Month: February 2014

We’re all in the rainbow coalition

by digby

Here’s an interesting perspective on Arizona’s new gay discrimination law. The author talks about the fact that jackie Robinson breaking the color line didn’t stop racial discrimination. In fact, black players for many years after had to contend with Jim Crow laws when they traveled with their teams.

He uses the examples of Hank Aaron and Michael Sam to examine Arizona’s proposal:

Coming up through the Milwaukee Braves minor league system, Aaron was one of three minority players on a team based in Jacksonville, FL and traveling to games throughout the southeastern United States. Although the team was integrated, Aaron and fellow farmhands Felix Mantilla and Horace Garner knew that most restaurants were not. Time and again, they would not be served when the team showed up for a meal on the road. A few of their teammates stood up to make sure they ate. Many did not. Nor did others, including league officials.

Could [Michael] Sam, the University of Missouri All-American football player and top draft prospect who is likely to be the first openly gay player in the NFL, come up on a similar road as Aaron did? He might, if a bill now making its way from the Arizona legislature to the governor’s desk is signed into law.

That bill, which legislators gave final approval on this past Thursday, provides changes to existing state laws having to do with religious freedom, including an expansion of who is protected under those laws. It would effectively allow a business owner to deny service to customers when such work violates their religious beliefs. And if a discrimination lawsuit were to emerge as a result, the business owner would have a defense by providing that the decision was motivated by “sincerely held” religious beliefs and that giving such service would have substantially burdened the exercise of those beliefs.

Critics of the bill see it as a license to discriminate against certain people, particularly those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. They are right. This is simply revisiting the Jim Crow South in a different guise—skin color is now sexual preference.

This isn’t the first article to make the obvious connection between this new law and Jim Crow, but I think putting it into the context of sports is well done. The “team” concept brings up the real potential problem here — family. Jim Crow discriminated against all African Americans and they could do it because Southern whites of the era were all of one mind and the law could easily keep up a pretense of “separate but equal.” But that bigoted social infrastructure doesn’t exist today. Do these allegedly religious people not understand that most Americans are related to gay people and that the vast majority of us have gay friends, acquaintances, and co-workers? Even in Arizona it’s hard to imagine that there are enough proud homophobes with no ties to gay people to openly support more than one ugly restaurant with lousy food. Who do they expect to be their customers?

Maybe it makes more sense to just allow this law to pass and let nature take its course — these “Christians” will not be able to serve anyone but their own church members and will go out of business in the first month. Once they’re all disabused of the idea that you can make a living in 2014 being a roaring bigot, I’d assume that Arizona would then quietly repeal this hideous law and try to pretend it never happened.

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Our genius overlords

by digby

Everybody’s having lots of fun with the recently released Fed transcripts from 2008. The NY Times highlighted this illuminating moment:

My initial takeaway from these voluminous transcripts is that they paint a disturbing picture of a central bank that was in the dark about each looming disaster throughout 2008. That meant that the nation’s top bank regulators were unprepared to deal with the consequences of each new event.

Consider comments about the strength of the United States banking system made at the meeting on March 18, 2008. This sit-down occurred just days after the collapse of Bear Stearns and the sale of its assets to JPMorgan Chase, in a deal brokered by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

While most of the discussion at this meeting covered the possibility that the country had already slipped into a recession and that inflation might rear its head, the topic of whether the nation’s banks were adequately capitalized did come up. That these institutions were inadequately capitalized was already obvious to some regulators, but that was not the view of Timothy F. Geithner, who was then the president of the New York Fed and vice chairman of the Fed’s Board of Governors.

“It is very hard to make the judgment now that the financial system as a whole or the banking system as a whole is undercapitalized,” Mr. Geithner said, adding that “some people are out there saying that.”

He continued: “Based on everything we know today, if you look at very pessimistic estimates of the scale of losses across the financial system, on average relative to capital, they do not justify that concern.”

To Mr. Geithner, the nattering naysayers raising alarms about the financial system’s soundness were a bigger problem than the one that they were trying to draw attention to. “There is nothing more dangerous in what we’re facing now,” he said, “than for people who are knowledgeable about this stuff to feed these broad concerns about our credibility and about the basic core strength of the financial system.”

By January 2009 we were in a full blown global financial crisis and the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression. So naturally they nominated Geithner to be the Treasury Secretary.

I’m sure you’ll recall that in his confirmation hearings the only real controversy was the fact that he had failed to pay some taxes a few years earlier:

[Senator Charles] Grassley said he recognized that many in Congress viewed Geithner as “possibly the only man for the job of healing the recession before us and a very fractured economy.”

With leadership like that it’s obviously pure random chance that we avoided a Great Depression.

