Month: June 2014

Friday baby dolphin blogging

by digby

Because you need this:

You can read all about this little orphaned dolphin rescued and raised by humans here.

Cheers!

McDaniel determined to fight to the legal end

by David Atkins

Chris McDaniel is fuming mad and going to fight every vote:

The Tea Party-backed candidate who has refused to concede defeat to Republican U.S. Senator Thad Cochran in Mississippi’s primary runoff said his campaign has found more than 1,000 instances of ballots cast by people who were ineligible to vote.

Chris McDaniel said his supporters continue to look for evidence of voters who participated in the state’s Democratic primary on June 3 and then voted in the Republican runoff primary on Tuesday, which would not be permitted by Mississippi law.

“We’ve already found more than 1,000 examples of that in one county alone,” McDaniel said in an interview Thursday night on Fox News’ Hannity show. “We’re talking about widespread irregularities, ineligible voters that should not have been there in the first place.”

In a bitterly fought contest, Cochran edged McDaniel by fewer than 7,000 votes out of more than 370,000 cast – a dramatic increase over the 313,000 votes cast in the earlier primary election.

As I’ve said before, I don’t like open primaries and I sympathize with Republican arguments that they should be allowed to select their candidate within their own caucus. But it’s awfully rich to watch McDaniel explicitly try to disallow every last Democratic vote, almost all of them African-Americans. He’s morally outraged by it:

McDaniel attacked his opponent’s strategy for attracting Democratic voters.

“They were pushed there by an overt action, an aggressive action on the part of Senator Cochran’s campaign that was filled with race-baiting, lies, distortions,” McDaniel said in the television interview.

“He literally ran the latter three weeks on food stamps,” McDaniel added. “He ran on voter suppression, and he ran on pork.”

There’s a large part of me that wants to see Mississippi Republicans get what they want. Most of the “pork” coming in to Mississippi isn’t going to African-American communities: it’s going to well-heeled connected families and corporations, as well as the military. If they want to elect a Senator who will destroy the state by preventing any federal largesse from coming in, who are we to stop them?

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From the “duh” files

by digby

This is a shockingly overdue move, but welcome nonetheless:

U.S. regulators are studying whether restrictions on marijuana should be eased, a step toward decriminalizing the drug at the federal level.

The Food and Drug Administration is conducting an analysis at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s request on whether the U.S. should downgrade the classification of marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, said Douglas Throckmorton, Deputy Director for Regulatory Programs at the FDA, at a congressional hearing.

Is it possible that US federal drug policy is finally becoming a tiny bit more sane?

Update: Probably not just yet …

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Never mind …

by digby

This has to be one of the worst predictions in history:

“It is not to be supposed,” wrote a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian analysing the significance of the assassination 100 years ago on Saturday, “that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe.”

Thirty-seven days later, Britain declared war on Germany and Europe was plunged into a worldwide conflict in which more than 16 million people died in four years.

Oops.

That’s from a piece in the Guardian commemorating the beginning of WWI by discussing how wrong the paper was in its early assumptions. It’s fascinating. If you want to see an example of everything going to hell in a hurry, read about that war…

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Knowing who your friends are

by digby

Many of us were sorely disappointed this week to see the Human Rights Campaign endorse Republican Senator Susan Collins who has a stalwart supporter of gay rights opposing her for office, Shenna Bellows.(She’s not just a supporter but an accomplished organizer who helped get marriage equality passed by referendum in Maine.) Collins, on the other hand, only belatedly decided a couple of days ago that it was ok for gay people to marry after all.

Here’s Howie Klein a past recipient of one of HRC’s highest awards:

I heard about HRC endorsing Susan Collins again a few hours ago. It seems to have surprised a lot of people. It would have surprised me if they hadn’t. Susan Collins and HRC are made for each other. Don’t they always. Last time, in fact, was the same year they chose not to endorse Tammy Baldwin’s congressional election, the same year I removed them from my will. I dug this up from a post I wrote this just over 8 years ago, May 30, 2006:

Because I was lucky enough to have had something of a reputation as an enlightened corporate leader for several years, my mantle is filled with awards from progressive public advocacy groups like the ACLU, GLAAD, People For the American Way and HRC. Actually my mantle used to have an HRC award on it. But a little over a week ago HRC endorsed Lieberman over clear, enlightened, unambiguously progressive and pro-gay Ned Lamont. So I took the award down and put it in a box where no one– including, or especially, myself– will see it.

