Month: June 2014

The worst neocon of all? I think it’s this guy.

by digby

Neocons are coming out of the woodwork.  But this one I wrote about for Salon is special:

If there was any doubt that the neocon undead will walk the earth forever, one only has to look at the latest reanimation of one of the most notorious of the whole bunch: none other than Elliott “I don’t know nothin’ about Salvadoran massacres” Abrams. It’s hard to believe that someone with his record would ever be consulted about anything more controversial than whether the veal looks good today, but here he is, in Politico magazine, giving credence to the belief that the zombie apocalypse is nigh.

His piece is entitled “The Man Who Broke the Middle East.” And no, it’s not about his former boss George W. Bush or his good friend Dick Cheney. It’s about President Obama, who Abrams says inherited a wonderful peaceful world filled with puppies and flowers and fresh baked bread…Read on.

He’s one of those zombies who’s been around for decades wreaking havoc wherever he goes. But he did something very, very, very bad during the 1980s that ranks up there with the worst things Americans have ever done — he covered up a massacre by US sponsored forces in El Salvador. That’s not a “policy disagreement”. It’s a straight-up war crime. Basically, this proves that there is literally nothing a hawk can ever do to lose his reputation in the American national security establishment.

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QOTD: Chief Justice John Roberts

by digby

That’s from today’s 9-0 decision requiring the police to show probable cause to search someone’s cell phone.

This is a good illustration of civil liberties cases transcending partisanship. They’re not an ideological or cultural touch stone. It’s why the normal alliances are so often strained when it comes to issues surrounding government power. The Bill of Rights isn’t a tribal document.

Update: Also too, this:

This paragraph could be huge for future privacy cases. Roberts cites Sotomayor’s famous concurrence in US v. Jones. pic.twitter.com/M8YQOZ1WNr
— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) June 25, 2014

The morning after

by digby

Markos surveys the battlefield on the morning after:

There’s more at the link. Much more.

I feel their pain.  We not only have open primaries in California, we have jungle primaries where liberals can completely cancel themselves out and leave the field to two Republicans in the general election.

And one can only imagine how it must feel to these hardest of hardcore throwback wingnuts to be defeated by a bunch of African American Democrats. I would guess it’s the equivalent of a bunch of right wingers stepping in to vote for say … Joe Lieberman. Oh right.  That happened.

We can only hope that Thad Cochran does to the right wing of the GOP what Lieberman did to the left wing of the Democrats — stab them in the back every chance he gets, purely out of spite.

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Another lesson of Thad Cochran’s victory: don’t count out Democratic turnout

by David Atkins

Mississippi Republican Senator Thad Cochran survived his primary runoff last night from radical nutcase McDaniel, almost entirely due to crossover vote in the open primary from African-Americans who would normally vote Democratic. McDaniel still hasn’t conceded, hoping to find enough irregularities (i.e., Democrats who had voted the Democratic partisan ballot in the earlier election) with which to challenge.

The tea party camp is crying foul, of course, accusing Cochran of betraying the conservative movement, courting Democratic votes, and using the open primary to abuse the process. They’re actually right about all of that, for what it’s worth. Cochran’s camp for its part did everything by the rules, and is now in theory at least somewhat more accountable to the constituency that pulled him through.

But it’s also worth noting that Mississippi Democrats actually did turn out to vote in large enough numbers to make a real difference, even though the big race was between two Republicans. Meanwhile, Republican pollsters in both this race and the Eric Cantor race were wildly off target.

Democrats are more excited to vote than one might expect, and Republican pollsters are still trying to calibrate their models both in terms of Democratic turnout and in terms of conservative base loyalties.

2014 is still very much up in the air, and the professional GOP establishment seems both blind, internally divided and utterly lost.

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We shall overcome … when hell freezes over

by digby

Watch members of congress literally holding hands and singing together to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. They don’t look happy about it:

Just give them money. That’s all they want.

by digby

If you still have questions as to why establishment figures like John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy are able to maintain their positions of power, this should clear it up:

Senior House Republicans announced plans Tuesday to provide millions of dollars in campaign cash to help shore up the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is lagging behind its Democratic counterpart in fundraising so far this year.
[…]
Seeking to quickly close the gap — and fill the void created by the stunning primary defeat of outgoing Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) — House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) announced plans Tuesday to transfer $1.5 million from his personal campaign accounts to the NRCC. The donations take Boehner’s total contributions to his GOP colleagues to $17 million so far this cycle — more than any other House Republican.

