Month: November 2013

Pope Francis remembers that Jesus thing about money

by digby

It would appear that somebody’s been listening to hippie Jesus instead of puritan Jesus or John Galt Jesus:

Pope Francis has attacked unfettered capitalism as “a new tyranny”, urging global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality in the first major work he has authored alone as pontiff.

The 84-page document, known as an apostolic exhortation, amounted to an official platform for his papacy, building on views he has aired in sermons and remarks since he became the first non-European pontiff in 1,300 years in March.

In it, Francis went further than previous comments criticising the global economic system, attacking the “idolatry of money” and beseeching politicians to guarantee all citizens “dignified work, education and healthcare”.

He also called on rich people to share their wealth. “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills,” Francis wrote in the document issued on Tuesday.

“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”

The pope said renewal of the church could not be put off and the Vatican and its entrenched hierarchy “also need to hear the call to pastoral conversion”.

“I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security,” he wrote.

Women are still expected to be primarily baby making vessels unfortunately, but you have to admit that this message must be making poor little Paul Ryan have some profane thoughts he’s going to have to cop to the next time he goes to confession. Ayn Rand is screaming inside his head.

Popes and priest have always said this stuff of course. They just made it sound like it wasn’t a major problem in comparison to issues of lady parts. This pope appears to think hippie Jesus was on to something important that needs to be addressed. It’s good timing, I’ll say that.

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Lara Logan’s slap on the wrist

by digby

Lara Logan has been asked to take a leave of absence due to the Benghazi hoax. The press release doesn’t say for how long.  This is the “internal report” that led to the request:

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

My review found that the Benghazi story aired by 60 Minutes on October 27 was deficient in several respects:

–From the start, Lara Logan and her producing team were looking for a different angle to the story of the Benghazi attack. They believed they found it in the story of Dylan Davies, written under the pseudonym, “Morgan Jones”. It purported to be the first western eyewitness account of the attack. But Logan’s report went to air without 60 Minutes knowing what Davies had told the FBI and the State Department about his own activities and location on the night of the attack.

–The fact that the FBI and the State Department had information that differed from the account Davies gave to 60 Minutes was knowable before the piece aired. But the wider reporting resources of CBS News were not employed in an effort to confirm his account. It’s possible that reporters and producers with better access to inside FBI sources could have found out that Davies had given varying and conflicting accounts of his story.

–Members of the 60 Minutes reporting team conducted interviews with Davies and other individuals in his book, including the doctor who received and treated Ambassador Stevens at the Benghazi hospital. They went to Davies’ employer Blue Mountain, the State Department, the FBI (which had interviewed Davies), and other government agencies to ask about their investigations into the attack. Logan and producer Max McClellan told me they found no reason to doubt Davies’ account and found no holes in his story. But the team did not sufficiently vet Davies’ account of his own actions and whereabouts that night.

–Davies told 60 Minutes that he had lied to his own employer that night about his location, telling Blue Mountain that he was staying at his villa, as his superior ordered him to do, but telling 60 Minutes that he then defied that order and went to the compound. This crucial point – his admission that he had not told his employer the truth about his own actions – should have been a red flag in the editorial vetting process.

–After the story aired, the Washington Post reported the existence of a so-called “incident report” that had been prepared by Davies for Blue Mountain in which he reportedly said he spent most of the night at his villa, and had not gone to the hospital or the mission compound. Reached by phone, Davies told the 60 Minutes team that he had not written the incident report, disavowed any knowledge of it, and insisted that the account he gave 60 Minutes was word for word what he had told the FBI. Based on that information and the strong conviction expressed by the team about their story, Jeff Fager defended the story and the reporting to the press.

–On November 7, the New York Times informed Fager that the FBI’s version of Davies’ story differed from what he had told 60 Minutes. Within hours, CBS News was able to confirm that in the FBI’s account of their interview, Davies was not at the hospital or the mission compound the night of the attack. 60 Minutes announced that a correction would be made, that the broadcast had been misled, and that it was a mistake to include Davies in the story. Later a State Department source also told CBS News that Davies had stayed at his villa that night and had not witnessed the attack.

–Questions have been raised about the recent pictures from the compound which were displayed at the end of the report, including a picture of Ambassador Stevens’ schedule for the day after the attack. Video taken by the producer-cameraman whom the 60 Minutes team sent to the Benghazi compound last month clearly shows that the pictures of the Technical Operations Center were authentic, including the picture of the schedule in the debris.

