Tweet ‘o the Day: Mad Men edition
by digby
Here Robert Kennedy campaigning for President in Oregon primary, 46 years ago this month: #Keller pic.twitter.com/mOi8vRBhnE
— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) May 16, 2014
It always puts things into perspective to remember that there was a time not all that long ago when people were shooting down our leaders on a regular basis.
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Billionaire Bowl I
by David Atkins
In the blue corner, billionaire Tom Steyer. In the red corner, billionaires Charles and David Koch. Let’s get ready to rumble:
Environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer is again taking aim at the Koch brothers with a new television advertisement set to run this Sunday in Washington, D.C. and Wichita, Kan., the home base of Koch Industries.
The minimalist 15-second ad includes only the sound of crickets chirping against a black night sky. At the end, it says simply, “The Koch brothers’ response to a climate change debate with Tom Steyer.”Steyer, a California-based hedge fund investor who has made a political name for himself by opposing the Keystone XL pipeline and calling for action to address global warming, challenged Charles and David Koch last month to a debate on climate change.
While the ad — which was funded by Steyer’s political committee, NextGen Climate Action — implies that the Koch brothers did not respond to Steyer’s request, a spokeswoman for the industrialists declined the invitation in a statement to a Kansas newspaper. The spokeswoman told the Wichita Eagle earlier this month that the Koch brothers are “not experts on climate change” and the debate should take place “among the scientific community.”
Obviously, I’m deeply grateful to Mr. Steyer for using his vast wealth to fight the good fight on what is probably the biggest issue of our time.
But it’s more than a little depressing and disconcerting that the biggest hope climate change activists have of making a real dent here is that one billionaire decided he cared bad enough to focus on it.
If that’s the only model going forward, this country is in deep, deep trouble.
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Demaaahcracy
by digby
More than half a billion people voted in India yesterday. And the result is somewhat alarming:
It’s easy to describe Modi to people who have never heard him speak, or read about his past. He is a depressingly familiar type. He is secretive; he is vindictive; he has creepily authoritarian tendencies (a woman in Gujarat was placed under surveillance by Modi for months in a controversy that somehow didn’t seem to register with voters); he ricochets between aggression and self-pity in a manner familiar to anyone who has heard nationalists of any stripe; and he is simply incapable of sounding broad-minded. During the 2002 Gujarat riots, hundreds of people (mostly Muslims) were killed in communal violence on Modi’s watch. (This is why he has been denied a United States visa for many years.) The extent of Modi’s role in spurring on the horrors has been extensively debated; suffice it to say that he once said his only regret about the mass murders was that he didn’t handle the media well enough.
Modi is also known for his close ties to unsavory, right-wing Hindu fanatics, notably in the Rashtriya Swamyamsevak Sangh (RSS), which he joined when he was very young. Arguably Modi’s closest confidante is Amit Shah, who has been accused of numerous crimes, including murder, and whose attitude to Muslims might be euphemistically described as unwelcoming. (He likes to talk about “appeasement” of Muslims and said this election was about “taking revenge” on them.)
For more on Modi’s personality, I encourage everyone to read Vinod Jose’s brilliant profile of him from 2010, which gets at the way he deals with dissent, and takes a disturbing trip through Modi’s psyche. (The dizzying summary: this is how a fascist person thinks.) The biggest question thus may be the degree to which India’s institutions and democratic checks and balances can contain Modi’s worst tendencies. It’s possible that Modi himself will moderate in office, but moderation usually refers to ideology; Modi may simply be incapable of keeping his worst instincts under control. Indian society has shown a disturbing willingness to disregard freedoms of speech and expression, and the country’s institutions are often weak in defending these encroachments. (See here for a good example.) Modi has never shown any interest in civil liberties; nor has he made the slightest positive noises about the communal violence that still frequently afflicts the country.
Huh. Why does this fellow seem so familiar?
There are times when people trend toward the right wing. It can provide some satisfying, simple answers to vexing problems. The test is whether or not the democratic institutions of the country are strong enough to mitigate the fascist impulse. It’s unclear whether they are in India.
And, needless to say, this is an area of the world that’s all nuked up. Cool heads must always prevail. Yikes.
