Month: June 2014

Working for The Big Change

by digby

Ed Kilgore speak, you listen:

What a lot of political observers seem to miss about today’s “constitutional conservatives” is that they view the utility of elections strictly in terms of how far they take the country towards a fixed agenda of radical change. Losing while maintaining one’s “conservative principles” is acceptable so long as the GOP is maintained as a vehicle for The Big Change once Republicans seize total power. From their point of view, it’s essential that candidates in the most favorable red turf are as ideologically pure as is possible.

This is why someone like Kevin McCarthy, the money machine, is seen as a safer bet being from a blue state than being from a red state. The most immediate, dangerous threat to the GOP establishment players comes from the right. Ed’s full piece, interestingly enough, is how the Arkansas Republicans may have made a misstep in assuming that their state was now red enough to accommodate one of their crazies.

There is nothing going on in politics today as fascinating (and potentially horrific) as the prospect of what Kilgore calls “The Big Change” ever happening. Every day the crazy seems little bit more normal.

Update: Thomas Frank has a predictably good piece up about this too. This so so right:

“We got what we had coming,” wrote Rep. Eric Cantor in his book “Young Guns” in 2010. He was referring to the drubbing his party took in the 2006 Congressional elections.

Back in 1994, he reminded readers, his fellow Republicans had taken control of Congress on a platform of high idealism. Once in power, however, “too often they left these principles behind.” The Republicans in that Congress, Cantor continued, “became what they had campaigned against: arrogant and out of touch. There were important exceptions, but the GOP legislative agenda became primarily about Republican members themselves, not the greater cause.”

These Republican backsliders abandoned their free-market ideology for an orgy of earmark spending, Cantor charged, and as a result they were rightfully punished at the polls. “The fact is,” the high-minded young gun declared, “we had our chance, and we blew it.”

Given what happened to Cantor himself last week — shot down in a Republican primary by an even younger gun promising an even more zealous dedication to free-market ideals — these passages seem highly ironic and more than a little bit prophetic.

In truth, however, both Cantor’s attitude circa 2010 and his sudden downfall last week were part of a long-running and basically unchanging Republican melodrama. The clash of idealism and sellout are how conservatives always perceive their movement, and what happened to Eric Cantor is a slightly more spectacular version of what often happens to GOP brass. That right-wing leaders are seduced by Washington D.C., and that they will inevitably betray the market-minded rank-and-file, are fixed ideas in the Republican mind, certainties as definite as are its convictions that tax cuts will cure any economic problem and that liberals are soft on whoever the national enemy happens to be.

And so the movement advances along its rightward course not directly but by a looping cycle of sincerity and sellout in which the radicals of yesterday always turn out to be the turncoats of today; off to the guillotine they are sent as some new and always more righteous generation rises up in their place.

And the Democrats generally toddle along behind wondering why “the country” seems to be lurching ever rightward.

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Dear Nino 

by tristero

You write, and your pal Clarence concurs:

Some there are—many, perhaps—who are offended by public displays of religion. Religion, they believe, is a personal matter; if it must be given external manifestation, that should not occur in public places where others may be offended. I can understand that attitude: It parallels my own toward the playing in public of rock music or Stravinsky. And I too am especially annoyed when the intrusion upon my inner peace occurs while I am part of a captive audience, as on a municipal bus or in the waiting room of a public agency.

“Some there are?” Are you joking? But I digress.

Point The First: Obviously, the issue is not that the display of religion is offensive but that the establishment of any religion by a government is extremely dangerous (see the Middle East) and that the government sanctioned display of a specific religion strongly implies establishment. But then, you’re the legal genius, Nino, you’re supposed to know this.  Now, don’t get me wrong, my friend:  I’m not for a moment suggesting that I think you’re no genius at all but rather a genuinely mediocre mind with a taste for glib, obnoxious putdowns. I’d never suggest that.

Point The Second: Your distaste for rock music and Stravinsky speaks directly to your qualifications to remain seated on the Supreme Court. Anyone who can’t understand either has absolutely no business making solemn decisions affecting this nation’s future legal direction.

For no other reason than your godawful musical taste  – but indeed, there are many other reasons – you deserve to be impeached, arrested, and subjected to 20 years of Don Ameche and Mitzi Gaynor.

Love,

t
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Two of the most heartbreaking photos you will see all year

by David Atkins

The father of the Isla Vista shooter met with the outspoken father of one of the victims:

The fathers of both young men, Peter Rodger and Richard Martinez, spoke out after the shooting and decided to meet one another.

Photos released today show the men clasping hands and hugging during that meeting, which occurred on June 1 in Santa Barbara. The photos were released today by RALLY, an issue advocacy firm.

“We plan to work together so other families such as ours will not suffer as ours have,” Martinez told ABC News affiliate KEYT-TV. “This was a private conversation between grieving fathers who’ve reached common ground.”

