Month: May 2014

A Tea Party for a Christian nation

by digby

I wrote a little bit about Ben Sasse the Ivy League, Tea Partying, Christian Crusader from Nebraska this morning. (Has anyone seen Sasse and Ted Cruz in the same room?)

[I]t is interesting that so far in these primaries the major victory claimed by the Tea Partyers doesn’t feature a standard libertarian-ish right-wing Republican railing against Big Government and babbling about Benghazi!™. It features a hardcore member of the Christian right, which is hardly the image of the Tea Party in the political press. That would be Ben Sasse of Nebraska, the Yale-educated history professor who had the backing of Tea Party groups like Freedomworks, the Senate Conservatives Fund and Club for Growth, and Tea Party icons Sarah Palin and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. He won the primary against establishment-backed State Treasurer Scott Osborne. Yes, he hates Big Government as much as any right-wing Republican, that goes without saying. But Sasse is motivated by his belief that the U.S. is a Christian nation under siege from that Big Government, not by his belief in free markets and low taxes.

Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches unearthed his doctoral thesis from 2004 and it’s a fascinating treatise on the origins of the modern religious right in America. Unlike most historians, he believes that the conservative movement grew up in the 1960s not out of rebellion against the civil rights stances of the Democratic Party but rather the “secularization” of the culture in the wake of the Supreme Court rulings banning school prayer and Bible reading. He even goes so far as to claim that rather than a cynical decision to stoke the flames of Southern racism with the Southern strategy, it was Richard Nixon’s deep understanding of the Christian culture that led him to persuade evangelicals and conservative Catholics to join the GOP and usher in the era of conservatism in the last decades of the 20th century. It’s a novel understanding of that history, to say the least. Most historians cite Nixon’s pursuit of blue-collar Catholics as part of the strategy to peel off working-class votes with racial resentment. But Sasse’s dissertation is evidently persuasive in at least some respects.
But regardless of his level of accomplishment as a scholar, Ben Sasse clearly sees the world through the lens of a conservative Christian crusader.

Read on to see just how extreme this guy is. He’s also very smart. That dissertation does something quite clever: it lets the religious right off the racist hook entirely. According to him, the Christian Right wasn’t catalyzed from the wreckage of Bob Jones University not being allowed to discriminate against blacks as is commonly understood, but rather a natural grassroots groundswell against the creeping “secularization” (also known as Godless atheism) imbuing our culture back in the 1950s. He admits that there might have been some racists among those Southern evangelicals and right wing Catholics in say, Boston and Chicago, but really it was all about their desire for school prayer.

And there may even be some truth in it. Social movements rarely spring up whole out of specific events and the right in America is a multi-faceted group that converges around their sense of being besieged by stronger forces, whether it be from foreign powers or our own Federal Government. Basically these are all people who are frightened by the pluralism of a free and democratic society. So, it’s natural that there would be plenty of variety in motivation for the modern conservative movement. But to say that racism was a second degree motive is simply wrong. It was a prime mover. That’s just obvious.

Anyway, read about Ben Sasse. He’s Ted Cruz with a cross. Well, actually Ted Cruz has a cross. (And his name is Cruz …)They’re all singing from the same hymnal.

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It’s almost as if…

by David Atkins

America’s secret agencies require the very best and brightest. Unless the best and brightest smoke pot.

Current prohibitions against hiring people who have recently smoked marijuana might be making the FBI’s job harder, but the agency isn’t planning on changing its policy.

FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday walked back a claim earlier this week that current rules were making it difficult to hire good computer experts.

“I did not say I’m going to change that ban,” Comey said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. “I said I have to grapple with the change in my workforce.”

“Look, one of our challenges that we face is getting a good workforce at the same time when young people’s attitudes about marijuana and our states’ attitudes about marijuana are leading more and more of them to try it,” he added. “I am absolutely dead-set against using marijuana.”
On Monday, Comey indicated a willingness to change the bureau’s no-tolerance policy, which prohibits it from hiring people who have smoked pot in the last three years.

