Little beyotches
by digby
Where do you suppose the misogynists get their ideas anyway?
.
"what digby sez..."
Month: June 2014
Ok, who put the LSD in the brownies
by digby
One of my oldest friends (Hullabaloo movie critic Dennis Hartley — shhhh don’t tell him) was the subject of a very funny story told among our crowd for years. Back when we were teens, despite admonitions not to, Dennis ate a full pan of pot brownies and ended up lying in his bed for several hours freaking out. At some point he came into the room demanding to know “who put the LSD in the brownies.” That was a long time ago.
Maureen Dowd is even older than we are but apparently she’s been very sheltered and never encountered marijuana baked goods until she had a similar “bad trip” to Denver recently. And now she thinks that this pot business is bad for kids because they might do what she did.
Let’s just say it’s always possible that some kids will fail to ask for or follow dosing directions. As a matter of fact, kids have been making that mistake for 40 years as my story above illustrates. I hate to break he news but kids didn’t just discover marijuana since it’s been legal, they have been smoking and eating pot this whole time! And guess what? There has not been an epidemic of ER visits by people who are think they are hallucinating on “the pot.” Somehow, the millions of people who have used marijuana all these years have been able to navigate these strange waters without any major problems.
But even if there were a sudden spate of older women over-indulging in a marijuana candy bar and ending up in the emergency room it won’t do anything but create a bad experience if it happens. They won’t die. There will be no brain damage. Usually, the result of such events is that the person decides they don’t ever want to use marijuana again. (Dennis certainly never did.) Which I would think would make Maureen very happy.
If only getting bombed on booze — which causes you to behave like a fool, fall down, slur your words, lose your memory, vomit uncontrollably and feel as if you have the flu for about 36 hours — would have the same deterrent effect. Funny I haven’t seen any Maureen Dowd columns about the effects of getting blotto from over drinking. Do you suppose she’s never had that experience either?
*I don’t think kids should smoke pot, by the way. Developing brains don’t need chemical alteration in my view and that includes a lot of the “medication” that’s being legally prescribed these days. But we have conducted a decades long experiment on a huge population with marijuana and if there were lethal dangers we would have seen them. It shouldn’t be legal for minors. But adults shouldn’t be surprised if some of them use it anyway — just like booze. But that will just mean that nothing has changed.
.
Laura Ingraham’s crusade against (immigrant) children — except her own, of course.
by digby
I wrote about the good Catholic Laura Ingraham’s latest xenophobic rantings over at Salon this morning and the trolls are out in force. (Apparently, unaccompanied immigrant children should go back where they came from.)
[W]e have the leading crusader against “illegal immigration,” ABC’s newest star Laura Ingraham, calling this humanitarian crisis an “invasion facilitated by our own government.” She blamed a number of politicians of both parties, all of whom, aside from Obama and the hated “mavericks” McCain and Graham, either had Hispanic or Jewish last names. She then said she was going down to Eric Cantor’s district to campaign against him with the message:
“Oh no you won’t. This is our country… Our borders matter to us. Our way of life and our culture matter to us. Our jobs and our wages matter to us. No you won’t.”
This is because little children are going to ruin our culture and our way of life and take our jobs. Indeed, the government is “trafficking illegal immigrants from one part of the country to another part of the country to further erode American wages and further forward their goal of ultimate amnesty and changing the electoral and cultural landscape of the United States forever.” (That’s one of her hobbyhorses, along with accomplice Ann Coulter, who insists that immigrants must be stopped not only because they’ll trash the place but because they’re going to vote Democratic. Fraudulently, of course.
She’s really awful on immigrants as are most of the hate radio stars and the wingnut commentators. One hopes it’s the dying embers of their intolerant movement, but that’s probably a vain hope. When you listen to Ingraham and her ilk talk about this there is no doubt that they are true believers. If this hatred is ebbing away it’s going to take a few more generations to work itself out of the body politic.
Let the GOP try to stand in the way of regulating power plant emissions. Good luck with that
by David Atkins
It’s 1:00am pacific time as of this writing (for those who may not have noticed, I usually write these morning posts the night before and schedule them forward), and it has been a very long day for this tired county Dem chair. So I’m going to save deep thoughts on the election until the dust has settled on some of the races that are still too close to call at this point.
