Month: July 2013

Organize or fail: a lesson from Egypt for the armchair anarchist

by David Atkins

As a blogger and Democratic activist, I often receive incredulous and angry messages about the futility of electoral organizing. Don’t I see how useless it is, they say, when the one percent runs roughshod over the rest of us, when the government spies on its citizens at will, and when the corporate sector has its way with the public sector as it pleases? Don’t I see, they say, that focusing on winning elections is a waste of time?

No matter how often I respond that it does in fact matter who and which party holds power (consider the fate of reproductive choice in Texas and North Carolina, the economic decline in Wisconsin since Scott Walker took office, the resurgence of California since Republicans were disempowered, the difference between even a weak Democratic approach to Wall Street such as Dodd-Frank and the deregulation on steroids championed by Republicans, or any number of other examples), these people are unswayed. It does little good to point out that the John Birch society types didn’t take power by force of arms or popular revolt, but by methodical organizing over the course of decades beginning at the local level. That’s too slow, they say, too much work (the true common denominator for most armchair anarchists, I fear), and too impossible given the force of oligarchic money at play against us.

When challenged to suggest their own tactics against the forces of oligarchy, the critics typically respond that Americans must take to the streets and force the oligarchs to give up power by sheer force of public anger. How exactly this will happen is unexplained, but the words “Gandhi” and “Martin Luther King, Jr.” are often used as examples.

It’s a fair point. Sometimes, when things are very bad and people have no other viable choice, mass protest is the only way to effectuate change. Selma in 1960, British India, and the France of Louis XVI are all exemplary. But it’s unlikely that Americans in 2013 will engage the oligarchs in that way. We are struggling, but most of us are still far too comfortable to put life and livelihood at risk in the face of fire hoses, tasers and machine guns. More importantly, there are still too many viable alternatives to effect change. The common denominator of societies forced into open rebellion against their government is the inability to organize politically or create change via democratic processes. Oligarchic money may make it somewhat more difficult now than it has been, but to equate the modern American experience with that of native Indians under British rule, or that of blacks under Jim Crow, is a petty, delusional bourgeois insult to people who have suffered the darkest oppressions that most modern Americans will never begin to experience.

That said, if protests rather than politics are to be the change agent, then it’s critically important to organize for what comes after. Protest is not a magic bullet. It is an angry expression of dissatisfaction with what is. It is not a blueprint for what will be. Power lies in the hands of those who create blueprints, not in the hands of those who protest. More often than not, the idealism of protesters is used as a tool for those who plan ahead. And the cure is often worse than the disease.

That, if nothing else, should be the lesson out of Egypt:

Millions of Egyptians have spoken: President Mohamed Morsi, elected a year ago, has failed. With vast throngs calling for his ouster and demanding new elections, the army has given him an ultimatum: satisfy the crowds by Wednesday evening or face military intervention. How could this happen, two years after the military helped demonstrators rid Egypt of the autocrat Hosni Mubarak?

Egypt has a dilemma: its politics are dominated by democrats who are not liberals and liberals who are not democrats.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Morsi’s Islamist movement, accepts — indeed excels at — electoral competition. Voters in 2012 gave it a far stronger grip on power than poll numbers had suggested. But that was foreseeable: though outlawed, the group built an effective political machine, starting in the 1980s, as individual members ran (as independents) in legislative and professional labor-union elections, even though Mr. Mubarak always found artifices to deny them real power.

Fair elections have improved the Brotherhood’s campaign skills. But it hasn’t fully committed to pluralism or to equal rights for minorities. It participates in democracy, but doesn’t want to share power.

Many in the opposition, on the other hand, believe fiercely in minority rights, personal freedoms, civil liberties and electoral coalition-building — as long as the elections keep Islamists out of power. In other words, they are liberal without being democrats; they are clamoring fervently for Mr. Morsi’s ouster and want the military to intervene. But they have proved themselves woefully unequipped to organize voters. Though my heart is with their democratic goals, I must admit that their commitment to democratic principles runs skin deep.

So today, Egypt faces a disturbing paradox: an ostensibly democratic movement is calling on the military, which produced six decades of autocrats, to oust a democratically elected president — all in the name of setting the country, once again, on a path to democracy.

