Month: March 2014

Rand Paul is the new Howard Dean? Not bloody likely

by digby

Mark Murray at MSNBC says that Rand Paul could be the Howard dean of the GOP:

… someone promising to change his party’s thinking who has the potential to catch fire, but who also has the potential to fizzle out.

Like Dean with his opposition to the Iraq war, Paul wants to fundamentally change the Republican Party’s hawkish national-security and foreign-policy tendencies. “America has never backed down from a fight-but we should never be a nation that is eager to get involved in nations’ conflicts that work against our own national security,” he said in a Nov. 2013 speech.

Like Dean with the young voters he attracted, Paul wants to bring more young and minority voters into the GOP fold. “We need young people in the party. The president won the youth vote 3 to 1,” Paul said back in January. “Since we’ve had the different spying scandals, I think if there were a Republican who stood up for privacy, who stood up for the Fourth Amendment, I think the young people will come back to us.”

I guess anything’s possible. Except the Democratic party has been the home of the anti-war faction in American politics for the past 50 years while the Republicans have run on law and order and national security. Howard Dean tapped into an existing strain of voters who were already Democrats and who were with the Party on most other issues. I suppose Paul can theoretically get a few libertarian isolationists out there who have never voted, but I suspect he’ll have a big problem with anyone who currently identifies as a Republican.And young people as a whole may be anti-war but they’re not anti-government, anti-taxes or pro business.

In any case, I’m going to guess that unless we’re involved in WWIII (always a possibility) “war” is not going to be the salient issue in 2016, and even if it were, the Republican Party of Taft died out long ago and is a long way from resurrection. I think the beltway is succumbing to the idea that because Rand Paul is espousing these ideas and getting some respect among the GOP faithful, it’s because the GOP faithful believes in it on the merits. This is not correct. The GOP faithful believes in anything that is in opposition to Barack Obama. Look at them today with the Ukraine crisis. Rand Paul cannot thread that needle. Nobody can.

But it’s fun to play these games because we’ll be able to come back and make fun of these absurd notions down the road.

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QOTD: Tom Harkin

by digby

From the senate floor

“We sent a message: We have a double standard. A terrible double standard,” Harkin said, pointing out that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts once worked on behalf of a mass murderer.

“Here’s the message we sent today. You young people listen up. If you are a young white person and you go to work for a law firm … and that law firm assigns you to a pro bono case to defend someone who killed eight people in cold blood … my advice from this, what happened today, is you should do that … Because if you do that, who knows? You might wind up to be the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

“However, if you are a young black person and you go to work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund … and you’re asked to sign an appeal for someone convicted of murder, what the message said today is, ‘Don’t do it! Don’t do it.’ Because you know what? If you do that, in keeping with your legal obligations and your profession, you will be denied by the U.S. Senate from being an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice,” Harkin said.

“What about that guy sitting over there — the chief justice of the Supreme Court — defended a person who killed eight people?” Harkin asked, pointing toward the nearby court building. “Maybe we should institute a — an impeachment process? Maybe that’s what we ought to do. Maybe my friends on the Republican side did not know this about John Roberts, that he had defended a mass murderer. Maybe that’s what we’ve got to do, bring up an impeachment process. Let’s impeach the chief justice because he had fulfilled his legal obligation to defend a murderer. Well, I hope that you see the ridiculousness of that argument.”

I doubt they do.

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Let’s play a game: libertarian professor of economics, or crazy man on street corner?

by David Atkins

Let’s play a game. I’m going to blockquote an article, and you tell me who you think wrote it.

Here you go:

1. As I’ve argued in detail here, poor healthy adults in the First World are largely undeserving. Indeed, few are even objectively poor; just look at the many luxuries the American poor typically enjoy.

2. People who used to be healthy adults in the First World are also largely undeserving. As long as they were healthy enough to work for a couples of decades, the vast majority could have easily saved enough (or purchased enough insurance, annuities, etc.) to protect themselves from unemployment, accidents, sickness, old age, and other perennial troubles.

…

In sum: The stages of blame, combined with basic facts about poverty, are deeply consistent with a radical libertarian critique of the status quo. Modern social democracies force their citizens to help their countrymen even though the latter are largely undeserving – and often not really poor. The most that could be justified is a rump welfare state that helps poor children and people who develop severe health problems early in life. At the same time, social democracies deliberately and massively increase global poverty by banning employment contracts between citizens and foreigners.

