Month: June 2014

Limbaugh was credited with winning the 1994 election. Meet the new Rush Limbaugh.

by digby

Back in 1994, the new Republican congress led by Newt Gingrich named talk radio host Rush Limbaugh as an honorary member of congress for his work in getting them elected:

REP. DICK CHRYSLER (R-MI): We as the freshman class would like to nominate and make Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of our freshman class and present to him today a pin that all the freshmen got called “The Majority Maker,” because surely he helped us become the majority!

In the wake of the stunning defeat of Eric Cantor tonight, welcome the new Rush Limbaugh:

Conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham campaigned here with the long-shot primary challenger to Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Randolph-Macon economics professor David Brat, issuing a blistering attack on Cantor’s immigration record. 

At an evening rally at the Dominion Club attended by roughly 500, Ingraham and Brat showed no love lost for Cantor, who has been touting himself as an anti-amnesty warrior in campaign literature.

“I was thinking about this prisoner swap. I kind of wish that President Obama would have thought this through a little bit more. Instead of sending five Taliban MVPs over there, he could have just traded one Eric Cantor,” Ingraham said, adding that “let’s be sure he gets treated well.” 

“If you actually want to help America, sending Taliban back to the battlefield, that’s not going to actually help us. The Taliban could actually kill some of our people.” 

“Sending Eric Cantor back for a little while, let’s be sure he gets treated well, that could actually help things. It could help our economy, stop so much spending.” 

The rally is another sign of the volatile political climate Cantor faces back home, even as he is poised to be the next Speaker of the House when its current holder, John Boehner, steps down. Cantor, although known for pulverizing even empty suit opponents, has taken a number of unusual steps to keep the Brat threat at bay, including the anti-amnesty literature and negative television ads criticized by fact-checkers as misleading.

Everyone on TV is saying that this is all grassroots with no astroturf. Not true. Talk radio won this one. And Ingraham was  all over Brat’s campaign and his anti-immigration message.

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Get a ring on it, beyotches

by digby

Or let’s do the time warp again …

Today the Washington Post published a piece by W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson originally headlined, “One way to end violence against women? Stop taking lovers and get married.” The subheadline, even more unbelievably, read: “The data show that #yesallwomen would be safer hitched to their baby daddies.”

The headline, after criticism and mockery on Twitter, was quickly changed to “One way to end violence against women? Married dads” and “The data show that #yesallwomen would be safer with fewer boyfriends around their kids.”

But still.

As Caitlin MacNeal writes at TPM, “While the Post chose to change the way it framed the piece, the article, which tells women that marriage will solve their problems, is still up on its website.”

Let’s remember, of course, that editors, not writers, create headlines. But the content of the piece isn’t much better. Wilcox and Wilson claim that women and children are “safer in married homes,” that married men “behave better,” that women who are married tend to live in “safer neighborhoods” — you get the idea. Why bother addressing misogyny when marriage will fix sexual violence?

Get that M R S ladies and stop yer bitching. If he can have the cow for free he’s going to beat the hell out if it whenever he feels like it, amirite?

By the way, where is this throwback nonsense coming from? You guessed it:

Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, is part of a growing movement of conservative Christians in the social sciences seeking to reimagine social relations through the lens of their distinctive faith. The lens of Christian patriarchy provides not only different shading to social scientific findings, but also kaleidoscopic distortion—creating patterns and shapes which simply aren’t there.

It’s not entirely surprising that conservative Christians are spouting traditional marriage as the best way to “protect” women from themselves. In their minds we’re little more than children. It is a bit more concerning that the Washington Post is publishing this drivel as if it has some sociological merit as an answer to misogyny and domestic violence.

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Judge rules against teachers and common sense in Vergara trial

by David Atkins

You may recall my writing a while back about the Vergara trial, which is basically an assault on public education and on teacher protections. My first primer on the case is here, additional context is here, and a further update is here. I talked about it on Netroots radio, and my brother wrote about it on the front page of Daily Kos here. The basic story is that a billionaire front group of faux education “reformers” is claiming that children’s civil rights are being violated by teacher protections in California, even though that’s patently untrue and California doesn’t even have a tenure system for teachers.

Today Judge Treu ruled for the plaintiffs without much in the way of evidence beyond the fact that he agreed with the political agenda of the billionaire “reform” group.

