Another casualty of the drug war
by digby
I can’t believe they gave him jail time to begin with.
If we survive as a species there will be a time when we look back on this sort of thing as see it as barbaric and primitive as dunking witches and tar and feathering. It’s stunningly idiotic.
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A Good Democrat
by digby
This is why I was proud that Blue America supported Barbara Buono for Governor of New Jersey even as Democrats — despite the fact that it allowed arch conservative Chris Christie to become the phony avatar of bipartisan centrism — decided to sit out the race. As you can see in this segment with Chris Hayes last night, she tells it like it is:
I especially enjoyed her response to Chris’ recitation of the emerging beltway CW that we need to re-introduce earmarks so that politicians can be bribed into bipartisanship. (“We do?”) I’m going to guess that because of her experience in New Jersey politics she knows very well that this sort of thing usually only accrues to the benefit of corrupt politicians who can always find reasons not to support government — unless they get a pay-off.
In any case, she’s right. There’s a difference between “transactional” politics and compromise. The first is form of legalized corruption and the second is the normal process of democracy. But when you’re dealing with a corrupt system that’s awash in money, the first may be the only way you get anything other than gridlock. What a racket.
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“Economic self-mutilation”
by digby
Krugman’s column yesterday is one of the scariest pieces I’ve read in a long time:
What passes these days for sound policy is in fact a form of economic self-mutilation, which will cripple America for many years to come. Or so say researchers from the Federal Reserve, and I’m sorry to say that I believe them.[…]
How so? According to the paper (with the unassuming title “Aggregate Supply in the United States: Recent Developments and Implications for the Conduct of Monetary Policy”), our seemingly endless slump has done long-term damage through multiple channels. The long-term unemployed eventually come to be seen as unemployable; business investment lags thanks to weak sales; new businesses don’t get started; and existing businesses skimp on research and development.
What’s more, the authors — one of whom is the Federal Reserve Board’s director of research and statistics, so we’re not talking about obscure academics — put a number to these effects, and it’s terrifying. They suggest that economic weakness has already reduced America’s economic potential by around 7 percent, which means that it makes us poorer to the tune of more than $1 trillion a year. And we’re not talking about just one year’s losses, we’re talking about long-term damage: $1 trillion a year for multiple years.[…]
And it is, as I said, a bitter irony, because one main reason we’ve done so little about unemployment is the preaching of deficit scolds, who have wrapped themselves in the mantle of long-run responsibility — which they have managed to get identified in the public mind almost entirely with holding down government debt.
This never made sense even in its own terms. As some of us have tried to explain, debt, while it can pose problems, doesn’t make the nation poorer, because it’s money we owe to ourselves. Anyone who talks about how we’re borrowing from our children just hasn’t done the math.
True, debt can indirectly make us poorer if deficits drive up interest rates and thereby discourage productive investment. But that hasn’t been happening. Instead, investment is low because of the economy’s weakness. And one of the main things keeping the economy weak is the depressing effect of cutbacks in public spending — especially, by the way, cuts in public investment — all justified in the name of protecting the future from the wildly exaggerated threat of excessive debt.
Is there any chance of reversing this damage? The Fed researchers are pessimistic, and, once again, I fear that they’re probably right. America will probably spend decades paying for the mistaken priorities of the past few years.
I won’t say just how complicit the Democrats have been in this. You already know. And from what we’re seeing so far, the most probable next Democratic administration will likely be no better:
Clinton, who has sprinkled her post-administration addresses with consistent calls for nonpartisan, evidence-based, compromise-seeking governance, appeared to flirt with supporting the idea of trimming entitlements in order to reach the infamous grand budget bargain: “What has worked is a compromise where yes, we raise revenues for a certain period, we go and look at entitlements to see what is fair and can be done without really disadvantaging either existing beneficiaries or people who are going to rely on those programs.”
One hopes she and her team are looking at this ongoing government slashing with the alarm that’s required and are creating some new policies and rhetoric to reflect the new reality. Austerity and long term debt fetishism as a convenient way to prove your “grown-up” bonafides is killing us.
John Cassidy at The New Yorker has more on this paper and calls the results “hysteresis”, something which Krugman was talking about years ago.
No accountability for authority
by digby
A little tiny piece of good news about an otherwise depressing subject:
Today in Texas, former prosecutor and judge Ken Anderson pled guilty to intentionally failing to disclose evidence in a case that sent an innocent man, Michael Morton, to prison for the murder of his wife. When trying the case as a prosecutor, Anderson possessed evidence that may have cleared Morton, including statements from the crime’s only eyewitness that Morton wasn’t the culprit. Anderson sat on this evidence, and then watched Morton get convicted. While Morton remained in prison for the next 25 years, Anderson’s career flourished, and he eventually became a judge.
In today’s deal, Anderson pled to criminal contempt, and will have to give up his law license, perform 500 hours of community service, and spend 10 days in jail. Anderson had already resigned in September from his position on the Texas bench.
