Month: February 2014

Ailes’ and Hitchcock’s blondes

by digby

I have long thought that Roger Ailes was a lot like Alfred Hitchcock: extremely talented but very, very creepy. They look a bit alike, of course, but also have an obsession with young blond women.

Check this out:

But it isn’t just old Roger’s personal fetish. It’s also about a very specific drama and dynamic:

The best explanation for Fox glam may be the channel’s largely conservative audience. An argument can be made that conservative women are typically less squeamish than progressive ones about embracing what the sociologist Catherine Hakim calls “erotic capital,” otherwise known as using your looks to get ahead. See the gleeful Laura Ingraham/­Ann Coulter school of beauty­ology, which holds that the angrier and better-­coiffed you are, the more attention you will receive. The Republican Party welcomes looks in a woman—Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Nikki Haley—and so does Fox.

“They’re definitely pandering to a male audience,” says Meli Pennington, a makeup artist who runs a blog called Wild Beauty. Also, cable-news viewers tend to be older, so Fox may be specifically catering to the sensibilities of older men, she posits, by making women a little “brighter.” She means this literally. “You think of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends,” she says: “As he got older, they all get brighter and blonder. Look at Anna Nicole Smith. It’s like the large-print edition of women.”

Media critic Jack Shafer adds that the women you see on Fox are not just winsome, lavishly cosmeticized women, but winsome women paired with older men. He says the network almost appears to be taking a page from the theory of evolutionary psychology, which argues that women are attracted to prosperous (often older) men, and these men are attracted to women whose youth and curves signal fertility. “

The men are kind of frumpy older men,” Sherman agrees, “paired with hyper-feminine women. That kind of kinetic energy between the sexes is one of the reasons Fox is successful. Oftentimes the older male hosts—Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity—in the prime time, at night, are paired with women, debating politics, and the women are generally much younger … It almost goes back to 1940s Hollywood.” For guests, the Hollywood screwball routine can be unnerving. It was for Nell Minow, a critic of inflated CEO pay, who was taken aback when a producer urged her to “attack the masculinity” of her debate partner.

Doesn’t that just say it all?

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With Democrats like these …

by digby

Honestly, this sort of thing just makes a mockery of the Democratic Party.

SiriusXM host Michael Smerconish: “Would Jeb [Bush] make a good president?”

Former FL Governor Charlie Crist: “Yeah, I think he probably would. He made a great governor, in my humble opinion. He’s a good man…I don’t agree with him on everything…but when I saw him as Governor [of Florida] when I was Attorney General—and they’re elected separately in Florida—we had a lot of hurricanes, and Jeb Bush did a great job protecting our beautiful Florida during that [time].”

It’s not as if Crist is a super-popular guy in a deep red state that would only elect a Democrat who used to be a Republican. Florida is a swing state that has many good Democrats in state-wide office, all of whom would be unlikely to extoll the virtues of Jeb Bush who oversaw the theft of the presidential election of 2000 for his misbegotten nincompoop of a brother.

Being a Democrat means never having to say you’re sorry — as long as you act like a Republican. It’s pathetic.

Why Emptywheel is so great

by digby

Marcy Wheeler announced a few days ago that she will be working for the new investigative empire of Pierre Omidyar doing what she does best — plowing through dense, difficult information and figuring out what’s really lurking underneath. I’ll confess that I assumed from the minute the venture was announced that they would offer her a gig. She’s a rare blogger who is perfect — necessary actually — for an investigative operation like First Look.

This piece is a perfect example of why:

In this post, I suggested that reports (WSJ, WaPo) that NSA collects only 20 to 30% of US phone records probably don’t account for the records collected under authorities besides Section 215.

So why did WSJ, WaPo, LAT, and NYT all report on this story at once? Why, after 8 months in which the government has taken the heat for collecting all US call records, are anonymous sources suddenly selectively leaking stories claiming they don’t get (any, the stories suggest) cell data?

There’s a tall tale the stories collectively tell that probably explains it.

Read on for the details. You really cannot understand the degree of government obfuscation that’s taken place without reading Marcy’s blog and I think having the even wider audience she’ll have with First Look will be invaluable to anyone who wants to know what’s really been going on.

I will just note, in my own pithy way, the amazing irony regarding this story and so many others: the government just leaked classified information to all those media operations.

One wonders when the investigation to root out the culprits will commence.

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Reason Number 6,985 that Medicare for all would be better

by digby

Your asshole boss would have no reason to know anything about your private medical business:

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong held a town hall meeting last week about why the company was cutting retirement benefits, one of his explanations caused a nationwide uproar.

“We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were okay in general,” Armstrong said.

