Month: January 2014

Throwing your friends under a bus

by David Atkins

I’ve always been 99% confident that Chris Christie knew about his Administration’s role in the bridge closures, and that he moreover likely ordered the closures himself.

The only little nagging doubt in my mind was the suspicion that not even Chris Christie would be stupid enough to throw his longtime friends and associates that far under the bus and deliver a 2-hour press conference about it unless he either knew they would never talk, or unless he really was innocent.

I guess not:

The former Port Authority official who personally oversaw the lane closings at the George Washington Bridge, central to the scandal now swirling around Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, said on Friday that “evidence exists” the governor knew about the lane closings when they were happening.

In a letter released by his lawyer, the former official, David Wildstein, a high school friend of Mr. Christie’s who was appointed with the governor’s blessing at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which controls the bridge, described the order to close the lanes as “the Christie administration’s order” and said “evidence exists as well tying Mr. Christie to having knowledge of the lane closures, during the period when the lanes were closed, contrary to what the governor stated publicly in a two-hour press conference” three weeks ago.

Anything is possible in politics, of course, but I don’t see how Christie survives this to even remain governor of New Jersey, much less start a presidential campaign.

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Artistic Solidarity

by digby

This is special:

“Snowden claims that he’s won and that his mission is accomplished,” Clapper said, according to a transcript from the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, posted by the Washington Post. “If that is so, I call on him and his accomplices to facilitate the return of the remaining stolen documents that have not yet been exposed, to prevent even more damage to U.S. security.”

So who, exactly, are Snowden’s “accomplices?”

Guardian national security editor Spencer Ackerman, among others, questioned on Twitter whether Clapper was referring to journalists.

HuffPost put the question to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which didn’t rule out that journalists could be considered “accomplices.”

The office’s public affairs director Shawn Turner said in an email that “director Clapper was referring to anyone who is assisting Snowden to further threaten our national security through the unauthorized disclosure of stolen documents related to lawful foreign intelligence collection programs.”

The suggestion that Snowden is conspiring with journalists, rather than acting as their source, has come up ever since the National Security Agency surveillance story broke last spring.

Here’s the oath that Clapper took when he took the job:

I, James Clapper, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

And here’s the First Amendment to the constitution which he swore to uphold in that oath:

The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.

There is no evidence that Snowden was working with anyone other than journalists who have been vetting the material with the help of editors, lawyers and experts and publishing it via legitimate news organizations. So this cavalier hinting around that there was some kind of espionage conspiracy is completely outrageous. Unless he wants to be remembered in history alongside the likes of Richard Nixon, President Obama needs to put a stop it among members of his administration. (He can’t do anything about the congressional miscreants like Mike Rogers.)

One can certainly see why Glenn Greenwald might not feel the need to rush back home right away under those circumstances. Which is why Wally Shawn went to Brazil to perform his show The Designated Mourner. Amy Goodman at Democracy Now talked to Shawn today:

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you back, Wally. So, talk about Brazil.

WALLACE SHAWN: Well—

AMY GOODMAN: Why did you go there?

WALLACE SHAWN: Initially, it was just an emotional response to the fact that I had invited this writer, who I deeply admire, to come and see my play. And, you know, people like me in show business, we’re show-offs, and I wanted him to see the play. And he kept not appearing in the audience. And eventually, I realized he was not able to return to the United States because of having received the NSA papers.

And on impulse, I said, “Well, we’ll bring the play to you.” And my colleagues—I went to Deborah Eisenberg and Larry Pine, who were the two actors in the play with me, and to the sound designer and—Bruce Odland, and the director, Andre Gregory, and they all said, before I had even finished the sentence—they all are old rebels from the ’60s, you could say—and immediately said, “What a great idea!”

So we brought the whole play to Brazil, and we did it for Glenn and some people he invited. We rented a theater, and we—our lighting designer, Jennifer Tipton, talked to the people in Brazil, and we did the complete version of the play, because, you know, you can’t email a play. A play is not the script of a play. You can’t send that in the mail or—you know, if you want to show somebody a play, that’s what you have to do. So it was a gesture of, expression of respect for the fact that he did what we all should be doing. He has risked his neck. He’s risked his physical security and freedom.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the choice of the play, Designated Mourner, the reason—its relevance to our time? Because the play has been out now for more than a decade, right?

