need not be the concern: History has already done that. You need not recall specifics of everything that has transpired in Florida over the past two hundred years to recognize this. The details of Rosewood, the black town terrorized and burned to the ground in 1923, and of Groveland and the black men falsely accused of rape and murdered there in 1949, can remain obscure and retain sway over our present concerns. Names—like Claude Neal, lynched in 1934, and Harry and Harriette Moore, N.A.A.C.P. organizers in Mims County, killed by a firebomb in 1951—can be overlooked. What cannot be forgotten, however, is that there were no consequences for those actions.

Perhaps history does not repeat itself exactly, but it is certainly prone to extended paraphrases. Long before the jury announced its decision, many people had seen what the outcome would be, had known it would be a strange echo of the words Zimmerman uttered that rainy night in central Florida: they always get away.

And this:

Tonight a Florida man’s acquittal for hunting and killing a black teenager who was armed with only a bag of candy serves as a Rorschach test for the American public. For conservatives, it’s a triumph of permissive gun laws and a victory over the liberal media, which had been unfairly rooting for the dead kid all along. For liberals, it’s a tragic and glaring example of the gaps that plague our criminal justice system. For people of color, it’s a vivid reminder that we must always be deferential to white people, or face the very real chance of getting killed…

Those are lessons learned long ago by African Americans and their racist white fellow citizens. I guess it’s the rest of us who are continuously under the misapprehension that it has ever changed.

From reading the right wing commentators and bloggers this morning I see the lesson learned is that it’s perfectly reasonable to conceal a loaded gun on their person, stalk/provoke/fight someone and then kill them with impunity if the state cannot prove that the person did not “look suspicious” and that the perpetrator didn’t feel scared because of it. They aren’t granting that this is only operative if the dead person isn’t white. (Otherwise, one would have to keep an open mind about those circumstances.) But it’s obvious.

This is filed under our new American credo — “Protect Us At All Costs!” Americans are so frightened of everything, even 17 year old kids with nothing more than skittles and tea in their hands,  that they must “protect” themselves from all threats by any means necessary. The government police apparatus may be vast, extremely powerful and growing exponentially, but even that is not enough. In places like Florida they empower citizens to carry concealed weapons to “protect” us as well.

For me, the lesson (aside from the deeply depressing racial one) is that this culture is deteriorating at the hands of a small group of gun fetishists who insist that we must have a society where certain people are allowed to carry guns everywhere and use them at their discretion. And that means that for all this talk of being “protected” from the boogeyman of the moment, we cannot ever feel safe.

Or free. If a young black man is stalked by a stranger he is not free to confront him. He must keep his head down, be obsequious, be prepared to be questioned not just by police, but by anyone. Because anyone could be concealing a weapon loaded with hollow point bullets and yesterday they were given permission to shoot if this young man does anything else.

But it’s not just him. In various parts of the country someone like George Zimmerman, a wannabe cop, a wannabe macho dude, is legally allowed to carry a concealed gun loaded with hollow point bullets. What if I did something to startle or frighten someone like him? Indeed, how can any of us know who’s carrying a loaded gun and who isn’t? So, I’ll keep my head down too and be obsequious and subservient to every person I come across in public. I won’t make any smart remarks. I won’t express myself at all. I’ll just hurry along in the hopes that I haven’t drawn any undue attention. It’s less likely that a white woman like me will be shot than it is a young black male, but it’s foolish to take any chances in a world like this. Standing up for your principles or the constitution is really hard to do when you’re dead.

This is already happening:

A member of Moms Demand Action said that she felt unsettled by the presence of [armed counter-protesters] and said that the organizers would have to think twice before holding another event, particularly one where children could be present.

This is what the gun fetishists characterize as a “polite society” brought about by the fact that guns are everywhere.

They also like to talk about liberty.