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The stale manifesto
by digby
So the Tea Party groups all got together yesterday to hammer out the agenda they expect the Republican Party to endorse in the fall. Here it is. Gird yourself:
In the 10-page pamphlet finalized Thursday, they called on party leaders to champion lower taxes, a well-funded military, and the idea that “married moms and dads are best at raising kids.” The document warns Republicans against signing on to an immigration overhaul unless the U.S. border is “fully secure,” and it argues that support for school prayer, a balanced-budget amendment and antiabortion legislation should remain priorities.
Yes, that’s the same agenda the conservatives have been advancing for the past 25 years or so. Actually the past 45 years or so. It is what they truly believe.
But the Republican establishment sees that this isn’t winning them many converts. And they need some converts since their base is dying off. The Chamber of Commerce wants immigration reform. Grover Norquist (who attended as a Wingnut Emeritus apparently) also wants immigration reform along with a discussion about military spending. And across the board the establishment would really like to have an election where their candidates don’t spend their time talking about lady parts.
It’s not that the establishment doesn’t agree with the Tea Party. They are perfectly happy to pass racist and sexist policies and allow their religious zealots to impose their beliefs on everyone else. Some of them undoubtedly agree with all that. But what is most important is having enough political power to ensure that the 1% is not interfered with. All else flows from that.
The problem is that the anti-immigrant faction and the Christian Right and the gun nuts all thought they were running things. They are learning the hard way that they can have what they want but they have to settle down when the Big Money Boyz need some running room. It’s unclear they have learned it yet.
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Newtie and Karl’s comedy routine
by digby
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the Republicans have a couple of problems facing Hillary Clinton in 2016. They have to go after her for being a dithering old broad, of course, but it’s a dicey prospect. As much as their base hate her and want to attack her on the most base level, they also have to be careful about going too far with the sexism. And since their own voters tend to be on the elderly side, they can’t get too insulting about her age and health. It’s a problem.
So, they’re going to have it both ways by staging a little pageant. I wrote about it for Salon this morning:
Bad cop Karl Rove stormed into the room, slammed his hands down on the table and hurled his accusations about Clinton’s so-called brain damage. He luridly went on and on about blood clots and secret hospital stays, implying that Clinton was hiding a very serious brain impairment of some sort.
He was then pushed aside as a more responsible member of the GOP immediately stepped up to criticize Rove’s indelicate comments. That would be the very sensitive good cop and new age guru Newt Gingrich:
i am totally opposed and deeply offended by Karl Rove’s comments about Secretary Clinton. I have many policy disagreements with Hillary but this kind of personal charge is exactly whats wrong with american politics. he should apologize and stop discussing her health. i was angry when people did this to Reagan in 1980 and I am angry when they do it to her today.
That’s so true. It’s just shocking that we’ve come to this. How do you suppose that happened?
Well, it turns out that back in the 1990s a self-described Republican revolutionary promoted a new way of talking about politics and trained an entire generation of politicians in its dark practice:
Newtie as the Good Cop has to be one of the funniest gags I’ve seen in years…
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Deconstructing Cecily
by digby
Bag News Notes did what it does best and thoroughly deconstructed the video and pictures of the events on the night Cecily McMillan allegedly attacked a police officer. Perhaps what’s most important is that they provide a full picture of the context for the incident which cannot help but illuminate it. One would think that the legal system, in a pursuit of justice, would have found that context to be important. Instead, they isolated the incident is extremely narrow fashion — which resulted in only certain facts being considered at the expense of the truth.
It’s a fascinating set of pictures and videos. In the end you will undoubtedly see the incident differently than the jury did with the myopic view they were presented. There is little doubt that it was Cecily McMillan who was assaulted, not that police officer.
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Comcast buys themselves a Majority Leader, tries to become rent seeker extraordinaire
by David Atkins
The blatant corruption is starting to get really old:
Comcast has been shelling out large sums of cash to Republican leaders in Congress, and the company’s efforts may be paying off.
The nation’s top political leaders rarely give much attention to the wonky regulatory battles of the tech industry. But embattled Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) took time off from budgets and immigration reform to threaten the Federal Communication Commission over its proposal to strengthen net neutrality.
Following the Republican leader, all of the Republican party’s top brass (the majority leader, the whip, and GOP conference chair) signed on to a strongly worded letter (.pdf) to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.
Wheeler has hinted that he would reclassify Internet broadband as a utility, giving him more power to regulate Internet service providers, such as Comcast, who want to be able to charge more money for faster service.
