QOTD: Celinda Lake
by digby
Pollster Celinda Lake says:
“For the life of me, as a Democrat, I don’t understand why they’re not lashing out at the insurance companies for these practices,” said Lake, “I don’t understand why we aren’t far more aggressive.”
Neither do I. Maybe it’s because the Democrats think they are just being “good Americans.”
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War is peace, surveillance is privacy
by digby
So now they’re going full Orwell and claiming that government surveillance is actually protecting your privacy:
As Congress considers legislation to reform the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency, senior intelligence officials have said publicly that they’d be willing to modify key aspects of how one of the most controversial programs is run. But now, the top lawyers for the NSA and other intelligence agencies are pushing back on that idea, arguing that they should be allowed to continue building a massive database of phone records on every American. It’d be better for American’s privacy rights, they claim.
They argue that having the companies hold on to all our data instead of storing it in a huge government data base means that local and state authorities could use it more easily and that it would be accessed by shyster divorce lawyers and the like.
Patrick Kelley, the acting general counsel of the FBI, said the phone company data could be made available to “other levels of law enforcement enforcement from local, state and federal who want it for whatever law enforcement purposes they’re authorized to obtain it.” He also raised a frightening prospect: “Civil litigation could also seek to obtain it for such things as relatively mundane as divorce actions,” he said. “Who’s calling who with your spouse … So if the data is kept only by the companies than I think the privacy considerations certainly warrants scrutiny.”
That’s funny, especially considering the kinds of things we know the NSA has done. But be that as it may, this notion that we must keep the data forever just in case the government might want to use it in the future is the fundamental problem. I see no good reason why anyone should keep all this information forever, whether it be private companies or the government, simply because it might be useful to law enforcement. Just as we are not required to give the government every piece of paper we’ve ever sent or received (or the post office is not required to copy every piece of mail that passes through it’s hands and “hold” it) just in case law enforcement might want to use it some day, neither should we have to give the government our digital correspondence “just in case.”
I’m sure this particular group of very nice FBI and NSA employees would never do anything untoward with all that information they are storing. They sound like wonderful people with only our best interests at heart. But I’m afraid I just don’t have the same faith in everyone. In fact, having watched our own government lose its collective mind after 9/11 and invade countries that didn’t attack us, torture and imprison innocent people and build prison camps where the people detained are facing a kafkaesque nightmare because they allegedly can’t be tried and can’t be freed, you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t have a whole lot of faith that some future crisis won’t “require” some future Dick Cheney to use some of that information they’ve been hoarding in ways they promise us they’ll never use it today.
The party line here is that these listeners have convinced themselves that they must do all this lest some terrorist slips through their fingers. At yet, we have mass shootings every week in this country and the government follows constitutional requirements based upon the principle that there are dangers of living in a free society and we all must be willing to take the good with the bad. So I’m not convinced that it’s a surfeit of concern for American lives that’s driving this. And I’m very suspicious about just what is.
So no, they shouldn’t be allowed to run a dragnet on everyone in the world and keep the information stored in some vault just in case they want to search through someone’s data in the future. There’s nothing different about that than the old practice of keeping dossiers on every citizen and telling them they have nothing to worry about as long as they are model citizens and do nothing the government doesn’t think they should be doing. I think we know what to call a society like that.
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It’s Election Day–you know what to do.
by David Atkins
It’s Election Day today. For passive observers of politics, that means waiting until 8pm to see the election returns come in. For the more actively engaged, that means being the force that drives voters to the polls.
Some of our readers believe that elections are a fool’s errand, and that nothing will seriously change through electoral politics. I don’t think so. I think it matters a great deal who holds the apparatus of state power. But it’s a legitimate difference of opinion. Even so, if there’s only a small chance in the reader’s mind that I may be right, then isn’t it worth just one day of the 365 days a year spent grousing about the state of affairs, to take the chance and help drive progressive turnout?
Maybe you do believe that elections matter, but you’re shy and hate being on the phone or knocking on doors. Well, guess what? I’m a fellow introvert. I feel your pain. But I make myself do it, because it’s totally worth it. And if there’s just one day to overcome that emotional obstacle and be a participant in helping progressives win elected office, that day is today.
Even if you live a hundred miles from the nearest election, there are literally hundreds of races across America with the ability to use your extra push from remote. Most of those races are greatly understaffed, and some of the more local races–races to keep Michelle Rhee and fundamentalist zombies off our school boards and sprawl-loving politicians out of our mayor’s offices and city council daises, for example–may well be decided by just a few votes. These races matter. One of the only reasons Republicans are still relevant to the national conversation is that their voters regularly turn out in elections just like this, while ours often think they have better things to do.