Benjamin Riley, an education attorney who has worked on these issues in the past, gives some good insight into what is wrong with the ruling:

1. Does strict scrutiny apply? Perhaps the most important paragraph in the tentative decision can be found at the bottom of page 8, where Judge Treu decides to apply “strict scrutiny” to the challenged statutes. Strict scrutiny is often described as “strict in theory, fatal in fact” because it requires the defending party to carry an enormous legal burden in justifying a policy. But the legal justification for strict scrutiny offered by Judge Treu here is a bit thin — in a single sentence, he says that based on evidence at trial and prior California Supreme Court education cases, the plaintiffs demonstrated the challenged statutes impacted their fundamental right to education. If the Court of Appeal disagrees with that analysis, and applies a different standard of review, the outcome will look different than it does today.

2. What facts will the final ruling contain? It’s important to understand that the greatest power a trial court has over a case involves the factual record, and not the legal analysis. The Court of Appeal will feel perfectly at ease applying fresh eyes to the legal issues raised in Vergara; what it won’t feel comfortable doing is peering deep into the factual record. In his tentative decision, Judge Treu cleverly relies on evidence offered by defendants in defense of the challenged statutes — which shows that, even by their own admission, these laws have problems. That said, this ruling is a far cry from the meticulously detailed evidentiary record that Judge Vaughn Walker developed in the case that challenged Prop. 8, California’s anti-gay marriage statute. The plaintiffs would be wise to try to add additional citations to the record in their proposed order that will become the final trial court ruling.

3. Will Judge Treu’s rhetoric come back to haunt plaintiffs? The consequences of grossly ineffective teachers on students “shocks the conscience.” The existence of LIFO means that defendants must have an interest in separating students from effective teachers, the logic of which is “unfathomable.” Strong words, and if you happen to think that reform of CA’s teacher-tenure laws are long overdue, they likely stir certain emotions. But when this case goes up on appeal, the reviewing justices may see these statements in a somewhat different light, and indicative of perhaps a not-entirely-neutral interpretation of the evidence.

There is also some question as to the applicability of the case to other states, but be aware that the anti-public-education crowd will waste no time in attempting to port the gist of the argument all across the country.

There is still a long way to go in the fight, however. The ruling will be stayed pending the certainty of an appeal by teachers and public education groups.

Even so, it’s another depressing reminder of the power of billionaires and their paid shills in their attempt to dissolve any and all shreds of protection from workers all across America, turning us all into desperate, underpaid at-will wage slaves.

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From the “we knew this but now we have proof files”

by digby

Yes, he was a real pip:

Did Richard Nixon’s campaign conspire to scuttle the Vietnam War peace talks on the eve of the 1968 election to capture him the presidency?

Absolutely, says Tom Charles Huston, the author of a comprehensive, still-secret report he prepared as a White House aide to Nixon. In one of 10 oral histories conducted by the National Archives and opened last week, Huston says “there is no question” that Nixon campaign aides sent a message to the South Vietnamese government, promising better terms if it obstructed the talks, and helped Nixon get elected.

Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, “was directly involved,” Huston tells interviewer Timothy Naftali. And while “there is no evidence that I found” that Nixon participated, it is “inconceivable to me,” says Huston, that Mitchell “acted on his own initiative.”

Huston’s comments—transcribed and publishedon the web site of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California on Wednesday—are the latest twist in a longstanding tale of political skullduggery involving Nixon and his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. It is a tale that features a secret “X-file,” a mysterious “Dragon Lady” and reports of wiretaps and bugging that has captured the imagination of scholars and conspiracy theorists for half a century

The good news is that the Republican Party is much more responsible today than it was back then so this sort of thing could never happen now. Just trust your leaders to do the right thing and everything will be fine.

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Who are the real terrorists? Gay couples naturally.

by digby

My morning piece at Salon highlights a very badly timed Townhall post about the domestic terrorist threat in America. No, it’s not right wing gun nuts like those two in Las Vegas last week-end. It’s an “armed and dangerous” group of radicals called “the LGBT”

Imagine the sheer terror of the poor baker when confronted with a live subpoena. Try to calculate the horror of a florist being forced to defend his belief that the happiest day of these people’s lives is an act of violence. I don’t know how they’re going to find the strength.

