Month: March 2014

Huckleberry and Benghazi!™

by digby

For those who have been puzzled by the right’s obsession with Benghazi!™ this ad should clear it all up:

This is a traditional Republican appeal to patriotism. It’s been subdued for a few years because of the Iraq disaster but it always comes back. It’s a huge part of the GOP’s sales pitch and extremely important for a large part of their Southern base.

Fox hasn’t been pimping the Benghazi!™ story for no reason. The word has been repeated so often that it’s now just a brand name, like “Whitewater” — or “Obamacare.” The details don’t really matter — just saying it in front of a GOP crowd is guaranteed to evoke a hostile response in the audience. Graham is going to use it in his Senate race and the GOP candidate for president will most certainly use it against Hillary Clinton in 2016. They need to have something to hang their patriot flag on and I’d guess Roger Ailes thought it would be smart to ensure that Clinton could be personally smothered in it.

Whether this will actually help them win in the near term is another question. But they’re going to be banking on making something of the fact that a woman can’t have a big swinging foreign policy and I suppose this is one way to do that. That Huckleberry Graham is deploying it is a delicious irony.

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St Patricks Day

by digby

… is fun what with all the green beer and the corned beef. But I remember being at an Irish pub one year many moons ago when everyone in the whole place cried when this song came on:

This may seem like ancient history now. But it really isn’t.

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Christie’s final nail

by digby

This, from Lee Fang, should put him away:

Christie had just won his first statewide election with the help of Paul Singer, the hedge fund manager who chairs the Manhattan Institute. The month before Christie’s election victory in November 2009, Singer had given $100,000 to the Republican Governors Association (RGA), which aired a barrage of advertisements in Christie’s favor.

In that campaign, among Christie’s lines of attack against incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine was that he had mismanaged the state pension system and had unethically invested retiree money on Wall Street. “Jon Corzine made it easier for his friends from Wall Street to manage New Jersey’s pension fund,” blasted a “Christie for Governor” press release.

But once he was elected, Governor Christie moved to award big pension management contracts to the Wall Street donors who have helped boost his political fortunes. In his second year in office, Christie’s administration proposed giving Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Associates, a contract to manage $200 million in state public pension funds. Elliott Associates won the contract in 2012. Singer again demonstrated his political loyalty to Christie in December 2013, shortly after Christie became chair of the RGA, a coveted post for GOP presidential aspirants. This time, Singer gave the group $1.25 million, making him the largest contributor that year and significantly enlarging the RGA’s war chest under Christie.

Another hedge fund manager with close political ties to Christie, Daniel Loeb, has also won big contracts to manage state retiree money under the governor, The Nation has found.

I don’t know why it didn’t seem obvious to everyone that this guy was a pretty typical crooked, right wing jerk. He sure seemed like one to me, but maybe my instincts are honed in a different way than some. Still, this seems like it should finally put an end to his national ambitions. A thuggish “boss” type who used his office to punish political rivals and engaged in crooked dealings with a pension fund is right out of the movies. Even the Republicans would have a hard time selling that to the rubes.

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Heads in the sand

by digby

This seems to be an excellent illustration of how our current system is likely to kill us. It’s a story about the sea levels rising in North Carolina and how the various people in charge are dealing with it:

There’s not much dispute these days, up and down the coast, about whether the ocean is rising. The question is: How high will it go here, and how fast?

North Carolinians must wait until 2016 for an official answer. That’s the law.

After promoters of coastal development attacked a science panel’s prediction that the sea would rise 39 inches higher in North Carolina by the end of this century, the General Assembly passed a law in 2012 to put a four-year moratorium on any state rules, plans or policies based on expected changes in the sea level. The law sets guidelines under which the Coastal Resources Commission, a development policy board for the 20 coastal counties, will formulate a new sea-level prediction to serve as the official basis for state planners and regulators.

The backlash fomented by a conservative coastal group called NC-20 prompted commission members in 2011, most of them Democratic appointees, to reject the 39-inch prediction from the panel of engineers and geologists, including Riggs, that has counseled the commission since the 1990s. A new documentary film, “ Shored Up,” shows anguished commission members imploring their science advisers to somehow “soften” the high-water warning.

Everything about that, from the greedheads, to the GOP ideologues to the impotent Democrats is a microcosm of the problems we face in dealing with … well, everything. But climate change is the Big Kahuna, where the consequences will be truly catastrophic.

