Month: March 2014

The GOP openly trying to stifle free speech. Hitting too close to home?

by digby

Louisiana doesn’t like this:

“They clearly have protected free speech rights and can say whatever they want to criticize an elected official as long as it does not violate our registered service mark,”

Yeah.  It’s all about protecting the “trademark.” The Lieutenant Governor, Jay Dardenne, has demanded the billboards be removed saying it will “confuse” people. Move On is refusing.

All I know is that these people just hate these satirical ads because it hits home and people like them. That’s why Blue America does it as frequently as possible:

They ain’t done yet. (The Jeff Sessions moment)

by digby

Adam Serwer has a nice piece up today providing some important context for the failureof President Obama’s nominee to head the civil rights division, Debo Adegbile, to win a majority in a Democratic Senate. He characterizes the Democrats who voted against him as “frightened” but I’d characterize them as opportunists. They know which side their racist bread is buttered on. Times have changed, but not that much. “Law and order” isn’t just a TV show — it was one of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy slogans and it was all about keeping the you-know-whats in line. That’s ultimately what was in play here. And there are, apparently, still enough Democrats who want to join that game still. Oh progress …

But Serwer rightly points out that the attack on this nominee to head the civil rights division is part of another long term GOP strategy:

Republicans don’t just oppose Adegbile. They oppose the civil rights division itself. That’s a tremendous irony given that it was first established under a Republican president – over the opposition of many Southern Democrats.

Yet recently when a president of their own party has been in charge of the division, Republicans have sought to purge it of civil rights lawyers perceived as too liberal. Failing that, they’ve simply declined to zealously enforce civil rights laws. During the Obama administration, Republicans have painted the division as racist against white people, and came to the defense of predatory financial industry practices that helped drive the American economy to the brink of destruction.

Where they have been unable to hamper the civil rights division’s enforcement of civil rights laws, they have turned to the conservative majority on the Supreme Court to neuter the division by gutting the laws themselves.

During the George W. Bush administration, an internal Justice Department report found Bush appointees had attempted to purge the division of liberals, or as one Bush appointee Bradley Schlozman put it, “adherents of Mao’s little red book.” The report found that Schlozman, who had vowed to “gerrymander” all those “crazy libs” out of the division, replacing them with Republican loyalists, had violated civil service laws with his hiring practices. His colleagues saw it differently – the Voting Section chief at the time, John Tanner, complained that before Bush, one had to be a “civil rights person” to get hired in the division. Imagine.

Shortly after Obama took office, conservatives seized on a now-discredited conspiracy theory that the new administration had sought to protect the New Black Panther Party. They argued that “If you are white,” in the words of Bush-era Justice Department official Hans von Spakovsky, “the Division won’t lift a finger to make sure you’re ‘protected.’”

There’s more at the link. This strategy is designed to stoke the grievances of white people who are being screwed by society and the focus them on racial and ethnic minorities as the cause of all their woes. That along with this long term scheme to sabotage civil rights and suppress the vote along with the emergence of that old stand-by of “law and order” signals that there’s still life in that old racist strategy yet. And this vote shows that there are still Democrats who are subject to being intimidated/seduced by it.

Apropos of nothing, I heard Fox’s Brett Baier call this a “Jeff Sessions moment” the other day. I’m not entirely sure what he meant. On repeated viewing I realized it may not have meant what I thought it meant. But considering Jeff Sessions’ history you can see why I might have been startled and thought the right wingers saw this as payback:

In 1986, Reagan nominated Sessions to be a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. Sessions judicial nomination was recommended and actively backed by Republican Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton. A substantial majority of the American Bar Association Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which rates nominees to the federal bench, rated Sessions “qualified,” with a minority voting that Sessions was “not qualified.”

At Sessions’ confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, four Department of Justice lawyers who had worked with Sessions testified that he had made several racist statements. One of those lawyers, J. Gerald Hebert, testified that Sessions had referred to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” because they “forced civil rights down the throats of people.”

Thomas Figures, a black Assistant U.S. Attorney, testified that Sessions said he thought the Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot.” Sessions later said that the comment was not serious, but apologized for it.[10] Figures also testified that on one occasion, when the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division sent the office instructions to investigate a case that Sessions had tried to close, Figures and Sessions “had a very spirited discussion regarding how the Hodge case should then be handled; in the course of that argument, Mr. Sessions threw the file on a table, and remarked, ‘I wish I could decline on all of them,'” by which Figures said Sessions meant civil rights cases generally. After becoming Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee, Sessions was asked in an interview about his civil rights record as a U.S Attorney. He denied that he had not sufficiently pursued civil rights cases, saying that “when I was [a U.S. Attorney], I signed 10 pleadings attacking segregation or the remnants of segregation, where we as part of the Department of Justice, we sought desegregation remedies.”

