Month: February 2014

Too right wing for the American Legion? I didn’t know it was possible …

by digby

Looks like it:

The head of the American Legion, one of the largest veterans advocacy groups in the United States, said on Wednesday that an amendment to place more sanctions on Iran has “no place” being added to a veterans bill currently being considered in the Senate.

Republicans this week have grounded Senate action on important military issues to a halt by adding Iran sanctions measures to bills meant to combat military sexual assault and help America’s veterans. Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) included an Iran sanctions provision in his alternative to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) vets bill, which would, according to the Hill, “boost veterans’ healthcare programs and give veterans in-state tuition rates at all schools across the country.”

Democrats criticized the Republicans for “inject[ing] partisan politics into the mix, insisting on amendments that have nothing to do with helping veterans,” as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said on the Senate floor on Wednesday.

The American Legion piled on, saying in a statement that “sanctions against Iran have no place in a U.S. Senate debate over legislation that aims to expand health care, education opportunities, employment and other benefits for veterans.”

There was a time when the American Legion would have attacked any group as being unpatriotic for saying something like this. And they still would if veterans benefits weren’t at stake. But still, I think this is progress of a sort. They’ve been forced to publicly come out against warmongering in order to protect their own people and that’s not a position in which the hawks of yesteryear would have ever placed them.

This is yet another positive consequence of the tea party’s insanity. They’ve knocked over the three legged Republican stool of “family values, small government and national security” and the establishment doesn’t know how to right it.

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Exceptional!

by digby

A study of election integrity around the world found:

Experts were critical about flawed elections in several long-established democracies, such as Italy and Japan. Most strikingly, according to the PEI index, the United States ranked 26th out of 73 elections under comparison worldwide, the lowest score among Western nations. Experts highlighted concern over American practices of district boundaries, voter registration and campaign finance.

What with all the cracking down on non-existent voter fraud and runaway campaign contributions from billionaires, we can get down in the 50s in no time.

And hey, our vaunted electoral college guarantees that from time to time we will elect someone who fails to get a majority, and when there is a dispute in the electoral college we turn to outright banana republic tactics and allow the political machines to install someone who didn’t actually get the most votes. I’m thinking that if they took those practices into account we’d be down there with Malaysia and Indonesia.

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That “special” relationship

by digby

I hope you and your honey weren’t flashing a bit of skin over your webcam recently because it’s been preserved for a bunch of bureaucrats to “research” and “analyze” if they think they might need to. Our good friends across the pond are looking at your nibbles and bits.

Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy”.

GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans’ images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.

The documents also chronicle GCHQ’s sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place.

Well that’s good. I’m awfully glad they try to keep it away from the staff. What could possibly go wrong?

It should be clear to anyone by now that there is no good reason to store all the stuff they’re storing. They can’t even point to a good reason. They are doing it because they can.

What this changes is the idea that the act of ephemeral, private communications must now go back to a far more primitive time when the only way you could have an ephemeral, private communication was to speak in person. The fact that they are storing your private calls and messages basically renders everything the internet and your telephone is used for a potentially incriminating piece of documentation for the government to use if it wants to build a case against you. And that doesn’t even take into account the massive threat it poses to individuals from private parties who may find ways to access this information. Maybe you trust the government. What about cyber-criminals? Do you trust that the government will be able to guard this information? They haven’t been particularly good at it so far — Chelsea Manning accessed it and snuck it out on a Lady Gaga CD.

Do you want your face (much less your T&A) in a “mug book” to be used by law enforcement based upon truly primitive facial recognition technology?

Rather than collecting webcam chats in their entirety, the program saved one image every five minutes from the users’ feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ’s servers. The documents describe these users as “unselected” – intelligence agency parlance for bulk rather than targeted collection.

One document even likened the program’s “bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events” to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals.

“Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for ‘mugshots’ or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face,” it reads. “The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright.”

The agency did make efforts to limit analysts’ ability to see webcam images, restricting bulk searches to metadata only.

