Month: May 2014

QOTD: Adam Corolla

by digby

Via Raw Story:

In an interview with The Daily Caller’s Jamie Weinstein, comedian Adam Carolla dismissed criticism of rich Americas like Donald Trump, stating that the rich are, “better than poor people. They just are.”

“They’re better than poor people. They just are,” Carolla replied. “I’ve hung around with plenty of poor people, now I’ve hung out with rich people. They work harder, generally. More focused. The folks I grew up with, the poor people I grew up with, fairly lethargic, did a lot of complaining, they smoked a little too much, drank a little too much, blamed everyone but themselves a little too much.”

He explained that there are no rich people who have inherited their wealth because none of his rich friends were born that way:

“A lot of them had the advantage of growing up with a family that was intact, that would let them go off and do things that would, later on, enable them to become wealthy,” he explained.

Carolla also pointed out that the rich give “a hell of a lot more to charity.”

Turning to his own charitable contributions, Carolla admitted that he could give more but concluded, “I do the ultimate charity — I pay a shitload in taxes.”

He’s always been a voice of the bros, ever since that vacuous piece of garbage “The Man Show.” But I think he performs a valuable service, nonetheless. Whenever you worry that your instincts are wrong about what these wingnuts really think he’s one of the guys who’ll get you right.

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Big media Atkins

by digby

ICYMI: David Atkins is now one of the regular week-end bloggers over at the Washington Monthly blog Political Animal.  He’ll still be contributing his stylings here, but now he’s got a new venue with a different audience.

Huzzah for David!

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The murder of Dr Tiller

by digby

… was five years ago today:

Sunday, May 31, 2009

They Cannot Know

by digby

I just want to give a rousing “shove it” to all the right wingers who have absolutely no sympathy for women and their loved ones who are faced with the horrible prospect of a life threatening delivery of a fetus that is destined for an extremely short, brutal, painful life. These strangers have decided that they have a right to dictate what people must do in the most gut wrenching, complicated situations with which any human being can be confronted. Who do these people think they are?

I’ve heard a lot of people saying recently that the abortion debate has changed because now that people can see the cute little baby inside the woman’s body with the ultrasound we feel the humanity of it. Perhaps that’s true. But that same technology also allows us to see the heartbreaking, doomed baby in the third trimester and we know that it will put the mother’s life and health at risk to carry that pregnancy to term. For all the joy that the ultrasound brings to the happily expectant parent, nothing could be worse that the horrifying news that a late term ultrasound shows a fatal birth defect. This technology goes both ways.

From Talk Left, we have a testimonial from someone who went through this:

In 1994 my wife and I found out that she was pregnant. The pregnancy was difficult and unusually uncomfortable but her doctor repeatedly told her things were fine. Sometime early in the 8th month my wife, an RN who at the time was working in an infertility clinic asked the Dr. she was working for what he thought of her discomfort. He examined her and said that he couldn’t be certain but thought that she might be having twins. We were thrilled and couldn’t wait to get a new sonogram that hopefully would confirm his thoughts. Two days later our joy was turned to unspeakable sadness when the new sonogram showed conjoined twins. Conjoined twins alone is not what was so difficult but the way they were joined meant that at best only one child would survive the surgery to separate them and the survivor would more than likely live a brief and painful life filled with surgery and organ transplants. We were advised that our options were to deliver into the world a child who’s life would be filled with horrible pain and suffering or fly out to Wichita Kansas and to terminate the pregnancy under the direction of Dr. George Tiller.

We made an informed decision to go to Kansas. One can only imagine the pain borne by a woman who happily carries a child for 8 months only to find out near the end of term that the children were not to be and that she had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy and go against everything she had been taught to believe was right. This was what my wife had to do. Dr. Tiller is a true American hero. The nightmare of our decision and the aftermath was only made bearable by the warmth and compassion of Dr. Tiller and his remarkable staff. Dr. Tiller understood that this decision was the most difficult thing that a woman could ever decide and he took the time to educate us and guide us along with the other two couples who at the time were being forced to make the same decision after discovering that they too were carrying children impacted by horrible fetal anomalies. I could describe in great detail the procedures and the pain and suffering that everyone is subjected to in these situations. However, that is not the point of the post. We can all imagine that this is not something that we would wish on anyone. The point is that the pain and suffering were only mitigated by the compassion and competence of Dr. George Tiller and his staff. We are all diminished today for a host of reasons but most of all because a man of great compassion and courage has been lost to the world.

