Month: July 2014

Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert goes on unhinged rant attacking children

by David Atkins

Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert:

During a speech on the House floor Friday, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) compared the surge of unaccompanied migrant children to soldiers invading France during World War II. Criticizing President Obama’s request for Congress to provide $3.7 billion in emergency funds to process the deportation proceedings of more than 52,000 children, mostly fleeing violence in Central America, Gohmert asked Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) to “use whatever means” like troops, ships of war, or taxes to “stop the invasion.”

“Even with $3.7 billion that’s requested, there’s no way for what’s being called for is going to stop the invasion that’s occurring,” Gohmert said. “That’s why I’m hoping that my governor will utilize Article 1, Section 10, that allows a state that is being invaded — in our case more than twice as many just in recent months, more than twice as many than invaded France on D-Day with a doubling of that coming en route, on their way here now under Article 1, Section 10, the state of Texas would appear to have the right, not only to use whatever means, whether it’s troops, even using ships of war, even exacting a tax on interstate commerce that wouldn’t normally be allowed to have or utilize, they’d be entitled in order to pay to stop the invasion.”

Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution provides that “[n]o state shall, without the consent of Congress, . . . engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.” The fact that this provision contemplates a state making “war,” however, strongly suggests that the framers were thinking about military invasions when they drafted it — not that they were concerned about an “invasion” of children.
Gohmert also suggested that the state of Texas should send National Guard to the border to secure the border, citing the time that President Woodrow Wilson sent General Pershing into Mexico to pursue Pancho Villa who had killed Americans. “I’m not advocating an invasion into Mexico,” he added. “I’m advocating strongly we stop the invasion into the United States.”

Remember that of the over 300 million people in America, this deeply disturbed, hateful man is one of only 435 who get to sit in the people’s House making our laws. This is who Republicans in a deep red district have chosen to send to Washington to represent them and legislate for us. And they keep sending him back.

Especially after Eric Cantor’s defeat largely due to a perceived weakness on immigration, this is now definitively the heart and soul of the Republican Party. On immigration, Republicans are Gohmert. And he is them. There’s no sense pretending otherwise. And every single Republican who gets elected to the House of Representatives and votes for a Republican Speaker of the House owns it–no matter what their individually professed stance on the issue might be.

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Dispatch from taser nation

by digby

This has only happened a few times so it’s no biggie:

A police officer here who said he meant to fire his Taser, not his handgun, has been charged with a misdemeanor in the shooting of a fleeing panhandler.

Officer Jason L. Shuck, 36, was charged Wednesday with misdemeanor third-degree assault in the May 9 shooting near a neighborhood Walmart. If convicted, he could face up to a year in jail.

“The best explanation that I have is that my … brain was saying Taser … but my body moved faster than my brain,” Shuck told an investigator, according to the probable cause statement filed in Greene County Circuit Court.

Police Chief Paul Williams said Shuck remains an employee of the Springfield police on paid administrative leave. Williams said Shuck, like any officer according to policy, might remain on the force even if he is convicted of the misdemeanor.

Williams said he has not made a final decision about Shuck’s employment.

“The internal investigation is separate from the criminal investigation, and it is in process,” Williams said.

Shuck and his lawyer could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Eric David Butts, 27, who had been seeking money outside the Walmart, was shot after Shuck confronted him and Butts started running away. He was hit in the lower back.

Butts, who has been diagnosed with mental illnesses including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, suffered serious intestinal injuries. He is a convicted burglar who had served time in prison and was wanted on a warrant for failure to appear in court on a parole violation.

The shooting has left Butts unable to use the bathroom normally, at least temporarily. A colostomy bag collects his intestinal wastes.

I’m sure tasering him was necessary. After all, he was panhandling — and the he ran away, thus was no longer doing the thing he was being rousted for. Of course he needed to be shot full of electricity, nobody argues with that. It’s a shame the officer made a boo-boo and shot him in the back with a bullet instead. But, you know, if you’re a mentally ill person living on the streets who is known by police you should always make sure your voices aren’t telling you to stop doing what the police are telling you to stop doing in any way but the way they are telling you to stop doing it. You’re asking for trouble.

Honestly, the shooting in the back is a terrible thing. But from the sound of it it actually was an accident — the cop was negligent, but it doesn’t appear he meant to shoot him. But the fact that nobody questions the officer’s decision to taser a mentally ill panhandler who was leaving the scene is even worse. Yes, he had failed to appear in court and had a warrant. So what? He’s schizophrenic, known to the cop, and pumping him full of electricity for failing to comply in a situation like this is as cruel as beating him with a nightstick. Unless someone’s life is at stake, there’s just no excuse for it.

(Also note the lovely authoritarian tone in the rest of the newspaper article as it excuses taser deaths. Yikes …)

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QOTD: Richard Nixon

by digby

New White House tapes revealed:

Mr. Nixon: We all do it. We all swear. But you show me a girl that swears and I’ll show you an awful unattractive person. . . . I mean, all femininity is gone. And none of the smart girls do swear, incidentally.