WALLACE SHAWN: Yes. Well, it happens to be a play that is on the subject of speaking out, in a way. I mean, you know, one writes out of a personal artistic impulse that you don’t necessarily plan, but it turns out that this play is about a writer, played by Larry Pine, who wrote quite a while ago some essays that were offensive to the regime, a sort of right-wing regime in this is made-up country. And he and his loyal daughter, played by Deborah Eisenberg, are not even gathering guns for the rebels. They’re simply people who are sympathetic to the poor of their country and have written essays.

So, they haven’t really done anything, and yet, as the political space in the country gets smaller and the regime begins to crack down, the people who are on the fringes are threatened, because artistic freedom, artistic freedom of thought, is dangerous freedom of thought, just the way political freedom of thought is. If people are out there thinking on their own, that’s dangerous to governments, if they are repressively minded. And so, it becomes dangerous for the son-in-law—me, my character—to live in the house with these rather dangerous people, or people who are mildly dangerous because they’re thinking freely. So I get out of the house. I play the survivor who is basically cowardly.

Update: Here’s a respectable Canadian politician rebutting the Snowden accusation in a rational fashion. Why would anyone feel the least bit concerned about such mature leadership misusing its power?

When you organize yourself around bigotry …

by digby

I wish I felt more confident about an immigration bill, but as long as the Republicans are in the grip- of the hard right I just find it very difficult to believe it can happen. It’s just not something that base can live with.

Ed Kilgore spells out the reasons better than anyone:

In all the analysis of the GOP’s immigration stance, it’s pretty much been taken for granted that the “self-deportation” stance of Mitt Romney—perhaps his most popular policy stance for movement conservatives, and an important key to his nomination—has to be discarded. But all this insistence on ruling out any “special path” to citizenship, however limited and remote, and on “hard triggers” for legalization that are designed to be unreachable, thinly disguises a fundamental unwillingness to accept the presence of unauthorized immigrants and the hope they will all find life here miserable enough to eventually go home. Illegal border crossings have already slackened significantly. The number of deportations remain very high. So all the talk of “enforcement first” increasingly sounds like an excuse for avoiding or at least delaying legalization in any form.

Conservatives have plenty of grounds for believing the Republican Establishment is being dishonest about its intentions on immigration policy, and is trying to “trick the base,” as I put it yesterday. But for the most part, they are being dishonest, too. They know they can’t just advocate rounding up 11 million people and sending them in boxcars across the border. And “self-deportation” sounds (and is) cruel. But by finding grievous fault with any workable—much less politically feasible—approach for dealing with the undocumented, they are actually fighting to ensure nothing replaces deportations and self-deportations as the de facto policy, particularly in a future Republican administration that owes nothing to Hispanic or Asian voters.

They don’t want them here. It’s really not any more complicated than that. They know it’s a problem politically and so are trying to find other reasons to explain their position. But in the end, they want undocumented workers to “go home” even if they’ve been here for years, have American kids and have been contributing to our economy and society. And I think we can all figure out why that might be. That’s the bind in which the GOP finds itself. It’s organized itself around a certain sub-group that simply does not like foreigners and racial minorities. It’s a problem for them. But it’s a problem for the rest of us too.

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TSA kabuki

by digby

This gossipy piece about the TSA is a fun read even though all of your unpleasant suspicions about creepy TSA agents laughing at your nakedness and pulling you aside just because they don’t like your attitude turn out to be true. But this is pretty amazing:

Until 2010 (not long after the TSA standard operating procedure manual was accidentially leaked to the public), all TSA officers worked with a secret list printed on small slips of paper that many of us taped to the back of our TSA badges for easy reference: the Selectee Passport List. It consisted of 12 nations that automatically triggered enhanced passenger screening.

The training department drilled us on the selectee countries so regularly that I had memorized them, like a little poem:
Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan
Iraq, Iran, Yemen
and Cuba,
Lebanon-Libya, Somalia-Sudan
People’s Republic of North Korea.

People holding passports from the selectee countries were automatically pulled aside for full-body pat-downs and had their luggage examined with a fine-toothed comb. The selectee list was purely political, of course, with diplomacy playing its role as always: There was no Saudi Arabia or Pakistan on a list of states historically known to harbor, aid and abet terrorists

Just, wow.

