Month: April 2014

Big Swinging Manhood

by digby

Yes, they’re coming right out with it nowadays:

DAVID BROOKS: And, let’s face it, Obama, whether deservedly or not, does have a (I’ll say it crudely) but a manhood problem in the Middle East: Is he tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad, somebody like Putin? I think a lot of the rap is unfair. But certainly in the Middle East, there’s an assumption he’s not tough.

That’s correct. A president with a Big Swinging Manhood would have taken a bull horn by the handle and invaded a country by now. Just to prove how Big his Big Swinging Manhood really was.

And then when you leave office you paint pussycats:

Also too, this.

The cradle of the confederacy offers up a couple of winners

by digby

…well, there isn’t really such a thing. Via Mother Jones, here’s a Rand Paul endorsed candidate running for Senate in South Carolina:

John, caller: I’m a 9/11 truther. And I had a friend of mine…tell me, look on the internet, Google “the Pentagon” and show me where the plane hit the Pentagon. Where is the plane? There’s all kinds of pictures of that building smoldering, and fire trucks everywhere. There’s no plane. So I did research on the size of planes, of the engines that ran this plane. These things are 12,000 pounds, these engines that would have flown off—that’s six tons—and put a hole in something. There’s nothing there.

Bill LuMaye: Well, without getting into—

John: There’s a hole in the building and there’s no broken glass.

LuMaye: Well, I’d rather not get into a discussion on whether 9/11 was an inside job or not. I really, I mean, we can save that for another day, I have no problem with that, it’s just—

Greg Brannon: These questions, again, actually, that’s what [9/11 commission vice-chair] Lee Hamilton said. And he just said, there’s other questions that need answering. The guy who got all the information…a Democrat and a Republican, were the co-chairmen of the 9/11 commission, and when they got done, they did not put their stamp of approval on the commission. They said, ‘There’s data that we did not put in there.’ So things like this have to be asked.

LuMaye: Well, I appreciate your call, John.

Brannon: Thanks, John.

Yeah. Things like this “have to be asked.” I suppose it’s inevitable that they would be asked. But let’s just say it’s a little bit unusual for a Senate candidate to be the one asking.

He’s running against Lindsay Graham. And he may not be the only freakshow conservative in the race. Get a load of this guy:

In the space of a few minutes on national television this month, Thomas Ravenel admitted to smoking pot, streaking nude and participating in … er, ah … unusual sex acts.. He also declared his likely candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

Even by South Carolina’s sometimes zany political standards, it was not your traditional announcement.

But, to use the catchphrase that Ravenel popularized a decade ago during a previous run for the U.S. Senate, “That’s how Thomas Ravenel rolls.”

Now, the Charleston businessman and disgraced former South Carolina treasurer says he is rolling up his sleeves to campaign as an independent, breaking from the Republican Party to challenge incumbent U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham.

It might seem like a bold gambit from a man with well-publicized legal problems, but Ravenel is energized and enthusiastic about his chances of unseating his Upstate rival, whom he criticizes for being under the thumb of corporate interests and beholden to hateful Republican policy positions. Ravenel proposes righting the country by adhering to a libertarian agenda and reducing the involvement of the federal government in almost everything –whether foreign entanglements, the economy or the regulation of marriage and drugs.

Much has changed for 51-year-old Ravenel, or “T-Rav” as he has come to be known, since he resigned from the state Treasurer’s Office in 2007 and pleaded guilty to cocaine-related federal drug charges.

Following his release in 2009 from a 10-month prison term, Ravenel has sought to salvage his reputation, continuing his lucrative career in commercial real estate development, taking up polo and securing a starring role in the Charleston-based reality show “Southern Charm,” which premiered in March on the Bravo channel.

Last month, Ravenel also became a father, celebrating a daughter born to girlfriend, Kathryn Dennis, also a cast member of “Southern Charm” and 29 years his junior.

