Month: January 2014

More gun numbers

by digby

Not that this comes as any surprise considering todays news about yet another gun rampage, but it’s probably worth noting:

People who have ready access to a firearm are almost twice as likely to be killed and three times likelier to commit suicide than those without a gun available in the home or from a neighbor or friend, a new study has concluded.

Though men and women with firearm access were about equally likely to take their own lives with a gun, the latest research turned up a gender gap when it came to homicide. Compared with all adults without access to a gun, men with firearm access were 29% more likely to die in a gun-related homicide. But the analysis found that a woman who had a gun in or available to her household was close to three times likelier to die by homicide.

Previous studies have found that three-quarters of women who are killed with a gun die in their home, and that women typically know their assailant. That suggests that women who live in homes with a firearm are more likely to be gunned down in a domestic dispute or by an abusive partner, the research team wrote in their study, published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine.

I’m sure that the gun proliferation advocates have some snappy retort to these sorts of statistics. Perhaps they’ll say that women would be four times more likely to die if there wasn’t a gun in the house or some such thing. But common sense alone says that if there are guns around you, you are more likely to be killed with one. It doesn’t take a statistician to figure that out.

The suicide numbers are particularly awful.  And it would appear that we’re seeing more and more people decide they want to take other people with them.

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QOTD: Jake Tapper

by digby

After politely listening to his repeated lies and innuendo about Edward Snowden, Tapper patiently explained to Hugh Hewitt what the job of a journalist is :

HH: And the question is, we don’t have to know this for sure. You and I can’t. We don’t have the clearances. But isn’t it a rational conclusion that what he gave away greatly injured the national security interests of the United States?

JT: I know that that’s what the U.S. Government says. I choose to make it my job to not automatically believe what the U.S. Government says just because the government says it.

HH: That is also said by, that’s also said by a lot of people outside of the government who are familiar with, perhaps have practiced in the past, the intelligence community. It’s not just the United States Government. It’s pretty much everyone who’s ever had a security clearance that I know of, isn’t it?

JT: Hugh, my job is to be skeptical, skeptical of people like Edward Snowden, and skeptical of the U.S. Government. I am, my job is to not take for granted when somebody says oh, this is all just a made up phony scandal or what this person did put the U.S. Government at risk, and the American people at risk.

HH: So you won’t call him a traitor?

JT: No, I don’t call him a traitor. I don’t call him a whistleblower. We call him a leaker on the show. And it’s not my job. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of my job to take what the government says at face value and say this is the truth because the government says it, and the government never lies.

One wouldn’t think this attitude would be rare among top tier journalists, but it is.

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The Kochs engineer a merger and acquisition of the conservative movement

by digby

72 billion can pay for a whole lot of wingnut welfare:

The billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are convening some of the country’s richest Republican donors on Sunday at a resort near Palm Springs, Calif., to raise millions of dollars for efforts to shape the political landscape for years to come.
[…]
The Koch political operation has become among the most dominant forces in American politics, rivaling even the official Republican Party in its ability to shape policy debates and elections. But it’s mostly taken a piecemeal approach, sticking to its sweet spots, while leaving other tasks to outsiders, or ad hoc coalitions of allies.

That’s changing. This year, the Kochs’ close allies are rolling out a new, more integrated approach to politics. That includes wading into Republican primaries for the first time to ensure their ideal candidates end up on the ticket, and also centralizing control of their network to limit headache-inducing freelancing by affiliated operatives.

The shift is best illustrated in the expansion of three pieces of the Koch political network expected to be showcased or represented at the three-day meeting in Palm Springs, whose evolving roles were described to POLITICO by several sources.

• Center for Shared Services: a nonprofit recruiter and administrative support team for other Koch-backed groups, which provides assistance with everything from scouting office space to accounting to furniture and security.

• Freedom Partners: a nonprofit hub that doled out $236 million in 2012 to an array of conservative nonprofits that is now expanding its own operation so that it can fulfill many of the functions of past grantees.