Under the iron fist of Mubarak’s rule, the only group that planned, organized and maneuvered for a post-Mubarak future was the theocratic Muslim Brotherhood. Liberals and secularists, by contrast, mostly sat on their hands and groused as the Brotherhood got to work and quietly organized for decades, beginning at the hyperlocal level.

It is true that the Arab Spring of protest did eventually fell Mubarak’s regime. But in the absence of an organized left to pick up the reins, the group that had laid a generation’s worth of groundwork waiting for its day in the sun was far better prepared to take control of what came after. And they did.

Unfortunately for Egypt, the theocrats and President Morsi have stumbled badly in office. And yet the liberals seem no better prepared for a post-Morsi politics than they were for a post-Mubarak politics. The plan seems to be perpetual revolt and a sea of humanity in Tahrir Square, demanding that something happen. Demanding that the oppressor du jour leave power, but with no very clear idea of who should take power, or what they might do when they get it.

Thus, we see liberals and secularists taking the decidedly undemocratic step of asking the military to engage in a coup to stop the predations of well organized theocrats who won elections fair and square, but have no respect for constitutional democracy as we know it. The oligarchic military is organized. The theocratic Brotherhood is organized. No one else is, so one of those two groups will hold power. That’s the way of things until the secularists and liberals decide to organize on the ground to take power legitimately.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere for Americans seeking to take the power away from our own oligarchs and theocrats. Yet it seems the armchair anarchists are often slow to learn it.

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Only one out of ten Wall Streeters are sociopaths

by digby

Sounds low to me:

BTW: when I say I’m dead inside, I’m kidding

Once again, poor people are the political footballs


by digby

This is depressing:

Nearly two out of three low-income Americans who are eligible for Medicaid coverage under Obamacare may not actually get those health benefits next year, according to a new analysis from the Associated Press. Those people are likely to miss out because states across the country are still refusing to expand the public insurance program. 

Since each state may now decide whether or not to participate in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, the health law’s goal of extending coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans has been thrown into question. Drawing on figures from the Urban Institute, the AP finds that 9.7 million of the 15 million adults who qualify for Medicaid coverage under the expansion live in states that are refusing to implement that policy.

This Medicaid expansion was the one true single payer piece of the Health Care Reform and the main reason why progressives were unable to fight effectively in the negotiations. How do you walk away from 15 million new people who will have government funded health care when all is said and done? Now it looks like it will only be 5.3 million to start — which isn’t nothing. That’s a lot of people, a bunch of them right here in my state of California. So huzzah for that.  And the conventional wisdom says that most of the states will eventually change their minds so this is hopefully only temporary.

But still, it’s just sad. Once more, the poor are the political footballs and the liberals who advocate for them are the goats, at least for the time being. What a pathetic comment on our political priorities.

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The only protester in America who gets any respect


by digby

Check out this yahoo walking around making a spectacle of himself openly carrying a rifle and a pistol — and the police behaving very respectfully toward him.

There are dozens of examples of police tasering people they perceive to be failing to properly obey, are aggressive, mouthing off, etc. They could have easily have done so with this fellow but didn’t. It’s always interesting to see who they consider to be disrespecting their authority.

Frankly, I’m glad to see it.  He’s following the law and as repugnant and provocative as I find what he’s doing, he has the right to do it under California law and the police reacted properly.  If only they did that more often.

But just imagine if he said “and they are real” in that tone of voice down in Florida. I’d think anyone in his vicinity might feel justified in shooting him down because they “feel” threatened. I know I would feel threatened. Of course, I don’t plan to shoot anyone and I would just get away from him. But under the stand your ground statutes those civilians could just shoot that guy and probably get away with it.

If only the authorities were this nice to people who peacefully assert something other than their 2nd Amendment rights. Like their right to peacefully assemble, for instance. On the steps of the
US Department of Justice:

* It is true that the police tasered a gun rights protester recently for heckling. It was also unjustified, in my opinion. But for the most part, the cops are very respectful and reserved when dealing with 2nd Amendment protesters.