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Scott Walker has a problem

by digby

I guess MSNBC can keep their focus on the implosion of Chris Christie. At least for now. Fox News is taking up the slack on GOP scandals and goes after Scott Walker:

It’s kind of hard to believe, but there it is. I guess Roger Ailes has someone else in mind for 2016. (Or Chris Wallace woke up with some sort of longing for the days when he was an actual newsman instead of a hack…)

If you want to catch up on “Walkergate” (oy) this Think Progress piece has links to it all. I don’t know why anyone would be surprised that the GOP Governors are all crooks. It’s a defining feature of consrvatism. (They call it “freedom.”)

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I hate to spoil the victory party but the right wing army in the war on women hasn’t surrendered yet

by digby

Guess who’s still fighting?

The anti-abortion rights Susan B. Anthony List is planning a multimillion dollar election-year effort that is already training big money on several incumbent Democratic senators.

SBA List wants to spend between $8 and $10 million this year, much of it aimed at rooting out senators that have not signed onto a current bill federally banning abortions after 20 weeks. The group also plans to take on lawmakers that supported Obamacare, hoping to draw attention to the ongoing debate over whether the law funds abortions.

In an interview on Friday, SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser laid out a strategy that includes $1 million each in states where Republicans hope to beat Democratic incumbents or seize open seats. Targets include Democratic Sens. Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas — with more statewide commitments of $1 million to come as races develop.

“We’re already hiring people and doing things in Louisiana, Arkansas and North Carolina,” Dannenfelser said. “And then there’s a whole watch list of states … that could be more relevant, [where] there could be a moment there where it really mattered.”

Georgia and Kentucky — two states where Democrats could be on the offensive — are both on that watch list, particularly if the group feels it needs to defend Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) against Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky.

Dannenfelser described an electoral effort heavy on phone banks and recruiting volunteers in battleground states, but also one that will fund network and cable TV ads as well as social media campaigns.

“The emphasis is on the ground game, grassroots immobilization, communication, boots on the ground … there will also be over-air activity,” she said. “The best use of our money is to make sure we are really communicating directly with the people that we want to vote and who will be volunteering, who will be showing up and being the arms and legs of the staff, the arms and legs of the candidates’ army.”

They seem to be under the impression that they haven’t lost the War on Women and are going to keep fighting. I sure hope they’re all just a bunch of Japanese soldiers holing up in caves who haven’t heard the news and not an army that is planning a counter attack. I also hope that the Democrats haven’t done their usual premature victory dance and will now cower and run when they are faced with a counterattack they assumed would never come. It wouldn’t be the first time.

And just in case anyone is still convinced that the best way to deal with abortion rights is to meet the other side half way and “acknowledge their moral unease” keep in mind that the “middle ground” has shifted once again:

The group also plans to spend at least $1 million on federal and state lobbying efforts this year. At the federal level, SBA List hopes to get more recruits onto its 20-week abortion bill, sponsored by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) with the support of 40 additional Republican senators.

20 weeks is a month too early to find out most serious fetal abnormalities. But in case you think this is coming from some genuine place of concern rather than just another step to make abortion more “rare” regardless of the circumstances, think again:

“One of the reasons the pro-life movement has been so successful is that in its political branch, the idea is to make abortion as restrictive as possible and incrementally chip away at it,” Doan said. “Because one incremental policy doesn’t seem like a big deal.”

In a 1996 interview with The New Republic, the NRLC lobbyist Douglas Johnson hinted that the goal was just this sort of gradual wearing away of abortion rights, explaining that the term “partial-birth abortion” (as opposed to its clinical term) was dreamed up with the hope that “as the public learns what a ‘partial-birth abortion’ is, they might also learn something about other abortion methods, and that this would foster a growing opposition to abortion.”

It was, in fact, during a 2004 federal trial on IDX that government witness Kanwaljeet Anand, now a professor of pediatrics, anesthesiology, and neurobiology at the University of Tennessee at Memphis, brought up some of the most frequently cited medical support for the 20-week cut-off when it comes to fetal pain.

“It is my opinion that the human fetus possesses the ability to experience pain from 20 weeks of gestation, if not earlier, and the pain perceived by a fetus is possibly more intense than that perceived by term newborns or older children,” Anand said in his testimony. “Anesthetic agents that are routinely administered to the mother during this procedure would be insufficient to ensure that the fetus does not feel pain.”

Anand has since turned down offers to testify in abortion hearings. Recently, he also said that a common method for performing abortions after 20 weeks, which involves injecting fetuses with heart-stopping medication, “would be fine, really, from a point of view of fetal pain … a compassionate way to do it.”

Despite his hesitancy, Anand’s work has been repeatedly cited by pro-life groups agitating for the 20-week ban. These groups point to poll results indicating that most Americans think abortions should not be “permitted beyond the point at which there’s substantial evidence that the unborn can feel pain.”

