Month: March 2014

“What’s written down in the Constitution is one thing, and the real practice is another.”


by digby

This is a fascinating Youtube about a citizen who politely stood up for his constitutional rights when some police officers took it upon themselves to search his car without probable cause and he took the time to challenge it in court:

I verbally objected to an unconstitutional search of my vehicle in Electra, Texas. Police officers Matt Wood and Gary Ellis maliciously responded by issuing me two false citations. I got a copy of the dashboard-camera video at the pretrial hearing. It showed all. City attorney Todd Greenwood demanded I give my copy of the evidence back, and tried to have me arrested when I refused.

Todd Greenwood then compared rural Texas to the movie Deliverance, and warned me “What’s written down in the Constitution is one thing, and the real practice is another.”

All charges dropped. Section 1983 anyone?

Here’s what Greenwood said verbatim and it’s just amazing:

I’m sure he’s right about all that, by the way. It’s just interesting to hear a government attorney say it all out loud.

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“A grinding sense of dislike”

by digby

ICYWW just what in the heck is wrong with this country, Peggy Noonan is here to tell you you in no uncertain terms:

The constant mischief of the progressive left is hurting the nation’s morale. There are few areas of national life left in which they are not busy, and few in which they’re not making it worse. There are always more regulations, fees and fiats, always more cultural pressure and insistence…

People feel beset because they are. All these things are pieces of a larger, bullying ineptitude. And people know, they are aware.

Conservatives sometimes feel exhausted from trying to fight back on a million fronts. A leftist might say: “Yes, that’s the plan.”

But the left too is damaged. They look hollowed out and incoherent. Their victories, removed of meaning, are only the triumphs of small aggressions. They win the day but not the era. The result is not progress but more national division, more of a grinding sense of dislike. At first it will be aimed at the progressive left, but in time it will likely be aimed at America itself, or rather America as It Is Now. When the progressive left wins, they will win, year by year, less of a country.

Replace the word left with right and liberals with conservatives and see how it sounds.

Yeah. I agree.

BTW: I think it’s important to share one of Jesse Taylor’s seminal Noonan satires from time to time. So much has disappeared into the ether, but this one survives just for this moment:

The Tears of Democracy
She cries because she’s free.

Friday, July 25, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST

We live in times untraveled by any who came before us, treading lightly over the settled dust of past conflicts as we kick up the dust of future fights, fighting an enemy the likes of which have never been seen before – stereotypically evil Muslims. This is a time for reflection, and a time for action. Most of all, it is a time for weeping.

On September 11th, I wept. That made me a real American, along with all of the other Manhattanites who shared my pain. In June of this year, I wept again as I saw my former fellow Americans lining up to get books signed by New York’s junior Senator, Hillary Clinton. Had they forgotten what we shared, betrayed that bond that I had with them on that terrible day when we all shared in my pain? I wept for them, and more importantly, for me.

There is a debate in America over whether or not we were led into war truthfully; for that, I weep. We are fighting evil, and this is no time to show weakness in its face through the screaming and carping of partisan politics. For a while, I did not weep as we fought bravely in Iraq; instead, I cheered loudly in my echoing apartment, prompting my neighbors to call the super and have me quieted with the threat of having my lease terminated. As a result, I wept.

At some point last year, I was weeping, on my then three-a-week schedule. September 11th made it impossible for happiness to ever be a part of the true vernacular of Americanness again, and so we are still weeping. Everywhere I go, I see tears. At the candy store, the clerk, a delightful Hispanic boy named Greg told me that they hadn’t received that day’s shipment of my favorite caramel peanut clusters. I wept, because this beauty of this choice stood in stark contrast to the repressive regimes that our brave President fights against. How many Arabs will not have peanut clusters, of the chocolate or caramel varieties, no matter how many tears I shed? And so, I weep. Chocolate tastes salty in the sunshine.

One day, we will teach the young, the infirm, and the mildly disinterested the story of this time. A place where everything changed, where the fight against terrorism was built upon a sea of barely contained tears, where we could rely on manly men to man it up when necessary; failing that, we had Jonah Goldberg. Within each of us was awoken the core of our being, and now we are free to feel the spirit of America. The weepy, borderline nonfunctional spirit of America.