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Saturday Night at the Movies

Stop! Or my mom will bite: Byzantium

Classiest pundit in America


by digby

That is the kind of quick wit and incisive political insight that CNN and FOX news find so valuable.

ICYMI, this is from January 2013:

I was not going to say anything, but rather just fade away. I suppose though with rumors and reports I should say something.

My voicemail and inbox are, as I type, filling up. I have turned my phone off as the only way to get it to stop ringing.

Yes, I can confirm I am leaving CNN. It was a very, very difficult decision. I appreciate their willingness to keep me on, but my wife and I decided it was time to move on. Contrary to some media reports, my departure has nothing to do with the new boss, though some have speculated on that since the announcement came on the same day as those related to decisions he made.

When I told my 7 year old I had decided to leave, she laid on the sofa for an hour crying that she’d never see Anderson Cooper again. She’s never actually met Anderson Cooper. But I have and I’ll miss him and his team and I’ll miss Wolf and his team, and all the other terrific people I’ve worked with these last three years. I deeply regret never working up the courage to pull on Wolf’s beard.

For three years I have been a conservative political contributor at the network I grew up watching from Dubai and then home in Louisiana. I grew up wanting to be a Bernard Shaw or a Robert Novak and wound up working for CNN.

For all those liberals who lost money thinking Keith Olbermann would outlast me at Current TV, well, sorry.

Me at CNN was not an easy fit. The first month was tumultuous with several tumultuous times throughout. I liked to think of myself as job security for the public relations department. About the only thing the far right and far left could agree on was that I did not belong at CNN.

For three years I have received unmitigated hate and loathing from the left and, ironically, from a lot of folks on the right. Frankly, I’d like to thank some significant people responsible for my time at CNN, but (1) they know who they are and (2) it’d just generate hate mail for them so I better not.

For some reason saying something negative about the GOP was fine here at RedState, but saying the same damn thing on CNN brought in a flurry of emails from conservatives accusing me of selling out. Funny how that works.

Let me set the record straight in a way I could not were I still under contract because of how self-serving it would sound.

For three years I have worked with some of the greatest people I have ever had the joy of meeting. It has been a privilege to sit in a green room and hear Paul Begala or James Carville or Donna Brazile or Hillary Rosen or David Gergen or Alex Castellanos or Ari Fleischer or Mary Matalin or Gloria Borger or so many others tell stories about their days in the White House or on the campaign trail or covering the politicians who’ve governed the country these last few decades.

I’ve learned I can be on television for twenty-six straight hours and still make relative sense.

I’ve learned that some of the people I grew up thinking were in the enemy’s camp, so to speak, are spectacular people who share many of the same interests and opinions I do.
I’ve learned that family is more than just my wife and kids and our siblings and parents, but includes a host of people who, every time I’m in the room with them, we hug and eat and talk about stuff other than politics. And they always have a place at my kitchen table and a bed to sleep in if ever they are in Macon.

I’ve learned that using my wife’s blush brush to put on my own TV makeup is more than a little problematic from both a marriage stand point and the extra color it adds. I’ve also learned that my make up is more expensive than my wife’s make up, but that’s a whole other story.

I’ve learned that a surprising number of people think Sam Feist and I are related.
I’ve learned to never stay at the Hotel Fort Des Moines when reporters and campaign operatives are in Iowa. Among all the interesting stories, I’ve learned to never stay at the Hotel Fort Des Moines when reporters and campaign operatives are in Iowa. No further comment on that one.

I learned that I will never be competitive with Roland Martin on the fashion front, but he makes an excellent road trip companion through South Carolina. One of the most formative moments of my career at CNN was standing outside a hotel with Roland Martin and tourists began handing him luggage and keys as if he worked at the hotel — only because he was in a suit. His courteousness to the people when he did not have to be courteous and the fact that in the 21st century that’d happen at all really struck me profoundly.