Here are two of the photos, courtesy photographer Simon Astaire:

Any politician who looks into the eyes of these two men and does nothing to curb the proliferation of guns in America deserves universal scorn and public shaming. It’s time to finally do something at long last so that no one else has to die to preserve the mass murder fantasies of racists, end-times nuts and anti-government paranoiacs.

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Xenophobes R Us


by digby

The bipartisan beltway conventional wisdom for the past week has been that what the America right is really concerned with these days is DC cronyism rather than old fashioned xenophobia and racism. Hmmm:

Representatives of prominent conservative groups converged on the Heritage Foundation on Monday afternoon for the umpteenth in a series of gatherings to draw attention to the Benghazi controversy.

But this one took an unexpected turn.

What began as a session purportedly about “unanswered questions” surrounding the September 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Libya deteriorated into the ugly taunting of a woman in the room who wore an Islamic head covering.

The session, as usual, quickly moved beyond the specifics of the assaults that left four Americans dead to accusations about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating the Obama administration, President Obama funding jihadists in their quest to destroy the United States, Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton attempting to impose Sharia blasphemy laws on Americans and Al Jazeera America being an organ of “enemy propaganda.”

Then Saba Ahmed, an American University law student, stood in the back of the room and asked a question in a soft voice. “We portray Islam and all Muslims as bad, but there’s 1.8 billion followers of Islam,” she told them. “We have 8 million-plus Muslim Americans in this country and I don’t see them represented here.”

Panelist Brigitte Gabriel of a group called ACT! for America pounced. She said “180 million to 300 million” Muslims are “dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization.” She told Ahmed that the “peaceful majority were irrelevant” in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and she drew a Hitler comparison: “Most Germans were peaceful, yet the Nazis drove the agenda and as a result, 60 million died.”

“Are you an American?” Gabriel demanded of Ahmed, after accusing her of taking “the limelight” and before informing her that her “political correctness” belongs “in the garbage.”

“Where are the others speaking out?” Ahmed was asked. This drew an extended standing ovation from the nearly 150 people in the room, complete with cheers.

The panel’s moderator, conservative radio host Chris Plante, grinned and joined in the assault. “Can you tell me who the head of the Muslim peace movement is?” he demanded of Ahmed.

“Yeah,” audience members taunted, “yeah.”

Ahmed answered quietly, as before. “I guess it’s me right now,” she said.

Where do you suppose they get their information? It can’t be talk radio and Fox News because everyone said last week that they aren’t listening to all those old stale voices anymore.

I’m so glad the right is over its “issues” with people who aren’t like them and have turned their hostility toward the elites who are rigging the game against the average Joe. Also too, their newfound skepticism of overseas military adventures and paranoia about foriegn threats. It’s such a big relief.

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Down the rabbit hole one more time

by digby

Yes, this seems to be real:

h/t to @City_Comfort

FYI on the new boogeyman

by digby

The latest events in Iraq have Wolf Blitzer and his cohorts very stimulated. Perhaps it’s brought up memories of the glory days when tanned and wind-swept embedded journos, fresh off their “basic training” and dressed to the nines in Prada desert fashion tore across the Iraqi frontier liberating everything that moved. (Or maybe it’s just the hope that somebody will once again tune into cable news for any reason.)  Whatever it is, it has resulted in a rather precipitous descent into a certain kind of jingoism we haven’t seen in quite some time.

So as you watch the cable gasbags lose their collective minds over Iraq over the next few days — particularly the handwringing over the leader of the militant group ISIS Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — keep one thing in mind.  The man is undoubtedly a very dangerous and violent person.  And yes, al Qaeda did disavow him. But it’s important to realize that their main problem with him was that he wasn’t focused on the Great Satan of America and instead was on killing fellow Muslims:

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri decried the fighting between rival rebel factions, which has come at the expense of their war against the Damascus regime, as “a catastrophe for jihad in Syria.” He condemned the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), one of the most powerful extremist groups in the country.

“Al Qaeda declares that it has no links to the ISIS group,” Mr. Zawahiri said in a posting on jihadist websites Sunday night. “We weren’t informed about its creation, nor counseled. Nor were we satisfied with it; rather we ordered it to stop. ISIS isn’t a branch of al Qaeda and we have no organizational relationship with it. Nor is al Qaeda responsible for its actions and behavior.”

The disavowal appeared aimed at rallying jihadist rebel groups fighting against ISIS in Syria. A month-old war within the armed opposition has turned the focus of many rebels toward battling ISIS and away from fighting the regime.

Mr. Zawahiri sees ISIS as a renegade band damaging al Qaeda’s brand through car bombings, mass killings, and torture of fellow Muslims. He rebuked the group for fostering discord among fellow Muslims, for attempting to impose a cross-border Muslim state ruled by strict Islamic law, and for oppressing both Muslims and non-Muslims.