Please help out today. Here’s how to get started.
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Your moment of Satanism
by digby
These must have been the same satan worshippers who were throwing tampons at nice Christian Republicans. We do that sort of thing.
Boooo!
h/t to Mike Lux, who has much more on this.
Who says the GOP isn’t the party of ideas anymore?
by digby
Here’s a handy list of possible GOP healthcare reforms:
Notice they didn’t include the one real GOP proposal: tort reform. It’s just too ridiculous.
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Eaten by their own dragon
by David Atkins
Here’s a study in two contrasting stories. First, we see President Obama tying the shutdown to Cuccinelli like an anchor to a drowning man:
Democrats gambled on Sunday that Virginia voters are angrier with Republicans over the shutdown than at Barack Obama for the botched health care rollout.
The president worked during an afternoon rally in the Washington suburb of Arlington to link the GOP candidate for governor, Ken Cuccinelli, with the wing of the national party he blames for paralysis.
“You’ve seen an extreme faction of the Republican Party that has shown again and again and again that they’re willing to hijack the entire party and the country and the economy and grind progress to an absolute halt if they don’t get 100 percent of what they want,” Obama told a crowd of 1,600 in a high school gymnasium.
“You cannot afford to have a governor who is thinking the same way,” he added, highlighting how furloughs hurt Virginia more than almost anywhere else. “That’s a practical job. They can’t afford to be an ideologue.”
But just in case you thought Republicans and their base would be chastened by the experience, there’s always Alabama:
Tuesday’s special primary runoff for an Alabama congressional seat is heading toward a photo finish — and emerging as a potential black eye for the Republican establishment forces that have converged on the race.
Despite a fierce, last-minute push from House GOP leaders and the business community to supply cash and endorsements to Bradley Byrne, public polling shows the former state senator in a tight race with Dean Young, a flame-throwing tea party contender with a penchant for controversial remarks.
A Wednesday poll conducted by the Republican consulting firm Cygnal showed Young, a wealthy real estate investor, with a 43.2 percent to 40.2 percent lead over Byrne among likely voters. Sixteen percent of those surveyed said they were undecided. The results were within the survey’s 3 percentage point margin of error.
The establishment Republicans have whipped their base into a fever pitch of hysteria. They can’t control them anymore. It’s going to play out like a bad monster movie, but one where the poor and the middle class are victimized along with the people who created the monster in the first place.
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Professional Journalism
by digby
On November 1, USDA reported that “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients will see their monthly benefits decrease” after the expiration of benefit increases enacted in the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA). But Fox News Sunday, NBC’s Meet The Press, ABC’s This Week, and CBS’ Face the Nation all failed to bring up the issue on the November 3 editions of their respective shows.
47 million Americans are affected.
Meet the Press found time to talk about Chris Christie’s chances for 2016, debate President Obama’s legacy and chat with two time loser Mitt Romney. This Week featured Rand Paul blubbering about duels and plagiarism. Face the Nation‘s panel chattered at length about the JFK assassination. Fox News Sunday gave what seemed like hours to Huckleberry Graham to opine on Benghazi and fetuses. None of them could spare a minute to mention that 47 million Americans are going to have less money for food this week.
I wonder what goodies they all nibbled in the green room before they went on the air. I hope they had some good smoked salmon and a mimosa or two. Just to calm the nerves.
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Dispatch from torture nation: “First do no harm” no longer operative
by digby
I have written about the participation of doctors and nurses in the post 9/11 torture regime for many years. The evidence has been there going back as far as 2004. I always thought the abandonment of the Hippocratic oath in service of thwarting hysterical Jack Bauer scenarios was among the most astonishing of all the violations of former taboos. From the black sites to Bagram to Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, medical personnel were implicated in torture.
Yet another report on the practice was released this past week:
The report of the Taskforce on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centres concludes that after 9/11, health professionals working with the military and intelligence services “designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees”.
Medical professionals were in effect told that their ethical mantra “first do no harm” did not apply, because they were not treating people who were ill.
The report lays blame primarily on the defence department (DoD) and the CIA, which required their healthcare staff to put aside any scruples in the interests of intelligence gathering and security practices that caused severe harm to detainees, from waterboarding to sleep deprivation and force-feeding.
The two-year review by the 19-member taskforce, Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror, supported by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) and the Open Society Foundations, says that the DoD termed those involved in interrogation “safety officers” rather than doctors. Doctors and nurses were required to participate in the force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strike, against the rules of the World Medical Association and the American Medical Association. Doctors and psychologists working for the DoD were required to breach patient confidentiality and share what they knew of the prisoner’s physical and psychological condition with interrogators and were used as interrogators themselves. They also failed to comply with recommendations from the army surgeon general on reporting abuse of detainees.
