Month: October 2013

Big money for Big Brother’s enforcement arm

by digby

Job creators:

Between October 25 and 28 a major urban security training event and trade expo will invade Alameda County, Calif. Urban Shield, now in its seventh year, is a marketplace of repressive ideas and technologies.

The mood on the expo floor is largely convivial and friendly, with stalls staffed by as many bored salespeople as over-enthusiastic product pushers. Alongside fearsome military technologies are everyday objects like flashlights, mobile phones and bicycles. These signs of ordinariness stand as reminders of how normal the militarization of society has come to seem.

The stated goal of Urban Shield is to improve “regional disaster response capabilities,” but rather than fostering community-focused crisis response, it presents a view of our “high-threat, high-density” cities as always, already violent spaces. This vision of urban life dehumanizes and criminalizes public assembly and nonviolent protest.

The annual event has a variety of backers, including the Department of Homeland Security and over 100 police and military agencies. It features a wide-range of corporate partners peddling their wares from Black-Ops Airsoft training guns to Safariland Group’s body armor and “less lethal” tear gas line. The past participation of governments like those of Bahrain and Israel has already come under scrutiny from journalist Max Blumenthal. This year Urban Shield will host representatives from even more countries, such as Brazil, that are currently struggling to quell popular uprisings and stabilize their international image.

The arrival of Urban Shield’s carnival of control technologies has dozens of Bay Area groups raising pointed questions: Why should their community support the market for policing techniques and technologies that have been responsible for so many deaths and injuries, like the killing of the unarmed man Oscar Grant by a public transit policeman and the police projectile assault on veteran Scott Olsen? The city council of Oakland, located in Alameda County, recently paid $1.17 million to Occupy Oakland participants for injuries suffered at the hands of police with riot control technologies.

If you read this blog you know how I feel about the militarization of the police.

This sort of thing is just gratuitous. But lucrative, I’m sure.

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Sunday Funnies: Halloween edition

by digby

Bryan McFadden in the New York Times:

Tom Tomorrow at Medium.com:

Big return on small investment

by digby

The moneybags know exactly how valuable this is to them:

Outside interest groups spent at record levels in state-level judicial elections in the 2012 election cycle, according to a new report, reflecting a trend of increased spending on down-ballot races by political groups looking to control individual state agendas.

The report — put together by Justice At Stake, the Brennan Center for Justice and the National Institute for Money in State Politics — shows that independent groups spent $15.4 million on 2012 judicial elections, which helped drive a record $29.7 million in television advertising in those races. The spending by independent groups also represented a record 27 percent of all spending on judicial races.

Some of the big spenders in judicial elections in 2012 included recognizable names from national political movements, such as the billionaire Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and the National Rifle Association’s Law Enforcement Alliance of America.

Alicia Bannon, counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy program, said that the increased spending, especially on television ads, has “created a carnival atmosphere where judges are starting to look indistinguishable from other sorts of politicians.”

This has been a long time interest of the right. They’ve been systematically taking over the judiciary for many years. Here’s a great story about how Karl Rove made his bones way back when by manipulating the Alabama judicial system in close elections.

If you look around the country (and particularly at the federal system) they’ve had a very nice return on their investment. And it’s likely going to reap even bigger rewards in the foreseeable future.

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Hit me with a flower

by digby

Lou Reed died. This one hurts. He helped me understand my life long mistrust of authority

Here’s Lou in 1974 singing a song that became a big part of my early musical and cultural education :

I’d say RIP but he would scoff at such silliness.

He’ll be missed.

Update: His last posting on Facebook, tweeted out as “The Door” early today:

Cool to the very end.

QOTD: Ted Cruz

by digby

On Dick Cheney shooting a man in the face:

“Look, it happens”

Congressman Steve King followed up:

“It doesn’t bother me a bit. The way I understood it, [the victim] was standing in the wrong place.”

Bully tactics

by digby

I have no idea whether the complaint here is legitimate — it is the Washington Times — but it sure smells to high heaven. The fact that they arrived at 4:30 AM in full body armor is enough to make it a questionable act of intimidation in my book:

Maryland state police and federal agents used a search warrant in an unrelated criminal investigation to seize the private reporting files of an award-winning former investigative journalist for The Washington Times who had exposed problems in the Homeland Security Department’s Federal Air Marshal Service.

Reporter Audrey Hudson said the investigators, who included an agent for Homeland’s Coast Guard service, took her private notes and government documents that she had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act during a predawn raid of her family home on Aug. 6.

The documents, some which chronicled her sources and her work at the Times about problems inside the Homeland Security Department, were seized under a warrant to search for unregistered firearms and a “potato gun” suspected of belonging to her husband, Paul Flanagan, a Coast Guard employee. Mr. Flanagan has not been charged with any wrongdoing since the raid.

The warrant, obtained by the Times, offered no specific permission to seize reporting notes or files.

The Washington Times said Friday it is preparing legal action to fight what it called an unwarranted intrusion on the First Amendment.

“While we appreciate law enforcement’s right to investigate legitimate concerns, there is no reason for agents to use an unrelated gun case to seize the First Amendment protected materials of a reporter,” Times Editor John Solomon said. “This violates the very premise of a free press, and it raises additional concerns when one of the seizing agencies was a frequent target of the reporter’s work.

