Month: January 2014

Chris Kluwe let go by Vikings while Phil Robertson gets back on TV

by David Atkins

Chris Kluwe, punter for the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings and outspoken marriage equality advocate, was let go from the roster this offseason for reasons that seem more than a little bit suspiciously linked to his political stance on the issue. His direct boss the special teams coach appears to be a fundamentalist bigot:

Throughout the months of September, October, and November, Minnesota Vikings special-teams coordinator Mike Priefer would use homophobic language in my presence. He had not done so during minicamps or fall camp that year, nor had he done so during the 2011 season. He would ask me if I had written any letters defending “the gays” recently and denounce as disgusting the idea that two men would kiss, and he would constantly belittle or demean any idea of acceptance or tolerance. I tried to laugh these off while also responding with the notion that perhaps they were human beings who deserved to be treated as human beings. Mike Priefer also said on multiple occasions that I would wind up burning in hell with the gays, and that the only truth was Jesus Christ and the Bible. He said all this in a semi-joking tone, and I responded in kind, as I felt a yelling match with my coach over human rights would greatly diminish my chances of remaining employed. I felt uncomfortable each time Mike Priefer said these things. After all, he was directly responsible for reviewing my job performance, but I hoped that after the vote concluded in Minnesota his behavior would taper off and eventually stop…

Near the end of November, several teammates and I were walking into a specialist meeting with Coach Priefer. We were laughing over one of the recent articles I had written supporting same-sex marriage rights, and one of my teammates made a joking remark about me leading the Pride parade. As we sat down in our chairs, Mike Priefer, in one of the meanest voices I can ever recall hearing, said: “We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows.” The room grew intensely quiet, and none of the players said a word for the rest of the meeting. The atmosphere was decidedly tense. I had never had an interaction that hostile with any of my teammates on this issue—some didn’t agree with me, but our conversations were always civil and respectful. Afterward, several told me that what Mike Priefer had said was “messed up.”

After this point, Mike Priefer began saying less and less to me, and our interactions were stilted. I grew increasingly concerned that my job would be in jeopardy. I had seen the same pattern of behavior directed at our former placekicker, Ryan Longwell, whom Mike Priefer began to ignore during the 2011 season and who was cut after rookie minicamps in early May 2012.

As a privately owned franchise the Vikings are free to do as they please, just as A&E was free to do as it pleased with regard to Phil Robertson.

But to those who say we’ve nearly won the fight on gay rights, realize there remains an incredible amount of work to do even in the entertainment industry. Something is still very wrong when a child-marriage-advocating bigot like Phil Robertson gets to stay on the air on A&E of all places, while Chris Kluwe gets blacklisted from the NFL.

.

Whose secrets are they anyway?

by digby

This piece in the Harvard Law Review a review of David Pozen’s , The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information, discusses the various ways in which the Congress might play a greater role in revealing secrets. But I thought this was an especially interesting insight which hadn’t quite crystalized for me before — “secrets” are an inherently political construct.

At the most general level, Pozen argues that the United States’s apparently chaotic system of leak regulation — draconian penalties that are almost never imposed; threats to punish leakers but not publishers — masks a deeper logic. This system, “although ritualistically condemned by those in power, has served a wide variety of governmental ends at the same time as it has efficiently kept most disclosures within tolerable bounds.” Pozen’s nuanced and subtle account of what those governmental ends are and how they are served by the existing regulatory regime is both wholly persuasive and deeply insightful.

The word “governmental,” however, covers quite a bit of ground and might usefully be deconstructed. As Pozen’s account makes clear, the broad ends that are served by the leak regime are most decidedly those of the President and other executive branch officials. Indeed, Pozen notes the pervasive sense among such officials that they “own” the secrets that they produce and control. Various executive branch officials collect and develop that information, classify that information as secret, and then, as Pozen so deftly demonstrates, selectively leak the “secret” information that furthers their agendas. This bare-bones summary of Pozen’s positive account suffices to make one key point pellucidly clear: “secret” is a political category, not a natural one. Facts in isolation do not cry out for secrecy; facts within a specific political context do.