• Aegis Strategic: a political consulting firm started last year by Koch-allied operatives who will recruit, train and support candidates who espouse free-market philosophies like those beloved by the Kochs, and will also work with nonprofit groups in the Koch network, like Freedom Partners, with which it has a contract to provide policy analysis.

The Koch network raised an astounding $400 million in the run-up to 2012, spending much of it assailing President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats. After the Election Day letdown, the Kochs did an in-depth analysis to find out what went wrong and what they could do better. Among the areas identified for improvement were greater investments in grassroots organizing, better use of voter data and more effective appeals to young and Hispanic voters, according to sources.

The meeting tomorrow is to persuade other moneybags greedheads to kick in a few bucks and the report says they are eager to sign on. But the Kochs don’t really need them. They could double their investment from 2012 and not even notice the difference.

Latinos overwhelmingly want action on climate change

by David Atkins

Latinos are America’s fastest growing demographic by far, causing untold headaches for Republicans and forcing Democrats to get serious on issues like immigration reform.

But the Hispanic community isn’t just motivated by core economic and immigration-related issues. The environment in general and climate change in particular are also very important:

Latinos overwhelmingly favor government action to fight climate change, voicing a level of support exceeded only in their views on immigration reform, according to a new poll commissioned by an environmental group.
Nine in 10 Latino voters surveyed said it was important for the U.S. government to address global warming and climate change; 80% favored presidential action to fight carbon pollution that causes it, according to the nationwide survey funded by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Other polling has shown that Latinos by wide margins back action to curb pollution, climate change and other environmental problems. The latest poll found even more intense support for policies to counter global warming.
“Almost any way you sliced it, Latinos were saying yes, we think there’s a role for government to regulate and limit carbon pollution,” said Matt Barreto, a professor of political science at the University of Washington and co-founder of Latino Decisions, the political opinion research firm that conducted the poll.
Those views cut across age, income and party affiliation, according to the survey. The poll, however, found somewhat lower support for government action on climate change among Latino Republicans and higher support for environmental protections among Democrats and young Latinos.
The results echo other surveys conducted in recent years for groups like the Sierra Club and National Council of La Raza that have found that a higher percentage of Latinos believe climate change is happening than do Americans as a whole.

Republicans like to deride minority voters, including Latinos, as “low information voters.” In reality, on this and many other issues the Latino community is much better educated than the Republican base, which lives in an ignorant denialist fantasyland peddled by Fox News and hate radio. They understand how big a deal it is.

As the two political parties vie for the Latino vote, action on climate and environment will be almost as important as action on immigration and jobs.

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The Big Chill

by digby

Scott Lemieux made an observation about the findings of the Civil Liberties Oversight board’s findings that I think are important to keep at the forefront of our minds. Yes, the legality of the programs may be debatable. I happen to think this is just another case of the politicians legalizing unconstitutional government behavior and the courts acquiescing in a time of crisis. These things tend to take time to straighten out.

But this is the real and present danger we are facing with these NSA Mass data collection programs:

In a perverse way, programs that restrict civil liberties become self-justifying because of restrictions on civil liberties are simply assumed to increase security and order. For example, in their 2007 defense of Bush-era expansions of executive branch powers to combat terrorism, Terror in the Balance, the eminent legal scholars Eric Posner and Adrian Vermuele proceed under the (empirically undefended) assumption that there is a substantial policy space in which there is a direct tradeoff between civil liberties and national security. This assumption stacks the political deck against civil liberties, because most assertions of executive authority are assumed to increase national security by virtue of their burdens on freedom on the one hand, and on the other that the people most likely to have their rights violated are likely to be unpopular minorities. The tendency of public officials to exaggerate threats further throws the tradeoff out of balance.

But the NSA program illustrates that this assumed tradeoff is often unfounded. Even in theory, in a world of finite resources it’s far from clear that collecting metadata is a better means of protecting national security than searches based on individualized suspicion. Analyses of metadata may reveal suspects and evidence that might otherwise go hidden, but they also consume valuable resources searching data generated by people with no connection to terrorism. Whether this tradeoff is beneficial is, at best, questionable. Generally, one doesn’t add triple the size of the haystack before searching for the needle. Given the real burdens placed on fundamental rights, the burden of proof is on those asserting that the programs are effective enough to justify such burdens.