Like it or not, much-maligned U.S. Gilded Age poverty policies – minimal government assistance combined with near-open borders – were close to ideal. And the broadly-defined poverty policies of much-beloved post-war social democracies are morally perverse – enforcing absurdly inflated moral duties toward poor citizens while slandering poor foreigners as criminals for using the most realistic strategy they have to avoid poverty: getting a job in the First World.

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Hazard a guess? Some random radical crank with a blog? Random nut on the Internet? Crazy man waving signs on a street corner?

Nope. It’s Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics (!) at George Mason University. Here’s his brief bio:

Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center. He is the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, named “the best political book of the year” by the New York Times, and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. He has published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Law and Economics, and Intelligence, and has appeared on 20/20, FoxNews, and C-SPAN. He is now working on a new book, The Case Against Education.

This nutcase is actually teaching impressionable students economics of all things, and getting published in all the big papers.

This is part of why we can’t have nice things. A person this morally insane and ignorant of both history and economics shouldn’t be anywhere near a classroom or a publishing house.

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Quote ‘O the Day: Sean Hannity

by digby

Sean Hannity Mocks Obama For Wearing Bicycle Helmet: “It’s Embarrassing”
Hannity: “When I Grew Up, All I Did Was Ride My Bike. I Never Wore A Helmet. Ever. Not Once, Not One Time. And Guess What … We Survived.”

I know what he means:

Of course Bush proved that everyone really does need to wear a helmet:

Hannity didn’t wear a helmet, “not once”  and we know how that turned out.

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General Keith Alexander, who has furiously denounced the Snowden revelations, said at a Tuesday cybersecurity panel that unspecified “headway” on what he termed “media leaks” was forthcoming in the next several weeks, possibly to include “media leaks legislation.”

In perhaps his most expansive remarks to date since Miranda – the partner of former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald – was detained for nine hours at Heathrow airport last summer, Alexander noted that a panel of UK judges found Miranda’s detention to be legal.

“Recently, what came out with the justices in the United Kingdom … they looked at what happened on Miranda and other things, and they said it’s interesting: journalists have no standing when it comes to national security issues. They don’t know how to weigh the fact of what they’re giving out and saying, is it in the nation’s interest to divulge this,” Alexander said.

That’s right. Only government “experts” can understand the “national interest.” Journalists and outside experts (much less mere citizens) are just not equipped to make such decisions. Let’s move along now.

And then he said something very curious. He said he was meeting with the White House about mass phone collection changes. And added this:

“We’ve got to handle media leaks first,” Alexander said.

“I think we are going to make headway over the next few weeks on media leaks. I am an optimist. I think if we make the right steps on the media leaks legislation, then cyber legislation will be a lot easier,” Alexander said.

The specific legislation to which Alexander referred was unclear. Angela Canterbury, the policy director for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said she was unaware of any such bill. Neither was Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists.

The NSA’s public affairs office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Alexander has previously mused about “stopping” journalism related to the Snowden revelations.

“We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on,” he told an official Defense Department blog in October.

There has been a lot of handwringing and chest beating about arresting journalist and making the publishing of leaks akin to “trafficking in stolen goods” and other wildly undemocratic nonsense by various members of the government over the past few months. But this is the first anybody’s heard of proposed legislation (or anything else) to “deal” with media leaks. Eric Holder has not entirely closed the door on prosecution and FBI Director Comey didn’t rule it out entirely, but neither of them have sounded eager to get into this. So I don’t know what Alexander is talking about.

Spencer Ackerman asked the NSA about this today:

About Gen. Alexander’s reference to “media leaks legislation.” http://t.co/SPksPY5vrz NSA now tells me he meant legislative options to (1/2)
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) March 5, 2014

(2/2) restructure bulk domestic phone records collection. That’s… not a phrase I’ve ever heard used to describe that thing-in-question.
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) March 5, 2014

So maybe “Emperor Alexander” is just losing the thread. Let’s hope so. This certainly lends itself to that conclusion:

In an October interview with the New York Times, Alexander said: “I do feel it’s important to have a public, transparent discussion on cyber so that the American people know what’s going on.”

