Cows are people too
by digby
.
"what digby sez..."
Month: April 2014
No good deed goes unpunished
by digby
That old trope has been truer than among today’s GOP. Just look at what the right wing is doing to old wingnut warhorse John Boehner:
The Tea Party Leadership Fund has spent almost $320,000 on voter communications opposing Boehner and backing Winteregg. The fund’s chairman, radio host Rusty Humphries, said the group interviewed a number of candidates before deciding to back Winteregg.
Winteregg “reminds me of a young reformer back 24 years ago,” he said. “There was this guy John Boehner who was going to reform things; he was going to change things. Boehner hasn’t been doing the job that the people of Ohio sent him there to do. They sent him there to be a strong conservative voice.”
I might see this as a clever pressure strategy if it weren’t so obvious that they really believe this. They think John Boehner is a sell-out.
Now it’s true that he’s failed to pass a law requiring kindergarteners to be armed and he came up short on getting the ban on condoms and oral sex (for women only — they aren’t completely nuts) through the Senate. The fact that he isn’t in the Senate just further proves what a failure he is.
But let’s take a look at the numbers, shall we? Here’s John Boehner’s greatest achievement since he became the speaker in 2010:
The four major pieces of deficit-reduction legislation enacted since the fall of 2010 were the Budget Control Act of 2011, the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 (also known as the Murray-Ryan deal), and this year’s farm bill.
Altogether, they cut projected deficits over 2015-2024 by $4.1 trillion: about $3.2 trillion from program cuts (including the associated interest savings) and $950 billion from higher revenues (again, including the interest savings).
Look at how they did it:
Now it’s true that many Democrats ended up voting for these budgets and our Democratic prsident signed them, sometimes under duress but sometimes calling it a big victory as well. But the fact is that under a Democratic administration and a Democratic Senate,the House, led by John Boehner, has successfully slashed the living bejeezuz out of federal programs on an unprecedented level. The House of Representatives held the line and a Democratic majority made up of just enough timorous centrists, helped them do it.
So ok, maybe that’s not enough. They want to start putting Occupy protesters in Guantanamo and give Western ranchers Yellowstone as reparations for the decades of disrespect they’ve been forced to endure from bureaucrats sending them a bill. And Boehner failed to get that done for them which I’m sure is a big disappointment. But he’s solidly moving their austerity ball down the field step by step.
QOTD: The dumbest man in America
by digby
“When you talk about prejudice, we’re talking about not being able to exercise what we think and our feelings — we don’t have freedom to say what we want,” said Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy on CNN. “If I say ‘Negro’ or ‘black boy’ or ‘slave’ — I’m not — if those people cannot take those kinda words and not be offensive, then Martin Luther King hasn’t got his job done yet.”
Well he is dead. Killed, by the way, by a white supremacist.
I’m actually not sure what the hell he’s trying to say. I think this tweet explains it as well as anything I’ve seen:
Cliven Bundy says he’s just like Rosa Parks. And the back of the bus is public land. And the passengers are cows. Or something. #confused
— Jeff Tiedrich (@jefftiedrich) April 25, 2014
Actually, Matt Yglesias unpacks it seriously here and adds what it probably the most important point: MLK preached non-violence. Civil rights protesters didn’t carry any guns.
And if you want to know how people like Clive Bundy reacted to African Americans arming themselves read up on the Black Panther movement. Let’s just say they weren’t fans.
.
George Will calls for the smelling salts
by digby
Oh dear me. Fox News superstar George Will is very offended. He’s calling for the smelling salts over that rude young man Barack Obama’s “adolescent” rhetoric. (Obama used the word “stinkburger,” a word so vile that poor George practically collapsed onto his fainting couch.)
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had recently released his budget, so Obama expressed his disapproval by calling it, for the benefit of his academic audience, a “meanwich” and a “stinkburger.”
Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan talking like that. It is unimaginable that those grown-ups would resort to japes that fourth-graders would not consider sufficiently clever for use on a playground.