The report concludes, however, that such evidence is sorely lacking. The report concedes three theoretical advantages to preemptively collecting huge amounts of metadata: speed, historical depth, and breadth of potential contacts. That these programs have some value in theory, however, is insufficient to demonstrate that they are superior to other available methods or effective enough to justify their intrusions into the privacy of individuals. Ultimately, after considering a substantial number of cases where terrorist plots have been stopped, the report concludes that the NSA program does not come close to justifying its costs: Based on the information provided to the Board, we have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.” In the rare cases where the metadata has provided leads pertaining to known terrorists, it had simply duplicated the work already being done by other law enforcement agencies such as the FBI.

And while the benefits of the program are ephemeral and at best speculative, the burdens are very real. The report shows in detail that the knowledge that communications being monitored can have a chilling effect on the speech and associational rights of journalists, activists, and scholars with no connection to terrorism. The report refers to Justice Sotomayor’s already influential concurrence in U.S. v. Jones, in which she correctly observes that “[a]wareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse.”

It’s the self-censorship, the hesitation, the fear that what you say or write or otherwise express today could be lurking somewhere on what Snowden referred to as your “permanent record” and come back to haunt you in the future. The collection of all this mass data amounts to a government dossier on every individual who has a cell phone or a computer. It’s forcing journalists, teachers and political dissidents to be afraid of doing their jobs and exercising their democratic rights. It’s making average citizens think twice about even doing silly things like search Amazon for pressure cookers or take a look at a controversial web-site.

And this is because no matter how much you may trust Barack Obama not to abuse that information it was only a few years ago that a man named Dick Cheney had access to it. Any of us can imagine what he might have done with it in the event of another major terrorist attack — after all, the man hijacked the presidency and illegally ordered commercial planes to be shot down after the first one. You simply cannot rely on the good will of people like him to resist using that information for nefarious means in the future. And frankly, mere fact that the collection of all this information isn’t giving results should make us all very leery about why they want it so badly.

The more power you give them the more they want, the more the bureaucracies need to justify themselves and ultimately the more tempting it will be to use the information for other purposes. It’s just a very bad idea in every way.

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Even the “own member” re-elect numbers are at all-time lows

by David Atkins

It’s an old truism that all politics is local, and that no matter how unhappy people may be with Congress at a national level they still want to re-elect their own Congressmember.

That’s not so true anymore:

Only 46 percent of people believe their own member of Congress deserves reelection — an all-time low in Gallup polling.

Last year, those who wanted their own member reelected stood at 59 percent, according to the poll released Friday.

That number has fallen from a record high of 69 percent in 1998.

The Gallup survey backs up a Pew poll that found much of the same sentiment last October.
Gallup also found only 17 percent of people think most members should be reelected, equally matching a record low. Historically, that number has averaged about 40 percent.

Typically, people are more supportive of their own representative than Congress as a whole.

The breakdown is equal among Democrats and Republicans.

The anti-incumbent sentiment comes as dissatisfaction with government and disapproval of Congress has spiked heading into the 2014 elections.

I’ve said it again and again: voters are angry. They know things aren’t working, that the economy is terrible, that the middle class is getting screwed, and that government isn’t doing much to help. Democratic and Republican partisans blame different factors and people, of course, but everyone knows that something is terribly wrong. That’s why anodyne, Bloomberg-style centrism is a political loser, despite the rising numbers of voters who self-describe as independents. People are calling themselves independents because the two main political parties are suffering from the same loss of credibility as every other elite institution that is failing to address the slide of the American middle class.

That in turn means that politics are going to get even uglier and more volatile in coming years.

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Ladies charging the citadel

by digby

I’m sure most of you of a certain age recall the battle royale over the admission of women to The Citadel back in the 90s. It was a slap in the face to freedom, Southern tradition and everything good about America. I seem to even recall that they were afraid that all the lady parts were going to drive the boys wild and if they didn’t is was just because all the female cadets were obviously lesbians.