You can sort of understand why — especially in places where the guns are loaded.  Still, there’s something very off about the fact that gun rights advocates have just a little bit more room to maneuver than anyone else does. In fact, it’s downright creepy.

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Even though it isn’t enough it’s still important

by digby

I cannot urge you strongly enough to read Rick Perlstein’s latest two pieces outlining exactly what happened during the 70s — the last time the congress tried to rein in the intelligence services. Let’s just say that the results we’ve all been taught they brought are largely a myth.

In Part One he discusses the environment in which the Church Committee along with the various other investigations finally raised the issue of our intelligence programs running wild to the national forefront. Today, he talks about how they were defanged:

Yesterday we learned how in 1975 the media, CIA apostate Philip Agee, the Church Committee in the Senate, and the Pike Committee in the House revealed the American intelligence community to be a violent, thuggish, and ineffectual embarrassment to the Constitution of the United States—and not very intelligent to boot. And what happened next, in 1976?

Pretty much nothing. The establishment’s distraction campaigns proved too powerful.

Begin the melodrama around Christmastime 1975, with Agee, author of the devastating expose Inside the Company: A CIA Diary. He had by then from his hideout in Communist Cuba joined a movement to actively sabotage American intelligence, centered in the organization the Fifth Estate and its magazine Counterspy (whose founders and funders included the novelist Norman Mailer). “The most effective and important systematic effort to counter the CIA that can be undertaken right now,” Agee wrote in the winter 1975 issue, was “the identification, exposure, and neutralization of its people working abroad.” One of the people Agee’s article thus named was named Richard Welch, whom he identified as the station chief in Lima, Peru.

By then, however, Welch was not in Lima. He was the station chief in Athens—where, two days before Christmas, he was ambushed and assassinated by masked men outside his home.

Agee’s article was merely coincidental to the attack—and in Athens, his cover had already, independently, been blown (as, in fact, it had been in Lima), not least because he lived in a house whose CIA identity was a matter of wide public knowledge. The work being done by the House and Senate select committees on intelligence had even less to do with it. No matter: here was the perfect fodder for a perfect disinformation campaign. Presidential press secretary Ron Nessen insinuated that the intelligence committees’ carelessness was responsible for the tragedy. The plane bearing Welch’s coffin was timed to touch down at Andrews Air Force Base for live coverage on the morning news, greeted by an Air Force honor guard. (It circled for fifteen minutes to get the timing just right.) 

Time had already eulogized Welch as a “scholar, wit, athlete, spy”—a gentleman James Bond. “Never before,” Daniel Schorr announced on the CBS News on December 30, “had a fallen secret agent come home as such a public hero,” and the lionization was only beginning: over the protests of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Welch’s burial broke military protocol by taking place at Arlington Secretary, starring more honor guards, dozens of flags, the flower of the American defense establishment, and the very same horse-drawn caisson from the interment of President Kennedy bearing the coffin, President Ford escorted the veiled widow.

Soon, hundreds of telegrams and letters, some just the single word “Murderer!” flooded the Church Committee’s transom from angry citizens alert to administration’s insinuations that it all must have been congressional investigators’ fault. A supposedly adversarial press piled on, especially the Washington Post. In 1974 they brought down a president; now, they ran thirteen stories in the week after Welch’s death following the administration line, an editorial labeling it the “entirely predictable result of the disclosure tactics chosen by certain American critics of the agency.” Wrote the Post’s admirably independent ombudsmen Charles Seib, “The press was used to publicize what in its broad effect was an attack on itself.” That is, when the press bothered to cover intelligence reform at all, now that a weary press public’s attentions had turned elsewhere—to the hydra-headed 1976 Democratic presidential field to the showdown between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, to the impending Bicentennial celebrations.

And it all happened just as the two select committees on intelligence were drawing up their final reports and investigations for intelligence reform—terrified, now, that any more disclosure of any secret would discredit the entirety of their work.

Read on to see just how successful this was.

Those of you who follow politics closely must see just how easy this sort of thing is to pull off. (One might even call it a patented hissy fit.) The ability of the permanent political etablishment to pull on the emotional/patriotic heartstrings of the American people in service of both misdirection and distraction is obvious. They do it all the time. And among their most servile accomplices is the mainstream media.

