Month: November 2013

At least 39 Democrats haven’t learned a thing from history

by digby

Are House Dems abandoning ACA? 34 Dems voted against passing it in 2010 — 5 more Dems backed Upton bill today. (39 Dems voting yes)
— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) November 15, 2013

And I’d just make the same point I made the other day: of the 34 Dems who voted against Obamacare in 2009, only five are still in congress. A few looked at the polls and decided to spend more time with their families and the seat turned over to the GOP but the vast majority were defeated in 2010 by Republicans. The stragglers were taken out by progressives in primaries in 2012.

Democrats can run but they can’t hide. They need to make it work, not sabotage it. It’s their only hope.

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How much personal data do these people need anyway?

by digby

Yet another Government bulk data collection program?

The Central Intelligence Agency is secretly collecting bulk records of international money transfers handled by companies like Western Union — including transactions into and out of the United States — under the same law that the National Security Agency uses for its huge database of Americans’ phone records, according to current and former government officials.

The C.I.A. financial records program, which the officials said was authorized by provisions in the Patriot Act and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, offers evidence that the extent of government data collection programs is not fully known and that the national debate over privacy and security may be incomplete.
[…]
Several officials also said more than one other bulk collection program has yet to come to light…

In recent months, there have been hints in congressional testimony, declassified documents and litigation that the N.S.A. program — which was disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor — is not unique in collecting records involving Americans.

For example, the American Civil Liberties Union is fighting a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for documents related to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the provision that allows the government to compel companies to turn cover business records for counterterrorism purposes. After the government declassified the N.S.A. phone records program, it has released many documents about it in response to the suit.

But the government has notified the A.C.L.U. that it is withholding two Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rulings invoking Section 215 — one dated Aug. 20, 2008, and the other Nov. 23, 2010 — because they discuss matters that remain classified, according to Alexander Abdo, an A.C.L.U. lawyer. “It suggests very strongly that there are other programs of surveillance that the public has a right to know about,” Mr. Abdo said.

Emptywheel unpacks this latest revelation in typically detailed fashion, so click here to understand the underlying issues which show that the program is, as usual, more nefarious than it seems at first blush. She think this sounds like a limited hang out and speculates just how tightly this information is actually held. (Let’s just say it’s likely pretty loose.)

It’s clear at this point that we have a secret surveillance state with access to every bit of information about your life whether you’ve done anything or not. The good news is that if you or anyone you know (or anyone who knows anyone you know) never becomes in any way suspicious to law enforcement they’ll have no need to access all this information they have stored so they can find evidence of something with which to prosecute you. Or threaten to prosecute you. There’s nothing to worry your pretty little head about.

Meanwhile, in other news, in its quest to protect our privacy, the government sentenced convicted hacker Jeremy Hammond, to 10 years in prison today. So you can feel perfectly safe.

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Is this Obama’s 10th or 11th Katrina?  I lost count. 


by digby

Sigh. A failed website is just like Katrina? Uhm, no. And it’s especially inapt when we have a real Katrina happening as we speak in the Philippines:

That is not the same thing as frustration with health insurance. Really. In fact, it’s downright offensive to suggest it.

And anyway, this is just the latest in inapt “Obama’s Katrina” comparisons:

1. BP Oil Spill
“[I]t’s getting baked in a little bit in the media that BP was President Obama’s Katrina.” [NBC News, Brian Williams, 8/29/10]

2. Bank Bailout
“A CHARMING visit with Jay Leno won’t fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses won’t fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won’t fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editorpublished by The Times last week: ‘President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.’” [New York Times, Frank Rich, 3/21/09]

3. Benghazi Consulate Attack And The IRS
“When House Republicans decided to reopen investigations into the White House and State Department response to the attacks on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, few thought it would inflict any serious damage to the president. Then came an admission from the IRS that it had unfairly singled out conservative groups for scrutiny during the 2012 campaign…This is President Obama’s Katrina moment. If he cannot regain control of the narrative, he will face the same loss of public confidence suffered by President Bush.” [Baltimore Sun, 5/19/13, Todd Eberly]

