Month: March 2014

It’s getting hot in here

by digby

Good lord:

The year 2013 was the driest in California’s recorded history, and predictions for 2014 aren’t much better. Three consecutive years of below-normal rainfall have left reservoirs at a fraction of their normal depth, seriously threatening farms in the state that grows half the nation’s fruits and vegetables. California Governor Jerry Brown has declared a drought emergency and signed a $687 million drought-relief package into law, and 125 additional firefighters have been hired already in anticipation of a dangerous upcoming fire season. One bright spot: gold prospecting. Amateur prospectors are flocking to the Sierra Nevada foothills, taking advantage of lower water levels to search for gold in riverbeds that have been unreachable for decades.

More pictures at the link. Some of them look like the 1930s dustbowl. Which was also largely created by man, by the way.

.

Ford responds beautifully to Cadillac’s right-wing diatribe

by David Atkins

Readers with sharp memories may recall that I wrote a takedown of this right-wing screed disguised as a Cadillac ad:

Well, Ford has delivered up a delicious response:

It’s no use pretending there isn’t a culture war in this country. And it’s no use pretending that some transcendent politician is going to fix it and unite everyone.

One side is going to win the culture war, and one side is going to lose. Frankly, I like our chances.

.

A Time of Miracles and Wonders

by tristero

We live in a time of miracles and wonders. It is a wonder that phrases like this one don’t spark an international outcry:

…almost a thousand migrants have died in neighboring Qatar while building infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup.

And it will take a miracle to get the world’s elite to pay attention to the misery they are inflicting on the rest of us in pursuit of the most frivolous of diversions and luxuries.

.

The results speak for themselves

by digby

Following up on my earlier post about torture, I think it’s probably worthwhile to mention in passing that one of our little problems with that pesky thing is this:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney refuted accusations that he is a war criminal during his speech to students and members of the AU community in Bender Arena on March 28. The Kennedy Political Union hosted Cheney as part of a stream of speakers coming to campus.

“The accusations are not true,” Cheney said.

During his vice presidency, three people were waterboarded, Cheney said. Waterboarding refers to either pumping a stomach with water or inducing choking by filling a throat with a stream of water, according to a report by NPR.

“Some people called it torture. It wasn’t torture,” Cheney said in an interview with ATV.

Students protested the event due to the accusations of war criminality against Cheney, The Eagle previously reported.

According to Cheney, the enhanced interrogation tactics used do not fall under the scope of the 1949 United Nations Geneva Convention, which outlaws cruel, inhuman or any degrading treatment or punishment because the Geneva Convention does not apply to unlawful combatants.

It wasn’t torture. And that’s that.  In fact, the whole sick scheme was a big success and he’s proud of it:

“If I would have to do it all over again, I would,” Cheney said. “The results speak for themselves.”

Indeed they do. Whatever tattered remains still existed of America’s reputation for decency and enlightenment were dissolved when that man did what he did. I honestly don’t know how normal people can stand to even be in his presence.

.

The Irony of Satire

by digby

Huh:

The Irony of Satire

Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report

This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert’s political ideology. 

Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. 

Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert’s political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.

I think their data set was incomplete …

By the way, this room was full of people who looked exactly like Dan Snyder probably looked when he saw Colbert’s “support” for his racist language. In fact, for all we know, Snyder was there:

.

House Republicans want to see no climate change, hear no climate change, speak no climate change.

by David Atkins

House Republicans just wish climate change would go away and that the government scientists would just stop researching it, thank you:

House Republicans want government scientists to focus on predicting storms, not climate change.

The House will vote next week on a Republican bill to require the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to focus its efforts on storm predictions instead of researching climate change.

Members will consider the Weather Forecasting Improvement Act, H.R. 2413, as early as Tuesday.

Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) introduced his bill last year after tornadoes hit his home state. Those storms led him to argue on the House floor the government spends too much on climate change research and not enough on developing weather forecasting tools to predict tornadoes and other events.