Boehner formally announced his intentions during his weekly closed-door meeting with GOP lawmakers. News of the donations was first reported by USA Today. The donations are another signal that Boehner has no plans to step down as speaker soon and is instead seeking to consolidate his support by generously sharing his ability to raise significant campaign cash.

It’s what they do. And on both sides, not the GOP side. Partisan Power doesn’t come from ideological purity or even organization talent (just look at former whip McCarthy’s inability to count votes.) It comes from $$$$. Which makes the congress go round.

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Voter fraud doesn’t usually happen. But when it does, it’s usually by Republicans.

by David Atkins

Voter fraud: it almost never happens. When it does, it usually gets caught. And it’s usually by Republicans like this guy:

A Shorewood man has been charged with more than a dozen counts of illegal voting, accused of casting multiple ballots in four elections in 2011 and 2012, including five in the 2012 gubernatorial recall.

Robert D. Monroe, 50, used addresses in Shorewood, Milwaukee and Indiana, according to the complaint, and cast some votes in the names of his son and his girlfriend’s son.

According to the complaint:

Monroe cast two ballots in the April 2011 Supreme Court election, two in the August 2011 Alberta Darling recall election, five in the Scott Walker-Tom Barrett recall, one illegal ballot in an August 2012 primary, and two ballots in the November 2012 presidential election.

In the presidential election, Monroe cast an in-person absentee ballot in Shorewood on Nov. 1 and drove a rental car to Lebanon, Ind., where he showed his Indiana driver’s license to vote in person on election day, Nov. 6, the complaint charges. Monroe owns a house there, according to the complaint.

The 26-page criminal complaint was filed Friday in Milwaukee County Circuit Court and is being prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf, one of the prosecutors involved in the John Doe investigations of Gov. Scott Walker’s staff when he was county executive and the now-halted probe into fundraising by Walker’s gubernatorial campaign.

The complaint indicates the investigation started in Waukesha County as an inquiry into possible double voting by Monroe’s son, who lives in Waukesha. But the son denied any knowledge of requesting an absentee ballot from his father’s Shorewood address, and the investigation shifted back to Milwaukee County.

Steven Benen has more examples of Republican vote fraudsters:

Remember the Nevada voter who cast multiple ballots in the same election because she wanted to test the integrity of the elections system? She was a Republican voter.

Remember the Texas voter who cast absentee ballots on behalf of his girlfriend for the five years after she died? He was a Republican voter, too.

Remember the Indiana secretary of state convinced to voter fraud? Yep, a Republican.

I don’t doubt that there are examples from the other side of the aisle, but they just haven’t left the kind of impression these amazing cases have.

There are a few cases of Dem-leaning voters out there, but a scramble of news stories tends to turn up more on the GOP side.

Again, this isn’t a big problem–and that’s really the whole point. It’s really rare. It’s almost always caught. But there’s little question which side has less compunction about cheating.

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The legacy of Florida 2000

by digby

This is Charles Pierce talking about the Mississippi election today:

You have a guy who’s so white he doesn’t even have a shadow asking for help from black voters because the guy he’s running against is a neo-Confederate yahoo. Of course, there is an entire legal and political infrastructure ready to assist the neo-Confederate by any means necessary. Elections are now about how good your side’s lawyers are, or about how firmly your local state legislature is controlled by ALECbots who have no interest in expanding the franchise. In a sane democracy, a half-seditious crackpot like Chris McDaniel wouldn’t get elected to a local zoning board, and Thad Cochran would have retired 10 years ago after a long career as his town’s most successful insurance man. In a sane democracy, the circus is harmless.

That ship sailed some time ago. Remember this?

(By the way, at the time of this decision, the people doing the recount were judges, who the Supreme Court majority apparently assumed were a bunch of hacks.)