That is not a defense of ISIS by any means. By all accounts they are extremely brutal and repressive. But the beef with al Qaeda was a result of a power struggle between the two groups and al Qaeda’s apparent move to tone down the sectarian violence in the name of preserving its “brand.”

There’s a word for what ISIS is doing: “takfir”

ISIS’s overuse of takfir (pronouncing a Muslim an infidel) and subsequent liquidation of enemies by any means has been a source of intense grievance from other Syrian rebel groups, as has ISIS’s unwillingness to submit to an independent sharia court and its belief that it is a sovereign state in liberated territory. Acting on this belief, ISIS has extrajudicially killed, imprisoned, and punished other rebels and civilians in northern Syria.

All of this is very bad news for the people of the middle east who are going to be subject to more violence, more repression and more war.What it doesn’t not appear to be is a major threat to the United States, at least not in the sense that all the usual shrieking warmongers are claiming. There could very well be a threat to oil fields and instability anywhere in the world can always lead to unpredictable outcomes. I don’t mean to dismiss this as inconsequential. It isn’t. But let’s just say that the ongoing fulminating about this new leader everyone claims is “EVEN WORSE than bin Laden” and who allegedly said “see you in New York” when he was released from prison (something his guards took as an off hand joke at the time, by the way) smacks of the media’s need to turn everything into a cheap Hollywood movie at the mere mention of war.

For the moment, this group’s brutality is focused on killing insufficiently reverent Muslims, not Americans, which is why al Qaeda cut them loose. Al Qaeda has a different agenda. And according to this analysis from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy anyway, this disagreement is a significant change in the way the global jihadists are organizing themselves:

This all highlights the current struggle and competition for the future of the global jihadist movement. Al-Qaeda’s unified movement under its central command post-9/11 appears more of an anomaly than the multipolar jihadosphere observers have seen in the late 1980s, 1990s, and in the era following the Arab uprisings.

So, yes. It’s reasonable to be concerned about this and also to acknowledge the brutality of ISIS. What’s not reasonable is to insinuate that when al Qaeda disavowed ISIS for being too brutal that it was because they were ready to hate us good Americans twice as hard as bin Laden so now we have to be twice as scared of our own shadows. At this point we aren’t central to their aims. But if we start swaggering around, talking about good ‘n evil and making it all about us as we usually do, I’m sure we can count on that changing.

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QOTD: Hillary Clinton

by digby

New York Times: If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

Hillary Clinton: At the risk of appearing predictable, the Bible was and remains the biggest influence on my thinking. I was raised reading it, memorizing passages from it and being guided by it. I still find it a source of wisdom, comfort and encouragement.

Hey, you can’t go wrong with that answer. It worked like a charm for George W. Bush:

Texas Gov. George W. Bush, a Methodist who leads the Republican race in opinion polls and fund-raising, gave the most personal testimony in Monday’s debate. Each candidate was asked what “political philosopher or thinker” he identified with most. (In an interview Tuesday morning with Des Moines Register reporters and editors, Bush said he understood the question to be, “Who”s had the most influence on your life?”)

Bush, the third candidate to answer in the debate, said, “Christ, because he changed my heart.”

Moderator John Bachman pressed for more and Bush added: “When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that’s what happened to me.”

That was after a couple of them foolishly thought the question was actually about political philosophers answered predictably with Locke, Hume, Adam Smith and the like. After Bush gave his testimony they all scrambled:

Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Mormon from Utah, followed Bush. Hatch cited Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan as his political role models, then added: “But I bear witness to Christ, too. I really know him to be the savior of the world. And that means more to me than almost anything else I know.”

Gary Bauer, a Baptist, quoted Scripture in naming Christ as his favorite political thinker. “If America’s in trouble in the next century, it will be because we forgot what he taught us,” Bauer said.

It’s only gotten worse since then. I predict that by 2024 candidates will be expected to speak in tongues on on the campaign trail. Of course, a case might be made that Sarah Palin already blazed that trail…

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The oversight charade


by digby

This is why “oversight” is never going to be an adequate check on secret state power:

[T]he communications between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the White House on issues from Iraq, to the Bergdahl swap and the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs are a hot topic to Feinstein’s committee colleagues. Extensive interviews with 10 members of her panel in both parties revealed a flawed process that will require leaps of faith by both sides to repair.

Senior Intelligence Committee member Richard Burr (R-N.C.) guffawed when asked whether the administration’s information pipeline to the committee is broken.
“It’s nonexistent,” he said.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said the relationship is at an all time nadir. And Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) called the latest misstep on Bergdahl’s transfer “either outrageous, outrageous arrogance or total incompetence.”

“The majority of us are together on this. … I think it’s the White House’s move” on picking up the pieces, Coats said.

