Month: November 2013

The day that will live in infamy

by digby

It occurred to me this week that very few people who are younger than I am can remember the Kennedy assassination — which means that this commemoration is a lot like the memories of Roosevelt’s death were to me when I was a little kid. Ancient history.

I was in the second grade in Wichita Kansas where my father was working for a defense contractor maintaining the nuclear missile silos. My teacher came into the room sobbing and told us all that we were going home, that the president had been killed. All the adults I saw for the next couple of weeks seemed to be shell-shocked, even my parents, who were big Kennedy haters.

Anyway, the old saying goes that everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news and I expect that’s true.  And I don’t think you can fully understand my generation without realizing that this was probably the most important national event of our young lives. The president was assassinated. To people my age that was not an abstract concern. It was something that happened. And it was only a few years later that it was further seared into our consciousness with the killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the attempt on George Wallace. You have to understand that to kids who grew up in that time, this was normal. 

People think the hippies were just a bunch of kids doing drugs (and they were) but there was a real message behind their “peace and love” campaign that sprang from this violence. And the young revolutionaries that everyone now sees as some left wing version of the Michigan Militia weren’t responding to something like the horrifying prospect of health insurance for everyone. They were (at least in part) responding to the fact that our leaders were being killed. There was a sense of urgency. Something’s happening here …

I’ve been watching all these remembrances over the past couple of weeks realizing that it’s the last time anyone will really care much about this. It will soon pass completely into the history books and that will be that. But all these documentaries with archival footage have reminded me just why — aside from the horrific act itself — it’s had such a hold on our national imagination and why it’s created such fodder for conspiracy theories. Certain facts of this assassination are simply astonishing and frankly make the official version hard to believe.

First of all, there are the politics of the time, which many of you will find very familiar. The following leaflet was handed out on the day Kennedy arrived in Dallas:

This was an ad taken out in the Dallas Morning News the day of the assassination:

WELCOME MR. KENNEDY TO DALLAS. . . . . .A CITY so disgraced by a recent Liberal smear attempt that its citizens have just elected two more Conservative Americans to public office. . . .A CITY that is an economic “boom town,” not because of Federal handouts, but through conservative economic and business practices. . . .A CITY that will continue to grow and prosper despite efforts by you and your administration to penalize it for its non-conformity to New Frontierism. . . .A CITY that rejected your philosophy and policies in 1960 and will do so again in 1964–even more emphatically than before. ..

Plus ça change and all that rot, right? This is why I tend to scoff just a tiny bit when people assure me that the right has only recently become a bunch of radicals.

That’s the political environment in which this assassination took place. And then we had the shooter revealed to have been someone with extreme left wing views, who had defected to the Soviet Union and then was let back into the country —- and he was repeatedly paraded around before the cameras like Miss America at which point he was himself assassinated on live television. You can’t blame people for being skeptical that this event was the simple work of mad men and lone wolves. In fact, these circumstances guaranteed that conspiracy theories would abound.

Despite people’s assurances one way or another, the fact is that we will never know definitively if there was a conspiracy or if Oswald acted alone. (Well, unless there is irrefutable documentation somewhere that’s been hidden.) But it is not unreasonable to be suspicious of the official accounts, that’s for sure. That’s not to say that this means the government was somehow responsible, just that it had good reason to want to close the books on the case, in a simple way, as soon as it could. Sometimes governments determine that finding the truth, whether a trial or in an investigation, could be so destabilizing that they decide “justice” is less important than confidence and security.  (I think we can see echoes of that sort of thinking in our civic lives today…)

The good news is that we baby boomers are soon to shuffle off our mortal coils and that will over time leave these mid-20th century obsessions to the history books. But I would recommend that young people look at those documents I published above and recognize what they mean — the right wing has always been the right wing. The left reinventing the wheel every few years in order to counteract the “growing radicalization” of the right is a big waste of energy. They’ve always been radical. And by assuming they aren’t,  they’ve been allowed to assume more and more political power.

Update: Dennis Hartley wrote a good post about assassination films a while back.