The problem is, there is no such point.

That will not stop them.

But sure, let’s keep talking about this on their terms, with fatuous pledges to work toward “zero” abortions or unhelpful bromides about how they should should be safe and legal but “rare”. Let’s keep conceding that abortion is just horrible, everybody knows that, what with all the pain and the gruesomeness and all. Pretty soon we’ll all be agreeing that it’s just too gruesome to be legal.

 And then it really will be gruesome — for the women who, once again, will end up like this:

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A Death Cult run by billionaires

by digby

Think Progress explains that this rather astonishing decline in deaths among young people in car accidents is the result of a concerted government and private industry effort of education, regulations, laws. It’s quite a success story. A lot of people are alive today as a result. But what’s going on with the guns?

For guns, these numbers represent an enormous failure. The United States has experienced a dramatic decline in violent crime over the last two decades, yet the rate of gun violence, particularly among young people, has barely moved. Why? We don’t know.

Unfortunately, since the early 1990s, very few public health researchers have been trying to find out. Restrictions on such research imposed by Congress have had a substantial chilling effect, which has resulted in the almost total abandonment of this issue by our nation’s public health research institutions. Without this research, policymakers, legislators, community leaders, and parents are left without much direction regarding how to best protect children and teenagers from gun violence.

This is the new thing. Right wing ideologues are no long just preaching their beliefs and trying to persuade people to go along. They know they cannot allow facts and knowledge to be shared with the public or the results of their handiwork will be obvious to everyone.

This isn’t the only area in which they are successfully blocking serious study that might undermine their faith-based ideological commitment to death. They are doing the same thing with climate change:

A new study conducted by Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert J. Brulle, PhD, exposes the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the powerful climate change countermovement. This study marks the first peer-reviewed, comprehensive analysis ever conducted of the sources of funding that maintain the denial effort.

Through an analysis of the financial structure of the organizations that constitute the core of the countermovement and their sources of monetary support, Brulle found that, while the largest and most consistent funders behind the countermovement are a number of well-known conservative foundations, the majority of donations are “dark money,” or concealed funding.

The data also indicates that Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, two of the largest supporters of climate science denial, have recently pulled back from publicly funding countermovement organizations. Coinciding with the decline in traceable funding, the amount of funding given to countermovement organizations through third party pass-through foundations like Donors Trust and Donors Capital, whose funders cannot be traced, has risen dramatically.

Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science in Drexel’s College of Arts and Sciences, conducted the study during a year-long fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The study was published today in Climatic Change, one of the top 10 climate science journals in the world.

The climate change countermovement is a well-funded and organized effort to undermine public faith in climate science and block action by the U.S. government to regulate emissions. This countermovement involves a large number of organizations, including conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, trade associations and conservative foundations, with strong links to sympathetic media outlets and conservative politicians.

And the results of this could very well be catastrophic.

My question to climate change deniers is this: what if you’re wrong? The only thing that will happen if the world addresses climate change will be a somewhat orderly change in the way we use energy, some economic reorganization and a whole lot of jobs and business being done to switch to different energy sources. The changes that are being proposed to mitigate climate change are far less cataclysmic than the changes that would be imposed by unaddressed climate change itself. Therefore, a fairly simple risk assessment suggests that anyone with a brain should take the prudent course and assume that the consensus that climate change is man made is the correct one and take steps to deal with it before it’s too late.

Of course, the people who refuse to believe this are mostly believers in an apocalyptic religion anyway and are easily convinced that their “enemies” (the hippies) are lying to them about this because …. well, I guess just to punish them somehow. The real culprits are those wealthy energy and finance magnates who worship money and refuse to sacrifice anything for the greater good — even if it results in the death of the planet itself. They’ll be long dead themselves.

I wonder if anyone’s told them they can’t take it with them?

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Iraq and Afghanistan will cost Americans $4 to $6 TRILLION

by David Atkins

The numbers involved are mind-blowing:

The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a decade of fighting, according to a new study by a Harvard researcher.

Washington increased military benefits in late 2001 as the nation went to war, seeking to quickly bolster its talent pool and expand its ranks. Those decisions and the protracted nation-building efforts launched in both countries will generate expenses for years to come, Linda J. Bilmes, a public policy professor, wrote in the report that was released Thursday.

“As a consequence of these wartime spending choices, the United States will face constraints in funding investments in personnel and diplomacy, research and development and new military initiatives,” the report says. “The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.”

Bilmes said the United States has spent almost $2 trillion already for the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those costs, she said, are only a fraction of the ultimate price tag. The biggest ongoing expense will be providing medical care and disability benefits to veterans of the two conflicts.

“Historically, the bill for these costs has come due many decades later,” the report says, noting that the peak disbursement of disability payments for America’s warriors in the last century came decades after the conflicts ended. “Payments to Vietnam and first Gulf War veterans are still climbing.”

