Month: August 2013

Rocking the headband

by digby

I don’t know if this story is true but if it is, it’s just sick. It is about a little 2 year old boy named Dexter who likes to dress up in costumes: Batman, Superman, Spiderman etc, like at least a dozen other little kids that age I know. He also likes to play dress up in his mom’s clothes.

Here’s where the story gets really insane:

After struggling to get him dressed and get his shoes on, I had to pry an overlarge teddy bear out of Dexter’s arms, as he was set on taking him with us. This brought on tears and tantrums, which I somehow managed to calm very quickly. But when I attempted to remove my discarded lace flower headband from his head (which he’d been wearing all day), I saw him getting ready to fight, so I left him to it. Who was he hurting?

We got to the store, and amazingly I managed to get him to sit in the shopping cart with no issues. The fact that he was wearing a cute girly headband made him feel good, and he was charming all the old ladies by waving like a little pageant prince. I snapped his photo after two old birds came up to tell me just how adorable he was.

He rocked that headband.

Soon enough, we were done with our shop and were making our way toward the front. As we passed through the produce section, two teenage girls began giggling and one of them asked, “Is that a boy or a girl?” I smiled and said, “He’s a boy.” I looked on at him adoringly as they continued to giggle.

Out of nowhere a big booming voice rang out. “THAT’S a BOY?!” The man was overly large with a bushy beard and a camouflage shirt with the arms cut off. He had tattered shorts and lace-up work boots with no laces. I could smell the fug of cigarette smoke surrounding him, and there was a definite pong of beer on him.

“Yes,” I said simply, still smiling.

With no notice, the man stepped forward, grabbed the headband off of Dexter’s head and threw it to the bottom of our shopping cart. He then cuffed Dexter around the side of his head (not hard, but that is not the point) and said with a big laugh, “You’ll thank me later, little man!”

At the same time as I stepped forward, Dexter grabbed his head where the man had smacked him and threw his other hand forward, stomping his foot and shouting, “NO!” I got between my son and this man and said very firmly, “If you touch my son again, I will cut your damn hands off.”

The guy snarled at me, looked at Dexter with disgust and said, “Your son is a f*cking fa***t.” He then started sauntering out, but not before he threw over his shoulder, “He’ll get shot for it one day.”

I stood there, shaking, fists clenched, waiting for the man to disappear out the door, and then I fell apart. I was shaking so hard, holding back tears and comforting Dexter.

Not a single person said or did anything. There were several people who had witnessed the encounter, but not one of them came over to offer support or console me or my son.

Let me repeat to you: Dexter is 2 YEARS OLD.

I was there with a 2-year-old and a 5-month-old baby, and my kid had been verbally and physically assaulted by a man. And no one did a thing.

I particularly like the “he’ll get shot for it one day” part.

I don’t think this sort of thing is common although it was when I was a kid. At least half of the “ittakes a village” ethos of the time was people shaming boys and girls about not being boyish or girlie enough. I had a little friend when I was about 5 and we liked to play dress up in my mom’s cast offs. One day his grandfather saw him wearing jewelry and lipstick (as was I) and gave him a brutal spanking right on the spot. It seemed to be as much of a show for my parents as anything else — the man was deeply embarrassed. I’ll never forget it. I’m sure he didn’t either.

I’m so relieved this sort of thing is changing, even if it does still happen from time to time. There was a time when most mothers would have refused to allow her son to wear that funny headband in public. But I see kids dressed up in wild stuff all the time these days. Grown-ups too, for that matter. Like grown men wearing camo shirts and cutoffs with lace-less work boots. Although I must admit I haven’t seen that one since I lived in San Francisco circa 1981.

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Loose lips sink ships, Huckleberry

by digby

Careful, careful:

The current major budget cuts known as sequestration could make America less safe in the event of a future terrorist threat, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Sunday.

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Graham called the Sunday closure of U.S. embassies in several countries “scary” and said he had been briefed by the vice president on the issue. Embassies will be closed for one day due to an unspecified al Qaeda threat, CBS News reported.