It’s difficult to say how much money influences policy, especially if a politician personally opposes their donors. But fighting net neutrality fits squarely within the anti-regulation ethos of Republicans, so it’s easier for big donors to get their pet issue some attention.
According to OpenSecrets, Comcast gave about four times more money to Boehner than net neutrality supporter Google ($74,000 vs. $20,000). Indeed, Comcast is the third biggest donor to Boehner’s re-election campaign so far.
The article goes on to point out that Nancy Pelosi has received the reverse ratio of donations, receiving much more from Google than from Comcast–but she hasn’t come out full throated for net neutrality, either.
I’ve come under fire from some readers for using the term “rent seeking”. They feel people don’t know what it means well enough. I try to explain that the phrase means using ownership of something to charge exorbitant prices people cannot do anything about, and that no other phrase can really do the concept justice.
ISPs attempting to rid themselves of pesky net neutrality in order to charge a toll for higher speeds online is a classic example of rent seeking. Comcast didn’t do anything to earn the right to charge those prices. The taxpayers funded most of the infrastructure of the Internet. Comcast is simply one of the companies that made it to the top of the heap when we foolishly privatized the profits of the internet investment We the People made. Now they want to strip net neutrality regulations in order to charge a toll for no good reason at all.
Rent seeking is at the heart of much of the economic malaise we suffer from. Exorbitant and pervasive rent-seeking is a byproduct of the misguided move to worship asset ownership instead of working wages.
Using our utterly corrupt money-is-speech election donation system to buy rules to allow greater rent seeking is the epitome of economic evil in politics. And Comcast and John Boehner are right in the middle of it.
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Gun nuts
by digby
Mother Jones reports on the lovely patriots who think the 2nd Amendment trumps the 1st:
AS JENNIFER LONGDON STEERED her wheelchair through the Indianapolis airport on April 25, she thought the roughest part of her trip was over. Earlier that day she’d participated in an emotional press conference with the new group Everytown for Gun Safety, against the backdrop of the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. A mom, gun owner, and Second Amendment supporter, Longdon was paralyzed in 2004 after being shot in her car by unknown assailants, and has since been a vocal advocate for comprehensive background checks and other gun reforms.
As Longdon sat waiting for her flight, a screen in the concourse showed footage of the press conference. A tall, thin man standing nearby stared at Longdon, then back at the screen. Then he walked up to Longdon and spat in her face. No one else blinked.
Longdon was shocked and embarrassed, she told me, but she didn’t falter. “Wow, aren’t you a big man,” she said as he turned and walked away. Instead of calling for security, she wheeled herself to a restroom to clean herself off. She was tired—she lives with constant physical pain—and didn’t want to miss her flight.
“Should I have done something more? Quite honestly, in the scheme of things it was a little man and a little moment,” she said. “He felt to me like a coward and a bully.”
What happened to Longdon in Indianapolis is part of a disturbing pattern. Ever since the Sandy Hook massacre, a small but vocal faction of the gun rights movement has been targeting women who speak up on the issue—whether to propose tighter regulations, educate about the dangers to children, or simply to sell guns with innovative security features. The vicious and often sexually degrading attacks have evolved far beyond online trolling, culminating in severe bullying, harassment, invasion of privacy, and physical aggression. Though vitriol flows from both sides in the gun debate, these menacing tactics have begun to alarm even some entrenched pro-gun conservatives.
Imagine that. It’s actually bad enough that some of the gun-proliferation activists are alarmed? (Yet the near daily murderous rampages against innocent civilians and little children isn’t a problem? I just just don’t understand these people….)
When I wrote recently about the fact that Open Carry demonstrators are bullying people into silence, I got some doozy responses. This twitter barrage was especially … vivid:
What @digby56 needs is to be on the receiving end of some gang’s diseased ghetto cocks rapin’ her up. She’d whistle a different tune then.
— Hector (@hectorhector219) May 9, 2014
Do ya think @digby56 is really concerned with OC and her 1A? Nope. She’s a Prog-Lib bitch who hates guns and loves gummint control.
— Hector (@hectorhector219) May 9, 2014
But maybe @digby56 wouldn’t change her mind on 2A during a ghetto gang rape. She’d lie passively, blame white racists, & dream it was Obama.