–Questions have also been raised about the role of Al Qaeda in the attack since Logan declared in the report that Al Qaeda fighters had carried it out. Al Qaeda’s role is the subject of much disagreement and debate. While Logan had multiple sources and good reasons to have confidence in them, her assertions that Al Qaeda carried out the attack and controlled the hospital were not adequately attributed in her report.

–In October of 2012, one month before starting work on the Benghazi story, Logan made a speech in which she took a strong public position arguing that the US Government was misrepresenting the threat from Al Qaeda, and urging actions that the US should take in response to the Benghazi attack. From a CBS News Standards perspective, there is a conflict in taking a public position on the government’s handling of Benghazi and Al Qaeda, while continuing to report on the story.

–The book, written by Davies and a co-author, was published by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, part of the CBS Corporation. 60 Minutes erred in not disclosing that connection in the segment.

Al Ortiz
Executive Director of Standards and Practices
CBS News

That’s nice. But there’s more to it than that. Logan has a very distinct worldview and it shows in the stories she covers.

Remember, it wasn’t just the Benghazi story. She did several big 60 Minutes “exposés” on Afghanistan. And this is what she said to Marvin Kalb at the National Press Club about that war in 2011.

LARA LOGAN: What it means, what we originally– go back to your original aims when you invade– well, it wasn’t an invasion. The Afghans are very quick to point out that they were actually the ones that toppled the Taliban with U.S. help. There were less than several hundred U.S. personnel on the ground at the time. But the original aim was to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban and to insure that they were never able to threaten the national security interests of the United States ever again. That clearly is not the case.

And when you’re sitting down and you’re avoiding the hypocrisy of not putting the Taliban on the terror list because you want to preserve the right to sit down and negotiate with them and they’ll bring out every academic in Washington that they can find who will tell you that every insurgency in history has been won through negotiation and settlement, you don’t win it on the battlefield. Well, tell that to the Sri Lankans. I believe they just won their insurgency on the battlefield.

So, I mean for me, if you’re not– people think when I say this, that I’m advocating for war, I’m not advocating for war. I think if you’re going to go to war, you better go to war and you better win. But if you’re not, if you’re just going to loiter on the battlefield and mesaround with one disastrous political strategy after another, then get the hell out because you have no right to ask people to go and fight in your name because you’re lying to them.

The best analogy I can give you, what you’re doing to your U.S. troops on the ground, line up all hundred thousand or so of those troops, handcuff them behind their backs, give them a shove, send them straight into the Taliban guns. Because that’s effectively what you’re doing. The enemy is not in Afghanistan. The low hanging fruit, the expendable people, are in Afghanistan. The real enemy is across the border in Pakistan, and I’m not advocating for war in Pakistan. But there are a thousand things you could do to address that. As long as you are not going after the command and control and the true source of the enemy– and by the way, we have the capacity and the information to do that and we have not because of our foreign policy towards Pakistan– then you have no business being in the fight.

And when people say Karzai is not a strategic partner and he’s corrupt, really? So 30, 40 guys will strap on suicide bombs and they’ll go and blow themselves up in an attack on a U.S. base because they’re pissed off that the government’s corrupt? Give me a break. This is not about corruption. This is not about whether Karzai is a reliable strategic partner. That’s an excuse. That’s all it is.

MARVIN KALB: Cut it down to the chase. What do you think is really at the heart of the American effort now in Afghanistan?

LARA LOGAN: Get the hell out. That’s all we care about. It’s costing too much. We don’t want to pay for it, we don’t think the Afghans are worth a fight, it’s their problem and we want to get out of here.

MARVIN KALB: And at this particular point, if the U.S. were to work out a way of getting out without having accomplished its original purpose, then it sounds to me that you think it’s just been a waste?

LARA LOGAN: Yeah, it has, it’s been a waste. I mean, you have the locations. The Quetta Shura runs the Afghan war from the city of Quetta inside Pakistan.

MARVIN KALB: But to go in there, you’re crossing a national border.

LARA LOGAN: You don’t have to go in there, there’s plenty of ways. If you’ve got their phone numbers, as I know we have had for years, you don’t need to go across the border. 

MARVIN KALB: What do you do?

