Month: September 2013

Catapulting the propaganda

by digby

So the GOP House of Representatives voted to cut food stamps today. Food stamps. And keep in mind that this is happening at a time of more than 7% (official) unemployment, something that used to be considered a crisis but is not so normal that we are assuming that the millions of people who are using food stamps are scam artists who just refuse to get a job. It’s sick and it’s cruel.

Dan Froomkin examined one of the major problems we face with this: the media’s unwillingness to portray it for the cruel abomination it is:

I decided to closely examine this morning’s coverage of the vote because such a blatantly absurd and cruel move struck me as a good test of whether the Washington press corps could ever bring itself to call things as they so obviously are — or whether they would check their very good brains at the door and just write triangulating mush that leaves readers to fend for themselves. It was no contest.

And as it happens, the Times editorial board actually understated things. Yesterday’s vote was not only an undeniable act of heartlessness, it was also perhaps the ultimate example of how today’s increasingly radical and unhinged GOP leadership picks on the poor, coddles the rich, makes thinly veiled appeals to racism, and plays time-wasting political games instead of governing.

In short, the important thing about this vote to anyone paying any attention at all was the subtext — what it really meant. But the coverage was stenographic and context-deficient.

The New York Times:

The headline over Ron Nixon’s story characterized the cuts as “deep,” but the author quickly turned to a play-by-play, writing that the vote “set up what promised to be a major clash with the Senate.”

His initial assessment was unskeptical and almost sympathetic:

Republican leaders, under pressure from Tea Party-backed conservatives, said the bill was needed because the food stamp program, which costs nearly $80 billion a year, had grown out of control.

Then he presented a fabulously disingenuous quote, without a hint of what it really signified, from Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.):

“In the real world, we measure success by results. It’s time for Washington to measure success by how many families are lifted out of poverty and helped back on their feet, not by how much Washington bureaucrats spend year after year.”
What’s notable about this quote is how it illustrates the GOP’s loopy fantasy that defenders of the program want more people on food stamps as a goal unto itself. In fact, the program is by design — and for good reason — countercyclical. When people need it more, participation goes up. When there are more hungry people, we spend more to feed them.

Everyone is concerned when there are a lot of people getting food stamps, but the problem is that they are hungry, not that they are being fed.

The GOP argument boils down to a nonsensical: When people are hungrier, we should feed them less. It shouldn’t be treated as if it makes sense. But it was.

Yes, Nixon put this comment in his story:

Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan and the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, called it “a monumental waste of time.”

But then he offered his readers this shockingly dishonest quote, without any skepticism:

“This bill makes getting Americans back to work a priority again for our nation’s welfare programs,” House Speaker John A. Boehner said.

Toward the bottom of the story, Nixon finally offers a little context:

A Census Bureau report released on Tuesday found that the program had kept about four million people above the poverty level and had prevented millions more from sinking further into poverty. The census data also showed nearly 47 million people living in poverty — close to the highest level in two decades.

But maybe that should have been in the second paragraph instead?

Do read on. The other papers were no better.

The problem here isn’t just that they newspapers are blandly reporting a legislative atrocity as if it’s no big deal for real humans. It’s that they mislead about the money as well:

Another big problem with today’s stories: Numbers that didn’t mean anything.

What’s $40 billion over 10 years? Well, it’s a lot to the people who won’t get it, but nothing in budget terms.

Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy research, has, as he puts it, “long harassed budget reporters and editors over the practice of reporting large budget numbers without any context.”

Baker’s suggestion: “Newspapers could get in the habit of writing budget numbers as shares of the total budget.” (They can even use this nifty calculator.) So, for instance:

[T]he food stamp piece could have told readers that the proposed cut to the program was 0.086 percent of projected federal spending over the next decade. That may or may not be a big deal for the people losing benefits, but readers would know that it would not matter much for the budget.

Baker concludes:

There are certainly people who want to believe that all of their tax dollars are going to lazy good-for-nothings and they have no intention of letting the evidence change their views. But that does not explain most of the confusion on budget issues. It really is a case where the media has been incredibly irresponsible, treating budget reporting more like a fraternity ritual than an effort to inform their audience about the budget.