Heavens to betsy! What will that childish miscreant do next? Tell a U.S. senator to go f**k himself? Oh no, sorry, that was Vice President Dick Cheney, whose return to the halls of power was widely celebrated among the denizens of the Beltway as a sign that the “grown-ups were back in town.” (And said “grown-up” was still snorting and high-fiving to his buddies about it years later.)
That’s from my latest at Salon. Do read on. It’s fun.
Will has a funny way of ignoring some of our recent Republican president’s er… colloquialisms. And his memory of FDR, JFK and Reagan is a little spotty too. You might be surprised at just how juvenile they could be at times. Just like the rest of us. Well, except for Will, who yearns for the Victorian era which, if he actually lived in it, would have him taking to his bed for weeks at a time gulping down the laudenum like it was water. People were, shall we say, a bit on the coarse side. Especially in politics.
It should be also be noted that Will’s prurient Victorianism was best displayed when he eagerly joined in the Lewinsky fun by superciliously sniffing about the “vulgarians” in the White House even as he drooled over every last lurid detail. Of course, he wasn’t alone in that. He and Cokie Roberts had numerous breathless encounters together — chests heaving, foreheads gleaming with perspiration, eyes bright with excitement — in which they tut-tutted the president’s immorality while they shared each dirty revelation with the national TV audience. On Sunday mornings no less. Lord have mercy!
.
Bundy’s Republican objectivism is almost as offensive as the racism
by David Atkins
Yesterday I wrote about how Cliven Bundy has suddenly become a pariah in mainstream Republican circles even though his rhetoric was different only in tone but not in content from that of top GOP politicians and media figures.
Obviously, the sort of overt racism preached by Bundy and his friends has become toxic to all but the rump Republican base. It needs the softening of Paul Ryan-style coding.
But isn’t it time that the arguments being used by Bundy and friends were anathema in polite society regardless of racial context? Ryan’s and Bundy’s syllogism goes something like this:
1. Poor people are poor because they’re lazy.
2. Minorities tend to be poor, therefore they must be lazy.
3. Government assistance stops people from working harder and encourages laziness.
4. Minorities stay poor because of government assistance, but vote for more government.
The first four elements of that syllogism are standard Republican rhetoric. Bundy’s only sin was adding point #5, that therefore minorities are slaves of government, and might be better off as harder-working slaves.
All of this is disgusting, of course. But it’s only offensive in part because of the racial element. Adding point #2 of the syllogism simply bakes in another layer of prejudice to the cake.
The fact is that people are not poor because they’re lazy. Most people living paycheck to paycheck work full-time in one or more jobs. A great many others are underemployed. And we know that productivity has been skyrocketing even as wages stagnate. This is not a country that rewards hard work:
We also know that government assistance does not in fact encourage laziness to a significant degree. Moreover, if there were any truth to the argument at all, the data suggests that government assistance leads to greater laziness among whites than among blacks.
But we don’t need racial context for that conversation. It’s almost as offensive to say that poor people of any color are made lazy by government assistance as to say that individuals of a specific skin color are. After all, the former statement expresses an equally awful and policy-distorting prejudice that affects an even larger number of people.
Every statement in the Bundy/Ryan syllogism is vile and deserves public repudiation. It’s about time Democratic politicians stood up in outrage over Republican objectivism as much as they do over Republican racism.
.
Travel advisory for Georgia?
by digby
And no I’m not talking about the country “over there” near Russia where all the action is. I’m talking about our Georgia. I can imagine that many travelers from more civilized parts of the world would not feel comfortable in a place this armed and dangerous:
Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) just signed a law former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ (D-AZ) organization described as “the most extreme gun bill in America.” The new law allows guns in bars, churches, nightclubs and libraries. It eliminates criminal charges against people who accidentally bring guns into airports or other buildings where guns are prohibited.
But get this:
It expands Georgia’s Stand Your Ground law so that felons may invoke this defense.