Figures also said that Sessions had called him “boy.” He also testified that “Mr. Sessions admonished me to ‘be careful what you say to white folks.'”

Sessions responded to the testimony by denying the allegations, saying his remarks were taken out of context or meant in jest, and also stating that groups could be considered un-American when “they involve themselves in un-American positions” in foreign policy. Sessions said during testimony that he considered the Klan to be “a force for hatred and bigotry.” In regards to the marijuana quote, Sessions said the comment was a joke but apologized.
In response to a question from Joe Biden on whether he had called the NAACP and other civil rights organizations “un-American”, Sessions replied “I’m often loose with my tongue. I may have said something about the NAACP being un-American or Communist, but I meant no harm by it.”

Just to show how much the nation has changed, here’s a quote from Sessions during the Adegbile debate:

Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions said, “The civil rights division must protect the civil rights of all Americans, it must not be used as a partisan tool to further the political agenda of any special interest groups, as too often has occurred in this administration in my opinion,” adding that “I do not believe the president’s nominee is therefore qualified, because I do not see the required degree of objectivity and balance that will be necessary.”

He didn’t use the “n” word. He called African Americans a “special interest group.” Progress.

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They just lie, Part XXIV

by digby

CPAC dispatch:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) fired up the audience Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference with an anecdote about what he called the heartlessness of giving out free school lunches — but it turns out that “moving” story never really happened.

Ryan used a story about a young boy choosing a lovingly made brown bag lunch over a free school meal, relayed to him by Wisconsin Department of Children and Families Secretary Eloise Anderson, to illustrate that Democrats offer Americans a “full stomach and an empty soul.”

But when Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler looked into that tale, he gave it “four pinocchios” because Anderson presented it out of context.

Kessler found Anderson told the story at a 2013 congressional hearing that Ryan chaired, and claimed she had spoken to the boy herself. Kessler notes her story closely paralleled an exchange from a book called “An Invisible Thread,” in which an executive offers to either give a young, homeless panhandler money to eat for the week or else make lunch for him each day. The boy insists on having his lunch made for him in a brown-paper bag, because that means “somebody cares” about him.

A spokesman for Anderson told Kessler that the secretary “misspoke” and was actually describing a television interview she had seen with Maurice Mazcyk, the boy described in the book. Kessler further noted that school lunch is not brought up in the book, which means Anderson inserted the program into the anecdote.

I doubt Ryan cares. He believes that giving kids free school lunches is a waste of money that rich people could use more productively by buying jewels and designer handbags. It is interesting that he also feels he needs to lie and pretend that it’s all about kids feeling that nobody cares about them if they get a hot lunch. Which is absurd.

They’re getting so filled with contradictions they are pretty much reduced to speaking gibberish.

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Look who loves the Keystone Pipeline

by digby

Hey guess what? Short term, self-interested Wall Street ethics aren’t confined to Wall Street:

It will create some construction jobs. I don’t know what is meant by “significant” but for those who need the work  any job is significant. And I get why people who would get those construction jobs are in favor of the pipeline even if they know there could be environmental disaster. Food in the belly today over whatever happens tomorrow is a powerful incentive. But that isn’t 65% of the American public.  What about all those people who already have jobs and know there will be a danger of environmental disaster? Apparently they just don’t give a damn. I guess they figure it will allow them to drive their gas hog cars a little bit longer and for them, that’s all that matters.

Why do they hate their children so much?

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Public banking gets off the ground in Vermont

by David Atkins

Last weekend I mentioned in my longish essay on the future of the Left the need for maximalist policy at a local level, including a strong push for public banking such as exists in North Dakota.

Some good news in that vein: 15 Vermont towns have just voted to establish a public bank that will serve the people, not Wall Street.

By a more than three-to-one margin on Tuesday, communities voting on whether to support the creation of a public bank in Vermont approved the idea, calling for the state legislature to establish such a bank and urging passage of legislation designed to begin its implementation.

In a show of direct democracy that also exposed the citizenry’s desire for a more localized and responsible banking system, fifteen of nineteen towns passed the resolution during ‘Town Meeting Day’— an annual event in which voters choose local officials, approve municipal budgets, and make their voices heard on a number of measures put before local residents for approval.