Simply quoting from this Congressional Budget Office report would have gone a long way to exposing the fundamental dishonesty of the basic GOP complaint.

This is even more important when you contrast the amount of money at stake in the food stamp program compared to the massive subsidies for agri-business, much of which is delivered by the very same politicians who oppose food stamps.

I suspect that much of this blasé journalistic attitude stems from the fact that these cuts will not become law due to the Democratic Senate and White House. And that’s correct. But the problem is that in doing so, they are normalizing this nihilistic argument. And when the Republicans once again obtain power, they will have persuaded a good many Americans that the food stamp program is a form of welfare that creates dependency on government. A lot of their own people already believe that, despite the fact that just a few years ago there was a bipartisan consensus that we shouldn’t allow people to go without food in America. Just as welfare took years of propagandizing to become unpopular among a majority, so too will cutting food stamps. And a lot of the reason it could ultimately succeed will be the media’s failure to take it seriously as a policy when it had no chance of being signed into law.

Update: Speaking of challenging GOP lies, C&L caught Chuck Todd explaining that it’s not his job to do that. So there’s that.

Update II: This is how you do it.
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The US House of Surreality

by digby

This Republican budget clusterf*%$# is getting more surreal by the day:

The House approved legislation on Friday to keep the government open past Sept. 30, but also to eliminate funding for “Obamacare.”

The vote marked an opening gambit by the GOP just 10 days before the deadline at which the government will run out of money, causing a myriad of federal services to cease. The provision gutting health care reform was intended to mollify conservatives who have vowed not to fund the government unless the landmark law is eradicated.

Ok, so that’s just posturing, right? Well, sort of. Ezra lines out the next steps:

1) The action moves to the Senate, and reporters stop reporting that Boehner doesn’t have a shadow of control over his Republican members;

2) Sen. Ted Cruz tries and fails to defund Obamacare in the Senate’s continuing resolution;

3) The Democrat-led Senate sends the House a continuing resolution that doesn’t defund Obamacare;

4) Boehner shrugs, says he tried, and persuades his members to let him bring the Senate’s bill to the floor;

5) The House passes the Senate’s measure, President Obama signs it, and everyone moves onto the next crisis.

Ok, crisis averted, everybody’s happy. Not quite:

The problem comes in No. 4. Boehner isn’t going to simply shrug, say he tried, and bring the Senate bill to the floor. He’ll shrug, say he tried, and tell his members that they should let him bring the Senate bill to the floor. He’ll say it’s because they need to save their fire for the debt ceiling fight, where they can force the White House to delay Obamacare for a year by threatening to trigger a global financial crisis. In fact, this is already the message he’s delivering to his members.[my emphasis — d]

There’s been a lot of talk — much of it among Republicans — about how irresponsible Ted Cruz is being in his fight to defund Obamacare or shut the government down trying. But Boehner and the rest of the House GOP leadership is being much more irresponsible in their promises to delay Obamacare or cause a global financial crisis while trying. And the way they’re going to get past Cruz’s irresponsible threats is to double down on their own, even more irresponsible, threats.

The lunacy of delaying Obamacare by a year is hard to overstate. States that are coming on line are all set to go starting in October. That’s a couple of weeks from now. It’s insane to believe they can stop it (obviously the White House will never sign on this) and even crazier to think they should stop it.

But this raises the question of what might happen if they succeed in train-wrecking the debt ceiling anyway. Obviously, there is no chance this Obamacare defunding will happen. It cannot.  So, assuming we are on the verge of a global economic crisis and the Republicans are holding fast on the debt ceiling, what do you suppose the administration, being responsible as it is, will offer the Republicans to end the siege?

Can you see them offering up all the deficit reduction and “entitlement” reforms without their requirement for (temporary) tax hikes? I can.  Indeed, I could even see them agreeing to some tax cuts. I just heard Debbie Wasserman-Schultz say on Andrea Mitchell that she’s more than willing to go the extra mile:

We’ve all got to set rigid ideology aside and sit down and find common ground because we’ve got to make sure that we can focus on continuing to get our economy to turn around. I know, look I’m the chair of the DNC, I know it can’t be my way or the highway. I’m willing to put my vote on the line and go back to my constituents and explain why I didn’t do it exactly the way they wanted me to. We’ve got to make sure that in the congress and put a majority of members, not Republicans, but members, on the board so we can continue to get our economy turned around and get a budget that breaks from the rigid adherence to dogma and ideology.