Because of CNN I’m not just better at my job, but I’m a better person. For all the hate and angst from a lot of folks on the right over me going to CNN, I know many of the contributors I consider good friends were initially skeptical of my hiring. I had to learn an art form too often missing these days in partisan talk — the art of conversation, particularly with those who might disagree with me. I had to learn to be friends with people who I disagreed with. And I leave deeply caring for those people.

Frankly, before I went to CNN I was oblivious to the fact that there are ways to say things, without sacrificing or compromising my view or principle, that come off as more respectable and honest without invective than how I might have otherwise said them. There are ways to say things that draw people to you and ways to say things that push people from you. There are also times that facts and “known facts” get bounced around by both sides of the political spectrum without them ever actually being actual facts. We should all be more mindful of that. CNN made me mindful of that.

I am forever grateful to them for giving me a chance and have many, many fond memories and friends.

To my friends at CNN, good luck and God bless.

Effective today I am a Fox News contributor.

And he learned that you can be a sadistic creep and joke about women bleeding to death from coat-hanger abortion and still make millions of dollars as a TV celebrity.

h/t to IG

Professional journamalism, local edition

by digby

I just don’t know what to say:

The saga of a bunch of obviously, hilariously fake names being reported as real on a local San Francisco TV station just got stranger. After people noticed that KTVU was reporting that the names of pilots in the Asiana Airlines crash included Ho Lee Fuk and Bang Ding Ow, KTVU insisted that it wasn’t them, it was a spokesperson at the National Transportation Safety Board who confirmed the names to them. And aside from the fact that they were very obviously fake names, it turns out that the person at the NTSB who confirmed the names to them was, naturally, a summer intern.

Spartan dreams and comic book heroes: right wing male panic on parade

by digby

The most ridiculous thing you will read all week-end:

They don’t make men like they used to. One can consult a Danish study that shows plummeting testosterone levels for scientific confirmation of this. Or, one could more easily turn on any cable news network’s wall-to-wall coverage of the Zimmerman-Martin case, a tragedy involving two males fumbling in the dark on how to be men.

***
On the maturity count, Trayvon Martin might reasonably plead not guilty by reason of chronology. Seventeen-year-old boys quite often act like, in the vernacular of Zimmerman, “f—-ing punks.” Most grow out of it, but Mr. Martin unfortunately will not get that chance. Rarely, in spite of their exaggerated masculine posturing, do teenage boys behave as mature males.

Martin’s Twitter feed reads as a parody of poor grammar and an even more impoverished vocabulary. There, he’s a “No Limit N-gga,” girls he knows are “bitches” and “hoes,” and the primary extracurricular activity he immerses himself in is marijuana. The gold-teeth smile, the tattoos, the ten-day suspension from school, and all the rest appear as pathetic attempts to assert his virility. Yet, as his supporters point out, Trayvon also liked Skittles and Chuck E. Cheese’s. The presentation that Trayvon affected and the Trayvon that his supporters present are, like so many making the journey from adolescence to adulthood, at war internally.

George Zimmerman, in contrast, projects a courtroom image of a meek pudgeball who wouldn’t (couldn’t?) hurt a fly — and not in a Norman Bates way. Perhaps this is the effect that his lawyers intended. But it jibes with what we know. According to one unidentified witness, Zimmerman endured a domineering mother’s frequent beatings and a docile father who failed to stick up for his kids. His mixed-martial arts instructor described him as “physically soft,” a student who lacked athleticism and “didn’t know how to really effectively punch.”

One wonders if the cage-fighting classes, the pursuit of a career in law enforcement, and a firearm kept ready to fire were Zimmerman’s ways of discovering his elusive manhood in a manner akin to Trayvon’s tattoos, coarse language, and demonstrative drug use. With the teenager sans a father in the home to serve as guide, and the neighborhood-watch captain growing up watching the cowed captain of his home, the pair’s past altered their future as much as anything else did.

