Month: June 2014

They do this because they can

by digby

I suppose if you think that the misdemeanor charge being drunk and mouthing off are crimes that deserve humiliation and abuse at the hands of the police then you’ll think this sort of thing is a-ok:

On March 30, Indiana State Police troopers were called after the New Albany woman got into a domestic fight with her estranged husband.

The officers brought the mother of four to the jail on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting an officer.

Tabitha Storms Gentry was pepper-sprayed after she shouted and begged for clothes, her lawyer said.

Tabitha Storms Gentry was pepper-sprayed after she shouted and begged for clothes, her lawyer said.

Inside the jail, Gentry was questioned by four officers. Video showed she was compliant but upset, her lawyer said.

Suddenly, the officers grabbed her, restrained her and forced her out of the room, into a padded cell.

The video doesn’t have audio, but Landenwich said her client must have said something that made the officers upset.

Then, the officers removed all of her clothing, leaving her completely naked. Both male and female officers removed her pants, shirt and undergarments.

Gentry was given a smock to gover up with, but her lawyer said it was more like a mat than an article of clothing.

Landenwich said the officers did not perform a cavity search — a common reason an arrestee might be stripped of clothing.

“This was not a strip search,” Landenwich told the newspaper. “I think it was outright abuse.”

The video showed Gentry banging on the cell door. She was apparently yelling, asking officers for something to wear.

Gentry was forced to walk through open areas of the jail while naked, her lawyer claimed.

Landenwich said police threatened to pepper-spray Gentry if she didn’t quiet down.
When she kept shouting, a hand reached into the cell from a slot and sprayed the room, video showed.

Almost 50 minutes later, officers let Gentry out of the cell so she could wash the spray off her body and out of her eyes.

But her smock slipped off when officers handcuffed her, so she walked through the common area of the jail totally exposed, her lawyer said.

The video showed returning to the cell a few minutes later, still naked.

“They leave her in that room — still with no clothes, with a mat that is now soaking wet from the water — for five more hours before they finally give her a jumpsuit and let her make a phone call,” her lawyer said.

Officers said Gentry was drunk and violent throughout the arrest.

According to a report, Gentry was warned that “since she had resisted, threatened and attempted to kick an officer, she was being placed in a smock and the females (officers) were going to remove her clothes.”

In another report, police said they pepper-sprayed Gentry to subdue her for “the safety of this facility” because her shouting “agitated other inmates.”

Because stripping a suspect naked for “threatening to kick an officer” and for “the safety” of the facility is perfectly fine.

 I wonder where they got that idea anyway?

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QOTD: *TDFGOTP

by digby

Doug Feith:

“This is the education of Barack Obama, but it’s coming at a very high cost to the Syrian people to the Iraqi people, to the American national interest. The President didn’t take seriously the warnings of what would happen if we withdrew and he liked the political benefits of being able to say that we’re completely out.

*The dumbest fucking guy on the planet:

Of all the revelations that have surfaced about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal so far, the least surprising is that Douglas Feith may be partly responsible. Not a single Iraq war screw-up has gone by without someone tagging Feith—who, as the Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy, is the Pentagon’s No. 3 civilian, after Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz—as the guy to blame. Feith, who ranks with Wolfowitz in purity of neoconservative fervor, has turned out to be Michael Dukakis in reverse: ideology without competence.

It’s not that the 50-year-old Feith is at fault for everything that’s gone wrong in Iraq. He’s only tangentially related to the mystery of the missing weapons of mass destruction, for example. (Though it’s a significant tangent: An anonymous “Pentagon insider” told the Washington Times last year that Feith was the person who urged the Bush administration to make Saddam’s WMD the chief public rationale for going to war immediately.) Nor was it Feith who made the decision to commit fewer troops than the generals requested. (Though Feith did give the most honest explanation for the decision, saying last year that it “makes our military less usable” if hundreds of thousands of troops are needed to fight wars.) But if he isn’t fully culpable for all these fiascos, he’s still implicated in them somehow. He’s a leading indicator, like a falling Dow—something that correlates with but does not cause disaster.