His bill does not explicitly kick the government out of the climate change business. But it does say NOAA must “prioritize weather-related activities, including the provision of improved weather data, forecasts, and warnings for the protection of life and property and the enhancement of the national economy, in all relevant line offices.”

Last year, Bridenstine released a statement saying the intent of the bill is to “protect lives and property by shifting funds from climate change research to severe weather forecasting research.”

“The bill does not increase spending but rather shifts funding to make improved severe weather forecasting a higher priority of the Federal government,” he said in July.

Democrats see the bill as an attack on anti-climate change efforts and have said the research is needed to meet the bill’s goal of improving the prediction of tornadoes and other weather events.

That’s a little cute, of course. Since climate change is increasing the severity and likelihood of extreme weather events, it’s a little difficult to research them without also researching the impact of climate change. Moreover, the cumulative impact of climate change is exponentially more severe than any given individual weather event. The issue here is less about the best way to deal with climate and weather effects, and more about the danger to conservative economic ideology and big oil if people know about the dangers of climate change.

But hey–what you don’t know about can’t kill you, right?

.

Whither the American Dream?


by digby

This piece by Kathy Geier in The Baffler about the wage fixing case in Silicon Valley gets to the nub of the issue in a way I haven’t seen anyone else do:

When we hear about wage theft, we usually think of cases involving low-wage-earning retail or fast-food workers. But middle-class professionals have also frequently been victims of the practice. For example, like the Silicon Valley workers, nurses have had their earnings artificially depressed by wage-fixing cartels of their own. 

More broadly, middle class wages have declined or stagnated for years now (depending on which income group you look at), with economic gains being siphoned off by those at the top. It’s not just poor people or blue- and pink-collar types who are hurting . As the Silicon Valley wage-fixing case demonstrates, even upper middle class professionals have become victims of the one percenters’ class warfare. 

Two of the inequality-themed books I’ve read in the past couple of years, Chris Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites and Göran Therborn‎’s The Killing Fields of Inequality made similar arguments about how the masses can take back the world from the one percent. Since both are men of the left, I had expected them to argue, as Adolph Reed recently has, that the answer is to bring back the labor movement. But instead, they both concluded that the key to the fight is the middle class. 

Therborn’s analysis is that, due to the decline of the industrial working class, labor unions are no longer well positioned to take a central role in these struggles. Hayes’s argument is that, while it is often very difficult to persuade poor and working class people that they are entitled to anything better, “[T]here are few forces more powerful in politics than downward mobility, the dispossession of the formerly privileged.”

Geier concurs about the potential power of this displacement of the middle class and so do I.  If there has ever been a perfect example of how to radicalize average American workers, it would be the obscene sight of Millionaire Mitt Romney complaining that nearly half of the population is a bunch of lazy sods. I think all but the most blindly partisan can see that he was talking about a good portion of the middle class with those remarks — and they didn’t like it.

The United States has many enduring myths and legends but none is more central to its self-image than The American Dream. And the right has come to dramatically misunderstand what that dream actually is.  It’s never been the dream of becoming a billionaire, although that’s certainly something that exists in the popular imagination.  It’s the dream of middle class security — a house, a good job, a decent retirement, a better life for your children. And that’s what feels like it’s slipping away.

It’s hard to imagine a middle class revolt in America.  We are, as I’ve said many times, a nation of overweight mall shoppers, not revolutionaries or Spartans. But unless that basic ideal of American prosperity and economic security is restored it could change. What will America be like without the American Dream?

.

 Huckleberry Graham and the torture fantasy

by digby

So, it turns out that the US can conduct a dignified, high profile Islamic terrorist trial in New York without any kind of drama in the courtroom or outside in the streets:

[E]ven as the debate continues over how and where international terrorists should be prosecuted, the United States attorneys in Manhattan and Brooklyn have since successfully prosecuted a series of terrorism trials without subjecting New Yorkers to the type of draconian security measures once contemplated for Mr. Mohammed’s trial.