When people start lecturing about “trade-offs between security and liberty, just think about that for a minute.

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QOTD: Moyers and Winship

by digby

On Tom Perkins’ watch:

Perkins also said that he has family “living in trailer parks,” but bragged like some cackling James Bond villain that he owns “an airplane that flies underwater” and a wristwatch that “could buy a six-pack of Rolexes.” That watch, on prominent display during the Bloomberg interview, is a Richard Mille, a charming little timepiece that can retail for more than $300,000. At that price, a watch shouldn’t just tell you the time, it should allow you to travel through it, perhaps back to the Gilded Age or Versailles in 1789, just as the tumbrils rolled in. Here in the office, our $85 Timex and Seiko watches have crossed their hands over their faces in shame.

Even the watches are embarrassed for him.

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MOUs whinng about dead people harshing their mellow

by digby

Even when they are directly responsible for the death of another, they whine and complain about being held responsible for it:

Here’s something you probably never knew about Tom Perkins, the venture capitalist who gave his name to one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic partnerships. The investor, backer of companies such as Compaq and boardroom schemer at Hewlett Packard, was once convicted of involuntary manslaughter. In 1996, the yacht-crazed financier was racing off the French coast when he collided with a smaller boat, killing a French doctor on board.

In a passage from the Valley veteran’s forthcoming memoirs, Perkins writes: “I was arrested and tried in a foreign court in a language you don’t understand, by judges indifferent – or worse – to justice, represented by an inappropriate lawyer with the negative outcome preordained.”

The negative outcome? He was made to pay a $10,000 fine. (And yes, the zeros there are correct.)

A French doctor died at his hands in a yacht race. And all he could say was that he was tried in a French court where they didn’t even speak English and was unjustly held liable — for a $10,000 fine.

One just does not do that to billionaires. Especially ones who have been knighted by Norway. Which, in an earlier, fairer time would inevitably have led to their ordination by God to rule the peasants. As it should be.

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QOTD: “A Southern Republican lawmaker”

by digby

On the problem with immigration reform:

“Part of it, I think — and I hate to say this, because these are my people — but I hate to say it, but it’s racial,” said the Southern Republican lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “If you go to town halls people say things like, ‘These people have different cultural customs than we do.’ And that’s code for race.”

I, for one, am shocked.

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When the plutocrats have lost even Politico…

by David Atkins

The Politico article on the collective hysteria of the plutocratic class doesn’t contain anything particularly revelatory, but it’s interesting per se in that even the reliably center/center-right news site is treating the temper tantrums of the obscenely rich with some scorn and derision:

At one level, the reaction seems dramatically out of proportion to anything any politician is actually proposing. And recent comments from the super-wealthy can seem baffling — and infuriating — to the vast majority of Americans who occupy much less rarefied air and now have myriad social media forums to castigate what they view as deeply out-of-touch whining from the plutocrat class.
Nothing Obama proposed in his relatively mild State of the Union address would do much to impact the lives of the nation’s top earners. Raising the minimum wage wouldn’t do it. Nor would extending unemployment benefits or instituting universal pre-kindergarten.

Even the president’s toughest lines on the issue of inequality were hardly the kind of fire-and-brimstone condemnation that Franklin D. Roosevelt heaped on bankers’ heads in the 1930s.
“After four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better,” Obama said. “But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.”

That was pretty much it.

Obama made no call to raise taxes further on the rich, who still enjoy rates dramatically lower than they were through most of the booming 1980s. He did not summon Occupy Wall Street protesters back to the barricades or threaten new actions to bust up big banks.

Meanwhile, de Blasio has no power to raise taxes unilaterally on the rich despite his fiery campaign rhetoric.
On a practical level, the wealthy are jumping at shadows.

“None of the issues currently on the table would have a large effect on the very rich,” said Justin Wolfers, economics professor at the University of Michigan. “If there is anything driving this rise in rhetoric, it’s that the president pivoted to talking about inequality, which some interpret as taking from the 1 percent and giving to the 99 percent.”
People who counsel the wealthy for a living say there is both an unease with growing income disparity and a fear of even greater persecution.

