Month: April 2014

Note to Jim DeMint: Ending slavery was a Big Government police action

by David Atkins

Jim DeMint, noted professor of history and respected race relations theorist, puts out his theory on the end of slavery:

“Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people,” DeMint said on “Vocal Point” with Jerry Newcombe of Truth In Action Ministries, as recorded by Right Wing Watch. “Unfortunately there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights’ in the minds of God.”

…

DeMint added that “big government” did not end slavery, a Republican did.

Of course, the Constitution did no such thing. The Declaration of Independence in which those words are found somehow didn’t end slavery during the first whole century of America’s existence.

Moreover, the Civil War could rightly be seen as the grandest and most successful form of Big Government federal intervention in United States history. The slaveholding South had decided to form its own nation dedicated toward the eternal preservation of slavery, and the federal government essentially exercised the largest police action in American history. That was followed by a Constitutional Amendment and coercive enforcement of the beginnings of equality under the law over the top of a resistant population. Further coercive Big Government actions were needed over the following 150 years to desegregate schools, enforce voting rights, prevent indentured servitude, and remove barriers to education and housing.

In fact, every single action that has resulted in greater racial equality was in fact a product of Big Government refusing to allow local good old boys like Jim DeMint and Strom Thurmond to exercise their own form of self-regulation.

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Vox successfully untangles the deportation mess

by digby

One of the interesting conceits of Ezra Klein’s new project Vox is that it’s supposed to be a venue for explanatory journalism, by which they mean to make complex issues comprehensible. It’s very new so the jury’s still out on whether this will end up being successful in terms of gaining an audience big enough to support such a venture.  But if they are able to produce pieces like this one about the Obama administration’s deportation policy they will certainly get traffic from me. It’s clear, it’s comprehensive and useful in detangling the spin and cant coming from all sides of the political spectrum on this very contentious issue.

And it’s devastating to administration, I’m afraid. The following is just one example of something this piece reveals that I did not formerly fully understand:

How many immigrants has Obama deported?

The best estimate is that the Obama administration made its two millionth deportation in late March. If Obama maintains last year’s pace, he will have deported more people by the end of 2014 than George W. Bush did in his entire eight years.
[…]

Obama says he has tried to make deportation policy “smarter” by targeting “criminals” and “gang bangers” — and not going after families. At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security has pushed to deport more immigrants than ever. Immigration officials wrote a “goal” of 400,000 deportations per year on a whiteboard at their headquarters, according to the New York Times.

The federal government couldn’t do both. So, in the end, Obama’s plans to selectively target deportations just ended up augmenting the Department of Homeland Security’s deportation dragnet — rather than replacing it:

Since 2009, a little over half of deportees have been “convicted criminals.” But this term is broader than most people think.

Simply being an unauthorized immigrant in the United States isn’t a crime, but entering illegally is. So anyone who’s prosecuted for “illegal entry,” leaves, and then returns is considered a “convicted criminal” and targeted for deportation.

Unauthorized immigrants can also be deported as “criminals” for driving without licenses (which, in most states, they can’t get). And the term “convicted criminal” includes a variety of smaller crimes: Experts estimate that the majority of American citizens would be considered “convicted criminals” under the administration’s broad definition.

As I said, that’s just one specific question about all this. There are many others, the answers to which you will likely find surprising.

It doesn’t answer the question as to why the administration has taken this tack, of course. That’s not something pieces like this are designed to do. It just spells out what’s actually happening. The bloggers, pundits and political insiders will have to take on that topic and try to figure out why a Democratic administration might do such a thing. But at least everyone will be operating from a common set of facts.

Good for Ezra and company. So far so good. Very good.

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Lethal negligence

by digby

We all know that nobody should ever go out on a walk in the country without carrying a gun to protect themselves. There could be gang-bangers roaming the hillsides. But even if she’d had one on her it’s hard to know how this woman could have protected herself from this:

The Benton County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the weekend shooting of a 60-year-old woman wounded on her way to get the newspaper outside her Monroe area home.

Capt. Greg Ridler with the BCSO said Monday Gale Fogelstrom was walking down a rural street for about half a mile to her newspaper box when she reported hearing about 40 rounds of ammunition being fired. Hearing shots in the area is fairly common, according to Ridler.

As she continued down the road, Fogelstrom told deputies she was struck twice by bullets, entering both her lower left back and her left buttocks. Folgestrom was eventually picked up by a motorist and given a ride to her home, where her boyfriend called 911.

