Month: July 2014

Evolution


by digby

The president does have a good sense of humor, you have to give him that:

Daniel Rugg Webb, a 32-year-old cashier at Franklin Barbecue in Austin, Texas, had been hearing the rumor all day on Thursday: President Obama was stopping by. He and his co-workers didn’t give much credence to the idea—that is, until eight secret service agents, and then some, walked into the restaurant in the afternoon.

“[They] frisked everybody, which was kind of my favorite part,” Webb recalled in an interview with BuzzFeed Saturday night. “Then he just showed up.”

Webb, who is also a comedian and retired musician, wasn’t about to miss his opportunity to say whatever he wanted to a sitting president. So, after he had introduced himself and the president was signing a reportedly $300 bill, he slammed his hand on the counter.

“Equal rights for gay people!” he exclaimed.

Obama reacted without missing a beat. “Are you gay?”

Taken aback by the directness of the question, he said, Webb responded, “Only when I’m having sex!”

The president laughed, then, realizing there was a group of children near the two, said, “Not in front of the kids!”

I’m not sure it’s entirely appropriate to ask if a person is gay, but for all I know, it is these days.

The reporter interviewed Daniel Webb and he had a specific request for the president:

While Webb said he appreciates Obama’s social progressiveness, he expressed hope that the president will close the gap between his own relative forward-thinking on gay rights, and his general quietness on the anti-gay views of many state leaders before he leaves office.

“It would be interesting if he could call some people out for it. People can use a lot of things—religion, freedom of speech—to be anti-gay, but I need people to understand you can call people out for civil rights things,” Webb said.
“We are an anti-gay state. We are a state with a whole bunch of hungry children and sick old people, and [Rick Perry is] grandstanding on things that will get him a better election,” Webb said. “And it’s glaringly obvious. He’s kind of primitive in his social beliefs. I would like to see Rick Perry negatively influenced by any kind of attention. Even Obama laughing at something as, hopefully, acceptable as sexuality can show the difference.”

Yeah, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that. The president has made himself pretty clear:

What you’re seeing is, I think, states working through this issue– in fits and starts, all across the country. Different communities are arriving at different conclusions, at different times. And I think that’s a healthy process and a healthy debate. And I continue to believe that this is an issue that is gonna be worked out at the local level, because historically, this has not been a federal issue, what’s recognized as a marriage.
[…]
Well, I– you know, my Justice Department has already– said that it is not gonna defend– the Defense Against Marriage Act. That we consider that a violation of equal protection clause. And I agree with them on that. You know? I helped to prompt that– that move on the part of the Justice Department.

Part of the reason that I thought it was important– to speak to this issue was the fact that– you know, I’ve got an opponent on– on the other side in the upcoming presidential election, who wants to– re-federalize the issue and– institute a constitutional amendment– that would prohibit gay marriage. And, you know, I think it is a mistake to– try to make what has traditionally been a state issue into a national issue.

But maybe he’s evolving, who knows?

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Stupid presidential candidate tricks

by digby

Governor Rick “Neidermeyer” Perry wants to “send a message” by calling in the National Guard:

“They need to be right on the river. They need to be there as a show of force because that’s the message that gets sent back very quickly to Central America,” he said. 

Hume challenged Perry, asking what purpose troops could actually serve.

“They’re not, under the law, allowed to apprehend any of these children that are crossing, are they?” he asked.

“The issue is with being able to send that message because it’s the visual of it, I think, that is the most important,” Perry responded. “If you don’t stop the bleeding. If you don’t staunch this flow of individuals that are coming up here, this is only going to get worse.”

Hume continued to press Perry.

“But the question I’m trying to get at with you is this: if these children, who have undergone these harrowing journeys to escape from the most desperate conditions in their home countries, have gotten this far, are they really going to be deterred by the presence of troops along the border who won’t shoot them and can’t arrest them?” he asked.

“I think we’re talking about two different things here,” Perry responded.

The governor then added that the “most humanitarian thing that we can do” is to take care of the undocumented immigrants, quickly process them and return them to their families.

And if he can’t get his way (which is useless unless we give the National Guard the order to shoot these kids) he wants the Republicans to hold their breath until they turn blue:

Also too:

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A disturbing data set

by digby

In the New York Times today — where the hate is among the younger set. The oranges and beige are where the most young white supremacists are. All under 30 …

They hate the Jews and the blacks the most. Same as it ever was.