If this observation at first seems too obvious to justify the expenditure of pixels, consider that it is emphatically not the way that we tend to talk about government secrets. The fact that someone in the executive branch has chosen to mark some piece of information as “secret” sets the presumptive terms for how that information may properly be used, shared, and disclosed. As Pozen notes, “virtually any deliberate leak of classified information to an unauthorized recipient is likely to fall within the reach of one or more criminal statutes,” and “[n]o court has ever accepted a defense of improper classification.” In other words, executive branch officials determine what information is secret, a determination to which other political actors are expected to (and do) defer. Executive branch officials frequently leak “secret” information without adverse consequence, because a permissive regime for such leaks broadly serves executive branch purposes. But when information is leaked outside of the normal, executive-friendly parameters of this regime, the executive reserves the right to prosecute, with the possibility of severe punishment. Secrets are treated as belonging to the executive; little wonder, then, that “there are substantially more unattributed disclosures ‘for’ the President than ‘against’ him.”

We have certainly seen this over and over again especially in the past decade. As I wrote the other day,  “secrets” are a form of currency that is used among the bureaucracy and the political establishment for their own aims. And the branch that holds most of this currency is the Executive.

This is another reason why it is not unreasonable to be very suspicious that the executive branch will hoard these secrets and use its immense power to use them for its own purposes, whatever those might be. They are already doing it, at least to the extent that we know they dole out the secrets when it suits them. Why is it so hard to believe they could use it in other, more nefarious, ways? They are basically political instruments.

.

Priorities

by digby

From The Fix:

But we definitely have to cut back on elementary school teachers, bridges and firehouses. We just don’t have the money.

.

On journalism and secrecy. Barton Gellman explained it a long time ago.

by digby

I’m noting all the usual sturm und drang among the cognoscenti over the New York Times’ call for clemency for Edward Snowden this morning. I’m, as usual, fairly shocked that anyone thinks a newspaper would believe otherwise:

Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency’s reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe, as it collects information about their phone calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend their days and where they spend their nights. The public learned in great detail how the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting outrage at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin to limit these practices.

The revelations have already prompted two federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of violating the Constitution (although a third, unfortunately, found the dragnet surveillance to be legal). A panel appointed by President Obama issued a powerful indictment of the agency’s invasions of privacy and called for a major overhaul of its operations.
[…]
Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.

That would be a sort of Ellsberg model, at least the part about spending his life advocating for greater privacy and stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community. It’s nice to see at least the New York Times editors showing they understand their function in our democracy.

This is not universally understood, obviously. Over the holiday there were plenty of examples of journalists and academics making assertions about Snowden that just aren’t true. For instance, many of them seem to be under the impression that he still has documents and is doling them out piecemeal to papers around the world and they are publishing them blindly. According to Barton Gellman this is not true. He made it quite clear in this appearance on MSNBC that Snowden gave all the documents to the three journalists, Gellman, Greenwald and Poitras, and they have all been going through institutional news organizations with editors and lawyers and other journalists vetting the material in consultation with experts. Snowden has nothing to do with how the material is being released.

As to the question of how journalists and news organizations make judgments about government secrecy, after having been contentiously challenged by the MSNBC host, Gellman tweeted out a link to the text of a talk he gave all the way back in 2003 on this subject. For those who do not understand the necessary give and take between government power and a free press in our democracy this lays it all out.  Gellman basically describes a system in which nobody is truly competent to balance the twin needs of liberty and security on their own. Not the government, not the press, not the experts or the people. So we have come to a strange accommodation that resembles nothing so much as democracy itself — a terrible system except for all the others. We are organized in such a way that all these competing interests wrestle with one another for supremacy under the principles of our Bill of Rights. It’s sloppy and unsatisfying but nobody’s yet come up with a better way to do it and frankly, I don’t see what will. Humans are what humans are and the only thing we can do is hope that the balance is struck through a sort of trial and error. I’m ok with this. I don’t trust individuals and I don’t trust bureaucracies but I do sort of trust the idea that we can get it right most of the time if these competing interests do their jobs.