The comment set off a firestorm of controversy, with the mother of one of the babies publicly blasting Armstrong for his comments. He has since apologized and reversed the decision to cut pension plans.

But how did the company head learn about the health conditions of his employee’s babies to begin with?

AOL would not respond to CNN’s inquiry about how Armstrong got his information.

But believe it or not, it’s perfectly legal for many companies to have access to employee records from their group health plans. That’s right, the stuff you thought was just between you and your doctor.

Here are the rules:

Q: Can my insurer or employer get my health records without my permission?

A: Yes.

The Amended HIPAA Privacy Rule gives health plans and self-insured employers broad authority (“regulatory permission”) to get information without consent that is far more extensive than is needed for billing or any other reason related to a specific individual’s health care. Other uses for which health plans and employers are authorized to obtain use and disclose an individual’s health information without consent include:

Due diligence in connection with the sale or transfer of assets;
Certain types of marketing;
Business planning and development;
Business management and general administrative activities; and
Underwriting, premium rating and other activities relating to the creation, renewal or replacement of a contract of health insurance. Section 164.501

That covers any reason at all.

I’d imagine that most people have no idea that their employer can see their medical records. (In fact, a whole bunch of various entities and individuals can see them.) But they feel that they “pay” for it so they own it, (just like they own you.) If we had a universal plan that wasn’t tied so closely to employment that would not be an issue.

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We’re number 46! (In press freedom)

by digby

This is just depressing:

The United States did not live up to the promise of the First Amendment last year, “far from it,” sinking to 46th in global press freedom rankings, a respected international nonprofit group said Wednesday.

The U.S. plummeted 13 slots to 46th overall “amid increased efforts to track down whistle-blowers and the sources of leaks,” Reporters Without Borders warned in an annual report.

“The trial and conviction of Private Bradley Manning and the pursuit of NSA analyst Edward Snowden were warnings to all those thinking of assisting in the disclosure of sensitive information that would clearly be in the public interest,” the organization said.

The group, known by its French initials, RSF, also cited the Department of Justice’s seizure of Associated Press telephone records and a court’s pressure on New York Times reporter James Risen to testify against a CIA staffer accused of leaking classified information.

“The whistle-blower is clearly the enemy in the U.S.,” Delphine Halgand, who heads the RSF outpost in Washington, told Yahoo News. “Eight whistle-blowers have been charged under the Obama administration, the highest number of any administration, of all other administrations combined.”

Actually, what’s really depressing is the number of Americans who think this is just fine. In fact they think it’s great.

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A sad and shameful decade of injustice

by digby

I guess this is a step in the right direction but it makes me feel horrified nonetheless:

Hunger-striking detainees in Guantánamo Bay will be able to challenge in federal court the force-feeding to which many are being subjected, a Washington appeals court ruled on Tuesday, though the judges declined to put an immediate end to the practice.

In a split judgment from the US court of appeals for the DC circuit that deals with Guantánamo, the judges ruled by 2-1 to allow detainees to challenge the conditions of their confinement, specifically force-feeding, in habeas corpus petitions to the federal courts. The decision overturns two earlier rulings by separate district judges who had suggested the military commissions in Guantánamo effectively stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction over detainees and their custodial conditions.

Though the appeal court ruling will do nothing instantly to change the plight of the hunger-striking detainees, it does open the door to challenges against force-feeding in the federal courts. Shayana Kadidal, managing attorney of the Guantánamo project at the Center for Constitutional Rights, predicted there would now be a wave of claims from detainees relating to solitary confinement, force-feeding and policies that prevent the men being able to work with their lawyers on a regular basis.

“That’s ultimately because conditions at Guantánamo have got much worse than they were during Obama’s first term, not because the courts have had some sudden change of heart,” Kadidal added.

So that’s what it takes?

Whenever I read about the force feeding I cannot help but think of this famous piece by former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky which was published in the middle of the torture debate in 2005. It’s more poignant than ever considering all the red-baiting that’s going on these days:

Why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to “improve intelligence-gathering capability” by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some “cruel, inhumane or degrading” (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

Even talking about the possibility of using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the “treatment” under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the “Chekist’s handshake” so widely practiced under Stalin — a firm squeeze of the victim’s palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?

Now it appears that sleep deprivation is “only” CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin’s “show trials” of the 1930s. The henchmen called it “conveyer,” when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.

I know from my own experience that interrogation is an intensely personal confrontation, a duel of wills. It is not about revealing some secrets or making confessions, it is about self-respect and human dignity. If I break, I will not be able to look into a mirror. But if I don’t, my interrogator will suffer equally. Just try to control your emotions in the heat of that battle. This is precisely why torture occurs even when it is explicitly forbidden. Now, who is going to guarantee that even the most exact definition of CID is observed under such circumstances?