I’m all for empowering the congress to investigate and I hope they do. It’s vitally important that these programs and the inevitable abuses are fully exposed. But don’t get your hopes up that it will change anything. Until this country comes off its war footing, they are going to protect this stuff with everything they have. And we’ve been on a war footing since 1941. (Also too: Big $$$$)

So I think we have to see this as an ongoing battle that will not be solved through some “oversight” or with a few investigations. It requires constant vigilance and a commitment to challenge the government’s powerful incentives to keep pushing the envelope.

The good news is that these revelations, when they happen, do set the establishment back on its heels, at least temporarily. They are forced to reckon with their own sloppiness and maybe even sometimes reevaluate the necessity of some of the crazy stuff they have been getting away with in the dark. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it’s an important function of our democracy that we always put pressure on them when this sort of thing comes to light.

Long term, maybe some day we’ll decide that it’s time for us to declare our post WWII imperial adventure a grand victory and start rolling it back. But in the meantime we citizens just have to keep up our end of the bargain and try to ensure that the government doesn’t too badly abuse its wartime powers. Like so much else in American civic life it’s a tension. And things are likely to go badly awry if one side doesn’t fulfill its obligation to hold up its end.

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The Good Lie

by digby

Lying to congress is an honorable act:

On March 12 of this year, Senator Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, whether the National Security Agency gathers “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”

“No, sir,” replied the director, visibly annoyed. “Not wittingly.”

Wyden is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and had long known about the court-approved metadata program that has since become public knowledge. He knew Clapper’s answer was incorrect. But Wyden, like Clapper, was also under an oath not to divulge the story. In posing this question, he knew Clapper would have to breach his oath of secrecy, lie, prevaricate, or decline to reply except in executive session—a tactic that would implicitly have divulged the secret. The committee chairman, Senator Diane Feinstein, may have known what Wyden had in mind. In opening the hearing she reminded senators it would be followed by a closed session and said, “I’ll ask that members refrain from asking questions here that have classified answers.” Not dissuaded, Wyden sandbagged he [sic] director.

This was a vicious tactic, regardless of what you think of the later Snowden disclosures. Wyden learned nothing, the public learned nothing, and an honest and unusually forthright public servant has had his credibility trashed.

Click the link above to see how Emptywheel dispatches all of this with her usual alacrity, pointing out that this back and forth had been going on for many months.

This has been a common view among the hawks for some time, however. Here’s a previous example:

He mocked the sanctimony of all who “sermonized about how terrible lying is.”

Granted, lies were told, he said, but it hardly makes sense to “label every untruth and every deception an outrage.”

He also condemned the “disconcerting and distasteful whiff of moralism and institutional self-righteousness” that led Congress to conduct hearings on the deceptions coming from the White House and he denounced the result as “a witch hunt.”

So said the House Republican who led the defense of the Reagan administration during the Iran-Contra hearings, the same Rep. Henry J. Hyde of Illinois who is leading the impeachment inquiry against President Clinton.

In 1987, when President Reagan and his top national security advisors were accused of lying to Congress and the public about their secret arms sales to a terrorist state, it was Hyde who argued forcefully for a more nuanced view of lies and deception. Lying is wrong, he said, but context counts.

While Reagan’s aides may have lied, they did so for the larger purpose of fighting communism in Central America, Hyde argued.

“It just seems to me too simplistic [to condemn all lying],” he said in 1987. “In the murkier grayness of the real world, choices must often be made.”

Now, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he has espoused a zero-tolerance view of lying. No exceptions can be made for lying to cover up an embarrassing sexual affair, he said.

“For my friends who think perjury, lying and deceit are in some circumstances acceptable and undeserving of punishment, I respectfully disagree,” Hyde said Tuesday. “The truth is not trivial. Playing by the rules is not trivial.”

Just don’t lie about unauthorized fellatio or personal steroid use. That will not stand.

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What if the people running our secret programs are idiots?


by digby

So it turns out that even as President Obama dismissed Edward Snowden the other day as “a 29 year old hacker ” the NSA hired hired him to do just that. Surprised? I’m not. The minute I saw the “offensive cyberwar” documents in the Guardian I figured as much.