Gellman’s speech took place during the early days of the Iraq war. He talks about the Bush administration lies that got us into that war and his own contemporary reporting exposing those lies. Those stories were all based on leaks and classified documents obtained by reporters and published for the people to see. That happened during a war with troops on the ground and in the perhaps legitimately more dangerous post 9/11 environment. Should the Washington Post not have published? Were we better off knowing this information? Did it result in a clearer picture of a government using it’s “security and secrecy” power to advance an agenda dishonestly? I would strongly argue yes. Your mileage may vary. But I don’t think we are any less safe because of those revelations. In fact, I think we’re safer because we are much more skeptical of the “trust us” argument. I’m not saying it will or won’t happen again, but in any case a free press is needed to push back if it tries.

This is how a real journalist, acknowledging that the system we have for dealing with secrets is necessarily ad hoc and inelegant, thinks about secrets:

There may be no Great Balancer of the interests at stake, but it is possible to describe some normative elements of the balance. We can identify more and less harmful forms of secrecy, better and worse reasons to withhold information from “we the people,” and factors that heighten and diminish the case for disclosure.

I am short on time, so I’ll sketch only a few. There are some reasons for secrecy that a self-governing people could never accept. One of them — I have heard it offered many times — is that the people will form the wrong views, or make the wrong choices, and therefore must not be told. It is antithetical to anything I call consent that government should assume such a power.

There are forms of secrecy that are more and less damaging to the project of self-government.

Simple secrets are those we know we don’t know. We can leave room for that uncertainty as we form our views. A complex secret, the very existence of which is unknown, is harder to justify. It can have an impact that compares to coercion or fraud. In a used car sale, a simple secret is when the seller says he has another offer but won’t disclose the terms. A complex secret is when the seller forgets to mention that the transmission fell out last week.

We can also distinguish honest and deceptive secrets. Churchill said the truth in wartime is so valuable that it must be “attended by a bodyguard of lies.” I do not believe we can reconcile deception for our own good with any meaningful understanding of self-government. In principle, it is never acceptable.

The duration of a secret makes a difference. A fleeting embargo on information has far less impact on self-government than a secret maintained beyond a point of decision — an election, for example, or the passage of a law to which the secret is pertinent.

There are easy questions of secrecy as well as hard ones. Sometimes strong security interests collide with weak public interests in disclosure. We do not publish the names of clandestine agents; future combat operations of the U.S. military; technical details that would enable defeat of U.S. weapons or defenses; or anything, broadly speaking, that puts lives at concrete and immediate risk.

At other times the mismatch of interests is reversed. The U.S. military almost never permits the whereabouts of its deployed units to be disclosed. That reflects a valid concern when a small force, for example, is operating behind enemy lines. It is far less so when the unit dominates its surroundings, is well known to those nearby and is garrisoned in a well-defended redoubt.

I am quite certain I do not speak for The Washington Post, but here are some personal observations about its practice. We seldom if ever agree to withhold information that exposes a government lie, even a well intended one. We give no special weight to preventing diplomatic embarrassment. We acknowledge no right of privacy for individuals acting in their capacity as government officers, and so their positions in internal debate are fair game.

That’s what I thought journalism was. I guess I’m still gobsmacked that big time reporters and news analysts who seem to be on TV for hours on end every day think otherwise.  I get why average people may not immediately understand the need for the press to be adversarial with the government on these issues but I will never in a million years get over the spectacle of journalists failing to instinctively know this in their bones. But then a lot of these folks are of the Judith Miller school, reporters who think journalistic integrity means protecting the high level sources who leak lies and feed them talking points to dishonestly advance their agenda so I suppose it makes some sense.

Update: Margaret Sullivan, the NYT public editor reports on the passionate response to the editorial. I’m pleasantly surprised by this aspect of it:

As for the extremely politicized nature of the response – with support for Mr. Snowden coming largely from the left – Mr. Rosenthal said that, by rights, “conservatives should be the most outraged” because of the intrusion of government that they normally oppose.

