Month: September 2013

Summer and smoke: Tautou and Lellouche in Therese

Villagers believe they are salt of the earth average Americans. Why do the real average Americans sound so much smarter?


by digby

Via Show Me Progress, here are a couple of Kansas City Representative Emmanual Cleaver’s constituents at a town hall last week:

….Thank you for being here. I came out tonight and much of my significant concerns about moving forward with a military strike against Syria at this time have been spoken to by my fellow constituents.

The thing that I’d like to add, and I apologize if I missed this earlier, uh, western intervention has a very long history in this region of the world as it does in many regions of the world. And I think that this strike will no doubt fit into that historical context. And those interventions have often been oppressive, unwelcome, hegemonic. And I don’t agree with that and I don’t think that’s what we preach here in the United States, although it happens all of the time, all over the world by our [inaudible], by our government. And so I just ask you to think very critically about what this means and how it fits into a much larger global picture. Thank you. [applause]

Transcript here

CNN should hire both of those people. They sound far more informed, cogent and thoughtful than most of the commentary I’ve seen on cable TV the past couple of weeks.

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Sick, sick, sick

by digby

What is wrong with people?

Residents in Waco, TX are angry over a company’s decision to advertise with a realistic depiction of an abducted and hog-tied woman in a truck bed. According to KTEM News, sign-making and marketing firm Hornet Signs designed the truck decal for an employee’s vehicle to advertise its car wrap services.

“I wasn’t expecting the reactions that we got,” said Hornet Signs owner Brad Kolb. “Nor was it anything we condone or anything else, but it was just something more or less that we just had to put out there and see who notices it.”

Some people noticed the vehicle in traffic and called police.

Kolb said that the woman on the decal is an employee who agreed to be photographed and that orders for car wraps and decals have gone up since the sign hit the streets.

The good news is that there were some people who called police. The ones who decided to buy from this company because of it are pigs.

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The Big Gap

by digby

Mark Hosenball has a new piece up about the evidence for Assad ordering the sarin attacks:

With the United States threatening to attack Syria, U.S. and allied intelligence services are still trying to work out who ordered the poison gas attack on rebel-held neighborhoods near Damascus.

No direct link to President Bashar al-Assad or his inner circle has been publicly demonstrated, and some U.S. sources say intelligence experts are not sure whether the Syrian leader knew of the attack before it was launched or was only informed about it afterward.

While U.S. officials say Assad is responsible for the chemical weapons strike even if he did not directly order it, they have not been able to fully describe a chain of command for the August 21 attack in the Ghouta area east of the Syrian capital.

It is one of the biggest gaps in U.S. understanding of the incident, even as Congress debates whether to launch limited strikes on Assad’s forces in retaliation.

After wrongly claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 U.S. invasion, the U.S. intelligence community, along with the Obama administration, are trying to build as solid a case as they can about what it says was a sarin nerve gas attack that killed over 1,400 people.

The Syrian government, backed by Russia, blames Sunni rebels for the gas attack. Russia says Washington has not provided convincing proof that Assad’s troops carried out the attack and called it a “provocation” by rebel forces hoping to encourage a military response by the United States.

Identifying Syrian commanders or leaders as those who gave an order to fire rockets into the Sunni Muslim areas could help Obama convince a war-weary American public and skeptical members of Congress to back limited strikes against Assad.

But penetrating the secretive Syrian government is tough, especially as it fights a chaotic civil war for its survival.

“Decision-making at high levels within foreign governments is always a difficult intelligence target. Typically small numbers of people are involved, operational security is high, and penetration – through either human or technical means – is hard,” said Paul Pillar, a former CIA expert on the Middle East.

I certainly have no problem believing that Assad could have ordered it. He’s a real piece of work. But because the motive for him blatantly crossing the “red line” and inviting international intervention is so obscure, the lack of public evidence of his ordering it is a bit suspicious.