No worries, though. I’m sure the ghouls at Fix the Debt will try to figure out how to screw those veterans out of their benefits while keeping taxes on Halliburton nice and low. Because job creators.

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Saturday Night at the Movies


And such small portions: 2014 SJFF preview 

By Dennis Hartley

 

Pretty new “guidelines” that don’t address the problems they were supposed to address

by digby

In this post, Marcy Wheeler recaps her previous work on the DOJs shiny new “guidelines” with respect to the targeting of journalists and then brings us up to speed on the latest:

[L]ast year, after it got caught obtaining the call records of some Pulitzer Prize winners, DOJ pretended to roll out new protections for journalists.

Charlie Savage reports that DOJ has just rolled out the final version of those great new protections.

Here’s the last paragraph of his report on the “new guidelines.”

The rules cover grand jury subpoenas used in criminal investigations. They exempt wiretap and search warrants obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and “national security letters,” a kind of administrative subpoena used to obtain records about communications in terrorism and counterespionage investigations.

Which makes these “new guidelines” worth approximately shit in any leak — that is, counterintelligence — investigation.

This is the stuff that drives you crazy.  They know they’ve gone too far and have to respond.  But they simply create some razzled dazzle “reform” that addresses a different issue and pretend that they’ve done something. I’m sure there were abuses of their capabilities with respect to criminal cases.  And it’s good if they’ve agreed to rein that in in some small way. But that’s not what the current controversy is about and they know it.

This is why I’m so cynical about ‘reforms.”  It’s probably the best we can do, but it won’t solve our problem.  We have created a bunch of powerful institutions that are not going to allow a little thing like the constitution to interfere with what they see as their mission. They are crusaders and bureaucrats — a lethal combination. Until we reevaluate our role in the world in a holistic way I’m not sure I see any way to do much more that mitigate the worst of it from time to time and set them back on their heels a little bit.

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Kiss of death

by digby

Unless the endorsement of two time losers is some kind of coup, I’m not sure this is going to help much:

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will fundraise alongside New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Thursday in Boston.

The joint appearance is a signal by Romney to the Republican establishment that he remains an ally of the embattled Garden State governor, whose administration has become engulfed by a bridge-closing scandal.

Aides to both Romney and Christie confirmed the appearance on Saturday, as Christie huddled with fellow state leaders at the National Governors Association annual meeting in Washington, held at the JW Marriott hotel.

On the other hand, if it’s about raising money, old Mitt can certainly write some checks.

The ineptitude of the Deep State

by digby

This Bill Moyers show is your absolutely must-see, must read of the week-end. It’s so good I’m tempted to just leave it at that. But just to give you a taste of what it’s about, we must first stipulate that the following by Mike Lofgren is true:

As I wrote in The Party is Over, the present objective of congressional Republicans is to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a Republican president is elected (a goal which voter suppression laws in GOP-controlled states are clearly intended to accomplish). President Obama cannot enact his domestic policies and budgets; because of incessant GOP filibustering, not only could he not fill the large number of vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get his most innocuous presidential appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate have responded by weakening the filibuster of nominations, but Republicans are sure to react with other parliamentary delaying tactics. This strategy amounts to congressional nullification of executive branch powers by a party that controls a majority in only one house of Congress.

That’s all correct and it’s worth all the commentary we devote to it. It’s a break-down of the democratic process and the ultimate expression of the doubts our constitutional framers had about parties in the system they designed. But that’s not what lies at the heart of our problems. Yes, the extreme factionalism of our party politics is making governance dysfunctional. But it’s a reaction to something and while it’s fairly incoherent (at least on the right) it’s not completely irrational.

The thesis is about a dysfunction in our democracy that’s much more pernicious:

Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct “dragnet” surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, to include arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite their habitual cant about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from congressional Republicans about these actions — with the minor exception of a gadfly like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save for a few mavericks like Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.

These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing thirteen people; during that same period of time, the government has spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of seventeen football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single electronic trace you make.

Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can it be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.

This Deep State is not even especially good at being a Deep State. Which is why some of us flip out when we find out the kind of secret shennanigans they’re pulling around the world. The chances of them making a huge mistake are far greater than anything that might happen by revealing them. They’re just that inept.

And that’s only part of what so many of us who trying to find our way through this are grappling with. Yes, both parties are equally implicated in this problem. But the reaction by the right is so ideologically extreme that you face the prospect of making all of this far worse when they are in power. So you end up empowering the Deep State, sort of by default. It’s very difficult to see how to use the available levers of power to change this.

Watch the whole show here if you can. It’s very enlightening.

And just by the way, Bill Moyers is indispensable. I don’t know what we’d do without him.

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