Neither bullet exited Fogelstrom’s body, but her injuries did not appear to be life-threatening upon initial assessment, Ridler said.

Two people, 47-year-old Jeffrey Field and 37-year-old Lena Potter, were named by Ridler Monday as being responsible potentially for Fogelstrom’s injury.

Deputies spoke to Field and Potter, who live about 100 yards from the road where the incident occurred. Both Field and Potter admitted to conducting target practice on their property when Fogelstrom was shot.

Accidents happen. But any time someone’s exercising their second amendment right, no matter how benign their intention might be, the possibility exist that stray bullets will end up in an innocent person’s body. Perhaps the penalties for such accidents ought to be a little bit stiffer. Maybe people would be a little bit more careful.

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Maher gets the MAD treatment

by digby

I have no idea how Bill Maher will take this but if MAD Magazine did a parody of me it would be the greatest tribute I could imagine. I suspect that will be true of Maher as well — he’s about my age and I would guess he grew up devouring MAD Magazine as I did. (I’ve admitted before, without shame, that it may be the greatest influence in my intellectual life.)

Here are some of the “rules”:

“Start going to a stylist. You can’t rail every week about the petroleum industry when you’ve got a quart of Quaker State in your hair.” 

“Regarding marijuana, you have to either smoke up on air or shut up. We get it: you like pot. So do all your viewers — it makes it easier to watch your show.” 

“You have to actually finish a monologue joke before you start to laugh at it.” 

And: “You can’t make references throughout the show about how stupid and uncultured the midsection of America is — and then close the show by rattling off upcoming live appearances in the same places those ‘stupid and uncultured’ yahoos live. What does that say about your act?”

This is via Politico

The legacy and the torture report

by digby

The LA Times published a scorching editorial today about the CIA and the torture report they’re trying to hide from public scrutiny. It’s not anything that people who read blogs like this don’t already know but it might come as a surprise to a few people who only casually follow these issues. Here’s a piece of it:

Thanks to news reports and a report by the CIA’s inspector general, Americans long have been aware of both the broad outlines and some abhorrent details of the Bush administration’s mistreatment of suspected terrorists after 9/11. We know that suspects were transported for questioning to “black sites” abroad, and that two suspected Al Qaeda operatives, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were subjected to waterboarding. And we have read the memos in which Bush administration lawyers used contorted reasoning to justify torture.

But the Intelligence Committee’s 6,200-word report, based on a review of millions of pages of documents, contains additional accounts of abuse, including (according to a Washington Post report) the alleged repeated dunking of a terrorism suspect in tanks of ice water at a site in Afghanistan. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the Intelligence Committee chairwoman who aggressively has sought its declassification, said the report “exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation.”
More important, those who have read the report say it concludes that waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” yielded little valuable intelligence that couldn’t have been obtained by other means. Of course, torture wouldn’t be justifiable even if it “worked”; but if there is evidence that the use of inhumane methods was ineffective as well as immoral, that constitutes another indictment of a policy former Vice President Dick Cheney described as operating on “the dark side.”

Last week the committee voted to declassify the report’s 480-page executive summary along with 20 findings and conclusions, but that represents only the beginning of the disclosure process. The executive branch will now determine which portions of the document must be redacted to protect sensitive national security information.

That brings up the next problem and it’s a big one. The CIA thinks it should be the one to do the redacting. Feinstein, for obvious reasons, thinks that’s a bad idea. She sent a letter to the White House requesting that it not turn that duty over to the CIA:

“I request that you declassify these documents, and that you do so quickly and with minimal redactions,” Feinstein, D-Calif., said in the letter dated April 7. “”I respectfully request that the White House take the lead in the declassification process.”

I think this is a major test for the Obama administration. After running in 2008 as an opponent of the Bush administration’s policies in these matters they came into office and were immediately cowed by the intelligence community (as all presidents seem to be.) Aside from making an ostentatious declaration that the United States “does not torture” they pretty much let the matter lie. As far as we know, they did end many of the torture practices (although what actually constitutes torture has still never been addressed) and the culture of the agencies has changed to some degree. But that vow to not look in “the rear view mirror” showed a willingness to let sleeping torturers lie and arguably led to this attitude that the congress should not have investigated nor should it be allowed to release a report that tells a story about what happened.