So, they are basically giving felons a right to kill if they “feel afraid.” They can’t vote but they can carry guns and kill people with impunity. Sure, that makes perfect sense.
Sadly, the way these things work is that something truly horrible will have to happen before they reverse this crazy law. It often takes decades and untold amounts of carnage before that happens. And that’s assuming they will see the error of their ways at all.
The inner cities of the US were shooting galleries for a couple of decades, with little girls being shot dead from stray bullets coming through the walls as they slept in their beds. It’s calmed down a bit. But it looks like the great state of Georgia and others like it are anxious to stage their own version of “Boys in the Hood” on streets all over their states. I guess that’s their privilege. I hope they don’t count on tourism as a form of revenue. I’ll bet Somalia doesn’t have a roaring tourist trade either.
.
The Times Public Editor takes a look at the story of those pictures
by digby
The Times led its print edition Monday with an article based in part on photographs that the State Department said were evidence of Russian military presence in popular uprisings in Ukraine. The headline read: “Photos Link Masked Men in East Ukraine to Russia.”
And the article began:
For two weeks, the mysteriously well-armed, professional gunmen known as “green men” have seized Ukrainian government sites in town after town, igniting a brush fire of separatist unrest across eastern Ukraine. Strenuous denials from the Kremlin have closely followed each accusation by Ukrainian officials that the world was witnessing a stealthy invasion by Russian forces.
Now, photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration on Sunday suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces — equipped in the same fashion as Russian special operations troops involved in annexing the Crimea region in February. Some of the men photographed in Ukraine have been identified in other photos clearly taken among Russian troops in other settings.
More recently, some of those grainy photographs have been discredited. The Times has published a second article backing off from the original and airing questions about what the photographs are said to depict, but hardly addressing how the newspaper may have been misled.
It all feels rather familiar – the rushed publication of something exciting, often based on an executive branch leak. And then, afterward, with a kind of “morning after” feeling, here comes a more sober, less prominently displayed followup story, to deal with objections while not clarifying much of anything.
Indeed it does. I was shocked at how credulous the Times reporting was on that original story. It felt like the “Old Shoe” campaign from “Wag the Dog.” Sullivan comes down hard on the paper, as she should. Even though they whine about the fact that their Iraq war reporting tainted their credibility, it did.
And as we well know, out government has a long history of distributing propaganda in these confusing situations to drum up support. (And if they don’t do it themselves they contract the job out to the private sector.) Skepticism is always called for at times like these.
Just the other day I was reminded of this when the story of the pamphlets instructing Ukrainian Jews to “register” came up. Does anyone remember this little debacle?
On May 19, 2006, the National Post of Canada published pieces by Amir Taheri alleging that the Iranian parliament had passed a sumptuary law mandating a national dress code for all Iranians, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
Both National Post articles went on to say that non-Muslim religious minorities in Iran would be required to wear “special insignia”: yellow for Jews, red for Christians and blue for Zoroastrian. According to the article by Taheri, “[t]he new codes would enable Muslims to easily recognize non-Muslims so that they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus becoming najis (unclean).” According to both articles, Iranian Muslims would have to wear “standard Islamic garments”.
It wasn’t true and the newspaper eventually issued a retraction. It’s interesting how this stuff just keeps coming up. That particular story was sourced to a conservative Iranian exile, known for fabricating stories. I’m sure he agreed with the neo-con mantra that “real men go to Tehran.”
.
QOTW: Erick Erickson
by digby
On why he thinks Hillary isn’t the shoo-in for the nomination everyone thinks she is:
She’s going to be old!I don’t know how far back they can pull her face!
He’s such a beautiful man himself — the Don Draper of right wing commentators — that he’s certainly got standing to say something like this.
As I have discussed many times before, this was a theme of the 2008 campaign as well, with people from all sides of the political spectrum feeling free to point out that older women are such repulsive creatures they should not even be seen in public much less run for public office.