This writer homes in on the true nature of this terrorist threat:

Make no mistake about the LGBT intentions. No longer content to ‘fit in’ or simply be ‘accepted’ by others for living an odd lifestyle, today they are out to castrate the minds and hearts of others into supporting their deviant faith – or crush those who might oppose their ranting into oblivion. As per the LGBT website, their goal is “… to seek to change the hearts and minds of Americans to ‘equality’ …” – unless you happen to be an American who doesn’t want to be brainwashed.

You see, these violent terrorists are seeking to castrate people. Or do something to some part of their body, at least, although it’s hard to picture exactly how that works.( It must be some gay thing …) But basically it comes down to a very special terrorist tool: brainwashing people against their will, also known as “seeking to change the hearts and minds of Americans” — and then crushing everyone who doesn’t succumb into oblivion, naturally. They’re terrorists, after all, armed with dangerous LGBT stealth weapons of persuasion.

Read on. They’ve infiltrated Big Gummint too.

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Freedom

by digby

There have been now 74 school shootings since Sandy Hook, roughly 9.5 a month
— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) June 10, 2014

74 school shootings since Sandy Hook.

117 total mass shootings in 2014.
— igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) June 10, 2014

Ed Kilgore:

Yes, conservatives do need to tone down extremist and dehumanizing rhetoric aimed at liberals of agents of the federal government, as Beutler suggests. But I strongly believe the more immediate demand liberals are justified in making of our conservative friends is a repudiation of the kind of self-defined “right of revolution” that can serve as dynamite in the minds of the self-deluded. As I argued (also at TNR) in the wake of the Tucson shootings back in 2011:

I’d like to think the tragedy in Tucson would convince conservatives (and anyone on the left with similar tendencies) to begin showing more respect for the rule of law and democratic processes even if they produce results they don’t like—which would mean no more talk about liberals or Democratic politicians or “bureaucrats” as if they belong to a different country or even a different species, and no more suggestions that conservative policies are mandated by some higher law, divine or natural.

But at a minimum, I think circumstances call for this: an absolute self-disciplinary ban among conservatives against revolutionary rhetoric, particularly in conjunction with defense of the right to possess lethal weaponry.

Unfortunately, we’ve heard nothing of the kind, even as the death toll of political violence slowly rises.

QOTD: Crazy radical Al Gore

by digby

Via Pando, on the question of the NSA surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden

This is a threat to the heart of democracy. Democracy is among other things a state of mind. If any of us are put in a position where we have to self censor, and think twice about what we write in an email, or what we click on for fear that somebody reading a record of this may misunderstand why we looked up some disease or something, some young people who might otherwise get help with a medical condition, might think oh my gosh if I put down a search for bipolar illness I will be stigmatized if my online file is hacked or accessed by my employer. That kills democracy.

Indeed. Thought crimes are a real democracy killer.

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Who still thinks being gay is sinful?

by digby

White evangelical Protestants are particularly likely to believe that homosexuality is a sin. In 2013, a Pew Research Center survey found that about eight-in-ten white evangelicals (78%) said it is a sin to engage in homosexual behavior, similar to the percentage saying the same 10 years earlier (82%). In 2013, about eight-in-ten black Protestants (79%) also said homosexual behavior is a sin, but far fewer white mainline Protestants (38%), Catholics (33%) or religiously unaffiliated people (18%) agreed. Overall, among the general public 45% said homosexual behavior is a sin.

In the same 2013 survey, six-in-ten white evangelical Protestants (59%) said homosexuality should be discouraged by society and 74% said there was a conflict between their religious beliefs and homosexuality, both more than any other major religious group besides black Protestants. In another 2013 survey, we found that 66% of white evangelicals said homosexuality is morally unacceptable. Overall, only 37% of Americans said this.

Young people tend to express more positive views of homosexuality and more support for same-sex marriage as compared with older generations. And the same pattern seems to be true of young evangelicals. In aggregated polling from 2012 to February 2014, 29% of white evangelicals under the age of 30 expressed support for allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, compared with 24% of evangelicals age 30-49, 19% among evangelicals age 50-64, and 14% of evangelicals age 65 and older.

But young evangelicals tend to look much more like other evangelicals than like other young people on this question. Among all adults under age 30, fully 67% expressed support for same-sex marriage in our aggregated 2012-2014 data, more than doubling the level of support from young white evangelicals.