The conviction on Wednesday of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, was the latest such example; Mr. Abu Ghaith, 48, was convicted of all three counts against him in Federal District Court in Manhattan, and he could face life imprisonment.
[…]
Critics of prosecuting terrorism cases in civilian court have long feared that defendants like Mr. Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, would, if given criminal trials, turn them into soapboxes and try to incite their followers.

But in the trial of Mr. Abu Ghaith, a Kuwaiti-born imam who was known for his oratory, that concern did not come to fruition. At one point, Mr. Abu Ghaith, who unexpectedly took the witness stand in his own defense, was asked about his nationality. He responded with an answer about how Muslims were “one nation, one blood, one race” and had no differentiation “based on color, language or features.”

He tried to continue, but Judge Lewis A. Kaplan interrupted, telling him to answer the question that was put to him, and then to stop. “Save the speeches for some other time,” the judge said.

Some of those who waged a full-blown hissy fit over the prospect of civilian trials for the Guantanamo prisoners had to admit that it went well. Some, but not all. One lonely little patriot from South Carolina still fights the good fight:

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, said after the verdict that the defendant should have been held as an enemy combatant and interrogated for intelligence gathering purposes.

On Thursday, Mr. Graham said in a telephone interview, “I applaud the judge and the jury; they did their job,” but added, “We’re not fighting a crime here; we’re fighting a war.”

“This guy is so connected to the organization,” he said. “He was a treasure trove of potential information, and we blew it.”

Testimony at the trial showed that Mr. Abu Ghaith was interrogated after being turned over to United States authorities in Jordan early last year, as he was flown to New York to face charges. Even before he was advised of his Miranda rights, he was asked by an F.B.I. agent and a deputy United States marshal if he knew of any threats of operations aimed at the United States or other countries. He said no.

After being advised of his rights and waiving them, he answered questions for hours. An F.B.I. summary of the interrogation runs 21 pages. Mr. Abu Ghaith described his time in Afghanistan, his interactions with Bin Laden, his imprisonment in Iran and other topics.

But Mr. Graham said, “It should have been a 200-page statement, taken over weeks or months.” He added, “We lost an opportunity here with this guy.”

Let’s be honest here, shall we? Senator Graham believes that those many hours of interrogation by the FBI were inadequate and the suspect should have been tortured in order to get more information. The reason he and others are so against trying terrorists in civilian trials is because information gleaned from torture would not be admissible. And he wants to torture terrorism suspects.There’s just no other way to read what he’s saying.

I’ll refrain from addressing the obvious moral depravity of “enhanced interrogation.” I’ve written plenty about it over the years. But it’s worthwhile to look at what Graham’s saying about the way the interrogation was handled in this case. I’m not familiar enough with the details to know if this defendant even could have had access to what they call “actionable intelligence” (meaning something that could stop an impending attack) but I do know that Osama bin Laden has been dead for three years so if this person’s status as son-in-law gave him some special access to the man himself I’m going to guess it’s not particularly relevant today. But be that as it may, (and despite the CIA’s junk-science that says than “enhanced interrogation” can release buried memories) the idea that torture can produce more useful intelligence than standard interrogation techniques has been debunked over and over again.

In fact, neuroscience has shown that the FBI’s approach of gaining trust and calming the suspect is far more likely to produce truthful responses than torture. Common sense tells us that a prisoner will quickly deduct that as long as he keeps talking — no matter what he’s saying — that he won’t be hurt. So it’s unsurprising that these tortured prisoners would provide false information. But the “enhanced interrogation” program takes that into account and continues the torture anyway under their junk scientific theory that prolonged pain will induce the long term memory to give up details it couldn’t otherwise access. In fact, the opposite is true. Torture, unsurprisingly, releases stress hormones that fog the brain and make it difficult for subjects to be able to tell the truth from fiction. So even if the torturers get beyond that first threshold where a prisoner consciously lies to stop the torture, their brains are so flooded with pain and stress that nothing they say, even if they themselves believe it to be truthful, is reliable:

Scientists do not pretend to know, in any individual case, whether torture might extract useful information. But as neurobiologist Shane O’Mara of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin explains in a paper in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science called “Torturing the Brain,” “the use of such techniques appears motivated by a folk psychology that is demonstrably incorrect. Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or ‘enhanced’ interrogation.”