Weeping. Wept. Weeps. Weep-Pop-A-Loo-Bop, Ba-Lop-Bam-Boom. We live in a sad and a hopeful time. Everywhere I go, there are children around me, laughing. Then, they start crying alongside me. Mainly because I am already crying, but also because they are sad. They feel the weight of the future world on their shoulders, the acrid dust of history clinging to their sweaty feet. They know, when I lure them over to a park bench with ice cream and start reading the organizational manifesto of People for a New American Century to them, that something bad is in the air – and so they cry. They weep, like me. Like Americans. And we weep together.

When I am asked by our brave police officers and firefighters to let go of those children, I weep, as well. Perhaps it’s the sadness of a world full of dangers and only a brave Texan man between us and them. Perhaps it’s the tear gas filtering in through my stately apartment, seeping in the cracks as I cry, tearily, to those children to always have hope, to never stand down in the face of fear. They may be clawing at the door of my apartment, but September 11th claws at the door of our national soul…and its apartment. Which is rent-controlled.

Who would have thought two years ago that my tears would have become so much? My tear ducts are cauterized now, by my spirit and my faith remain unencumbered by the stunting practices of modern medicine. I weep for my tears. They are America.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Her most recent book, “Three Pennies, A Thimble, And A Parking Ticket,” is published by Viking Penguin. You can buy it from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

Your tax dollars at work

by digby

Sure, let’s cut the hell out of government spending to help poor people and kids. But this is money well spent:

Robert Duncan moved from Los Angeles to Northern California in 2010 to manage marijuana growing operations for a collective of medical marijuana dispensaries. Although California voters legalized medical cannabis more than 17 years ago, the plant remains illegal under federal law, and the Obama administration launched a renewed crackdown on marijuana in California in 2011.

That October, Duncan’s grow house was raided. A few months later, U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner indicted him and others involved in the dispensary business on the grounds that it had grown too large. Despite California’s struggle with prison overcrowding, and despite new federal guidelines that say size should no longer be considered in prosecution decisions, Duncan, 31, was sentenced to two years in prison.

Read on.

Huffington Post has been with this fellow all day, interviewing him live, as he prepares to submit himself to prison. I can’t imagine it. I find the idea of being locked up, especially for doing something that no person should be imprisoned for, is horrifying.

It boils down to the feds wanting to make an example out of us. There’s no rhyme or reason, no formulas, like the feds saying you have too many patients or you have too many profit dollars. And actually, we really weren’t making that much money because we were just reinvesting into the company. And I didn’t see any of that anyways. I just had a modest salary. President Obama saying that marijuana is like a vice similar to alcohol, maybe there’s a bigger strategy there and he’s trying to ramp up for a bigger policy change. But the snapshot of right now — it couldn’t be a more insulting slap in the face.

More message sending. With human lives.

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Whose Waterloo is it anyway? (Hint: not ours …)

by digby

This piece about the the Ukraine “crisis” by Michael Cohen in The Guardian is a bracing must-read:

In the days since Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into the Crimea, it has been amateur hour back in Washington.

I don’t mean Barack Obama. He’s doing pretty much everything he can, with what are a very limited set of policy options at his disposal. No, I’m talking about the people who won’t stop weighing in on Obama’s lack of “action” in the Ukraine. Indeed, the sea of foreign policy punditry – already shark-infested – has reached new lows in fear-mongering, exaggerated doom-saying and a stunning inability to place global events in any rational historical context.

He goes on to provide examples of the “Personality-driven Analysis”, the “Overstated Rhetoric Shorn of Political Context”, the “Unhelpful Policy Recommendations”, the “Inappropriate Historical Analogies” and the most common, from all sides, “Making It All About Us” analysis which he characterizes this way:

As in practically every international crisis, the pundit class seems able to view events solely through the prism of US actions, which best explains Edward Luce in the Financial Times writing that Obama needs to convince Putin “he will not be outfoxed”, or Scott Wilson at the Washington Post intimating that this is all a result of America pulling back from military adventurism. Shocking as it may seem, sometimes countries take actions based on how they view their interests, irrespective of who the US did or did not bomb.