Zimmerman’s screams and Trayvon slamming Zimmerman’s head into the concrete weren’t the acts of men. A man is neither a woman nor an animal. The proper response to an assault by a 158-pound teenager isn’t to scream for help or grab for a gun. It is to punch back or better yet subdue and issue a spanking. And a sucker punch, the repeated hitting of a downed opponent, and the bashing of a skull against the concrete doesn’t pass muster with the Marquess of Queensberry. Perhaps the “No Holds Barred Fighting” dojo that Zimmerman had signed up for would approve.

***
Civilizing men out of existence has come at great cost to civilization. Instead of men, we get feminine imitations lacking beauty. We get lost boys compensating by becoming barbarians. We get Sanford, Florida, February 26, 2012.

John Cole aptly characterizes this as:

one half Kim Du Toit’s infamous Pussification of the Western Male and one half Ron Paul newsletter

Oh gosh, I haven’t thought of that essay in a long time. I wish I didn’t have to ever think of it again.

Somebody’s been reading too many comic books or romance novels — or playing too many video games. The immaturity of his view of “manhood” is typical of the average right winger, however. Their development stopped somewhere around the age of 14.

I was reminded of this:

Sunday, March 18, 2007

 
Hey Joey, Do You Like Movies About Gladiators?

by digby

I’ve been following this story about “300” in the entertainment press with some interest. It has to be the most breathless, overwrought wingnut attempt to find relevance in popular culture yet. Here’s Newsweek:

…the cultural significance and popular appeal of “300” reach beyond the thrill of watching pixilated decapitations. The Persians in “300” are the forces of evil: dark-skinned, depraved and determined to terrorize the West. The noble, light-skinned Spartans possess a fierce love of liberty, not to mention fierce six-pack abs. “Freedom is not free,” says the wife of Spartan King Leonidas. The movie was adapted from a graphic novel by Frank Miller (“Sin City”). Miller’s post-9/11 conservatism (he is reportedly working on a new graphic novel pitting Batman against Al Qaeda, titled “Holy Terror, Batman!”) suffuses his comic-book fantasies. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that “300” resonates for some real warriors. At a theater near Camp Pendleton outside San Diego, cheers erupted at a showing of “300,” the Los Angeles Times reported. The Marines (“The Few, the Proud”) identify with the outnumbered Spartans.

Ok. So the few the proud at Camp Pendleton see themselves in the role of Spartans. Most of them do have fierce six-pack abs, if not necessarily light skin, and it’s common for soldiers to enjoy battle rituals. I’m not surprised by this.

But this is ridiculous:

The analogy between the war on terror and the death struggle of ancient Greece with Persia has not been lost on some high administration officials either, especially Vice President Dick Cheney. (A White House spokesman declined to comment about the film.) In the months after 9/11, a classics scholar named Victor Davis Hanson wrote a series of powerful pieces for the National Review Online, later collected and published as a book, “An Autumn of War.” Moved by Hanson’s evocative essays, Cheney invited Hanson to dine with him and talk about the wars the Greeks waged against the Asian hordes, in defense of justice and reason, two and a half millennia ago.

Everyone thinks of George W. Bush as being something of a child, with a childlike view of the world. But I think Dick Cheney’s a bit of a child too, at least when it comes to war, something which has been well documented if not well reported. (He indulged in ridiculous fantasy scenarios in the first Gulf war and was so taken with Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary that he came to believe he was Lincoln and wanted to fire Schwartzkopf for being too McClellanlike.)

Keep this guy away from Netflix, half baked conservative historians and comic book writers. It’s dangerous.

But, as pathetic as Cheney’s Walter Mitty delusions are, nothing comes close to the wingnut bloggers:

The movie is a cartoon, based very loosely on historical fact. The Persians are depicted as either effeminate or vicious abusers of women, while the Greeks are manly men. The bad guys in “300” also include corrupt Spartan politicians who refuse to send more troops to the battle. Some right-wing bloggers have likened them to liberal Democrats voting against the surge in Iraq.