So, with all the talk about sluts and feminazis and other issues of women and war, this piece by Corey Robin is especially interesting.  He notes that Lindsay Graham is being challenged from the right by a Tea party candidate. A woman Tea Party candidate.  A woman Tea Party candidate who also a graduate of The Citadel.

Robin writes:

And now we have Nancy Mace complaining that Lindsey Graham is too liberal.

Once upon a time, conservatism derived its edge, its sense of will and adversity, from the fact that many of its most illustrious leaders had been outsiders. From Benjamin Disraeli to Phyllis Schlafly, the movement understood its work as the volition of the upstart. “I was not,” hissed Burke at the end of his life,

like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a legislator; “Nitor in adversum” is the motto for a man like me….At every step of my progress in life, (for in every step was I traversed and opposed,) and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws, and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at home. Otherwise no rank, no toleration, even for me.

Nowadays, we get stuff like this:

In the summer of 1996, The Citadel opened its doors to women and Nancy took a bold step—she simply hopped in her car and drove to The Citadel to pick up an application. The next day, she submitted it.

A few days later, Nancy was accepted as one of the first women ever to enter the Citadel’s ranks as a “knob.” Nancy took the plunge and joined the Corps of Cadets, eager to follow in her father’s footsteps.

It’s a little bit of progress for the world. But needless to say, progress is the last thing conservatives really want. As Robin quips, “this doesn’t bode well for the movement.”

I do love the idea that The Citadel just “opened its doors to women.” Not exactly. The doors had to be hit repeatedly with a battering ram, by some brave women the Tea Partiers of the day did everything in their power to degrade and demean in the ugliest fashion possible. And they’d do it again today without a second thought, probably led by Nancy Mace waving a bloody shirt. Consistency isn’t their strong suit …

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QOTD: Chris Hayes and Anya Schiffrin

by digby

What with all the Davos babble going on, I was reminded of this by a tweet this morning. From “Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy“:

The successful overachiever can only enjoy the perks of his relatively exalted status long enough to realize that there’s an entire world of heretofore unseen perks, power, and status that’s suddenly come within view and yet remains out of reach.

I caught a glimpse of this in 2010 when I attended the Davos World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the global ruling class that takes place each January in Switzerland. When you arrive at the Zurich airport, your first instinct is to feel a bit of satisfaction that you are one of the select few chosen to hobnob with the most powerful people on Earth. Airport signs welcome and direct you to a special booth where exceedingly polite staff give you a ticket for a free shuttle bus that will drive you the two hours to the small ski-resort town in the Alps.
But you can’t help but notice that other guests, the ones who landed on the same plane, but who were sitting in first class, are being greeted by an army of attractive red-coated escorts who help them with their bags before whisking them off in gleaming black Mercedes S-Class sedans for the two-hour drive.

Suddenly your perspective shifts. At first you had viewed yourself as special and distinct from all those poor saps who would never be allowed into the inner sanctum of global power that is the World Economic Forum. But now you realize that, in the context of Davos attendees, you are a member of the unwashed masses, crammed into a bus like so much coach chattel.

And while you’re having this realization those same special VIPs whom you’ve quickly come to envy are enjoying their ride inside their plush, leather confines. But later that night they will find out over cocktails that those who are the true insiders don’t fly on commercial flights into Zurich; they take private jets and then transfer to helicopters, which make the trip from Zurich in about thirty minutes and feature breathtaking views of the Alps.

This constant envy is the dominant experience of the Davos conference, an obsessive looking over the shoulder instilled by the participants’ knowledge that the reality of fractal inequality means there are infinite receding layers of networking happening that one doesn’t even know about! “The point about Davos is that it makes everyone feel wildly insecure,” observed Anya Schiffrin, the wife of Nobel Prize–winning economist and frequent Davos attendee Joseph Stiglitz. “Billionaires and heads of state alike are all convinced that they have been given the worst hotel rooms, put on the least interesting panels, and excluded from the most important events/most interesting private dinners. The genius of World Economic [Forum] founder Klaus Schwab is that he has been able to persuade hundreds of accomplished businessmen to pay thousands of dollars to attend an even which is largely based on mass humiliation and paranoia.”