LARA LOGAN: You take them out the same way you took out al-Loki and Nek Muhammad and all the others that have been killed that way.

MARVIN KALB: Well.

LARA LOGAN: And you do it, you target not just the Quetta Shura, you target the Miran Shah Shura, the Peshawar Shura, the Haqqani Network. 

You take 24 to 48 hours out of your day where you target all the people who you know where they are and you send a message to the Pakistanis that putting American bodies in Arlington Cemetery is not an acceptable form of foreign policy.

Here is what she said a year later on America’s lily-livered policy in Afghanistan:

Which is very similar to the comments she made about Benghazi in her speech a month later:

I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil, its ambassadors will not be murdered and the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.

If CBS thinks her comments about Benghazi show a bias, her comments about Afghanistan and Pakistan show exactly the same one.   She thinks that powerful “dark forces” are trying to destroy our way of life and evidently believes they are capable of doing it.  She believes that the US should be sending in “clandestine warriors” and drones to “take people out” to send messages and exact revenge. She has a particular hang-up about Pakistan and apparently wants the US government to “teach them a lesson.” She identifies very closely with the military brass and her work seems to be aimed at criticizing the pusillanimous politicians in Washington who refuse to allow the Generals to take the gloves off and do what needs to be done.  That is a pretty immature worldview which I doubt the Generals she so admires share, even if they find her a useful political tool. (Generals tend to be a little bit more sophisticated than that.)

In other words, she’s a hardcore, but somewhat shallow, warhawk and her work needs to be seen through that filter. Perhaps 60 Minutes doesn’t care about that and is willing to label her as an advocate for a particular point of view within the military. But she must be labeled that way because that is what she is.

You can watch the whole 60 Minutes piece on Afghanistan here.
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Well, bowl me over with a feather

by digby

… the War of Tea Party Aggression doesn’t seem to be taking off as everyone predicted:

The Republican civil war erupted into full view this fall, and the establishment looked like it was about to shove the movement back in line.

But the early skirmishes ended with the tea party no weaker than it was.

And while the party’s internal fight will rage on, the opening battles suggest the establishment is just starting to see how much it will take to reclaim the power it has ceded to the movement in recent years.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s first big play: threaten to blacklist any consultant who does business with a key group taking on sitting Republicans.

The result: pretty much business as usual.

Meanwhile, members of Congress pleaded with corporate America to commit big money to support business-friendly candidates willing to take on the tea party.

The result: early interest but no coordinated effort to take out challengers.

Shocker, I know. Just when the Villagers all went on the record saying that the rubes had gone too far, it turns out that the Republicans aren’t actually doing much to constrain their crazies. I’m going to take a wild guess that this might have something to do with the fact that they think they can parlay 2014 into another 2010 and take back the Senate. That means they need their “wacko-birds” to come out in force.

I’ll expect a little bit more muscle will be applied to 2016 but even then, there’s only so much the establishment can do to stop this. These are real voters with a real agenda. The Tea Party is a serious grassroots movement.  And a few of them at least, happen to be billionaires who have more money than God.

They are the Republican Party. The mythical establishment consists of a few elected officials, some centrist pundits and a couple of businessmen. Think about it: raging Randroid General in the War on Women, Paul Ryan is considered a centrist elder statesman. The lunatics took over the asylum a long time ago.

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Villager garbage for lunch

by digby

Mr Double Down visits with the wingnuts:

The Affordable Care Act contains provisions for “death panels,” which decide which critically-ill patients receive care and which won’t, according to Mark Halperin, senior political analyst for Time magazine.

“It’s built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled,” Halperin told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.

Watch the whole thing to see just how shockingly extremist all the questions are and how blithely Halperin answers answers them as if it’s perfectly normal. (This particular comment is at the 8 minute mark.) Interestingly, he also agrees that there probably should be death panels because we can’t afford to keep older people alive when they get too expensive, so he’s actually a defender of the mythic liberal Soylent Green policy. (Of course, being a rich person who would never have to face such a question makes it a little more abstract for him than it is for the rest of us.)