That could be just political rhetoric to contrast the loony GOP with the Democrats. But it could also signal a willingness to deal away some sacred cows. We don’t know if the Republicans will accept anything but Obamacare defunding or delay, but if they can get more cuts without any tax hikes, especially ones that will make Democrats scream,  they might just accept it as a consolation prize. It sure sounds like Wasserman-Schultz will be happy to consider anything they have in mind.

Like I said, this could be rhetorical. The Democrats think it works in their favor to sound as if they are the grown-ups. And if it weren’t for the fact that the president and the leadership have repeatedly offered up these cuts to vital programs I’d probably just shrug and call it kabuki. But they have offered those cuts and, therefore, nobody in the Village will even see it as news if the GOP accepts it.

What is new in all this is that the GOP has come up with a new demand, which cannot be met. And everyone’s run out of ideas for realistic delaying tactics. So, in order to avert a crisis, the Republicans have to get something besides Obamacare defunding. If they don’t completely cave, I suspect the most likely casualty will be the president’s demand for phony corporate tax hikes in exchange for “entitlement” cuts. After all, if there’s one thing the Republicans hate even more than Obamacare, it’s taxes.

And really, what would it cost the president, in his mind, to do it?  He’s on record wanting the Chained-CPI on the merits. A few more cuts to Medicare fit in with the larger health care reforms. He’s overtly proud of his record on deficit reduction and implies in his speeches and interviews that it’s been good for the economy.  The only reason they’ve been insisting on the rich and corporations kicking in some chump change is to appease liberals by pretending it’s somehow “balanced” among all the relevant interests.  (As if a few extra bucks from the wealthy is in any way comparable to cuts in the meager social security benefit.) They obviously know that any tax hikes are temporary and will be reversed the minute the Republicans gain enough power to get it done. So what would he really lose by being the grown-up in the room and facing down the GOP’s irrational demand to defund or delay Obamacare but being a big enough man to drop the demand for more revenue. They could always just say they agree to sit down and hash out “tax reform” later. (Max Baucus is already consulting with business on how to finesse it.)

I really hope I’m wrong.  The Tea Party has prevented Boehner from taking yes for an answer up to now, so maybe they’ll continue their streak of stupidity.  But if they push all the way to a debt ceiling crisis and the Democrats take tax hikes off the table in exchange for taking Obamacare defunding off the table, it could be harder for them to justify.

Still, one would never grow broke betting on the idiocy of the far right.

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Quote o’ the millenium

by digby

Pope Francis:

My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I lived a time of great interior crisis when I was in Cordova. To be sure, I have never been like Blessed Imelda, but I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.

When the pope distances himself from authoritarian, ultra-conservatism and insists he is not a “right-winger” I think we can safely say the worm is turning.

Any word from Wild Bill Donohue and the Catholic League? Did Rick Santorum want to throw up when he heard it as he did when John F. Kennedy reaffirmed the separation of Church and State? Chirp?

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I Read The News Today, Ha Ha – And Oh Boy, Too

by tristero

Now this is funny:

“It only takes one with passion — look at Rosa Parks, Lech Walesa, Martin Luther King,” said Representative Ted Yoho of Florida, one of the rank-and-file House Republicans who have risen up to challenge their party’s leadership over whether to confront the Senate and President Obama with their demands to cut off funding for the president’s health care law. “People with passion that speak up, they’ll have people follow them because they believe the same way, and smart leadership listens to that.”

Yes, of course, this rhetoric is hilariously insane. But don’t kid yourself. It cannot be ignored. That was one serious mistake we made from before Reagan up until around 2003/2004, refusing to vigorously confront tit for tat the far right’s biggest idiocies. As a result, the crowd that believes that only kind of abortion a woman should have access to is one done with a coat hangar successfully branded themselves as “pro-life” and are vigorously pushing on numerous fronts to restrict a woman’s access to reproductive decisions. And thus, the crowd that believes that scientific fact begins and ends with a collection of texts culled from nomadic tribes over 2000 crafted the idiocy known as “intelligent design” creationism which has all but shut down the teaching of evolution in many areas of this country, and stunted the education of American children.

