Month: July 2013

Roger Ailes’ creatures: The Reckoning

by digby

I guess I wasn’t paying attention because the last I heard, North Carolina was practically in the bag for the Democrats and wingnut radicalism was just a piece of my fevered imagination. Not so:

Every Monday since April, thousands of North Carolina residents have gathered at the State Capitol to protest the grotesque damage that a new Republican majority has been doing to a tradition of caring for the least fortunate. Nearly 700 people have been arrested in the “Moral Monday” demonstrations, as they are known. But the bad news keeps on coming from the Legislature, and pretty soon a single day of the week may not be enough to contain the outrage.

In January, after the election of Pat McCrory as governor, Republicans took control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since Reconstruction. Since then, state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot.

The cruelest decision by lawmakers went into effect last week: ending federal unemployment benefits for 70,000 residents. Another 100,000 will lose their checks in a few months. Those still receiving benefits will find that they have been cut by a third, to a maximum of $350 weekly from $535, and the length of time they can receive benefits has been slashed from 26 weeks to as few as 12 weeks.

The state has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country, and many Republicans insulted workers by blaming their joblessness on generous benefits. In fact, though, North Carolina is the only state that has lost long-term federal benefits, because it did not want to pay back $2.5 billion it owed to Washington for the program. The State Chamber of Commerce argued that cutting weekly benefits would be better than forcing businesses to pay more in taxes to pay off the debt, and lawmakers blindly went along, dropping out of the federal program.

At the same time, the state is also making it harder for future generations of workers to get jobs, cutting back sharply on spending for public schools. Though North Carolina has been growing rapidly, it is spending less on schools now than it did in 2007, ranking 46th in the nation in per-capita education dollars. Teacher pay is falling, 10,000 prekindergarten slots are scheduled to be removed, and even services to disabled children are being chopped.

“We are losing ground,” Superintendent June Atkinson said recently, warning of a teacher exodus after lawmakers proposed ending extra pay for teachers with master’s degrees, cutting teacher assistants and removing limits on class sizes.

Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that was the first in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to prove they were victims of discrimination. They have refused to expand Medicaid and want to cut income taxes for the rich while raising sales taxes on everyone else. The Senate passed a bill that would close most of the state’s abortion clinics.

And, naturally, the Legislature is rushing to impose voter ID requirements and cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, which have been popular among Democratic voters. One particularly transparent move would end a tax deduction for dependents if students vote at college instead of their hometowns, a blatant effort to reduce Democratic voting strength in college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham.

North Carolina was once considered a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness. In a few short months, Republicans have begun to dismantle a reputation that took years to build.

It’s not just North Carolina, of course. Wherever there is a GOP majority, they are turning the state into a right wing paradise as fast as they can.

And to think this is happening after the leaders of the Democratic Party have twisted themselves into pretzels for years trying to appease the right. You’d almost think it wasn’t worth it.

.

More Americans would rather their daughter marry a Muslim than an Atheist

by David Atkins

Next time you see anti-Muslim prejudice in your community, consider that your fellow Americans likely hate atheists even more:

The number of those identifying as nonreligious has grown dramatically in the U.S. in recent years. The percentage of American adults not identifying with any religion in Pew Research polls has grown from barely 15% to nearly 20% in the last five years. Much of this change comes from the fact that just 9% of those 65 and older do not identify with a religion, and they’re being replaced by youths with far higher rates.

The amount of hate and distrust toward atheists in America is still astounding. “Atheists as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society,” a paper by three sociologists at the University of Minnesota, compared perceptions of atheists to those of other groups. Forty percent surveyed said atheists were a group which “Does not At All Agree With My Vision of America,” while the next most common response was Muslims at 26%. Nearly 50% said they would disapprove of their child marrying an atheist, and the next two highest groups were Muslims at 34% and African-Americans at 27%.

It’s all of a piece: the racism, the prejudice, the misogyny. A huge portion of Americans desperately want to believe that there is divine order in the world, that it can be easily digested by reading the right book, that women who disobey their husbands and fathers will be punished, that “inferior” races who overstep their bounds will be brought to heel, that God favors this nation-state over that one, and that all the free-thinking libertines, global citizens and race traitors will burn forever in a lake of fire.