He points out that all this analysis is missing the key question of why, exactly, President Obama is supposed to respond:

After all, the US has few strategic interests in the former Soviet Union and little ability to affect Russian decision-making.

Our interests lie in a stable Europe, and that’s why the US and its European allies created a containment structure that will ensure Russia’s territorial ambitions will remain quite limited. (It’s called Nato.) Even if the Russian military wasn’t a hollow shell of the once formidable Red Army, it’s not about to mess with a Nato country.

The US concerns vis-à-vis Russia are the concerns that affect actual US interests. Concerns like nuclear non-proliferation, or containing the Syrian civil war, or stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Those are all areas where Moscow has played an occasionally useful role.

So while Obama may utilize political capital to ratify the Start treaty with Russia, he’s not going to extend it so save the Crimea. The territorial integrity of Ukraine is not nothing, but it’s hardly in the top tier of US policy concerns.

What is America’s problem is ensuring that Russia pays a price for violating international law and the global norm against inter-state war. The formal suspension of a G8 summit in Sochi is a good first step. If Putin’s recalcitrance grows – and if he further escalates the crisis – then that pressure can be ratcheted up.

But this crisis is Putin’s Waterloo, not ours.

To me, this issue is really about borders, ethnic identity and regional influence that have been in flux since the end of the Cold War. I get that Ukraine is a sovereign country, but I also get that the people within it aren’t necessarily united. That doesn’t mean that Russia is justified in just doing whatever it wants there, of course, but it also doesn’t make a compelling case for the US to beat its chest and start scrambling NATO jets (particularly in light of our own dicey recent foreign adventures.)

Cohen plays down the ramifications of losing Russian support in Syria and Iran, which I’m not so sure is not going be a problem. But by the same token, sabre rattling is far more likely to cause trouble with those negotiations than keeping a cool head. He gives the president credit for containing the rhetoric and being clear minded and I’m inclined to do the same thing.

He concludes with this:

You don’t have to listen to the “do something” crowd. These are the same people who brought you the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other greatest hits. These are armchair “experts” convinced that every international problem is a vital interest of the US; that the maintenance of “credibility” and “strength” is essential, and that any demonstration of “weakness” is a slippery slope to global anarchy and American obsolescence; and that being wrong and/or needlessly alarmist never loses one a seat at the table.

The funny thing is, these are often the same people who bemoan the lack of public support for a more muscular American foreign policy. Gee, I wonder why.

Exactly.

And I would just add that the over-stimulated media could use some talking down as well. If you are watching CNN and MSNBC right now, we’re on the verge of WWIII and we’d better check our emergency supplies of peanut butter and duct tape stat. I guess it’s good for ratings but I think it creates an echo chamber among the political class that ratchets up the emotion around this stuff. That’s not good.

Today is a good day to just read good writers and eschew the twitter craziness and overwrought cable gasbags. If nothing else it will do wonders for your mental health.

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It’s not a messaging problem

by digby

Brad Dayspring, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee:

“When you’re spending 60 percent of your time talking about birth control and Obamacare, not a lot of men are paying attention to you”.

Because men have no interest in health care or birth control. Why should they? Pregnancy has nothing to do with them and they live forever.

Isn’t it time for people to recognize that this isn’t a problem with the GOP “message?” It’s a problem with conservative philosophy.