But staff at Georgetown University, which sponsored the Tuesday cybersecurity forum, took the microphone away from a Guardian reporter who attempted to ask Alexander if the NSA had missed the signs of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine, which appeared to take Obama administration policymakers by surprise.

Although the event was open to reporters, journalists were abruptly told following the NSA director’s remarks that they were not permitted to ask questions of Alexander, who did not field the Ukraine question. Following the event, security staff closed a stairwell gate on journalists who attempted to ask Alexander questions on his way out.

I guess he’s Elvis now.
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Man accidentally shoots 12-year-old, fumbles gun, shoots self. No charges will be filed.

So this guy shot a 12-year-old girl, fumbled his gun, then shot himself:

An Orlando, Fla. man accidentally discharged a gun on Friday, first striking a 12-year-old girl in a moving car then himself immediately after, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

Ventura Santos Mateo, 60, was in his garage teaching a friend how to clean his gun.

Investigators said he was holding a Sig Sauer pistol above his waist when the weapon discharged in the direction of the street, striking the girl in her right upper arm. The 12-year-old was riding in the front seat of the car, with her younger brother in the back seat. Her father didn’t realize she had been shot until he pulled into his driveway about a block down the street.

“Surprised and distressed by the inadvertent shot, Mateo ‘nervously’ shot again by accident, striking himself in the left thigh,” the Sentinel reported, citing police.

Sounds like a big deal. Criminal charges, reckless endangerment, something like that.

Ah, who am I kidding? This is Florida! Shit happens, ya know? Gotta keep the guns in the hands of the sheepdogs to protect from all them wolves, know what I mean?

Both he and the girl are expected to recover from the injuries. A police report said he won’t be charged, but authorities are still investigating the incident.

Moral insanity. No other phrase does our guns policy justice.

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Tin horn dictators quelling dissent

by digby

I hate when President Obama gets all dictatorish and authoritarian and everything and uses the power of his office to quell dissent:

Oh, sorry. Wrong YouTube. Never mind.

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What a lovely bunch of jackholes

by digby

Oh look, the Democratic majority of which we’re all supposed to be so protective just failed to protect a highly qualified Obama nominee because some reactionary Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to vote for someone who led the NAACP. What is this, 1953?

Debo Adegbile, who previously served as the acting head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, is one of the nation’s top civil rights attorneys. He’s also a leading expert on voting rights who twice defended the Voting Rights Act before the Supreme Court — the first time successfully. He was, in other words, an ideal candidate to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — the division which, among other things, oversees the federal government’s voting rights work in an era where conservative state lawmakers are currently waging a widespread campaign to prevent demographic groups that tend to vote for Democrats from casting a ballot.

And yet, the Senate just voted his nomination down, thanks to seven Democrats. The Democrats who opposed Adegbile’s confirmation are Sens. Bob Casey (D-PA), Chris Coons (D-DE), Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Mark Pryor (D-AR) and John Walsh (D-MT).

Why did this happen? Apparently because he defended the constitution at one time:

In 2008, a federal appeals court unanimously held — with two Reagan appointees on the panel — that procedures used during a convicted cop killer named Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death penalty hearing violated the Constitution. Specifically, the panel of predominantly Republican judges concluded that the trial judge gave the jury a confusing form that could have been read to require a death sentence unless every single juror agreed to a life sentence. The NAACP LDF filed an amicus brief on Abu-Jamal’s behalf.

At least one of the Democrats who opposed Adegbile, Sen. Casey, cited his work to overturn this unconstitutional death sentence as the reason for his opposition.

But never fear, just because you are a lawyer who defends the constitution it doesn’t mean you will forever be denied a job in the US Government. You can defend the constitution on behalf of all the white collar criminals you like. In fact, it’s required. It’s only if you defend it on behalf of the “wrong kind” of criminal (and I think you know what that means…) that you will be voted down by a bunch of right wing Senators.

And people wonder why so many Democrats are sick to death of having to put up with these assholes.

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Torture? What torture?

by digby

I’m sure most people have no problem with this. After all, the world is full of dangerous people and we need to keep an eye on them lest they kill us in our beds:

The CIA Inspector General’s Office has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of malfeasance at the spy agency in connection with a yet-to-be released Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, McClatchy has learned.

The criminal referral may be related to what several knowledgeable people said was CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides to prepare the study. The monitoring may have violated an agreement between the committee and the agency.