In 1997 I had been so proud to accept HRC’s Leadership Equality Award “for outstanding corporate leadership and dedication to the gay and lesbian community.” My mother and my grandmother were kvelling and my boss, the Chairman of Warner Bros, was beaming at my side when I went up to make my speech. Last week I thought about calling friends and family over and having a smashing-up ceremony but I decided to just wait and see if HRC changes and gravitates more towards their roots as real agents for change and leaves the severely compromised kiss-up politics that pervades the sick, sick system Inside the Beltway to others. I’m not overly optimistic. HRC’s fancy new 8-story building symbolizes their institutional self-perpetuating role inside that insider game.

[…]
Two years later, I found that award and chopped it up with an axe when HRC endorsed Susan Collins in her race against Tom Allen. Inside the crazy world known as “Inside-the-Beltway,” Collins was deemed to be “good… for a Republican” on gay issues. Rep. Allen was perfect on gay issues as a human being and as a Democrat.

So, this is nothing new. It’s actually indicative of a certain strain among liberal institutions in Washington which seem to crave bipartisanship for its own sake, even when it’s unnecessary and will make them no allies for the causes they espouse. (And it’s not just gay organizations — NARAL, among others, has done the same.)

Conservative organizations rarely do this. Imagine an anti-gay marriage group endorsing a Democrat who merely uttered a few words indicating that she might not be fully on board (while voting with the Party down the line) over a true believer. It wouldn’t happen because their donors and supporters would be appalled.

This article proves once and for all that progressives should know up front that they will not necessarily be rewarded for championing basic human rights against people who want to deny them:

It was a slap in the face.” Steven Levine is remembering that day in 2006 when President George W. Bush took the stage in a small-town school gym in Indiana. It was October 28, right before the midterm elections, and Levine was a 22-year-old White House advance aide. He’d been camped out in Sellersburg all week, working to get the details just right for Bush’s campaign rally. The flags hung just so, the big presidential seal on the podium. Then Bush started talking, his standard stump speech about taxes and supporting the troops. But a new applause line took Levine by surprise. “Just this week in New Jersey,” the president said, “another activist court issued a ruling that raises doubt about the institution of marriage. We believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman, and should be defended. I will continue to appoint judges who strictly interpret the law and not legislate from the bench.”
The crowd loved it. Levine was crushed.

He was gay and working for a Republican and convinced it was possible to be both at the same time.

Like dozens of other gay colleagues in the Bush White House, many of them closeted, Levine had been sure that Bush himself was personally tolerant even if the GOP was not—and uncomfortable with gay-bashing as a way to win elections. But this was a rebuff, and it was hard not to take it personally: “To be working extraordinarily hard with all of your energy, working through many nights for somebody that you believe in, and to hear that person that you work so hard for come out against something that you are.”

Levine knew, of course, that Bush had officially backed the Federal Marriage Amendment, a proposed amendment to the Constitution to define marriage as solely between a man and a woman. But this was also the president who had made combating AIDS in Africa a personal cause (later, at Levine’s urging, he would even decorate the White House North Portico with a giant red ribbon to mark World AIDS Day), who had met with previously ostracized gay Republican leaders and whose hard-line conservative vice president had an openly gay daughter. And besides, opposing gay marriage just “wasn’t a centerpiece of the campaign to date,” Levine recalled when we talked recently. “So it wasn’t something that I was expecting to have been sort of his rallying cry at that event.” 

Afterward, Levine made what small protest he could, telling his bosses he refused to work advance for future campaign events. Back in Washington, Levine says, “I told the folks in the [White House] advance office that I couldn’t do that anymore. … I told them why. These are my friends.”

“That was sort of my quiet way of objecting,” Levine recalls.
***
Levine stayed with Bush right up until the president hopped into the armored presidential limo for the ride to Barack Obama’s inauguration 27 months later. As the taillights disappeared down Pennsylvania Avenue, Levine left town. A few months later, one of his gay friends who had also worked in the White House sat down in front of Facebook and counted the Bush White House staffers he knew to be gay. He came up with at least 70 (only two of them women).

That’s just depressing …

The good news is that fighting for civil rights and civil liberties for everyone is its own reward. But there are lots of places to put your money and your time to that end. It’s worth it to find those who have a holistic belief in the betterment of human kind in all respects.

Support Shenna Bellows. She’s one of those people.

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Classy as always

by digby

This is lovely:

“Obama and Boehner have proven once and for all that their talk of passing immigration reform amnesty, instead of enforcing America’s existing border and immigration laws, only brings more unwanted and destructive illegal immigration!” Gheen said. “Instead of using our tax money to buy illegals 42,000 pairs of new underwear, we would like to send the illegals and DC politicians a message by mailing them our used underwear, and some of our pairs are in really bad shape due to the bad economy and all of the jobs illegal immigrants are taking from Americans.”

This is in response to a line item budget request from the DHS for underwear (among many other things) to properly supply the facilities that are holding undocumented workers.