He also just downsized, selling his 5,500-square foot mansion in downtown Charleston for $3.3 million, enabling him more freedom to enjoy his Edisto Island plantation or remotely manage his business while following the U.S. polo scene, which moves seasonally between locales like Aiken, Florida and New York.

Oh those wacky rich guys with their plantations and polo …

I guess we can see why the well-known eccentrics Strom Thurmond and Lindsay Graham got elected by the conservatives. They are just regular, down home guys compared to the rest of them.

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Dear Ezra Klein: if Americans don’t accept evolution or the Big Bang, they won’t apply science to politics either

by David Atkins

Earlier this month Ezra Klein posted one of his first articles on Vox decrying the lack of scientific objectivity in American politics, and the inclination of the electorate to discard basic facts about public policy in service of an ideological agenda. Paul Krugman smartly responded that the abandonment of fact-based politics is not a two-sided affair, but rather largely limited to the right.

Krugman is right, of course. But I also wonder if the phenomenon isn’t also a particularly American one in that so many Americans deny even basic scientific facts, including evolution and now apparently the Big Bang:

In a new national poll on America’s scientific acumen, more than half of respondents said they were “not too confident” or “not at all confident” that “the universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang.”
The poll was conducted by GfK Public Affairs & Corporate Communications.

Scientists were apparently dismayed by this news, which arrives only a few weeks after astrophysicists located the first hard evidence of cosmic inflation.

But when compared to results from other science knowledge surveys, 51 percent isn’t too shameful — or surprising.

Other polls on America’s scientific beliefs have arrived at similar findings. The “Science and Engineering Indicators” survey — which the National Science Foundation has conducted every year since the early 1980s — has consistently found only about a third of Americans believe that “the universe began with a huge explosion.”

In 2010, the NSF poll rephrased the question, asking whether the following statement was true: “According to astronomers, the universe began with a big explosion.” When reworded, more Americans agreed, suggesting more respondents are aware of the science than originally suggested — they just don’t believe the science.

Krugman would say, of course, that the vast majority of the people who refuse to accept evolutionary and cosmological science are on the conservative end of the spectrum, and he would be right.

But there’s a lesson here. Many liberals often believe that if we could just marshal enough facts and figures in evidence, that more people would see reason and vote for Democrats. Liberals operate on the assumption that the public simply needs to be better educated about the facts. But that’s not necessarily so.

The public is aware of the science of evolution and the Big Bang. A majority simply chooses not to believe it.

And if the public chooses not be accept the scientific consensus around easily observable, non-political phenomena, how much more unlikely will they be to accept the balance of the evidence on more controversial, less provable political theories such as supply-side versus demand-side economics?

Politics is mostly about making emotional value judgments. Most people have already made up their mind how the world works, and the rules it operates under. You tend to either believe that the universe is just, that the privileged by definition earned their status, that people are either good or bad, that patriotism is the highest moral good, and that traditional social mores are de facto superior; or you tend to believe that the universe is ruled largely by luck, that the privileged tended to be rent-seekers and advantage takers; that personal morals come in varying shades of gray, that racial and national borders are artificial creations, and that almost all social norms are cultural constructs subject to questioning and evaluation.

Most people fall on one side or another. Most politicians’ natural base will fall on one side or another. The art of politics is essentially about maximizing your side’s turnout at the polls, while encouraging the very few people dangling on the fence to lean toward your camp.

And you know what? There’s really nothing wrong with that.

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QOTD: radical Republican edition

by digby

You’ll recall that the wingnuts in the House charged Eric Holder with contempt of congress:

Gohmert suggested Republicans consider passing “a resolution directing the Sergeant at Arms to detain anyone who is in contempt of Congress.” 

“There is a cell there on Capitol Hill,” he added.

Only in Bizarro World is this called justice

by digby

Does this sound like anything you’ve ever been told could be called “justice”?

Two weeks ago, a pair of F.B.I. agents appeared unannounced at the door of a member of the defense team for one of the men accused of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As a contractor working with the defense team at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the man was bound by the same confidentiality rules as a lawyer. But the agents wanted to talk.