The development marks an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers amid an extraordinary closed-door battle over the 6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program. The CIA has disputed some of the reports findings.

White House officials have closely tracked the bitter struggle, a McClatchy investigation has found. But they haven’t directly intervened, perhaps because they are embroiled in their own feud with the committee, resisting surrendering top-secret documents that the CIA asserted were covered by executive privilege and sent to the White House.

McClatchy’s findings are based on information found in official documents and provided by people with knowledge of the dispute being fought in the seventh-floor executive offices of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va., and the committee’s high-security work spaces on Capitol Hill.

I think it’s very cute that the CIA sent these torture documents to the White House so they could be covered up under executive privilege — and that the White House is actually acquiescing.

But hey, there’s no reason to suspect our fine public servants in the secret surveillance and clandestine services would ever use their power for anything but good. We need to trust them. Just because they are covering up their crimes and spying on the staff of Senators tasked with oversight doesn’t mean we should be skeptical of their goodness and righteousness. Those Senate staffers — hell, the Senators themselves — could be terrorists. We really can’t be too careful.

Oh, and by the way, this isn’t ancient history. As this piece from a few years back pointed out, the Obama administration’s reversion to the Army Field Manual guidelines did not eliminate torture from the tool kit as we were led to believe. It doesn’t allow waterboarding or putting people in coffins with bugs to drive them crazy like the Yoo-approved methods did. But what it does allow is still plenty bad. Also too: force feeding in Guantanamo.

The torture continues.

But never say the US Government doesn’t have a sense of humor:

Update: The Guardian adds this little detail:

A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an “unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee, which has apparently prompted an inspector general’s inquiry at Langley.

The subtle reference in a Tuesday letter from Senator Mark Udall to Obama, seeking to enlist the president’s help in declassifying a 6,300-page inquiry by the committee into torture carried out by CIA interrogators after 9/11, threatens to plunge the White House into a battle between the agency and its Senate overseers.

McClatchy and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it. The CIA sharply disputes the committee’s findings.

Udall, a Colorado Democrat and one of the CIA’s leading pursuers on the committee, appeared to reference that surreptitious spying on Congress, which Udall said undermined democratic principles.

“As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight powers and for our democracy,” Udall wrote to Obama on Tuesday.

Independent observers were unaware of a precedent for the CIA spying on the congressional committees established in the 1970s to check abuses by the intelligence agencies.

h/t to @attackerman

The “tough” question

by digby

God I wish we could dispense with all this fatuous talk about “toughness” every time a foreign policy question comes up:

New York Times White House Correspondent Peter Baker joined Hugh Hewitt on his radio show Tuesday to take on the latest from Ukraine, and Baker told Hewitt that it doesn’t appear that Russian President Vladimir Putin has holds that much respect for President Obama.

Baker rattled off the differences between the current conflict and what happened six years ago in Georgia, saying that thie time around Putin “knows what the West is going to do, and he’s decided it’s a price he’s willing to pay.” And this time around, he said, the White House has made sanctions “the weapon of choice.”

Hewitt brought up criticism of Obama’s perceived weakness on the world stage in the midst of all this, and asked if “Putin views Obama as significantly softer than Bush.” Baker gave a pretty blunt response.

“I don’t think he has a lot of respect for President Obama. I think that’s fair. And I do think that he has tested, in his mind, President Obama on a number of occasions and did not come away feeling intimidated.”

Right.  President George W. Bush Bush is responsible for the greatest American foreign policy disaster in at least a century, maybe ever, and yet we’re supposed to believe that he’s respected? For his toughness? What a joke. Bush was also the manly man who saw into “Pooty-poot’s” soul and told us all he was just a wonderful guy you’d like your daughter to bring home for Thanksgiving. To the extent that Putin sees the US as an enemy he can only dream of facing another credulous boob like George W. Bush who will piss away 50 years of American moral authority with one outrageous act of “toughness.”

I’m sure he finds this sort of thing very amusing:

“It is not often that you have a spit take moment when you’re watching the news,” the MSNBC host began on her show. She was referring to Secretary of State John Kerry’s criticism of Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine on Sunday’s “Face the Nation.” Kerry had said, “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.”