Yes, like it or not, someone is going to have to confront this narcissistic nut job, or at the very least the others that follow. Otherwise, people will really start to given them the benefit of a doubt.

Sure, most normal Americans may never fully buy that opposing John Boehner is an act of undaunted courage comparable to defying bullets, whips, and billy clubs to stand up for civil rights and dignity, but so what? The point is to create enough doubt about the wisdom of Obamacare to fan a controversy where none exists and gain political leverage.

So yeah, let’s all laugh. But let’s also take this shit very, very seriously.

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Suffer the little children

by David Atkins

The next time someone talks about how food stamps create a “culture of dependency”, remind them almost half of the people on SNAP, otherwise known as the food stamp program, are children. And nearly half of those kids belong to parents who have jobs, but are in poverty anyway.

SNAP provides families with an estimated 22 million children with resources to purchase a nutritionally adequate diet. This represents close to 1 in 3 children (29 percent) in the United States. Almost half of all SNAP recipients are children (47 percent), and an additional 26 percent are adults living with children. (See Figure 1.) Forty percent of all SNAP recipients live in households with preschool-age children (ages 4 and below).
Over 70 percent of SNAP benefits go to households with children. In 2011, SNAP provided an estimated $51 billion in benefits to families with children, over half of which went to families with preschool-age children.

SNAP families are low-income. A typical family with children that is enrolled in SNAP has income (not including SNAP) at 57 percent of the poverty line. For a family of three, 57 percent of the poverty line corresponds with an annual income of $10,785 in 2012. A typical family with children on SNAP spends close to three-quarters of its income on housing and/or child care costs. Families with children currently receive an average of $420 a month in SNAP benefits, or about $5,000 a year.
SNAP benefits help working families support their children. Nearly half (48 percent) of children who receive SNAP live in low-wage working families. A typical working household with children receives an average of $400 a month in SNAP benefits, representing about 30 percent of the family’s average income.

This is not a rational disagreement about public policy. This is a gulf of basic decency, a demand by fearful people for the sacrifice of innocents to sate a perversely sadistic form of cosmic justice.

Interestingly, most people demanding the starvation of children so that billionaires can buy more yachts call themselves Christian. Perhaps they’re reading a Biblical translation that calls for blood sacrifice of innocents so that the rich may enjoy more fruits of Mammon. I missed that part in my copy.

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Creepy image ‘o the day

by digby

Hoookay:

A team of British scientists is convinced it has found proof of alien life, after it harvested strange particles from the edge of space.

The scientists sent a balloon 27km into the stratosphere, which came back carrying small biological organisms which they believe can only have originated from space.

Professor Milton Wainwright told The Independent that he was “95 per cent convinced” that the organisms did not originate from earth.

“By all known information that science has, we know that they must be coming in from space,” he said. “There is no known mechanism by which these life forms can achieve that height. As far as we can tell from known physics, they must be incoming.”

Some of the samples were captured covered with cosmic dust, adding further credence to the idea that they have originated from space.

“The organisms are not usual,” said Professor Wainwright, who works at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. “If they came from earth, we would expect to see stuff that we find on earth commonly, like pollen.”

“We’re very, very confident that these are biological entities originating from space,” he said, acknowledging that absolutely certainty is hard to achieve in science.

The team believes that the entities are coming from comets, which are big balls of ice shooting through space. The samples were collected during a meteorite shower from a comet. As they hit the earth’s atmosphere, the comets melt – ablate, to give it a technical term – releasing the organisms as they break down.

“The particles are very clean,” added Prof Wainwright. “They don’t have any dust attached to them, which again suggests they’re not coming to earth. Similarly, cosmic dust isn’t stuck to them, so we think they came from an aquatic environment, and the most obvious aquatic environment in space is a comet.

“They’re very unusual beasts, not your normal kind of life from earth.”

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Road rage for dummies

by digby

This is exactly the kind of thing we can expect to see more of when the whole country is armed to the teeth.

Police said two men died Wednesday after a shootout allegedly motivated by road rage, the Grand Rapids Press reported.