People always act like this issue is simple. But pregnancy is one situation in life that falls across all kinds of moral, emotional and rational lines, calling into question the autonomy of the very body in which we live and lifelong commitments made in the heat of the moment — painful choices and primitive imperatives in the most basic human drive we have. Whether it’s the idea that women should be “punished” with pregnancy for failing to use birth control, to the idea that adoption is a simple and painless alternative, to the insistence that women who carry a child for seven or eight months must be forced to give birth when the child has no chance at life to the spectacle of the Octamom, the fact is that there is no broad brush answer that can be applied to all these different circumstances. Certainly, the crude instrument of the law isn’t the answer (as even the anti-choicers tacitly admit when they refuse to consider the women who have abortions murderers and instead focus on the doctors.)

Indeed, the murder of Dr Tiller in a demented defense of a “culture of life” should be all it takes for everyone to see that this is not the simple, straightforward issue they’d like to believe it is. And once you recognize that it’s a unique circumstance in which the moral boundaries are blurry and indistinct, the only possible course is to trust the person with the most knowledge of the circumstances, the symbiotic relationship to the fetus and greatest immediate stake in the outcome — the woman.

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digby 5/31/2009 08:30:00 PM

The following are Youtubes of the Rachel Maddow documentary about Tiller and his killing:

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The kicks just keep getting harder to find

by digby

This is what’s on stage at #RLC2014 right now pic.twitter.com/xPPUhgDYCQ
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlakeWP) May 31, 2014

Just goes to show, they really are living out their 60s dreams in the twilight of their lives:

I happen to have Daniel Ellsberg right here …

by digby

John Kerry’s accusations of “cowardice” and fatuous admonitions for Edward Snowden to “man up” the other day were rather depressing considering how such schoolyard taunts of effeminacy were used against him in 2004. But his use of Daniel Ellsberg as an example of the “good whistleblower” needs to be examined more closely. And who better to do it than … Daniel Ellsberg:

On the Today show and CBS, Kerry complimented me again – and said Snowden “should man up and come back to the United States” to face charges. But John Kerry is wrong, because that’s not the measure of patriotism when it comes to whistleblowing, for me or Snowden, who is facing the same criminal charges I did for exposing the Pentagon Papers.

As Snowden told Brian Williams on NBC later that night and Snowden’s lawyer told me the next morning, he would have no chance whatsoever to come home and make his case – in public or in court.

Snowden would come back home to a jail cell – and not just an ordinary cell-block but isolation in solitary confinement, not just for months like Chelsea Manning but for the rest of his sentence, and probably the rest of his life. His legal adviser, Ben Wizner, told me that he estimates Snowden’s chance of being allowed out on bail as zero. (I was out on bond, speaking against the Vietnam war, the whole 23 months I was under indictment).

More importantly, the current state of whistleblowing prosecutions under the Espionage Act makes a truly fair trial wholly unavailable to an American who has exposed classified wrongdoing. Legal scholars have strongly argued that the US supreme court – which has never yet addressed the constitutionality of applying the Espionage Act to leaks to the American public – should find the use of it overbroad and unconstitutional in the absence of a public interest defense. The Espionage Act, as applied to whistleblowers, violates the First Amendment, is what they’re saying.

As I know from my own case, even Snowden’s own testimony on the stand would be gagged by government objections and the (arguably unconstitutional) nature of his charges. That was my own experience in court, as the first American to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act – or any other statute – for giving information to the American people.

I had looked forward to offering a fuller account in my trial than I had given previously to any journalist – any Glenn Greenwald or Brian Williams of my time – as to the considerations that led me to copy and distribute thousands of pages of top-secret documents. I had saved many details until I could present them on the stand, under oath, just as a young John Kerry had delivered his strongest lines in sworn testimony.