Graham said the budget cuts enacted in March are hurting America and could do further damage if they’re not reversed.

“Al Qaeda’s on the rise in this part of the world, and this NSA program has proven its worth yet again. But we need to reevaluate where we’re at in light of these threats. Sequestration has to be fixed,” Graham said.

Speaking of the weekend’s embassy security threat, Graham said, “If this happens a year from now, our intelligence community and military will be less capable.”

Despite his criticisms, Graham praised the Obama administration Sunday for taking security threats seriously.

And here I thought it was aiding and abetting the enemy to discuss the operational outcome of these NSA programs. Did he learn that in the scary classified briefing from the Vice President? Isn’t Huckleberry being a little loosed lipped here?

Still, you have to give him credit. He’s cleverly conflating the Pentagon sequestration cuts with the NSA programs to try to create the impression that sequestration will defund the intelligence that’s keeping your little babies safe from the bogeyman. It doesn’t, unfortunately. And frankly I’d be surprised if other Republicans use that line to try to roll back the defense cuts. These NSA programs are controversial enough even among Republican voters that they may be reluctant to put them in the mix with “the troops” to make their case for rolling these cuts back in favor of more head start defunding.

Then again, Republicans are nuts so who knows what they’ll do?

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Dangerous 95 year old man with a walker update

by digby

More information has emerged about the incident last week in which police felt the need to “subdue” a 95 year old man who used a walker with tasers and a bean bag shots — and killed him in the process:

The old man, described by a family member as “wobbly” on his feet, had refused medical attention. The paramedics were called. They brought in the Park Forest police.

First they tased him, but that didn’t work. So they fired a shotgun, hitting him in the stomach with a bean-bag round. Wrana was struck with such force that he bled to death internally, according to the Cook County medical examiner.
[…]
I wasn’t at the scene, and maybe the police have a good explanation. But common sense tells me that cops don’t need a Taser or a shotgun to subdue a 95-year-old man.

And after doing some digging, I found there are two versions of events: The police version, and a new picture that raises questions of whether John Wrana was killed unnecessarily.

The Park Forest police version is that on the night of July 26, John Wrana, a resident of the Victory Centre senior living facility, threatened staff and paramedics with a 2-foot-long metal shoehorn and a metal cane. The police statement neglects to mention that the old man also used a walker, at least according to photographs supplied by Grapsas.

“Attempts were made verbally to have the resident comply with demands to drop the articles, to no avail,” the police statement reads. “The resident then armed himself with a 12-inch butcher type kitchen knife.”

But lawyer Grapsas says that Wrana’s family never saw a knife in his room and that staff also told him Wrana didn’t have such a knife.

“So where did the knife come from?” Grapsas asked.

The police statement leaves the impression that the staff was under threat, leaving police with no choice other than to shoot him.

But according to Maria Oliva, an executive with Pathway Senior Living, the staff was kept out of the room after police arrived. So there was no imminent threat to staff.

“The staff was not inside once the police were on the scene,” Oliva told us. “At different times the staff were in there, but not when they were called. They (the police) were in charge at that point.”

Police said there had been threats made against the staff. But Grapsas said he was told that staff begged to be allowed to try to calm down the old man.

“If there were threats to the staff, why did the staff want to intervene and say, ‘Let us handle this; we’ll get him calmed down’?” he asked.

Grapsas says he was told that police used a riot shield to come through the door before shooting bean-bag rounds at the old man as he sat in his chair.

Riot shields are used to push back mobs of angry young protesters in the streets, or against dangerous convicts in prison cells, not to subdue an old, old man in a chair.

“At some point, I’m told there were between five and seven police officers, they went back to the room with a riot shield in hand, entered the door and shot him with a shotgun that contained bean-bag rounds,” Grapsas said.

People say “the whole world is a battlefield, including the homeland” and this is the perfect example of why that’s increasingly true. These officers with their military gear and warlike mindset don’t see citizens. They see an enemy. And when you see citizens as the enemy, even a 95 year old man will be considered potentially lethal.

