Month: June 2014

Andrew Cuomo must be a true believer. Nobody can think this is good politics.

by digby

Everyone seems to assume that Andrew Cuomo is a cynical politician who’s positioning himself for higher office by walking a centrist path in order that he not alienate any moderates of even possibly conservatives he might need in the future. The conventional wisdom among progressives is that he’s out of touch with current politics and is caught in a Clintonian time warp. But I’m beginning to think he’s not out of touch or cynical. I think he might just be a real centrist who truly believes what he believes and that it’s foolish not to take him at his word.

That’s the only way stupid stuff like this makes any sense at all:

In ancringeworthy move that will be compared with Bill Clinton’s much lampooned line, “I smoked pot, but I didn’t inhale,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo says you may need cannabis for medical reasons, but you can’t smoke it. Why? Because it is too dangerous, says Cuomo, ignoring tons of data showing that pot smoking is far less dangerous and more beneficial than alcohol. But Cuomo, for reasons that are unclear and open to severe head scratching, continues to remain in the Dark Ages when it comes to pot.

He must be daft enough to think it’s true. Nobody could possibly be so politically tone deaf as to think that people will think that’s some kind of reasonable compromise instead of a completely stupid attempt to have it both ways.

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Nice work if you can get it

by digby

Hey, a guy’s got to make a buck:

As the four-star general in charge of U.S. digital defenses, Keith Alexander warned repeatedly that the financial industry was among the likely targets of a major attack. Now he’s selling the message directly to the banks.

Joining a crowded field of cyber-consultants, the former National Security Agency chief is pitching his services for as much as $1 million a month. The audience is receptive: Under pressure from regulators, lawmakers and their customers, financial firms are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into barriers against digital assaults.

Alexander, who retired in March from his dual role as head of the NSA and the U.S. Cyber Command, has since met with the largest banking trade groups, stressing the threat from state-sponsored attacks bent on data destruction as well as hackers interested in stealing information or money.
[…]
Alexander, 62, said in the interview he was invited to give a talk to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, known as Sifma, shortly after leaving the NSA and starting his firm, IronNet Cybersecurity Inc. He has met with other finance groups including the Consumer Bankers Association, the Financial Services Roundtable and The Clearing House.

At the sessions, Alexander discussed destructive computer programs such as Wiper, which the U.S. government said was notable because attacks using it appeared to originate from North Korea and Iran. “I told them I did think they could defend against that,” Alexander said.

Gosh, you’d think that information wouldn’t be public. Now North Korean and Iranian hackers know what we know and everything’s all ruined.

This, however, is hilarious:

Still, despite the banks’ growing investments in computer security, Alexander said, “many of them aren’t really confident they’re getting their money’s worth.”
The ex-NSA chief is leasing office space from Promontory Financial Group LLC, a Washington consultancy that focuses on the banking industry. Eugene Ludwig, Promontory’s founder and chief executive officer, joined Alexander at a meeting with Sifma, Wall Street’s largest lobby group.

Alexander offered to provide advice to Sifma for $1 million a month, according to two people briefed on the talks. The asking price later dropped to $600,000, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the negotiation was private.
Alexander declined to comment on the details, except to say that his firm will have contracts “in the near future.”
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There are a lot of very high-caliber people that have served in public positions who bring a tremendous amount of expertise that our industry or other industries can benefit from. General Alexander is certainly one of those people,” Bentsen said.

Golly what information could possibly be worth a million dollars a month do you suppose?

But don’t worry, everything Alexander knows will only benefit the average American like you and me. There’s no reason to suspect that he is trading his high level of inside knowledge to benefit a bunch of rich people all around the globe. Because patriotism.

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“Take out word for it”

by digby

No, I don’t think so.

Unsurprisingly, I’m with Greenwald on this. The government always traffics in boogeyman fear-mongering around these issues and at this point I think it’s more than fair to be skeptical. Look at the bullshit the hawks are bandying about on Iraq right now — insisting that ISIS’s mission is to stage jihad against America when it’s clearly a militant sectarian group bent on fighting Shia Muslims. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t a danger to the stability of the world and hence America as well in the abstract, but the idea that it’s focused on attacks the US is simply untrue. But that’s what they’re saying. And people are buying it.