Tonight I just wanted to reinforce this tidbit from the Washington Post on the popularity of regulating power plants emissions per the President’s plan:
A lopsided and bipartisan majority of Americans support federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll that also finds most are willing to stomach a higher energy bill to pay for it.
Fully 70 percent say the federal government should require limits to greenhouse gases from existing power plants, the focus of a new rule announced Monday by the Environmental Protection Agency. An identical 70 percent supports requiring states to limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions within their borders. (Read everything you need to know about the EPA’s proposed rules).
Democrats and Republicans are in rare agreement on the issue. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans, 76 percent among independents and 79 percent of Democrats support state-level limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Strong tea party supporters are most resistant to limits on emissions by states and power plants; 50 percent say the federal government should impose caps, while 45 percent say they should not.
Let the GOP try to rant and rail against this commonsense idea. Not even Republican voters are opposed to it.
.
QOTD: Charlie Pierce
by digby
Bergdahl is a window. When the previous administration took us to war in Afghanistan, the voices of opposition were few and very far between. The previous administration then turned the war in Afghanistan into a sideshow of the war it really wanted, the war it had planned since before it took office, the criminal debacle in Iraq. The effort the previous administration put into the task of lying us into the war it wanted drained money, and energy, and attention away from the war that was (at least partly) forced upon it. The energy the previous administration put into trying to legitimize its criminal “statutory violations,” as McCarthy would put it, and the energy the previous administration put into reversing centuries of American policies in areas such as torture, and the energy the previous administration put into covering it all up, drained money, and energy, and attention away from Afghanistan, which was as distant an outpost of the national administration as it was distant from the officials so hellbent on ignoring it. These were the days in which George W. Bush told us that he didn’t spend much time thinking about Osama bin Laden, whose attacks on this country were used to justify the entire decade of crimes and bungling. The current president ran for the office he now holds based on the formulation that Iraq was the wrong war and Afghanistan was the right one. This was a debatable proposition, but at least it gave the war in Afghanistan a pride of place in the national mind that the Iraq-centered geopolitics of the previous administration had denied it.
Of course, even though Afghanistan had fallen out of the spotlight, Americans were still dying there. Americans were still living in a war zone, with all the physical and psychological peril that involved. There were still casualties of all sorts. Much of this damage, and many of these casualties were unique to the circumstances of that war in that place, as is the case in any war. (I remember sitting with my father and his friends, listening to them talking about World War II, and thinking how different the experiences seemed to be between the veterans of the European and Pacific theaters of what was the same war.) We have to confront the unique legacy of the war in Afghanistan and the unique legacy of the war in Iraq by acknowledging that the experiences of the men and women who fought there in many ways were unique to the places where they fought. We have to confront the unique legacy of the war in Afghanistan and the unique legacy of the war in Iraq by acknowledging, as a democratic self-governing people must, that we were taken to war in each different place for different reasons, with different impacts on the history of how we have governed ourselves, and how we will govern ourselves in the future. It is time for the American people to confront the war in Afghanistan not as a sideshow, and not as a theater in a fanciful “war on terror,” but as a war we freely launched in a specific place at a specific time and for a specific purpose. We have ignored the unique circumstances of that war for far too long. The return of Bowe Bergdahl gives us a chance to begin that hard and serious work.
That’s the last thing the Republicans — and some Democrats too — want. Keeping the two wars entwined, and stoking the fires of chauvinism and martial glory is what keeps the Deep State going. If there is one lesson they learned from Vietnam it’s that.
Please click over for the whole thing. It’s really great.
A few good torturers
by digby
Jeffrey Kaye points out yet another report about horrific acts of torture at Guantanamo — and nobody cares:
The Senior Medical Officer (SMO) at Guantanamo who attended at least two of three high-profile “suicides” at Guantanamo nearly eight years ago concluded at the time that, contrary to the conclusions of a later government investigation, the detainees did not die by hanging but by “likely asphyxiation” from “obstruction” of the airway. Moreover this SMO found a prisoner he examined and pronounced dead had “cotton clothing material in [his] mouth and upper pharynx.” (See pgs. 5-7 of this PDF to view the SMO’s original findings.)
The finding is consistent with other accounts, and with the theory the three prisoners died from a torture procedure known as “dryboarding,” as researcher Almerindo Ojeda described in an 2011 story at Truthout.
Yet, unaccountably, the SMO was never formally interviewed by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which had the Department of Defense mandate to investigate the supposed suicides. Furthermore, the SMO’s account was not included in the NCIS final report.
This new finding is one of a number of such discoveries detailed in a new investigatory report published last month by The Center for Policy and Research (CPR) at Seton Hall University School of Law.
Thus far, their report has been totally ignored by the press.
Dry-boarding is a torture method that induces the first stages of death by asphyxiation. Unlike waterboarding, where water is poured on a wet cloth placed over a supine subject’s airways, so their breathing slowly fills their lungs with water, dryboarding induces asphyxiation through stuffing the subject’s airways with rags, then taping shut his mouth and nose. It is among techniques used by the United States during its war on terror: CIA and military agents under the Bush administration described this as among enhanced interrogation techniques. It has since legally been defined by US courts as torture.
I know that some of you movie buffs may recognize that “technique” as the one used against the unfortunate private in “A Few Good Men” who was accidentally killed when the brass ordered soldiers to “teach him a lesson.” It was called a “code red.” (And ironically, that illegal act was supposed to have taken place a tGuantanamo before it was a prison camp.)
I always wondered if everyone took the same message from that film as the writer obviously intended. I thought it was very possible that people would think the kid deserved it because well … he was a wimp and we need gladiators. (You know — “you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”) I’m reminded of those thoughts as I contemplate these methods being used in the Guantanamo prison camp — and the fact that no one gives a damn. It doesn’t look like there’s going to be a Hollywood ending for this one.
You can download the full report at this link. Scott Horton also has written an article about this at Harper’s but it’s behind the subscription wall.
Kaye summarizes the whole thing this way:
Government authorities contend the three prisoners died in an act of simultaneous suicide by hanging, an act JTF Guantanamo Commander Harry Harris described only one day after the deaths as “asymmetrical warfare.” It is this version of what happened that has been accepted by a wide section of the press. Horton’s article surmises that the prisoners may have died at Guantanamo’s “Camp No,” also known as “Penny Lane,” thought to be a special CIA black site at Guantanamo used to coerce prisoners, including through torture, to turn informants for the U.S. government.
CPR’s report goes much farther than Horton’s article in documenting exactly how the government pulled this document — Exhibit 25 of the NCIS report — and replaced it with random pages from elsewhere in the group of documents gathered in the course of the investigation. Detailed in Appendix D of the report, the work is an impressive piece of forensic research.
This deliberate suppression of information contrary to the government’s story should be a matter of public outrage and congressional investigation, but the CPR report also shows how the Obama administration’s Justice Department deliberately misled congressional queries about the report in the wake of the 2010 Harpers report and earlier Seton Hall CPR investigation and report, “Death in Camp Delta” (PDF).
No. People are running around today shrieking about a standard prisoner exchange inspiring terrorists. This isn’t even on the radar.
.
We ignore people who don’t vote. We stop caring about you. So vote.
by David Atkins
It’s that day again. If you’re obsessive enough about politics to be reading this, you should probably already be registered to vote by mail (assuming you live in a state that allows it.) But if you’re registered to vote at the polls, be sure to get out there and vote today.
If you believe that there really is value in seeing Democrats defeat Republicans–as I suspect most of you do–then it’s very important that you vote. It’s not just that your vote helps win elections today. When you vote, the Democratic Party knows that you’re that much more reliable a voter. We don’t have to spend as much money making sure you show up, and you won’t get harassed as often. From a progressive warrior point of view, it also means that when there are intra-party primaries to pick the more progressive Democrat, the campaigns will fight harder over your vote because they know you’re going to show up.
For the rest of you, this is why the people who say they’re going to “punish” politicians by not voting are just deluded. You’re not punishing anyone. You just fall off our radar. We stop caring about you at all.
As campaign workers, we sort voters a number of different ways, but the most important beyond partisanship is voter frequency. If you’re a Democrat who voted in the last 3 major elections, we call you a “3×3” voter. We know that you’re almost certainly going to show up and we know you’re almost certainly going to vote for the Democrats on the ballot; all we have to do is make sure you know who all the Democrats are in the non-partisan races, which Democrats to vote for in the primaries, and which initiatives to vote for.
If you voted in 2 out of the last 3 major elections, we have to spend more money on you–not to convince you how to vote necessarily, but to just make sure you get out and show up to vote the right way at the top of the ticket. If you’re 1×3, we will call and harass you almost endlessly, because you’re unreliable.
Do you know what happens to 0x3 voters? We just don’t care about you. You’re not worth the time. We don’t read your facebook posts or internet comments about how much you hate both parties for the NSA or Afghanistan or whatever. You’re a cipher. You have far more impact on us if you’re a 3×3 conservative Democrat who threatens to leave the Party and start voting for Republicans, because then we both lose your vote and our opposition picks up a vote. You would have far more impact by being a regular voter and threatening to leave and vote Green Party, but since the Greens aren’t exactly going to pick up any seats, all we’ve done is lost your one vote. Which sucks, but not as badly as losing someone to the Republicans does.
So guess what? When a bunch of Democrats who voted in 2008 decided to just not show up at the polls in 2010 because they weren’t inspired or whatever, the Democratic Party didn’t say to itself “oh, we should be more progressive and inspirational!” The Party said, “well, those people can’t be counted on. Let’s worry about the more conservative senior voters who are on the fence.”
If you want to make the Democratic Party care more about progressives and progressive issues, withholding your vote isn’t how to do it. That only weakens your hand.
The biggest way to make an impact is to be both loud and reliable. Particularly when it comes to voting in Democratic primaries. Make sure the party knows you vote, that you’ll vote for Democrats generally, but that any individual politician may or may not get your vote–and that you’ll vote against them in a primary if it comes to that.
Those are the people who scare politicians. Not the non-voters.
So get out there and vote. Because you know what we call the sort of person who votes in a June off-year midterm primary? Someone we have to pay attention to.
.
The very consistent John McCain
by digby
FYI, John McCain, who now is railing against the administration for its prisoner swap has flip-flopped again. Back in 2012, he was against it. Then, in February he changed his mind:
Sen. John McCain says he now would be inclined to support trading a Taliban prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay for a U.S. soldier held captive in Afghanistan.
In 2012, McCain called the idea of negotiating with the Taliban “bizarre” and “highly questionable,” but on Tuesday he said on CNN’s ”Anderson Cooper 360″ that he would be open to a swap now being discussed.U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has been held by a group with ties to the Taliban for almost four years, and the group has demanded the United States release five Taliban prisoners in exchange for him.
The Washington Post reported that U.S. officials confirmed that talks among diplomats and the Pentagon were under way. The official U.S. policy is not to negotiate with terrorists, but the military is winding down operations there by the end of the year and could risk leaving Bergdahl behind, CNN noted.
McCain said his stance has changed only because the previous proposal was to release five “hard-core” Taliban leaders as a “confidence-building measure.” The current proposal would be an actual exchange of prisoners.
“These are the hardest of the hard core. These are the highest high-risk people, and others that we have released have gone back into the fight,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in an interview on “Face the Nation,” adding that he was disturbed the Taliban named the prisoners they wanted in exchange for Bergdahl’s freedom.
“We need to know more information about the conditions of where they are going to be,” McCain added. “It is disturbing that these individuals would have the ability to reenter the fight.”
(…)
For McCain, the chief concern is what will happen to the detainees once they are released.“If they reenter the fight then it is going to put American lives at risk and none of us want that to happen…if they are able to have after a year in Qatar to do whatever they want to do there’s no doubt they will reenter the fight,” he said.
Mr Consistency.
.
War of the Worlds rolls on
by digby
Well at least it isn’t Move-On “politicizing” the military. That would require a congressional rebuke:
A former Bush Administration official hired, then resigned, as Mitt Romney’s foreign policy spokesman played a key role in publicizing critics of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the released prisoner of war.
The involvement of Richard Grenell, who once served as a key aide to Bush-era U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton and later worked for Romney’s 2012 campaign, comes as the Bergdahl release has turned into an increasingly vicious partisan issue.
The New York Times reported that “Republican strategists” had arranged an interview for them with men who served in Afghanistan with Bergdahl, who was released after five years of imprisonment by the Taliban in a controversial prisoner swap deal. In the article, the men express their anger at Bergdahl for leaving the base, causing other soldiers to risk their lives looking for him.
The same soldiers also did interviews with The Weekly Standard, the Daily Mail, the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News.
Cody Full, one of the soldiers quoted in the New York Times and other stories, tweeted yesterday about Grenell: “I want to thank @richardgrenell for helping get our platoon’s story out.” Grenell retweeted the tweet, calling Full a “true American hero.”
Grenell is the guy known for juvenile tweeting, John Bolton worshiping and being forced out of the Romney campaign when the his voters found out he was gay. Whatever.
What’s more interesting here is that soldiers apparently believe that a fellow soldier should be left on the battle field because his political views make them suspect he was a deserter. That’s a precedent they might not want to set.
I’m genuinely puzzled by this. Do they honestly believe that the US government should have just let this guy rot forever based only upon the “feelings” of some of his fellow soldiers? I can see them insisting that he be investigated or that he be court martialed or something, but to say that he should have been left behind seems a very bizarre position for a soldier to take.
Prisoner swaps have been around forever. George Washington arranged them in the Revolutionary War. And I don’t think anyone has ever suggested that they not be done on the basis of the soldier’s political leanings or the suspicion they might have deserted. And these Guantanamo prisoners aren’t al-Qaeda, they’re Taliban, enemy soldiers in the Afghan War. They are no different than the Nazis we swapped or the Japanese prisoners of war. They aren’t supermen.
And as far as the men who died searching for this fellow, keep in mind that this happens from time to time, as Marines will even go after the bodies of their dead comrades and be killed in the process. (Blackhawk Down was a situation like that.)
There’s something about this conflict that continues to make some Americans see it as an unprecedented threat of such magnitude that rules which have been in place for centuries are no longer operative. They still think of it on the scale of an alien invasion. Still. 13 years after 9/11. I honestly thought that the smoke would have cleared by now. It’s extremely unnerving — and dangerous — that it hasn’t.
I’ve been saying for some time that this notion the Republicans have been vanquished because of their lunatic right wing is premature. Yes, they are on the run on some of the social issues like gay marriage and pot. (Women’srights, not so much.) Huzzah. And both parties are on board with the Big Money Boyz agenda — their differences are mostly pretense. But the national security card is a very, very potent card and they aren’t giving it up. Watch how your allegedly victorious Democratic Party reacts when they are challenged on it. I suspect it won’t be pretty.
.
The Koch brothers’ model Senator
by digby
Over at Salon this morning I wrote about the original Tea Party Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. He’s quite the multi-tasker:
[W]hat to make of his scolding the people who put him in office at last week’s Republican Leadership Conference?
“I think the conservative movement may just be maturing a little bit. You can be very doctrinaire, you can demand purity, but in the end if you want to advance policy that you want enacted you have to win elections,” Johnson said when asked about a recent spate of Tea Party losses around the country.
“I value the membership of the Tea Party movement. I am right there with them ideologically, I mean, ‘Taxed Enough Already.’ But the groups don’t necessarily represent all of the individuals in the movement. I think the individuals are now realizing they may have been led astray by an individual group or two and they really do understand that they have to win elections,” he said, adding, “My guess is the Tea Party grassroots are maybe a little more flexible.”
He went on to point out that he just “went to a few Tea Party rallies” back in 2010 but that he “never joined a group.” Only four years in Washington and he’s already lost his fire.
But what “groups” do you suppose he’s talking about when he says there’s a difference between the grass roots and the “groups”? Here’s a picture of Johnson at one of the Tea Party rallies back in 2010. In it, he’s standing at a podium that says “I am AFP.” What’s AFP? Well, it’s Wisconsin’s favorite Tea Party group, Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers’ personal super PAC. Surely he isn’t talking about them. It must be some other Tea Party group leading the flexible grass roots astray. After all, according to Ken Vogel at Politico, Sen. Johnson remains very close to the Randroid Brothers, so much so that he’s referred to as the Kochs’ “model senator.”
Vogel attended a Koch brothers retreat and listened in as Johnson tried to calm down a major conservative donor who was ragging on the Republican National Committee, complaining that they didn’t know what they were doing. Johnson agreed that the money might be better spent with the Kochs on this fellow’s particular issue, but did defend poor Reince Priebus as a good guy whose heart was in the right place. When Vogel stepped in to ask some questions, Johnson jumped up complaining of the heat and ran inside.
I’ve never thought Johnson was the sharpest tool in the shed. And they seem to be asking him to operate with a little bit more finesse than he’s capable of. But I guess he’s the best they’ve got.
.