Month: February 2014

GOP: Party over country

David Atkins

Greg Sargent has a good snag: not only do Americans broadly support immigration reform, so really do Republicans and evangelicals when the issue is fully explained:

Republican leaders themselves have admitted the problem must be solved. Last summer, back when reform looked plausible, John Boehner said a “vast majority” of House Republicans “do believe that we have to wrestle” with the problem of the 11 million. There’s no longer any debate from top Republicans: the status quo is unacceptable, including when it comes to the status of the undocumented.

There is evidence that even Republican base voters respond to the argument that the current situation is unacceptable. GOP pollster Whit Ayres explains that his polling and focus grouping shows that Republicans are hostile up front to reform, but once they are told the consequences of inaction are to maintain the broken status quo, they change their minds and support legalization under certain conditions.

Two polls this week found that more Americans say doing something about the 11 million is as important or more so than securing the border. Indeed, as Francis Wilkinson has put it, not only is the policy debate over the need to deal with the 11 million mostly over; the cultural debate underlying it is over, too.

Fear of Tea Party primaries may be motivating Republicans here, but the biggest reason Republicans are refusing to act on immigration reform is that they cynically don’t want President Obama to get the credit. So they’re taking a gamble on winning the White House without Latino support in 2016 (presumably winning 75% of the white vote?), then taking credit for passing immigration reform then.

From a strategic point of view, that’s a bad and very risky bet. From a moral point of view, it’s an outrage.

Sargent notes dryly:

Reform will happen. Republicans can continue deferring action, forever hoping that the next cycle will make embracing reform easier for them politically, or give them more leverage over what reform ends up looking like. Maybe that gamble will pay off. Or maybe it won’t, in which case reform will have to wait until Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, and do it themselves.

Anything can happen in politics, of course, but it’s likelier to be the latter than the former no matter how 2014 plays out.

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Ragnarok is upon us. Run fer yer lives!

by digby

The Vikings saw it coming:

We’ve survived the Mayan apocalypse and Y2K, but be afraid – the end of the world is coming…again.
This time it’s the Viking apocalypse that is allegedly set to destroy Earth, with Norse mythology claiming the planet will split open and unleash the inhabitants of Hel on February 22.

According to the Vikings, Ragnarok is a series of events including the final predicted battle that results in the death of a number of major gods, the occurrence of various natural disasters and the subsequent submersion of the world in water.

The funny thing is that this one seems like it’s been happening in slow motion.

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Building the anger

by digby

It’s been very interesting watching the press report this mistaken bombing on American soldiers in a remote outpost today. First they started censoring the bad language and then started downplaying the whole thing as no big deal.

But I was struck by this comment:

The soldier says the impact was so powerful that it knocked people to the ground. 

‘After the initial realization that it had hit behind us, we were so scatter brained trying to figure out what happened. It hit so close to the guys in the tower it actually knocked the fill out of radios,’ he said.

‘Once the smoke had cleared and we realized that no one was seriously injured, we were just sitting there in awe as the anger started to build,’ he continued.

I can imagine. I can also imagine how much it angers innocent villagers who find themselves on the receiving end of such “mistakes.”

There’s a lesson in this but I’m fairly sure the US Government isn’t going to take it.

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Let’s get straight who is paying for whom

by David Atkins

Two data points today, side by side. First:

Second:

I’m no economic royalist, preaching about producers and parasites. I don’t much care. I believe that we’re all one big human species, and that every single human being on earth deserves basic dignity and economic protection.

But it’s very, very tiresome to watch a bunch of delusional narcissists taking urban tax dollars to pay for their rural infrastructure and safety nets (most SNAP recipients are white, remember) elect a bunch of jokers to Congress who prevent the people who actually pay the bills from solving big problems like climate change, healthcare, privacy, wealth inequality, poverty, and financial corruption. All while whining that “those people” in big cities are stealing their hard-earned munnee from Real ‘Murica.