They believe these people aren’t entitled to even basic human decency. It’s sick.

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Buy pitchfork futures


by digby

Reading the Nick Hanauer piece that David flags below, I can’t help but be reminded of a little dust-up that happened back in 2010, when all the rich boys were whining to the newspapers about how tough it was to get by on their millions and how the plebes really didn’t understand how much worse it was to lose some of your income when you’re rich because you’re used to having so much more than a poor person. I used to used the pitchfork metaphor quite often.

In fact, at one point, writing about a particularly annoying screed by Ben Stein,  I said “I’ll be sharpening my pitchfork. After all, according to these people I’ve got nothing to lose,” which evoked this response from conservative economist Tyler Cowan:

I read about this guy [me] and his pitchfork and it genuinely scared me, especially his description of Ben Stein and his intermingling of the political and the aesthetic.

I responded to that with a little reprise of Ben Stein’s greatest hits as a celebrity and actor and a political commentator.  Talk about intermingling the political and the aesthetic …

Anyway, at the time I made this point, which I think Nick Hanauer would appreciate:

But Cowan’s argument [is] about whether or not people have a moral right to complain about money if they are better off than some portion of the population and I’m sure there is an interesting philosophical argument to be had about that. But that’s not really the point. Perhaps these people do have a right to complain without issuing a disclaimer that there are others who are worse off than they are. But regardless of where you come down in the moral argument, I think there’s little debate among decent people that it’s just plain tacky for people in the upper one percent to publicly complain about the fact that after saving 60k a year, paying for their million dollar home, fancy educations and servants that they don’t have much money left over for their well-deserved $200 dinners, much less taxes. Not to mention that it’s also just plain stupid to rub salt in the wounds of millions who lost their jobs and homes and futures in this stalled economy. The arch comment about pitchforks was meant to convey where this level of arrogant stupidity leads.


This is one of the things that’s puzzled me the most in the last couple of years. It’s one thing for the wealthy to lobby the government on their own behalf. There’s nothing new or even controversial in that. It’s always been the case. But it’s quite another for them to lobby the public with endless plaintive wails about how hard they have it in a time of economic crisis. They are in better shape than any time in history. Their tax rates are the envy of wealthy people all over the industrialized world. They have the leaders of both parties tied up in knots trying to keep the metaphorical pitchforks at bay. And still it’s not enough. They seem to need sympathy from the proles — their millions just aren’t enough to keep them warm at night.


If they’d kept a low profile and worked the politics solely behind the scenes, they’d probably get off with a modest tax hike, as few regulations as possible and they’d be back in business collecting their vastly outsized portion of the nation’s wealth with little notice. If they’d thrown a couple of sacrificial lambs to the slaughter and gone on a Celebrity rehab Mea Culpa tour, even better. Instead they keep whining and shrieking (and lying) about how unfair it is for them to pay slightly higher taxes on their bloated wealth, while the average worker is experiencing a huge, probably unrecoverable, contraction in their fortunes and expectations. It’s unnecessary and shortsighted and it only provides more evidence that the failure of the financial system wasn’t a fluke — it was because the wealthy elite aren’t as smart as they think they are.


This is a simple equation: when the majority of the population is hurting economically and your biggest problem is being unable to keep up with the Hiltons, it’s the better part of valor to STFU and suffer in silence. If you want to know why people have no faith in the elite institutions, this is exhibit one: those who run them seem to have the emotional maturity of 15 year old kids. 

Hanauer has his work cut out for him if he expects to make the capitalist’s smartest self-interested case against being a total greedhead. I’m not sure this generation of Marie Antoinettes are reachable. And they’re intent upon taking the rest of us down with them.

The best play for a wily capitalist is to buy pitchfork futures …

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Just go read Hanauer today

by David Atkins

.01%er Nick Hanauer continues to be a thorn in the side of his follow ultra-rich, shaming them time and time again. His latest at Politico Magazine is a thing of beauty. I’m going to excerpt a small piece of it here, but it’s long and you should just go go read the whole thing:

But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?

I see pitchforks…

But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when….

It’s the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become economic orthodoxy across party lines—and has so screwed the American middle class and our economy generally. Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.
Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around….

The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.

There’s much much more. Read it. Share it widely.

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Civilized torture


by digby

They had a fancy  dress ball at Guantanamo the other day.  So lovely:

That’s such a civilized ceremony, steeped in tradition, celebrating the history and mission of the US Army.

This isn’t so civilized, however:

Lawyers who spent the weekend examining 28 videotapes of a detainee at Guantánamo Bay being force-fed told a federal judge Wednesday they plan to submit the “extremely disturbing” set of tapes as evidence of rights abuse at the base.