“I have to hire a great workforce to compete with those cyber criminals, and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” he told an annual lawyer conference.

Making snarky comments about this is almost like a choose-your-own-adventure book. There are so many targets of opportunity it’s hard to pick one.

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The FBI and other federal police agencies join the 21st century

by digby

I didn’t know about this rule against taping statements and am truly shocked it took so long to change the practice. Wow:

Since the FBI began under President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, agents have not only shunned the use of tape recorders, they’ve been prohibited by policy from making audio and video records of statements by criminal suspects without special approval.

Now, after more than a century, the U.S. Department of Justice has quietly reversed that directive by issuing orders May 12 that video recording is presumptively required for interrogations of suspects in custody, with some exceptions.

There was no news release or press conference to announce the radical shift. But a DOJ memorandum —obtained by The Arizona Republic — spells out the changes to begin July 11.

“This policy establishes a presumption that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the United States Marshals Service (USMS) will electronically record statements made by individuals in their custody,” says the memo to all federal prosecutors and criminal chiefs from James M. Cole, deputy attorney general.

“This policy also encourages agents and prosecutors to consider electronic recording in investigative or other circumstances where the presumption does not apply,” such as in the questioning of witnesses.
[…]
Attorneys, researchers and longtime critics of the old policy say reform brings federal agencies up to modern policing standards, and removes a stigma that has damaged the credibility of America’s criminal justice system. Put simply, in the absence of recorded interviews, defense lawyers have been able to undermine honest testimony by some FBI agents while, in other cases, agents misremembered, distorted or lied about suspect statements.

The failure to maintain electronic records of interrogations also created gaps in FBI intelligence-gathering, especially terrorism cases. Instead of maintaining an accurate and largely indisputable record, agents on the witness stand for decades have relied on their memories, interpretations and handwritten notes transcribed into a form known as the 302.

Critics have said that flawed system results in botched investigations, lost evidence, unprofessional conduct and false convictions. They noted that the historic DOJ practice was problematic in trials of suspects ranging from terrorist Osama bin Laden to TV star Martha Stewart to Oklahoma City bombing defendant Terry Nichols, and thousands of defendants with no public exposure.

The FBI, considered one of the most advanced investigative agencies in the world, helped pioneer the use of fingerprints, ballistics, electronic wiretaps, psychological profiling and other advanced techniques. Yet, while local police have audio- or video-recorded suspects for decades, some FBI agents and administrators doggedly resisted the use of a device more accurate than the pen.

As recently as 2005, the FBI declined to give The Arizona Republic a copy of its written policy requiring special authorization for recordings, or even to say when and why the rule was created. Bureau assertions that taping of suspects is a logistical problem, or inhibits honest interviews, are generally disputed by street cops, detectives and professors of criminology. In fact, taping of criminal suspects is now mandatory in at least eight states, either by statute or court decrees.

In 2006, The New York Times uncovered another explanation for the DOJ policy, spelled out in an internal FBI memorandum. Basically, it argued that jurors might be offended, possibly to the point of acquitting defendants, if they observed the deceit and psychological trickery legally employed by agents to obtain information and confessions.

Drizen said the FBI has obtained a number of false convictions in homicide cases, particularly on Indian reservations, because suspect interviews were not recorded. Drizin also noted that, in some recent trials, jurors have acquitted defendants because they mistrusted FBI testimony about interrogations that could have been recorded.

Fred Whitehurst, an attorney and ex-FBI agent who turned whistle-blower, said the new policy is “delightful,” adding, “What have we got to hide?”

Mel McDonald, a former U.S. Attorney for Arizona who now does criminal defense work, said FBI interrogations involve one agent taking notes while a second conducts the interview. While 302 records and agent memories may be inaccurate, he said, their testimony trumps a suspect’s recollection. In fact, a defendant who disputes the FBI statements could be charged additionally with lying to federal authorities.

“I’ve had more clients who told me, ‘That’s not what I said.’ ” McDonald noted. “But you’ve got two agents supporting each other. It’s your word against theirs. Who are they (jurors) going to believe?”