Anyway, this information is revealed in this comprehensive synthesis of the case by Scott Shane and David Sanger in today’s New York Times:

[H]is last job before leaking classified documents about N.S.A. surveillance, he told the news organization The Guardian, was actually “infrastructure analyst.”

It is a title that officials have carefully avoided mentioning, perhaps for fear of inviting questions about the agency’s aggressive tactics: an infrastructure analyst at the N.S.A., like a burglar casing an apartment building, looks for new ways to break into Internet and telephone traffic around the world.

I have wondered since this whole thing began why nobody in the agency has lost his job or why Booz Allen has not been stripped of its agency contracts. Did nobody think that hiring hackers to hack might result in being hacked themselves? Is it even possible to truly guard against this? The article implies that they were shocked to find out that these highly skilled computer nerds might be smart enough to skirt whatever security they had in place. Which means these agencies and companies are being led by morons.

First there’s the big picture of what the NSA is doing:

[…]
A close reading of Mr. Snowden’s documents shows the extent to which the eavesdropping agency now has two new roles: It is a data cruncher, with an appetite to sweep up, and hold for years, a staggering variety of information. And it is an intelligence force armed with cyberweapons, assigned not just to monitor foreign computers but also, if necessary, to attack.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the documents suggest, the N.S.A. decided it was too risky to wait for leads on specific suspects before going after relevant phone and Internet records. So it followed the example of the hoarder who justifies stacks of paper because someday, somehow, a single page could prove vitally important.

The agency began amassing databases of “metadata” — logs of all telephone calls collected from the major carriers and similar data on e-mail traffic. The e-mail program was halted in 2011, though it appears possible that the same data is now gathered in some other way.

The documents show that America’s phone and Internet companies grew leery of N.S.A. demands as the years passed after 9/11, fearing that customers might be angry to find out their records were shared with the government. More and more, the companies’ lawyers insisted on legal orders to compel them to comply.

So the N.S.A. came up with a solution: store the data itself. That is evidently what gave birth to a vast data storage center that the N.S.A. is building in Utah, exploiting the declining cost of storage and the advance of sophisticated search software.

Those huge databases were once called “bit buckets” in the industry — collections of electronic bits waiting to be sifted. “They park stuff in storage in the hopes that they will eventually have time to get to it,” said James Lewis, a cyberexpert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “or that they’ll find something that they need to go back and look for in the masses of data.” But, he added, “most of it sits and is never looked at by anyone.”

Indeed, an obscure passage in one of the Snowden documents — rules for collecting Internet data that the Obama administration wrote in secret in 2009 and that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved — suggested that the government was concerned about its ability to process all the data it was collecting. So it got the court to approve an exception allowing the government to hold on to that information if it could not keep up. The rules said that “the communications that may be retained” for up to five years “include electronic communications acquired because of the limitation on the N.S.A.’s ability to filter communications.”

As one private expert who sometimes advises the N.S.A. on this technology put it: “This means that if you can’t desalinate all the seawater at once, you get to hold on to the ocean until you figure it out.”

Collecting that ocean requires the brazen efforts of tens of thousands of technicians like Mr. Snowden. On Thursday, President Obama played down Mr. Snowden’s importance, perhaps concerned that the manhunt was itself damaging the image and diplomatic relations of the United States. “No, I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” the president said during a stop in Senegal.

Mr. Obama presumably meant the term to be dismissive, suggesting that Mr. Snowden (who turned 30 on June 21) was a young computer delinquent. But as an N.S.A. infrastructure analyst, Mr. Snowden was, in a sense, part of the United States’ biggest and most skilled team of hackers.

The N.S.A., Mr. Snowden’s documents show, has worked with its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, to tap into hundreds of fiber-optic cables that cross the Atlantic or go on into Europe, with the N.S.A. helping sort the data. The disclosure revived old concerns that the British might be helping the N.S.A. evade American privacy protections, an accusation that American officials flatly deny.

And a secret presidential directive on cyberactivities unveiled by Mr. Snowden — discussing the primary new task of the N.S.A. and its military counterpart, Cyber Command — makes clear that when the agency’s technicians probe for vulnerabilities to collect intelligence, they also study foreign communications and computer systems to identify potential targets for a future cyberwar.

