Month: April 2014

Come on honey, money can’t buy you love

by digby

In case this sort of thing matters to you, you might want to print it out and give it to your woman friends before the next election. Maybe they’re fine with this. But it can’t hurt to remind them:

Just make sure your friends aren’t “liberals” like Ruth Marcus however. She’s more offended by Democrats being political than she is about equal pay for women. Of course, she’s paid very well.

Update: Marsha Blackburn, congresswoman from Tennessee (and rumored presidential candidate) says that Republicans have always led the way for equal rights for women. So there.

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Dispatch from torture central: aka America

by digby

As people who have read this blog for years know, I’ve been writing about the use of tasers as torture-to-compliance tools for a very long time. I’ve also written about how it’s used for punishment on people who have been convicted of nothing but failing to be properly “respectful” of certain men and women in uniform. This is not what I think of as freedom, but apparently many Americans think of it as comedy.

Last week there was a great brouhaha on the right over a western land stand-off with the BLM over grazing rights. Federal agents moved in and tasered some protesters who, in this case, are nice white people in cowboy hats. Republican politicians howled, calling it akin to Tianenmen Square.

But this happens every day to people all over the country who try to assert their rights to a policemen or a judge, people who are mentally ill, who legally protesting their government or other institutions, or are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is used against people who are handcuffed and on the ground, it’s used against deaf people who cannot hear the policeman’s command, it’s used against epileptics in the throes of a seizure, it is used against bedridden 90 year old ladies suffering from delusions. It is used against people who refuse to be taken to a hospital.

And it is used against children. The New York Times raised the issue a couple of days ago with this editorial:

Federal investigators have opened an inquiry into the tragic case of a high school student in Bastrop County, Tex., who suffered severe brain damage and nearly died last fall after a deputy sheriff shocked him with a Taser, a high voltage electronic weapon.

In North Carolina, civil rights lawyers have filed a complaint with the Justice Department, charging the Wake County school system with violating the constitutional rights of minority children by subjecting them to discriminatory arrest practices and brutality by police officers assigned to schools. In one nightmarish case described in the complaint, a disabled 15-year-old was shocked with a Taser three times during an interrogation at school, resulting in punctured lungs. And in New York, civil rights lawyers have sued the city of Syracuse on behalf of two students. One was shocked three times, not for threatening behavior but for lying on the floor and crying, they say, and another was shocked while trying to break up a fight.

Complaints about dangerous disciplinary practices involving shock weapons are cropping up all over the country. The problem has its roots in the 1990s, when school districts began ceding even routine disciplinary duties to police and security officers, who were utterly unprepared to deal with children. Many districts need to overhaul practices that criminalize far too many young people and that are applied in ways that discriminate against minority children. In the meantime, elected officials need to ban shock weapons in schools.

The Taser, the most popular of these weapons, uses a powerful electrical charge to create intense spasms that drive the suspect to the ground. Police organizations view such weapons as a means of defusing violent confrontations without resorting to deadly force. But a growing body of research shows how lethal these weapons can be.
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In the Texas case, Noe Niño de Rivera, a 17-year-old at Cedar Creek High School, collapsed after being shocked and struck his head on the floor. Doctors performed emergency surgery to repair a severe brain hemorrhage and subsequently placed him in a medically induced coma, in which he remained for 52 days. He now needs rehabilitation and is unlikely to fully recover.

The sheriff’s department said that a Taser was used against the teenager because he interfered while the deputies were breaking up a fight. A security video leading up the incident shows that the fight was already over when the officers arrived, and it seems to show the student backing away when one of the officers shocked him.

Civil rights groups point out that Texas has already prohibited Taser use in its juvenile justice facilities. The state should extend the restriction to its public schools. That would be a sensible start. Beyond that, school administrators need to reclaim responsibility for disciplinary matters from security or police officers, who too often treat students like criminals.

There have been reports of police using tasers to subdue school children as young as six years old. Or to simply train 8 year olds to comply with the police.

Oh, and I forgot to mention: tasers are killing people. And there’s no way of knowing who they’re going to kill. It depends on where the taser lands on the body, underlying health conditions, how the person falls (as one always does when hit with 50,000 volts of electricity) and just random bad luck. Unless we think that all those situations described above should be subject to summary execution, we need to rethink the use of this torture compliance weapon. It’s lethal. It’s also un-American — or should be anyway.

h/t to @walizonia

Sunday Funnies

by digby

From Brian McFadden

“History? We won’t know. We’ll all be dead” :

Actually that isn’t really a funny, is it?