This blithe insistence on Snowden coming back to face the music like a man the way Ellsberg did is similarly nonsensical. As Ellsberg himself agrees, whistleblowers should not have to be martyrs. In fact a Supreme Court case was just decided this week that addressed the subject in a case in which a public employee had been fired for blowing the whistle on government corruption. Now, obviously, we are dealing with a different set of interests with national security information, but the principle to which the majority opinion (written by Justice Sotomayor) refers is worth thinking about when you look at the Snowden case:

Speech by citizens on matters of public concern lies at the heart of the First Amendment, which “was fashioned to assure unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people,” Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 , 484 (1957). This remains true when speech concerns information related to or learned through public employment. After all, public employees do not renounce their citizenship when they accept employment, and this Court has cautioned time and again that public employers may not condition employment on the relinquishment of constitutional rights. See, e.g., Keyishian v. Board of Regents of Univ. of State of N. Y., 385 U.S. 589 , 605 (1967); Pickering, 391 U.S., at 568 ; Connick v. Myers, 461 U.S. 138 , 142 (1983). There is considerable value, moreover, in encouraging, rather than inhibiting, speech by public employees. For “[g]overnment employees are often in the best position to know what ails the agencies for which they work.” Waters v. Churchill, 511 U.S. 661 , 674 (1994) (plurality opinion). “The interest at stake is as much the public’s interest in receiving informed opinion as it is the employee’s own right to disseminate it.” San Diego v. Roe, 543 U.S. 77 , 82 (2004) (per curiam).

Yes, one more time,  national security brings with it different concerns. And even in this case, the subsequent paragraphs in the opinion assert that the government also has some right to control its employees so that it can do the job efficiently. The court says that a balance must be struck, so I’m not arguing that it’s only a simple matter of free speech.

But the reasoning in that opinion, in which the underlying principles pertaining to free speech and the necessity of whistleblowers for an informed public are given serious weight, are potentially even more important in the Snowden case. There, we have another very serious constitutional issue because the Fourth Amendment has been rendered partially inoperable by our government secretly using surveillance technology to put every citizen under a microscope, storing the information and accessing it whenever it finds it necessary. This at least requires some kind of public debate — a debate which would not have happened if Snowden had not done what he did. 

And as for all the alleged secret murders of Americans which the government cannot tell us about but which we are supposed to accept happened just because — ask yourself a question. Does it really make sense that they would not find a way to let the public know that Snowden was responsible for the deaths of Americans or its allies? I’m going to guess that they would find a way. Moreover, when people who assert this claim are questioned more closely, they inevitably say that the reason this must have happened is because the terrorists now know that we are listening in on phone calls between them and US citizens and that their email could be monitored. Because of that, they will now be able to kill Americans and their allies because we won’t be able to stop them. Unfortunately they’ve been unable to document any cases where they had managed to thwart any terrorist acts with these methods before. But they seem sure they would have eventually been able to do it so we can assume that these revelations have cost American lives. Or something.

They have been open about a major area of concern from the revelations — the insistence that our relationships with certain foreign leaders has been compromised, which allegedly has caused some sort of rift and made the US unable to efficiently conduct foreign policy. Now, it’s probable that the Brazilian leadership actually was miffed when they found out that the US was spying on Petrobas, their oil company. (We don’t know exactly who that spying is supposed to benefit, but one can assume that the CEOs and investors in multi-national energy corporations are the ones with the major interest in that information. God bless America.) And it’s also possible that the allegedly frosty relationship between Angela Merkel and Obama was legit, but it’s a little bit more likely that they were both playing to their population’s national egos.

But for the most part this whole “embarrassment” issue seems overblown. If the US isn’t embarrassed at having acted like a bunch of hysterical children after 9/11 and went about invading countries that didn’t attack us, I think it can weather this squall. And anyway, we’re exceptional, which means we can do whatever the hell we want and if you don’t like it it’s just too bad. In any case,  I expect that the only people who expect that the United States will act any differently on this whole planet are … Americans. After our behavior of the past several decades, particularly the last one, nobody else in this world is as naive about what we really do and who we really are. Not anymore. It’s up to Americans to make our global military empire accountable to us and to operate with integrity, morality and adherence to the principles of the Bill of Rights. If we actually care about that, that is.

Simply buying into some blind assertion that we must allow the government to operate these programs without accountability because it’s a dangerous world pretty much moots that whole inalienable rights thing. Times are always dangerous in one way or another and “protecting the nation” is the oldest excuse in the book for the abuse of government authority. That’s why those guys in the white wigs wrote that stuff down in the first place.

Update: Howie has an interesting piece today about national security votes in the House yesterday.  it’s a mixed bag, with one unfortunate consistency — a cadre of Democratic Party leaders who vote the wrong way in every case.
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Chart ‘O the Day

by digby

Ain’t that America edition:

All the cities that have done it will end up saving money in the long run, of course because the poor will not stop getting sick regardless of the medicaid expansion. But a lot of them will probably get care now before it’s catastrophic.