But when I finally heard my lawyer ask the prearranged question in direct examination – Why did you copy the Pentagon Papers? – I was silenced before I could begin to answer. The government prosecutor objected – irrelevant – and the judge sustained. My lawyer, exasperated, said he “had never heard of a case where a defendant was not permitted to tell the jury why he did what he did.” The judge responded: well, you’re hearing one now.

And so it has been with every subsequent whistleblower under indictment, and so it would be if Edward Snowden was on trial in an American courtroom now.

Indeed, in recent years, the silencing effect of the Espionage Act has only become worse. The other NSA whistleblower prosecuted, Thomas Drake, was barred from uttering the words “whistleblowing” and “overclassification” in his trial. (Thankfully, the Justice Department’s case fell apart one day before it was to begin). In the recent case of the State Department contractor Stephen Kim, the presiding judge ruled the prosecution “need not show that the information he allegedly leaked could damage US national security or benefit a foreign power, even potentially.”

We saw this entire scenario play out last summer in the trial of Chelsea Manning. The military judge in that case did not let Manning or her lawyer argue her intent, the lack of damage to the US, overclassification of the cables or the benefits of the leaks … until she was already found guilty.

Without reform to the Espionage Act that lets a court hear a public interest defense – or a challenge to the appropriateness of government secrecy in each particular case – Snowden and future Snowdens can and will only be able to “make their case” from outside the United States.

I think people may need to review the Ellsberg case to get an idea of how it was he eluded jail time. It wasn’t because he “manned up.” It was because of government misconduct, which included the break-in at his psychiatrist’s office:

Due to the gross governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering, and the defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, Judge Byrne dismissed all charges against Ellsberg and Russo on May 11, 1973 after the government claimed it had lost records of wiretapping against Ellsberg. Byrne ruled: “The totality of the circumstances of this case which I have only briefly sketched offend a sense of justice. The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case.

I think you can see the irony here, can’t you? It was “losing the records” of illegal wiretapping that freed Ellsberg…

Suffice to say that it wasn’t that the courts declared Ellsberg a patriot, as John Kerry seems to imply. It was the abuse of power of the US Government, which was so flagrant and appalling that the court had no choice but to let him go. That strikes me as useful history when considering why Edward Snowden would opt not to fall on his sword so that Big John Kerry and the bros wouldn’t call him a wimp. That, along with the more recent history that Ellsberg relays in his piece above, shows that it’s not simply a matter of “facing the music” as everyone seems to say. What they want him to do is allow the government to put him in jail without the ability to defend himself — over a story that is already public. That means it’s purely a means to “make an example” of him. But he’s not a martyr, he’s a whistleblower, and he has no obligation to throw himself on the pyre so the government can soothe its defenders by burning the witch.

The government could do something in between if it chose. It could allow him to find permanent asylum in another country like Bolivia, which would deny him his home but not his freedom. Truly that ought to be enough of a human sacrifice for this deed which everyone acknowledges has resulted in a much-needed examination and pullback of a surveillance program run amock.

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The best thing you’ll read on Ukraine

by David Atkins

You can always count on American pundits to be narcissistic to the point of solipsism when it comes to foreign policy. Everything is always about America. Whatever is happening anywhere in the world is always about America–and when it’s not, it’s always painted in terms of good vs. evil.

As most progressives know, the world is much more complicated than that, and not everyone is as obsessed with the United States as Americans are.

In that light, Gary Brecher’s superb analysis at Pando of the situation in Ukraine is a breath of fresh air. It’s a moderately long, very good read that is impossible to effectively summarize here, but below is a taste:

What’s happening in Eastern Ukraine is very simple, rational, and straightforward.

Russia has what it wanted—Crimea, a Russian-majority peninsula with better beaches than the rest of Russia put together, a Russian majority, and a geography so eminently defensible that all you have to do is look at it on a map and it screams “Secede!

What’s going on in Eastern Ukraine, a very different Russian-majority region, is a sideshow, as far as Putin and his schemers are concerned. This sideshow has two audiences. The first, as Mark Ames explained in his article, “Sorry, America, Ukraine Isn’t All about You,” is a domestic one, Russia’s “silent majority. “ As Ames explained, Putin has used the violence to keep that silent majority in an angry, nationalist mood.