The initial police investigation showed Ionia, Mich. residents James Pullum, 43, and Robert Taylor, 56, pulled into a car wash parking lot after a confrontation on the road. They then exited their vehicles, drew handguns and exchanged fire, authorities said.

Police found both men at the scene with gunshot wounds, and the two were pronounced dead at an area hospital soon after, according to the newspaper.

Both men held concealed carry permits, according to police.

With bullets flying all over the place it’s lucky they only killed each other. Usually we can expect a bunch of innocent bystanders to give their lives in these altercations. Even when trained cops start firing, it often ends up this way.

But there is a lesson in this for all of us. Behave as though any nut you come across in public is armed and willing to use his gun whenever he’s crossed. Because freedom.

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We don’t have a spending problem we have a revenue problem

by digby

Before we get back into the exciting world of budget negotiations, “skin in the game” and
what DC likes to call “reform”, we should take a look at this friendly reminder via Wonkblog about what’s causing the national debt.

The best chart on this is the so-called “parfait chart” by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), which breaks down what specific policies caused the big increase in the U.S. federal debt in the 2000s. Strikingly, the current debt was almost entirely caused by events in the past 13 years.

The most important factor was the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which greatly reduced federal revenues and put the federal government into deficit after the surpluses of the late ’90s and early ’00s, but the economic downturn, the stimulus and other recovery measures, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan all played important roles too.

Without those four things, we’d have a debt burden around 20 percent of GDP — far too small to even start to worry about, and smaller than every developed country other than Luxembourg.

The Republicans like to say “we don’t have a revenue problem,we have a spending problem” But as with virtually everything they say and do, in reality, it’s the opposite. If you look at that chart you can see that the problem isn’t spending.  It’s the shortfall of revenue caused by the Bush tax cuts which build on themselves over time.

But we knew that.  It’s just that reality is irrelevant to this discussion because everyone in Washington has obsessed over deficits and taxes for so long that they have no language left to communicate the problem. The president seems to think the deficit reduction that’s been done on his watch is a fantastic achievement. (In fairness, Bill Clinton did too, but at least his was brought about during a great economic boom rather than by brutally cutting government programs during an epic economic slump.) So unfortunately, there’s nobody to champion the idea that we could be creating a better society for ourselves and our children if we’d just be willing to tax the rich at a fair rate and be willing to put up a little bit more ourselves when we can spare it. Instead we’re stuck spending every bit of energy we have to keep them from cutting Social Security or raising the Medicare age. What a shame.

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Earworms and probes in the nether regions

by digby

I used to write a lot about something I think of as political ear worms back in the day. Here’s an excerpt from one in 2006 called “Using our Religion” :

The Republicans have figured out something that the Democrats refuse to understand. All political messages can be useful, no matter which side has created it. You use them all situationally. The Republicans have been adopting our slogans and memes for years. They get that the way people often hear this stuff is not necessarily in a partisan sense. They just hear it, as a sort of disembodied phrase. Over time they become comfortable with it and it can be exploited for many different reasons.

In this instance, there has been a steady underground rumbling about stolen elections since 2000. Now, we know that it’s the Republicans who have been doing the stealing —- and the complaining has been coming from our side. But all most people hear is “stolen election” and many are just as likely to paste that charge onto us as they are onto them. It’s like an ear worm. You don’t know the song its from, necessarily, but you can’t get it out of your head.

We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are appropriating — and they will probably use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections

It’s galling, of course, to have them project their own transgressions onto others. But it’s very effective. Still, I’ve rarely seen them do it so blatantly as they’re doing it in these ads trying to get young people to “opt out” of buying health insurance.

That’s right. The people who brought you government mandated vaginal probes, which reproductive rights advocates used successfully to frame the controversy, are using that same imagery to persuade young people not to buy health insurance.

And just so the boys get the message too, they made do with one with their own obsessions.(When they aren’t going on about things being “shoved down their throats” the forced anal probe is one of their favorites):

Who’s doing this? Surprise:

Generation Opportunity, a Virginia-based group that is part of a coalition of right-leaning organizations with financial ties to billionaire businessmen and political activists Charles and David Koch, will launch a six-figure campaign aimed at convincing young people to “opt-out” of the Obamacare exchanges. Later this month, the group will begin a tour of 20 college campuses, where they plan to set up shop alongside pro-Obamacare activists such as Enroll America that are working to sign people up for the insurance exchanges..