However, analysts were shown the faces of people with similar usernames to surveillance targets, potentially dragging in large numbers of innocent people. One document tells agency staff they were allowed to display “webcam images associated with similar Yahoo identifiers to your known target”.

(If you think that’s cool, remind yourself of this little error. I)

It is, quite simply, too dangerous to our civil liberties and our personal privacy for these records to be stored at all. Governments functioned quite well having to build cases based upon suspicion. They should have no problem being able to get warrants for specific people or groups of people. It’s how it’s always worked before.

Read the whole thing. It would be laughable if it weren’t so appalling. We’ve officially graduated to farce.

*Oh, and if you think the NSA isn’t intimately involved in this — and likely farmed it out to GCHQ because of their more lax legal system — you must have recently taken a trip to Colorado and bought some of that really good Mountain High.

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You wouldn’t know it from the political conversations happening in the United States and Australia, but the world’s scientists are speaking loud and clear. The debate is over, and it’s long past time to act:

Two of the world’s most prestigious science academies say there’s clear evidence that humans are causing the climate to change.

The time for talk is over, says the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, the national science academy of the UK.

The two released a paper, Climate Change: Evidence and Causes, written and reviewed by leading experts in both countries, lays out which aspects of climate change are well understood and where there is still uncertainty and a need for more research.

Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, said:

“We have enough evidence to warrant action being taken on climate change; it is now time for the public debate to move forward to discuss what we can do to limit the impact on our lives and those of future generations.”

NAS President Ralph J. Cicerone said:

“As two of the world’s leading scientific bodies, we feel a responsibility to evaluate and explain what is known about climate change, at least the physical side of it, to concerned citizens, educators, decision makers and leaders, and to advance public dialogue about how to respond to the threats of climate change.”

Here’s the deal.

NASA knows humans are causing climate change and that it’s dangerous.

The Pentagon knows it.

The UN knows it.

99% of the international scientific community knows it.

We can either believe what NASA, the Pentagon, the UN, and the entire scientific community say about climate change.

Or we can believe what the paid lackeys for the oil industry, Tony Abbott, Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh say.

That’s not a debate. It’s a joke.

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DOJ Follies

by digby

Come on …

The Justice Department is asking a secret federal court to let the government keep telephone records collected by the National Security Agency beyond a five-year limit, arguing that it has an obligation to retain evidence in lawsuits it is facing.

Data collected under the NSA’s phone records programs are supposed to be destroyed within five years, but lawyers for the government are asking that the records be preserved longer for use as potential evidence in pending lawsuits. The Justice Department says it has a legal obligation to identify, locate and maintain information that may be used as evidence in those suits that might otherwise be destroyed.

So, if you file a lawsuit protesting the retention of record collection for five years it means they will have to retain them for more than five years due to the fact that they want to keep the records for five years and will draw out the litigation beyond five years?

A rather large mistake


by digby

Oopsie …

Income inequality can lead to slower or less sustainable economic growth, while redistribution of income, when measured, does not hurt and can even help an economy, IMF staff found in a research study released on Wednesday.

Although the study by International Monetary Fund economists does not reflect the Fund’s official position, it is another sign of a shift in its thinking about income disparity.

“It would still be a mistake to focus on growth and let inequality take care of itself, not only because inequality may be ethically undesirable but also because the resulting growth may be low and unsustainable,” according to the study.
[…]
“In the bad old days, the IMF asked governments to cut public spending and taxes,” said Nicolas Mombrial, the head of Oxfam’s Washington office. “We hope this research and Christine Lagarde’s recent statements are a sign that they are changing their tune.”
[…]
Jonathan Ostry and Andrew Berg, two of the authors of the IMF paper, also researched the link between income inequality and growth in 2011.

At the time, Ostry said the response was that income redistribution rather than inequality was responsible for hurting growth: some argued that inequality prompted governments to transfer money to the poor, which reduced incentives to work.

Their follow-up paper on Wednesday showed redistribution was not to blame.