What makes today’s plea newsworthy is not that Anderson engaged in misconduct that sent an innocent man to prison. Indeed, while most prosecutors and police officers are ethical and take their constitutional obligations seriously, government misconduct–including disclosure breaches known as Brady violations–occurs so frequently that it has become one of the chief causes of wrongful conviction.
What’s newsworthy and novel about today’s plea is that a prosecutor was actually punished in a meaningful way for his transgressions.
As the article goes on to discuss at some length, this is an incredibly rare occurrence. We simply do not punish government officials who knowingly put innocent people in jail. In fact, we often reward them, even after it’s known that they did what they did.
I think a lot of this stems from our culture’s celebration of government using whatever means possible to imprison “bad guys” (the smug “they got Al Capone on income tax evasion” thing.) And what that translates to is a belief that they must be guilty of something or the prosecutors wouldn’t have done what they did. And sometimes they are guilty of something but the government can’t prove it. So they make something up. Which isn’t justice.
And just as often they simply want to close cases and win prosecutions and they either don’t care or refuse to believe they’re wrong. In some cases, these prosecutors and police are simply corrupt. And yet we have decided that it’s better to simply release the victims of these wrongful prosecutions and, at best, compensate them with some money for their trouble. Apparently, it was decided that punishing corrupt and negligent authorities was not going to be part of our system of justice.
Rogue cops and prosecutors going unpunished is the rule rather than the exception. In Illinois, two police officers whose improperly grueling interrogation techniques led to the wrongful conviction of Juan Rivera and others were not penalized when their 3rd degree tactics came to light. Rather, they were recently hired at taxpayer expense to teach interrogation courses to other police officers around the state.
A recent study found prosecutorial misconduct in nearly one-quarter of all capital cases in Arizona. Only two of those prosecutors have been reprimanded or punished. This led the Arizona Republic to conclude:
There seldom are consequences for prosecutors, regardless of whether the miscarriage of justice occurred because of ineptness or misconduct. In fact, they are often congratulated.
I think the rationale for this is the same one they use for failing to punish the CIA torturers — if we prosecute them they will be unwilling to take chances in the future and then criminals/terrorists will kill us all in our beds. This has always struck me as a fairly insulting indictment of public servants who take oaths to our constitution. It implies that unless they are given immunity in advance from any accountability they will refuse to do their job to protect and serve. And frankly, I don’t think that’s fair to them. Indeed, what’s happened is the opposite: there’s no advantage to being a straight arrow and following the rules so the incentives go the other way.
This is a sickness throughout our culture. Government authorities at all levels, from the cops who overuse the taser because they know there will be no ramifications if their torture leaves no mark to the top Justice Department torture advocates who are now feted as “experts” and heroes, there is little accountability. And it tars all the ones who do follow the rules of the constitution and just plain human decency with the same taint.
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It may be getting hot but at least the job creators will have air conditioning
by digby
Heat waves will kill about 10 times more people in the Eastern United States in 45 years than they did at the turn of this century, according to a new projection from researchers.
The good news:
It will mostly be the parasitical old people who are leaching from the system with their insanely generous Medicare and Social Security and babies of people who need food stamps.
It’s a deficit reducer!
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We’re going to win
by David Atkins
Remember back just a decade ago when this would have been unthinkable?
When, as most everyone expects, Gov. Neil Abercrombie signs into law same-sex marriage here in the coming days, it may almost seem like a routine event. Hawaii is poised to be among 16 states to approve gay marriage, along with Illinois and shortly after Minnesota, New Jersey and Rhode Island.
But the step in Hawaii has special resonance because the contemporary battle over same-sex marriage was born here two decades ago. Such marriages existed nowhere when Ninia Baehr and Genora Dancel, along with two other couples, filed what seemed like an utterly quixotic lawsuit seeking a marriage license. To near universal shock, Hawaii’s Supreme Court granted them a victory in 1993, ruling that a refusal to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry was discriminatory and illegal.
It was the first judicial expression of an idea that soon caught fire across the country and the world.
Things can often seem hopeless. For years and even decades it can seem as if opposition to common decency is just too stiff, and that justice will never be served. But then the dam breaks and suddenly what had seemed unthinkable starts to become mainstream.
It’s admittedly harder on economics than on social issues. The big money boys don’t care much what people do with their private parts. Wall Street is more interested in controlling people’s back pockets than their front zippers. But times are changing on that front, too. It’s going to take some time. It’s going to seem impossible, and there are going to be setbacks.
But just as with marriage equality, we are going to win. We’re going to win because the history of middle class peoples being slowly ground into poverty suggests that they don’t tend to take it lying down. We’re going to win because the only reason the plutocrats have been able to escape their electoral comeuppance so far is by driving a wedge of racial and sexual resentment into a generation of people who are now aging out of the electorate with no one as easily conned to replace them. We’re going to win because economic and environmental realities require us to win, or else watch the planet burn and societies be driven into two-class feudalism.
Big economic and political change works like punctuated equilibrium. Nothing changes for a long time–until suddenly it does. And then everything changes quickly.