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Your depressing Ukraine Post ‘O the Day

by digby

Courtesy Henry Farrell:

You may want to not just focus on the obvious questions. My gloomy prediction: it’s going to transform Europe’s debate about energy, in a largely negative direction. The current battle between environmentalists and business interests about how to deal with global warming is already heavily lopsided in favor of the business interests. Very shortly, it’s going to be a three way battle between (1) environmentalists, (2) business interests, and (3) people arguing that European security requires energy independence (many of (3) being funded by (2), which doesn’t mean that they don’t have a point). Efforts to find a quick and dirty way of escaping dependence on Russian gas are likely to focus on fracking as the obvious low cost alternative, and will ditch regulations that get in the way of hydraulic fracturing a-go-go. This, in turn, will create new and powerful business interests who have an interest in keeping the fossil fuel racket going as long as possible. Which means that Europe will scuttle backwards even more quickly from its global commitments, and from any process that might oblige it to make new ones. And then, basically, goodbye to any hope of tackling global warming in this generation or the the next, since Europe is the only major global actor plausibly willing to push for action.

This is why I rarely believe in big conspiracy theories. Human beings simply being fools, knaves and jackholes is always a better bet.

FWIW, you’re already seeing the Neocons using this as an excuse to get with the program here at home too:

Ukraine situation reminds why US should allow exports of nat gas to EU http://t.co/1glcBRhrDo
— davidfrum (@davidfrum) March 1, 2014

The Very Serious Paul Ryan kicks the 47% for fun and profit

by digby

I guess you know it’s election time when the Republicans decide it’s time to troll for votes among their lovely base by kicking the poor.

As a direct counter to President Obama’s recent emphasis on the gap between rich and poor, the upcoming House Republican budget will focus on welfare reform and recommend a sweeping overhaul of social programs, including Head Start and Medicaid.

The push, led by Rep. Paul Ryan, returns the GOP’s attention to a policy front that animated the party in the 1990s and signals Republicans’ desire to expand their pitch to voters ahead of this year’s midterm elections. This new effort comes after the party spent months fixated on combating the federal health-care law and engaged in intraparty squabbles over fiscal strategy.

On Monday, Ryan (R-Wis.), the House Budget Committee chairman, published an often stinging 204-page critique of the federal government’s anti-poverty policies, questioning the efficacy of dozens of initiatives and underscoring where Republicans say consolidation or spending reductions are needed.

“There are nearly 100 programs at the federal level that are meant to help, but they have actually created a poverty trap,” Ryan said in an interview. “There is no coordination with these programs, and new ones are frequently being added without much consideration to how they affect other programs. We’ve got to fix the situation, and this report is a first step toward significant reform.”

Ryan said the report is a ­prelude to the House GOP’s budget, which will be unveiled later this month, and a preemptive rebuttal to the president’s budget, which will be released Tuesday.

The report, titled “The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later,” features analysis of eight areas of federal policy: cash aid, education and job training, energy, food aid, health care, housing, social services, and veterans affairs. Most sections begin with a glance at the state of federal anti-poverty ­programs 50 years ago, when President Lyndon B. Johnson launched a “war on poverty,” and chart their evolution and expansion.

“This document is a precursor not only of our budget but of our larger project to introduce poverty reforms over the course of this year,” Ryan said. “The president may focus on inequality because he can’t talk about growth. We’re focused on upward mobility, speaking directly to people who have fallen through the cracks.”

Food stamps, low-income hous­ing, and a flurry of other social service programs and tax credits are also targeted in the report. Ryan said Republicans will soon offer specific prescriptions to the problems he outlines. Putting a comprehensive anti-poverty agenda alongside efforts to devise an alternative to the federal health-care law is a GOP priority, he said.

“Poverty reforms”. You’ve got to love that. We’re here to help you citizens, by forcing you into a life of crime and prostitution! After all, we still have massive unemployment!

Is this a great country or what?

Just remember what we’re talking about here:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”

Or, as Paul Ryan and his fvorite philosoper calls them (and most of us): parasites

RYAN: You know, it doesn’t surprise me that sales of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have surged lately with the Obama administration coming in, because it’s that kind of thinking, that kind of writing, that is sorely needed right now. And I think a lot of people would observe that we are living right in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking.

But more to the point is this: The issue that is under assault, the attack on democratic capitalism, on individualism and freedom in America, is an attack on the moral foundation of America. And 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 most. It is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big, the health-care plan doesn’t work for this or that policy reason, it is the morality of what is occurring right now and how it offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will, to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack. And it is that what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on, and we need that kind of comment more and more than ever.