“We find that inequality is bad for growth … in and of itself,” Ostry told reporters on Wednesday. “And we can say that redistribution by itself doesn’t seem to be bad for growth, unless it’s very large.”

They said there was evidence that extremely high taxes or transfers to the poor, such as which occurs in some European countries, could hurt growth. But they found that redistribution also helped growth by reducing inequality.

Oh H-E-double hockey sticks. You mean all that character building austerity wasn’t really a good idea after all?

I’m shocked.

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Progress: scammer Republicans are at least pretending to tax the rich

by David Atkins

Michael Hiltzik has a good take on the GOP’s latest tax scam:

The long-awaited Republican tax reform plan was released today by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich). It’s being hailed as a breakthrough in putting real reform on the table, but also being instantly eulogized as dead-on-arrival in a Congress that wants no part of any tax reform, now or ever.
Still, it’s instructive to examine the Camp plan for a primer on the latest mathematical trickery aimed at making something that preserves, even enhances, tax benefits for the wealthy appear instead to be a tax increase for the wealthy. Nice try, Congressman Dave.

Here’s the easiest calculation. Camp says he’s eliminating the preferential tax rate on capital gains, and taxing them the same as ordinary income. That would be a big philosophical change and a big tax hike on the rich, if it were true.

It’s not true.

Camp’s plan exempts 40% of capital gains (and investment dividends) from any taxation at all. How does this work out in real numbers? The top marginal tax rate on married taxpayers today is 39.6% (couples with more than $457,600 income). The top capital gains rate is 20%.

Camp wants to cut the top marginal rate to 35%. If you tax capital gains at 35%, but exempt 40% of them from any tax, your effective rate on all capital gains works out to (… wait for i t…) 21%. In other words, Camp is raising the standard cap gains rate by a single percentage point. But since he’s also cutting the top rate on all income by nearly five percentage points, rich taxpayers still come out ahead.

This is all typical Republican economic royalism and lying chicanery–except for one thing. They’re actually trying to make it look like they’re taxing wealth the same as work.

They know they’re losing the argument. I pointed this out before in the context of the Right’s shift from attacking Democrats as “socialist” to calling us “crony capitalists.”

They know that Americans are upset about the preferential treatment of wealth over work. They know that if this is what capitalism looks like, more and more Americans want no part of it. They know they’re losing. These sorts of desperate dodges and lies in the hope of acknowledging but avoiding reality are what a political party does when it’s on the ropes.

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Speaking of liberals …

by digby

I wrote earlier about the Gallup findings that show more people assuming the liberal label in the past couple of years. And I mentioned that while it’s good news that people are no longer afraid to identify with the left side of the dial, the question remains as to what that left side of the dial actually stands for.

This conversation between Bill Moyers and Professor Adolph Reed delves into that question and the upshot is that modern liberalism leaves a whole lot to be desired. (Surprised?)

If you have the time today to watch this (or read the transcript) I urge you to do it.

Reed worries that liberals have come to depend upon electoral politics as their only path to progress and that this is short sighted. I think that is short sighted as well, but as people who read this blog regularly know, I take the Norman Solomon approach and say that “state power matters” and it’s foolish to abandon it to the right wing or the “neos” on both sides. (Reed agrees as well, by the way.) His critique is aimed at liberals who only focus on electoral politics when obviously that’s not getting us where we need to go.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how much expectation and pressure we are putting on semiotics to create the change we all believe in. So often lately it seems to me that symbolism, labels, totems and signs are becoming the ends instead of the means for progress. And I don’t mean to suggest that those things aren’t important. They are indispensable. But they aren’t enough. The system must be challenged too. And on that I think Reed is correct in this exchange:

BILL MOYERS: You remind us of how leftist, progressive, liberals, a lot of everyday folks were swept up in the rhetoric and expectations surrounding Obama’s campaign, his election, and his presidency. I’ll bet you remember election night in Grant Park in 2008.

ADOLPH REED: Yeah, I do.

BILL MOYERS: Here it is.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This is our time to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids, to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace, to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth that out of many, we are one. That while we breathe, we hope.