It obviously matters a great deal to them which book is used, which name their God takes, and which races and nation-states rise to the top of the primate heap. But that’s not actually as important as the belief in the divine order itself. For them, the thought of a universe in which people grope forward with progress toward an uncertain end, where evil is not necessarily punished, and where society and culture change fluidly forever is a terrifying thing.

It shouldn’t be. Human history is filled with far more pain, misery and cruelty than happiness. The idea that a grand creator made us this way is anything but hopeful. If the same creator that made this place is also in charge of whatever may come after, that’s not a terribly reassuring thought. The notion, on the other hand, that our children will have the opportunity to create a better world than we lived in, and that our actions on this earth can help them make that a reality? That’s an inspiring thought.

.

I amuse you? What do you mean funny? Funny how? How am I funny?

by digby

Hollywood didn’t invent these guys after all:

The trial of James “Whitey” Bulger descended into an expletive-laced shouting match Tuesday between the alleged mob boss and the former right-hand man who called him a rat. 

The outburst happened as Kevin Weeks, who prosecutors say was an enforcer for Bulger’s team, was on the stand for a second day, giving graphic testimony about murders that Bulger is accused of committing.

“We killed people who are rats, and the two biggest rats were sitting right next to me,” he said, referring to Bulger and a cohort, Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, and their work as FBI informants.

At that point, Bulger, who has been stoic for most of the trial, hissed: “F— you!”

Weeks yelled back: “F— you! What are you going to do!”

“You have radicalized hundreds of thousands of us”

by digby

This is how you do it:

Here’s an interview with my new hero.

.

Why are we paying them again?

by digby

Keeping with our afternoon theme of do-nothing (but legislate vaginas)congress:

The current Congress has had just 15 bills signed into law so far, the fewest in recent history. This is not an insignificant feat. After all, the 112th Congress (2011-2013) was the most unproductive since the 1940s. But even that Congress, by this time in its first year, had 23 bills signed into law. And the low number can’t be blamed on President Barack Obama. He’s vetoed just two pieces of legislation during his time in office, both in 2010. The Huffington Post compiled the data from GovTrack, which lists laws since 1973. Back then, significantly more legislation made its way into public law. The height was the 94th (1975-1976) and 95th (1977-1978) legislative sessions.

Why doesn’t anyone care about this? Is it that we don’t think they’ll do anything good so they might as well do nothing? I’m honestly confused as to why people in this country aren’t more upset about this. We have huge problems and things aren’t getting much better. The government is doing exactly the opposite of what it should do in that circumstance. And yet … crickets. It’s as if the whole country’s asleep.

.

Republicans still pushing deregulation of Wall Street

by David Atkins
“
Following on Digby’s post below about Republicans being unmoored from anything like responsible governance, there’s also this:

he House Appropriations Committee approved an agriculture budgeting bill last month that would significantly restructure the U.S. bank regulatory regime as part of a GOP effort to protect Wall Street’s offshore trading in derivatives — the complex financial products at the heart of the 2008 economic meltdown.

Republicans in Congress have been pressuring regulators for years to exempt derivatives that U.S. companies sell overseas from the new rules set by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. For much of 2013, the deregulatory drive enjoyed bipartisan support in the House, with lawmakers casting their efforts as an attempt to harmonize U.S. law with international regulations. But financial reform advocates have attacked the initiative for padding Wall Street profits at the expense of important public protections, and Democratic support has eroded.

In June, the House passed a bill that would completely exempt from U.S. oversight derivatives sold through the nine most popular foreign derivatives jurisdictions. The legislation is occasionally derided as the “London Whale Loophole Act” on Capitol Hill — a reference to the overseas trades that cost JPMorgan Chase more than $6 billion in 2012. London was the epicenter of much of the derivatives trading by U.S. financial firms leading up the 2008 crash, including AIG’s infamous Financial Products division. If banks can simply route trades through loosely regulated overseas affiliates, financial reform advocates warn, the most critical aspects of Dodd-Frank will be effectively nullified.

The “London Whale Loophole Act” faces opposition from Senate Democrats and President Barack Obama, so it’s unlikely to be signed into law. But June’s House Agriculture Committee funding bill has much stronger prospects for passage, since it’s tied to approximately $19 billion in other spending. That bill would require the Commodities Futures Trading Commission — the agency with responsibility for more than 90 percent of the derivatives market — to negotiate its regulations with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees the remainder of the derivatives business.