Most veteran cops I talked to suspect this is a case of unnecessary force. I’ve never met a police officer who couldn’t handle a 95-year-old man in a walker. And John Wrana wasn’t Jason Bourne. He was an old war veteran who didn’t want to be pushed around.

But one senior police official who has trained police recruits in defensive tactics had a different take.

“When I first heard it, I was like, ‘C’mon,'” he said. “Then I thought it through. We don’t know what occurred. We don’t know what information they had at that time. If you don’t have all of the facts, it’s hard to judge someone. … Anyone can be dangerous.”

I’m sorry, anyone with even the slightest bit of common sense would know that using such force against a 95 year old man could easily kill him. Clearly they didn’t take the time to properly assess the situation or they never would have used these tactics.  They just saw him as a dangerous enemy to be subdued by any means necessary.

On the night of the incident, he wound up at Advocate Christ Medical Center. The doctor was on the phone with Mangerson, telling her that even if Wrana survived surgery, he’d likely be on life support. Wrana wanted to talk to her. The doctor held the phone up to his ear, she said.

“He just said, ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I love you and goodbye,'” Mangerson recalled, her voice cracking. “That was it.”

Jesus.

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The One Percent Doctrine lives

by digby

Here’s a nice piece on Snowden and the NSA revelations from Jacob Heilbrun in which he offers one of the better critiques of the administration’s response to the situation:

The Obama administration has gone into overdrive to attempt to capture Snowden, promising Moscow that Snowden would neither be tortured nor subjected to the death penalty if he is returned. But in the wake of the treatment of Bradley Manning, who was apparently subjected to prolonged isolation and other maltreatment, those promises are necessary but hardly sufficient. America’s track record when it comes to dealing with dissent—for that is what Snowden represents—is a parlous one, from the incarceration of Eugene Debs during World War I to the latest batch of whistleblowers. So Moscow has blown a giant raspberry at President Obama.

The problem is really of his own making. The appropriate response to Snowden would have been to promise him immunity from prosecution and allow him to return to America, where he could have testified to Congress. From a practical standpoint, the administration would have been better off with Snowden in America rather than back in Russia, where he can dribble out embarrassing information. Everything that Snowden has said appears to be accurate. The latest revelation concerns a computer program called XKeyscore that is one more step towards the omnicompetent state. It permits government officials to snoop wherever and whenever they please, to trawl through your internet activities, chats, emails, and so on. The indispensable James Bamford, writing in the New York Review of Books, reports that “with the arrival of the Obama administration, the NSA’s powers continued to expand at the same time that administration officials and the NSA continued to deceive the American public on the extent of the spying.”

So far, Snowden is on a roll. The Washington Post notes today that “Obama administration officials faced deepening political skepticism Wednesday about a far-reaching counterterrorism program that collects millions of Americans’ phone records, even as they released newly declassified documents in an attempt to spotlight privacy safeguards.” Indeed they do. Apart from the privacy questions, there is also the one of practicality, as Senate Judiciary Committee head Patrick Leahy made abundatly clear in questioning NSA officials yesterday. How effective are these programs? Do they testify more to bureaucratic aggrandizement than common sense? What confidence does anyone have that the NSA is able to use this massive amount of information in a clear and coherent fashion that promotes American national security? Little of this would be occurring absent Snowden’s release of documents about the NSA’s activities. Instead, the Obama administration would continue stealthily to assemble information about the activities of American citizens.

That sounds right to me. But, it also seems fairly obvious that having Snowden testify openly before congress is hardly something they would like to see happen. Indeed I’ve wondered from the beginning if the administration even really wanted Snowden to come back and face a public trial in which this story would remain on the front burner for a very long time. I can’t help but think they might prefer to let this fade into the sunset. After all, with much of the media now wallowing in Cold War nostalgia and portraying Snowden as the modern equivalent of Philip Agee (which is totally absurd) the government may be better off than if he came back to the US as what many people would see as a political prisoner cause célèbre. This may be the US government’s choice as much as the Russian’s.