Being a neocon and a failure means never having to say you’re sorry.

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Is Marie Antoinette waking up from her beauty nap?

by digby

David has a nice catch over at Political Animal today that addresses one of the big questions I’ve had since the beginning of the financial crisis: what in the hell do these wealthy jackasses think will happen once people get desperate? It just seemed absurd to me that these allegedly brilliant financiers and businessmen couldn’t see that spreading just a little of their vast wealth would go a long way to preserving what they have. It’s as if they have nothing to live for if they aren’t on a quest to get every last penny for themselves. David finds an unlikely enlightened plutocrat:

While Blankfein argued that one way to fix income inequality is to “make the pie grow” and grow the economy, he also acknowledged that “too much of the GDP of the country has gone to too few of the people.” He added, “If you grow the pie but too few people enjoy the benefits of it, the fruit, then you’ll have an unstable society.”

David observes:

The smarter denizens of the plutonomy know that it’s unwise to court civil unrest. Many on the right seem to believe that economic insecurity will lead people to simply work harder; cynical operatives on the right work to ensure that any anger is directed outward and toward the “others” in society. But that doesn’t always work, and once a racist, populist prairie fire has been ignited, it’s very difficult to stop until it has scorched everything in its path—including the people who set it and thought they could control it.

You may have made a killing on pitchfork futures but that won’t keep the mob from using them on you.

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“Nixon was a piker”

by digby

Masochist that I am, I spent a few hours with Fox News last night and this morning just to get a flavor of what they’re talking about in Bizarroworld. Needless to say, Obamacare is responsible for everything bad in the world including the chaos in Iraq (which means we need to start bombing immediately), Bowe Bergdahl should be strung up as a traitor and we’re going broke so we need to cut taxes. But what caught my attention was the hysteria over the missing IRS emails, which turned each commentator into a frothing monster along the lines of Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

In case you haven’t been keeping up on this Very Important Scandal:

Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea party controversy.

The IRS said Lois Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011, wiping out an untold number of emails that were being sought by congressional investigators. The investigators want to see all of Lerner’s emails from 2009 to 2013 as part of their probe into the way agents handled applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups.

Lerner headed the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications by some conservative groups.

“Do they really expect the American people to believe that, after having withheld these emails for a year, they’re just now realizing the most critical time period is missing?” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight Committee. “If there wasn’t nefarious conduct that went much higher than Lois Lerner in the IRS targeting scandal, why are they playing these games?”

Charles Krauthamer called Nixon a “piker” compared to this administration and virtually every right wing wag is bringing up the “18 minute gap” as the proper precedent showing that Obummer is far, far worse that Tricky Dick could ever hope to be.

But there’s another precedent they might want to look at that’s a little bit more recent and a little bit more relevant:

In response to a federal court order issued last week, the White House late last night refused to acknowledge any missing e-mails, instead stating that it “has undertaken an independent effort to determine whether there may be anomalies in Exchange e-mail counts” during the 2003-2005 period. A sworn statement by the Chief Information Officer of the White House Office of Administration filed with U.S. federal court just before midnight admitted the White House had recycled its e-mail back-up tapes before October 2003 and only began retaining the back-ups starting at that point.

“It strikes me as odd that they recognized a problem and changed their practice in 2003 to start saving the backups, but four-and-a-half years later they still have not yet figured out whether or what e-mails were deleted,” commented Meredith Fuchs, the Archive’s General Counsel. “It also is troubling that the problem may have started before October 2003, and they acknowledge that back-ups prior to that period were recycled and are gone.”

“Two years after a special prosecutor concluded that key e-mails were missing from the White House system administered by the Office of Administration, the White House astonishingly now admits it has no back-up tapes from before October 2003 and doesn’t know if any e-mails are missing,” said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive.