Here’s a fairly typical post:

The mind set reflected in the reviews of “300” suggest that the reviewers, with their apparent discomfort with the open expression of defiant aggression expressed in the movie, are too sophisticated to partake, even vicariously, in the Spartan heroics. It is unclear whether the pacifist left would ever fight, even to save themselves, let alone to save the civilization that they cannot imagine is under siege. If the sophisticates of Athens had refused to pick up the sword, they would have been dead or enslaved. Our modern day sophisticated Athenians of the MSM who refuse to wield their weapons, their pens and computers, in the service of Western Civilization, have already shown their willingness to live as slaves. After all, what did the Danish cartoon saga tell us except that the members of the elites in Academia, Hollywood, and the MSM are willing to offer up their free speech rights in obeisance to the barbarians at the gates.

“300” resonates because Americans have not yet shown themselves so willing to live as slaves as their “betters” in the effete elites.

Who hasn’t wondered why the “modern day Athenians of the MSM refuse to wield their weapons, their pens and computers, in the service of western Civilization?” Thank God Americans such as this fine blogger are wielding their mighty weapons in public for all the world to see, eh? It’s made all the difference.

The Jawa Report is much more honest and straightforward than most:

I just saw “300”. It is probably the most important movie made since 9-11.

[…]

The propaganda, it is oh-so-beautiful. It rivals anything put out by Republic Pictures or Warner Brother’s animation during WWII. Heroic Americans fight the Hunnish/Asiatic hordes (many seem to forget that it wasn’t until after WWII that our movies redeemed the “Germans” by separating them from the “Nazis”—part of the Cold War propaganda effort).

In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and compare this to Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part I–that classic piece of Soviet propaganda which artfully legitimized the Stalinistic purges as an effort to consolidate state power in the face of a foreign menace (Ivan as Stalin, the boyars as anti-revolutionary forces, and the Turks as the Germans). And who would argue that Eisenstein’s masterpiece wasn’t needed to help the war effort? Or Bugs Bunny? Or John Wayne?

No, “300” brings us back to the good-old days of propaganda. When propaganda was produced in support of our country. When propaganda was produced to remind us that we are the good guys and that our ideals are better than the ideals of our enemies.

Go see “300”. If you don’t like it you probably hate America. That, or you’re gay.

Right.

It should be said that some rightwing bloggers were not as taken with the film. But their commenters showed them that they were missing the point:

No one ever said that reinstalling the American man’s long-lost testicles was going to be a painless process, but it’s worth it. Best of all it reminds us that we once made of far sterner stuff than we are now and we need to get it back. I’m hoping there are a hundred more movies like “300” over the next couple of years. We need them.

dostrick on March 16, 2007 at 12:51 PM

Bingo.

Haven’t seen it yet (getting my infusion of cinematic testosterone tomorrow), but I’m definitely pumped up and ready for it. I can let the fact that it’s not historically accurate by any means slide since the movie makes no pretenses to the contrary. It pisses off all the right people (liberals, the tyrants in Iran, etc.) while espousing themes such as that there are some things worth fighting for.

‘Bout damn time. I’ll take this over former tough-guy Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima wimpfests any day.

thirteen28 on March 16, 2007 at 1:03 PM

“It’s a manly film, full of heroic poses and speeches…”

Which is why some liberal reviewers hated it, of course. After all, liberalism’s fundamental premise is the sissified surrender of the West, while presided over by girlymen.

So there you have it.

I couldn’t believe it when I heard about this movie because I’ve long joked that “America isn’t Sparta — America is a bunch of fat, spoiled shoppers” which is true. We are not a warrior culture, never have been, and yet we’ve fought and won our share of wars. These guys can go on and on about how it doesn’t matter that the film was historically inaccurate because it was all about teh good vs evil and all, but its inaccuracy is quite relevant. If you want to be a mighty warrior nation, everybody has to move their fat asses off the couch and become — you know — warriors. “Wielding” a keyboard and using words like “girly-men” and Islamofascism” doesn’t count.