I don’t expect to see Democrats saying that sort of thing this time unless a sexy dark horse candidate emerges who doesn’t fit the old hag profile. (No Liz Warren for you! She’s over 60 …) But the Republicans are going to have a field day with it. It will be interesting to see how the GOP women react and if they join in the fun. It wouldn’t surprise me. But in the back of their minds they know that they too are going to be old some day — and that this is how the men they associate with will think of them.
Is there even one woman anchor over 50 on Fox News? Over 40? I can’t think of one. Of course, their strongest demographic is conservative, white men over 60. The last thing they want to see is someone who looks like their wives. After all, they all look like George Clooney.
Update: I stand corrected. Greta Van Susteren is a Fox News anchor and she’s 59. I do recall that when Ailes lured her over from CNN he insisted that she get some surgery though. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But she’d better not run for office or people will give her grief for having it done. You can’t win this game.
.
The next time a Republican gets on the wrong side of the law, tell him to call a plumber
by digby
So we’re finally coming to the point where political candidates feel free to run ads against a rival who was a criminal defense lawyer — for the crime of defending criminals. This ad from Chris Christie’s Republican Governor’s Association comes right out and says it:
So much for that “you have a right to an attorney” balderdash. This follows the recent similar campaign against Debo Adegbile, resulting in his being rejected by the Senate for the civil rights post at the Department of Justice, a truly shameful episode. (Cowardly Democrats participated as well…)
And let’s not forget that the government itself has been “sending a message” by jailing criminal defense lawyers (rather than the usual less onerous sanctions) for allegedly aiding their terrorist clients and has just last week been revealed to be infiltrating the defense team in one of the Guantanamo trials.
All of this is to say that we are seeing a rapid degradation of our traditional respect for the concept that everyone accused of a crime has a right to a lawyer and certain protections under the constitution. I know that there has always been tension among our various governmental functions and that public opinion often believes that criminals are routinely freed on “technicalities” used by unscrupulous lawyers. But let’s just say that if any one of us found ourselves on the wrong side of the police we’d be very, very grateful for the fact that our system provides us with a right to legal representation. And don’t think it couldn’t happen — any of you could have an accident or be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
To allow this to become a disqualification for elective office and encourage people to believe there’s something shameful about taking on that often thankless role in our system of justice is a huge mistake. If it becomes a common political cudgel it would mean the end of defense lawyers running for office, even judgeships, and there will be no more pro-bono work of the kind Chief Justice John Roberts did early in his career when he defended an accused murderer. Any ambitious young lawyer would assiduously avoid any possible associations with accused criminals and the government at all levels would be even more overloaded with prosecutors than it already is.
If anybody has the mistaken idea that a government full of prosecutors funded by billionaire patrons spells “liberty” for the people they need to think about it a little bit more.
.
Look what the Kochs are buying with the spare change they find in their couch cushions
by digby
I know it’s hard to believe, but it looks as though the .001% are vastly outspending everyone else on political campaigns.
Campaign contributions are about 10 times as concentrated as income. Moreover, as both income and campaign contributions have become more concentrated in the top 0.01 percent, inequality in campaign contributions have needed to grow at ten times the rate of income growth — that is, each 1 percent increase in the top 0.01 percent share of income needed to be matched by a 10 percent increase in the top 0.01 percent share of contributions. The ruling in McCutcheon makes it that much more likely that this trend will continue unabated.
Again, the percentage of their fortunes they’re spending on this is the equivalent to the money you and I find in our couch cushions every year. They are just that rich — and they’re getting massively richer in record time. For instance, the Kochs have doubled their fortune from a combined 50 billion in 2011 to 100 billion in 2014.
Here’s a little bit of what they’re buying:
Why do I say they’re buying this? Because the article by Ned Resnikoff to which those maps are attached explains that the politicians who represent the areas with the highest concentrations of food insecurity are the same politicians who voted against funding for food stamps. These are all people who are supported by the radical billionaire plutocrats who are financing a greater and greater percentage of our politics.
They are basically saying “let them eat cake.” Where have we heard that before?
.