They asked questions, lawyers say, about the legal teams for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other accused terrorists who will eventually stand trial before a military tribunal at Guantánamo. Before they left, the agents asked the contractor to sign an agreement promising not to tell anyone about the conversation.

With that signature, Mr. bin al-Shibh’s lawyers say, the government turned a member of their team into an F.B.I. informant.

Also too, is this ok?

Last year, as a lawyer for Mr. Mohammed was speaking during another hearing, a red light began flashing. Then the videofeed from the courtroom abruptly cut out. The emergency censorship system had been activated. But why? And by whom? The defense lawyer had said nothing classified. And the court officer responsible for protecting state secrets had not triggered the system. Days later, the military judge, Col. James L. Pohl, announced that he had been told that an “original classification authority” — meaning the C.I.A. — was secretly monitoring the proceedings. Unknown to everyone else, the agency had its own button, which the judge swiftly and angrily disconnected.

Last year, the government acknowledged that microphones were hidden inside what looked like smoke detectors in the rooms where detainees met with their lawyers. Those microphones gave officials the ability to eavesdrop on confidential conversations, but the military said it never did so.

There’s a term for this:

A kangaroo court is a judicial tribunal or assembly that blatantly disregards recognized standards of law or justice, and often carries little or no official standing in the territory within which it resides. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted”.

A kangaroo court is often held by a group or a community to give the appearance of a fair and just trial, even though the verdict has in reality already been decided before the trial has begun. Such courts typically take place in rural areas where legitimate law enforcement may be limited. The term may also apply to a court held by a legitimate judicial authority who intentionally disregards the court’s legal or ethical obligations.

This is why I laugh when people say we need to “trust” the secret intelligence agencies and accept that they are following the rule of law and the constitution. It’s probably the most fatuous remark I ever hear from liberals. According to that way of thinking, it’s the people who reveal the government’s misdeeds, not the misdeeds themselves, that constitutes betrayal of our country. I think that may be just a tiny misunderstanding of the issue.

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Storyteller in chief

by digby

Pretty sure he’s talking about congress …

President Obama reads “Where the Wild Things Are” at the Easter Egg Roll today. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images pic.twitter.com/y4HlsM4X4I
— HuffPost Politics (@HuffPostPol) April 21, 2014

“Remove” vs “Return” tells the real immigration story

by digby

If you are confused by the conflicting reports of deportation statistics for illegal immigration, read this explainer from Anna O. Law. The problem is that we are dealing with various definitions of what constitutes deportation. And it turns out that the Obama administration is not the ogre on this issue that we thought. Apparently, the confusion comes from the differences between “removal” and “return” which often get conflated. Removals would be what we would normally think of as deportation — finding illegal immigrants in our midst and kicking them out of the country with all the legal ramifications that goes with that. Returns are people who are refused entry. They don’t ever appear in a court and thus have no record and suffer no penalties like not being allowed to apply for legal entry or being incarcerated if they’re caught in the future.

It turns out that the Obama administration’s higher statistic apply to the latter category which is obviously the more benign one:

To understand deportations under Obama, it’s more helpful to look at the ratio of returns and removals. Compared to his predecessors, Obama has deemphasized removals and concentrated on returns. His numbers reflect a deliberate shift in strategy to exercise prosecutorial discretion to aid longtime immigrant residents who have family ties and no criminal backgrounds besides the immigration law violation. In recent years, two-thirds of Obama’s overall expulsion numbers consist of returns of people who have previous final orders of removal and who are recently arriving entrants.

It must be noted that none of that helps the residents and their children who live in the shadows and are forced to deal with possible deportation. It changes nothing with respect to the desperate need for comprehensive immigration reform. But it does suggest that the Obama administration has adopted a more compassionate policy than his predecessor if you look beneath the surface of those statistics.

It’s a sad comment on our politics that the administration can’t make that case for itself. But unfortunately, if they admitted what they were doing they’d be portrayed as soft on “illegals” and would likely have even less of a chance to get immigration reform passed. It’s a sick system we have here.