This is how it’s done:

The agoge was a rigorous education and training regime undergone by all Spartan citizens (with the exception of future kings.) It involved separation from the family, cultivation of loyalty to one’s group, loving mentorship, military training, hunting, dance and social preparation.

The term agoge literally translates as ‘raising’. Supposedly introduced by the semi-mythical Spartan law-giver Lycurgus but thought to have had its beginnings between the seventh and the sixth centuries BC, it trained boys from the age of seven to eighteen.

The aim of the system was to produce the physically and morally steeled males to serve in the Spartan army, men who would be the “walls of Sparta,” the only city with no defensive walls – they had been taken down at the order of Lycurgus. Discipline was strict and the boys were encouraged to fight amongst themselves in order to determine who was the strongest in the group…

Boys were sent from the family home and from then on lived in groups (agelae, herds) under an older boy leader. They were encouraged to give their loyalty to their communal mess hall rather than their families, even when married they would not eat an evening meal with their wives until at least 25. The boys however were not well fed and it was expected that they would steal their food. If caught stealing however, they would be severely punished (not for stealing, but instead for getting caught). All Spartan males with the exception of the eldest son of each of the Spartan royal households (Agiad and Eurypontid) were required to go through this process (they were permitted not to attend as it was believed they were part god).

Americans wouldn’t last a day in such a regime, and frankly, good for us. There have been others who tried to emulate it and it didn’t work out so well.

These flabby keyboarders are just big babies like their hero Dick Cheney, getting all hot and bothered at the sight of all those rock-hard abs and all that death. If they want a piece of it, there are military recruiters everywhere who would be more than willing to sign them up and send them to the marine version of agoge. It’s called boot camp. Once they get through that and do some time in an actual war zone then maybe they can cheer wildly at “gladiator” movies and talk about manly-men without sounding like a bunch of fools or sad closet cases.

Or if they have “better things to do” maybe they could just be all they can be. The Spartans would have been pleased.

Here comes the sun

by digby

I know you don’t have enough to worry about so I thought I’d share this:

Today, electric utilities and the insurance industry are grappling with a scary possibility. A solar storm on the scale of that in 1859 would wreak havoc on power grids, pipelines and satellites. In the worst case, it could leave 20 million to 40 million people in the Northeast without power — possibly for years — as utilities struggled to replace thousands of fried transformers stretching from Washington to Boston. Chaos and riots might ensue.

That’s not a lurid sci-fi fantasy. It’s a sober new assessment by Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest insurance market. The report notes that even a much smaller solar-induced geomagnetic storm in 1989 left 6 million people in Quebec without power for nine hours.
“We’re much more dependent on electricity now than we were in 1859,” explains Neil Smith, an emerging-risks researcher at Lloyd’s and co-author of the report. “The same event today could have a huge financial impact” — which the insurer pegs at up to $2.6 trillion for an especially severe storm. (To put that in context, Hurricane Sandy caused about $68 billion in damage.)

The possibility of apocalypse has piqued scientific interest in solar storms for many years. But researchers are now realizing that periodic space weather can cause all sorts of lesser mischief all the time, such as disorienting GPS satellites or severing contact between polar flights and air-traffic control.

This is the sort of thing that makes you want to throw up your hands and say “I give up.”

I give up.

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Movement on Gitmo: Why does this have to be so hard?

by digby

Some good news:

President Barack Obama’s renewed push to close the Guantanamo Bay prison for terrorism suspects has given a glimmer of hope to foreign governments that he will fulfill that promise and triggered diplomatic maneuvering from U.S. allies eager to bring home long-held detainees.

Kuwait has hired lobbyists to help bring its two remaining prisoners home. British Prime Minister David Cameron personally pressed Obama at the Group of 8 summit last month to release the United Kingdom’s final detainee. And the fate of Afghans being held at the U.S. military prison in Cuba has been at the forefront of peace talks between the U.S., Taliban and Afghanistan.