Also too, Woodward is a putz. Hillary is right about Bush being a fatalist and it is completely inappropriate — not to mention terrifying —  for a sitting president of the United States to say such a thing.


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The best way to “put points on the board” is to put Republicans on the defensive

by David Atkins

John Podesta and President Obama are apparently concerned about “putting points on the board” in terms of legislation and executive orders:

White House senior adviser John Podesta is running against the clock.

Time is winding on Podesta’s objective, which is to make sure President Obama put points on the board in the final three years of his second term through either legislation or executive action.

With Obama and the White House flailing in late 2013, Podesta returned to the West Wing in January as part of an Obama reboot. 

A little more than three months later, the former chief of staff for President Clinton gets good marks from Democrats and fellow West Wingers for helping to improve the White House’s strategy and communications.

They say Podesta has improved the White House’s chances of moving meaningful regulatory actions through the government while better coordinating with Democrats in Congress.

“Lawmakers feel more engaged now,” said one former senior administration official, who called Podesta a “hell of a supplement” to the White House legislative affairs office.

A senior Democratic aide who had grumbled about relations with the White House in previous months, said it has been “a lot better than before” under Podesta.

With all respect, the current Republican House is quite possibly the most intransigent in all of American history. It is also, not coincidentally, among the most ideologically extreme in American history.

That means that the chances the passing meaningful legislation are near zero. It also means that any remotely controversial legislation that does manage to get passed is likely to be only marginally beneficial to the American people, if not actively harmful.

In an environment where nothing good can get passed through Congress, the only legislative tool left in the arsenal is to shame the opposition until they either give in or lose the next election. Rather than attempt to figure out what good bills have a larger-than-zero chance of passing the House, the President should simply work alongside the Democratic Senate to craft good, popular bills and dare the House to reject them and refuse to bring them to a vote.

That was essentially the strategy with equal pay, and it can work for a variety of other issues as well. The Democrats should engage in a full court press on issue after issue, from student loans to jobs programs to income inequality to tax fairness to immigration to climate change to voting rights to campaign finance and anything and everything in between. Rack up issue after issue after issue on which Americans agree with Democrats and hammer Republicans for refusing to hold votes on them until the cows come home.

Frankly, if Democrats lose the Senate in 2014 and cannot make gains in the House then Obama is already a lame duck President. He might as well do everything in his power to make life miserable for Republicans and maximize Democrats’ electoral chances in 2014.

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Swinging 60-ish: On My Way & Le Week-End 

 By Dennis Hartley

Grandmere du jour: On My Way

It’s not about cows, it’s about freedom

by digby

In case you’re curious about what the conservatives are frothing about this week-end, it’s this:

A group of Republican Arizona lawmakers are upset with a brewing showdown in Nevada between the federal government and a rancher who claims rights to graze his cattle in a remote area about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

Rep. Bob Thorpe of Flagstaff said Thursday he is among about three dozen state legislators sending a letter to federal and Nevada officials about the standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy and Bureau of Land Management officials.

Federal officials say Bundy has racked up more than $1.1 million in unpaid grazing fees over the years while disregarding several court orders to remove his animals.

Thorpe says lawmakers aren’t arguing over whether Bundy has broken laws or violated grazing agreements. They’re more concerned with what they perceive as government heavy-handedness and how officials are restricting protesters to “free speech zones” near the closed off federal land.

Tea Party Republican state Rep. Kelly Townsend tells the Las Vegas Review-Journal she was shocked after seeing the video where federal police used a stun gun on one of Bundy’s sons.

“Watching that video last night created a visceral reaction in me,” Townsend told the Review-Journal. “It sounds dramatic, but it reminded me of Tiananmen Square. I don’t recognize my country at this point.”

I don’t blame her for being upset about that video, although I’m not sure it qualifies as a Tienenmen moment. Those taser videos make me sick to my stomach every time I see them.  I wonder if this Tea Partier realizes how often these are used on people she doesn’t like?  After all these same folks cheered on the cops brutalizing Occupy protesters. (But then they deserved it. According to Fox News they were randomly shitting everywhere, so what could you do?)

On the other hand, maybe this is a teachable moment. If the government can even use electric shock on good, God fearing conservatives, maybe it’s not such a good idea after all.

Anyway, they won:

A Nevada cattle rancher appears to have won his week-long battle with the federal government over a controversial cattle roundup that had led to the arrest of several protesters.