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Nothing about budget politics in America makes sense

by David Atkins

I examined the bizarre funhouse mirror that is budget politics in one of my posts yesterday at the Washington Monthly. After noting that in the modern era Republican presidents tend to explode deficits while Democratic ones try to close them, I pointed out the inherent craziness of that phenomenon:

But there’s a double absurdity at work here, which is that in a poor economy the country shouldn’t be trying to balance the budget at all. Paul Krugman and the Keynesians have been proven right on this question repeatedly, even as the austerity fetishists and the supply-siders have been proven wrong at every turn. We know now definitively what we should have known instinctually back in 1980: that supply-side economics is junk science and a proven failure. We also know from the European experience that austerity economics only sends countries further into recession—with the added effect of increasing deficits in the bargain, thus supposedly necessitating further cuts in a negative reinforcement loop.

Democrats are supposed to be the party of stimulus and fiscal laxity. Republicans are supposed to be the party of belt-tightening and fiscal austerity. Instead we see repeatedly that Republicans play fast and loose with the nation’s budget in order to deliver tax breaks to their wealthy friends, while Democrats spend their time closing the deficits Republicans create. But even more bizarrely, we see Democrats counterproductively pushing austerity economics when they should be pursuing Keynesian stimulus, even as Republicans ironically vote for stimulus—albeit in its weakest and worst-targeted guise—in the form of tax breaks for the rich.

When budget politics has gone this far into funhouse mirror land, it almost makes popular polling on budget issues irrelevant. How are voters even supposed to know which party represents what policies, or even which economic theory they’re working under? While Republicans are clearly more destructive and wildly irresponsible, both sides are operating in such self-contradictory opposition to their stated economic ideologies and branding that it’s a wonder voters can even make sense of it all.

This is part of what comes of allowing conservatives and neoliberals alike to spout three decades and more of fallacious economic talking points essentially unchallenged. People start to believe things that simply aren’t true, and politicians start to believe their own press clippings as well.

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Reliving the good old days one more time

by digby

I guess there’s some question as to who exactly made these, but it sure seems believable that it was the Republican Party to me … they excel at snotty stuff like this.

I expect we’ll see more. In 08 it was all Dem on Dem nastiness and despite some really hard core internecine political nastiness, for the most part they didn’t go here. I suspect the Republicans won’t be able to resist. They love to snicker about sex even as they’re decrying it as immoral. The question will be if members of the press succumb to their inner adolescent Mean Girl this time or if they manage to behave like adults.

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Patriot vs Patriot

by digby

Now here’s a good idea:

The leader of an effort to rally a Bundy Ranch-style militia at the Texas border said this week that his troops were fighting for “national sovereignty.”

“We have patriots all across this country who are willing to sacrifice their time, their monies, even quit their jobs to come down and fight for freedom, liberty and national sovereignty,” Chris Davis said, as quoted by Rio Grande Valley TV station KRGV.

Davis would not tell KRGV how many members make up his group, Operation Secure Our Border, nor offer an outline of when and where the group planned the deploy along the Texas-Mexico border.

Davis, who has been identified as a member of the Second Amendment activist group Open Carry Texas, also reportedly released a YouTube video recently in which he issued a warning to those migrants crossing the border illegally: “Get back across the border or you will be shot.”

So, these particular patriots dorecognize the Federal government? In fact, they love the United States so much they are willing to kill authorized foreigners who set foot across the border in the United States at all in the name of freedom and liberty.

Is there some way we can engineer a stand-off between these guys? Preferably somewhere remote where they can play out their respective cowboy fantasies against each other and leave the rest of us alone?

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Chart ‘O the Day

by digby

Nobody really knows why this happened. There’s a pretty good theory out there about lead in our atmosphere and in older dwellings with lead paint leading to that huge spike in violence, but it’s not been proved.

One thing we do know is that the so-called political science that hypothesized that America had bred a “Super-Predator” that was so uniquely evil that we needed to throw out all common sense and constitutional principles to thwart it turned out to be hysterical nonsense. Now we’re applying that superstitious nonsense to “terrorism”, mostly foreign. We just love that boogeyman theory …

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Cruel and unusual conservatives

by digby

Over at Salon I discussed the cruel streak the right right wing is so shamelessly displaying these days.  It’s not just the way they are treating these kids at the border, although that’s the most recent example. They also treat pregnant women with contempt, despise the poor and are increasingly derisive toward the sick and the disabled:

So, it should come as no surprise that the next cruel attack on vulnerable Americans is to cut the federal disability program, which is run through the Social Security Administration. Darrell Issa’s personal wrecking crew, also known as the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, took time away from Benghazi! and its Javert-like pursuit of former IRS commissioner Lois Lerner to issue a report claiming that the program is rife with waste and fraud and must be cut to the bone to restore America’s trust. Here’s what Senator Sherrod Brown had to say about this:

There is a quiet, covert war being waged on Social Security. The tactic? Divide and conquer.

