Month: March 2014

Prepping the next generation of extremists

by digby

The Children’s Book Council has announced the nominations for children’s book author of the year. Guess what jolly old uncle in on the list?

Yep.  The guy who says stuff like this about hungry children (or rather what he calls “wanton little waifs and serfs dependent on the state) is writing children’s books:

[T]here’s always the neighborhood dumpster. Now, you might find competition with homeless people there, but there are videos that have been produced to show you how to healthfully dine and how to dumpster dive and survive until school kicks back up in August.

One could fill an entire schoolroom with examples of this sadistic psychopath’s twisted commentary. The idea that he’s peddling his name to innocent children, is horrifying. It’s like having Hannibal Lechter cater your dinner party.

h/t AC

Mr Dogwhistle

by digby

How many times does Paul Ryan get to go on some right wing talk show and dogwhistle extremist crapola to his listeners and then walk it back for the village and get away with it?

After reading the transcript of yesterday morning’s interview, it is clear that I was inarticulate about the point I was trying to make. I was not implicating the culture of one community—but of society as a whole. We have allowed our society to isolate or quarantine the poor rather than integrate people into our communities. The predictable result has been multi-generational poverty and little opportunity. I also believe the government’s response has inadvertently created a poverty trap that builds barriers to work. A stable, good-paying job is the best bridge out of poverty.

The broader point I was trying to make is that we cannot settle for this status quo and that government and families have to do more and rethink our approach to fighting poverty. I have witnessed amazing people fighting against great odds with impressive success in poor communities. We can learn so much from them, and that is where this conversation should begin.

No, he wasn’t being “inarticulate” and his meaning was quite clear. We’ve been hearing this stuff from Republicans since Nixon’s Southern Strategy. There isn’t anyone in America who didn’t know what he was talking about when he said “inner city men” and the “culture of poverty.”

Ryan does this a lot.  Recall his going before the Ayn Rand society and saying:

“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand … Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism. And this to me is what matters the most: it is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big or that the health care plan does not work, or this or that policy reason. It is the morality of what is occurring right now; and how it offends the morality of individuals working for their own free will, to produce, to achieve, to succeed that is under attack.

And then getting away with this weasel when it was brought up in the presidential election and a bunch of evangelicals started paging through their Bibles for this “Ayn Rand” character:

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.

The guy goes on Glenn Beck and says progressivism is a cancer (“exactly”) and then gets feted by Villagers for being a Very Serious “wonk”

I guess it must be those blue, blue eyes of his.

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Here we go again

by David Atkins

They can’t help themselves:

House Republicans expect to vote this Friday on legislation that would risk steep, destabilizing Medicare cuts at the end of the month unless Democrats agree to a five-year delay of Obamacare’s individual mandate.

It mirrors some of the brinkmanship in the government shutdown fight last fall in that the GOP is using a must-pass bill as a vehicle to chop the Affordable Care Act. Democratic leaders have repeatedly rejected proposals to tinker with the mandate to buy insurance and have warned Republicans not to tie a physician payment fix to their partisan quest to unravel Obamacare.

“This is not credible, what they’ve done,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

The legislation would delay the penalty for noncompliance with the individual mandate until 2019. It suffered a blow on Wednesday when the Congressional Budget Office found that it would raise premiums and cause 13 million fewer people to be insured come 2018. It would save the federal government $170 billion and use the money to cover the $138 billion cost of replacing the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula, which calculates Medicare payments to physicians and will automatically impose a 24 percent pay on April 1 unless Congress acts.

The individual mandate is a sweet target for Republicans in an election year because it’s both unpopular and critical to the success of Obamacare. GOP leaders weren’t fazed by the CBO score and fast-tracked the bill to a Friday vote.

Insurance industry wrote a letter this week calling on Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to leave the individual mandate alone, warning of higher premiums if it’s unraveled. Even the top physicians group, the American Medical Association, which has made SGR repeal a priority, voiced disappointment with the partisan direction the issue has taken.