4. Hurricane Sandy
“I want to show you this report by our own David Lee Miller of a public housing unit in New Jersey, and — I’m sorry, in Brooklyn — devastated. This is Obama’s Katrina. And now the people are seeing that the gas lines and the suffering and the millions without power, the millions without heat, the millions — the ten and thousands that have lost their homes, and the cries for help.” [Fox News, Sean Hannity, 11/5/12]

5. Unemployment
“‘Will The Unemployment Crisis Be Obama’s Katrina?’ There’s a Category 5 storm about to make landfall, and the president and the officials in charge of preparing for the approaching disaster don’t seem to be particularly worried. Sound familiar? Just as Katrina exposed critical weaknesses in the priorities and competence of the Bush administration, the unfolding unemployment disaster is threatening to do the same for the Obama White House.” [Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington, 11/23/09]

6. The Underwear Bomber
“To the list of phrases it may be best for political leaders to avoid after a major security incident, add ‘the system worked’ right after ‘Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.’ Just as the public did not really share President George W. Bush’s assessment of how things were going after Hurricane Katrina, so too was there a good deal of skepticism when President Obama’s homeland security secretary declared faith in a system that failed to stop a guy who tried to blow up a passenger jet on Christmas Day.” [New York Times, 12/29/09]

7. Haiti Earthquake
“‘Haiti: Obama’s Katrina.’ Four years ago the initial medical response to Hurricane Katrina was ill equipped, understaffed, poorly coordinated and delayed. Criticism of the paltry federal efforts was immediate and fierce. Unfortunately, the response to the latest international disaster in Haiti has been no better, compounding the catastrophe.” [Wall Street Journal, 1/25/10]

8. Obamacare
“‘Health Law Rollout’s Stumbles Draw Parallels to Bush’s Hurricane Response.’ President Obama is now threatened by a similar toxic mix. The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.” [New York Times, 11/14/13]

The reason Bush was tarred with his Katrina response is because he acted like he didn’t give a damn. And it came out of a long series of problems in Iraq and after revelations that his administration had blown off warnings about 9/11. People can say a lot of things about the Obamacare rollout but I don’t think anyone can say that the president doesn’t give a damn and isn’t trying to fix the problems.

But of course the media (under the influence of Republican ref-working) will try to tag him with his own Katrina. As you can see, they’ve been trying since he came into office. Just as they spent decades trying to find a Democratic Watergate — and finally just created one out of whole cloth with Whitewater — they will try to even out Bush’s debacle. The media always wants to be above partisanship and tries desperately to find ways to prove they aren’t. They called Bush out on Katrina and so feel compelled to find a corollary with Obama.They’ll keep doing it until something sticks — or he is out of office. But don’t kid yourself. Some Democrat, whether Obama or a successor, will have to pay a price for Bush’s incompetence. It’s in the Village bylaws.

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Pictures from hell

by digby

The LA Times is featuring a series of photos from the typhoon that are just horrific. I urge you to look at them if only to keep whatever problems we have right now in perspective. Here’s just one of them:

Here’s a list of agencies if you are of a mind to help.

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Fix the Debt caught astroturfing

by digby

Oh, my goodness. Can it be that Fix the Debt is using patented right wing astroturf tactics? Say it ain’t so!

Our friend Jon Romano, press secretary for the inside-the-beltway PR campaign “Fix the Debt” and its pet youth group, The Can Kicks Back, have been caught writing op-eds for college students and placing the identical op-eds in papers across the country.

This is the latest slip-up in Fix the Debt’s efforts to portray itself as representing America’s youth. Previously, they were caught paying dancers to participate in a pro-austerity flash mob and paying Change.org to gather online petition signers for them.

The newspapers involved in the scam were not amused.

Gainesville Sun to Fix the Debt: “Lay Off the Astroturf and Outright Plagiarism”

The identical op-eds were discovered by Florida’s Gainesville Sun. The paper’s scathing editorial on the topic makes for an entertaining read.

If you liked University of Florida student Brandon Scott’s column last Sunday about the national debt, you also should enjoy columns by Dartmouth College student Thomas Wang and University of Wisconsin student Jennifer Pavelec on the issue.

After all, they’re the same columns.

The identical columns ran last weekend in newspapers in New Hampshire and Wisconsin. They each included the same first-person passage describing the student’s work with the Campaign to Fix the Debt and its “millennial arm,” The Can Kicks Back.