— Hector (@hectorhector219) May 9, 2014
I couldn’t help but think of that little exchange when I read about this new NRA “outreach” to African American young people. I’m fairly sure that most people, young, old, black or white, find that ad campaign to be laughably absurd. ButI certainly hope that any young African American male understands the ramifications of taking these folks up on that invitation. These gun proliferation activists tend to be hostile to young black men who are just walking around eating skittles or playing music too loudly. If anything, this campaign seems designed to give them a legal reason to “stand their ground.”
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Time to let the FCC fear your voice on net neutrality
by David Atkins
They’ve moved the pay-to-play Internet fastlane rules to the public comment phase:
U.S. regulators on Thursday advanced a “net neutrality” proposal that would ban Internet providers from blocking or slowing down access to websites but may let them charge content companies for faster and more reliable delivery of their traffic to users.
For four months now, the public can weigh in on the rules proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in what promises to be an intense tug-of-war between some tech companies and consumer advocates on one side and Republicans and broadband providers on the other, over the extent to which the agency can regulate Internet traffic.
Dozens protested the vote at the FCC on Thursday as many consumer advocates have rejected FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal that may allow some “commercially reasonable” deals in which content companies could pay broadband providers to prioritize traffic on their networks.
Critics worry the rules would create “fast lanes” for companies that pay up and mean slower traffic for others. Wheeler pledged to use all of his powers to prevent “acts to divide the Internet between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots.'”
“I will not allow the national asset of an open Internet to be compromised,” Wheeler said. “The prospect of a gatekeeper choosing winners and losers on the Internet is unacceptable.”
Consumer advocates want the FCC to instead reclassify Internet providers as utilities, like telephone companies, rather than as the less-regulated information services they are now. Broadband companies and Republicans, both in Congress and at the FCC, vehemently oppose the plan.
The advanced proposal seeks comment on benefits of reclassification, which critics say would throw the industry into legal limbo, discourage investment in network infrastructure and still not prevent pay-for-priority deals.
Wheeler’s two fellow Democrats at the FCC expressed misgivings about his proposal, with Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel saying the FCC moved “too fast to be fair.” But she and Mignon Clyburn concurred with Wheeler for a 3-2 vote to begin the process of collecting public comment on the proposal.
“The real call to action begins after the vote today,” Clyburn said. “You have the ear of the entire FCC. The eyes of the world are on all of us.”
The contact information for the FCC is here.
Call them. Email them. Let them know that a two-tier Internet is completely unacceptable.
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Not saying we won’t get our hair mussed …
by digby
Must read ‘o the day: David Denby on the 50th anniversary of “Dr Strangelove”. An excerpt:
America had become an obsessively anti-Communist national-security state. Twenty-four hours a day, at least a few bombers, fully loaded with nuclear weapons, were aloft, as a way of warding off a Soviet sneak attack. The strategist Herman Kahn, in a notorious book, “On Thermonuclear War,” published in 1960, insisted that a nuclear war was winnable, and that life would go on despite millions dead and nuclear radiation everywhere. In the movie, George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson, the Air Force Chief of Staff, advocates for war as follows: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say that no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops—depending on the breaks.” And Kahn later proposed a doomsday device as the ultimate deterrent: threatening the extinction of human, animal, and plant life, he believed, would end the dangerous brinkmanship displayed by the Soviet Union and the United States in the Cuban missile crisis. He thought that it was a reasonable idea, even a clever one.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose:
All of this was, so to speak, in the air. So were many kinds of ridicule in response—not just schoolboy pranks but the disbelieving complaints of liberal intellectuals at dinner parties, cabaret sketch humor, scabrous Off-Broadway plays, Norman Mailer’s rants against technology, and, most of all, the nihilistic funning of Mad, which had started as a comic book in 1952 and become, a decade later, a nagging presence in American humor. Mad made indiscriminate fun of everybody and everything. Growing up fast and hard in New York in the late forties and early fifties, and scraping around the edges of photojournalism, Kubrick the young filmmaker was certainly aware of all this. For “Strangelove,” he distilled the essence of hipster disgust: the only sane response to the prospect of nuclear annihilation was ridicule and black farce. Columbia Pictures produced the movie; nothing like “Strangelove” had ever been made before by big-studio Hollywood.
Who’s today’s Kubrick?
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