The reality of climate change isn’t just troubling. It’s pants-wettingly alarming.

by David Atkins

If you do nothing else today, please check out Gaius Publius’ third post in his important series on climate change, in which he details the extinction event that awaits us at our current rate of carbon emissions. It’s far too extensive to remotely do justice to here, but below is a snippet:

For a very long period, from the Cambrian until about 15 million years ago, global temperatures have swung widely, spiking up to +7°C or more, and down to –2°C, measured against modern (“age of man”) average temperature.

▪ More recently we entered a period of ice ages, in which global temperatures rarely exceeded 2°C above the modern norm. During this period, hominids evolved. Late in this period, man (homo sapiens) evolved.

▪ Then 12,000 years ago, we entered a time (the Holocene, “today”) in which average global temperatures stay within a very narrow range, ±½°C of the global average for the period. For the last 12,000 years, we’ve seen almost no global fluctuation.

During this period, man settles down, becomes a farmer and builds cities. Our lives today — civilized, settled, technological — are products of the Holocene and are entirely encompassed by it…

Got that? Our entire growth as a species and subsequent civilization has occurred during a period of remarkably stable climate.

Here’s where we’re going:

Now let’s look at the future. This is the heart of this piece, the last in our introduction to the global warming story. Where are we going and when will we get there? In the second essay in this series, I wrote (emphasis added):

If we go to 3°C warmer, we may go to 7°C or beyond

For a reason I’ll discuss next time, if global warming is man-made — and few unbought scientists think otherwise — then 3°C warming may well be just the halfway point to the full disaster. By that I mean, because of the way the socio-political process works, the “never stop burning carbon” scenario could easily take us right past 3°C to a 7°C (12½°F) warmer world — in the worst case, by 2100 — and perhaps beyond.

That’s double the compression of Hansen’s 3°C [by 2100] scenario — it means 3°C warmer by the mid-2050s and 7°C warmer by the end of the century. The discussion of that outcome is also in the IPCC literature, the same literature Hansen used to make his mass-extinction prediction. This is their own worst-case scenario. It’s not a prediction, but it’s one of the possibilities. …

For a look at times when the earth was as hot as 7°C above pre-Industrial norms, you have to look at the Mesozoic Era and earlier …

That’s an unusual symmetry, from a +7°C spike (or more) in the deep past to a +7°C spike (or more) in the very near future. What’s different about the modern spike is the time it will take to create it. Each of those spikes in the Paleozoic Era (in orange on the second chart) occurred across tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

The temperature spike we’re creating, at our end of the chart, could well occur within the next 100–200 years. In the most chaotic situation, if governments have almost no control of populations, +7°C by 2100 becomes much more likely. No one will be able to put the brakes on carbon emissions.

Hansen says that +3°C will trigger a 20–50% extinction scenario. Think what +7°C will do. We might survive as a species (we’re awfully smart), but the world will certainly see another Great Dying.

There’s much, much more to the post than just this. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

The reality of this issue above all but also other pressing issues is part of why I argue that the cost of inaction is far higher than the risk of action on issues like the filibuster. Yes, it’s true that by making our processes more democratic and subject to radical change, we put ourselves in danger should a Tea Party ever rise to power.

But then, if that does happen we’re screwed anyway. Keeping along the status quo doesn’t help us much more than the Tea Party can hurt us. If we don’t start to act with some urgency, it won’t be worth being involved in politics, anyway. At that point it won’t be about fixing the system, but rather surviving its breakdown.

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End of day feel-good treat

by digby

We don’t have to use plastic bags. Really.

What I learned about women this week

by digby

1.) We are shrieking harpies whose hysterical behavior is responsible for unhappy marriages.

2.) The pay gap is simply a reflection of the fact that we are lazy and/or uncommitted to the job.

If it weren’t for Kim Kardashian keeping it real for all of us I just don’t know where we’d be:

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

Some important perspective from Tom Tomorrow 

by digby

Yes, it’s a mess. But consider the alternative:

Support independent cartooning: join Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!

(Cartoon via Daily Kos Comics)

Real Americans should be willing to “do a little starving”

by digby

This should be fun. It looks like conservatives are starting to turn on their own voters. Michelle Goldberg reviews the new book by Charlotte Hayes called When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? A Southern Lady Asks the Impertinent Question.