Yes, this is a cynical and sociopathic play by the GOP. But it’s also worth noting that not even the pleas of the health insurance industry executives are swaying Republicans, nor have they for some time now. Republicans are acting not out of big business interest corruption, but simply because they think people having cheaper healthcare is a moral outrage that saps their initiative to work harder. Really.

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One house of congress (possibly) takes a step for decency

by digby

Here’s some good news for a change:

Senate negotiators are close to reaching an agreement extending unemployment insurance benefits to the 2 million jobless Americans who have stopped receiving their checks since the program expired in December.

The agreement will extend the unemployment insurance program for five months. The benefits affect the long-term unemployed who have been out of a job for at least six months. Because the new program will include retroactive benefits from December, the extension would expire for all beneficiaries in late May.

The agreement is similar to one proposed by Senate Republicans just last week, Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Illinois, said Thursday.

These people will get a nice packet of checks in the mail. They need it for all their back rent and mortgage payments so they don’t get evicted. So, huzzah …

Oh wait:

A Senate deal is still far from guaranteed to pass the House, where Republicans have expressed opposition to extending the benefits. House Speaker John Boehner has insisted that he will not bring an unemployment insurance fix to the floor unless it is fully paid for and also includes a separate job-creation provision.

Yeah, whatever. It will pass the House if Republicans are worried they’ll be punished in November for not passing it. It certainly won’t happen because they have compassion or even because it will help the economy to put money in these people’s hands. If they cared about that they wouldn’t have cut them off in January.

I’m sure they’ll want several pounds of flesh in return — they understand how to leverage decency and humanity for their own purposes. But it could happen. Maybe.

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We’re number 23!

by digby

… in gender equality, according to the World Economic Forum. Here’s the top 10 list:

Iceland
Finland
Norway
Sweden
Philippines
Ireland
New Zealand
Denmark
Switzerland
Nicaragua

Oh and worldwide, women occupy about 20% of leadership roles in political positions.

Lest you get depressed that the US isn’t Number One, we are still in first place in military spending, the leading gun manufacturer and we have the world’s largest consumer market. Yeah!

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The CIA’s aggressive, provocative move.

by digby

For those who haven’t been following the ongoing sage over the torture report, this recap by Ari Melber will catch you up. Houston, we’ve got a problem with our intelligence agencies. All of them. It’s possible they finally went too far by spying on lawmakers, but I think even that would have been excused if they hadn’t done this:

T

he most dangerous move came from what the CIA did with the information that it gleaned from monitoring the Senate.

A top CIA lawyer took one of the most severe legal actions possible — officially asking the Justice Department to consider prosecuting the Senate investigators for doing their jobs.

Feinstein, backed by colleagues in both parties, said this tactic is an illegitimate attempt to get Senate staff to back off.

“There is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime,” she said on the Senate floor. “I view the acting general counsel’s referral as a potential effort to intimidate this staff — and I am not taking it lightly.”

This week, I spoke with congressional staff members who said even a small risk of prosecution for investigating the CIA would have a chilling effect.

Feinstein also drew a direct line from the CIA’s aggressive, provocative move, which threw the grenade of a separation of powers crisis into President Barack Obama’s Justice Department — back to exposing the history of torture. Where this all started.

“The staff members who have been working on this study and this [torture] report have devoted years of their lives to it,” she explained, “They are now being threatened with legal jeopardy, just as the final revisions to the report are being made so that parts of it can be declassified and released to the American people.”

Melber gets right to the nub of what’s so astonishingly aggressive about this:

Right now the Justice Department, which closed its own criminal investigation into torture by U.S. officials with no charges, is reviewing a high-level referral to investigate and possibly charge U.S. officials for investigating torture.

This is more than backward — it is dangerous for our separation of powers. Do we have a functioning democracy? Or are we sliding into a system where there are checks and balances for the rest of us, but no rules for the CIA?