…

The other audience is Putin’s colleagues in power—in Kyiv, Brussels, and Washington. Russia has already managed to shift the focus of international attention from Crimea, which Russia really wanted and now possesses, to Eastern Ukraine. Crimea has become a classic “fait accompli,” the goal of this kind of old-school Great Power game.

Ukraine has been forced to give up any pressure on Crimea, whether military or political, in order to put out the ethnic Russian insurgency in the East. This is a real, grassroots ethnic uprising, born out of long-standing resentment of Ukrainian attempts to enforce a vindictive, petty form of Ukrainian nationalism, full of sentimentality about the wide grasslands and little Ukrainian-speaking villages, on Eastern Ukraine, which is urban, Russian, and industrial.
After Crimea showed, or seemed to show, how easy it was to secede from this vindictive Ukrainian regime and rejoin Russia, ethnic Russians in Donetsk, Sloviansk and other Eastern cities naturally attempted to duplicate the quick, easy separation Crimea accomplished.

…

And yet ethnic Russians, both in Putin’s constituency in Russia, and among ethnic Russian communities shut out of the Russian Federation, like the cities of Eastern Ukraine, continue to be willing to give their lives for Russia. Their grievances, their love for Russia, and their courage are real, not the creation of SpetzNaz or security-service infiltration as jingoistic American journalists like Eli Lake keep claiming.

But those noble qualities, and the lives of the people who hold them, are just expendable assets—straw dogs—to cold-eyed practitioners of Great-Power politics like Putin. They’re fighting at this moment to form a Russian secessionist republic in Eastern Ukraine, but the odds they’ll meet anything but betrayal from Moscow are very dim.

Does Putin really want to annex Eastern Ukraine? It’s not clear to me that he does. It’s very clear that the Russian state wanted Crimea, and was willing to risk war for it. It’s not so clear that Moscow will risk war for Eastern Ukraine, which does have valuable resources and major industrial installations, but lacks Crimea’s easily-sealed entry points.

The alternatives here, for Moscow, are not either outright annexation or total disengagement. It’s naïve to think that Moscow has to say a simple yes or no to the militias fighting in Russia’s name in Donetsk and Sloviansk. The history of Great-Power politics shows that in many cases, it’s much more useful to leave a disputed, ethnically-mixed area festering, giving your proxies there just enough weaponry, money, and moral support to keep them bleeding the occupying enemy.

Kashmir is the classic example in the contemporary world. Does Pakistan really want to take Kashmir, with its hopelessly messy, complex, bloody feuds, into Pakistan proper? Officially, yes; and in the minds of the millions of Pakistani nationalists, of course it does. But for the ISI, the intelligence agents who run the country, it’s much more useful to have Kashmir as a goad, an irritant, a reliable source of nationalist rage and suicide volunteers, than it would be to march in and try to govern the place.

So, despite the valid grievances of the Eastern Ukrainian Russian community, despite all the nationalist rage Putin is stirring up among nationalists in Russia proper, the Russian government may let Eastern Ukraine’s Russian militias be ground down by troops, tanks, and aircraft from Kyiv.

Not wiped out—that would be a waste of potentially useful proxies. But decimated, occupied, and humiliated. A population in that condition is as useful to a Great Power as Kashmir’s Muslims are to Pakistan.

Brecher goes on to point out that the United States did exactly the same thing to the Kurds and the Shia in Iraq when we encouraged them to rebel against Saddam Hussein, then watched in feigned helplessness as Saddam slaughtered the rebels who reasonably believed we would come to their aid.

This is how world politics actually works. The problem today is that as the world becomes increasingly connected and as our problems become global in scope, this sort of coldhearted gamesmanship is increasingly dangerous to everyone.