This article goes into some of the details if you’re interested. But suffice to say that the decades the FBI has studied interrogation techniques showed the same results. They are most successful at getting useful information if the suspect is calm and cooperative and torture is hardly something that produces such a state.

But I doubt very seriously that Lindsay Graham is concerned about actionable intelligence. He’s running for re-election in South Carolina which is one of the most conservative states in the union and one where the primary is getting ugly. He’s never had to prove his macho bonafides more. But Graham isn’t really an outlier in this. Republicans in general believe in torture:

Well, perhaps we should be a little bit more precise: most Republican men believe in torture. And half of Independent men as well. But that would be the group that Graham needs to convince that he’s macho enough to continue to protect the nation from the dusky hordes.

Unfortunately, that poll, which was done in 2009 actually understates the current support for torture. It seems more Americans are coming around to Graham’s way of thinking. (This article in Foreign Policy examines why that might be so. Let’s just say that it may be some combination of distance from the horror of Abu Ghraib which has the public reverting to its longstanding fundamental love of torture and Hollywood spy/torture porn. Yikes …)

In any case, this is all more relevant today with this ongoing turf war between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA over the torture report. I think people expect that there must be something truly alarming in it for the CIA to be so adamant about keeping it under wraps. And it’s certainly possible that’s so, although if I had to bet, what that report will show is what we already know: the Bush administration engaged in torture and it produced nothing but bad results from wrong intelligence to a catastrophic loss of (what was left of) America’s moral authority in the world. If there’s anything new to be learned it’s that they engaged in an elaborate cover up (although it’s hard to imagine what could be more damning than the conscious decision to destroy the torture tapes …)

Indeed, we already have a ton of evidence including this report by the bipartisan Task Force on Detainee Treatment that was largely ignored by the press because it was released on the day of the Boston bombings. This interview with one of the principles spells out the findings most succinctly:

We made a number of findings as a result of our two-year effort. All of these but one were unanimous. I just want to share with you a few of the most significant unanimous findings that this task force reached.

We found unanimously that U.S. forces in many instances used interrogation techniques which constitute—I underscore—torture. We conducted an even larger number of interrogations that involved cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Both categories of actions violate U.S. laws and international treaties. The conduct that I’m going to share with you in a few moments is directly contrary to the values of the Constitution and the nation.

A second finding unanimously made: The nation’s most senior officials, through some of their actions and failures in the months and years immediately following the September 11 attacks, bear ultimate responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of illegal and improper interrogation techniques used by some personnel in several theaters. Responsibility also falls on other government leaders and military leaders.

Third—this is really critical—there is no firm or persuasive evidence that the widespread use of harsh interrogation techniques by U.S. forces produced significant information of value. There is substantial evidence that much of the information adduced from the use of such techniques was not useful or reliable.

This just concluded trial and conviction of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith in New York City shows that the American justice system is more than adequate to deal with accused terrorists. It might not fulfill the sadistic needs of the likes of Huckleberry Graham and his followers, but that’s what video games are for. Justice and security should be assigned to people who don’t need to act out their depraved fantasies on the world stage.

.

What do women want Part XXX

by digby

CNN has posted an article about the Democrats’ appeal to women on the issue of equal pay. Apparently, the Republicans are searching for a good way to counter them. I’m not sure this is going to work:

Katie Packer Gage, a former Romney campaign adviser who co-founded Burning Glass Consulting, a firm that advises Republicans on how to appeal to women voters, said Democrats are using equal pay “to distract women from real issues.”

