Month: December 2013

Somebody needs to have his TV watching privileges suspended

by digby

This is so offensively stupid on so many levels that I don’t even know what to say about it. It was apparently sent out to the Tea Party Nation by its president Judson Phillips:

The TV series of programs in the “Law And Order” family are among the most popular programs ever in the history of the TV industry. And why do you suppose that might be? I am sure all the “experts” on popularity have their own ideas of why this is so. Well, I am certainly no “expert” in anything other than survival but I would like to offer my opinion on why this is so.

I think these programs are so popular because people of every persuasion want to believe in justice.

There is one particular group of these programs called: “Law And Order: SVU”. And in this series there are a few episodes that I simply cannot watch because they expose the deepest darkest side of human nature and despite their disclaimer that no real persons are reflected, most people recognize that there are far too many real world parallels for comfort.

And in some of these episodes, there are gifted actors that portray fictional characters whose defense when charged with rape runs along these lines:

“She seduced me.”
“She wanted it.”
“She enjoyed it.”
Really?

At what point does rape become a pleasurable experience for the victim?

And whom among us are not revolted and angered by such nonsense?

And whom among us are willing to believe that if we “Just lay back and don’t fight it you will inevitably enjoy it.”?

And the “IT” that I am referring to here is “Obamacare”.

The Obama Regime is encouraging people to become the evangelists for Obamacare in their own family and social groups over Thanks Giving dinner. Their message is truly quite simple: Lie back and quit fighting and eventually you will enjoy the experience.

I won’t belabor you with the horrendously offensive aspects of this Socialist doctrine. Nor can I predict the level of socially unacceptable behavior that might erupt should some fool attempt to do that in my home much less over Thanks Giving dinner (ALL of which I personally prepare from scratch ).

But I will encourage you to think about your own families and extended families and decide for yourself if there is a point at which this rape experience could possibly become enjoyable; rape of our free will, rape of our religious convictions, rape of free markets, rape of our Constitution, a brutal rape of the American Dream and personal freedoms.

And for those of us old enough to remember what a free nation once felt like I encourage us all to be truly thankful for this land for which “…God shed his grace on thee”.

And in giving thanks and sharing thanks with our friends and families may we refresh our faith in those things that gave this nation strength in the past and draw on those same strengths to restore her to her place in the world.

May your Thanks Giving truly be a period of giving thanks for friends and families and may God Bless you all and may God Bless America – Again.

What a lovely Thanksgiving message. It really captures the spirit of our holiday season.

Can it be that these people actually believe that a government program that creates a way for many Americans to buy affordable private health insurance is akin to a violent, sexual attack? What must it be like to live inside the twisted hell that is their psyches?

Seriously, has anyone done a psychological profile of the completely delusional reaction to health care reform?  It seems to be hitting these people with the same emotional intensity as 9/11. And that’s really weird.

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Kamo-Kulturkampf

by digby

Nothing says “peace on earth good will to men” like Christmas themedtactical police gear:

I guess it’s for people who see this and want to shoot it:

I suppose this is what a decade of war and expensive militarization of police does to a country.

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Lara Logan remains in good standing at CBS News

by digby

… despite the fact that she is an overrated, hawkish stenographer for the military:

CBS News chairman and ’60 Minutes’ EP Jeff Fager held a meeting with CBS News staff on Tuesday and took questions about the fate of Lara Logan and Max McClellan, the journalists currently on a leave of absence in the wake of the controversial ’60 Minutes’ report on Benghazi, POLITICO has learned.

In the meeting, held with ‘CBS This Morning’ staffers, Fager said he did not know how long Logan and her producer would be on leave, and made no indication that they would be asked to resign in the wake of the now-retracted report, according to sources familiar with the meeting. Those sources said that Fager defended Logan as a valuable member of the ’60 Minutes’ team even as he acknolwedged the erroneous nature of the report.

“He did not throw her under the bus,” one source said of Fager’s remarks about Logan.

That’s nice. I guess it was a good thing she didn’t fall for a hoax about something that happened 30 years ago or she would have been in big trouble.

You can’t help but think of this:

In an effort reportedly intended to repair relations with the White House in the aftermath of CBS’ publication of unauthenticated memos concerning President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS president Andrew Heyward met with then-White House communications director Dan Bartlett in January 2005. According to Broadcasting and Cable magazine: “Heyward was ‘working overtime to convince Bartlett that neither CBS News nor Rather had a vendetta against the White House,’ our source says, ‘and from here on out would do everything it could to be fair and balanced.’ “

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Deja vu all over again

by digby

Here’s a shocker:

[A] national Republican group will hit 12 Democrats–all running in Senate elections next year–over changes to Medicare.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee will highlight Wednesday the candidates’ support for the federal health care law, better known as Obamacare, and what Republicans call $717 billion in cuts to the popular entitlement program that guarantees health insurance to seniors.