I’d be surprised if President Obama wants his legacy tainted by a torture cover-up but perhaps that’s just being optimistic. After all, he’s worked closely with the agency on drone assassinations and other very high level clandestine programs so perhaps he’s come to respect their work and thinks that the “enhanced interrogation” torture regime was no big deal. But if he doesn’t he needs to be very, very thoughtful about what comes next here. If he fails to ensure that the public is fully informed of what their representatives have found out about the past, his reputation will be forever sullied as an accessory to torture. The reason, obviously, is that this report will find its way into the public domain one way or another. They always do.

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It matters little whether Oscar Pistorius is telling the truth or not. He’s guilty of murder, anyway

Paranoid gun nut and Olympic athlete Oscar Pistorius took the stand in his murder trial yesterday. For those who haven’t been following the story, Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend who was behind a closed door. The prosecution claims there were arguments between the couple that night and that Pistorius killed her in cold blood knowing who was behind the door. Pistorius says he thought he was defending his home from an intruder:

The chief prosecutor in Oscar Pistorius’ murder trial demanded Wednesday that he openly say he killed his girlfriend, sharply challenging the double-amputee runner when he said he made a “mistake” and setting the stage for a rigorous cross-examination.

Prosecutor Gerrie Nel asked the court for permission to show a video of the celebrated Olympic athlete allegedly firing a gun at a range and referring to its deadly power as a “zombie stopper.” Defense lawyer Barry Roux objected to the gun video being shown, saying it was inadmissible character evidence and amounted to a legal “ambush” of the defense. Judge Thokozile Masipa allowed the video to be shown.

Pistorius, 27, has said he shot model Reeva Steenkamp by accident on Feb. 14, 2013, mistaking her for an intruder. The prosecution alleges he killed her by firing through a closed toilet stall door after an argument. The runner faces a possible prison term of 25 years to life if convicted of premeditated murder.

Nel tried to dismantle the sympathetic image of Pistorius that the defense had sought to build up in three days of testimony. He opened by asking the athlete to explicitly acknowledge that he had killed Steenkamp.

“I made a mistake,” Pistorius said.

“What was your mistake?” Nel shot back.

Pistorius then said he “took Reeva’s life.”

“You killed her,” Nel said. “You shot and killed her,” and he asked Pistorius to say it. Pistorius would not, saying merely: “I did.”

Nel then tried to drive a wedge between the rosy former image of Pistorius and the ideals the runner has said he aspires to, and the prosecution depiction of the runner as a hothead with a gun obsession.

Pistorius is likely lying. But the reality here is that, no matter what the law says, Pistorius is guilty of murder regardless. The newspapers are filled with stories of mistaken identity killings as paranoid spouses and parents kill their partners and their children by “mistake” as they come home secretly or unexpectedly. Cases also abound of inebriated people being shot when they mistakenly come home to the door of the neighbor’s house instead of their own. Still others have been gunned down simply for seeking assistance from a local homeowner after a car accident.

The law needs to come to the same point with guns that it does with drunken driving. If you kill someone while driving under the influence, you are guilty of murder because you made a needless, reckless decision that resulted in loss of life.

The number of home invasions that occur while the resident is present and that cannot be cut short by simply making noise and scaring off the burglar is very small. Meanwhile, most of the time that something goes bump in the night, it’s either a non-human event or someone innocuous. Simply bringing a gun into the situation is almost always a bad idea.

Firing at an unknown person in the dark or behind a closed door is reckless, extremely dangerous stupidity far worse morally than driving under the influence. Pistorius is guilty of murder regardless of whether he’s telling the truth.

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MAD money: the new political arms race

by digby

ICYMI: my Salon piece from today about the radical billionaires and the McCutcheon MAD money scheme:

The Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, which uncorks another gusher of big money into the political system, brought forth a lot of justifiable angst among progressives for obvious reasons. There may be progressive billionaires out there who are willing to sign big checks, but it’s the right-wing billionaires who are making a profit at it. A MAD-money arms race is highly unlikely to benefit people who are concerned with income inequality, poverty and economic justice.

Reportedly, both parties took to the phones in the immediate aftermath and started calling up their deep pocket supporters. And even though the Supreme Court has launched what many people acknowledge is a money “arms race,” some in the media inevitably called the Democrats hypocrites for doing it — but I don’t think you can really blame them for failing to lay down their weapons as a matter of principle. (It would be a fascinating experiment if they did, though …) McCutcheon seems designed to make the parties more powerful again by allowing big donors to simply hand over big checks and let “the professionals” do what they do.