Infrastructure analysts like Mr. Snowden, in other words, are not just looking for electronic back doors into Chinese computers or Iranian mobile networks to steal secrets. They have a new double purpose: building a target list in case American leaders in a future conflict want to wipe out the computers’ hard drives or shut down the phone system.

It turns out that this isn’t just “cyberwar planning” which everyone assured me was just a contingency, despite the fact that the documents clearly showed that it was planning for offensive war. These hackers are employed to actually get into systems all over the world to set up such an event. That’s a step beyond mere planning.

I don’t think we the people have weighed in on this nor has anyone thought through the ramifications of doing such work. It is extremely dangerous, done entirely in secret and obviously with few safeguards. I can’t believe that people can’t see how this sort of thing could go very sideways very quickly

Setting aside the undemocratic and authoritarian aspect of all this, on a practical level this offensive cyberwar planning is an accident waiting to happen. From the looks of it, most of the people engaging in this planning are as deluded as those who Barbara Tuchman profiles in her great book The Guns of August, which showed a similar febrile eagerness among the boys running the great powers before WWI to use their shiny new toys and enact their shiny new war plans — and a similar lack of understanding among these boys about how their new technology changes the nature of warfare.

(Seriously, does James Clapper seem like the kind of guy who’s got a handle on all this stuff? Even if you believe it’s a good idea, wouldn’t it be prudent to at least have competent people in charge of it?)

We know this is an attack on Americas’ civil liberties and potential cyberwar (which will likely morph quickly into real violence if it ever happens.) It’s about more than that:

In fact, as Mr. Snowden’s documents have shown, the omnivorous agency’s operations range far beyond terrorism, targeting foreigners of any conceivable interest. British eavesdroppers working with the N.S.A. penetrated London meetings of the Group of 20 industrialized nations, partly by luring delegates to fake Internet cafes, and the N.S.A. hacked into computers at Chinese universities.

At Fort Meade, on the N.S.A.’s heavily guarded campus off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in Maryland, such disclosures are seen as devastating tip-offs to targets. The disclosure in Mr. Snowden’s documents that Skype is cooperating with orders to turn over data to the N.S.A., for example, undermined a widespread myth that the agency could not intercept the voice-over-Internet service. Warned, in effect, by Mr. Snowden, foreign officials, drug cartel leaders and terrorists may become far more careful about how, and how much, they communicate.

Ooops. Looks like somebody leaked some classified information there. And if their logic is correct, by saying what they said, the terrorists now know that the US knows they’ve changed their MO.  Loose lips sink ships dontcha know. Of course that’s nonsense. Only the dumbest and least likely to succeed of terrorists were Skyping their attack planning … But, it’s increasingly clear that we’re using this capability for the boondoggle also known as the drug war, which means this information must be being shared with the DEA and the FBI.   (Everybody on board with that?)

In fact it looks to me as if a large portion of the program probably isn’t about terrorism at all. One could even easily surmise that commercial spying might be part of this endeavor if they were hacking the Group of 20 and Chinese universities. Maybe it’s time someone asked just what national security interests are being served by all this spying. Oh wait, we can’t. It’s secret.

But we don’t have to worry our pretty little heads. The authorities are conducting a secret assessment of what happened and will fix it. We won’t know about it because it’s classified, but you can trust the professionals.

Unfortunately, up until now it apparently never occurred to these geniuses that someone on the inside might be offended by what they were doing:

The N.S.A.’s assessment of Mr. Snowden’s case will likely also consider what has become, for intelligence officials, a chilling consideration: there are thousands of people of his generation and computer skills at the agency, hired in recent years to keep up with the communications boom.

The officials fear that some of them, like young computer aficionados outside the agency, might share Mr. Snowden’s professed libertarian streak and skepticism of the government’s secret power. Intelligence bosses are keeping a closer eye on them now, hoping that there is not another self-appointed whistle-blower in their midst.

They should be worried they don’t have an apocalyptic Christian on the payroll or someone who is willing to secretly trade money for information. If this is the first time it’s occurred to them that their hired hackers might not be good little soldiers then clearly this secret program is run by idiots who are running amock. And I’m not talking about Edward Snowden.