The most heartening response, he said, was from readers who said that The Times’s editorial “had forced them to sit down and really consider what they thought.” For some, at least, the editorial brought about “more textured thinking” on a difficult subject.

That’s good news, although I am anything but surprised that the right would fail to be outraged by government intrusion. Despite their constant caterwauling about freedom, they are authoritarians at heart whose only real concerns about government power have to do with their guns and their tax money benefiting people who aren’t like them.

Sullivan concludes:

Like The Times’s editorial board, I believe that Mr. Snowden has done the United States, and in fact, the world, a great service.

I agree wholeheartedly with this line in the editorial’s concluding paragraph: “When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government.”

That’s the upfront journalistic integrity that made me name her my choice for best columnist of the year.

.

Reminder: walking joke “economist” Arthur Laffer was dead wrong, as usual

by David Atkins

Via Joseph Weisenthal on Twitter, it’s worth reminding the world what noted conservative “economist” Arthur Laffer (he of the Laffer Curve) predicted for the economy in 2009:

Get Ready for Inflation and Higher Interest Rates

Here we stand more than a year into a grave economic crisis with a projected budget deficit of 13% of GDP…

With the crisis, the ill-conceived government reactions, and the ensuing economic downturn, the unfunded liabilities of federal programs — such as Social Security, civil-service and military pensions, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, Medicare and Medicaid — are over the $100 trillion mark. With U.S. GDP and federal tax receipts at about $14 trillion and $2.4 trillion respectively, such a debt all but guarantees higher interest rates, massive tax increases, and partial default on government promises.

But as bad as the fiscal picture is, panic-driven monetary policies portend to have even more dire consequences. We can expect rapidly rising prices and much, much higher interest rates over the next four or five years, and a concomitant deleterious impact on output and employment not unlike the late 1970s.

As Paul Krugman often notes, almost no one in the conservative movement is ever accountable for being consistently and demonstrably wrong about everything. Not only did the stimulus and quantitative easing not cause inflation and higher prices, they frankly didn’t go far enough. What they did was help create bubbles in assets like stocks and housing, but that alone doesn’t lead to widespread inflation or higher interest rates (neither of which are necessarily a bad thing in moderation.)

What’s wrong with the economy has nothing to do with the deficit, the ACA, government spending, regulation, or anything remotely related to what any conservative pundit might blather about. The weakness in the economy is a function of wages that are too law and jobs that are too few. And given the outlandish stock prices, corporate profits and executive salaries over the last few years, any claims that businesses are too overtaxed or overregulated to create jobs are an outright joke.

Everything conservative economists say is an attempt to distract from the most dangerous truth they face: that corporate profits and stock prices are at record highs, but that’s not helping create middle class jobs and prosperity. If they ever admit that simple truth, the whole game is up.

But remember: they’re wrong about everything. The disconnect between profits and salaries, stock prices and jobs, and assets and wages is all that matters in the economy. The rest is a sideshow, and any Democrat claiming progressive credentials without talking about this disconnect is a fraud who only hurts the country in the long run. The current situation is unsustainable, and someone will take the blame when it all comes crashing down. Democrats’ only chance is to be like Elizabeth Warren, calling out the problems so that when the dam breaks they can have anti-establishment solutions ready at hand.

.

*This post will remain at the top for the day.  Please scroll down for newer posts.


Thank you!

by digby

… Fallenttinme Be Mice Elf Again

Just a quick post to say thanks so very much for all of your kind generosity during my holiday fundraising drive. I especially appreciate all the tweets, retweets, Facebook and blog posts from my friends and colleagues that made it a success. And to those who anonymously donated — you know who you are, even if I don’t — my eternal gratitude. It means the world to me that people value the work we do here enough to voluntarily pay for it. I cannot imagine a greater compliment or a better endorsement.

.