This brings me such joy.

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Those basement dwelling kids in their PJs are trying to steal our bodily essence, Mandrake …

by digby

Keep in mind that this unctuous loon is the former head of both the NSA and CIA:

In a speech at the National Bank, General Hayden said that there are three types of “sinners” in cyberspace : States, criminal groups and anarchists. 

States are “very good at it. Mine is. I’ve been director of the NSA and intelligence gathering reasons against legitimate targets, stealing information from other states. This does not put us on par with the Chinese. The Chinese steal things, and we Americans steal. But we do it to ensure the safety of our citizens, we do not do it to enrich our citizens, and that is the difference between us and the Chinese,” said Hayden, at the panel on “Intelligence and Cyber Security.” 

The second are “criminal groups” found in the former Soviet satellites. They consist of a lot of “talented people working for pay to steal things or to destroy networks on behalf of others.” 

The third group is made up of anarchists and activists, as well Guccifer who “do not do it for profit, but simply do.” 

In his opinion, the most dangerous is the third group . 

“States should be responsible for their actions. They should be careful that their actions have consequences. Groups have less control, but ultimately, they’re parasites. They live on the backs of others. Parasites can not find a way to survive after destroying their “host.” 

“I’m bad, but not a catastrophe,” said the American general. 

He says he is more worried about the group which consists of people who are “20-something, sitting in pajamas and slippers, still living with their mother in the basement, who are mad at the world, who want to do what you and I can not understand and certainly can not perform.” 

Michael Hayden claims that these young people can become very dangerous if they acquire capabilities that currently only states and criminal groups have.

Sure, state power can be a teensy bit of a problem. And criminals trying to steal all of our financial information is a bit of an inconvenience. But these basement kids in pajamas are monsters who are so powerful with all their knowledge and skills and junk, they are sort of like robots who can kill you just by thinking about you. That’s how scary they are!!!! And I don’t know if you noticed but he leaves out one particular category in this fear matrix: Islamic terrorists, the very people we’re supposed to be using all this technology to thwart. Odd don’t you think?

Read over that piece and think about the fact that this is the level of analytic expertise that’s been running our secret surveillance state for the last decade.

Now I really am scared.

*Oh, by the way, Hayden is now working for the “Chertoff Group” a security consultancy. Owned by this guy:

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: (Sustained applause.) Phil, I want to thank you for that introduction. And I want to thank Heritage for bringing us all together this morning to talk about the issue of terrorism and its place in American culture. We’ve got many distinguished guests. I’m not going to single them all out, but I do want to observe that we have Justice Thomas and Ginni Thomas here. (Sustained cheers, applause.) We also have some very distinguished radio commentators. Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham are here. (Cheers, applause.) This is great. If I keep identifying the prominent people in the audience, I’ll just get applause throughout the entire speech! (Laughter.)

I have to remember to use that technique in the future. I also want to thank the cast members of “24” and the producers and writers who have come out here, because I think it’s a testament to the seriousness with which they take this issue that they’ve come out to Washington to talk about it…In reflecting a little bit about the popularity of the show “24” — and it is popular, and there are a number of senior political and military officials around the country who are fans, and I won’t identify them, because they may not want me to do that (laughter) I was trying to analyze why it’s caught such public attention. Obviously, it’s a very well-made and very well-acted show, and very exciting. And the premise of a 24-hour period is a novel and, I think, very intriguing premise. But I thought that there was one element of the shows that at least I found very thought-provoking, and I suspect, from talking to people, others do as well.

Typically, in the course of the show, although in a very condensed time period, the actors and the characters are presented with very difficult choices — choices about whether to take drastic and even violent action against a threat, and weighing that against the consequence of not taking the action and the destruction that might otherwise ensue.