Still, what Heilbrun suggests was actually the right thing to do. Not that that is particularly relevant in this situation.

I do think he nails the most important questions:

How effective are these programs? Do they testify more to bureaucratic aggrandizement than common sense? What confidence does anyone have that the NSA is able to use this massive amount of information in a clear and coherent fashion that promotes American national security

I would say that the evidence so far is that this is a matter of boys and their toys — and a cadre of spooks in the government who’ve managed to convince everyone that they need unlimited capacity and a very long leash. It’s basically the logical result of Dick Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine:

If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.

That idea, that even a 1% probability means we must respond as if it’s certainty, has permeated our government’s terrorism policy. And it’s crazy.

That quote comes from Ron Suskind’s book of the same name in which he:

…makes a distinction between two groups engaged in the fight against terrorism: “the notables”, those who talk to us about the threat of terrorism (Bush, Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, et al.), and “the invisibles”, those who are fighting terrorists (the CIA analysts, the FBI agents and all the other foot soldiers)

The foot soldiers are still there. They’re always there.

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Daily Show shreds Fox News on minimum wage

by David Atkins

In case you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Daily Show’s total destruction of conservative attacks on raising the minimum wage in the fast food industry. It’ll make your morning. Start with part one, but it gets very good starting in part two.

If there was ever any doubt that organizations and ideologies could be sociopathic regardless of the psychological profiles of the people working in them, Fox News and the rest of the conservative media establishment should dispel it.

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How I did it: The Act of Killing

The biggest back-up file on earth


by digby

This conversation on PBS about the NSA revelations was worth watching for any number of reasons but this exchange struck me as particularly interesting. I had heard about the giant security center they were building in Utah but it hadn’t occurred to me to question just what in the hell they needed all this storage for:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Bill Binney, what was your sense of who was being targeted and why they were being targeted? And what was being collected, in other words?

WILLIAM BINNEY, former National Security Agency technical leader: Well, I wasn’t aware of specific targeting like Russ was. I just saw the inputs were including hundreds of millions of records of phone calls of U.S. citizens every day. So it was virtually — there wasn’t anybody who wasn’t a part of this collection of information.

So, virtually, you could target anybody in this country you wanted.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Both Binney and Tice suspect that today, the NSA is doing more than just collecting metadata on calls made in the U.S. They both point to this CNN interview by former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente days after the Boston Marathon bombing. Clemente was asked if the government had a way to get the recordings of the calls between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his wife.

TIM CLEMENTE, former FBI counterterrorism agent: On the national security side of the house, in the federal government, you know, we have assets. There are lots of assets at our disposal throughout the intelligence community and also not just domestically, but overseas. Those assets allow us to gain information, intelligence on things that we can’t use ordinarily in a criminal investigation.

All digital communications are — there’s a way to look at digital communications in the past. And I can’t go into detail of how that’s done or what’s done. But I can tell you that no digital communication is secure.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Tice says after he saw this interview on television, he called some former workmates at the NSA.

RUSSELL TICE: Well, two months ago, I contacted some colleagues at NSA. We had a little meeting, and the question came up, was NSA collecting everything now? Because we kind of figured that was the goal all along. And the answer came back. It was, yes, they are collecting everything, contents word for word, everything of every domestic communication in this country.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Both of you know what the government says is that we’re collecting this — we’re collecting the number of phone calls that are made, the e-mails, but we’re not listening to them.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I don’t believe that for a minute. OK?

I mean, that’s why they had to build Bluffdale, that facility in Utah with that massive amount of storage that could store all these recordings and all the data being passed along the fiberoptic networks of the world. I mean, you could store 100 years of the world’s communications here. That’s for content storage. That’s not for metadata.

Metadata if you were doing it and putting it into the systems we built, you could do it in a 12-by-20-foot room for the world. That’s all the space you need. You don’t need 100,000 square feet of space that they have at Bluffdale to do that. You need that kind of storage for content.