After I was told last week about the column appearing under the byline of different writers in other publications, it was removed from The Sun’s website. Staff with the Campaign to Fix the Debt, who sent out the columns, said they were templates that were supposed to be personalized or otherwise reworded.

The campaign’s vice president of communications, John Romano, said Scott -— an intern with the group — was not at fault.

“This was an inadvertent mistake and the campaign takes full responsibility for it,” he said.

Oh heck. I wonder if this might mean that their so-called millennial “I want all my elderly relatives to move in with me when they can no longer work” program might be a bit overblown? As in, it might be just a silly front group created with Pete Peterson money and it has no real members.

I’m shocked.

Via Campaign for America’s Future

American Justice

by digby

I was railing about the horror of locking up the Guantanamo prisoners forever with no due process earlier. And then I read this:

LANCE SALTZMAN did not like the way his stepfather, Toni Minnick, settled arguments with his mother, Christina Borg. Once Mr Minnick fired a gun into a wall beside her. A couple of weeks later, says Ms Borg, he threatened to shoot her. So Mr Saltzman went into his stepfather’s bedroom and took the gun. He sold it to a friend, who used it in a burglary. Mr Saltzman was charged with burglary, theft and being a felon in possession of a firearm—all for taking a gun from his own house—as well as with the burglary committed using the gun, in which he says he took no part. He was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He was 22.

Mr Saltzman was mauled by a pit bull as a toddler and is “not altogether upstairs all the time”, says his mother. In his teens he got hooked on drugs and was convicted of marijuana possession, trespassing and petty theft. He was then jailed for a burglary he committed when he was 16, and this was his undoing.

He stole his stepfather’s gun within three years of his release; under a Florida mandatory-sentencing law for re-offenders, the judge had to lock him up for ever. Given Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws, Ms Borg believes that her son would probably be free if he had shot his menacing stepfather instead of stealing his gun.

So much for due process. Read the ACLU report about the thousands of prisoners serving life without parole sentences for non-violent offenses — if you can stomach the injustice.

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It’s killing Real Americans already


by digby

In case you were wondering what the GOP “big picture” propaganda is going to be on Obamacare, check out this article in the Atlantic about Ted Cruz’s apocalyptic vision:

In an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace at the Washington Ideas Festival, Cruz said he planned to introduce a bill to repeal and replace the three-year-old health-care overhaul law and dismissed Democratic efforts to find a legislative fix that will to undo its impact on the existing private insurance market, where millions of insurance plans have been cancelled.

“You’re seeing lots of Democrats scrambling and they’re coming up with lots of proposals and they’re all named clever things: ‘If you like your plan you can really, really, really keep it.’ Listen, I don’t think people are interested in some cosmetic Band-Aid. Most of these plans have a good title, but if they passed into law, they’d do next to nothing for the millions of people who have lost their health care. And the thing about Obamacare, the five million who’ve lost their health care right now is just the beginning of this,” Cruz said.

“One of the next shoes that is going to be dropping is you’re going to see more and more people realizing they can’t keep their doctor. Texas oncology, one of the very best cancer centers in Texas, has just announced it’s not going to participate in Obamacare. I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve got people who are close friends who are cancer survivors who are discovering now they can’t go to their cancer doctor because Obamacare has denied them their doctor,” Cruz continued. “That’s the next shoe that’s going to fall.”

This spring, he argued, the public would see premiums go up dramatically. “And then the shoe to drop that I think is most damaging, potentially, is the 90-plus million people who have employer-provided health care. I cannot tell you how many HR directors at big companies have said they’re just getting ready to dump their employees off of their health care and onto these exchanges.

“The trade-off that Obamacare was all about—that the president was not honest with the American people about—it was a trade-off that was focused on providing insurance to part of the group of Americans that didn’t have insurance. And that is a noble goal,” Cruz said. “But that trade-off to provide insurance for tens of millions of people… is that they said we’re going to screw up the insurance of the remaining couple 100 million people. I think that’s a terrible trade-off.”

This is a good one: “I’ve got people who are close friends who are cancer survivors who are discovering now they can’t go to their cancer doctor because Obamacare has denied them their doctor.” It’s already killing people and it hasn’t even taken effect yet. Unfortunately in a couple of months it will be in effect and they’ll sound less ridiculous even if their silly claims are based on their own fever dreams.