“I think that with Occupy Wall Street there was a sense of the heat getting turned up and a feeling of vilification and potential danger,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a psychologist whose Wealth Legacy Group focuses on counseling the affluent. “There is a worry among our clients that they are being judged and people are making assumptions about who they are based on their wealth.”
Much of the current anxiety is also driven by the precarious nature of the recovery from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The U.S. economy is showing signs of picking up speed with job creation and consumer confidence on the rise. But there is still an enormous sense of national pessimism about the future, as evidenced in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that showed 68 percent of Americans believe the country is stagnant or worse off since the president took office in 2009.

And the recent stock market swoon, the bad December jobs report and gyrations in emerging market currencies could convince some wealthy Americans that their pessimism is well-founded and that another economic downturn is not far off — and might carry even greater risks for the rich.

“People are very anxious about the decline in the stock market and feel that this may be just a hollow shell of a recovery, and we may see in the next few years that things really haven’t changed,” said Louis Hyman, a historian of capitalism at Cornell. “They are afraid the critics are right and that inequality really is a driver of all this, and are afraid of what that means for them.”

No kidding. They should be worried. All but the worst of the Objectivist Randroids know at some level that they’re being compensated wildly out of proportion to their contributions to the economy. Some, myself included, would even argue that much of the modern financial industry is directly counterproductive to broader economic health. They also understand that their obscene wealth isn’t the anodyne result of growing the pie, but constitutes a direct theft of the pie at the expense of everyone else.

And most of them have enough experience of history to know that when things get unequal enough in a society with a big enough middle class, the results range from broad progressive economic reforms to bloody revolution.

The only historical alternatives to those left-leaning scenarios are total economic collapse and decentralization leading to feudalism, or fascist military coup. Most of even the top 1% outside of the Koch far right aren’t particularly keen on those outcomes, either.

Instead of having a collective meltdown, it would behoove the top tenth of one percent to head things off at the pass by promoting and accepting some New Deal 2.0 style economic reforms, including a collective basic income, higher minimum wages, single-payer healthcare, and the like. They would wind up with a little less money, but they’d still be extremely well off. Not to mention the psychological benefits of knowing they did the right thing, and discarding the specter of violent revolution.

It’s a pretty easy call, actually–unless you’re a narcissistic wealth addict using money to keep score instead of secure comfort and happiness.

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The WMD in my kitchen

by digby

I’m against the death penalty in all circumstances. I think it is a barbaric, backwards concept that has no place among civilized people. I would be against it for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev no matter what, even acknowledging that the crimes he is alleged to have committed are heinous. If found guilty he could be locked up for life and never harm another soul, at which point the state’s obligation to protect the people from criminals is fulfilled and justice is served to the best extent decent human beings can deliver it.

But that’s not the law of the land. And the Justice Department today decided to charge the Boston Bomber with crimes that carry the death penalty. This is not surprising. But look at some of these absurd charges:

[T]he United States will seek the sentence of death for these offenses: Conspiracy to Use A Weapon of Mass Destruction Resulting in Death; Use of A Weapon of Mass Destruction Resulting in Death; Possession and Use of a Firearm During and in Relation to a Crime of Violence Resulting in Death; Conspiracy to Bomb a Place of Public Use Resulting in Death; Bombing of a Place of Public Use Resulting in Death; and Malicious Destruction of Property Resulting in Personal Injury and Death, all of which carry a possible sentence of death.

A pressure cooker bomb is a “weapon of mass destruction?” It’s as if the Department of Justice is trying to make a mockery of the law. I guess it must make it easier to convict and kill him. But really, the other charges should have been enough. Adding this to the mix is ridiculous.

I guess I shouldn’t reveal here that I used a weapon of mass destruction just last night to make pot roast. Shhh.

For a deeper think piece on Tsarnaev and the death penalty, read this piece by Zack Beauchamp and Ian Millhiser.

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A Buck Ain’t What It Was


by tristero

This story’s been making the rounds of the inter tubes. But the moral of the story isn’t, as the headline goes, that “money won’t turn people straight.” No kidding.

No, the moral of the story is that $65 million wasn’t enough. Now $130 million, that’s when a “moderately deluxe life” gets somewhat interesting and so the offers are flooding in.