I wonder what the “real” issues women care about are? It can’t be education because the Republicans think early childhood education is a big waste of time, even though the latest studies show it creates remarkable benefits for both individuals and society. (Also too, they want to privatize public education.)  It can’t be health care because they are having a full-fledged meltdown over the tepid Obamacare health care reform and apparently think that the main thing that needs to be done to “fix” the current system is tort reform and coercing people in California to buy phony insurance plans that are only legal in Mississippi. It certainly can’t be ensuring that people have food or shelter or good roads or safe bridges or public services like fire fighters and police after the years and years of budget cutting they’ve endorsed at all levels of government.

But I suppose if what most American women care about is “sending messages” to foreign countries, empowering the clandestine government agencies to do anything they want without accountability or spending billions on unnecessary military hardware then sure, any discussion of equal pay is a “distraction.” If these women think that the government’s sole role is to find wars to fight and enable billionaires to plunder the treasury and destroy the land, then Republicans have their fingers on the pulse of American womanhood and it should be smooth sailing in November. If not, I’d have to say that the Republicans aren’t making a whole lot of sense.

In fairness, the campaign adviser I quoted above did go on to say that she thinks the Republicans should point out to women who are concerned about pay fairness that there have been laws on the books for years requiring equal pay. Which means that it must be fair that women still only make about 75 cents on the dollar. See how easy that is?

.

Awful conservative “comedian” thinks America loves conservatism, got suckered by “cool”

by David Atkins

This idiot is the right wing’s answer to Jon Stewart. No, really:

Gutfeld said liberals use cool as a weapon and persuade people to do bad things simply by the virtue of their coolness.

“The cool has hijacked elections. The last two were decided not by heroism, but by hypnotists. John McCain was a prisoner of war hero, a respected senator. Mitt Romney was a charitable businessman, a governor, who ran the Olympics. They both lost to a political Ferris Bueller,” Gutfeld said, a reference to the character in the 1986 film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

“The cool report the news, write the scripts, teaches our children, runs our government — and each day they pass judgment on those who don’t worship at the altar of their coolness. The cool fawn over terrorists, mock the military and denigrate employers. They are, in short, awful people,” he said.

Gutfeld said his book “attempts to expose this phenomenon and help you reclaim the real American ideal of cool, which is building business, protecting freedom at home and abroad, taking responsibility for your action, and leaving other people alone to live as they damn well please.”

This is the schlock feeding the conservative ID on Fox News. They still have to convince themselves that they have the silent majority, that people really do agree with their ideas on the whole, but that Americans got bamboozled into voting for Democrats.

Of course, it has nothing to do with “cool.” It has everything to do with Americans absolutely rejecting atrocious, immoral and wrong conservative “ideas”. Ideas like:

1) The rich create jobs. They don’t.

2) Women should be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. They shouldn’t.

3) The working poor are lazy, and can get rich if they just work harder. They can’t.

4) The rich got rich because they deserved it. No, most were either lucky or well connected, or got rich on Wall Street by killing real jobs.

5) More guns make people safer. They don’t.

6) Education will improve if we privatize it and let creationism be taught in schools. It won’t.

7) America will be better off if gay people can’t marry or serve in the military. It won’t.

8) Climate change isn’t real or caused by man or dangerous. It is.

9) Hard-working immigrants and their grandmothers should all be deported. They shouldn’t.

10) It’s more patriotic to give Blue Cross and Aetna your health insurance money, so their CEO can buy another yacht while denying healthcare to 1/6 of Americans. It isn’t.

11) Everyone in the Middle East is the same, and we can just bomb them all into freedom. They aren’t, and we can’t.

12) If we let corporations do whatever they want, the free market will regulate their behavior. It won’t.

It’s not that America agrees with conservative ideas, but got Svengalied by “cool.”

America despises conservative ideas with open eyes, and votes against them in every big election.

Americans are a lot smarter than frustrated, angry unfunny man Greg Gutfield.

.