And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people. Yes we can. Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.

ADOLPH REED: The clip is interesting, right? Because you think about the clip and his utterances, right, were a collection of evocative statements. But there was no real content there, right? I mean, he didn’t say, I’m going to fight for X, and I have–

BILL MOYERS: Against inequality or for equality–

ADOLPH REED: Right, right.

BILL MOYERS: –or for wages, or–

ADOLPH REED: Right, right. So it was as he said himself in one or both of his books, his move is to encourage people to imagine a better world and a better future and a better life for themselves through identification with him.

BILL MOYERS: And you say in your article that his content, essentially, is his identity.

ADOLPH REED: Correct.

BILL MOYERS: I can imagine that if President Obama were sitting here talking with you or you were at the White House talking with him, he’d say, Adolph, I understand your diagnosis. But what you have to understand is that pragmatism can be and often is an effective agent or tool or weapon in the long-range struggle for social justice.

And I know you’re impatient, I know you believe in this restructuring of society, but we’re not going to get there with the wave of a wand. And it takes just as it did in the civil rights movement, a long time for me to get here to the White House, it’s going to take a long time for this country to get where you would take it.

ADOLPH REED: Right. Oh, I am absolutely certain that he would say something like that. I admit that this is kind of treading maybe, into troublesome water, but among the reasons that I know Obama’s type so well is, you know, I’ve been teaching at elite institutions for more than 30 years.

And that means that I’ve taught his cohort that came through Yale actually at the time that he was at, you know, Columbia and Harvard. And I recall an incident in a seminar in, you know, black American political thought with a young woman who was a senior who said something in the class. And I just blurted out that it seem, that the burden of what she said seemed to be that the whole purpose of this Civil Rights Movement was to make it possible for people like her to go to Yale and then to go to work in investment banking.

And she said unabashedly, well, yes, yes, and that’s what I believe. And again, I didn’t catch myself in time, so I just said to her, well, I wish somebody had told poor Viola Liuzzo, you know, before she left herself family in Michigan and got herself killed that that’s what the punch line was going to be, because she might’ve stayed home to watch her kids grow up. And I think–

BILL MOYERS: This was the woman who on her own initiative went down during the civil rights struggle to Selma, Alabama to join in the fight for voting rights and equality, and was murdered.

ADOLPH REED: Right, exactly. I’m not prepared to accept as my metric of the extent of racial justice or victories of the struggles for racial justice, the election of a single individual to high office or appointment of a black individual to be corporate CEO.

Well, you can’t really say there is no progress if women and people of other races aren’t allowed to be avaricious greedheads just like middle aged white men. That’s our “meritocracy” at work. But I take his point. And for the rest of us who are never going to be investment bankers or CEOs, there are more important concerns. Like the disappearing middle class. And personal debt. And hunger. And gun violence. And a government run by the rich for the rich. I do think it matters that we have an African American president. It matters a great deal. And it might even matter that we have African American Masters of the Universe. But to declare “mission accomplished” because of that is to leave the job undone.

Our society has undoubtedly made some very important social progress in the last few years, especially on race and gay rights. It was a huge lift and largely done by activists and allies on the left. And liberals must continue to fight for equality and human rights wherever and whenever it’s needed. But most people of all colors, sexual orientation, creed, ethnic background etc, etc., are facing a decline in living standards and a drop in expectations for their children along with the prospect of some cataclysmic dislocation if we stay on our current path. And Reed and Moyers are absolutely correct that the only way to meet the challenges of our time is to band together in common cause.

It’s an easy equation really: I’ll fight for you if you’ll fight for me. We’re all in this together. It would be nice if we avoided our apparently natural inclination to fight amongst ourselves while the world is burning.

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QOTD: A gullible police chief

by digby

Some people will believe anything:

“The first day of legalization, that’s when Colorado experienced 37 deaths that day from overdose on marijuana,” said Annapolis, Md., police chief Michael Pristoop while testifying against legislation to decriminalize cannabis in Maryland, according to the Capital Gazette. “I remember the first day it was decriminalized there were 37 deaths.”