McDonald haled the close of “an insane policy” at DOJ, declaring, “Bravo! It’s about time. It uses science to establish the truth … That’s a no-brainer.”

Larry Hammond, chairman of the Arizona Justice Project, said the recording of interrogations is one of the most important steps in eliminating false confessions and unjust convictions.

“I cannot understand why this hasn’t happened sooner,” Hammond said.

It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?

I’m sure this cuts both ways and that criminal defendants will be caught out from time to time as well. But there is simply no excuse for law enforcement to be against taping of themselves in the line of duty. They work on behalf of the public to ensure that justice is done. Covering their asses is not part of that job description.

It’s surprising that this was decided internally by the Department of Justice rather than mandated by a court considering how long and how energetically they have resisted doing it. But however it happened, it’s obviously long overdue. Chalk one up for the Obama DOJ.

h/t to @bmaz
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The rails of the crazy train

by digby

In case you were believing the hype about the crazy Tea Party being vanquished by the sober Republican establishment, Ed Kilgore takes a look at a couple of House races in Georgia:

One of the most common Twitter-memes early last night was that no matter who won the ultimate Senate prize, Congress would be rid of Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey, two of the members most likely to say very crazy things.

Before celebrating their departure, you might want to take a look at the contests to replace these two men in heavily Republican districts. In both cases, the top finisher last night was someone I had singled out in the past to exemplify the scary “bench” being built by the GA GOP.

In Broun’s district, the leader of the pack and a runoff finalist is the Rev. Jody Hice, a raging homophobe and long-time opponent of church-state separation, who became nationally famous in an earlier campaign for putting up billboards featuring the legend “Tired of Obama’s Change?” with the “c” in “Change” turned into a hammer-and-sickle. He faces a wealthy trucking executive in the runoff, but if the turnout is as low as I think it will be, Hice should be considered the front-runner.

Meanwhile, in Gingrey’s district, a big well-funded field was trounced by a former state senator named Barry Loudermilk, who is a classic, teeth-grinding “constitutional conservative” whom I profiled here more than a year ago:

Described by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway as a “constitutionalist somewhat in the mold of Paul Broun,” Loudermilk became famous even before running for office as the author of a post-9/11 local newspaper screed that went globally viral, encouraging non-Christians and immigrants to pack up and leave America if they didn’t like “our culture.” During his climb through the Georgia Republican ranks, Loudermilk has championed a variety of anti-immigrant bills, “personhood” initiatives, efforts to shut down all state agencies not specifically authorized by the state constitution, and serial theocratic gestures. He was also one of the participants in a colleague’s “briefing” for state senators on the evil United Nations Agenda 21 effort to destroy private property rights.

It’s a token of how far things have gotten out of control in the Georgia GOP that Loudermilk’s runoff opponent, Bob Barr, will be the RINO in the contest. Barr outspent Loudermilk, and obviously (he represented much of this area in the House before redistricting threw him into a losing battle-of-incumbents with John Linder) had a name ID advantage, but trailed him 26-37 last night and will be a heavy underdog in the runoff, I would guess.

Bob Barr is a RINO. That tells you something.

And then there’s this:

The Chamber of Commerce has had a triumphant few weeks.

Key candidates supported by business lobby have won their Republican primaries, some in big upsets. But five of the candidates stand in opposition to one of the core issues the Chamber of Commerce has lobbied hardest for: major legislation on immigration.
Chamber president Tom Donohue has been strident for months, insisting Republicans must pass new immigration laws.

“We’ll be absolutely crazy if we don’t take advantage of having passed an immigration bill out of the Senate,” he said just a few weeks ago, remarking that Republicans shouldn’t “shouldn’t bother to run a candidate in 2016” if immigration reform doesn’t get done. But none of the endorsed candidates who have won with the Chamber’s endorsements are proponents of the Chamber-supported Senate bill.

But practically all of their candidates have said that immigration reform can’t happen without border security first, however, and fixing current law needs to be a priority. And many view the Senate bill as “amnesty” for the 11 million undocumented immigrations in the U.S.