A bunch of people in Texas and Dixie want to secede to shed liberal America from their more perfect union. Fine. Quietly, a lot of liberals are sharing the sentiment. If we as a nation can’t get started on solving our real problems, those voices are going to start growing much louder.

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You’ll never know if you were one of them

by digby

… and anyway, if you aren’t an Islamic terrorist, you probably have nothing to worry about:

AT&T said Tuesday that a secretive US court ordered data turned over from more than 35,000 customers in six months as the telecom giant released its first “transparency report.”

AT&T joined other telecom and Internet firms in releasing broad ranges of numbers following an agreement with authorities aimed at providing the public with more information on US data collection for national security investigations.

The transparency report, covering the first six months of 2013, said AT&T received between zero and 999 requests for customer content under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act affecting between 35,000 and 35,999 accounts.

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Should prosecutors be able to get away with murder? We’re about to find out.

by digby

In case you were curious about the latest Supreme Court arguments:

Wolfe v. Clarke is about a murder conviction and death sentence that unraveled under the force of the truth. It is a case about state prosecutors getting caught hiding exculpatory evidence, and getting scolded for it by the federal courts, and then violating the federal court order sanctioning them by threatening a witness and spoiling the retrial of a man they helped to wrongly convict. It is a case where prosecutors did all of this, right up to the brief they filed with the justices, without an evident shred of public contrition for their improper conduct.

If the Supreme Court lets Virginia get away with this, your fair trial rights will never be the same.
All of this makes me think one of two things will likely happen to Wolfe v. Clarke. Either at least four justices will agree that the prosecutorial misconduct that occurred here is so egregious that it merits review, in which case we’ll get an oral argument later this year and a ruling sometime after that. Or the Court will turn its back on this case and we will get a pointed dissent from the denial of certiorari from Justice Sotomayor in which she laments the Court’s continuing abdication of its role as guardian of Sixth Amendment rights.

There is a simple factual narrative about the case—about what state prosecutors were willing to do first to gain and then to regain a murder conviction against Justin Michael Wolfe. And there is a more complex legal narrative about the standards the federal courts ought to apply when prosecutors behave as badly as they have in this instance. But don’t be fooled by the distinctions: If the Supreme Court lets Virginia get away with what has been done to Wolfe, the fair-trial rights of all of us will be jeopardized

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I find it hard to believe this is even controversial. An the fact that it is says everything you need to know about whether or not the death penalty in America is even remotely moral.

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So not one “illegal” can escape their grasp

by digby

Oh hey, why not?

The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.

The national license-plate recognition database, which would draw data from readers that scan the tags of every vehicle crossing their paths, would help catch fugitive illegal immigrants, according to a DHS solicitation. But the database could easily contain more than 1 billion records and could be shared with other law enforcement agencies, raising concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens who are under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.

But there’s nothing to worry about citizens because they promise they won’t use this for anything but catching the bad guys. So, just relax already:

A spokeswoman for DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) stressed that the database “could only be accessed in conjunction with ongoing criminal investigations or to locate wanted individuals.”

And just so you feel better about it, they’re going to outsource it:

“It is important to note that this database would be run by a commercial enterprise, and the data would be collected and stored by the commercial enterprise, not the government,” she said.

It’s fairly obvious that the government has totally lost the thread. No, we aren’t assuaged that they are going to turn the collection of all of our information into a profit making enterprise to which the government has access. This is not a solution — it’s the creation of even more problems.

Read the whole article to get the full sense of where this is going. I especially like the part where they allow the “vendor” to decide how long to keep the information. And who they sell it to.

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Speaking of speeches

by digby

…. this famous one by JFK on the meaning of liberalism is worth looking at once in a while:

September 14, 1960

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label “Liberal?” If by “Liberal” they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer’s dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of “Liberal.” But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”

But first, I would like to say what I understand the word “Liberal” to mean and explain in the process why I consider myself to be a “Liberal,” and what it means in the presidential election of 1960.