“Homeland’s conduct in seizing privileged reporters notes and Freedom of Information Act documents raises serious Fourth Amendment issues, and our lawyers are preparing an appropriate legal response,” he said.

Maryland State Police declined comment, except to say that “evidence and information developed during this investigation is currently under review by both the Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office and the United State’s Attorney’s Office,” and that a determination has yet to be made on any charges.

The U.S. Coast Guard confirmed it seized and reviewed Ms. Hudson’s documents but insisted it did nothing wrong.

Capt. Tony Hahn, a spokesman at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, said the Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS) was involved in the case because Mrs. Hudson’s husband, Mr. Flanagan, is a Coast Guard employee.

During the search of the home, said Capt. Hahn, “the CGIS agent discovered government documents labeled ‘FOUO’ — For Official Use Only and ‘LES’ — Law Enforcement Sensitive.”

“The files that contained these documents were cataloged on the search warrant inventory and taken from the premises,” he said. “The documents were reviewed with the source agency and determined to be obtained properly through the Freedom of Information Act.”

Ms. Hudson described a harrowing ordeal the morning her family home was raided.

The agents, who had arrived a 4:30 a.m. in full body armor, collected several small arms during the raid, although no charges have been filed against Mr. Flanagan, 54, during the nearly three months since.

Mrs. Hudson, 50, says that while the authorities were raiding her house, Coast Guard investigator Miguel Bosch — who formerly worked at the marshal service — began asking questions about whether she was the same “Audrey Hudson” who had written “the air marshal stories” for The Washington Times. Mrs. Hudson says she responded that she was… more

I guess reporters should just assume from now on that they can be rousted by the government at any time. Best to be prepared.

h/t to JS

By denying Medicaid expansion, Republican governors are sentencing the mentally ill to die

by David Atkins

Yesterday watched the extraordinary and powerful documentary The Bridge, about suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge. It led me to spend much of last night thinking about mental health in America.

In all the discussion of basic healthcare for the underserved, the young, the poor and those with pre-existing conditions, the impact of the Affordable Care Act on mental health may be among the most overlooked.

It’s important to remember that suicide rates in the United States have jumped sharply over the last couple of decades, including among those in middle age. The jump in suicides has spiked in particular after the recession. Also notable is that a common denominator in gun massacres does tend to be a history of mental health problems, such that in the absence of gun control increased focus on mental health services should in theory be something to draw support from both sides of the aisle.

One of the most common reasons for people not to seek mental health services is stigma. But cost and lack of insurance is another huge factor as well. The Affordable Care Act can help deal with that aspect:

Lack of insurance and the high cost of care are the biggest reasons mental-health patients don’t seek treatment, according to a study released in this month’s Health Affairs.

The Affordable Care Act supports increased access to mental-health services, with insurance coverage through the law’s exchanges set to begin Jan. 1 for those who sign up by Dec. 15. The full implementation of the ACA, according to a Health and Human Services report, will provide first-time access to mental-health services for roughly 32.1 million Americans.

The new health law requires all insurance plans in the exchanges and in the individual and small-group markets to treat mental-health services equal with other forms of care when it comes to co-pays and deductibles. In the past, insurance companies did not cover—or required higher out-of-pocket costs for—mental-health services. Stabenow proposed the parity amendment, which is now part of the ACA.

“People with mental illnesses are more likely to have lower incomes,” said Kathleen Rowan, a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota and the primary author of the study published in Health Affairs. “That’s because mental illness might be limiting in terms of the work they are able to do or the hours they are able to work. And so, many people face cost barriers in terms of access to care.”

The law will open the doors to affordable care for many of these individuals, Rowan said, through the subsidies on the exchanges and the expansion of Medicaid.

In 2010 there were 38,364 suicides in the United States–almost 5,000 more than were killed in car accidents. An untold number of others have died by the hands of those with mental health issues.

How many of those lives could have been saved with affordable access to mental health services? How many more lives will be lost in states that are denying affordable mental health care by preventing Medicaid expansion?

How many of these people, many of them poor, uninsured, taking unlicensed medications or self-medicating and at the end of their ropes, could have been stopped from making the fateful jump? How many Republican governors are sentencing people just like them to their deaths by denying them basic healthcare?

I say chatzilim, you say maqluba: Zaytoun

“The End of Antibiotics, Period”

by digby

The scariest horror movie you’ll see this year:

The age of antibiotics may be coming to an end.

The world is facing a rise of superbugs that modern antibiotics are powerless to stop. In Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria, veteran journalist David Hoffman examines the disturbing rise of what the CDC has termed “nightmare bacteria” — and investigates why many drug companies have abandoned the development of new antibiotics needed to stop them.

“Twenty-five years ago, there were more than 25 large companies working to discover and develop new antibiotics,” infectious disease doctor Brad Spellberg tells FRONTLINE. “Now there’s two, maybe three.”

The bacteria are spreading in frightening ways with alarming speed, both across the globe and inside hospitals — though few hospitals are willing to talk about the problem publicly.

What can we do to stop or slow their spread? How can you minimize the risks of catching one of these bugs? What government agency is responsible for responding to the threat — and is it doing enough? What will make pharmaceutical companies return to antibiotic research?

Like we don’t have enough to worry about …

Click the link to watch the documentary and read the interviews with various experts. But only if you really like horror movies …

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Ick

by digby