If some poor people have to die unnecessarily well — that’s how it goes when you’re holding the line against the evils of socialism.

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Either the world cares, or it doesn’t

by David Atkins

While everyone is fretting over Iraq, there’s still an extreme humanitarian crisis happening in Syria:

The humanitarian situation in Syria is worsening and the number of people needing urgent help has reached 10.8 million – almost half of Syria’s population of 22 million, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday.

Ban’s monthly report to the U.N. Security Council said the current estimate of 3.5 million people living in areas that are difficult or impossible for humanitarian workers to reach is also likely to have increased to 4.7 million people.

The U.N. chief painted a grim picture of a country gripped by severe levels of violence, including the intensified use of barrel bombs by government forces against civilian areas and suicide attacks, reported executions and other acts of terrorism by extremist groups.

As a result, Ban said, the number of people in need has increased by 17 percent – from 9.3 million to 10.8 million.

Ban said the rules that govern the conduct of war “are being flagrantly violated every day.”

“Efforts to expand humanitarian assistance to those most in need have been met with continued delays and obstruction,” he said.

Currently, all U.N. aid must go through Damascus – a practice which U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos has repeatedly criticized.

New procedures sealing government trucks delivering aid which were introduced in April resulted in fewer people being reached with aid in May, he said, and additional clearance requirements introduced by the government have further undermined access to people in desperate need of aid.

By June 9, only 12 percent of the 4.25 million people the U.N. World Food Program planned to provide with food had been reached compared to 26 percent at the same time in April, Ban said.

The secretary-general decried the government’s obstruction of the delivery of medicine and medical supplies, saying “it is inhumane and unlawful” that these potentially life-saving items continue to be removed from World Health Organization convoys entering opposition-controlled areas.

As a result, he said, opposition-controlled areas received only 25 percent of the quantities distributed in the first three months of 2014.

“Tens of thousands of civilians are being arbitrarily denied urgent and lifesaving medical care” which Ban called “a deliberate tactic of war aimed at denying help and support to those most in need.”

Ban said Physicians for Human Rights reported that 29 medical personnel were killed in May, “the highest number in a month since the start of the conflict.” He said 27 were killed by government forces and two by opposition groups, bringing the total recorded deaths of medical personnel in the war to 502.

This is not something most Americans are even aware of. It’s not something that most people on either side of the aisle talk much about, mostly because the left doesn’t want to intervene anywhere and the right doesn’t see oil or profit in it. Meanwhile, Russia and China couldn’t care less how many people suffer while they play realpolitik games, the United States has so badly screwed the pooch in the Middle East that it would be powerless to do any good under the best of circumstances and intentions, and the rest of the world would prefer to tut tut very loudly while doing almost nothing.

Meanwhile, a whole lot of people will gesticulate wildly about making the world a better place by marginally affecting minor flows of income from one group to another within wealthy industrialized nations–all while ignoring the desperate plight of 11 million people because no one can supposedly do anything about it any more than we can do anything about climate change. Because, after all, doing something about climate change might affect the precious sovereignty of inviolable nation states and their self-determined right to do whatever the hell they want to the atmosphere.

Either the UN is going to be a force in the world capable of stopping the next holocaust, controlling climate change and bringing awful dictators and war criminals like Assad and Cheney to justice, or it isn’t. If it isn’t going to be that because not enough countries care bad enough to give up a little of their budget and sovereignty, then the world should stop pretending that we’ve moved very far beyond base tribalism where every little group called itself “The People” and race, language and taboo dictated who was considered human and who was not. It’s as unseemly with countries as it is with clans.

If that’s who we are as human beings in the world, then so be it. Let’s stop pretending we’re something else, or that crouching behind our borders, futilely trying to fix global economic and climate problems on a nation-by-nation basis, and pretending that barbarous acts in faraway lands don’t affect “us” is some form of nobility in the 21st century. It isn’t.

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American rush to judgment

by digby

This should be a cautionary tale — but it probably won’t be:

The five men whose convictions in the brutal 1989 beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park were later overturned have agreed to a settlement of about $40 million from New York City to resolve a bitterly fought civil rights lawsuit over their arrests and imprisonment in the sensational crime.

The agreement, reached between the city’s Law Department and the five plaintiffs, would bring to an end an extraordinary legal battle over a crime that came to symbolize a sense of lawlessness in New York, amid reports of “wilding” youths and a marauding “wolf pack” that set its sights on a 28-year-old investment banker who ran in the park many evenings after work.