That change is coming. Don’t give up and don’t despair. We’re going to win this.
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More excrement than sex
by digby
Michael Kinsley’s writing has often been downright weird lately but lord, when he’s good he’s very, very good. His review of Halperin and Heilman’s Double Down is the best review since NY Times Restaurant critic Pete Wells portrayed Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant as one of Dante’s circles of hell.
You have to read it all, but here’s just a little taste:
There is actually no vomit in the scene the authors describe as “vomitous.” It’s just their way of writing vividly. They’re not snobs. They actually have a weakness for colorful vernacular, with a special fondness for a particular bodily function. And it’s not the usual one. The many references to excrement — people serving it to one another on a bun, people burying one another in it and so on — are . . . are . . . help me, I need a word here. Well, they’re vomitous. This may be the first political book ever with more excrement than sex.
They are fond of retrograde (old-fashioned) or simply odd similes and metaphors. For Senator John McCain to endorse Romney “would have seemed as likely as a terrier reciting Tennyson.” The economic adviser Gene Sperling was “enamored of his work in the way that Dean Martin enjoyed martinis.” And alliteration: McCain’s endorsement “was based on a mixture of caprice, calculation and comparative chagrin.” President Obama and Vice President Biden developed a “personal peachiness” (i.e., they liked each other), after starting out as “chalk and Camembert” (i.e., they didn’t like each other). The usual expression is “chalk and cheese” — I don’t know what that “Camembert” is about. Romney didn’t like the Huntsman family and the Huntsmans “vice versa’d the vitriol.” But the authors don’t always get it precisely right. “Major-domo” means a servant or butler — not, as they seem to think, a bigshot “muckety-muck.”
George Bush the Elder and the Younger refer to themselves as “41” and “43.” But do Clinton and Obama refer to themselves as “42” and “44”? And do people really call the Oval Office “the Oval” for short? That is how Halperin and Heilemann refer to them, and their workplace. Obama is POTUS. The first lady is FLOTUS. Obama’s campaign staff is referred to as “the Obamans” or “Obamaworld” or, bizarrely, “Chicago” (where the campaign headquarters were). Romney’s entourage is “Romneyworld” or “Boston.” Romney himself is “the Bay Stater.” When Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey enters the drama, he and his staff are referred to as “Trenton.” It’s like Shakespeare (in this sense only) — the merging of the nobleman and his seat: Lancaster, Norfolk and so on.
Does that ever describe the Halperin-Heileman style. (For more on that read Marc Tracey’s piece in TNR.)
I so loathed their 2008 book Game Change that I never finished it. The disgusting lack of human decency in the way they treated a dying woman was more than I could take. This one doesn’t sound like it’s much of an improvement.
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Tweety the 7th grader
by digby
There is nobody in politics today who I dislike more than Chris Christie. But damned if Chris Matthews isn’t going to make me defend him. From Huffpost Hill:
Matthews was speaking at Thinkfest, a weeklong event sponsored by Philadelphia magazine at the Rittenhouse Hotel, when magazine editor Tom McGrath asked Matthews’ take on Christie’s potential 2016 bid. ‘Two days after Election Day, Chris Christie has crushed his opponent. Is he gonna be the Republican …’ began McGrath. ‘The one I feel for is his wife,’ Matthews cut in. After a brief pause, some chuckled as McGrath asked, ‘Why’s that?’ ‘Did you just say, ‘crush?” Matthews said. ‘I mean, use your imagination.’ The crowd erupted.” Goldman tells us the crowd contained many highschoolers
Matthews likes Christie a lot so it’s surprising to see him turn the juvenile insults he tortured Hillary Clinton with in 2008 on him. But I guess he just can’t help himself.
A great ad on bullying in school
by David Atkins
This is a fantastic French ad on bullying in school.:
The end of the ad loosely translates to “A workday doesn’t look like this. What about a school day? Bullying at School.”
As someone who was homeschooled until college, this is what freaks me out most about schools. I don’t understand why kids are allowed to be fully in control of school culture, why teachers and principals aren’t given more leeway to deal with these issues without preposterous overboard “zero tolerance policies.” I don’t understand why behavior that would be criminally illegal and civilly actionable in adulthood, is allowed when the assailants are under the age of majority in a trapped space where the victimized children have no choice but to be if they want a decent future.
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Colbert and the Dolphins
by digby
The football bullying scandal, that is:
I hope you were able to watch all the way through to the part where Tucker Carlson (back to sporting a very small bow tie, I notice) asserts that anti-bullying is just a fad like low carb diets. The implication is that as soon as people get tired of being decent and teaching their kids to be decent we can go back to ganging up on the misfits and making their lives a living hell again, thank God. It is the natural order. If you’re a little elite princeling like Tucker Carlson anyway.
(And remember. Poor Tucker was allegedly traumatized by being approached by a gay man once and had to bash his head in in retribution, so he’s definitely someone who can speak to the issue.)
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