It’s somewhat difficult to know how many evangelicals there are because the category encompasses a number of different protestant sects. There are a lot of them in the US and around the world. But I would guess that it wasn’t too long ago that many more Catholics would have been on the conservative side of this issue so it’s not as if these beliefs don’t ever evolve. This is just a snapshot of the moment.

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This can’t be good

by digby

I suppose Condi Rice would call these more “birth pangs” of democracy but I think this is probably something else:

Iraqi police and army forces abandoned their posts in the northern city of Mosul after militants overran the provincial government headquarters and other key buildings, dealing a serious blow to Baghdad’s efforts to control a widening insurgency in the country, a provincial official and residents said Tuesday.

The insurgents seized the government complex — a key symbol of state authority — late on Monday, following days of fighting in the country’s second-largest city, a former al-Qaida stronghold situated in what has long been one of the more restive parts of Iraq. The gunmen also torched several of the city’s police stations, freeing detainees held in lockups.

The fighters are believed to be affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaida splinter group that is behind the bulk of the bloody attacks in Iraq and is among the most ruthless rebel forces fighting to topple President Bashar Assad in neighboring Syria. The group has also tried to position itself as a champion for Iraq’s large and disaffected Sunni minority.

Several worried Mosul residents reported seeing the gunmen hoisting the black flags inscribed with the Islamic declaration used by ISIL, al-Qaida and other jihadist groups.

The insurgents appeared to be in control in several parts of the city, they said over the telephone, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

I don’t know how many Americans died in Mosul during the last decade but there were a lot of them. And many more Iraqis. Why was that again?

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Geithner’s dad was an economic hit man. 


by digby

Following up on his fascinating review of Tim Geithner’s book, Matt Stoller excerpted various pieces which refer to his childhood.

Geither describes his father this way:

My father is quieter, more reserved, more skeptical, more conservative in every way. He’s an understated child of the fifties, a nice complement to my mother’s exuberant spirit of the sixties. He’s also a lifelong Republican, although he came of age in the Eisenhower era, before much of his party veered to the far right. He devoted his professional life to global development, not a typically conservative cause.

Geithner was born in 1961. How then can his father be a child of the 50s? It makes no sense. Children of the 50s are baby boomers. His father, most likely, was a child of the depression and WWII — a very different type. Not that it matters really. Stoller is really highlighting the pieces of the book that show Geithner made it to the top through his connections and his family rather than any particular skill and I don’t doubt that’s very true.

The funny thing about his memories of living abroad as a child very much mirror my own. I too grew up as an expat, in some of the same places Tim Geithner grew up. In fact, we went to the same school in Thailand although not in the same years. That post-war period in the 1960s and 1970s was rife with swashbuckling Military Industrial Complex and International Construction types who lived what Geithner describes somewhat accurately as a “quasi-colonial” existence in exotic locales. (The difference was that those of us who were not from the elite social cast were right back in middle class suburban American life the minute we came home…)

But it is interesting that Geithner ended up where he did. Remember, his father “devoted his life to global development, not a typically conservative cause.” If you read the book “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” you can see what that really means:

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is a book written by John Perkins and published in 2004. It provides Perkins’ account of his career with consulting firm Chas. T. Main in Boston. Before employment with the firm, he interviewed for a job with the National Security Agency (NSA). Perkins claims that this interview effectively constituted an independent screening which led to his subsequent hiring by Einar Greve, a member of the firm (and alleged NSA liaison) to become a self-described “economic hit man”.

According to his book, Perkins’ function was to convince the political and financial leadership of underdeveloped countries to accept enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID. Saddled with debts they could not hope to pay, those countries were forced to acquiesce to political pressure from the United States on a variety of issues. Perkins argues in his book that developing nations were effectively neutralized politically, had their wealth gaps driven wider and economies crippled in the long run. In this capacity Perkins recounts his meetings with some prominent individuals, including Graham Greene and Omar Torrijos. Perkins describes the role of an EHM as follows:

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.

For me, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” was a big eye-opening book on the level of “The Shock Doctrine.” Perhaps that’s because I grew up in that milieu that it rang so true. That Geithner’s father was one of those guys and that his son became who he became is wholly unsurprising. It’s the family business.

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