The confidential deal, disclosed by a person who is not a party in the lawsuit but was told about the proposed settlement, must still be approved by the city comptroller and then by a federal judge.

The initial story of the crime, as told by the police and prosecutors, was that a band of young people, part of a larger gang that rampaged through Central Park, had mercilessly beaten and sexually assaulted the jogger. The story quickly exploded into the public psyche, fanned by politicians and sensational news reports that served to inflame racial tensions.

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The five black and Hispanic men, ages 14 to 16 at the time of their arrests, claimed that incriminating statements they had given had been coerced by the authorities. The statements were ruled admissible, and the men were convicted in two separate trials in 1990.

In December 2002, an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, found DNA and other evidence that the woman had been raped and beaten not by the five teenagers but by another man, Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist and murderer who had confessed to acting alone in the attack. Concluding that the new evidence could have changed the original verdict, Mr. Morgenthau’s office joined a defense motion asking that the convictions be vacated.

The reason I say it won’t make a difference is because the media, the public and the legal system all get very stimulated when a story like this happens and they lose all discretion. It’s happened many times before.

This case is actually one of the few that has a satisfying result but a lot of the credit has to go to the DA’s office which actually endorsed the fact that they had wrongfully convicted these men. That is an anomoly.

If this is an issue that moves you — well, if injustice is an issue that moves you — do yourself a favor and spend some time with this Pro-Publica investigation about wrongful convictions in this country and the outrageously immoral unwillingness of police and District Attorneys to admit when they’ve made a mistake — and go about obstructing any investigations into the innocence of people they’ve sent to prison. If any of us did what they routinely do we would be indicted for obstruction of justice. They are almost never held to account either for the original mistake/conscious railroading or the lengths to which they went to prevent the truth from ever coming out. Many of these alleged public servants are far too willing to let innocent people rot in jail (while guilty ones go free) rather than admit they were wrong. It’s enough to make you sick to your stomach.

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Mitch McConnell: a mother’s best friend


by digby

Who says the Republicans don’t have any ideas that will help working people? Here’s one that’s really going to hit people where they live. Literally:

Today’s families face a number of challenges: About half of all parents say it’s difficult for them to balance the demands of raising their children with the demands of work. Childcare costs more than rent or food, just 12 percent get paid leave if they have a new child, and if a kid gets sick 40 percent of workers can’t take a paid day to care for them.

Called “A Fair Shot for Everyone,” one key piece of the Republicans’ package, introduced by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), is the Working Parents Home Office Act, which allows parents to deduct home office costs from their taxes if they have a baby crib in the office. “These are just the kinds of things that could make a difference in people’s lives now,” McConnell said.

Uhm, no. Not really. Being able to deduct costs for the baby crib you have to keep in your “home office” is not particularly helpful. Sure, it’s better than a sharp stick in the eye for the new mothers who happen to have a home office, but the real problem for workers is low pay, non-existent child care, inflexible work schedules and unpaid maternity leave. And the Republicans are actually trying to make all that worse than it already is. Even the rather tepid assistance the ACA offers in terms of health care for those working less than 40 hours per week is the subject of a rollback by none other than than great and wonderful avatar of bipartisanship Susan Collins.

So, yes. If you happen to be a new mom who works from home and has a home office that already qualifies for the minuscule tax benefits that are offered, you can add one more little write-off if you agree to keep the crib in the office so you can work while the baby sleeps and breastfeeds. Because God knows, you’ll need to work twice as hard to make a living if these people have their way.

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GrantHer FTW


by digby

Here’s a very neat idea from my pal Peter Daou and his wife Leela Daou:

GrantHer focuses attention on women and girls around the globe who are a force for positive change. We provide no-strings-attached personal grants to the next generation of women leaders, entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and creators. Grants range from $50 to $500, covering items from business startup costs to supplies for creative projects, budgets for investigative reporting, and travel and registration expenses for professional conferences.

If you have general feedback or would like to recommend someone for a grant, please use this form. Provide all relevant information about the prospective recipient, including full name, contact information, location, and the purpose of the grant. We will respond to grant requests within 30 days. Recipients are selected after careful review. Please note: The number of deserving recipients will always exceed available resources. Grants are not taxable.

I’m proud to be on the advisory board of this project. Sometimes all it takes is a few buck that you don’t have to make a difference.  If you go to the link above you’ll see a whole bunch of women who are doing that, one small project at a time.

I’m going to be keeping an eye on this and bringing some of the stories to these pages from time to time. It’s important to refocus from the 30 thousand feet level to the street level.  That’s where the real inspiration lies.