In simple terms, whether it’s the president in the show or Jack Bauer or the other characters, they’re always trying to make the best choice with a series of bad options, where there is no clear magic bullet to solve the problem, and you have to weigh the costs and benefits of a series of unpalatable alternatives. And I think people are attracted to that because, frankly, it reflects real life. That is what we do every day. That is what we do in the government, that’s what we do in private life when we evaluate risks. We recognize that there isn’t necessarily a magic bullet that’s going to solve the problem easily and without a cost, and that sometimes acting on very imperfect information and running the risk of making a serious mistake, we still have to make a decision because not to make a decision is the worst of all outcomes.

Yes, he was talking about the television show “24”. The one with all the violent torture and government lawlessness.

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Putz and sluts

by digby

Mike Huckabee’s feelings are hurt. But he’s not going to let that stop him from shilling for money:

I am apparently the worst conservative ever or at least the most annoying one according to the left wingers in Washington today. My remarks to the RNC today were immediately jumped on and blown sky high by hand-wringing, card carrying liberals from coast to coast, some of them in the media.

What did I say? Here you go:

“Our party stands for the recognition of the equality of women and the capacity of women. That’s not a war on them, it’s a war for them. If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control, because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. Let us take that discussion all across America, because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be.”

Guess what liberals? If you can’t stand to look at yourself in the mirror, then get ready for more of this talk, because conservatives are going to continue to fight back against your destructive policies towards women and families.

I’m afraid Huckabee has been spending waaaay too much time in the Fox bubble.

On the other hand that fundraising email will probably bring in a boatload of money. There is literally nothing that animates the right wing base more than being the perceived victims of liberal political correctness. It doesn’t matter if it’s nonsense. And it doesn’t matter that most of them know what he said was BS. It’s about cricling the wagons.

This piece by Paul Waldman successfully unpacks what Huckabee “means” better than anything I’ve read. He notes that this is at least partially a throwback attitude of older men who have never figured out how birth control works and assume that Huckabee and Limbaugh are making sense when they assume that women who use birth control must be having a lot of sex (because of their uncontrollable libidos.) That’s just plain old ignorance.

Waldman also points out that like a lot of conservative Christians, it just reflects his attitude toward sex in general. It’s a sin. (And the story of Eve tells you all you need to know about who it is that causes all that hotsy-totsy temptation ….) But he also gets to exactly what it is about this that’s so tone deaf — and why these Republicans can’t hear it:

Huckabee’s position is that saying “Democrats are treating women like dirty sluts by saying they should have access to birth control!” is very, very different from just saying women are dirty sluts. He feels he’s been falsely accused of saying the latter, when he was really just saying the former. I’m sure that he thinks that if women just understood the full context of his statement, they’d realize he respects and honors them. What he doesn’t get is that women actually want and need contraception, and 99 percent of women who have had sex have used some form of contraception at some point in their lives. So when he tells them that contraception is for sluts, what they hear isn’t “Because I care for you, I don’t want you to become a slut,” what they hear is, “You’re a slut.”

This seems to come up again and again: Republicans think they’re talking to a nation of nuns, when in reality they’re talking to actual women whose lives and experiences are different from what Republicans imagine them to be. If you told them that, guess what, your wife uses contraception, and so does your sister, and so does your daughter, and not only that, so did your mom, they’d cry “Nuh-uh!” and stick their fingers in their ears.

Which is why this is going to keep happening

Frankly, I think “because I care for you I don’t want you to become a slut” is just as bad. Who are any of these people to be telling women they shouldn’t enjoy sex — and with whomever they choose to have it? To hell with that. But I’ll bet that this that gets to the nub of the problem a lot of these conservative men don’t want to think about. Their wives don’t want to have a lot of sex with their husbands, and their wives are good women. Therefore, women who want to have sex are dirty sluts. They must be. Otherwise the fact that no one wants to have sex with the Mike Huckabees of the world (at least unless they are paid to do so) might just reflect badly on the men rather than the women.

After all, if a man can’t even be bothered to figure out how birth control works, I’m going to guess he hasn’t spent a lot of time figuring out how a woman’s sexual response works either.

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