It’s hard to know what game the Chamber is playing. Maybe they’ve been able to secure promises that these folks would vote for IR if push came to shove. Or maybe the Chamber doesn’t really care about immigration. Either way, you cannot really make the case that the “reasonable” Republicans are back in charge. They actually don’t exist.

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Sherrod Brown making a welcome push to expand Social Security

by David Atkins

Greg Sargent has an underreported bit of Social Security news that should please progressives who long been arguing for similar measures:

Dem Senator Sherrod Brown, a member of the Finance Committee, tells me that GOP Senators have requested hearings into Social Security Disability Insurance this summer. Dems expect Republicans to attack the program as wasteful and fraudulent, in part because conservative media have already done so, and in part because at least one GOP proposal in recent days took aim at the program.

Brown says Dems should seize this occasion to get behind a proposal that would lift or change the payroll tax cap, meaning higher earners would pay more, while adopting a new measure for inflation that would increase benefits for all seniors. Instead of getting drawn into debates about “Chained CPI” and other entitlement cuts, Brown says, Dems should make the case that stagnating wages and declining pensions and savings demand an expansion of social insurance.
“We should stop playing defense on Social Security, and instead talk about why Social Security is a public pension that we should be proud of, that has lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty,” Brown tells me. “The three-legged stool — Social Security, pensions, private savings — has seen two of the legs sawed off for a large number of people. It’s time to look at expanding Social Security as an issue of retirement security.”

Brown said he expects Republicans to renew attacks on disability insurance (as opposed to the retirement security portion) to divide supporters of Social Security and renew the push for structural changes to the program, and said Dems could use that to draw an effective contrast. SSDI’s trust fund is set to be depleted soon, but that could be solved by a reallocation fix that’s been done before, rather than a deep benefits cut, which Republicans may press for.
“They want to separate ‘good’ Social Security (retirement security) from ‘bad’ Social Security (disability insurance), to win support for structural reform,” said Brown, who is holding a Senate Finance sub-committee hearing tomorrow on the overall program. “The attacks on disability insurance will accelerate. This is how they will try to back-door the dismantling of social insurance. But the public is with us on social insurance.”

Brown noted that such an issue could play well in the midterms. “The electorate is older, so the field is fertile for Democrats to talk about this,” he said. “We should turn up the volume.”

People like myself who work really hard at the inside game of Democratic politics and personally know a lot of fantastic, progressive, genuine and hard-working elected officials often get frustrated with the cynicism shown by many even smart progressives over politicians in general and the Democratic Party itself. There’s a lot of hand-waving about endemic personal corruption and grousing that the Party itself is a moribund, hopelessly compromised institution.

Those of us who actually know many of the politicians and put our noses to the grindstone to advance a more progressive agenda know that’s not true, and we have to work hard to clear away a lot of that cynicism. If we don’t, many progressives won’t come out to vote, and when our people don’t vote the far-right objectivists win.

That said, it’s hard for us to make our case on that front as local activists when the top levels of the Party seem, in truth, to be either politically befuddled or deeply morally compromised on many issues. The Iraq War is often cited as one such issue, but at least there one could argue that in the years immediately following 9/11 Democrats would have been dealt political defeats for seeming too weak on the “war on terror.”

But the failure of the national Democratic Party to seize on expanding Social Security is something else altogether. There’s literally no downside except the wrath of a few plutocratic oligarchs like Pete Peterson and the rest of the fiscal austerity hand-wringers. The public favors higher taxes on the wealthy, and the public loves Social Security.

Raising the payroll cap is good politics. It’s good policy. So it’s hard to blame the cynics when they argue that personal and political corruption must be to blame for Democrats not doing the right thing on such obvious issues.

If national Democrats want to win more votes and help activists like me, they’d do well to follow Sherrod Brown’s lead. It wouldn’t just be good for the public, it would be good for the fortunes of the Democratic Party at every level. Keeping Pete Peterson and the Third Way crowd happy just isn’t that important.