In short, having set forth my view — I hope for all time — two nights ago in Houston, on the proper relationship between church and state, I want to take the opportunity to set forth my views on the proper relationship between the state and the citizen. This is my political credo:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man’s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

I believe also in the United States of America, in the promise that it contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill the aspirations of its citizens, but serve equally well as a beacon for all mankind. I do not believe in a superstate. I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well. But I believe in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities. Government is an art and a precious obligation; and when it has a job to do, I believe it should do it. And this requires not only great ends but that we propose concrete means of achieving them.

Our responsibility is not discharged by announcement of virtuous ends. Our responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention, with political skill, and executive vigor. I believe for these reasons that liberalism is our best and only hope in the world today. For the liberal society is a free society, and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them. Only liberalism, in short, can repair our national power, restore our national purpose, and liberate our national energies…

Our liberalism has its roots in our diverse origins. Most of us are descended from that segment of the American population which was once called an immigrant minority. Today, along with our children and grandchildren, we do not feel minor. We feel proud of our origins and we are not second to any group in our sense of national purpose. For many years New York represented the new frontier to all those who came from the ends of the earth to find new opportunity and new freedom, generations of men and women who fled from the despotism of the czars, the horrors of the Nazis, the tyranny of hunger, who came here to the new frontier in the State of New York. These men and women, a living cross section of American history, indeed, a cross section of the entire world’s history of pain and hope, made of this city not only a new world of opportunity, but a new world of the spirit as well.

This is an important election — in many ways as important as any this century — and I think that the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party here in New York, and those who believe in progress all over the United States, should be associated with us in this great effort. The reason that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson had influence abroad, and the United States in their time had it, was because they moved this country here at home, because they stood for something here in the United States, for expanding the benefits of our society to our own people, and the people around the world looked to us as a symbol of hope.

The conservative movement eventually succeeded in destroying that label and making it something shameful for average Americans to wear openly. (“I’m not a liberal or anything, but …”) So we became progressives. And that’s fine, I guess. What’s in a name, right? But it’s still interesting to revisit what it meant half a century ago at the height of what people like to call the liberal consensus (something which obviously didn’t really exist since the 1960 election was essentially a tie.) That speech is such a bold ideological statement, something you never hear Democrats do in the modern era. They hem and they haw and run from anything that might put them into a particular category they believe might offend some median voter out there whom they think could be persuaded to vote for them if only they were presented with a bucket of warm milk on the ballot.

The Republicans went the other way and adopted a hardcore identity as conservatives and it’s largely worked for them, at least as it pertains to the ideas about government espoused in that Kennedy speech. The Tea Party may finally be tarnishing it a bit with its extremism, but they built up a lot of unearned credibility over the years so it will be quite a while before the Republicans feel compelled to change their label lest they be seen as out of the mainstream. I suspect they’ll have a little more grit on that count than the Democrats with their irrational fear of hippies.

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Americans: we love paying more for less

by David Atkins

Now that Comcast is apparently going to be merging with Time Warner, net neutrality is dead, and vertical integration is all rage, it’s worth remembering the glorious benefit Americans are getting from all this free market magic:

Yep. Higher prices, worse service. USA! USA!

And no, this isn’t just because we’re a bigger country and service to rural areas is bad. We also pay more money for slower Internet in big cities, too.

Why is this? Doesn’t standard economics dictate that free markets provide greater competition and lower cost?

Well, yes–in theory. There are many and very large wrinkles in the classical economic model, but in a perfectly efficient market where manufacturing the product is easy, and the public has the option not to buy the product or to substitute other products, that can and does work. For instance, it’s hard to overcharge for toothpaste or apple juice. They’re pretty easy to make, and if one company overcharges for them someone else will make it cheaper or people will find a substitute. A free market in toothpaste or apple juice will generally provide a better product at lower prices than a centrally planned market will (provided that government regulation exists to ensure that those products are produced safely and actually contain the advertised ingredients.)