These policies are still in force.
And no one except those misfit grunts at Abu Ghraib have been punished for doing any of this. Not the architects, not the perpetrators, not the medical personnel who helped them do it, nobody. And there’s a reason for that:
President Barack Obama does not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies that led to the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday.
Obama last week authorized the release of a series of memos detailing the methods approved under President George W. Bush. In an accompanying statement, he said “it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice, that they will not be subject to prosecution.” He did not specifically address the policymakers.
Asked Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” about the fate of those officials, Emanuel said the president believes they “should not be prosecuted either and that’s not the place that we go.”
In his statement last week, the president said: “This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”
No need to look in the rearview mirror. Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. If only Edward Snowden had been a torturer perhaps he too could get such forgiving treatment from the US government.
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Partying (sadly) like it’s 1999
by digby
More proof that whatever growth we have in this economy, the effects aren’t being widely shared:
Last year the median wage hit its lowest level since 1998, revealing that at least half of American workers are being left behind as the economy slowly recovers from the Great Recession.
But at the top, wages soared — the latest indication in a long-running trend of increasing inequality, with income gains going to top earners while the majority of workers see stagnant or falling wages.
The median wage — half of workers make more, half less — came to $27,519 last year, virtually unchanged from 2011. Measured in 2012 dollars, the median wage was down $4.
The 2012 median wage was at its lowest level since 1998, when the median stood at $26,984.
From its all-time peak in 2007, the median wage was down $980. That means someone at the midpoint in pay worked 52 weeks last year but earned about the equivalent of working just 50 weeks at 2007 pay levels, the last peak year for the economy.
The good news is that the average wage is up to $42,498. The bad news is that:
…when the average wage grows but the median wage stagnates, it means that, statistically, only workers in the top half of the job market are experiencing increases. My analysis of SSA data shows the growth is mostly in the top quarter, which starts at just under $50,000 in annual pay.
In 2012, the data show, 67. 1 percent of workers earned less than the average, up from 66.6 percent in 2011 and 65.9 percent in 2000. When a rising share of workers makes less than the average wage, it is another sign that wage increases are taking place only high on the income ladder, not on every rung.
There’s money in this economy. And a few members of the upper middle class are getting a small taste. But it’s the 1% that’s still taking the largest share:
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Bright spot ‘o the day
by digby
This may not seem like much, but it’s actually a big deal:
A bright spot in the recent spate of body blows to reproductive rights: the Supreme Court has affirmed the unconstitutionality of Oklahoma’s absolute ban on medication abortion, dismissing the state’s appeal of the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling striking down the law and ending a long legal battle over women’s access to medication abortion and the non-surgical treatment of ectopic pregnancies in the state.
Rh Reality Check legal analysis:
The Supreme Court had earlier agreed to hear Cline v. Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice but sent the case back to the Oklahoma Supreme Court to answer what it saw as two questions of state law first. Those questions both addressed the scope of Oklahoma’s restrictions on medication abortion, including whether the law bans all abortions induced by medication and whether it also bans the preferred treatment for ectopic pregnancies. Last Tuesday, the Oklahoma Supreme Court definitively ruled that the law does outlaw all abortion medication, including those methods of terminating a pregnancy specifically approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The Robert Court’s order does not explain the justices’ reasoning for dismissing the challenge, only that it was “dismissed as improvidently granted.” And by declining to keep the case, the Supreme Court has, for now, signaled its unwillingness to look at state laws that ban specific abortion procedures that have been approved by the federal government.
That’s a good thing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean they’ve rejected the anti-abortion zealots’ preferred strategy of chipping away incrementally at a woman’s right to control her own body:
[T]he ruling does not answer whether the Supreme Court will weigh in on the narrower question, raised in states like Texas and Ohio, as to whether other specific medication abortion bans that target procedures not approved by the FDA are constitutional. So far, a divided federal appeals court has upheld an Ohio law that severely restricts medication abortions, and the issue is currently before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, following a lawsuit over the medication abortion regulations in Texas’ HB 2, that state’s massive anti-choice omnibus bill.
Still, this is an unambiguously good outcome for women all over the nation. Medical abortion was always seen as a way of empowering women to avoid the many roadblocks the anti-abortion zealots have set up over the years.
I’m frankly surprised this court decided to let this one go. I assume the anti-abortion members see better opportunities on the horizon to deny women their rights.
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