Sounds bad, right? But then you have to recognize that the administration’s obsession with stopping leaks — something that most of the committee shares when it’s leak they don’t approve of — is at the heart of it:

If he had gotten notice, Chambliss said he would have gone public in opposition — just as he did two years ago when rumors of the release of Taliban fighters from Guantanamo rippled through Washington.

“I’d have raised holy Hell,” he said. “Absolutely. I did last time and I would again.”

You have to give the administration points for consistency, anyway. They really do believe that preventing leaks is worth sacrificing normal constitutional processes for. The Senators, on the other hand, are not quite so reliable. They leak and then they decry leaking, depending on the president and the issue and their own concerns.  The only kind of leaking the administration will stand for are the official leaks to their official stenographers. They don’t see the oversight responsibilities as any more of a necessity than the freedom of the press. And I think they are probably no different than any other administration in this — since the creation of the Deep State after WWII (and the permanent boogeymen who are always trying to kill us in our beds) at least.

“Oversight” will never be enough.  The free press and protections for whistleblowers have to be part of the mix if we expect to keep the government from going off the deep end with their police and military power. It would be very nice if we had a neater and less adversarial way to do this, but we don’t.  Like our imperfect justice system and democracy itself, it just happens to be the best we can do.

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The GOP leadership race shows how DC really works

by digby

I wrote about the Republican establishment response to Cantor’s loss today over at Salon, focusing on the fact that Kevin McCarthy is going to be the new majority leader mostly because he can raise huge sums of money:

Any idea that the consequence of Cantor’s defeat would be a new leadership decided on the basis of ideology misunderstands what drives the choice of partisan leaders. Whenever a powerful member of the party leadership retires or goes down to defeat, the rest of the members lose a very important resource: money. And lots of it. The way these people ascend in partisan politics isn’t through their “beliefs” or any kind of ideological purity, it’s through their ability to raise money from big donors and industry and their strategic sense of how best to spread it around. Cantor may have been a jerk — everyone says so. But he was the majority leader because he had bought partisan loyalty over the years from being in bed with big money and judiciously spreading it around. The Tea Party might think Kevin McCarthy is a squish on immigration but everybody in the GOP caucus knows that their own futures rest on made men like him.

But it isn’t just money. It’s also organization. As Robert Costa reported last Friday, McCarthy had it in spades. Not that he built it himself, mind you. He inherited the chief of staff of the most ruthlessly effective House majority leader in GOP history.

That would be none other than Tom DeLay.

I also talk about how, by contrast, the Tea party caucus was completely unprepared for anything and basically just wandered around aimless for days trying to figure out their next steps.

But after I posted that at Salon, I came across this interesting quote from Bill Moyers that sheds even more light on the issue:

And then there are the lapdogs in Congress willfully collaborating with the financial industry. As the Center for Public Integrity put it recently, they are “Wall Street’s secret weapon,” a handful of representatives at the beck and call of the banks, eager to do their bidding. Jeb Hensarling is their head honcho. The Republican from Texas chairs the House Financial Services Committee, which functions for Wall Street like one of those no-tell motels with the neon sign. Hensarling makes no bones as to where his loyalties lie. “Occasionally we have been accused of trying to undermine aspects of Dodd-Frank,” he said recently, adding, with a chuckle, “I hope we’re guilty of it.” Guilty as charged, Congressman. And it tells us all we need to know about our bought and paid for government that you think it’s funny.

Why is that important? Hensarling was one of the hard core Tea Party “insurgents” the grassroots conservatives were hoping would challenge McCarthy. He declined.

You just have to laugh.

You can read my Salon piece here.

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Gun grabbers insist that you buy your deadly weapons in your own name

by digby

Here’s one to make the Bundy militia lose its grip:

The Supreme Court says federal law does not allow a “straw” purchaser to buy a gun for someone else, even if both are legally eligible to own firearms.

The justices ruled Monday that the federal background check law applied to Bruce James Abramski, Jr. when he bought a Glock 19 handgun in Collinsville, Virginia, in 2009 and later transferred it to his uncle in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Federal officials brought charges against Abramski because he assured the Virginia dealer he was the actual buyer of the weapon, even though he had already agreed to buy the gun for his uncle.

I think this court has some splainin’ to do to the NRA and the ghosts of the Founding Fathers. If the 2nd Amendment is a guarantee of your unfettered right to bear arms in the same way the 1st Amendment is a guarantee of a corporation’s right to spend money then this doesn’t follow does it? If making gun buyers buy their own guns isn’t an infringement of their God-given liberty, I don’t know what is. The constitution clearly meant for guns to be traded and passed around like trading cards. And I think it’s in the Bible too.

Of course, the ruling was 5-4 with the commie-lib Hitler loving gun grabbers (plus Kennedy) in the majority so it really doesn’t count. Nothing a few more wingnuts on the court can’t fix.

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