Recall that every wag in the nation told those of us who thought this was slightly well, rigged, being that it was all happening in the state that was run by the presidents brother, that we needed to “get over it.” (There’s plenty of evidence that they rigged it, at least in some important respects.) The manipulation of the voting laws and the underlying principles thereof have subsequently become institutionalized. Why wouldn’t they? It works like a charm.

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I was wrong about Peter Beinart being right about being wrong. He’s just wrong.

by digby

Oh good lord. When I look like a fool, I really look like a fool. Just the other day I wrote a nice piece about Peter Beinert being someone worth listening to on Iraq because unlike others, he had repented for being wrong and learned some valuable lessons.

Uhm, I spoke too soon:

Yes, the Iraq War was a disaster of historic proportions. Yes, seeing its architects return to prime time to smugly slam President Obama while taking no responsibility for their own, far greater, failures is infuriating.

But sooner or later, honest liberals will have to admit that Obama’s Iraq policy has been a disaster. Since the president took office, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has grown ever more tyrannical and ever more sectarian, driving his country’s Sunnis toward revolt. Since Obama took office, Iraq watchers—including those within his own administration—have warned that unless the United States pushed hard for inclusive government, the country would slide back into civil war. Yet the White House has been so eager to put Iraq in America’s rearview mirror that, publicly at least, it has given Maliki an almost-free pass. Until now, when it may be too late.

Read on to find out how the Obama administration was supposed to perform magic tricks on the head of a pin to prevent this from happening. They didn’t “push hard” against the government to allow troops to stay beyond the Bush administration’s residual forces agreement expiration. He quotes his fellow memebers of the wrong about everything caucus Kenneth “Gathering Storm” Pollack saying that the administration “sent the wrong message” saying “the United States under the new Obama administration was no longer going to enforce the rules of the democratic road…. [This] undermined the reform of Iraqi politics and resurrected the specter of the failed state and the civil war.”

For crying out loud. The assumption that the US could have done anything to prevent this short of keeping a large military presence in the country at huge expense to America in blood and treasure is nonsense. That they could have done it by “sending messages” and “pushing harder” is delusional.The sad reality is that we broke Humpty Dumpty and all the presidents horses and all the president’s men can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

So, here’s my mea culpa: I was wrong to give Peter Beinart the benefit of the doubt. Just because you acknowledge that you were wrong about Iraq it doesn’t prove that you’ve given up the line of thinking that assumes America has a special ability to change the world by sheer will and good intentions. That’s a children’s fairy tale.

I won’t fall for that one again. (I hope.)

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How do you define murder?

by digby

Emptywheel on the newly released Awlaki memo:

Importantly, the memo doesn’t include the government’s discussion about what makes a terrorism suspect an “imminent threat,” and the lengths to which the government must go to try to capture the suspect before it is deemed infeasible — both central standards in the government’s claim to be able to kill Americans. (Those may appear in a February 2010 memo Barron also wrote to authorize Awlaki’s killing.) For all we know, Obama’s team watched a YouTube video of an Awlaki sermon and looked at a map of Yemen before deciding it was drone time.

But the government did leave unredacted a hint of the standard for review — and it is pretty shocking. Rather than speaking of probable cause — the standard a court would use before approving a mere wiretap on Awlaki— the memo instead weighs whether “a decision-maker could reasonably decide that the threat posed by [Awlaki]’s activities to United States persons is ‘continued’ and ‘imminent.'” Not only does the memo approve bypassing due process, but it sets the standard unbelievably low for a decision taken with a lot of advance notice.

Wow. It sure is a good thing our leaders are so good and so not evil or you might think someone could easily make a big boo boo.

Emptywheel has much more detail. But this Vox explainer lays out the basic points we know and don’t know about the memo.  We understand they’ve based their finding on the 2001 Authorization to use military force in Afghanistan.  We don’t know anything about the case against Awlaki himself because it’s been redacted. And we don’t know how they thread the important needle that gets them off the hook for plain old murder charges — the CIA, you see, has never before been considered a military force allowed to kill as a military institution under international and domestic law. That part’s redacted too.

The takeaway seems to be that the administration became very agitated at the notion set forth by legal scholars that they had literally committed murder under domestic statutes. So they wrote a very long and detailed memo setting forth justifications to answer that charge. But they’ve redacted so much of it that nobody can really make heads or tails out of the rationales behind it.

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