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I don’t want this to work. But I also hope it does.

by David Atkins

Yesterday Digby highlighted an overlooked but terrifying new phenomenon in politics: the rise of the mega-donors as their own singular driving force. In the past political parties would stand for things, and big money donors would align themselves on either side (or both) depending on their interests, and use the corrupting power of money to carve out their own special exemptions here and there.

That’s all standard political corruption. But this new Koch model is something altogether different: donors don’t just help their preferred cause and get special favors. Increasingly in the modern Republican Party the big donors are the party. Much of the new Objectivist slant in today’s GOP is partly the reaction of a cornered animal to the decline of the middle class. But it can’t be overlooked that the Party may become more Objectivist simply to reflect the image of its biggest mega-donors.

That’s a scary thought even to the most jaded political observer.

In that vein, the the rise of climate activist Democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer is equal cause for hope and concern:

A recent Democratic fund-raiser at billionaire Tom Steyer’s home amounted to a summit between Washington’s liberal elite and San Francisco’s climate intelligencia.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, six other senators, and a 2014 Senate candidate took in views of the Golden Gate Bridge with former vice president Al Gore and some of the nation’s richest environmentalist donors.

The $400,000 fund-raiser, held for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, included remarks from Gore, who said the party needs to make global warming a central issue during the midterms, participants said. And Gore called Steyer, who has vowed to raise at least $100 million,”Mr. Tipping Point.”

‘‘How do you inject this into the debate in a meaningful way?’’ Steyer said in an interview during a visit to Washington, where he lobbied a gathering of Democratic governors. ‘‘That changes what can happen in Washington, D.C.’’

With the end of President Obama’s tenure now in sight, wealthy environmentalists are pushing Democrats to take bolder positions on climate change — vowing to emphasize the issue in swing-state contests and threatening to withhold money from candidates who support the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

In the Senate, Reid has pledged to allot time to anyone who wants to discuss climate change at party lunches or on the Senate floor. Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a Democrat, is laying plans for an all-night talkathon on the subject.

Climate activists are often pigeon-holed as “pet issue” people. But as someone who adamantly believes that climate change is by far the biggest, most consequential issue facing humanity bar none, it’s no “pet” to me. When historians look back at us 200 years from now, I firmly believe they’re likely to care about little else than what we did (or did not do) on this issue.

In that sense, I hope that Tom Steyer can help shake a sleepy Democratic Party out of its stupor to become much more forceful on this issue. After all, if we’re going to allow billionaires to dictate public policy, we might as well have a few on the side of the angels.

On the other hand, if the Steyer effect does start producing radical, noticeable changes in Democratic politics, it will become increasingly obvious that nothing will matter more than the movement to drive big money out of politics entirely, and that the Left won’t be able to hope to make real progress on issues most billionaires don’t care about unless we do something big about campaign finance.

Time will tell.

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Beware of artists


by digby

As you watch the Oscars tonight keep this poster in mind.  It may not actually be a bit of McCarthyite propaganda as the internet claims, but plenty of people agree with the sentiment:

They are …

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Rush Limbaugh weighs in

on digby

No, not on Ukraine or even the Oscars. On Michelle Obama’s weight.

I’m not kidding:

Rush: You’ll notice that this dress is bigger than the president of France. Here, let me make one more adjustment here and I’ll show you this again. Take a look at that picture. The little guy in the middle is the socialist dictator — well, not dictator. He’s the socialist president of France. On the left, that’s not Oprah. Don’t confuse that. That’s Michelle Obama. I saw a picture of this from the rear. That’s why I thought it was Oprah.

He’s certainly not the first corpulent man to make rude comments about a woman’s weight. It’s actually quite common. But he may be among the very few who are this delusional. Michelle Obama is not fat. Certainly not in that picture. Or anywhere. It’s just not factually, observably correct.

And apparently when Rush looks in the mirror he sees George Clooney. And he’s not George Clooney:

Via Political Carnival which has much more on this.