Uhm. No there aren’t. But there’s no need. Both President Bush and President Obama assured us that “the United States does not torture” so we don’t need to worry our pretty little heads about that. President Obama also said that he’s committed to declassifying the report. Which is great. Except he failed to explain why his CIA chief is trying to stop it.

As Melber concludes in his piece:

So who is in charge here? The president either needs to get his CIA director in check, or get a new CIA director.

I wonder why he hasn’t done that? You’d think that a president who won the Noble Peace Prize would be especially anxious not to have his legacy sullied by a torture cover-up. Oh well.

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“Arm-in-arm, chanting ‘Hail Satan'”

by digby

So, this happened yesterday at an anti-abortion event:

Sen. Mike Lee said those who support abortion rights favor a “culture of death” and engage in “savagery.”

Mike Huckabee said women typically cite hardship or inconvenience as their reason for getting an abortion — the same reasons that he said could be used to justify ending the lives of the elderly.

GOP Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska told the activists: “Abortion is not a women’s issue. It is not a men’s issue. It is not a health care issue. It is a violence issue.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham said, “wouldn’t it be wonderful to win the White House in 2016, undo Obamacare, put America on a different path and have a president who defends little babies?”

Sen. Ted Cruz “Arm-in-arm, chanting ‘Hail, Satan,’ embracing the right to take the life of a late-term child,” Cruz said (in reference to supporters of abortion rights).

The “Hail Satan” and “culture of death” stuff is pretty amazing. I’m sure that won’t incite any weirdos to do anything violent. After all, they’ve never done anything like that before …

But I also really like Huckleberry Graham wanting to repeal Obamacare in defense of “little babies.” I guess all those little babies who will be without insurance had better be healthy.

Oh, in case you failed to notice, all those people are elected officials.  Well, except for Huckabee, but he was a Governor and is likely running for president.

Actual voters select these people to represent them.

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Google’s response to Snowden foiling Chinese censors

by David Atkins

Of all the reactions so far to the Snowden revelations, Google’s new encrypted searches may be the most consequential in advancing human freedom and online privacy. While the Western world benefits from greater privacy protections against warrantless surveillance by the NSA and other agencies, the impact in China may be much greater:

Googling the words “Dalai Lama” or “Tiananmen Square” from China long has produced the computer equivalent of a blank stare, as that nation’s government has blocked websites that it deemed politically sensitive.

But China’s Great Firewall, as the world’s most sophisticated internet censorship and surveillance system is known, is facing a new challenge as Google begins to automatically encrypt searches in China as part of its global expansion of privacy technology, company officials say.

Most Google searches soon will appear to Chinese censors as gibberish, blocking the government’s ability to screen searches for particular words.

Chinese officials – and those from other nations, such as Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, that censor the internet on a national level – will still have the option of blocking Google search services altogether. But routine, granular filtering of content will become more difficult, experts say. It also will become more difficult for authorities to monitor search queries for signs that an individual internet user may be a government opponent, experts say.

The development is the latest – and perhaps most unexpected – consequence of Edward Snowden’s release last year of National Security Agency documents detailing the extent of government surveillance of the internet. Google and other technology companies responded with major new investments in encryption worldwide, complicating relations between the companies and governments long accustomed to having the ability to quietly monitor the Web.

Chinese officials did not immediately respond to questions about Google’s decision to automatically encrypt searches there, but the move threatens to ratchet up long-standing tensions between the American tech powerhouse and the world’s most populous nation.

“No matter what the cause is, this will help Chinese netizens to access information they’ve never seen before,” said Percy Alpha, the co-founder of GreatFire.org, an activist group that monitors China’s Great Firewall. “It will be a huge headache for Chinese censorship authorities. We hope other companies will follow Google to make encryption by default.”