But if we cannot guarantee this, then how can you force your officers and your young people in the CIA to commit acts that will scar them forever? For scarred they will be, take my word for it.

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner — through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man — my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around.

They surrounded the doctor: “Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It’ll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool.” The doctor was in tears: “Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can’t do that. . . . ” And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again…

Today, when the White House lawyers seem preoccupied with contriving a way to stem the flow of possible lawsuits from former detainees, I strongly recommend that they think about another flood of suits, from the men and women in your armed services or the CIA agents who have been or will be engaged in CID practices. Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers.

I’m pretty sure the force-feeding is not this violent down in Gitmo these days. But it is experienced as violent by the prisoners, some of whom are know to be innocent of any wrongdoing and have never been charged (and in any case deserve to be tortured…)  Now, after more than a decade, some of them will be allowed to plead their case against being force fed against their will to a court somewhere. This is “justice.”

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Welcome to your new Internet monopoly

by David Atkins

I’m not an expert in telecommunications and anti-trust law, but not only does this seem like a terrible idea, I don’t understand how it could even be legal:

Comcast is set to buy Time Warner Cable in an all-stock deal that values Time Warner at $159 per share, CNBC’s David Faber reports on Twitter.
At $159, Comcast would be paying an 18% premium to today’s closing price. It would value Time Warner Cable at ~$45 billion. Comcast is valued at $146.5 billion.

This would make one gigantic cable company.

Comcast is the biggest cable provider in the U.S. with 23 million subscribers. Time Warner is the second biggest with 12 million subscribers. The next closest is Cox with 4.6 million subs…

However, this is far from a done deal. It will come under heavy government scrutiny.

This would create the biggest pay-TV business by a mile. There’s not exactly a ton of competition in the world of cable, but this would effectively make it nonexistent.

If the FCC allows this to move forward, it’s hard to see what the FCC’s role is anymore.

On a broader level it’s a complicated issue, but the short version is that the taxpayers funded much if not most of the actual wiring infrastructure that makes up the Internet for which these companies charge. Moreover, the Internet is an absolutely essential commodity for doing business, no less important in many ways than water and electricity. No matter what the law says, it’s functionally a utility and public good at this point, and since taxpayers funded both its creation and most of its subsequent development, we deserve to reap the rewards. We don’t deserve one monopolistic behemoth seeking rents on all of us, particularly now that the courts have eliminated net neutrality.

A society that allows its taxpayer-funded public goods to be privatized, monopolized and vertically integrated is crazy, corrupt or both. It’s long past time to nationalize Internet services.

But since that’s not likely in the cards for a long time, the next best option (as in healthcare) is for saner, more progressive states and municipalities to enact their own taxpayer-funded free Wifi and broadband services.

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Ballsy comment ‘o the day

by digby

Former Governor Sarah Palin:

“I just don’t know all the information out there, but it’s hard to be the CEO of an organization and not know what the closest people to you are up to.”

I’m sure everyone remembers why Palin quit the Governorship, right?

Gov. Sarah Palin abused her power when she fired her public safety commissioner this July, a state investigation has concluded.

The Alaska legislature voted Friday to release the 263-page report on the “Troopergate” scandal, a state kerfuffle which has come to haunt Palin’s vice presidential bid. The scandal centered around her firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. Monegan and others believed Palin fired him because he refused to take action against Mike Wooten, a state trooper under him who had been involved in a messy divorce with Palin’s sister, Molly.

The investigator, Stephen Branchflower, found that Monegan’s refusal to fire Wooten “was not the sole reason” but was “likely a contributing factor” to his firing.

Branchflower also said Palin’s attorney general failed to provide him with e-mails of Palin’s that he had requested as part of the probe.

The report found that Palin let the family grudge influence her decision-making, even if it was not the sole reason Monegan was dismissed.

I had to go back to Palin’s resignation freak show to recall exactly what she said about all this:

Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I’ve been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations – such as holding a fish in a photograph, wearing a jacket with a logo on it, and answering reporters’ questions.

Every one – all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We’ve won! But it hasn’t been cheap – the State has wasted THOUSANDS of hours of YOUR time and shelled out some two million of YOUR dollars to respond to “opposition research” – that’s money NOT going to fund teachers or troopers – or safer roads. And this political absurdity, the “politics of personal destruction” … Todd and I are looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills in order to set the record straight. And what about the people who offer up these silly accusations? It doesn’t cost them a dime so they’re not going to stop draining public resources – spending other peoples’ money in their game.