As I wrote earlier, I think the Snowden revelations perversely give cover to sources and methods. It’s completely believable that the US has penetrated their communications at this point. So the fact that the US is unwilling to share the information lends itself to the suspicion, at least, that they don’t have proof. And after Iraq, that’s a problem.

It may very well be that they don’t have the intelligence capability to know for sure that Assad ordered the attacks. But if that’s the case, they are foolish to say they know he did. After all, if he didn’t do it Assad has been alerted to the fact that Big Brother hasn’t penetrated his communications. That doesn’t sound too smart to me.

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So sick of these jackass plutocrats …

by digby

Not that this is exactly news, but Michael Bloomberg is a jerk. A very wealthy jerk.

“This city is not two groups, and if it is, it’s one group paying for services for the other.”

Yeah, well these rich assholes wouldn’t have any of the “services” that helped them to become so rich if it weren’t for the honest labor of the people he so disdains.

I guess Bloomberg and his ilk really do feel that they deserve to have every last penny on this earth. Why else would they be constantly whining and bitching and moaning about how much they have to pay to live in a society that’s just this side of a third world banana republic. They won’t be satisfied until we have little children selling chicklets on the side of the road and old ladies begging outside of restaurants.

They “deserve” to have all the money, not just most of it. Because they’re productive.

Meanwhile, after calling Bill DeBlasio a racist for having the temerity to campaign with his mixed race family, he says this:

Q: Stop-and-frisk has also been a big issue. Three years from now, do you think the policy will be largely the same, substantially changed, or scrapped?
I don’t know. I think that if crime starts tweaking up the tiniest bit, there’s going to be enormous pressure. And there may be other ways to do it—we’re not the only ones with good ideas, but we’ve found a formula that works and we believe is consistent with the law.

Q: How do you square that view with the ruling last month that it is unconstitutional?
The judge is just wrong. We have not racial-profiled, we’ve gone where the crime is. I don’t have any doubts that she will be reversed right away. The question is, will our successor continue the battle? I cannot get involved in the next administration, nor should I. But for something like that I would certainly make my views known.

Q: What would you say?
The sad thing, which nobody’s willing to talk about, is that most of our crime is in two neighborhoods: southeast Bronx, central Brooklyn. All minority males 15 to 25. We’ve got to do something about that. And unless you get the guns out of their hands, you’re not going to ever be able to do anything.

You know, I don’t see why he didn’t just propose to lock up all young black and Hispanic males from the age of say, 16 to 35. That would have “solved” the problem as he sees it too. Why hold back on a really thorough solution?

It looks as though New York is about to vote in a real liberal for mayor. Los Angeles just did it. Maybe people are finally getting a belly full of this crap.

And by the way, my friend Debra Cooper is running for City Council and she is awesome. If you live in New York and can volunteer to help a real progressive who will help the new mayor achieve some real reforms, you can do so here. She’s a wonderful candidate and a wonderful person.

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Your Daily Grayson

by digby

Grayson in the NY Times:

THE documentary record regarding an attack on Syria consists of just two papers: a four-page unclassified summary and a 12-page classified summary. The first enumerates only the evidence in favor of an attack. I’m not allowed to tell you what’s in the classified summary, but you can draw your own conclusion.

On Thursday I asked the House Intelligence Committee staff whether there was any other documentation available, classified or unclassified. Their answer was “no.”

The Syria chemical weapons summaries are based on several hundred underlying elements of intelligence information. The unclassified summary cites intercepted telephone calls, “social media” postings and the like, but not one of these is actually quoted or attached — not even clips from YouTube. (As to whether the classified summary is the same, I couldn’t possibly comment, but again, draw your own conclusion.)

Over the last week the administration has run a full-court press on Capitol Hill, lobbying members from both parties in both houses to vote in support of its plan to attack Syria. And yet we members are supposed to accept, without question, that the proponents of a strike on Syria have accurately depicted the underlying evidence, even though the proponents refuse to show any of it to us or to the American public.