A chapter on the foreclosure crisis and crushing student debt, for example, is called “White Trash Money Management.” “There are, I thus adduce, two keys to not being White Trash: having a job and paying your bills on time,” Hays sniffs. “The first is getting more difficult in this economy, but it is still White Trash to go on disability if you aren’t positively unable to lift a finger.”

Hays’s work is saturated with that partiuclar kind of right-wing smugness born of the conviction that one’s willingness to express common prejudices is a sign of free-thinking audacity. What’s interesting is where it’s directed—not at liberals or their sacred cows, but at fat, broke, ordinary Americans. “We look like hell as a nation, and fat people bear a large brunt of responsibility for this,” she writes. “I can remember when going to New York meant seeing beautiful, pencil-thin people in stylish clothes on Fifth Avenue. Where are they now? The other day I saw a fat guy in polyester in my favorite New York restaurant.” Heaven forfend! She’s so delighted with her description of diabetes as “the talismanic White Trash disease” that she uses it twice.

Nice. If conservatives don’t want liberal elites to vote for them and don’t want African Americans to vote for them and don’t want Latinos to vote for them and now don’t want fat, white people to vote for them, just how the hell do they think they can put together a majority?

Goldberg points out that this isn’t the only sign that the conservative movement may be dropping their good ole boy act. She discusses the popularity of the snotty Fox fop Stuart Varney whose plummy accent makes Prince Charles sound like a dockworker by comparison and the infamous Charles Murray who’s recently taken to deriding the white working class in an apparent effort to demonstrate that the only people in America who are worth a damn are in his immediate family:

And now we have this nasty little book, which has received favorable coverage in The National Review, The Washington Times and The Weekly Standard. Writing in the latter, Judy Bachrach called it a “plaintive tract…a serious political one, in fact.” In a sense, Bachrach is right. Hays’s flip dehumanization of struggling people does have a serious purpose. It’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore inequality’s ravages or to blame them on gay marriage or snotty university professors. Conservatives find themselves faced with a choice: either acknowledge that our economic system is failing the American people, or deride the American people for failing our economic system.

Hays opts for the latter. Her book’s message is essentially the same as Murray’s: Americans are falling behind because they are lazy and dissolute. She even mocks the idea that full-time work alone should be enough to escape poverty. The colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth, she writes, “knew you had to work full time—and then some—and maybe still do a little starving.”

If this is a trend, it portends a huge change. The faux populist, neo-confederate, Joe the Plumber image of the Republican Party has been essential to its ability to maintain its edge, even though it represents a minority of the country. Calling these folks “white trash” has been fighting words for a long time. If they keep it up some of them might start looking at their own bank accounts and wondering if maybe voting in the same party as African Americans and feminazis isn’t so bad after all.

I just can’t wait to hear what Rush Limbaugh has to say about all this …

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If we put theocrats in charge, we deserve what we get

by David Atkins

There has been a lot of hand wringing today from the usual TipnRonnie centrists over the long-awaited elimination of the filibuster for executive nominees today. David Frum serves as a good example of the genre:

President Scott Walker will thank Sen Harry Reid for today’s work
— davidfrum (@davidfrum) November 21, 2013

Others have been warning of future justices Todd Akin and Sharron Angle.

It would have been nice, in theory, to preserve the filibuster for the most egregious nominees. But the outlandish extremism and routine use of the filibuster to block the President from sending any nominees at all to the D.C. circuit means that of the two choices, eliminating the filibuster entirely in these cases was the better of the two options.

The broader point, however is this: if the American people see fit to put theocrats in charge of the White House and Senate, then the American people deserve to get the government they elected. We’re a single nation, and both sides need to abide by the dictates of our democracy.

If we really are at a point in history where each side is unified in confirming its own president’s choices, and each side believes that confirming justices picked the other side’s President will lead to a hellish dystopian nightmare, then perhaps it would be best for everyone not to share the same democracy and to each go our separate ways. A nation divided against itself cannot stand for long. But as long as we do, both sides need to abide by the government a majority of our citizens have chosen to elect.