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When a demonstration isn’t a demonstration

by digby

Chris Hayes and Mother Jones’ Mark Follman discuss the very obvious fact that people who carry guns to political events to “demonstrate” are actually chilling the free exchange of ideas.

Demonstrating for your political beliefs is as American as apple pie. Organize boycots, march on the capitol, carry a sign, scream at your officials, argue in the face of those who oppose you. But the minute guns enter the picture you are no longer demonstrating, you are physically intimidating people with a deadly weapon. But of course, that’s really the point isn’t it?

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Don’t make trouble

by digby

I’ve often used this famous Yiddish joke to describe certain events in Democratic politics:

There were these two Jewish men standing before a firing squad in Czarist Russia. Their crime? Being Jewish. So the Cossack captain heading the firing squad looks at Abie and Yankele and shouts, “Jews, take off your hats.” Abie takes off his hat. But Yankele says, “No, I won’t take off my hat.” So Abie leans over to Yankele and whispers, “Yankele, don’t make trouble.”

There are hundreds of versions of that joke out there. This one comes from a retired professor from San Francisco State named Ralph Beren who now leads seminars at synagogues about Jewish humor and how it’s gotten the people through rough times for millenia.

Anyway, what made me think of it today do you suppose?

Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi announced that she will appoint the following Members to the Select Committee on Benghazi. Pelosi also announced that Congressman Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland will serve as Ranking Member.

The following Democratic Members will serve on the Select Committee on Benghazi:

Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD), Ranking Member, Committee on Oversight & Government Reform Adam Smith (D-WA), Ranking Member, Armed Services CommitteeAdam B. Schiff (D-CA), Committee on Appropriations (Subcommittee on State & Foreign Operations), Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,Linda T. Sánchez (D-CA), Committee on Ways and Means (Subcommittee on Oversight)Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Armed Services Committee, Committee on Oversight & Government Reform

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QOTD: John Boehner

by digby

Truth:

You get in these primary elections – they are hard-fought battles and sometimes – listen, there is not that much, not that big a difference between what you call the tea party and your average conservative Republican,” he said, pointing to the GOP’s near-unanimous opposition to Obamacare, tax increases and an overbearing federal government.

Actually, there’s zero difference. They are the same people.

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Republicans throughout the land deliver for “freedom”. For rich people.

by digby

As we celebrate the return of the Republican “establishment” this morning, I mused over at Salon that perhaps we should give a little bit of thought to what it is these “establishment” Republicans are actually doing all over the country:

It’s the morning after a primary Election Day, the smoke has cleared and the pundits have spoken. They tell us that the portent for November is obvious and the 2016 election will be shaped by what happened in places like Kentucky and Georgia. What they are far less likely to discuss is what the result of elections mean for people in their real lives.

This piece by Corey Robin in the New York Times gives us a hint about what that might be. He talks about a recent study from Gordon Lafer, a political scientist from the University of Oregon who published a paper for the Economic Policy Institute on bills affecting workers all over the country. The bills involved unemployment insurance, sick days, childcare, minimum wage, child labor, collective bargaining, etc. These are meat and potatoes issues for hundreds of millions of Americans. And what he found was that across the board, where Republicans had the power, they passed legislation to roll back workers’ rights and make individual employees weaker in the workplace.

You will be surprised at the kind of nonsense these people are accomplishing. And as Corey Robin points out in his piece, this is all about creating a frightened and docile work force. It makes you think a little bit differently about why we’ve somehow managed to have such a weak recovery with ongoing high unemployment while the owners are doing better than ever.

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It’s not your imagination. Republicans are becoming more racist

by David Atkins

Michael Tesler has the eye-popping charts of the day in a tremendous piece in the Washington Post.

Here is the way Republicans and Democrats used to be split on controversial major events dealing with race:

Here’s how the split is now:

That’s simply stunning. The Republican base had a choice to become more inclusive as the demographic tide advanced on them, or to double down on maximizing the racist white vote.

It’s obvious which way they’ve decided to go.

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