These are people who looked at the financial crisis of 2008 and didn’t see a problem to be solved, but a small bump in the road and an opportunity for the wealthy to make even more money in an increasingly unstable system. They simply don’t care.

It’s also a good reminder that as bad as so many neoliberal Democrats may be on financial sector issues, there’s still a world of difference between the two parties even on that front.

.

QOTD: Greg Sargent

by digby

It’s now become accepted as normal that Republicans will threaten explicitly to allow harm to the country to get what they want, and will allow untold numbers of Americans to be hurt rather than even enter into negotiations over the sort of compromises that lie at the heart of basic governing.

That’s from an excellent piece about how the Republicans are sabotaging the roll out of Obamacare, which he correctly surmises is being done for cynical electoral purposes. (I think they also want to build a consensus among the people that it’s made things worse in order to chip away at the parts of the law that benefit those they believe are undeserving.)

He also quotes Chuck Todd at length, who seems to have had an epiphany about his erstwhile GOP friends. Apparently, the political establishment is waking up to the fact that just because Obama passed health care reform, there was no guarantee that it would be implemented as passed. And they are realizing that looking to past implementations of major progressive legislation doesn’t really tell you much in an era of extreme right wing radicalism.

This is not news to everyone. Some of us realized that we were dealing with people who had become unmoored from any consciousness of the need to govern. The problem is — what now?

Check out this piece by Jonathan Bernstein on how the GOP strong-armed the NFL not to participate in any Obamacare education campaign. Sheer thuggery. But that’s not new. They have been doing this stuff for quite a while now. It’s just that the establishment refused to believe what they were seeing with their own eyes.

.

“A use will always be found for it”

by digby

Today was the first public event of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight board since the Snowden revelations. There were a lot of interesting comments, like this for instance:

Marc Rotenburg at #PCLOB : a threshold has passed once data has been collected, because a use will always be found for it

From the Up is Down files: Southern style

by digby

I don’t think I need to point out just how obvious these people are being, do I?

State officials across the South are aggressively moving ahead with new laws requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls after the Supreme Court decision striking down a portion of the Voting Rights Act.
[…]
Within hours, Texas officials said that they would begin enforcing a strict photo identification requirement for voters, which had been blocked by a federal court on the ground that it would disproportionately affect black and Hispanic voters. In Mississippi and Alabama, which had passed their own voter identification laws but had not received federal approval for them, state officials said that they were moving to begin enforcing the laws.

The next flash point over voting laws will most likely be in North Carolina, where several voting bills had languished there this year as the Republicans who control the Legislature awaited the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had covered many counties in the state. After the ruling, some Republican lawmakers said that they would move as soon as next week to pass a bill requiring voters to present photo identification at the polls. And some Republicans there are considering cutting back on the number of early voting days in the state, which were especially popular among Democrats and black voters during the 2012 presidential election.

Thus proving that discrimination no longer exists and there is no need for the Voting Rights Act.

I’m beginning to think the Supreme Court is doing this stuff just to screw with our heads. And it’s working.

.

What do you have to do to not be eligible for promotion in official Washington?

by digby

I’ve always thought it was a mistake for the administration not to pursue prosecutions for the torture regime. It seems like a bad idea for a powerful nation to ignore war crimes. You have to assume that it could blow back on it some time in the future. But since we now know that the presidency is largely a ceremonial position without any power to shape the debate, affect legislation or influence the military industrial complex, it’s clearly awfully tough to do anything at all. Best stick to nice pictures with foreign leaders and leave it at that.

However, even those who view the office as nothing more than a symbol of leadership would have to grant that the president surely has the discretion not to promote the people who signed off on the war crimes. And yet:

Previously undisclosed Justice Department e-mail messages, interviews and newly declassified documents show that some of the lawyers, including James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general who argued repeatedly that the United States would regret using harsh methods, went along with a 2005 legal opinion asserting that the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were lawful.

That opinion, giving the green light for the C.I.A. to use all 13 methods in interrogating terrorism suspects, including waterboarding and up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, “was ready to go out and I concurred,” Mr. Comey wrote to a colleague in an April 27, 2005, e-mail message obtained by The New York Times.