Of course, there’s still the question of what Google is doing with all of your search data and what it all means for the endangered if not defunct automatic presumption of privacy. Just yesterday my brother received a Facebook ad talking about a rare medical condition that a mutual family member suffers from–even though my brother had never mentioned the disease on Facebook, nor can we find any instance of the sufferer mentioning it on Facebook either. He was understandably a little freaked out about that. I’m more resigned. It’s a brave new world out there.

But at the very least we can do something to chip away at the state’s ability to abuse our private data both at home and by much more totalitarian governments abroad.

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Even wild predators are more altruistic than Republicans

by digby

Check it out:

“Leopard seals are the most incredible animals I’ve ever had the pleasure of photographing,” he said. “When you get in the water with a wild animal, you’re essentially giving yourself to that animal because, as humans, we’re quite helpless and vulnerable in the water. You’re at the seal’s mercy. You’re at the predator’s mercy.

“Not only did the leopard seals not attack as some predicted they would, they fed me penguins, followed me around, and generally put on a nonstop show.”

In the video above, Nicklen explained how an encounter with one particular female leopard seal was especially poignant. The animal had a head larger than a grizzly bear’s, and it took his camera and his head into its mouth. 

But instead of harming him, the seal began to “nurture” him. It began to bring him penguins, first alive, then dead, perhaps assuming that he was a “useless predator in her ocean.”

The top predator apparently tried to feed the weaker Nicklen for four days as he scuba dived in the area, working on the assignment.

I guess she didn’t read Atlas Shrugged.






h/t to Josh Holland

The intelligence budget is on a “need to know” basis. And the citizens don’t need to know.

by digby

So those silly progressives in the House think that the people should know how much money is being spent on intelligence operations. That’s just ridiculous. If the government thought we needed to know how our tax dollars were being spent, don’t you think they’d tell us?

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) is calling on the executive branch to disclose the federal government’s budget for U.S. intelligence operations and agencies — the so-called “black budget” — in an effort to shine light on details that had remained secret until last summer when intelligence funding specifics were revealed from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The 73 member CPC unveiled its “Better Off Budget” on Wednesday — which pledges to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years and create nearly 9 million jobs by 2017 — to serve as a counter proposal to the Republican one that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will offer next month.

The CPC — which is co-charied by Reps. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) — says it “believes that taxpayer-funded government surveillance programs must not infringe on American taxpayers’ constitutionally-protected rights to privacy and free expression” and that its budget proposal “seeks to provide accountability for these vast, highly technical, and often unwieldy programs by requiring that the President disclose in his annual budget submissions to the Congress the total dollar amount requested for intelligence activities at each intelligence agency.”
[…]
Last August, the Washington Post revealed — based on the documents Snowden leaked — that for fiscal year 2013, the federal government had set aside nearly $53 billion for U.S. intelligence agencies and operations, including $14.7 billion for the CIA, the most requested for any agency. “Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007,” the Post reported, “it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.”

The CPC wants this information made public in the federal government’s annual budget. “By shining sunlight on our nation’s intelligence budget,” they say, “Congress will be better equipped to adopt meaningful reforms that ensure our intelligence programs strike the proper balance between national security and individual liberty.”

The derision with which this budget has been received by the Villagers in general, much less this provision, has been overwhelming. If only these hippies could be as respectable as that nice Paul Ryan, the man who went on the radio this week and basically accused African Americans of being the causes of poverty, what with all their shiftlessness and laziness. (And that was after he’d been shown to have basically copied and pasted erroneous conclusions to his big “study” apparently to pad it with citations that don’t apply. Very very serious.)

So the Progressive Caucus puts out a budget in which the numbers all add up, the deficit is cut, people are put to work, kids are educated and old people are taken care of and it’s declared dead on arrival by all the pundits. Why? Because it raises taxes on millionaires — which is such an outrageous proposal it might as well have been a proposal to fund the government with unicorn spit.

If only they’d strap some guns to their legs, slap some tri-corner hats on their heads and start babbling about tyranny and liberty then maybe the media would take it seriously.

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