Democrats defending the program, however, say the changes aren’t cuts, but savings of projected costs of Medicare over the next 10 years.

The $717 billion figure comes from a Congressional Budget Office report that measured the impact of repealing the health care law. The figure was a big campaign issue during the 2012 presidential election.

The report says that under the repeal measure, “Spending for Medicare would increase by an estimated $716 billion over that 2013-2022 period.” Those spending increases would be a result of more spending on hospital and medical insurance, offset by a decrease in prescription drug coverage.

That should be easy to explain to senior citizens.

This was entirely predictable. It was the GOPs main selling point in 2010 and I’m sure they’ll use it to great advantage this time too. Elderly people always vote and in off-year elections it makes a difference. The question will be if the 12 Democrats can come up with something that brings their people out to balance it out. So far, I haven’t seen what that’s going to be. The off year election in a president’s second term is rarely a good one for the president’s party, unfortunately.

On the other hand, these Republicans never seem to learn from their own mistakes:

History will record that on Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2013, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary met to consider the impeachment of Barack Hussein Obama.

They didn’t use that word, of course. Republican leaders frown on such labeling because it makes the House majority look, well, crazy.

It is, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said from the dais, “the word that we don’t like to say in this committee, and I’m not about to utter here in this particular hearing.”

One of the majority’s witnesses, Georgetown law professor Nicholas Rosenkranz, encouraged the Republicans not to be so shy. “I don’t think you should be hesitant to speak the word in this room,” he said. “A check on executive lawlessness is impeachment.”

This gave the lawmakers courage. “I’m often asked this,” said Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) “You got to go up there, and you just impeach him.”

Bless their hearts …

Next, say goodbye to the waiters and waitresses

by David Atkins

The internet, workforce mechanization and deskilling have already decimated America’s manufacturing jobs. Soon those forces will be coming for the white collar jobs as well. Also, package delivery people. Cab drivers and car salesmen, too.

But service sector jobs should be OK, right? You still need people to serve other people, right?

About that:

Score one for the machines. On Tuesday, Applebee’s announced plans to install a tablet at every table in its 1,860 restaurants across the United States. Customers will be able to use the devices to order food, pay the bill, and ignore their dining companions by playing video games.

Chili’s unveiled basically the same plan three months ago. But that doesn’t mean Applebee’s hasn’t been plotting this move for years. In fact, Applebee’s was the name that came up when my former Slate colleague Annie Lowrey first wrote about the tablets-for-restaurants idea in April 2011. Her story focused on Palo Alto-based startup E La Carte, which is in fact Applebee’s partner on the just-announced deal. Chili’s opted for a rival vendor, Ziosk. Applebee’s went light on details in announcing the terms of its deal, but here’s how the economics of the proposition looked when Lowrey wrote about it in 2011:

The Presto [E La Carte’s tablet] aspires to be the food-services version of the airline check-in kiosk or the ATM or the self-checkout at your local pharmacy. It makes a person’s job a computer’s job, and that cuts costs. Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table—making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter. Moreover, no manager needs to train it, replace it if it quits, or offer it sick days. And it doesn’t forget to take off the cheese, walk off for 20 minutes, or accidentally offend with small talk, either.

It mustn’t be understated what is at stake here. There’s a reason the big money boys want to cut “entitlements” so much. Under the current social and economic order, in 20 years or so there really won’t be enough tax revenue from jobs to support the welfare state we have. And the welfare state we have won’t be half as big as will be needed to take on the social need when the natural unemployment rate is 20%.

The big money boys can see where all of this is headed: either the developed world’s middle classes start learning to live with a lot less, or their tax rates are going back up to Eisenhower levels. Or there will be a revolution and dramatic re-ordering of the social and economic contract.

The next few decades are going to be a very interesting time, particularly with climate change thrown into the mix. It’s going to entail a dramatic battle of ideas between two very different solutions to a vexing problem complex human societies have never really faced before. In that battle, the neoliberal “New Democrats” aren’t all that different from the hardcore conservatives. When you have 25% real unemployment/underemployment and massive climate disruption, all of a sudden a bunch of other issues that separate the corporate New Dems from the Bible-thumping Republicans start to become trivial by comparison.

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First forced colonosocopy, now this?

by digby

Wait, what?

A New Mexico corrections officer is being sued over claims she repeatedly pepper sprayed a suspect’s genitals.