King of the hill, top of the heap

by digby

Great picture, great All American family:

The two biggest cities in the country have elected progressive mayors this year. Good luck to both of them.

.

Words to live by

by digby

#2013TaughtMe that profoundly unlikable people can still make some damn good points.
— Dave Zirin (@EdgeofSports) December 20, 2013

And not just Alex Rodriguez folks. I know it’s hard to believe sometimes, but just because someone’s personality or style offends you it doesn’t mean they are always wrong. Some people are smart enough to learn this when they are young. Some of us don’t get that until we’re old. But it’s a fact.

.

Shocking statistic ‘o the week

by digby

Sick:

You’d think Christmas week would be a slow week for GunFAIL incidents. But all that actually slowed down was the number of guns found in schools, since most schools were closed for the better part of the week, if not all week long. Instead, those kids were at home, in some cases, with nothing better to do than accidentally shoot one another, or get accidentally shot. In fact, I found fifteen kids who were accidentally shot last week. And in a bizarre, if not particularly significant twist, six of them were 14-year-olds. Shockingly, we also saw our record for the youngest GunFAIL victim shattered, when an infant of just 2 months of age was accidentally shot and killed in East Lampeter, PA. The other child victims of GunFAIL last week were aged 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 17 and 17…

Also of special note from last week: the Pennsylvania man who decided to punctuate a domestic argument by pounding a rifle on the floor, which then discharged and shot his daughter, upstairs, and; the Colorado man who mistook his 14-year-old step-daughter for an intruder and shot her to death as she tried to sneak back into the house. But that was only the first of two GunFAILs in Colorado Springs for the week. It’s a relatively GunFAIL-y place, actually. These two incidents are their 13th and 14th appearances in our lists. But that’s over only 10 weekly lists. In other words, this is actually the third time Colorado Springs has appeared more than once inside of a single week’s list.

And that’s not all by a long shot. Read on to hear about all of this horrifying carnage (as well as the concealed carry fool who shot himself in the ass in Home Depot…)

And keep in mind that as David Waldman points out, a whole lot more guns were given out as stocking stuffers this year than were confiscated by Obama…

.

Normal Americans know the real economy isn’t doing well

by David Atkins

It’s not just progressive bloggers sounding alarm about the growing disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street, and nervous the “recovery” which was already only benefiting the asset class anyway might be short-lived. Americans in general are as pessimistic about the economy as ever:

Americans have weathered several years of negative feelings about the economy, fears for the state of the world, and worries about their own family’s finances. Now they are greeting 2014 with a surprising amount of pessimism, according to the latest Economist/YouGov Poll. On the eve of the New Year, Americans are less positive than they have been in years about how the country’s economy, the world as a whole, and their own family’s circumstances will fare in the next 12 months.

Nearly half the country is pessimistic about the state of the economy next year – and less than a third are optimistic. Since the start of the Great Recession in 2008, Americans have been more willing to think the economy is getting worse than to say it is improving, despite the steady improvement in most economic indicators. This poll continues that negative assessment when it comes to the economy.

At the start of 2013, Americans looked more favorably on the economy than they do today. About the same percentage was optimistic as pessimistic about what the year now past would be like.

Pessimistic views now also outweigh optimistic ones when it comes to predicting what will happen in the world. And the public also has become more pessimistic with time. When Americans looked ahead to 2010, 2011, and 2012, positive assessments outweighed negative ones, although the margins shrunk each year. Now, Americans are decidedly pessimistic about the coming year.

Those negative feelings will only begin to subside when wages start to go up and the government starts offering a basic sense of economic security. Rising stock and housing prices are doing nothing to make most Americans feel better about the economy, because that’s not how most Americans see their economic security.

It’s all about wages and job security. If the private sector cannot or will not provide higher wages and economic security, it falls upon the government to do it. Failing to provide higher wages and more job security is no longer an option for the public. And without a re-balancing of the economy and an improvement in economic outlook, even the asset classes are likely to see their ill-gotten gains come crashing down like the house of cards it is.

.