But commodities like healthcare and the Internet are different. They’re absolute necessities bordering on human rights, for which there is no substitute. They’re enormous and impossible for an underdog to produce at a lower cost. And they’re easy for ruthless corporations to monopolize and vertically integrate for exploitative, rent-seeking purposes absent government intervention.

Allowing a “free market” in such commodities isn’t free at all. It’s insane. It’s guaranteed to produce monopolies, high prices and terrible service. Which is exactly what we have in American healthcare and American internet: the world’s freest, and therefore worst and most expensive, markets in essential services.

The mark of a sophisticated mind is to understand that some solutions work in some cases but not in others. It’s the mark of an idiot to think that the same model will work in all cases.

People who think “free markets” work in healthcare or the Internet are just as functionally stupid about economics as the most hardline Communist who thinks that the government should exercise full control of the toothpaste market. Most of the world understands by now that the second guy is a dangerous fool. But we’re at a weird point in history where the first guy undeservedly has more credibility. He shouldn’t–and he won’t for long.

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ICYMI: The fascist aging rockstar

by digby

But don’t worry. According to Wayne Slater, Texas Republican Governor candidate Abbott says this is all about protecting the 2nd Amendment from that bitch … er, Wendy Davis:

Republican Greg Abbott touted Ted Nugent today as a political comrade in arms. He largely avoided questions about Democrats who have singed out Nugent’s outspoken comments calling President Obama “a subhuman mongrel” and women leaders “fat pigs.” Democrats have also also noted that Nugent has acknowledged having sex with underage girls, an issue — sexual predators — that Abbott pledged as attorney general to combat. Abbott told reporters following a campaign event in Denton that he wasn’t aware of Nugent’s past statements.

Abbott trumpeted the 65-year-old rocker’s advocacy of gun rights as the reason to have him share the campaign stage today. Abbott says Democratic rival Wendy Davis’ association with Barack Obama is a bigger problem for her than his on-stage association with Nugent.

Here’s what Abbott told reporters following a campaign event in Denton today, the first day of early voting.

“Sen. Davis knows she is suffering with voters because of her flipping and flopping on 2nd Amendment gun laws. And she knows that Ted Nugent calls her out on her disregard for 2nd Amendment rights. We are going to expose Sen. Davis’ weaknesses on the 2nd Amendment and show that in this area and in so many other areas, she represents the liberalism of Barack Obama that is so bad for Texas.

This allows us to get Texans to focus on issues that really matter. It allows us to focus on issues like the 2nd Amendment, which is a symbol of constitutional liberties in general. And we’ve seen Wendy Davis across the board take positions that are antagonistic to the Constitution.

Ah, so the 2nd Amendment is the “symbol of constitutional liberties” in general.  That other stuff about speech, religion, trials and due process is nice, but it’s your right to pack heat that really says “freedom.” In fact,only advocacy of total, uninhibited gun proliferation without restriction can be said to be a defense of the constitution.

And who better to make the case than a fascist like Ted Nugent? I mean, it’s obvious that this is a guy who truly understands the meaning of freedom and democracy:

Nugent: I scare the living hell out of brain dead psychotic liberal democrats. I’m on a mission doing God’s work. I’m exposing the soullessness of the left The evil agenda of the same liberal democrats who engineered the destruction of the greatest city in America, my birth city Detroit

They did it on purpose and now we have a commander and chief who’s actually following the recipe for the destruction of Detroit for the whole country.

My most important driving duty as a “We the People” caring, knowledgeable, educated participating in self government is to spotlight the cockroaches that have infested our government and much of our media Joseph Goebbels propaganda ministry of so much of the media in this country, so I’m a very busy man.

Newt Gingrich was apologizing for Nugent earlier saying everyone was holding him to a different standard because Al Gore and Joe Biden are much more racist and nobody cared. And he said it was ridiculous to assume that he knew he was making a Nazi analogy with his “subhuman mongrel” comments. And I’m sure he’s right. After all, his mention of Goebbels was with respect to the liberal media and everybody knows that.