The specific proposal under consideration, Senate Bill 204, would turn an existing agency, the Vermont Economic Development Authority, into a public bank that would accept deposits and issue loans for in-state projects. Currently, the only state in the U.S. to maintain a public state bank is North Dakota. However, since the financial downturn of 2008, other states have looked into replicating the North Dakota model as a way to buck Wall Street while taking more control of state and local finances.

This is a good start. The idea needs to be replicated all across the country until the federal government starts to take notice.

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Lovin’ Vlad

by digby

I am not the first one to observe that American conservatives have always secretly admired the former Soviet Union. They are both, after all, authoritarians and they both have a feel for the “efficiency” of the police state (as long as it’s directed the the ‘right” people, of course.) But this survey at CPAC takes it to a new level:

[H]ow bad do they think Obama is? Would they, for example, prefer to have Russian President Vladimir Putin running the country?

It’s an absurd question, of course. But it’s one the conservative website The Daily Caller kind of asked when it put out an “URGENT NEWS POLL” asking: “Who would make a better president? Obama or Putin?”

Rather than wait for the answers, The Huffington Post decided to do the field work. We spoke to a dozen attendees out in the hall, showing them the Daily Caller’s webpage and asking them for a reaction. One person said she would take Obama over Putin. The majority was ambivalent, while a few talked themselves into the potential benefits of a Putin administration. 

Here are some of their answers.

Ed Porter: “I feel so uncomfortable answering. My instinct on that is: I don’t know. I would think Putin would be just as lawless, but he would have actual leadership and gravitas. It pains me to say it. But I’d go with him.”

John Rhodes: “Neither one. I would stay home. Putin has a long-term strategy. There is nothing we can do over Crimea and even then it is not worth it … It would be the first election I didn’t vote in.”

Emily Hillstrom: “I think Obama will still make a better president. Putin discriminates against people. He puts them in jail. I just don’t think he is a good leader. He also invaded Ukraine.”

Sarah Kelley: “I don’t know. Putin is a lot more forward with the way he does things.”

Conor (declined to give his last name): “Putin.”
Huffington Post: “But he puts people in jail.”
Conor: “So does Obama.”
Huffington Post: “But he just invaded a neighboring country.”
Conor: “So would Obama.”
Huffington Post: “But then why Putin, if they’re both bad?”
Conor: “Because, hope and change.”

Brent (asked for his last name not to be used): “Putin. He has done a stronger job of playing international politics.”

The Huffington Post asked Brent about Putin’s domestic record. In response, he said that on 2nd Amendment rights, the IRS screening of Tea Party groups, and domestic surveillance, Obama was pursuing policies that are “hallmarks of everyday circumstances in Russia.”

“As absurd as the poll is, there is greater respectability for someone who can effect change,” he added.

Mark Roepke: “It’s tough. Putin is an effective leader. He is getting things done. It depends where I live … I probably don’t want a Soviet running this country, but I already got a socialist.”

Somebody get Grover or Newtie over there to instruct these poor kids about how they’re supposed to answer this question. They are completely lost.

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Mr Popular


by digby

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has now become the least popular U.S. Senator in the country.

Key findings: “Only 30% of Arizonans approve of the job McCain is doing to 54% who disapprove. There isn’t much variability in his numbers by party- he’s at 35/55 with Republicans, 29/53 with Democrats, and 25/55 with independents, suggesting he could be vulnerable to challenges in both the primary and general elections the next time he’s up.”

I guess the more people see him, the less they like him. Here’s a list of the most appearances on the Sunday shows in 2013:

If you add up all the appearances he makes during the week, it’s a wonder he has time to vote.

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You can fix inequality on the front end and on the back end. I prefer the front.

by David Atkins

A new report shows that boosting the minimum wage to a paltry $10.10 an hour would reduce SNAP expenditures by $4.6 billion:

Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would cut federal government outlays on food stamps by $4.6 billion per year, according to a study released Wednesday.

The estimate published by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, is among the first to assess the effect of increasing the minimum wage on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (better known as food stamps). The study backs supporters who say the policy change would benefit not just low-wage workers, but also taxpayers by reducing government expenditures.

The group’s analysis found that increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 from the current $7.25 rate would lower total food-stamp aid by $4.6 billion, or 6% of the program’s budget.