But what you have to pay attention to is that last paragraph.  He’s setting the table for every complaint about health care in America going forward to be blamed on the you-know-whos — the “dependent” ones who keep taking from the Real Americans who really deserve it.

Not that they wouldn’t have done this with the individual market anyway.  After all, liberals make that very argument all the time. But Cruz is going to take it way beyond any reality and say basically that the government is having bad people steal everyone’s health care against their will. In other words, the welfare queens and wetbacks are now trying to kill you.  It’s the fundamental basis of their arguments against government in general and feeds directly into their lizard brain fear of losing their privilege.

Obviously, not everyone will buy this line of malarkey. But it will feed right wing angst and will give them fodder for their anti-government crusade. And things could get dicey during this transition — the 2010 energy seems to be coming back under the careful stoking of the GOP. There’s not a lot Democrats can do about it except hope that everything settles down in the next few months, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

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Forever prisoners

by digby

Alex Wagner on NOW featured a truly disturbing story about Guantanamo yesterday that I think got lost in all the Obamacare brouhaha.

That creepy footage of Gitmo in which the “Forever Prisoner” cries out for help just makes my skin crawl. (A Forever Prisoner is someone they have decided must be kept forever without trial because they “scare us”  — even though we cannot prove they committed a crime.) You cannot call yourself a civilized country if you do such a thing. Notice that Alex Wagner brings up the apparently irrelevant idea that America should not be holding people indefinitely without trial (much less in SuperMax prisons, which Robert Gibbs blandly describes as “worse than hell” even as he apparently thinks putting these prisoners there forever would be some kind of solution) and the response is pretty much “yeah, yeah, yeah, moral legal blah, blah, blah.”

Our prison system is something out of the third world as it is. But normalizing the idea that we can lock up people forever who we think are “scary” even though we cannot try them is basically rendering the principles that inspired our constitution moot. It’s just appalling.

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Blood in the water

by digby

Colbert with the “conventional reaction” to Richard Cohen

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

The Cohen archives are so rich in bloggy goodness that it’s hard not to go back and feature them at a time like this.

Ok, here’s just one from July 29, 2008:

The next president will have to be something of a political Superman, a man of steel who can tell the American people that they will have to pay more for less — higher taxes, lower benefits of all kinds — and deal in an ugly way when nuclear weapons seize the imagination of madmen.

This is from the fellow the Washington Post lists as a liberal columnist.

No wonder everyone hates liberals.

By the way, Jonathan Schwarz wrote the definitive take on Cohen and his ilk a long time ago. H/t to Atrios.

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QOTD: Confederate celebration edition

by digby

Hell no, they ain’t forgot:

One hundred and fifty years ago an invading Union army was halted at Chattanooga by the Confederate Army of Tennessee under General Braxton Bragg. The Battle of Chickamauga was one of the bloodiest days of the entire Civil War, and a resounding defeat for the Northern forces. Today Southeastern Tennessee faces invasion from another union— an actual labor union, the United Auto Workers (UAW). The UAW has its heart set on organizing Chattanooga’s Volkswagen plant, which employs several thousand and supports thousands more throughout the Southeast. […]

No wonder Hamilton County Commissioner Tim Boyd warns that unionization “will be like a cancer on [Chattanooga’s] economic growth.” Indeed it would be, though perhaps an infection is a more apt metaphor, an infection borne by an invading union force from the North. One hundred and fifty years ago, the people of Tennessee routed such a force in the Battle of Chickamauga.

Let their descendants go now and do likewise.

As Lee Fang points out:

The battle Patterson romanticizes in his column resulted in over 34,000 casualties. One of the leading officers in the battle, Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest—a wealthy slave-trader—went on after the war to found the Ku Klux Klan, a group that helped powerful elites suppress black-white labor unity through a campaign of terrorism and murder.

But hey, it’s all just a celebration of “heritage” dontcha know? Apparently, the confederates were all anti-union, which is kind of a surprise because the union movement didn’t exist at the time.

But unions did help a whole bunch of the people the confederacy sought to keep enslaved so I suppose it’s not all that surprising. Evidently, the would also like to keep white workers from having good paying, secure jobs as well. But then that was always part of the confederate plan as well and the way to make that work is to rile up the racist lizard brain and get them all fighting over the scraps. Same as it ever was.

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