That’s as low as it gets. Not only is the message itself completely false, the goal is downright murderous. They are encouraging young people to go without health insurance, which if you follow their logic, mean that they should just be left on the street to die (or have their friends beg for charity on Facebook or something) if something happens. That’s because they refused to take responsibility for themselves … by buying insurance. (Well, unless they had the good fortune to be born into wealth which is what all smart Americans should do. Then they’re just fine.)

They’re not being subtle about it:

The campaign is one part of a larger network of conservative groups that are shifting attention away from the battle in Washington to the ground game in the states. In one recently announced campaign, the tea party-organizing group FreedomWorks called on its activists to “burn your Obamacare card.” (The act is symbolic more than it is literal, of course, since there isn’t any such card.) Another group, Americans for Prosperity, plans to host events at sporting events, festivals and town fairs around the country to urge people away from the exchanges.

Organizers behind these efforts know that the law relies on young people. After several failed attempts by conservatives to repeal it in Congress, they have determined that this is their best shot at killing it, or at least give it a knee-capping.

“If young people do opt out en mass, it will put the law in a bind, for sure,” said Feinberg, who insists the main goal is not to get rid of the law. “If it means they have to repeal it because it doesn’t work and that ends up crippling the law, well fine. Then they have to make some changes or repeal the law to make it work.”

Remember what their plan to “make it work” is: allow insurance companies to sell insurance across state lines and deny people the right to sue quacks. That’s all it will take to make everyone live happily ever after in their minds. Meanwhile if a few more uninsured young people have to destroy their lives to make it happen, it’s a small price to pay for freedom. Freedom to die or lose everything you have due to one accident or illness.

Who are these twisted people?

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You mean they haven’t foiled thousands of terrorist attacks after all?

by digby

Talk Left:

The Office of Inspector General has issued a new report on DOJ’s reporting of prosecutions and convictions, including terrorism cases. The report is a follow-up to a 2007 and 2012 report which found DOJ inflated its terror case statistics. The new report finds DOJ continues to misreport its record in terrorism cases. The OIG attributes the mistakes to shoddy record-keeping. The full report is here.

Funny story. Turns out they’ve been misreporting their terrorism statistics and gets lots moire money every year to fight terrorism.

Here are a few examples of the “shoddy record keeping”:

In one case, the defendant was convicted of animal fighting, but the USAO coded the case as Domestic Terrorism. In the second case, the defendant was convicted of bank robbery by force or violence, but the USAO coded the case as Terrorism Related Hoaxes. While these two cases were initially investigated as terrorism cases, the resulting indictments did not result in terrorism charges.

…In one case, the defendant was charged with conspiracy and intent to distribute over 50 kilograms of marijuana and was involved in the importation and delivery of approximately 200 pounds of marijuana. According to an USAO official, this case should have been coded as an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force case instead of an Export Enforcement Terrorism-Related case.

…[in another case]the defendant was convicted of possession with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of a mixture and substance containing a detectable amount of cocaine. This case was reported as an International Terrorism Incident Which Impacts U.S. case, but an USAO official told us this case was an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force case.

….In one case, the defendant was convicted of being an illegal alien in possession of a firearm. This case was reported as a Domestic Terrorism case but an USAO official told us that this case should have been recoded as an Immigration case.

In [another] case, the defendant was convicted of using an access device with intent to defraud. This case was reported as a Terrorism/National Security Critical Infrastructure case, but an USAO official told us that this case should have been coded as a White Collar Crime/Fraud case.

…In [one] case, the defendant was convicted of redemption of illegally received food stamps and an USAO official told us the case was miscoded[as a Terrorist financing case.]

I’m sure there are many Republicans who legitimately see food stamps as a from of terrorist financing. So, perhaps we shouldn’t be so hasty.

The report indicates this is about data entry errors. And I’m sure some of it is that. But it’s always a good idea to follow the heat and follow the money. Terrorism is big business for the police apparatus’ of this nation.

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