“Our results show that a minimum-wage increase to $10.10 would reduce the need for 3.5 million people to support themselves on food stamps,” said Michael Reich, one of the study’s authors and an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

The standard way you’ll hear most progressives address inequality issues is to allow the labor market to run as usual, but levy heavy taxes on the back for redistribution.

No doubt that is the simplest way of doing it. But it also creates some problems, including a perception of unfairness, the potential to simply lower the tax rates when conservatives are put in charge, and capital mobility in which the richest people simply leave the country.

Front-end fixes that distribute wealth more fairly before it makes it to the hands to the plutocrats is more desirable in my book. They’re harder to get rid of legislatively, they eliminate the “we’re overtaxed” argument, and they reduce the incentive for capital mobility.

Raising the minimum wage, altering the structure of corporate law to encourage worker ownership, and instituting regulation and transaction taxes on Wall Street to encourage real long-term investment instead of job-slashing hollow corporations are all examples of front end fixes.

We need to focus on both sides of the equation, of course, but it would be great if the progressive movement as a whole spend a little more time on the front end than it does.

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Why don’t they just release the torture report?

by digby

Emptywheel answers a question I and others have posed about this SSCI torture report: why don’t they just release it?

Over the last few days, I’ve tracked the accusations and counter-accusations between CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

A number of people have asked why, as a way to end this issue, the Committee doesn’t just declassify the entire SSCI Report.

But it’s not so simple as that.

It’s not clear there are the votes to release the Report.

Recall that when the Committee approved the Report back in 2012, the vote was largely split on party lines, with the exception of John McCain, who voted as an Ex Officio member (as Ranking Member of Senate Armed Services Committee) to release the Report. McCain is no longer SASC Ranking member: Jim Inhofe is, and I’m betting he’s not going to vote to release the Report.

There are few other changes in the Committee proper since the report was originally finalized. Martin Heinrich and Angus King have replaced Bill Nelson and Kent Conrad, and Susan Collins and Tom Coburn have replaced Olympia Snowe and Roy Blunt.

And while Heinrich has quickly become one of the better overseers on the Committee, including on torture, it’s not actually clear whether King would vote to release the report. Collins, too, has been reported to be undecided (and her vote would be critical to making this a “bipartisan vote,” now that McCain doesn’t have a vote). There are even hints that Mark Warner wouldn’t vote to support its declassification (though he supported its finalization).

Historical reminder from Rick Perlstein’s forthcoming book:

…The [Pike] report, drafted by an Ervin Committee veteran, was, for a government document, a literary masterpiece, and hard-hitting as hell: it opened with seventy pages savaging the Ford administration’s lack of cooperation with Congress’s work, and continued, more aggressively than Pike’s public hearings—which had been plenty aggressive themselves, far more so than Senator Church’s—by documenting the CIA’s wasteful spending (where it could figure out what it spent), its bald failures at prediction, its abuses of civil liberties and its blanket indifference that any of this might pose a problem. It singled out Henry Kissinger for his “passion for secrecy” and statements “at variance with facts”; it detailed a number of failed covert actions—not naming countries, but with plenty enough identifying details to make things obvious enough for those who cared to infer. For instance, how the Nixon administration encouraged the Kurdish minority in Iraq to revolt, then abandoned them when the Shah of Iran objected. “Even in the context of covert action,” it concluded concerning that one, “ours was a cynical exercise.”

And something about all this seemed to spook cowed congressmen—who soon were voting to neuter themselves.

The House Rules Committee approved a measure by nine votes to seven to suppress publication report unless President Ford approved its contents. The full House debated whether to accept or reject the recommendation. Those against argued that the “classification” system itself violated the canons of checks and balances that were supposed to be the foundation of the republic. A moderate Republican from Colorado pointed out that the executive branch was desperate to serve as judge and jury in the very case for which it was plaintiff: that the report definitively established that the CIA had committed “despicable, detestable acts,” but that “we are being castigated by those who perpetrate the acts and classify them.” Pike made a demystifying point: that each of these things called “secrets,” and hemmed around with such sacralizing foofaraw, talked of as if they were blatant instructions to our enemies on how to defeat us, “is a fact or opinion to which some bureaucrat has applied a rubber stamp.” A Democrat from suburban Chicago drove home the bottom line: “If we are not a coequal branch of this government, if we are not equal to the President and the Supreme Court, then let the CIA write this report; let the President write this report; and we ought to fold our tent and go home.”