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Reagan the populist hero

by digby

Rick Santorum is trying to say that Ronald Reagan was some sort of populist. Hahahaha:

The former Pennsylvania senator, who is exploring a 2016 presidential bid, quoted President Ronald Reagan to make the case for a more robust government that can provide assistance to lower and middle income Americans. He argued that the Republican would “be appalled today” by GOP lawmakers who tailor their policy prescriptions to conservative orthodoxy rather than the economic problems at hand.

“One of [Reagan’s] famous quotes was, ‘government isn’t the answer, government is the problem.’ But here is what he said in the beginning of that quote, ‘in this current crisis,’” Santorum declared. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a different crisis in America, we have a crisis of people in the middle of America feeling disconnected to this country and the opportunity they can provide.”

Here’s the relevant portion of Reagan’s speech:

These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions. We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.

Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.

But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending. For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.

You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we’re not bound by that same limitation? We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding: We are going to begin to act, beginning today.

The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we’ve had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

That’s a lovely sentiment isn’t it? You can see why ordinary people didn’t understand what he was really saying, can’t you? he couched his trickle down with warm bromides about the average Joe but nonetheless it’s clear to anyone who listens closely that he;s average Joe and Jane’s problems are all caused by high taxes and high government spending.

He went on to talk about how this all about opportunity for cabbies and factory workers and waitresses etc. and talked about American being the land of opportunity and greatness. And then he got specific:

It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government.

Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work–work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.

If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on Earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price.

It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. It is time for us to realize that we’re too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We’re not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope.

So yeah sure, he was responding to “the present crisis” but he also made it clear that he intended to cut taxes and cut spending by the federal government as a general principle.

Santorum can pretend that Reagan was some kind of populist who wanted to help the poor but it just isn’t not true. Yes, he spoke glowingly and effectively about our American Dream, but it was all about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. In fact, Santorum’s newfound support for the minimum wage would have been vociferously opposed by St. Ronnie:

Established during the New Deal, the minimum wage was once viewed by Democrats and Republicans alike as an instrument of economic justice — an effort to “end starvation wages,” as President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself put it. Now, though, it is seen by much of official Washington as an economic impediment, an undue burden on a marketplace better left unfettered. Where the onus was once on the business owner to pay “a decent wage,” it’s now more on the worker to demonstrate that he or she deserves one.

This sea change began when Ronald Reagan swept into office. From 1950 through 1982, the minimum wage was allowed to fall below 45% of the average hourly wage in the U.S. in only four separate years. Since 1982, the minimum wage has never reached 45%, and it currently stands at 36%, of that benchmark. Even using a conservative measure of inflation, the minimum wage throughout the ’60s and ’70s was consistently worth more than $5.50 an hour — and frequently more than $6 — in today’s terms. After 1980, its value plummeted, sinking to less than $4.50 as President Reagan left office.

That’s just one of many examples of Reagan “curbing the influence of the federal government” to help actual workers. He didn’t manage to cut the growth of government however. It turned out that he did believe in one kind of government largesse — military spending. That’s always good.

Reagan was a very gifted politician who effectively appropriated the ethos of the left whenever it suited him to provide cover for his right wing philosophy. The paeans to “renewal” and “strength” and faith in American greatness were all very inspiring concepts and he used them liberally. But they were ultimately a vacuous misdirection in his hands. He had the gift of appearing to be whoever you wanted him to be — an actor’s talent. A talent poor Rick Santorum is sorely lacking.

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Poor Scott Walker. Even when he wins he loses.

by digby

I wrote about the Great Wisconsin Hope this morning for Salon. Judges may be deciding that the prosecutor’s claims that his alleged criminality is without merit but they’re not doing him any political favors:

Despite the fact that a couple of judges have found the “John Doe” investigation that’s been dogging him for years to be without merit, the news for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is not good. On Thursday, the Wisconsin Club for Growth got what they wanted and the court released secret documents underlying the case against the governor and the groups alleged to have been illegally coordinating with him during the 2011 recall election. If one assumes that everyone in the nation agrees that outside Big Money groups should be allowed to funnel money into politics using subterfuge and misdirection (while marching around self-righteously insisting they are defending the First Amendment) then perhaps this can be considered a victory.

Certainly the Wall Street Journal editorial page will see it that way. For them this case is a “civil rights case” in which the Club For Growth is their Rosa Parks being forced to sit in the back of the private jet and drink Perrier-Jouet instead of Dom. You’ll recall that recently they almost had a full-blown breakdown at the rumor Scott Walker might settle this case rather than have it tied around his neck like a sack full of gold bullion as he was trying to run for president.

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