At a certain point the world is going to realize that nation-states cannot continue playing these sorts of games with people’s lives in pursuit of “national interests.” We are going to need a post-Westphalian system sooner rather than alter. Both conservative and left-libertarian pundits who imagine that only one side or one country is to blame for most of the world’s ills, and who worship nation-state borders as if they were sacred lines not to be infringed by another nation-state (except for America, in neoconservative fantasyland) as a matter of near ritual impurity, are increasingly anachronistic, irrelevant, and actually damaging to the interests of long-suffering peoples worldwide.

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Common Sense on guns

by digby

This interview by Harold Pollack with noted expert on gun laws and criminology Philip Cook is worth reading in full. This excerpt gets to something I think is very salient:

P: Mass shootings by disturbed individuals comprise a very small fraction of American gun homicides. Is there a danger that such horrific incidents might be misleading as a guide to preventing more common forms of gun homicide?

PC: Mass shootings galvanize public attention to the problem of gun violence, and serve as horrific reminders that no one is entirely safe from this scourge. Too often, though, the media accounts are focused on the question of what could have been done to prevent the last mass shooting, and provide no perspective on the chronic problems of gun violence – the half million assaults and robberies, the 11,000 gun homicides, and the 20,000 gun suicides that occur each year. Even if there is no easy answer to the question of what could be done about Elliott Rodger, there are a variety of promising actions that would be helpful in reducing gun misuse.

HP: If you could propose one or two policies to reduce gun homicide and that have some prospect of making it through Congress, what would you emphasize?

PC: Tough question. Congress is simply not a promising venue for action against gun violence, not these days. There has been some hopeful talk about a bipartisan deal around mental health and guns, but don’t hold your breath. Even federal action to reduce violence (regardless of weapon type) seems unlikely to be forthcoming, but there is a somewhat better chance there: I would suggest expanded financial support for local police departments through the COPS program, and an increase in the federal alcohol excise tax rates, for starters.

I suspect that the “action” in the near future, as it has been during the last year, will be in the state legislatures.

HP: What would you like to see states do, even in areas that go beyond what Congress is likely or able to do at the federal level?

PC: In the “laboratory of the states,” we can hope to learn from systematic analysis of innovations. For recent examples, almost half the states have adopted Stand Your Ground laws, and two studies by economists found similar conclusions: the effect has been to increase the homicide rate, with no reduction in assault, robbery or rape. An analysis of Missouri’s repeal of their universal background check system in 2007 demonstrated quite convincingly that it resulted in a [14 percent] jump in gun homicides (with no change in non-gun homicides). We are still awaiting an analysis of California’s requirement that pistols be designed to stamp a serial number on the shell casing, so that police investigators can link shootings to particular guns.
The general direction that makes sense to me is adoption of regulations and law enforcement tactics that have the effect of making guns a liability to criminals. Guns should be readily traced to their owners. The police and courts should work together to deter illicit carrying of guns, and crimes committed with guns should be viewed as more serious than similar crimes with knives. Gang members should understand that if any of their members misuse a gun, they will all pay a legal price (as in Boston’s Operation Ceasefire beginning in 1996).

I’m also sold on the potential of smart guns to make gun-owning households safer. The German firm Armatix has developed a gun that uses RFID technology to unlock a gun (similar to the keys for unlocking cars). Only when the gun is near a special wristwatch can it be fired. This is one of many methods for “personalizing” a gun and reducing the chance of an unauthorized use – say, by other household members (young children, teenagers thinking of suicide) or burglars.

The NRA is against all those things, of course. Even smart guns, which I cannot imagine a principles reason to oppose other than a belief that guns cannot be regulated in way at all. Which means you are much freer to shoot guns than you are speak in this country.

And ponder this lovely comment for a moment:

“Guns are mostly for hunting down politicians who would actively seek to take your freedoms and liberty away from you. Google ‘Hitler, Mao, Kim Jung Il, Castro, Stalin’ just for starters.”

I guess he doesn’t realize that there are people in the world who might interpret that to mean his good friends Sarah Palin and John McCain might be fair game too.

I do like the fact that he honestly says that guns are “mostly” for hunting down politicians. Makes it very clear that the “protecting the family” and “deer-hunting” arguments are bogus. These guys think of themselves as revolutionaries. Good to know.