To no avail. On January 29, the full House voted by two to one, led by conservatives, to suppress the very report it had authorized a year of work and several hundred thousand dollars to produce.

It all was too much for Daniel Schorr. He took his copy to his bosses at CBS: “We owe it to history to publish it,” he said. They disagreed. He went to a nonprofit organization called the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to see if they could find a publishing house that might be interested, with the proceeds perhaps going to their group. They could not. Finally the alternative weekly the Village Voice agreed to publish it, in a massive special issue, and since the Reporters Committee now controlled the document, theVoice made a contribution to the group. This set off a fierce backlash among the polite guardians of journalistic decorum; the New York Times editorialized that by “making the report available for cash” Daniel Schorr was guilty of “selling secrets.” On ABC, anchor Sam Donaldson said, “There are those that argue that in an open society like ours nothing should be concealed from the public. Depending on who espouses it, that position is either cynical, or naive.” He said “mature and rational citizens” understood this—but not, apparently, Daniel Schorr. Nor his bosses at CBS News, who suspended him, though local affiliates begged CBS brass to fire him.

The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into who leaked the document to Schorr, who never told coughed u his source; they ended up spending $350,000, interviewing 400 witnesses, coming up with, yes, one leaker, Congressman Les Aspin (D-Wisconsin)—but he had leaked it to the CIA, as a political favor.

And I’m quite sure that someone has reminded all the cowardly Senators of this as well:

T]he unfortunate fact is that such investigations, while necessary, tend to be politically poisonous for the lawmakers who run them. Frank Church had presidential aspirations in 1975, but the investigation ate up so much of his time that it kept him from campaigning (he later groused that it might have cost him a shot at being Jimmy Carter’s vice president, too). The public and Congress, who had been furious about agency abuses of power in 1975, had mostly lost interest by the time the committee delivered its report a year later. Only one of its recommendations—the surveillance court—actually made it into law, and Church lost his Senate seat in the 1980 election following spurious accusations that his investigation had led to the assassination of a CIA station chief in Greece. The chairman of the concurrent investigative committee in the House, New York Democrat Otis Pike, saw his reputation similarly battered, and left office in 1979.

And that was in the aftermath of Watergate.

I’m sure the CIA realizes this history which is why they are as freaked out by anyone having access to documents as they are about the report itself. Who knows where they might end up?

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New Christie scandal! (He’s a Koch addict …)

by digby

Well, not exactly a scandal…

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spoke to thousands of conservative activists Thursday, burnishing his Republican credentials by touting his efforts to stand up to unions, reform entitlement programs and oppose abortion. Christie also defended Charles and David Koch, the billionaires who have helped sustain the conservative movement and have come under attack from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

“What they’re for in Washington, D.C., is that the leader of Senate Democrats stand up and rail against two American entrepreneurs who have built a business, created jobs, and created wealth and philanthropy in this country. Harry Reid should get back to work and stop picking on great Americans who are creating great things in our country,” said Christie at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference. His audience applauded.

Huzzah! No wonder all those big donors from both parties loved Christie before his little “problem:”

Gov. Chris Christie is cashing in donations from top Democratic fundraisers and other traditionally liberal donors across the country, even nabbing the support of a handful of rainmakers aligned with President Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Star-Ledger review of state and federal records shows.

The checks are flying into the Republican governor’s war chest from all sorts of unlikely places — the hedge fund run by liberal billionaire George Soros, for example, and the politically progressive halls of the University of California, Berkeley.

The nascent support from Democratic donors is an early sign of Christie’s fundraising prowess in a potential run for the White House in 2016, experts and Democratic donors said, and dovetails with recent polls showing him gaining popularity nationally among Democrats and independents.

Christie’s partnership with New Jersey Democratic leaders and his warm relationship with Obama after Hurricane Sandy could be enticing donors who don’t often give to GOP candidates, even if they are closer ideologically to Democrat Barbara Buono, Christie’s lesser-known challenger, political scientists and Democratic fundraisers say.

“While I do not agree with his stance on every issue, he is one of the best political leaders I have talked to in a long time,” said Ken Rosen, a UC-Berkeley professor who cut a $3,800 check to Christie after chatting with him at two events. “He is willing to take on tough issues such as pension reform, education reform, mental-health issues, even if his views are not politically correct.”

The really good news is that these rich donors are putting their feet down and taking an active role in Party strategy now. They have such good judgement, after all. If Christie keeps defending the Kochs maybe the rest of them will rediscover their affection for the big lug.

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