They have made so-called “structural reforms” their goal. But it’s up to us to call it like it is: privatization. […]

We need to recognize these attacks for what they are—backdoor attempts to weaken Social Security by dismantling disability insurance.

And why not? Being cruel to people who are disabled and cannot work seems to be quite popular among Tea Party members, many of whom are disabled themselves (but, of course, they deserve their benefits while other do not.) Recall this nauseating display of cruelty during the healthcare debate.

Protecting the delicate sensibilities of the religious corporation

by digby

Bill Moyers’ show this week features a fascinating discussion about the Roberts court with sharp Supreme Court observers Linda Greenhouse and Dahlia Lithwick:

I confess I had not seen one rather shocking example of the court majority’s self-serving insularity before Greenhouse pointed it out:

LINDA GREENHOUSE: I think you have to understand Hobby Lobby setting it alongside the other big religion case this term which is a case called Town of Greece– Town of Greece against Galloway, which upheld the recitation of Christian prayers at the start of town board meetings in this upstate New York town.

And this practice was challenged by two non-Christian citizens who didn’t feel like having to listen to these prayers when they showed up at the town board to conduct their business. And they argued and the lower court agreed that this was in effect an establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause.

And Justice Kennedy, writing for the 5-4 majority that overturns the lower court and upholds the prayer, says, yeah, you know, these two plaintiffs were offended. But adults in America hear lots of offensive speech and basically just, you know, deal with it. I mean, a total lack of, you might say empathy, for the position of these plaintiffs who were being made to feel– who claim they were being made to feel excluded as citizens in their community.

So take a look at that and then eight weeks later we come down with Hobby Lobby where the court’s solicitude for the conscience claim of Hobby Lobby’s owners not from having to hand out birth control to their employees but simply following a federal law that includes contraception within the employee health plan and the employees could decide to do whatever they wanted about that– this attenuated claim was so worthy of being heard that the court was just dripping with empathy for Hobby Lobby’s owners.

Basically the court says to non-Christian humans that the world is full of unpleasantness, just man-up and deal with it. But Christian corporations are delicate creatures whose sensibility is so fragile they must not even be required to have one penny of their precious money flow to a practice they find offensive. Their empathy only runs one way. (This is, of course, nonsense — the corporate owners are cynically advancing a Christian Right agenda and everyone on the Court is fully aware of it.)

On the other hand, as Lithwick points out, they are simply incoherent when it comes to women. (In fact they both pointed out that the word “woman” or “women” rarely even came up in the majority opinion in Hobby Lobby.) She compared Hobby Lobby to McCullen, the abortion clinic buffer case:

DAHLIA LITHWICK: Right. I mean, there was a 35 foot buffer. This is Massachusetts, it comes up after a history of horrific clinic violence including shootings at clinics. And Massachusetts says, we don’t know how to keep these women safe and how to keep public safety and health, beyond this 35 foot buffer. And it comes up as a free speech case.

But in the opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the solicitude for these sidewalk counselors and the implication that everyone who has ever stood outside a clinic to talk to a woman does so in gentle tones, with sweetness and light, and without any acknowledgment that there is a reason, a historic reason that these women needed to be protected on their way into the clinics is really another example of what Linda’s ascribing as that over empathizing with one set of interests and almost total disregard for the interests of those women seeking abortions.

And I just think– I track both of these as going back to, you know, Justice Anthony Kennedy, and the last time the court heard a major abortion case was so careful to say, we’re just worried. Women are extra frail. And sometimes they regret their abortions. And we have to be super duper careful with getting them good information.

And it seems to me that that’s kind of the pill from which so much of this sentiment that all of First Amendment law stops and all of religious freedom stops and everything in the constitutional architecture of this country stops when we’re talking about women and their reproductive systems, it’s so strange.

Essentially, this majority believes that women who have abortions are childlike fools who don’t understand what they’re doing and need to be “protected” from themselves. And the best way to do that is to allow anti-abortion protesters to get right up in their faces and scream about baby killing while waving pictures of bloody fetuses.

Basically we have five extremely powerful, conservative Catholic men issuing incoherent edicts about women based on religious superstition and lies, edicts rising from the assumption that women are imbeciles requiring protection from themselves which can best be accomplished through crude, aggressive bullying.

That Enlightenment stuff was really cool and all but how far have we really come since the 15th century?

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I wanna be sedated

by digby

I spent way too much of my misspent youth listening to this.

And I don’t regret a minute of it:

RIP Tommy Ramone.