On the surface, this may sound like a good thing. After all, the big super PACs and the Dark Money that’s come to dominate our politics in the past few years has very little transparency (which is why these Big Money Boyz like it so much.) One could make a case that the the parties, at least, are subject to some accountability to the public. Election expert Rick Hazen thought that one of the unanticipated results of this decision might be a loosening of the gridlock that has completely seized up the machinery of government during the Obama era:

Strong political parties have more incentive to cooperate than oppose each other under certain circumstances because they care about their electoral prospects. Look at how Speaker John Boehner pushed through a “clean” debt-limit increase with the help of Democrats in the House and how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell voted to break a Sen. Ted Cruz filibuster of this legislation. Party leaders know that it is in their interest to cooperate and keep the government moving so that voters do not abandon them as obstructionist.

It’s always pretty to think that Washington will come together in bipartisan comity and start governing for the good of all the people. To think this will happen as a result of the vastly wealthy having even more influence than they already have strikes me as so optimistic as to be delusional.

You can read the rest here.

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Quoting Maggie

by digby

I’m surprised that the Republicans have failed to deploy this tactic more. Maybe they have a hard time finding GOP women who are willing to make nasty, borderline sexist remarks about other women, but I’d be surprised.

“Frankly, Mrs. Pelosi is somebody who was briefed on the program,” Cheney said on “Fox and Friends,” according to Mediaite. “She forgot she was briefed on the program, later had to admit it. And I have to say that when I heard those comments yesterday, I was reminded of something that Margaret Thatcher once said about one of her political opponents. Mrs. Pelosi’s problems is that her spine doesn’t seem to reach her brain

I’m pretty sure that the attitude there comes from Liz Cheney’s commitment to her father and his legacy as the Texas Torquemada. But a Republican woman deploying Margaret Thatcher at her rudest to insult a Democratic female politician is pretty slick.

Speaking of Thatcher, I’ve been meaning to post this YouTube of one pivotal scene in the movie featuring Streep as Maggie at the end of her successful run summing up the conservative argument.

I’ll bet the Cheneys stood up and cheered.

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Mystery meat will make you sick

by digby

Howie has a fiery post up today (I know, big surprise) condemning the Democratic party’s doomed to fail “mystery meat” strategy for 2014. It’s enough to make your stomach churn.

But all is not lost. There are alternative candidates who can win without the support of the DC establishment:

Standing in sharp contrast to the tongue-tied loser candidates Israel has assembled, are the candidates listed by Alternet today– Key Progressive Politicians To Watch In the 2014 Elections. Every single one of them, though they may have to battle moron consultants trained in mystery-meatism by the DCCC, has taken on a leadership role in his or her community about the tough issues that distinguish a progressive from a conservative. These are not “ex”-Blue Dog Steve Israel’s dreadful array of Blue Dogs and New Dems… these are candidates eager to seek out the media and make the case for a progressive agenda. You can find the best of the best House candidates here and the best of the best Senate candidates here. The DCCC isn’t helping these men and women win in November, just like they never helped Alan Grayson, Donna Edwards, Raul Grijalva, Matt Cartwright or any good progressives who needed it. 

It’s an uphill climb against the billionaires and careerists who work together to keep progressives from accessing out democratic process. But you never know, when they’re not looking,  a few might just sneak in under the wire.

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So they even cheat the big boys?

by digby

You could have bowled me over with a feather when I read this. You mean to say that people in the financial industry who commonly cheat average Americans out of their meager savings would cheat the people who have a lot of money too?

A majority of private-equity firms inflate fees and expenses charged to companies in which they hold stakes, according to an internal review by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, raising the prospect of a wave of sanctions by the agency.

More than half of about 400 private-equity firms that SEC staff have examined have charged unjustified fees and expenses without notifying investors, according to a person with knowledge of the SEC’s findings who asked not to be named because the results aren’t public. While some of the problems appear to have resulted from error, some may have been deliberate, the person said.

The SEC’s review of the $3.5 trillion private-equity industry began after the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act authorized greater oversight of money managers, putting many firms under the agency’s scrutiny for the first time. By December 2012, examiners had found that some advisers were miscalculating fees, improperly collecting money from companies in their portfolio and using the fund’s assets to cover their own expenses.

The good news is that the SEC is on it. And since it’s a conflict between important rich people you can bet it’s going to be hashed out and something’s going to be done. We can’t have the rich stealing from the rich now can we? That spells the end of civilization as we know it!

h/t to JBF