In fact, even gaining access to just the classified summary involves a series of unreasonably high hurdles.

We have to descend into the bowels of the Capitol Visitors Center, to a room four levels underground. Per the instructions of the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, note-taking is not allowed.

Once we leave, we are not permitted to discuss the classified summary with the public, the media, our constituents or even other members. Nor are we allowed to do anything to verify the validity of the information that has been provided.

And this is just the classified summary. It is my understanding that the House Intelligence Committee made a formal request for the underlying intelligence reports several days ago. I haven’t heard an answer yet. And frankly, I don’t expect one.

Compare this lack of transparency with the administration’s treatment of the Benghazi attack. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to her credit, made every single relevant classified e-mail, cable and intelligence report available to every member of Congress. (I know this, because I read them all.) Secretary Clinton had nothing to hide.

Her successor, John Kerry, has said repeatedly that this administration isn’t trying to manipulate the intelligence reports the way that the Bush administration did to rationalize its invasion of Iraq.

But by refusing to disclose the underlying data even to members of Congress, the administration is making it impossible for anyone to judge, independently, whether that statement is correct. Perhaps the edict of an earlier administration applies: “Trust, but verify.”

The danger of the administration’s approach was illustrated by a widely read report last week in The Daily Caller, which claimed that the Obama administration had selectively used intelligence to justify military strikes in Syria, with one report “doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion reached by the original report.”

The allegedly doctored report attributes the attack to the Syrian general staff. But according to The Daily Caller, “it was clear that ‘the Syrian general staff were out of their minds with panic that an unauthorized strike had been launched by the 155th Brigade in express defiance of their instructions.’ ”

I don’t know who is right, the administration or The Daily Caller. But for me to make the correct decision on whether to allow an attack, I need to know. And so does the American public.

We have reached the point where the classified information system prevents even trusted members of Congress, who have security clearances, from learning essential facts, and then inhibits them from discussing and debating what they do know. And this extends to matters of war and peace, money and blood. The “security state” is drowning in its own phlegm.

My position is simple: if the administration wants me to vote for war, on this occasion or on any other, then I need to know all the facts. And I’m not the only one who feels that way.

As I said yestersay, keeping these secrets doesn’t make a lot of sense in the Snowden era. Everyone on the planet already knows the US has the capability oistening in on every conversation and tracking every communication. Even Bashar Assad knows that. The “sources and methods” cat is out of the bag — or, at least, nobody can prove otherwise. The default assumption is that the US has eyes and ears everywhere.

Regardless of that, there’s certainly no good reason to keep the intelligence from the congress. If even they can’t see it, I think it’s fair to question if there’s something wrong with it. Why else would they keep it from them when they are being asked to approve military action the administration insists is necessary? These representatives, collectively, are supposed to have the same power under our constitution as the executive branch — they are not just allowed to have this information, they are required to have it. This isn’t a monarchy.

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Yes, the world’s biggest geopolitical threat is climate change

by David Atkins

The world’s greatest geopolitical threat bar none is climate change. Droughts due to climate change have often been cited as the source of the uprisings that became the Arab Spring, which in turn has directly led to the mess in Syria. There will be more such instability in the near future.

Now, there is more evidence that climate change is a key factor behind at least half of last year’s extreme weather events:

new report plumbing 12 extreme weather events from 2012 for the degree to which human factors, especially carbon dioxide emissions, contributed to the disasters has identified anthropogenic underpinnings in some of the events, but not others.

The paper, a collaborative effort between 18 different research teams, is the latest effort to pinpoint the causes behind the storms, droughts, and warm spells that befell countries all over the world last year, in hopes of better understanding what climate trends can be expected in the future.

In recent years, how much climate change has been a factor in the hurricanes slamming into the US East Coast or the droughts parching farmland in the Midwest has been an outstanding question in climate science. Answering that question has acquired high-octane urgency, as scientists now suggest that better understanding the human origins of extreme weather could help scientists predict when, where, and how those events might impact people.