The indefinite captivity has created tension with some important U.S. allies, particularly in the Arab world, the native home of many of the 166 remaining detainees. Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen are among those countries that have pressed the U.S. to turn over their nationals.

The Obama administration is in the midst of determining which detainees present the lowest risk for terrorist activity if released – considering both their personal histories and security in the countries to which they will be returned…

David Cynamon, an American lawyer based in the Middle East who is working with Kuwait on getting their detainees back, said in recent months they are finally having meaningful negotiations after years of “radio silence.”

“You would think with a close ally like Kuwait they would at least get a hearing, but they kept getting the brush off,” Cynamon said.

But hey, it’s only five, six extra years of imprisonment. Not a biggie, I guess. Also too, the prisoners finally had someone sussed out how you have to do business in Washington. Appeals to decency, morality and basic human rights are clearly not taken seriously. This is how you get things done:

Kuwait hired The Potomac Square Group, a Washington lobbying firm, to help spur talks for the transfer of Faiz al-Kandari and Fawzi al-Odah.

“They want all their citizens back if the United States is not going to charge and try them,” Cynamon said. “Now that the negotiations have started, I do think they are meaningful. But for a two-year period there was nobody who was answering the door.”

I honestly don’t understand why this has to be so hard. President Obama pledged to close the prison and even though congress has tied his hands, he has had the authority to release many of these prisoners since he took office. Now that they are submitting themselves to force-feeding and making the US look bad, the administration is finally making some moves to do this. This has been happening only since May of 2013 two months ago. Why does it always take such dramatic pressure from outside before this administration will behave in a way that comports with its alleged values? It’s not as if the Republicans (or the terrorists, for that matter) will give them any credit for “holding out as long as they could:”

Administration officials say they are working aggressively to certify detainees for release under Obama’s directive in May to transfer as many detainees as possible to other countries. The president, in announcing new steps to get the detainees out, said diplomatic concerns are chief among the reasons to close the facility.

“Gitmo has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law,” Obama said during a speech at National Defense University. “Our allies won’t cooperate with us if they think a terrorist will end up at Gitmo.”

Congress has fought Obama from achieving the goal he announced upon taking office in 2009 of closing Guantanamo. Lawmakers have blocked detainees from coming into the United States, but the Pentagon can issue a national security waiver to transfer the detainees overseas.

So far the Obama administration hasn’t used that power to move out any detainee, even though 86 have been cleared for transfer. But administration officials say they expect to begin transfers soon.

Last month, Obama appointed lawyer Clifford Sloan to reopen the State Department’s Office of Guantanamo Closure. Obama said the sole responsibility for Sloan and a yet-to-be named envoy at the Pentagon will be to transfer detainees overseas, and Sloan’s team is busy finding its first candidates.

That’s good. It’s only taken five years. Better late than never I guess.

All the caterwauling about the US having a finger stuck in its eye with the NSA revelations is a joke — the US has been pounding itself in the face for nearly a decade with this shocking violation of its own principles and basic human rights. Finding out that it is collecting information on huge numbers of people, including its own citizens, is a mild transgression of our values by comparison.

I’m glad they are finally coming around and using some measures they’ve had at their disposal to end this nightmare. Every time I see someone wringing her hands over Edward Snowden “betraying” our country and and our president and making us “less safe” with his revelations about global spying I want to scream. There is nothing anyone could do in this so-called War on Terror that makes us any less safe than the continued imprisonment of these men, many of them innocent of any crimes, in Guantanamo.

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Chase “savings”

by David Atkins

Late capitalism run amok:

If you are a working stiff and can squirrel away $250 to put in a Chase “savings account,” Chase will pay you 12.5 cents a year (.05% APY at a “standard rate”). Furthermore, if you don’t make any transactions, they will charge you $4 a month, meaning that you will be left with $202 at the end of a year, plus your 2.5 cents.