Marlene Tapia alleges that Blanca Zapater subjected her to “cruel and unusual punishment” after she was brought to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Bernalillo County on Nov. 22, 2011.

Her lawsuit claims that, during a routine strip search for her suspected parole violation, Zapater and another officer “observed a plastic baggie protruding from Ms. Tapia’s vagina.”
But instead of asking Tapia to remove the package, Zapater allegedly “sprayed a chemical agent directly on Ms. Tapia’s genitals twice.”

Pepper spray while in custody is torture. Spraying it on genitals is sexual sadism. There can be no other reason for it.

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Do “job creators” go out of their way to insult potential customers?

by digby

Sometimes you just have to wonder who raised these people:

They used to outsource this kind of crude dogwhistling to their wingnut jackasses but that’s the Republican Party saying that, not Rush Limbaugh. It’s not just bad manners, it’s also really, really stupid. As Josh Barro points out:

Some people celebrate Christmas and some don’t. It’s fine to say “Merry Christmas.” But sometimes, a speaker wants to be especially mindful of the fact that not all of his or her listeners celebrate Christmas, so he or she says “Happy Holidays.”

Why should Republicans have a problem with that? When Republicans say they have a problem with it, what message are they sending to non-Christian voters?

Most voters are Christian, so a pro-Christmas position seems like it should be popular. But Republicans don’t understand how their anti-outsider messages aggregate.

Most voters are straight, so opposition to gay marriage shouldn’t be an electoral problem. Most voters aren’t Mexican-Americans, so they shouldn’t be too bothered by thinly-veiled (or unveiled) anti-Mexican messaging on immigration.

Add these things all together, and you get a political party that looks like it’s engaged in interest group politics for straight non-Hispanic white Christians. That’s not too appealing to the increasing share of voters who aren’t straight non-Hispanic white Christians.

I’m fairly sure that “Happy Holidays” didn’t evolve out of political correctness, it came from business public relations as a way to ensure that all of their customers, regardless of religion, were in their stores buying as much crap as possible during this holiday season. It shows just how far gone the GOP is these days that they don’t understand even the simplest forms of mass marketing anymore.

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All you need to know about the “Third Way”

by David Atkins

This from Daily Kos is priceless:

That’s pathetic. The big coordinated Wall Street Democrat pushbank against De Blasio, Warren and others is even sadder.

Just in case it wasn’t clear, it’s not that progressives hate Wall Street. Most of us understand that Wall Street and the financial industry have their place in a healthy economy. There’s an argument to be made that in a future of mass globalization, deskilling and mechanization we’ll need a dramatic reorientation of global economics. But that day isn’t here quite yet. So for now at least, Wall Street has a valuable role to play.

But right now Wall Street dominates absolutely everything and everyone. Stocks are at record highs, as are corporate profits, as is income inequality. The vast majority of the insanely rich are in the financial industry. There has been a huge brain drain from the rest of the productive economy into finance, as people who should have been scientists, teachers, engineers, authors, doctors and entrepreneurs instead help Wall Street firms figure out newer and cleverer ways to manipulate markets. Long term investment in real business productivity has been converted to a quarter-by-quarter obsession with “trimming fat” in the service of next quarter’s earnings report.

The Tea Party right wants to destroy government and go back to the 14th century on social issues. The progressive left doesn’t want to destroy Wall Street. We just want to put it back on even footing with Main Street again.

That’s not so much to ask. These corporate titans will still be rich; they just won’t be quite as rich even as the economy grows much more stable and most people are better off–which incidentally reduces the risk of violent revolution against them as well. It’s not a lot to ask, and not at all equivalent to the Tea Party right.

If the Wall Street Dems want to really push this fight, they’ll simply sow the seeds of their own destruction. Already the populist right is accusing Democrats of being crony capitalists in service to Wall Street. If the Third Way crowd insists on a war with the populist elements of both parties, it won’t end well for them.

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What happens when all criminal threats become “terrorism”?

by digby

So any threat to rape and murder can now be considered “terrorism”?

The teen who documented his plans to murder and rape fellow students at Comstock Park High School on Facebook and through text messages pleaded guilty to his crimes and faces as much as 20 years in prison.

Benjamin Christopher Malachino sent text messages in March to a female student whom he threatened to sexually assault in front of her friends while at the same time killing fellow students.
[…]
On Monday, Dec. 2, Malchino pleaded guilty to false report or threat of terrorism, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison, but the defendant’s age and lack of criminal record will likely save him from a lengthy term of imprisonment when he is sentenced Jan. 23 by Kent County Circuit Court Judge Mark Trusock.