“I’ve had a lot of trouble sleeping this week as a result of watching these tapes,” Alka Pradhan, a member of the legal team representing Syrian national Abu Wa’el Dhiab, told Al Jazeera. She said the footage gave an insight into conditions at the controversial camp and that President Barack Obama should “sit down and watch” it.

In addition to submitting the footage as part of their case, Dhiab’s attorneys informed the D.C. District Court that they will also file a motion by the end of the week seeking interviews with several Guantánamo officials — including the senior medical officer at the camp and Army Col. John Bogdan, a Guantánamo prison commander.

The hearing Wednesday was part of a lawsuit that alleges Dhiab and other detainees are being subjected to inhumane force-feedings and treatment during their participation in a hunger strike to protest their detainment.

I’ll just issue my usual reminder when it comes to this sort of thing, from former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky:

Why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to “improve intelligence-gathering capability” by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some “cruel, inhumane or degrading” (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

Even talking about the possibility of using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the “treatment” under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the “Chekist’s handshake” so widely practiced under Stalin — a firm squeeze of the victim’s palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?

Now it appears that sleep deprivation is “only” CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin’s “show trials” of the 1930s. The henchmen called it “conveyer,” when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.

I know from my own experience that interrogation is an intensely personal confrontation, a duel of wills. It is not about revealing some secrets or making confessions, it is about self-respect and human dignity. If I break, I will not be able to look into a mirror. But if I don’t, my interrogator will suffer equally. Just try to control your emotions in the heat of that battle. This is precisely why torture occurs even when it is explicitly forbidden. Now, who is going to guarantee that even the most exact definition of CID is observed under such circumstances?

But if we cannot guarantee this, then how can you force your officers and your young people in the CIA to commit acts that will scar them forever? For scarred they will be, take my word for it.

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner — through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man — my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around.

They surrounded the doctor: “Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It’ll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool.” The doctor was in tears: “Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can’t do that. . . . ” And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.

And he made a most important observation that also stuck with me:

Today, when the White House lawyers seem preoccupied with contriving a way to stem the flow of possible lawsuits from former detainees, I strongly recommend that they think about another flood of suits, from the men and women in your armed services or the CIA agents who have been or will be engaged in CID practices. Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers.

But it’s very nice that they were able to have a fancy dress ball there at the camp.

Contraception comes from “the pit of hell”

by digby

I’m thinking it’s time for pro-choice activists to do a little protesting outside this woman’s “clinic”:

An Alabama Christian radio host who runs an anti-abortion “clinic” told activists on Thursday that women’s health care services like contraception were the true “war on women” because they came from the “pit of hell.”

Speaking at the opening day of the National Right To Life Convention, EWTN host Joy Pinto said that liberals had used “verbal engineering” to create the term “war on women.”

Pinto insisted that she was able to see the “real war on women” because she ran the Her Choice Birmingham Women’s Center.

“I have the privilege on a daily basis — being the director of a pregnancy medical center — to see the wreckage of humanity that walks in my door, because they have bit the apple, they have believed the lie that this government, that all of the politics, that even some churches tell them,” she explained. “That it’s okay to go use contraception, it’s okay to use abortion as a backup birth control.”

Pinto said that one of her clients took two morning after pills in one week, and then went to an abortion clinic to make sure she wasn’t pregnant.

“This is the war on women!” she exclaimed. “We are telling them — and it’s available! And so they can go to the pharmacy and get it! This is the war on women!”

“There is a war on women, but we’re not waging it,” Pinto added. “It’s coming from the pit of hell, like it did in the book of Genesis, when he told the women — when she bit the apple, he said, ‘You will not die.’”

“It’s the same lie. It’s the same war. And it’s not just on women, it’s on humanity. It’s on every aborted baby girl and baby boy. And every woman, and every man that has impregnated her.”

Some of us have been saying for a long time that the “war” isn’t only about little babies. It’s about sex, specifically women having it. They believe that (decent) women must be willing to procreate whenever they do it — in fact, it’s really the only reason to do it at all. Men have plenty of whores and animals to take care of their needs. Good women should never see sex as something they might like to do without the potential consequence of having children. If they do, they are bad women.

This is want they want for all of you girls:

And by the way, no birth control after marriage. That’s why these girls become brood mares. The mom has 19 kids.

The boys have lives outside the home. (The oldest Duggar boy lives in DC and works for the Family Research Council.) The girls, however, are only mothers. But that’s what one would expect. When you have a dozen kids or more you really are pressed for time.

*The Duggars claim they aren’t part of the Quiverful movement but other than not claiming to be, there is no difference. Their close friends the Bates’, who also have 19 children, are openly Quiverful.

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