It’s all right here on a Chase website marketing page for what is called “Chase Savings.” But a closer look at the fees and disclosures page indicates that if you are a consumer not used to reading the footnotes, you could end up losing your savings through add-on fees (including potentially the $4 a month “service” fee).

The oligarchy doesn’t keep its money at Chase we bet, at least in savings accounts. We doubt that JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has a standard savings account at his own firm, the parent company of Chase. Why? Because according to the Chase rate chart, any sucker who puts $5 million into even the premium “Chase Savings Plus” still only gets .15% interest. To break that down, that would equal a $150.00 return on every $100,000 lent to Chase each year. Do you think Dimon is a master of the universe with those kind of investment returns?

We call savings at Chase lending because the bank takes your money and charges credit card holders up to around 30%, yielding enormous profits at your expense and the indebtedness of the credit card holders. Meanwhile, you end up as a “good” American saver with literally pennies in interest on your nest egg. Consumer savers at banks like Chase are paying for providing the banks to big to fail with the capital to lend out funds at usurious interest rates for a variety of purposes — or financing their risky investment ventures.

For most of history in the post-classical Western world, this sort of thing would have been flatly illegal. In the ancient Western world there were fewer controls on interest rates, but their impact was blunted by regular bouts of debt forgiveness, and the ever-present threat that the rulers of the day could simply impound the assets of the lender.

It’s important to realize that allowing financial institutions to perpetrate this sort of savage usury on people with the full support of their government is a relatively novel modern phenomenon. It was not always so. It was not usually so.

And there will come a day again when it is illegal and treated with the same scorn that we reserve for slavery and child labor today.

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Quote of the millenium

by digby

Why are we so afraid?

Had I really understood something of war, I wouldn’t have gotten sidetracked trying to write about rebels and loyalists, Sunnis and Shia. Because really the only story to tell in war is how to live without fear. It all could be over in an instant. If I knew that, then I wouldn’t have been so afraid to love, to dare, in my life; instead of being here, now, hugging myself in this dark, rancid corner, desperately regretting all I didn’t do, all I didn’t say. You who tomorrow are still alive, what are you waiting for? Why don’t you love enough? You who have everything, why you are so afraid?

It’s only a few short paragraphs. You. Must. Read. It.

You’ll pry my Maxipad from my cold dead hands …

by digby

This is unreal:

According to Jessica Luther, a freelance writer and pro-choice activist who has been coordinating much of the push-back to the proposed abortion restrictions over the past few weeks, Senate officials are confiscating any objects they believe may cause a similar disruption in the gallery during Friday’s vote. Protesters aren’t allowed to carry water bottles or even feminine hygiene products, just in case they might throw them at lawmakers.

I guess they should feel lucky they weren’t subjected to a cavity search. Transvaginal probes are on the agenda after all. Lucky for the ladies, patriarchal throwbacks believe that menstruating women are unclean so they’re highly unlikely to want to go there.

The good news is that they haven’t suspended everyone’s rights:

Even though the Texas legislature may not be comfortable with feminine hygiene products, it’s a bit more relaxed when it comes to firearms. Individuals with concealed carry licenses are permitted to bring their guns into the Senate gallery. In fact, a Texas Republican recently insinuated he might do just that during the current special session.

In a recent interview with the National Review Online, state Rep. Jonathan Strickland (R) expressed concern over becoming the target of violence as thousands of angry pro-choice activists rally at the capitol. When asked whether those concerns would inspire him to carry a hidden gun this session, he said he couldn’t legally answer that question. But he did add, “I very, very often do concealed-carry, I can say that.”

It’s good to know that if the good congressman is assaulted by an illicitly smuggled-in Maxipad he can “stand his ground” and shoot to kill. I’m sure he’d find it very frightening.

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