“People can actually use some of this information to make decisions,” says Thomas Peterson, principal scientist at the National Climactic Data Center and one of the lead editors on the report. For example, it makes a difference to a Midwestern farmer who has just weathered a punishing drought whether or not that experience is rare event or part of a long-term trend toward a drier climate, he said.

The report cautions against the idea that climate change causes extreme weather, suggesting that while climate change is a factor in such events, it is in none of the studied cases the sole factor. In the paper, the team likens the influence of climate change on superstorms to speeding while driving: If a crash happens, it might be because the driver was texting or because the roads were wet, but the speeding made it more likely that the crash would happen or be more catastrophic.

That in mind, climate change did not necessarily cause Hurricane Sandy, but it did contribute to its severity, the scientists said. The report, looking at just the hurricane’s flooding patterns, said that sea levels up from their 1950 values caused a storm surge that was also unusually high, plunging low-lying areas along the East coast under a barrage of water: storm tide levels broke 16 records along western Atlantic coastline.

The results also suggest that future storms, whirling in on the backs of swelled-up seas, could do increasingly catastrophic damage within longer and longer ranges.

Both as a matter of geopolitical stability and economic growth, the world could do with a lot more solar panels and a lot fewer guns and bombs. It’s just common sense.

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Your moment of zen: McCain edition


by digby

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Arthur and August! Supahstahs!

by digby

Colbert with the get ‘o the decade:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

Arthur and August, the beloved subway kittens, appeared last night with Stephen Colbert, who recognized Daily Intelligencer’s work on this important issue in the mayoral race. The host called out former MTA chief and Republican favorite Joe Lhota as the only candidate who vowed firmly to “grease our tracks with cat babies” by refusing to stop the trains.
“Folks, this is a shrewd political move,” said Colbert. “All these other candidates are just going to split the pro-kitten voters, leaving Joe to sweep up in the key anti-kitten demographic of sociopaths, rats large enough to vote, and ALF.”

Pushing for the rebels

by digby

Really???

A Wall Street Journal op-ed cited this week by both Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has drawn scrutiny for not disclosing writer Elizabeth O’Bagy’s ties to a Syrian rebel advocacy group.

On Thursday, The Daily Caller examined O’Bagy’s role as political director for the Syria Emergency Task Force, a group that has lobbied the White House and Congress to support the rebels. O’Bagy told The Daily Caller that she is not a salaried employee, but serves as a paid contractor.

Journalist Laura Rozen questioned Friday why the Journal op-ed — which was published a week ago online and in Saturday’s print edition — did not identify O’Bagy’s affiliation with the group.

The Huffington Post contacted the Journal on Friday and was told the paper would not comment on op-ed’s lack of disclosure. But shortly thereafter, a clarification was added to the piece: “In addition to her role at the Institute for the Study of War, Ms. O’Bagy is affiliated with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a nonprofit operating as a 501(c)(3) pending IRS approval that subcontracts with the U.S. and British governments to provide aid to the Syrian opposition.”

O’Bagy, a senior analyst for the Institute for the Study of War who has traveled extensively with rebel forces, wrote in the op-ed that “contrary to many media accounts, the war in Syria is not being waged entirely, or even predominantly, by dangerous Islamists and al Qaeda die-hards.”

Both Kerry and McCain noted O’Bagy’s findings in addressing Congress’ concerns over whether the Syrian rebels can be trusted.

McCain read part of O’Bagy’s piece out loud during a Tuesday Senate hearing and asked Kerry if he agreed with the writer’s findings. Kerry said he mostly did. “The fundamentals of Syria are secular and will stay that way,” he told McCain. The following day, Kerry said it was a “very interesting article” and suggested members of Congress read it. (Reuters later challenged Kerry’s assertions about the opposition).

Come on. They can’t really believe they can run this game again can they?

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