The loss of White House e-mails first surfaced on January 23, 2006, when prosecutors in the Scooter Libby matter informed Mr. Libby’s defense counsel that they were unable to provide copies of e-mail records “because not all email records from the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.” The full scope of the problem was not appreciated until April 2007, when Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) issued a report stating that over 5 million e-mails were missing throughout the Executive Office of the President. At that time, White House spokesperson Dana Perino acknowledged the lost e-mails.

Dana Perino yesterday:

Yep. She did it.

Oh, and for all you folks who are just so sure the government will only use the vast stores of information it’s collecting to protect the children from the foreign boogeymen, here’s a little clue about what certain of our fine leaders think it might also be good for:

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) responded to the news by asking the National Security Agency to turn over all the metadata it has collected on Lerner, in an effort to help find out more about who Lerner contacted.

“I have asked NSA Director Rogers to send me all metadata his agency has collected on Lois Lerner’s email accounts for the period which the House sought records,” said Stockman. “The metadata will establish who Lerner contacted and when, which helps investigators determine the extent of illegal activity by the IRS.”

Why not? It’s just sitting there, amirite?

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Picking pecans and torturing animals, All American pastime

by digby

Surprisingly this creepy guy is not one of Saddam’s long lost sons, he’s a US Senator:

“I grew up coming down here for Christmas,” he said. “My father’s family was here. My mother’s family was from rural Hinds County in Utica.”

“It was fun, it was an adventure to be out there in the country and to see what goes on,” he said of his boyhood visits to Hattiesburg. “Picking up pecans, from that to all kinds of indecent things with animals.”

The audience chuckled.

“And I know some of you know what that is”.

That’s Thad Cochran. People are assuming this is a sexual thing and it might well have been. But I’m going to guess that, like George W. Bush, he’s actually referring to animal torture. Either way, it’s repulsive.

And no this isn’t a generational thing. My father grew up in the country back in the 20s and he hunted, trapped and fished for a living throughout his childhood. He was extremely respectful of animals and thought that people who weren’t were sick pieces of work. It wasn’t “normal” to do “indecent things” to animals even then.

I have to love the fact that people “chuckled” at his comments. I can only hope it was actually nervous laughter and they just wanted to get the hell out of there.

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Yes, they’re VERY desperate to stop people from getting health insurance

by David Atkins

Those not in Virginia may have missed this story flying a little under the radar, but the Virginia GOP basically bribed a Democratic senator to resign, thus handing them control of the chamber in attempt to end-run Governor McAuliffe’s threat to shut down the state government if Republicans didn’t include Medicaid expansion in the state budget.

There was some question as to whether the Republicans would actually go through with the threat. Yesterday they did.

The Virginia General Assembly adopted a long-delayed state budget late Thursday, acting after an hours-long debate among newly ascendant Senate Republicans who fought among themselves over whether the plan threw up sufficient barriers to Medicaid expansion.

The Republicans, who gained control of the Senate Monday when a Democrat resigned from what had been an evenly split chamber, approved a spending deal hashed out by a bipartisan group of House and Senate negotiators.

But they first amended it in a way intended to make it harder to expand the federal-state healthcare program for the poor under the federal Affordable Care Act — Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s top legislative priority.

As midnight approached, the plan moved over for consideration by the House of Delegates, where it quickly passed. It was expected to then head to McAuliffe’s desk, but with no certainty that he would approve it and avert a government shutdown before July 1.

McAuliffe quickly issued a statement after the House vote: “When this budget reaches my desk I will evaluate it carefully and take the actions that I deem necessary, but this fight is far from over. This is the right thing to do for Virginia, and I will not rest until we get it done.”

The Senate vote came after Republicans huddled behind closed doors and argued — at times yelling, two participants said — over whether they should tinker with the budget deal and risk undermining it.

Keep in mind that there is no fiscal advantage to Virginia whatsoever in rejecting the Medicaid expansion. Virginia Republicans simply despise the idea that underprivileged people might get health insurance. They really do want the poor to wither and die.

It sounds harsh, but that’s all there is to it. The truth should be told, unadulterated.