Cliven Bundy went head to head with the Bureau of Land Management over the removal of hundreds of his cattle from federal land, where the government said they were grazing illegally.

Bundy claims his herd of roughly 900 cattle have grazed on the land along the riverbed near Bunkerville, 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, since 1870 and threatened a “range war” against the BLM on the Bundy Ranch website after one of his sons was arrested while protesting the removal of the cattle.

“I have no contract with the United States government,” Bundy said. “I was paying grazing fees for management and that’s what BLM was supposed to be, land managers and they were managing my ranch out of business, so I refused to pay.”

The federal government had countered that Bundy “owes the American people in excess of $1 million ” in unpaid grazing fees and “refuses to abide by the law of land, despite many opportunities over the last 20 years to do so.”

However, today the BLM said it would not enforce a court order to remove the cattle and was pulling out of the area.

“Based on information about conditions on the ground, and in consultation with law enforcement, we have made a decision to conclude the cattle gather because of our serious concern about the safety of employees and members of the public,” BLM Director Neil Kornze said.

“We ask that all parties in the area remain peaceful and law-abiding as the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service work to end the operation in an orderly manner,” he said.

The roundup began April 5, following lengthy court proceedings dating back to 1993, federal officials said. Federal officers began impounding the first lot of cows last weekend, and Bundy responded by inviting supporters onto his land to protest the action.

“It’s not about cows, it’s about freedom,” Utah resident Yonna Winget told ABC News affiliate KTNV in Las Vegas, Nevada.

“People are getting tired of the federal government having unlimited power,” Bundy’s wife, Carol Bundy told ABC News.

Huzzah! A Major Patriotic Victory. Well sort of.

Perhaps I’m being cynical but I just have a feeling that these people will not enthusiastically support other protesters when they are forced to confront police armed with tasers. Or be as upset when the DEA storms through someone’s house and confiscates all their belongings and auctions them off without any due process. They haven’t been up to this point anyway.

But hey, maybe this is a turning point. We live in hope.

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Brave New World

by digby

And I do mean brave:

The journalists had been threatened, cajoled and condemned by the British and American governments. Their work together had set off a hunt for their source and a debate on both sides of the Atlantic about government surveillance.

But they had never met — until Friday.

That was when Glenn Greenwald, the journalist, lawyer and civil liberties crusader, and Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian newspaper, finally shook hands after months of working remotely on articles based on material from the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. The two were in New York for the prestigious Polk Award presented to Mr. Greenwald and his colleagues, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, and the Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, for national security reporting.
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The crowd of journalists at the Polk ceremony at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan cheered and applauded when it was announced that Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras had cleared customs and were en route. They arrived just after 1 p.m., trailed by flashing cameras. With the ceremony already underway, Guardian editors, including Mr. Rusbridger, welcomed the two.

Oh my goodness. Cheering? How unpatriotic of them.

I probably wouldn’t have come back. Not just because I was afraid of what the government might do — arresting journalists as they are accepting a prestigious award for exposing government wrongdoing would be beyond foolish —  but because this country is full of loons who are armed to the teeth who might think it was a patriotic act to take down a high profile “traitor,” a claim which, after all, is something that quite a few high government officials (and even people who erroneously think of themselves as journalists) have validated all over the TV. You just don’t know these days.

Read the whole NY Times piece which talks about the difficulty of doing such a complicated story remotely from various places all over the world and not being able to trust that your communications are secure. I can only imagine the hoops they went through. But it was important and somebody had to do it.

My warmest congratulations to Glenn, Laura, Barton and the others for being acknowledged for their journalistic achievement. It is well deserved. This is the story of a lifetime, for sure, but it took real guts to do it anyway. I hope they win the Pulitzer as well.

Oh, and about that once in a lifetime thing. I’m sure people said that about Seymour Hersh’s expose of My Lai. But lookee here: he’s got a new story out about Syria.

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Who’s the biggest hypocrite on civil liberties? You might be surprised.

by digby

So Rand Paul is agitating for the youth vote with the privacy issue:

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told New Hampshire Republicans Friday night that the key to winning the youth vote could come by appealing to them on privacy issues, arguing that one of his potential rivals — former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — is vulnerable on the topic.

“They’ve all got a cell phone and they all think the government shouldn’t be looking at their cell phone or listening to their cell phone without a warrant. We get to the young people with privacy,” Paul said at an NH GOP rally at the Cottage by the Bay in Dover, N.H., Friday night.