If we thought that we had gone beyond the time of irrationality and superstition, that humans had evolved to the point at which we could at least deal with the facts as we know them, we are quickly proving that this is just not so. I always thought the big mistake would be a nuclear disaster or war. (And that remains a possibility, obviously.) But I can see now that our technological capability has outstripped our reason in many other ways. We may just kill ourselves in slow motion instead.

h/t to TS

What Krugman said

by David Atkins

Part of what makes Krugman a joy to read is how sharply he can both clarify and eviscerate without resorting to the level of angry indignation that most progressive writers constantly express, myself included. Particularly on the subject of conservatives and race, it’s hard to keep the arguments piercing but the passions cool.

This is Krugman at his best:

There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.

So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.

Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.

Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.

We are told, for example, that conservatives are against big government and high spending. Yet even as Republican governors and state legislatures block the expansion of Medicaid, the G.O.P. angrily denounces modest cost-saving measures for Medicare. How can this contradiction be explained? Well, what do many Medicaid recipients look like — and I’m talking about the color of their skin, not the content of their character — and how does that compare with the typical Medicare beneficiary? Mystery solved.

Or we’re told that conservatives, the Tea Party in particular, oppose handouts because they believe in personal responsibility, in a society in which people must bear the consequences of their actions. Yet it’s hard to find angry Tea Party denunciations of huge Wall Street bailouts, of huge bonuses paid to executives who were saved from disaster by government backing and guarantees. Instead, all the movement’s passion, starting with Rick Santelli’s famous rant on CNBC, has been directed against any hint of financial relief for low-income borrowers. And what is it about these borrowers that makes them such targets of ire? You know the answer.

One odd consequence of our still-racialized politics is that conservatives are still, in effect, mobilizing against the bums on welfare even though both the bums and the welfare are long gone or never existed. Mr. Santelli’s fury was directed against mortgage relief that never actually happened. Right-wingers rage against tales of food stamp abuse that almost always turn out to be false or at least greatly exaggerated. And Mr. Ryan’s black-men-don’t-want-to-work theory of poverty is decades out of date.

I wish I could post the whole thing, so go read it. The second half of his argument lays out how even if there had been a shred of validity to conservative arguments about laziness and welfare back in the 1970s, the fraying of the middle class and the dismantling of the ladders of opportunity since then make conservative claims about the safety net ridiculous.

It’s part of a thesis I’ve been laying out for some time: conservatives simply have no answers for the new plutocrat-controlled two-tier economy. They’re stuck pretending it’s the late 1970s forever, on both social and economic policy.

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The Sunshine Years

by digby

“This is the most transparent administration in history,” Obama said during a Google Plus “Fireside” Hangout. “I can document that this is the case,” he continued. “Every visitor that comes into the White House is now part of the public record. Every law we pass and every rule we implement we put online for everyone to see.” February 14, 2014.

As Paul Harvey used to say, and now we have the rest of the story:

The Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.

The administration cited more legal exceptions it said justified withholding materials and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy. Most agencies also took longer to answer records requests, the analysis found.

The government’s own figures from 99 federal agencies covering six years show that half way through its second term, the administration has made few meaningful improvements in the way it releases records despite its promises from Day 1 to become the most transparent administration in history.

In category after category – except for reducing numbers of old requests and a slight increase in how often it waived copying fees – the government’s efforts to be more open about its activities last year were their worst since President Barack Obama took office.

In a year of intense public interest over the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, the government cited national security to withhold information a record 8,496 times – a 57 percent increase over a year earlier and more than double Obama’s first year, when it cited that reason 3,658 times. The Defense Department, including the NSA, and the CIA accounted for nearly all those. The Agriculture Department’s Farm Service Agency cited national security six times, the Environmental Protection Agency did twice and the National Park Service once.

And five years after Obama directed agencies to less frequently invoke a “deliberative process” exception to withhold materials describing decision-making behind the scenes, the government did it anyway, a record 81,752 times.

I suppose there are a couple of people out there who thought that when candidate Obama promised to have a transparent administration he just meant that he would put the rules he implemented online. But I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that most of his voters thought he was promising to reverse the paranoid secrecy and usurpation of the constitution during the Bush years by being accountable to the people. I think they were especially concerned about the tendency to cite national security as a reason to deny citizens access to information and due process.

That was a wrong assumption. But hey, we do have the White House visitor logs to pore over now, so that’s something.

Read on …

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Just a regular guy

by digby

Who are they talking about here?

…[H]is possessions are modest: three houses, one plane, no yachts. He wears loafers and khakis and V-neck sweaters. He often needs a haircut. His glasses haven’t changed much in 40 years

Bill Gates. (What? No yachts????) To be fair, they did preface that with “given the scale of his wealth” but even so.

Here’s the Seattle “house”:

1. The mansion took seven years to build and cost $63M.

2. The swimming pool runs 60-feet-long and includes underwater music system. A locker room has four showers and two baths.