Ok, this kid apparently deserves to be locked up. I’m certainly not defending his behavior. And they don’t appear to be ready to send him to Gitmo. But if they’re starting to call threats like this “terrorism” we are into a whole new realm in American criminal justice because we’ve just spent the last decade fashioning legal theories around the idea that “terrorism” is such a uniquely horrifying threat that we can no longer afford to follow constitutional principles. We’ve created prison camps, we’ve tortured, we’ve got people locked up for life without trial. We have created a massive surveillance apparatus that’s blown a hole through the fourth amendment. “Terrorism” is a catch-all term for the government police authorities to pretty much throw the constitution out the window if it wants to.

I think everyone’s been soothing themselves that this will only apply to immigrants and/or Muslims, so it’s not a biggie. But that’s very foolish. Once you give the government a rationale for throwing out the book, they’re going to find ways to do it. This is why granting “exceptions” to the constitution for “bad men” is such a fatuous idea. The police would love to have the power to simply designate someone a “bad man” for whom the normal rules don’t apply. Unfortunately, police aren’t infallible and sometimes the “bad men” are the police themselves. That’s why the old boys wrote the constitution and the Bill of Rights in the first place.

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Reach out and touch progressivism. (New Blue America contest — Depeche Mode!)

by digby

Yesterday Howie announced the last Blue America contest of the year, this time to benefit Progressive hero congressman Keith Ellison and progressive challenger Mike Obermueller of Minnesota.

Keith Ellison stood out as a principled, values-driven progressive when he was a member of the Minnesota legislature. Blue America backed him back then, hoping for more of the same in Washington. And we haven’t been disappointed. Co-chair of the Progressive Caucus and Democratic Chief Deputy Whip, Keith is one of the only Democrats on a leadership track who speaks to the interests of ordinary working families. As Raúl Grijalva told us, “Keith, above all, isn’t posturing. He deeply believes in and relentlessly fights for progressive values and equality for all… He is a real person for these unreal times, and I support him every chance I get.”

Keith is one of the few Members of the House Financial Services Committee who doesn’t kowtow to the banksters and, unlike many of his colleagues, Wall Street doesn’t finance his reelection efforts. When Blue America offered to help him with reelection expenses, he thanked us and asked if we could also help Mike Obermueller, the progressive Democrat running against John Kline in the district next door. We are happy to oblige.

Today is the second day of a week-long drive to raise some campaign funds for Keith and Mike– and Blue America is going to give away a beautiful, classic, RIAA-certified double platinum award for the Depeche Mode album Violator. One lucky random donor on this ActBlue page will get that special prize as a gift from Blue America– regardless of how much you contribute. In fact, if a contribution is too much of a stretch right now, you are still eligible to “win” by sending a note to us at:

Blue America PO Box 271201
Los Angeles, CA 90027

Easy rules, right? So is Keith’s proposed Robin Hood tax. “While the Tea Party pushes to slash government investment, Congress has ignored simple, progressive revenue options that could help us grow our economy. One solution would be my Inclusive Prosperity Act, also known as the Robin Hood tax, which will add a tax of a fraction of a percent on transactions made by the same Wall Street firms and stock traders who crashed our economy in 2008. Forty countries have a similar tax, as did the U.S. until 1966. “This tax alone will generate up to $300 billion a year in revenue, stabilizing the deficit and allowing us to invest in the things that matter– like roads and bridges, and health care for our seniors. “The American people stepped up to help Wall Street because they thought it would protect Main Street. But what has Wall Street done in return? Give itself bonuses and exorbitant pay? Tried to repeal Dodd-Frank protections? No, it’s time for Wall Street to help out with Main Street.”

And Mike sees eye to eye with him on economic justice. “Congressman Ellison,” he told us, “is talking about putting justice back in our system. I, too, want to make sure everyone has a fair opportunity in this country. Those who can afford to pay more should step up so that those who are less well-off have a chance at success. Congressman Kline wants to pad the pockets of the wealthy, while ignoring the inequality that still exists in this country. We can do better and I’m committed to making sure we actually do.”

Whether you’re a Depeche Mode fan or not, please help us make Minnesota even bluer by contributing to Keith Ellison’s and Mike Obermueller’s campaigns.

I’m not saying Keith Ellison is our Personal Jesus. But I have faith that supporting him and Mike Obermueller is a good way to build progressive strength in the US House of Representatives. Whether you donate one dollar or (hopefully) much more, you might win the double platinum award for the Depeche Mode album Violator. And either way, you win, by supporting strong progressive leadership.