He was informed that this statistic came from the satirical web site The Daily Current and later apologized, which is nice.

But how could a police chief think such a thing is possible?

Obviously, the man is completely out of touch if he was willing to believe that pot could kill people at all. He’s downright stupid if he thought that it was reasonable that it killed 37 people in one day. The day it became legal.

This man is the police chief of a fair sized city.

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The shoot first and ask questions later doctrine

by digby

I think a lot of us watching this increasingly surreal devolution of our cultural norms around guns are starting to get a little bit scared. This is rapidly spinning out of control.

After the Dunn verdict, I wrote that it’s more and more obvious that the “polite society is an armed society” trope is really just a get out of jail free card for bullies and hotheads to run society by the law of the jungle. I noted that a European friend told me recently that it’s common advice for travelers to the United States to be told to avoid confrontation at all costs, no matter what the provocation, because you never know who might be armed.  Certainly, the bullies in places that have enshrined “stand your ground” believe they are allowed by law to provoke a confrontation and then shoot the victim if he fights back.

Dahlia Lithwick unpacks all this and more  in typically incisive fashion:

The gun lobby has single-handedly made certain that the very definition of what one might reasonably expect from an altercation at a Walmart, a movie theater, or a gas station has changed. By seeking to arm everyone in America, the NRA has in fact changed our reasonable expectation of how fights will end, into a self-fulfilling prophecy about how fights will end. It should surprise you not at all to learn that of the 10 states with the most lenient gun laws in America, seven support “stand your ground.” In those jurisdictions shooting first isn’t merely “reasonable.” It borders on sensible.

And it’s not just cultural expectations that are shifting. We’re also shifting what we ask of our jurors. Under “stand your ground,” we are asking jurors to impose a subjective test about whether the shooter was experiencing a profound moment of existential panic. We are asking them whether—in a country seemingly full of people who are both armed and terrified that everyone else is armed—shooting first makes sense. By redirecting jurors to contemplate whether people who are armed and ready to kill are thinking reasonably about others they believe to be armed and ready to kill, we have created a framework in which one’s subjective fears about the world are all that matters. Or as the father of one victim explained to the Washington Post, “Somehow, we’ve reached the point where the shooter’s word is the law.”

Every time we hear about a Zimmerman, a Dunn, or a Cyle Wayne Quadlin, we get a little bit closer to believing that we need to become a Zimmerman, a Dunn, or a Cyle Wayne Quadlin merely to protect ourselves. And then it gets a little bit easier for us to relate to, and to believe, the next Zimmerman, Dunn, or Cyle Wayne Quadlin. It’s a perfect loop of logic. We define the reasonableness of a lethal response by the growing number of lethal responders. “Stand your ground” laws, or at least the public conception of what they do, are changing the way the rest of us think about self-protection. This is, of course, exactly the world the NRA dreams of constructing: Everyone armed and paranoid that everyone else is armed. But the old canard that an armed society is a polite society is pretty much bunk. Ours is not a polite society; we are rude and hotheaded and terrified. Now we have guns to help us sort it all out.

I think that’s so. But I don’t think the NRA dream will be realized.  Something much more repressive and socially stifling is taking place. In the final analysis, I think most people will not take a chance on getting into a deadly altercation. If it becomes accepted that the bullying types who demand “respect” and like to tell strangers to follow their orders are packing heat most people aren’t going carry their own guns and they aren’t going to be reckless enough to get into gun battles with armed thugs.

They will submit.

They will keep quiet.

They will apologize and move on.

Sure, there will be more killing of young men and assorted people asserting their right to speak, but once most of us understand that we could die if we fail to follow a bullying stranger’s orders, we’ll usually do what we’re told. Life is already short enough.

And the gun proliferation zealots will call it liberty.

Is everyone getting the same picture in their heads? It’s not unprecedented in America.

 In fact, we had an entire race of people live under a regime like that once before: