Month: June 2014

Ted Cruz: taking money out of politics is just like burning books

by David Atkins

So Democrats today are making a largely symbolic push to create a constitutional amendment to limit money in politics. It’s a worthy thing to do when there isn’t not much else than can get done legislatively.

If Republicans were smart, they’d ignore it and leave well enough alone. They aren’t smart.

Ted Cruz’ reaction:

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, predicted the Democrats’ amendment would allow critics to use the Constitution to ban books and films.

“Ray Bradbury would be astonished because we are seeing ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Democrats today,” Cruz said, invoking the novel about book burning.

That’s the CPAC straw poll winner, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s keep him talking as loudly as possible.

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Pro-life, but only in the womb

by digby

Just in case you still think all this pro-life rending of garments has always been about he “sanctity of life” perhaps this will enlighten you about the real agenda:

In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.

Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.

More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.

“The bones are still there,” local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “The children who died in the Home, this was them.”

The grim findings, which are being investigated by police, provide a glimpse into a particularly dark time for unmarried pregnant women in Ireland, where societal and religious mores stigmatized them. Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home. “When daughters became pregnant, they were ostracized completely,” Corless said. “Families would be afraid of neighbors finding out, because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time it had been because of a rape.”

I’m sure it’s very nice if children grow up to be happy and healthy people. But it’s always been a secondary concern and still is. The main issue is punishing the slutty women.

They’ve become slicker in their marketing in recent years and are no longer turning pregnant women into indentured servants. Today they just insist that they can be subject to criminal laws if they harm themselves (because their bodies aren’t their own.) They cruelly insist that they be forced to deliver their still born fetuses through normal childbirth and give birth to those which are horribly malformed and cannot live. And they insist that women who wish to exercise their right to decide their own reproductive fate be harassed, abused, insulted and demeaned and their doctors should be run out of business or killed.

But in today’s more evolved world, they aren’t literally neglecting and killing the children they are forcing women to have against their will. So that’s progress.

Read the whole story. And then, after considering all the other revelations of recent years, ask yourself why these institutions have any leg to stand on when it comes to sexual morality. This wasn’t that long ago.

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Eric Cantor throws some juicy red meat at Virginia’s hungry beasts


by digby

Just in case you mistakenly thought Eric Cantor was an honest broker on immigration, this should finally put that idea to rest:

That’s what passes for “nuance” in Republican circles.

This isn’t the first effort by Cantor’s campaign to throw some red meat to the GOP base in the lead-up to his primary, where he faces economics professor Dave Brat. Last week, Cantor’s campaign sent a mailer that also struck a harsh tone on immigration.

Back in Washington, Cantor’s office has pushed back on the notion that he is against immigration reform. As examples, aides have cited his continued support for policies that would grant legal status to undocumented immigrants who enlist in the military, as well as legislation that would grant citizenship to kids brought to the country illegally.

Virginia has a strange obsession with “illegal immigration.”  I wrote a lot about it at one time, based on some articles in The New Republic and the LA Times when they looked into the so-called Minuteman movement a decade or so ago as it was forming in Virginia.  The TNR piece had this:

Bill explains that he “slid into the Minutemen” because he was disturbed by the way his neighborhood was changing, and the other Minutemen standing with him nod in agreement. “Dormitory-style homes” have popped up on their streets, Bill says, and the residents come and go at strange hours. Their neighbors’ children are intimidated and no longer like to play outside, in part because “we’ve got about 17 cars coming and going from our neighbors’ houses.” Matt, another Minuteman who lives in nearby Manassas, claims that the police have busted prostitution rings operating out of nearby properties. Bill doesn’t want his name printed, he tells me, because he worries about retaliation from the local Hispanic gang, MS-13. Pointing to the cluster of day-laborers across the street, he explains to me that the Herndon 7-11 is “a social gathering place, too.” Taplin has publicly objected to a regulated day-laborer site set to open in Herndon on December 19–proposed in order to combat the trespassing, litter, and nuisance complaints that have arisen in conjunction with the informal 7-11 site–because he worries that even a regulated locale wouldn’t change “their behaviors.” Even on the coldest mornings, more than 50 workers often convene at the 7-11, and Bill judges that sometimes only 10 or 20 get hired. “When,” he asks me, “is it ever a good thing for 40 men to hang out together?” 

These anxieties may be overblown, in some cases borderline racist; but they are not, unfortunately, outside the mainstream. In Mount Pleasant, the predominantly Hispanic, rapidly gentrifying Washington neighborhood where I live, complaints have begun to surface about the groups of men that congregate on stoops or outside of convenience stores at night. Those who have complained call it loitering, but one Hispanic resident told the Post that when the men gather outdoors, “[t]hey’re having coffee; they talk about issues. … It’s part of our community.” For the neighborhood’s Hispanic population, this practice is a cultural tradition; for its newer batch of hip, ostensibly liberal urbanites, it is disturbing, and too closely resembles something American law designates a crime. 

These are people who would never admit they share anything in common with the Herndon Minutemen. But like it or not, the Minutemen are acting on anxieties many Americans share–anxieties about the challenge of enforcing the law in towns that are swelling in size due to immigration; anxieties about the challenge of integrating and accommodating an immigrant culture. Border states like California have been grappling with these issues for years, in court battles about day-laborer sites and debates over concepts like bilingual education. Often in these conflicts those who have presented cultural, as opposed to legal, objections to uncontrolled immigration are condemned as xenophobic or racist. But as my Mount Pleasant neighbors have shown, it can be tricky to disentangle legal from cultural discomfort.

Back at the Help Save Manassas booth, volunteers wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” displayed photographs of garbage-strewn houses and yards. One showed a tent next to an overturned wading pool propped up by a stick—overflow, Letiecq claimed, from a house full of illegals. An elderly woman in a Democratic Party T-shirt confronted a stocky ex-Marine named Steve, asking, “How do you know that the people living in these houses are illegal? Poor people would live like that, too.” 

“Ma’am, they’re illegal. They are,” Steve said. “You’re in denial.

Spreading the good word

by digby

One of the nice things about living in a progressive district is that when an old liberal lion like Waxman retires, the scramble to replace him features a bunch of candidates speaking to progressive issues. Like State Senator Ted Lieu who’s running in my own district to replace Henry Waxman:

It’s nice to see my concerns addressed. Many of the other candidates are also running ads that speak to the issues in a progressive way. And that, in turn, reinforces those ideas. It’s a feedback loop. This is why it’s important to support candidates who want to speak in these terms even when they are not going to win. Campaigns are educational opportunities as much as anything and if people never hear a candidate express liberal views or espouse a progressive agenda they have much less chance of ever knowing about them or feeling compelled to leave their house and go to the polls. It may not pay off in the short run, but over the long haul some people’s minds may even be changed by it.

The Democratic Party’s job is to elect Democrats, period. But the progressive movement has a different goal. They often intersect as they will here in California’s 33rd. I’m sure the Party will welcome whichever Democrat wins (and if it’s Independent marianne Williamson, I’m sure they’ll welcome her too.) But where there is a progressive in a race against a party backed centrist or conservative, progressives have no obligation to back them over someone who hews more closely to their beliefs in primaries, even if the centrist or conservative has a better chance of winning, for all the reasons I just set forth. Unfortunately, for some reason, there are a lot of Democrats who become livid at the idea of anyone running for office in a conservative district who they believe is not “serious” because they espouse the very beliefs that virtually every candidate in my district are running on. It’s as if such ideas are never even to be spoken of outside liberals enclaves on the coasts.

I feel just terrible that this makes some people uncomfortable (not), but the truth is that progressive ideas deserve a hearing every place in this country. There are people who believe as I believe all across the nation in all 50 states and while they may not be a majority who can win their district, they have a right to have their voices heard and perhaps persuade a few of their neighbors that the centrist, moderate or right wing worldview are not the only ways to look at the world. Who knows, maybe some day one of these liberal cranks will actually win a seat because of the groundwork that was laid by a few people who decided to run for office so they could talk about progressive ideas.

Anyway, if you think it’s worth it to pay a couple of bucks so that progressives around the country can hear the kind of thing that Ted Lieu is proudly running on in my district, then you can throw a couple of bucks the Blue America 14 slate (which includes Lieu, by the way, who I’ll be voting for tomorrow.)

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Think the lawyers are safe from the robots? Think again

by David Atkins

As mechanization and outsourcing continue to take their toll on the economy, students and those in career transitions have been forced to scramble to careers requiring increasing amounts of higher education to escape the undertow. For many, this has meant going back to grad school or learning to code. For others, it has meant law school.

Because no one can outsource a lawyer, and a robot can’t become a lawyer, right? Right?

But the plight of legal education and of the attorney workplace is also a harbinger of a looming transformation in the legal profession. Law is, in effect, an information technology—a code that regulates social life. And as the machinery of information technology grows exponentially in power, the legal profession faces a great disruption not unlike that already experienced by journalism, which has seen employment drop by about a third and the market value of newspapers devastated. The effects on law will take longer to play themselves out, but they will likely be even greater because of the central role that lawyers play in public life.

The growing role of machine intelligence will create new competition in the legal profession and reduce the incomes of many lawyers. The job category that the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “other legal services”—which includes the use of technology to help perform legal tasks—has already been surging, over 7 percent per year from 1999 to 2010. As a consequence, the law-school crisis will deepen, forcing some schools to close and others to reduce tuitions. While lawyers and law professors may mourn the loss of more lucrative professional opportunities, consumers of modest means will enjoy access to previously cost-prohibitive services.

A decline in the clout of law schools and lawyers could have potentially broader political effects.

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Five key areas of law now face encroachment by this machine intelligence. Some invasions are imminent, and others more distant but no less likely. The area ripest for computational transformation is discovery. As a young lawyer, I spent lots of time rifling through documents to determine which were relevant to an opponent’s request for information. That was the tedious, if lucrative, lot of the junior litigation associate and an important profit center for the litigation group at a big firm. These days, “predictive coding” is removing that labor-intensive task from lawyers. In predictive coding, a small number of lawyers can swiftly sample a large set of documents and construct algorithms—with the help of computer technicians—to decide which documents are relevant. Computers can sort better than people because fatigue, boredom, and distraction reduce human accuracy, while machine intelligence works nonstop, with no lag in attention or need for caffeine or sleep.

“E-discovery” has already become the hottest new phenomenon in litigation. Job growth in this legal area, unlike most others, is strong. One graduate of Northwestern Law School now specializes in head-hunting for professionals who can strengthen law firms’ e-discovery capabilities. And courts now recognize that e-discovery can curb litigation costs and make justice more affordable. For instance, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which specializes in patent cases, has issued a standing order that encourages the use of e-discovery.

Private firms are also beginning to specialize in these sophisticated services. With a combination of computational and legal knowledge, they can innovate more readily than lawyers who are left to their own devices. Last year, Modus raised $10 million to continue its data-driven competition with law firms in e-discovery. Such innovation will render e-discovery more accurate and less expensive, making use of such methods routine.

More than 100 years ago, a jurist wrote: “Every practitioner knows that when a hard case arises, the law books are ransacked from the time of the Norman Conquest and the court blindly applies any absolute precedent that may have been found by diligent counsel.” Even if he exaggerated, searching for the right cases for precedents remains an important legal skill. Yet just as computers have largely replaced humans in making complex calculations, so machine intelligence will supplant lawyers’ legal search function—a second key area to be disrupted.

Until now, computerized legal search has depended on typing in the right specific keywords. If I searched for “boat,” for instance, I couldn’t bring up cases concerning ships, despite their semantic equivalence. If I searched for “assumption of risk,” I wouldn’t find cases that may have employed the same concept without using the same words. IBM’s Watson suggests that such limitations will eventually disappear. Just as Watson deployed pattern recognition to capture concepts rather than mere words, so machine intelligence will exploit pattern recognition to search for semantic meanings and legal concepts. Computers will also use network analysis to assess the strength of precedent by considering the degree to which other cases and briefs rely on certain decisions. Some search engines, such as Ravel Law, already graphically display how much a particular precedent affected the subsequent course of law. As search progresses, then, machine intelligence not only will identify precedents; it will also guide a lawyer’s judgment about where, when, and how to cite them.

Search is also becoming ever more affordable, even as its efficiency increases. Lexis and Westlaw still charge for their superior legal search engines, but free search is now available from FindLaw and Google Scholar, among others, and these sites offer more than adequate assistance for many purposes. Such cost reduction exemplifies the Silicon Valley slogan that information “wants to be free.” Lawyers have traditionally enjoyed leverage over the laity, partly because of their superior access to information. Low-cost legal knowledge poses a threat to that power.

This sort of thing is happening everywhere. Google has decimated the market for political writing as websites struggle for revenue and political organizations have turned to an email-and-petition based fundraising model to survive. The marketing research industry is in turmoil as big data crushes out many traditional research methods. Retail has long been suffering. Education is on the block.

And as artificial intelligence increases, most of those professional jobs everyone is scrambling toward will be gone, too. Or, if not gone completely, they will be glorified button-pushing jobs that pay 1/5 what they used to, which is the other major development in the economy. It’s not so much that unemployment is rapidly increasing, but that there has been rapid destruction of industries and wages. The thing to watch in the broader economy is underemployment more than unemployment, as armies of trained professionals cobble together multiple income sources at far less pay.

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Making dull subjects understandable is what Stewart, Colbert and Oliver do for us

by digby

Are you confused by he net neutrality debate? Let John Oliver explain it to you:

He’s right. It is a dull subject which makes the average person’s eyes roll back in their heads or, more likely, change the channel or turn the page. And that’s where the comedians and the satirists come in.

Oliver’s show is coming right along, by the way. He gives a long form treatment to these stories that’s both informative and funny. Well worth watching — if you have HBO anyway.

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Dodging a bullet on reporter’s privilege

by digby

In a way, this is probably a blessing:

A reporter who has been ordered to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of disclosing classified information lost his bid Monday to get the Supreme Court to clarify whether journalists have a right to protect their confidential sources.

The justices did not comment in rejecting an appeal from New York Times reporter James Risen, who detailed a botched CIA effort during the Clinton administration to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Risen’s reporting is at the center of criminal charges against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling. Federal prosecutors want to force Risen to testify about his sources at Sterling’s trial.

Risen argued that he has a right to protect his sources’ identity, either under the Constitution or rules governing criminal trials. The federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, rejected Risen’s bid to avoid being forced to testify.

This Supreme Court is so partisan that it might be expected to defy the Obama justice department and grant a reporter’s privilege one and for all. But it is also so ideological that it’s far more likely to deny it. It’s a big risk.

And considering that just last week the Department of Justice made this startling admission, Risen can probably rest easy — at least for a while:

“As long as I am attorney general, no reporter is going to go to jail for doing their job,” Eric Holder, who heads the Justice Department, told news representatives in a private meeting earlier this week.

And that, according to Holder’s deputy, has always been Holder’s position.

But Holder’s Justice Department has threatened for several years to put New York Times reporter James Risen behind bars unless he testifies about one of his confidential sources for a 2006 book on covert CIA operations.

Federal prosecutors first subpoenaed Risen for that information in 2008, and Holder has since approved subsequent subpoenas for Risen to testify about his source, most recently at the upcoming trial of former CIA official Jeffrey Sterling, who, even without Risen’s help, was indicted in 2011 for allegedly being the source. Defying a subpoena backed by a judge amounts to contempt of court, which can put someone in jail for up to 18 months.

Risen’s case has become part of a much larger uproar over how the Justice Department handles journalists and their confidential sources – an uproar peaking last year with news that federal investigators had secretly obtained phone records from The Associated Press for a separate leak investigation and had described Fox News reporter James Rosen as a criminal “co-conspirator” in another leak probe.

The uproar forced the Justice Department to revise its guidelines for dealing with reporters, specifically when and how federal investigators can obtain a reporter’s records.

But a Justice Department official acknowledged that those revisions did not tackle when and how federal investigators can try to compel reporters to testify about their confidential sources, something the comments from Justice Department leadership this week addressed in unprecedented terms.

“So [not jailing a reporter] has been the policy of this attorney general from the start?” ABC News asked Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole at a reporters’ roundtable inside the Justice Department Wednesday.

Cole answered simply: “Yes.”

Good to know the whole thing is just a kabuki designed to scare reporters and give lawyers something to do.

One of these days it would be a good idea to test the constitutionality of the reporter’s privilege before the Supreme Court. But this Supreme Court is not one where liberals and civil libertarians should feel confident of getting a good result on anything.

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Good luck putting the “open carry” genie back in the bottle

by digby

Gosh, even 41% Republicans would rather not sit with their kids and eat their burger and fries with some yahoo wandering around the place with an AR-15 casually strapped to their chests. I wonder why?

According to the poll, 55 percent of Americans prefer that retailers and restauranteurs don’t allow guns, while only 32 percent prefer that they do. The poll found a partisan divide, with a no-gun policy preferred by Democrats 72 percent to 19 percent, and by independents 48 percent to 34 percent. Republicans said they preferred establishments that allow guns 50 percent to 41 percent.

It looks like the NRA is getting the message that their lunatics are on the verge of ruining everything:

In a remarkably frank statement issued on Friday, the National Rifle Association said that gun activists in Texas had “crossed the line from enthusiasm to downright foolishness” with their demonstrations at fast food restaurants.

“As a result of these hijinx, two popular fast food outlets have recently requested patrons to keep guns off the premises,” the unsigned statement said. “To state the obvious, that’s counterproductive for the gun owning community.”

In denouncing the demonstrations, the NRA said that using guns “to draw attention to yourself in public not only defies common sense, it shows a lack of consideration and manners.”

“[W]hile unlicensed open carry of long guns is also typically legal in most places, it is a rare sight to see someone sidle up next to you in line for lunch with a 7.62 rifle slung across his chest, much less a whole gaggle of folks descending on the same public venue with similar arms,” the statement said. “Let’s not mince words, not only is it rare, it’s downright weird and certainly not a practical way to go normally about your business while being prepared to defend yourself. To those who are not acquainted with the dubious practice of using public displays of firearms as a means to draw attention to oneself or one’s cause, it can be downright scary. It makes folks who might normally be perfectly open-minded about firearms feel uncomfortable and question the motives of pro-gun advocates.”

The NRA made clear it “does not support bans on personalized guns or on carrying firearms in public, including in restaurants. ” But it concluded that “when people act without thinking, or without consideration for others – especially when it comes to firearms – they set the stage for further restrictions on our rights.”

I’m sorry, these opportunists created this monster and now they’re going to have to deal with it. The have demeaned anyone who calls for common sense with guns up until now, even including the relatives of gun violence victims, like those who lost 6 year olds at Newtown. They have proclaimed to anyone who would listen that there is an “unfettered” right to bear arms whenever and where ever you want. Where in their approach has ever “consideration for others” been a part of their message?

They have managed to create an entire movement of people who think they are not only empowered to carry guns whenever and wherever they want, they are empowered to use them. Some of them even believe they are there as adjuncts to the police departments, as if anyone in their right minds want these bozos to “protect” them.

By the way, these people were very impressed with the NRA’s message on Friday. This is what people going to Home Depot for some spackle and paint in Dallas had to put up with this week-end:

Does anything about that look safe to you?

Update: And here you go:

In response to the NRA’s statement on Friday criticizing Texas activists’ recent tactics, members of the pro-gun group Open Carry Texas have been cutting up their NRA membership cards, and the group has issued a statement demanding a retraction of the NRA’s “disgusting and disrespectful comments.” Or else.

“The more the NRA continues to divide its members by attacking some aspects of gun rights instead of supporting all gun rights, the more support it will lose,” Open Carry Texas said in a statement published Monday on its Facebook page.

Well, they’ll always have Larry Pratt.

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Your “right to bear arms” was ratified all the way back in …. 2008. In a 5-4 decision.

by digby

I wrote about the so-called “fundamental” right to bear arms at Salon this morning. The history is, unsurprisingly, a little more complicated than the gun proliferation activists let on:

So, what happened? Well, the NRA happened. Or more specifically, a change in leadership in the NRA happened. After all, the NRA had long been a benign sportsman’s organization devoted to hunting and gun safety. It wasn’t until 1977, that a group of radicals led by activists from the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms took control and changed the direction of the group to one dedicated to making the Second Amendment into a “fundamental right.”

What had been a fringe ideology was then systematically mainstreamed by the NRA, a program that prompted the retired arch conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger to say that the Second Amendment:

“Has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime”

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Bowe Bergdahl and the structural problems of secrecy and obstruction

by David Atkins

Digby did a fantastic job yesterday calling out the right-wing nuttery over the return of our POW in exchange for five Guantanamo detainees. Still, there’s no question in my mind that what should be a simpler issue has been clouded by overzealous executive secrecy and the nihilistic extremism of the modern Republican party. I examined that issue yesterday over at the Washington Monthly:

The first of these problems is the legal swamp that is the War on Terror, and the particularly murky moral and legal zone that is the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. But for the cowardice of Congress, all the prisoners at Guantanamo should have been transferred into stateside prisons and tried for their crimes or released. That would have eliminated many of the legal issues involved in the exchange.

The second is a political question. The GOP has become such a nearly nihilistic obstructionist force that even if the Obama Administration hadn’t needed to act so quickly to secure the transfer, giving the House 30 days notice would have been turned into a carnival for political gain in advance of the midterm elections, and likely would have blown the potential deal.

The third is a matter of government secrets. Partially because of the political problem and partially due to an overweening security state, not nearly enough members of Congress are adequately briefed on nearly enough national security secrets. That in turn leads to an inability by the legislative branch to fully hold the national security deep state accountable for wrongdoing, as well as mutual distrust between the branches.

It is highly unlikely that the Obama Administration released men who still posed extremely strong risks to U.S. interests. But without sharing that information with Congress and the American people, and without knowledge of how detainment at Guantanamo has affected the specific prisoners involved, that’s an impossible question for the lay pundit to answer.

In the end there’s no one to trust. It’s bad policy on the merits to simply trust the Executive Branch on its own say-so. But the GOP has been such a bad faith actor that its objections can hardly be seen as more than political gamesmanship—particularly from the same party that idolizes a president who secretly traded missiles to Iran for hostages.

One of the possibilities that comes to mind, somewhat horrifically, is that the five men we released have been so thoroughly broken by the torture of Guantanamo that they would be completely ineffective on the battlefield. Meanwhile, it’s entirely possible that the far right’s accusations against Bowe Bergdahl have some basis in fact–in which case he would not only be a high-value POW we want to return, but he might even have some actionable intelligence. If either or both of those postulates are true, that wouldn’t be something government officials would ever care to admit, but it would make the trade a very good one in terms of realpolitik.

But that’s not necessarily something Congress would be aware of due to executive secrecy. More importantly, the GOP has so lost its moral compass that even if key players in the House did know about it, they would subvert the interests of both America and Afghanistan in order to score points against the President.

There are words for that sort of behavior. They’re the same words the far right is using to smear Bowe Bergdahl.

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