I suppose we might ask why Mark Halperin is appearing on wingnut central in the first place. But then he vocally agrees with the host that there’s liberal bias in the press so I guess it makes sense.  Still, it’s just a little bit jarring to hear the King of the Village just stand by as this lunatic goes off on Obama’s alleged drug use (and apparently not for the first time.)  Halperin repeats what he’s evidently said before on the show which is that Obama wasn’t properly scrutinized in 2008. He does point out in the end that Republicans have been a teensy bit unreasonable with the filibuster and that it might be just a little unfair for one party to be allowed to pack the courts when it’s in the White House while another is not. Fairnbalanced and unafraid. .

But watch out folks, the tales of the death panels are going to come out, Halperin promises. And they need to because older people are allegedly losing their coverage and can’t afford end of life care. Hey, that’s what he said.  He’s obviously a big expert. You can look it up.

Seriously, this is the kind of stuff the Village pundits vomit up with regularity.  Half -cocked cocktail party conversation among elites about health care costs (only for for the polloi) is passed off as some sort of expertise and is always couched in “we can’t afford it” and there has to be “sacrifice”  and “skin in the game” even though none of these people will ever have a moment’s stress over their own health care costs and the only people who will have to “pay” are the middle class and the poor. It’s enough to make you sick.

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Who knew? (Even presidential turkey pardoning is BS …)

by digby

Sigh. I’ve kind of loved the Turkey pardon thing because well … I’m a sap. But my Thanksgiving bubble has been burst once again:

Ronald Reagan was technically the first president to “pardon” a Thanksgiving turkey, in 1987 — but he did it as a joke to distract the press from scandal. Reporters had been asking the president if he planned to grant a pardon to key Iran-Contra figures such as Oliver North and John Poindexter, and Reagan quipped that he would have pardoned that year’s turkey had it not been en route to a petting zoo already.

Eventually, Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush made the turkey pardon an annual ritual in 1989. But it all started as a glib one-liner meant to deflect attention away from White House lawbreaking. Hardly a sacred convention.

Reagan was actually quite a jerk.

But nothing will ever beat this horrific — and hilarious — turkey pardon event.

“I’m in charge of the turkey …”
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Chart ‘O the Day

by digby

Where the minimum wage workers are:

I think what I find most shocking is the fact that minimum wage workers exist in the financial industry (what do they do?) or that “professional and business services” have such a high proportion of them.

But in any case, there are a whole lot of people in this rich country making about $290.00 a week (assuming they even work full time.) That ain’t much folks.

Update: Kevin Drum offered this related chart ‘o the day:

The United States is one of the richest countries in the world, with a top 1 percent that’s seen its income triple or more in the past three decades. And yet, we also do the least to fight the rising tide of income inequality. Government programs in America reduce the level of inequality by only 26 percent. Nobody else is so stingy.
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Why you should care about NSA surveillance

by digby

This short film by Brian Knappenberger about why you should care about the surveillance state is a must see.

Yes, yes, yes. This is the point civil libertarians have been trying to make from the beginning. You should care, particularly since the government has been lying about what it’s using this information for and the results it’s getting from collecting it.

I had a talk on Sunday’s Virtually Speaking with Marcy Wheeler that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. This isn’t an abstract issue. The NSA lawbreaking that has been going on for over a decade is overwhelming, under both administrations. And the scope of the dragnet combined with the process they use to entrap and coerce witnesses makes anyone with a few degrees of separation from a suspect a target. (Which means all of us …)

And that doesn’t even get into the extreme danger to democracy discussed in the film. The history of government misuse of these powers is clear for anyone to see. Unless we truly believe that humans, Americans in particular, have been perfected to the point where there’s no reason to ever mistrust them, the scope of this spying power and the reckless assumption of authority by the people wielding it should make everyone care about this.

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Climate change could be a lot worse than we even thought

by David Atkins

If this is true, it’s absolutely terrifying:

A comprehensive new study of atmospheric levels of methane, an important greenhouse gas released by leaky oil and gas operations and livestock, has found much higher levels over the United States than those estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency and an international greenhouse gas monitoring effort. The paper, “Anthropogenic emissions of methane in the United States,” is being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study, combining ground and aerial sampling of the gas with computer modeling, is the most comprehensive “top down” look so far at methane levels over the United States, providing a vital check on “bottom up” approaches, which have tallied estimates for releases from a host of sources — ranging from livestock operations to gas wells.

More study is needed on this topic, but if it’s true we are in a lot of trouble. The world is already far, far behind the reductions in emissions we need to stop runaway catastrophic climate change even at the current estimated rates of emissions.