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by tristero

Here’s why we badly need strong unions:

Many people getting hired these days are working fragmented, unpredictable hours at the whim of their employers.

A few months into a job at Urban Outfitters on the Upper West Side, Zyad Hammad noticed a change: He was scheduled for fewer actual shift and was asked to be “on call.” This meant phoning the store a couple hours before the start of a possible shift.

“I would speak to one manager, and they would be like, ‘Hold on a second, I have to ask to this other manager if we’re going to use you,’” Hammad said. “Finally someone picked up and would say, ‘Yes, we are using you,’ or, ‘No, we’re not going to use you.’”

If there was work, he’d have to make himself presentable and hurry to the store.

Pretty quickly, Hammad realized this decision was not random. Managers were closely watching the volume of sales to determine whether additional workers were needed.

Increasingly, employers in service sector industries are using advances in software to fine-tune employee schedules, allowing them to add staff at the last minute. It can save on costs for the businesses, but may prevent workers from securing steady paying jobs.

Be sure to listen to the entire segment.

Barton Gellman responds

by digby

… to Woodward’s silly insults:

Barton Gellman fired back Thursday at Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward over Woodward’s remarks that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden should have come to him first with documents “instead of others, particularly The Guardian.” Woodward also said he doesn’t consider Snowden a hero.

Gellman has led The Washington Post’s recent coverage of the National Security Agency, with Snowden as his source.

“I can’t explain why Bob would insult the source who brought us this extraordinary story or the exemplary work of his colleagues in pursuing it,” Gellman said in an email to HuffPost Thursday.

“The ‘others’ he dismissed include [The Washington Post’s] Greg Miller, Julie Tate, Carol Leonnig, Ellen Nakashima, Craig Whitlock, Craig Timberg, Steven Rich and Ashkan Soltani — all of whom are building on the Snowden archive with me to land scoop after scoop,” Gellman continued. “I won’t get into why Snowden came to me or didn’t come to Bob. But the idea of keeping Snowden anonymous, or of waiting for one ‘coherent’ story, suggests that Bob does not understand my source or the world he lived in.”

Of course he doesn’t. Woodward understands his powerful friends and the world he and his powerful friends live in. If you want a story that “exposes” what Villagers are thinking and saying, you go to Woodward. If your idea of a “coherent story” is the one told by high government officials then Woodward is your man. Anything else, not so much.

I wrote about Woodward’s original comments here .
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Huge, huge victory for political sanity today

by digby

Kids, don’t say Harry Reid never did anything for you. He and the Senate Democrats just ended the use of the filibuster for executive branch appointments and lower court judges. What this means is that the dominance of our judicial system by batshit insane right wing extremists trained into radicalism by the federalist society is going to be diluted. That may not sound like much, but at this point it’s extremely important. If you’d like to see why, take a look at this:

But, beyond the unprecedented frequency of filibusters under Mitch McConnell, the current Republican minority wielded them to seize an unprecedented degree of control over the law and the judiciary. With enough creativity, Senate Republicans discovered that the filibuster could not simply prevent new laws from being enacted, it could also be used to effectively repeal laws protecting workers and regulating Wall Street. By refusing to confirm nominees to lifetime appointments on the federal bench, they could also ensure that some of the nation’s most powerful courts remained in Republican hands. And looming over all of this is the next Supreme Court vacancy. If Senate Republicans will use the filibuster today to keep their grip on the nation’s second most powerful court, imagine what they’ll do if a justice retires.

The president will also now be allowed to make appointments to the executive branch with majority approval of the Senate. I know that sounds like something all presidents could pretty much take for granted, and until now they could. But Republicans have kept the president from filling important jobs throughout his term which one can only see as yet another form of governmental sabotage. “Nice little independent branch of government you have there. Be a shame if you couldn’t staff it ….”

This is a pretty monumental step and actually quite overdue. But at this point if the Democrats haven’t realized that they have nothing to lose by taking the bull by the horns, they never will. They get no credit for good intentions from these Republicans. They’ve been left with no choice if they hope to govern.

Update:  Think this is unfair?  Think again:

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