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Maybe we should focus more on who has guns than on who has drugs

by David Atkins

It turns out that not only did the police not actually watch the Isla Vista shooter’s misogynistic video rant, they didn’t bother to search the database to see if he had bought guns:

With the toughest gun-control regulations in the country, California has a unique, centralized database of gun purchases that law enforcement can easily search. It offers precious intelligence about a suspect or other people officers may encounter when responding to a call.

But this rare advantage wasn’t enough to help authorities head off the May 23 rampage in Santa Barbara that claimed six victims.

Before a half-dozen sheriff’s deputies knocked on Elliot Rodger’s door last month in response to concerns raised by his mother about his well-being, they could have checked the database and discovered he had bought three 9mm semiautomatic handguns. Several law enforcement officials and legal experts on gun policy said this might have given deputies greater insight into Rodger’s intentions and his capability for doing harm.

The deputies did not check the database. They left his apartment after finding him to be “shy, timid, polite and well-spoken,” in the words of Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown. The deputies saw no evidence that Rodger was an immediate threat to others or to himself.

“I cringed when I learned they didn’t run for guns,” said Emeryville Police Chief Ken James, who is chairman of the California Police Chiefs Association’s firearms committee.

I understand that police have a difficult job with lots of paperwork and not enough time. But maybe that’s because they focus on the wrong things.

Police make more arrests for drug violations–mostly possession–than for any other crime. That is a wildly misplaced priority.

I’m much more worried about the disturbed guy with a gun than about the dude next door with a bowl. I’m pretty most most people would agree with that. Law enforcement might want to take note.

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Measles are not fun

by digby

This is concerning:

The consensus is that it is happening as a result of people failing to vaccinate their kids.

This is a bad idea. Aside from the fact that vaccines require herd immunity to be effective, so your “individual choice” to expose your kids to disease also means you’re choosing for others, parents should know that these are not fun diseases. I know because I had them. I had measles, mumps, chicken pox and German measles, the latter of which was very serious. They were all miserable. I was a healthy kid and came though with no ill effects, but one of my neighbors wasn’t so lucky when her kid came home with German measles when she was pregnant.

I guess I find this to be another piece of the war on science in which people are mistaking vaccination for a scientific “advance” like pesticides which later turned out to be deadly. Yes, there can be side effects from vaccines. That’s always been the case. Life has risks. But the risk from disease has always been much greater. And the near eradication of so many of these diseases just in my lifetime has been a tremendous boon to mankind.

Skepticism is good, but this one’s been tested and proven over many years and the suspicions just don’t add up.

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The War at Home

by digby

From the “if you build it, they will use it” files:

A 19-month-old boy is fighting for his life after a SWAT team threw a stun grenade into his crib during an overnight home raid, the toddler’s family says.

Police were looking for Wanis Thometheva, who sold methamphetamine to an undercover officer Tuesday evening, police said.

But when the team raided his Georgia home, the Phonesavanh family was inside — not Thometheva.

The horror of this is almost too much to bear. A poor little 19 year baby may die and will surely be severely impacted if he lives because an explosive device was thrown into his crib, next to his head. It’s hard to see how this could be seen as anything less than manslaughter.

But I think we have to ask ourselves why in the world the police felt it necessary to stage a military style raid on any home, much less fail to do the due diligence to find out who lived there, over a sale of illegal drugs. This wasn’t terrorism. It wasn’t a gang selling automatic weapons out of the back yard. It wasn’t the home of a suspected kidnapper holding someone for ransom. It wasn’t anything that one could construe as an immediate danger to the public requiring such aggressive military tactics.  And yet, the police do this all over the country and they are constantly making mistakes, misidentifying the occupants or the residence, wounding and sometimes killing people.

Why do they do this?  Because of the militarization of our police forces which are in the business of buying more and more military-style gear and assuming more and more military tactics and strategies. And inevitably, they have also assumed the posture of an occupying army.

I don’t suppose that Eisenhower saw this as one of the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex, but it is one. The government spends trillions on combat gear and military training somebody’s going to use it. There are only so many land wars they can get away with fighting. So police agencies are fighting the “war on drugs” here at home and the enemy is the American public.

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