If emissions are actually greater and faster than estimated, it’s impossible to overstate the level of alarm that needs to be raised. No other issue on the planet even comes close in importance or consequence.

If my generation turns out to be a lost generation until we die, struggling and unable to achieve the American Dream, our children will survive and help us make things better. But if we allow the climate to spin out of control until the earth is barely habitable, it will destroy of the futures of all our generations to come.

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Moment of zen

by digby

This still not as weird as the original:

Here’s the original. You be the judge.

Activists are losing patience on immigration reform and for good reason

by digby

The president got into a back and forth with a heckler today over immigration reform:

It’s nice that he didn’t have the young fellow removed and engaged him respectfully. His answer was what one might expect from any president. Nation of laws,compromise, yadda, yadds, yadda. But this guy doesn’t believe the law will be changed and wants the president to use his power to stop the deportations through an executive order. And for good reason:

Conservative Media Use Rule Change As An Excuse For GOP Not To Act On Immigration Reform

Rush Limbaugh After Rules Change: “Amnesty Ought To Be Dead In The Water.” On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh listed several actions Republicans could take in the wake of Senate Democrats’ rule change on filibusters, saying “all Obama agenda items that make it to the Senate floor should be objected to, at every juncture,” including immigration reform. He went on to say: 

LIMBAUGH: Republicans should never vote in favor of another Obama initiative, no matter how benign — unless it’s a Republican measure that benefits Republicans in a way that Democrats find [intelligible]. And this includes amnesty. Amnesty ought to be dead in the water.

Of course, the problem is that the Republicans want amnesty. The problem is, you know you look at it from the outside, you almost would conclude that there are some Republicans who actually wish they were Democrats. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 11/22/13] 

Laura Ingraham Encouraged Republicans To Refuse To Work With Democrats On Immigration Following Filibuster Change. During an interview with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on her radio show, Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham agreed with McConnell’s statement that the rule change was an example of President Obama’s “power grab,” and suggested Republicans refuse to work with Democrats on immigration following the filibuster move, which she likened to being hit in the face “with a two-by-four.” She continued: 

INGRAHAM: The idea of working with Democrats after we’ve seen the fraud of Obamacare, the lies about Obamacare, policies canceled — all those lies, now this. Should Republicans — should Republicans work with the Democrats on the issue of immigration given, or any major issue, given what they’ve proven themselves capable of? [Courtside Entertainment Group, The Laura Ingraham Show, 11/22/13] 

Ed Henry: Filibuster Reform “Could Poison The Well” Against Obama’s Agenda, Including Immigration Reform. Discussing the rule change on Fox News, chief White House correspondent Ed Henry claimed Republicans would now be less likely to work with Democrats on immigration reform, saying that “what it could mean in the long run for [President Obama’s] agenda is that it could really poison the well even further on a partisan basis and get Republicans –who are already a determined opposition against much of his agenda: immigration reform, grand bargain, budget deal, you name it — even more angry about this.” [Fox News, America’s News HQ, 11/21/13] 

FoxNews.com: “Any Prospect For Compromise” On Immigration Reform “Is Now That Much Fainter.” A FoxNews.com article repeated the GOP claim that the parliamentary move “has poisoned an already tainted well,” adding: “Any prospect for compromise on items ranging from immigration legislation to a fiscal deal to tax reform is now that much fainter.” The article went on to quote a Republican strategist reinforcing the claim: 

“There’s no question that the move by Harry Reid will make it much tougher to get anything done between now and 2014,” GOP strategist and former long-time Senate aide John Ullyot told FoxNews.com.

“In the short-term, it’s a wrecking ball through any efforts that were underway previously to have both parties work together on key bills.” [FoxNews.com, 11/22/13]

In fact, Republicans have repeatedly refused to take action on immigration reform so this is just another excuse. Read on.

It’s nice that the president still believes that together he and the congress can come to some sort of agreement over immigration. One would certainly think they could since it is in both parties’ political interest to do it. But as the shutdown and filibuster controversy (among dozens of other examples)show, we are not dealing with a normal political party and there is little reason to think that the normal incentives will work on this issue — or any issue — for quite some time.

For the people who are dealing with record deportations (and yes, the president failed to address that reality) waiting around for the Republicans to be restored to sanity doesn’t seem like a good idea. They’d like the president to do what he can, today, to end this policy. And I can’t blame them.

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