I only knew the most rudimentary details about Bluffdale and found this 2012 article from Wired:

At the city’s international airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted while outbound regional jets were grounded. But among those making it through the icy mist was a figure whose gray suit and tie made him almost disappear into the background. He was tall and thin, with the physique of an aging basketball player and dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of matching hair. Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, the man was NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency’s highest-ranking civilian and the person who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations.

A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency’s associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed “the spy center.” Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? “Absolutely not,” he said with a self-conscious half laugh. “Nor do I want them spying on me.”

For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: “It’s a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation’s cybersecurity.” While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it’s collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover—it’s easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as “a great tribute to Utah,” then added, “I can’t tell you a lot about what they’re going to be doing, because it’s highly classified.”

And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation’s largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who’d originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country’s human and electronic spies.
[…]
Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.

Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)
[…]
The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”

There are a lot of very important and not so important people who believe that anyone who wants to expose what they are doing is a traitor. Even journalists. It’s not much of a stretch then for these fine folks to believe that those who disagree with these surveillance programs are at least somewhat suspect. And that could be anyone. So I’m going to take a wild guess and say that everyone is considered a potential adversary.

Read the whole thing. Bluffdale is a very, very interesting piece of America’s secret surveillance infrastructure.

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Messina said the president has great trust in Summers. “Larry Summers walked into the administration as the economy went into its worst slide since the Great Depression,” Messina said. “And his advice and actions were absolutely crucial to the president’s decision-making, and those actions helped lead us out of a historical recession.”

As I posted yesterday, this is the same man who has recently signed on as an adviser to the King of Austerity himself, the UK’s head Tory, David Cameron.

And then there’s this guy:

#summers The pres supports Summers and so does Steve Rattner. Given the strident left that opposes him on personal attacks, I support him.
— Lanny Davis (@LannyDavis) August 3, 2013

(FYI:  Rattner.)

Meanwhile, we have this obscure fellow making a different observation:

Both anti-Yellen campaigns, then, involve unmistakable sexism, and should be condemned for that reason. As it happens, however, both campaigns have another problem, too: They’re based on bad economic analysis.

In the case of the “female dollar” types, the wrongheadedness of the economics is as raw and obvious as the sexism. The people shouting that the Fed is “debasing the dollar” have been warning of runaway inflation any day now for almost five years, and they have been wrong every step of the way. Worse, they have shown no willingness to admit having been wrong, let alone to revise their views in the face of experience. They are, in short, the last people in the world you should listen to when it comes to monetary policy.

The wrongheadedness of the gravitas crowd, like its sexism, is subtler. But to the extent that having gravitas means something other than being male, it means being what I like to call a Very Serious Person — the kind of person who talks a lot about the need to make tough decisions, which somehow always involves demanding sacrifices on the part of ordinary families while treating the wealthy with kid gloves. And here’s the thing: The Very Serious People have been almost as consistently wrong, although not as spectacularly, as the inflation hysterics.

I think we can see why the gravitas laden Larry Summers is such a favorite can’t we?

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The rise of the One True Conservative


by digby

Alex Pareene has come up with the most concise explanation of what’s gone wrong with the Republican party that I’ve yet seen:

Ted Cruz is the right man for the decadent decline stage of the conservative movement, which has always encouraged the advancement of fact-challenged populist extremists, but always with the understanding that they’d take a back seat to the sensible business interests when it came time to exercise power. The result has been a huge number of Republican activists who couldn’t figure out why the True Conservatives they kept voting for kept failing to achieve the creation of the perfect conservative state once in office. That led to an ongoing backlash against everyone in the party suspected of anything less than perfect ideological purity. Meanwhile all the crazies got rich simply for being crazy. There’s no longer any compelling reason, in other words, not to act like Ted Cruz, and the result is Ted Cruz.

Put that on a plaque somewhere to mark this moment.

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Can you see what’s wrong with this picture?

by digby

I don’t suppose those two things are related in any way …