It’s pretty insane – my staff and I spend most of our day dealing with THIS instead of progressing our state now. I know I promised no more “politics as usual,” but THIS isn’t what anyone had in mind for ALASKA.

If I have learned one thing: LIFE is about choices!

And one chooses how to react to circumstances. You can choose to engage in things that tear down, or build up. I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity. I choose NOT to tear down and waste precious time; but to build UP this state and our country, and her industrious, generous, patriotic, free people!

Life is too short to compromise time and resources… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and “go with the flow”.

Nah, only dead fish “go with the flow”.

No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time… to BUILD UP.

And there is such a need to BUILD up and FIGHT for our state and our country. I choose to FIGHT for it! And I’ll work hard for others who still believe in free enterprise and smaller government; strong national security for our country and support for our troops; energy independence; and for those who will protect freedom and equality and LIFE… I’ll work for and campaign for those PROUD to be American, and those who are INSPIRED by our ideals and won’t deride them.

I WILL support others who seek to serve, in or out of office, for the RIGHT reasons, and I don’t care what party they’re in or no party at all. Inside Alaska – or Outside Alaska.

But I won’t do it from the Governor’s desk.

Never say Palin doesn’t have chutzpah.

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Anyone can be a billionaire if they just try hard enough?

After Oxfam found that the world’s 85 richest people had a as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people, [Shark Tank host] Kevin O’Leary had applauded the report as “fantastic news.”

“This is a great thing because it inspires everybody, and gets them the motivation to look up to the 1 per cent and say, I want to become one of those people. I’m going to fight hard and get up to the top,” he said on a Canadian news program.

Because anyone can see that if you just “fight hard” you too could beat the odds and become one of the 85 out of 3.5 billion to get to the top. If they can do it anybody can! Like the Waltons and L’Oreal heirs, for instance, all of whom inherited their wealth and then let their money do the earning.

It’s the American Dream:

Be sure to click over to the full story to see Tucker Carlson weigh in. It’s just precious.

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Pretty soon we won’t even need sweatshop labor

by David Atkins

Your “Defense” tax dollars at work:

Americans may never again buy clothes labeled “made in China” if robot sewing machines can beat Chinese costs of labor. The Pentagon has given $1.2 million to a Georgia Tech spinoff company to turn that futuristic concept into reality.

Such computer-controlled sewing machines must precisely move fabric under the needle “stitch by stitch” and carefully track passing threads — a job normally done with human hands and eyesight. Success could lead to automated U.S. factories that “produce garments with zero direct labor,” according to the contract issued by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on June 5.

The idea of making garment cutting and sewing a profitable U.S. business came from Steve Dickerson, founder and chief technology officer of Softwear Automation (the Georgia Tech spinoff company that received DARPA’s recent $1.2 million funding).

Dickerson realized the possibility for robotic sewing machines after observing that sewn items had disappeared almost entirely from his hometown of Commerce, Ga., and most of the United States. The U.S. currently imports about $100 billion worth of clothes and sewn items each year — much of it from countries such as China or Vietnam.

“The [robotic] technology proposed appears to allow cutting and sewing at costs LESS THAN in China,” according to Softwear Automation’s website. “There is only one basic innovation required; that the metric of motion should not be meters or inches but rather thread count in the fill and warp directions.”

Success could spell out huge disruptions for workers as robots continue taking over human jobs in manufacturing and other industries. Low-paid workers in developing countries stand to lose out the most in this case, but U.S. workers won’t gain much, either. Still, U.S. businesses could once again regain a foothold in the garment industry and win back a share of international trade.

Yes, U.S. businesses could regain a foothold in the garment industry. With no actual workers whatsoever. It will be glorious. For a few rich people, anyway.

Something tells me the cost of clothing won’t come down, though. And the CEOs of these companies will whine and cry at the notion that anyone should suggest redistributing their income.

I’m not a Luddite. I understand that these sorts of mechanization changes are inevitable. In fact, I think they’re a good thing. But far too many people have their heads in the sand about the modern wave of job mechanization, assuming that new jobs will be created elsewhere to replace them as productivity rises. They won’t be.

Most American seamsters and seamstresses have already been displaced by overseas labor, so the impact of something like this domestically isn’t huge (though some companies like American Apparel still do sew and create jobs with domestic labor.) But even the sweatshops themselves have been a pathway out of utter destitute poverty for many people in developing nations. Those people will soon be out of work. I know that most Americans couldn’t care less about workers in China or Bangladesh, and would much rather see some American executive make an extra $50 million than help anyone in another country. But they shouldn’t.

We really are moving to a world in the next few decades where, at both a global and domestic level, there simply won’t be remotely enough jobs available for the people who need them. What then?

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