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Counting the votes of African Americans and Latinos is the real vote suppression

by digby

I have a post up at Salon this morning discussing this reflexive conservative impulse to explain that they are really winning all the elections. It’s just that they are forced to count the votes of all those people of color:

The news is so depressing for conservatives these days. All the demographic trends are moving against them.With every election showing a large majority of single women, young people and people of color voting for the Democrats, thus solidifying their identification with the party, the less likely it is that Republicans can outrun the shift to a multiracial majority. But they still don’t seem to understand exactly what this means for them.

Take, for example, Michael Medved’s latest in the Wall Street Journal in which he explains that the Democrats’ strategy of wooing women voters by pointing out the GOP’s hostility to reproductive rights and equal pay is nothing but a sham. Sure, Barack Obama won the female vote by a commanding 11 points in the last election but it’s not as if he won a mandate for his message. After all, he lost the white female vote… read on.

It’s amazing how they can so blithely imply that they win if the “real” vote were counted.  And it proves why they are so desperate to suppress the vote of African Americans and Latinos. Those “illegitimate” voters are diluting the votes of legitimate citizens. What could be more obvious?

Indeed, all you have to do is look at the GOP rationales offered up in the 2000 recount: they said it explicitly. (James Bopp, the author of that linked article is one of the GOP’s foremost vote suppression experts.)

Once you let those illegitimate votes count, Real Americans are denied their franchise. In fact, counting the votes of African Americans and Latinos is the real vote suppression.

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Chart of the day: The United States is not overtaxed. Far from it.

by David Atkins

The United States has the third lowest effective tax rate in the developed world:

The U.S. was the third least taxed country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2011, the most recent year for which OECD has complete data.

Of all the OECD countries, which are essentially the countries the U.S. trades with and competes with, only Chile and Mexico collect less taxes as a percentage of their overall economy (as a percentage of gross domestic product, or GDP).

This sharply contradicts the widely held view among many members of Congress that taxes are already high enough in the U.S. and that any efforts to reduce the federal deficit should therefore take the form of cuts in government spending.

As the graph to the right illustrates, in 2011, the total (federal, state and local) tax revenue collected in the U.S. was equal to 24.0 percent of the U.S.’s GDP.

The total taxes collected by other OECD countries that year was equal to 34.0 percent of combined GDP of those countries.

Remember also that the top 1% of Americans have over 50% over the wealth, and that the top 10% have over 90% of the wealth.

America isn’t broke. We could pay for decent infrastructure, schools and healthcare. But we have a system of legalized political bribery that would shame banana republics, ensuring that the very wealthy don’t have to contribute more than a pittance toward the general welfare.

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Joshua Holland shares the good news for poor people:

In 2009, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a study that revealed what seems to be a shocking truth: those who live in societies with a higher level of income inequality are at a greater risk for premature death. 

Here in the United States, our high level of income inequality corresponds with 883, 914 unnecessary deaths each year. More specifically, the report concluded that if we had an income distribution more like that of the Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland — or eleven other wealthy countries — every year, about one in three deaths in the US could be avoided.
Put that into perspective. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), tobacco, including second-hand smoke, causes approximately 480,000 deathsevery year, and in 2010, traffic accidents killed 33,687 people and 31,672 othersdied of gunshot wounds. 

The mechanism by which a bullet or a car crash kills is readily apparent. Inequality is lethal in ways that are less obvious. It’s a silent killer – a deadly plague that we, as a society, tend not to acknowledge. 

In Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality, a new book edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, Stephen Bezruchka, a former emergency room physician who is now a professor of public health at the University of Washington, explains the connection. (An excerpt from his chapter titled “Inequality Kills” can be read at Boston Review.) Read on…

Yeah, whatever. If people want to live a full lifespan they ought to work as hard as the people who are inheriting all the wealth.  Oh wait …

Update: The poorest women are actually seeing their life expectancy decline

Well look a the bright spot.  It’ll help keep Social Security from being so expensive that we would have to curtail our unaccountable, runaway military spending. So that’s good.

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