3. The home includes a 2,500 square-foot gym,

4. The dining room is 1,000 square-feet large. Chances are the apartment you’re reading this inside isn’t even 1,000 square-feet.

5. When a guest arrives, they are given a pin that interacts with sensors in each room in the house. Depending on their preferences, the temperature, music and lighting will change in the house wherever they are.

6. The home is also an “earth-sheltered house,” meaning it uses its natural surroundings as walls for temperature and to reduce heat loss.

7. Bill Gates pays $1M a year…on taxes on the house.

8. The house has a trampoline room with a 20-foot ceiling. We’re guessing there is a trampoline inside it, but, not confirmed.

9. Located somewhere inside the house is Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th-century notebook, the Codex Leicester, which Gates purchased for $30.8 million.

10. There are 84 steps down from the entrance to the ground floor. Of course you can always just take the elevator if you’re lazy.

11. The 2,300 square-foot reception hall can seat 150 people for dinner or 200 for a cocktail party.

12. The house contains 24 bathrooms. Twenty-four. Including ten baths. That is a lot of bathrooms, you guys.

13. Speakers are hidden beneath the wallpaper and allow music to follow you from room to room, depending on where you go and who you are.

14. The home comes with a 23-car garage. Twenty-three people can drive to his house, get their own parking spot and then use their own bathroom WITH ONE TO SPARE!

15. Anyone in the house can “call up” a favorite painting or photograph on $80,000 worth of combination TV-computer screens that is run by several $150,000 computer-storage devices.

Hard to reconcile any of  that with the word “modest.”

Ok, here’s 15 more:

1. The total assessed value of the estate in 2006 was $125M. In 2009, the value was $147.5M. The most expensive area home on the market at the time of this writing…$16.75M. Gates purchased the lot for $2M in 1988.

2. Early in construction of the house, an interior designer didn’t like the layout of one section. Sixty cubic yards of concrete were demolished and redone.

3. It was important to Gates that a forty-year-old maple tree adjacent to the driveway was preserved. The tree is monitored electronically 24 hours per day via computer. If it becomes too dry, water is automatically pumped into it.

4. The 17-by-60-foot swimming pool comes with a fossil-motif on the floor and an underwater music system. A locker room includes four showers and two baths.

5. The 2,100 square-foot library includes two secret pivoting bookcases, one of which contains a bar.

6. A quote from The Great Gatsby is engraved on the ceiling of the library, “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.”

7. The 1,500-square-foot, art deco theater contains twenty plush seats as well as couches. There’s also a popcorn machine if you get hungry.

8. The 1-BR, 1-bath guesthouse is 1,900 square-feet was the first structure completed on the estate. Gates wrote most of his book The Road Ahead here.

9. Outside the home is an artificial stream and wetland estuary stocked with salmon and sea-run cutthroat trout.

10. Half a million board feet of lumber was used to build the estate.

11. 300 workers were needed to complete the home. One hundred of them were just electricians.

12. Want to tour the home? It will cost you $35,000. All of that money goes to charity, if that makes you feel better.

13. Every door handle in the house is custom-made and cost $200 each.

14. When the house hosted a party for the National Governors Association in 2004, a temporary security zone was placed around the entire estate, blocking access to large portions of Lake Washington.

15. The estate’s sand on the lake bank is not natural to Lake Washington. It is actually delivered via barge annually from a tropical beach in St. Lucia.

Hey, as far as I know, at least he isn’t agitating to do away with property taxes. For someone of his wealth that practically makes him a saint.

(That Gatsby quote though. Wow…)

QOTD: Bill Kristol

by digby

On This Week:

I will defend the intelligence community against a bunch of senators and their staff. And I will defend the interrogation program!

I have to give him some credit for consistency. He really believes in torture. Always has. Here he is back in 2009 when the whole right wing went crazy over the release of the torture memos:

I think now that the door is open, I say “bring it on.” Let’s have a big national debate on this. Let’s have Steve Bradbury confront his accusers, who are one tenth the lawyers he is, and we’re not under the pressure he was under and not a real threat. Let’s have George Tenet testify. Let’s have Mick Hagen testify. Let’s have a serious debate, let’s have Dick Cheney take on anyone that the left wants to produce about whether we were responsible, whether it was a dark chapter in our history that we have to be ashamed of or whether the US government behaved in a very fine way and I think a very impressive way…

I think he speaks for a lot of people who believe that torture is a fine and impressive thing to do.

And, by the way, it’s bad that the CIA was spying on congress and that should be investigated. But it’s not as bad as torturing people. Just thought I should raise that small point.

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From the “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” files

by digby

Matt Stoller dug up another blast from the past about our history of spying on congress.