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The fools who created the mess should be the last ones to speak

by David Atkins

Following up on Tristero’s post below about the execrable Judith Miller having the temerity to counsel the nation on Iraq, Paul Waldman is excellent reading also:

But there are few people who understand Iraq less than the Republican politicians and pundits who are being sought out for their comments on the current situation.

As you watch the debate on this issue, you should remind yourself that the most prominent voices being heard are the very ones who brought us the Iraq War in the first place, who promised that everything was simple and the only question was whether we’d be “strong” and “decisive” enough — the same thing they’re saying today. They’re the ones who swore that Saddam was in cahoots with Al Qaeda, that he had a terrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, that the war would be quick, easy and cheap, that since Iraq was a largely secular country we wouldn’t have to worry about sectarian conflict, and that democracy would spread throughout the region in short order, bringing peace and prosperity along with it.

We can start with the man on every TV producer and print reporter’s speed dial, John McCain. McCain does provide something important to journalists: whatever the issue of the moment is, he can be counted on to offer angry, bitter criticism of the Obama administration, giving the “balance” every story needs. The fact that he has never demonstrated the slightest bit of understanding of Iraq is no bar at all to being the most quoted person on the topic.

For context, here’s a nice roundup of some of the things McCain said when he was pushing to invade Iraq in the first place. When asked if Iraqis were going to greet us as liberators, he answered, “Absolutely.” He said, “Post-Saddam Hussein Iraq is going to be paid for by the Iraqis” with their oil wealth (the war ended up costing the American taxpayer upwards of $2 trillion). And my favorite: “There is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias, so I think they can probably get along.”

The conflict between Sunnis and Shiites is the central dynamic of the Iraq conflict, of course. Yet today, the media once again seek out John McCain’s wisdom and insight on Iraq, which is kind of like saying, “Jeez, it looks like we might be lost — we really need to ask Mr. Magoo for directions.”

…

And the rest of the neocon gang is getting back together. Here’s Lindsey Graham advocating for American airstrikes — and I promise you that if the administration does in fact launch them, Graham will say they weren’t “strong” enough. Here’s Max Boot saying that what we need is just short of another invasion of Iraq: “U.S. military advisers, intelligence personnel, Predators, and Special Operations Forces, along with enhanced military aid, in return for political reforms designed to bring Shiites and Sunnis closer together.” Former Bush administration official and torture advocate Marc Thiessen is appalled that Barack Obama squandered George W. Bush’s glorious Iraq victory.

And Bill Kristol, who may have done more than any single person outside the Bush administration to make the war a reality, and whose predictions and assessments about the war were so spectacularly wrong they constituted their own genre of stupidity? He’ll be on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday, so he can enlighten us about what’s really going on.

There’s no reason for any of these people to even be on TV talking about the issue. They understand little and less about Iraq and foreign than almost anyone else in politics.

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Judith Miller? Seriously? On Iraq? Seriously?!??!?

by tristero

You have to be kidding.

And for those who are Judy noobies, go ahead and read what Miller did.

 During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein’s ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by Chalabi and his allies—almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate. 

For the past year, the Times has done much to correct that coverage, publishing a series of stories calling Chalabi’s credibility into question. But never once in the course of its coverage—or in any public comments from its editors—did the Times acknowledge Chalabi’s central role in some of its biggest scoops, scoops that not only garnered attention but that the administration specifically cited to buttress its case for war.

The longer the Times remained silent on Chalabi’s importance to Judith Miller’s reporting, the louder critics howled. In February, in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing held up Miller as evidence of the press’s “submissiveness” in covering the war. For more than a year, Slate’s Jack Shafer has demanded the paper come clean. 