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So half of Democrats think the Roberts Court is just ducky?

by digby

I’m sorry. I just can’t understand this:

There’s no clear consensus about the court’s ideological slant. In the poll, 31% say the court is too liberal, 21% say it’s too conservative, and 37% say it”s “about right.” That’s the lowest percentage saying the court is “about right” in the two decades that Gallup has asked the question.

Two-thirds of Republicans say the court is too liberal. About half of Democrats say the court is “about right,” though those with other views are much more likely to say it is too conservative.

I expect Republicans to always assume that the court is “liberal” because it sometimes does something that they don’t like. It’s just how they roll. But for half of Democrats to think this right wing majority is “about right” is just pathetic.

It does explain why says this is a right wing country. It’s because people who should know better are sadly misguided and have no clue about what their government is really doing.

This is not debatable. The activist Roberts Court is deeply reactionary. If half the Democrats don’t understand that it’s no wonder we’re in the soup.

*Not meaning to ignore the fact that the same poll shows a big majority of Americans now support marriage equality. That’s the good news and I’m happy about it. But just because the Court opened the door to gay marriage in California and struck down that embarrassing 90s relic, DOMA, doesn’t mean the Court is “about right.” I’m even going to guess that this isn’t going to be the last word from this Court on that issue and that the next one might not be as positive.

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Republicans will become more racist, not less

by David Atkins

Remember when the GOP was told to “put a little salsa sauce” on their policies and everything would be fine? Yeah, about that:

A new poll released Monday throws a bucket of cold water on the theory that nominating a Latino candidate for President would help the Republican party win a larger share of the Latino vote.

The poll, from Latino Decisions, shows former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walloping U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) among Latinos in a hypothetical 2016 matchup. According to the poll, Clinton grabs 66% of Latino voters. Only 28% would vote for Rubio.

Clinton is wildly popular with Latinos. 73% view her favorably and just 17% view her unfavorably. Those with an opinion are evenly divided on Rubio: 31% favorable; 29% unfavorable.

Republicans get creamed among Latinos in all possible matchups in the poll. The closest a Republican candidate comes to a Democrat is former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who trails Vice President Joe Biden with Latino voters 60-30.

There’s a civil war in the Republican Party over this problem. Some are counseling that the GOP being a long trudge to sanity on issues that won’t yield short-term dividends but may help avert longer-term demographic disaster. Others see major hurdles among minority voters and want to double down on the white vote:

But it’s important to recognize that a lot of Republicans in and out of Congress don’t buy the basic premise that improved performance among minority voters is the best and only path to majority status. And a lot of them are reading, or are being influenced indirectly by, Sean Trende’s series of analytical columns at RealClearPolitics suggesting that the more obvious route to a Republican majority, at least over the next couple of decades, is to intensify the GOP’s appeal to white voters…

This profile of the “missing white voters” of 2012—which is suggestive rather than definitive, since the Perot “coalition” Trende’s talking about arose a full two decades ago—will smell like catnip to those proposing some sort of conservative “populist” makeover for the GOP. And it would also reinforce the idea that being opposed to immigration reform might (a) not really cost the GOP votes they had no realistic chance of winning anyway, and (b) appeal in a positive way to the “missing white voters” who are reflexively nativist.

In his latest piece in the series, Trende tries to put his numbers together into a future scenario, as part of an argument that winning a higher percentage of Latino voters isn’t the exclusive GOP survival strategy it’s cracked up to be.

Count on Republicans to choose to amp up the racism until they lose Presidency, House and Senate. Things are going to get worse on that side of the aisle before they get better.

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QOTD: Huffpost Hill

by digby

“Congress has decided to let interest rates rise on student loans, because the bill to stuff puppies in a sack and toss them in the pond was stuck in committee.”

Yes, they’re really doing it.

I just heard Stephen Hayes on Fox say that the rates should double because the government should not be involved in student loans. Krauthammer agreed and said it’s a big boondoggle for those wealthy public colleges which re raking in the dough. Also too: Obamacare.

Yowza. This week is starting off very badly …

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