First, here’s Abzug, who had received her CIA file the night before the hearing. It’s pretty obvious the CIA was fighting disclosures, and only gave her the file at the last minute because it simply had to. The file detailed extensive surveillance of her activities as a member of Congress and as a private attorney, including surveillance of her work when she represented entertainment figures during the House Un-American Activities Committee red-baiting episodes. It also showed violations of attorney-client privilege. Colby responds that CIA surveillance happened to her and three other members of Congress in ‘perfectly natural’ ways, namely because she was talking to foreigners who might be suspicious. 

There’s more at the link. You’ll especially enjoy the part where the Mike Rogers of his day wonders if Freedom of Information requests could be a radical plot to cripple the agency and make America unsafe. (Mr Colby thought it might be …)

What this means is that what we think of as “oversight” is largely a convenient construct and always has been. It’s not useless, mind you.  It provides some avenues for officials outside the White House and the agencies to have access to classified material. And you never know, at some point they might even find a way to tell the people.  But the point is that from the very start of the surveillance state after WWII, the system has been closed and it has been abused and no amount of “oversight” has ever been enough to keep that from happening.

I don’t know that any rules or laws will ever be adequate to that task. Social norms are actually probably more important in something like this (which is why it’s so depressing to see so many people defending this stuff and condemning those who object.) In my opinion, as long as we are the world’s policeman, the best we can probably hope for is constant pressure from the (mostly impotent) overseers, the legal system, and a free press, with the outcome being a constant growth and then restraint of the Deep State apparatus. If the constitution works, it should be possible to keep it mostly in check. But if any one of those pieces of restraining power breaks down, who knows what could happen?

ICYWW, Stoller’s post was kicked off by this interview with Jason Leopold who is called a “FOIA terrorist” by some government agency because he files so many FOIA requests.

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Pouncing on Paul

by digby

Poor boo-boo:

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Sunday addressed the controversy over Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) remarks about a “culture problem” in inner cities where men don’t want to work.

When asked about Ryan’s comments by the host of CNN’s “State of the Union,” Candy Crowley, Priebus did not directly address whether Ryan’s comments were appropriate, but defended the congressman’s efforts in general.

“Paul said he thought it was inarticulate, but quite frankly Democrats are lying in wait as well to pounce on whatever might be off tone,” he said when asked about Ryan’s claims.

You know, there’s a lot of hair-trigger offense-taking that goes on in our political discourse these days so I might be sympathetic to his claim that people are lying in wait to attack if it weren’t for the fact that there’s even a name for the cold, calculating strategy that employs the very same “inarticulate” phrasing Ryan used. Unless Paul Ryan is even dumber than we think, he knew exactly what he was doing.

[W]hat of Ryan’s insistence he did not consider race whatsoever, or his later explanation that he had been “inarticulate” in his comments? Perhaps Ryan genuinely did not recognize the racial narrative embedded in his remarks about an inner city culture that devalues work. But at best, this suggests that Ryan has uncritically adopted the charged rhetoric of his party without understanding its racial undertones.

Less charitably, in weighing Ryan’s protestations of innocence, we should be clear that denying racial intent is par for the course in dog whistling. The whole point of speaking in coded terms is to transmit racial messages that can be defended as not about race at all. Today’s broadly shared anti-racist ethos condemns naked appeals to racial solidarity; those politicians who nevertheless seek to trade on racial provocations must do so in ways that maintain plausible deniability.

Another defense is to insist that Ryan is no bigot. Here’s one version, from Republican political strategist Ron Christie: “Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is not racist nor did he blow a ‘dog whistle’ to launch a thinly veiled racist attack against black people. I offer this from the perspective of someone who has known Paul for more than 20 years: there is not a racist bone in his body.” The fact that Christie is black no doubt lends credibility to his testimony.

But this retort misses the point. Dog whistling is not rooted in fiery hatred but rather in cool calculation—it’s the strategic, carefully considered decision to win votes by stirring racial fears in society. Suppose we stipulate that Ryan is no bigot. So what? The question is not one of animus on Ryan’s part, but of whether—as a tactical matter—he sought to garner support by indirectly stimulating racial passions.

Of course, an individual’s mindset in any particular instance is almost impossible to know. We cannot be certain what Ryan intended. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that Ryan employed rhetoric closely connected to a dismal history of Republican racial demagoguery.

No, there is no doubt. And there is also no doubt that he also has a history of being a standard issue right wing demagogue when speaking to right wing audiences and then trying to deny that he is one. At some point people in the beltway need to grapple with the fact that their lovely young “wonk” is actually not much different from Michele Bachmann. He’s just smoother.

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