“It’s not a conservative or Republican issue. It’s an area where we can connect with people who haven’t been connecting. Obama won the youth vote 3 to 1 but he’s losing them now. Hillary Clinton’s as bad or worse on all of these issues,” he said. “It’s a way we can transform and make the party bigger or even win again, but we’ve got to be as proud of the Fourth Amendment as much as we are the Second Amendment.”

He’s probably right about Clinton being as bad as Obama on the NSA stuff. I’ve seen no evidence that she will do anything different, although like Obama himself in 2008, I’m fairly sure she’ll make a lot of noises in the campaign about protecting privacy rights but will likely end up doing the bidding of the intelligence apparatus once in office. That’s the usual pattern since WWII,  regardless of party.

But Paul will fail to get any traction in this despite the fact that he might be perceived as having more credibility when it comes to government intrusion into individual privacy. And that’s because he has one of the most glaring inconsistencies on this issue imaginable. He is personally anti-choice and would allow states to ban abortion. If deciding when you wish to reproduce isn’t a matter of privacy, I don’t know what is. Certainly, it’s very hard to see how it’s wrong for government to read your emails but requiring you to have children against your will is perfectly fine.

The bottom line is this: Rand Paul’s position on privacy is even more inconsistent than Obama’s or Clinton’s. The latter at least pay lip service to the basic philosophical principles even if they disregard them in the national security sphere. Paul is right up front saying that the government has a right to intrude on a woman’s most private decisions even as he holds himself up as an avatar of civil liberties. That says he really doesn’t understand these principles and probably holds his position on civil liberties as a convenient tool with which to broaden his appeal beyond his radical libertarian goals on taxes, regulations, guns, civil rights etc.

The “youth vote” cares about civil liberties.  But it sees it a little more broadly than Paul fantasizes.  Young people also care about  gun proliferation, climate change, racial equality, economic and social justice and private debt, all of which are things that Paul is on the wrong side of. He will not be able to gain more than a few rich young tech geeks and maybe a handful of conservative hipsters who are embarrassed to be regular Republicans. They aren’t stupid. His manipulative inconsistency is obvious.

Is he a useful member of congress on these NSA issues? Absolutely.  It’s common to have members of both parties taking up the cause of civil liberties. By definition, civil liberties often requires strange bedfellows who must defend the right of their ideological foes to have the same freedoms they want for themselves.  In fact, it used to be a lot more common than it is today now that the GOP has congealed into a hard core conservative bloc with a handful of libertarian cranks like Paul.  But you defend the constitution with the Senators you have not the Senators you’d wish to have so it’s a good thing he’s there making that case even if his actual philosophy is full of holes.

But if you think Paul is leading the Republican party into neo-isolationism and a shrinking of the national security state, think again.  They only care about this stuff when a Democrat does it. Look at the polling over the years as well as today to see that the Republican Party is, at it’s core, a martial, chauvinistic, authoritarian political party. That’s not changing. And yes, the Democrats are nearly as bad (and sometimes even worse in practice) but the party has a large, permanent faction which believes in peace, diplomacy, transparency and civil liberties and which at least puts pressure on their own from time to time. The Republicans have a couple of guys from Silicon Valley who say they care about civil liberties but not at the expense of getting their tax rate lowered. So they support a presidential gadfly who has no chance of winning or influencing anything within the GOP on civil liberties but whose Party will help them with that tax problem. Fair enough. But let’s not kid ourselves about what this is all about.

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Top Ten Towns for the 1%

by digby

Note that 4 of the top 10 are Washington DC suburbs. Imagine that:

Even New York and LA only have two each.

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Pathetic Whine ‘O the Week

by digby

Rush, the “entertainer”:

“What do I think of Colbert getting Letterman’s gig? I’ll give you the short version: CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America. No longer is comedy going to be a covert assault on traditional American values, conservative values — now it’s just wide out in the open. What this hire means is a redefinition of what is funny and a redefinition of what is comedy and they’re blowing up the 11:30 format under the guise of ‘the world’s changing.’ It’s the media planting a flag, here. It’s a declaration.”

I guess old Rush thought Letterman’s open revulsion for George W. Bush was apolitical? Or did he think it was funny? Either way, he’s misinformed. “Comedy” (the real thing, not the fratboy insults he dispenses every day) has a well known liberal bias.  It really does. Witness how many upfront right wing political comics there are. Right. Dennis Miller and Victoria Jackson.

On the other hand, in the space of two short weeks Colbert officially became an enemy of the left and the right. You can’t be more mainstream than that.

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