But finally, with Chalabi’s fall from grace so complete—the Pentagon has cut off his funding, troops smashed his portrait in raids of the INC office—the Times’ refusal to concede its own complicity became untenable. Last week, on page A10, the paper published a note on its coverage, drafted by executive editor Bill Keller himself. The paper singled out pieces that relied on “information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors, and exiles bent on ‘regime change.’ ” The note named Ahmad Chalabi as a central player in this group…

Miller’s many doubters at the Times were effectively silenced. She had emerged as one of the paper’s biggest stars, with the kind of “competitive metabolism” that new editor Howell Raines—he’d taken over from Joseph Lelyveld the week before 9/11—made into a crusade. According to a friend of Raines’s, as well as one of Miller’s colleagues at the paper, the editor pulled her aside after the attacks. “Go win a Pulitzer,” he told her.

For the next two years, she supplied the paper with a string of grim exclusives. There was the defector who described Saddam Hussein’s recent renovation of storage facilities for nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. There was her report that a Russian virologist might have handed the regime a particularly virulent strain of smallpox. To protect themselves against VX and sarin, she further reported, the Iraqis had greatly increased the importation of an antidote to these agents. And, most memorably, she co-wrote a piece in which administration officials suggested that Iraq had attempted to import aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons. Vice-President Dick Cheney trumpeted the story on Meet the Press, closing the circle. Of course, each of the stories contained important caveats. But together they painted a horrifying picture. There was just one problem with them: The vast majority of these blockbusters turned out to be wrong. 

A bowl of overcooked penne has more credibility than Judith Miller.

And people wonder why Thad Cochran is in trouble

by digby

Good lord:

In an interview Thursday, Cochran, who is locked in a tight runoff-election campaign with state Sen. Chris McDaniel, appeared to be completely unaware of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s loss to a Tea Party-aligned challenger two days earlier.

The interviewer asked Cochran if Cantor’s loss made him more concerned for his own chances. McDaniel, who has the support of many high-profile Tea Party-aligned politicians and groups, has claimed momentum in the wake of Cantor’s stunning defeat.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cochran told the interviewer in a video posted on Fox News’ website. “What happened in Virginia?”

“With Eric Cantor losing his seat,” the interviewer replied.

“Well, I haven’t really followed that race very closely at all,” Cochran said.

“Really?” the interviewer said, bewildered.

“Really,” Cochran said.

When the interviewer went on to explain the situation and its importance — the majority leader and No. 2 Republican in the House of Representatives being knocked off by an unknown, underfunded challenger — Cochran said, “It happens.”

“Members of Congress — some win, some lose,” Cochran said. “It’s not an automatic proposition.”

Cochran has been criticized in the final months of the campaign for what seems to be his general lack of awareness on the trail.

I’m one who thinks that the far right really did unseat Cantor because he was perceived as being a squish, particularly on “amnesty.” But if Cochran loses, I really doubt it can be attributed to Tea Party insurgency. He’s just no longer with it — and the voters have an alternative who’s just as conservative as he is. In fact, it’s a testament to the power of incumbency that he made it into a run-off.

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No, smoking pot doesn’t make you homicidal

by digby

My piece in Salon this morning takes on the laughable claim by Accuracy in Media that because the Las Vegas shooter Jared Miller was a pot smoker and a fan of Alex Jones, his shooting was a leftist revolutionary act:

[I]t’s possible that the combination of far right rhetoric along with a libertarian desire to end the drug war attracted Miller to Jones, but it’s pretty clear that it was the guns that bound them to each other most strongly.

Kincaid proves, if nothing else has, that he is seriously out of touch with his own movement:

The paper said that Garry Frick, the owner of a bookstore, got caught in a short but dramatic debate with Jerad Miller, in which the pothead “covered everything from Bundy to the Declaration of Independence to the morality of pornography, guns and drugs in a span of less than 15 minutes. He kept misquoting things and incorrectly using words, Frick said, all the while sounding very sure of himself.”

It sounds like marijuana took its psychological toll on him.

If “misquoting things and incorrectly using words all the while sounding very sure of himself” is a sign of marijuana induced psychological problems, the entire right wing of this country is a very dedicated bunch of potheads.

read on … these people just can’t get any sillier.