Maddow appeared amused by the comments. “Agreed,” she said. “Also, it’s really awkward to hear you say that.” The “awkwardness,” Maddow said, came from the United States being “only a couple years out now from our own near decade of war in Iraq, which was a war that was of course also launched on a trumped up false pretext.”

After playing Kerry’s comments again, she observed, “Absolutely true and something which the United States has absolutely no leg to stand on after it famously did the same thing on a much bigger scale.”

Or this:

TAPPER: Vladimir Putin spoke earlier today, Senator, defending his actions. He said military force would be a last resort. They don’t plan to make Crimea part of Russia, he said, even though of course there are thousands of Russian troops there. He did take a dig at U.S. foreign policy. I want to get your reaction to what he said. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

VLADIMIR PUTIN, RUSSIAN PRESIDENT (through translator): When I say do you think that everything you do is legitimate, and they say yes, so I have to remind them about the actions of the U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, where they were acting without any U.N. sanctions.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: So there you have Putin invoking the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

Obviously, this is not a popular position in the United States, but do you think with the world community, we in the United States are perceived as having a double standard?

CORKER: Well, look, we acted — you know, we had some degree in every case of working with other countries to make this happen.

This was a unilateral effort on their part. Obviously I saw where Eugene Robinson made a similar case in the last 48 hours, one of the our editorialists in our own country.

But, no, I don’t think so. I think there are obviously countries that had a lot of concern about us being in Iraq. I don’t know there’s any question about that. But the comparison to me is apples to oranges, and not even close. And we should not certainly use that — we shouldn’t let someone use that as a reason for him to be where he is. It’s totally ludicrous and not something that even should be considered.

Yes I’m sure that Vladimir Putin very much respects George W. Bush for his “toughness.” And his remarkable ability to turn the United States into an international joke.

Oh and by the way, the Eugene Robinson column Bob Corker refers to does make the obvious case that US officials making the strident case for sovereign borders being inviolate sound ridiculous, but he also says this:

If the goal is to persuade Russia to give back Crimea — which may or may not be possible — the first necessary step is to try to understand why Putin grabbed it in the first place.

When Ukraine emerged as a sovereign state from the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was agreed that the Russian navy would retain its bases on the Crimean Peninsula. After Viktor Yanu­kovych, Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, was deposed by a “people power” revolution last month, it was perhaps inevitable that Putin would believe the status of those bases was in question, if not under threat.

The new government in Kiev could offer formal reassurances about the naval base in Sevastopol. More broadly, however, Putin may have decided that allowing Ukraine to escape Moscow’s orbit was too much to swallow. Seizing Crimea does more than secure a warm-water port for Russian ships. It implies the threat of further territorial incursions — unless the new government in Kiev becomes more accommodating to its powerful neighbor.

This is not fair to Ukraine. But I don’t believe it helps the Ukrainians to pretend that there is a way to make Putin surrender Crimea if he wants to keep it.

The question is whether there is any way to tip the balance of Putin’s cost-benefit analysis. The Russian leader has nothing to fear from the U.N. Security Council, since Russia can veto any proposed action. Kicking Russia out of the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations would be a blow to Moscow’s prestige but probably would not cause Putin to lose much sleep.

Economic sanctions are more easily threatened than applied. The European Union depends on Russia for much of its natural gas — a fact that gives Putin considerable leverage. In a broader sense, there is zero enthusiasm in Europe for a reprise of the Cold War. Putin knows this.

If Putin really has lost touch with reality, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly speculated in a conversation with President Obama, then all bets are off. But if Putin is being smart, he will offer a solution: Russia gets sole or joint possession of Crimea. Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics remember that Moscow is watching, and we all settle down.

Sadly for Ukraine, but realistically, that may be a deal the world decides to accept.

I know that’s not as exciting as assuming we can “defeat” the Hitleresque Vladimir Putin and save the world from tyranny if only our president is “tough” enough, but it’s just a tad more realistic.

I’d also point out that presidential candidates making “Hitler” analogies is more than a little bit provocative when talking about Russia and Ukraine. They (and the other Soviet states) lost nearly 20 million people in WWII and it doesn’t seem that long ago to them.  I’m not a particular sticker for Godwin’s law — I think a war that cost the world 60 million lives and ranks as the bloodiest conflict in human history should not be off limits for public discussion. But this is one situation where they really should zip it with the Hitler stuff.  These Russians and Ukrainians know from Hitler.

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