What an asshole …

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The Good Mandate

by digby

Hobby Lobby’s owner Steve Green believes it’s a constraint on their religious liberty and the 1st Amendment for the government to mandate they pay for insurance that covers contraception. But never let it be said that they are against government mandates on principle. Or even religious mandates:

STEVE GREEN: “We’re working on 4 year public school bible curriculum. The first year will be a summary of all three of those section. It’s history, it’s impact and it’s story. Then the next 3 years is going in depth in each of those — a year for the history, a year for the impact and a year for the story — in some order… The nation is in danger because of its ignorance of what God has taught. . . . If we don’t know it, our future is going to be very scary … We were looking – uh- we — we were talking – – discussed a college curriculum but it’s no — we really want to get — be into the – um – high school level because we want to reach as many as possible. Someday, I would argue, it should be mandated. Here’s a book that’s impacted our world, unlike any other, and you’re not gonna teach it? There’s — there’s something wrong with that.”

When I was in high school I took a course called “comparative world religions” which, needless to say, discussed the Bible since it is the basis for three of them. It’s “history” “story” and “impact” were a huge part of he course as I recall and I think we all came away understanding how important the Bible has been in the development of Western Civilization. They didn’t teach us that what was in the Bible was revealed truth or that its stories were to be taken literally or that we would all go to hell if we didn’t believe in it. And that is undoubtedly what this fellow really wants the public schools to be teaching children.

Now, I also went to Sunday school for years and in those classes, we got the religious instruction. Of course, my parents wanted me to be schooled in that religion. I guess I just can’t understand why that’s not good enough. And anyway, if their job isn’t to teach the good word then I don’t know what their job is.

Religion is given a huge piece of the private sphere in which to do its work. They don’t pay taxes even though they own a lot of property. Their social and cultural influence is immense. There is no reason on earth that they cannot be in charge of religious instruction. If they aren’t successfully getting it done I’d have to say it’s pretty lame to blame the poor overburdened public schools for failing to do their job for them.

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Benghazi!™  is BS? Say it ain’t so …

by digby

Huh. I wonder why we didn’t hear about the outcome of this hearing earlier?

Military officers testified that there was no “stand-down order” that held back military assets that could have saved the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans killed at a diplomatic outpost and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya. Their testimony undercut the contention of Republican lawmakers.

The “stand-down” theory centers on a Special Operations team – a detachment leader, a medic, a communications expert and a weapons operator with his foot in a cast – that was stopped from flying from Tripoli to Benghazi after the attacks of Sept. 11-12, 2012, had ended. Instead, it was instructed to help protect and care for those being evacuated from Benghazi and from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli.

The senior military officer who issued the instruction to “remain in place” and the detachment leader who received it said it was the right decision and has been widely mischaracterized. The order was to remain in Tripoli and protect some three dozen embassy personnel rather than fly to Benghazi some 600 miles away after all Americans there would have been evacuated. And the medic is credited with saving the life of an evacuee from the attacks.

Transcripts of hours of closed-door interviews with nine military leaders by the House Armed Services and Oversight and Government Reform committees were made public for the first time on Wednesday.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the oversight panel, has suggested that Hillary Rodham Clinton gave the order, though as secretary of state at the time, she was not in the military chain of command.
Despite lingering public confusion over many events that night, the testimony shows military leaders largely in agreement over how they responded to the attacks.

Not that the facts ever make any difference in these GOP pseudo-scandals. They never do. But for those trying to keep score at home, this is a useful piece of evidence.

All you ever needed to know was this, although these fools just refuse to acknowledge that even God-fearing exceptional US marines aren’t time travelers:

Military officials differ on when that telephone conversation took place, but they agree that no help could have arrived in Benghazi in time. They put the call somewhere between 5:05 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. local time. It would take about 90 minutes to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi. The next U.S.-chartered plane to make the trip left at 6:49 a.m., meaning it could have arrived shortly before 9 a.m., nearly four hours after the second, 11-minute battle at the CIA facility ended at about 5:25 a.m.

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The “diseased” immigrant, a very old story

by digby

I have a piece up at Alternet today about the hideous new meme sweeping the right wing fever swamps that declared these little refugees to be “disease” carriers who threaten American children with diseases they imagine don’t already exist in our country (they do) along with the most mundane of childhood ailments.  It’s especially nice that they don’t think we should treat these illnesses (we can’t afford it) but instead send them back over the border immediately as if they are a threat to the very air we breathe. If you want sickness, this is it:

The piece goes into the long history of this sort of thing, particularly on the US-Mexican border where we have a terrible record of abuse. For instance, did you know that the US government used Zyclon B? And that its use of it in the 1930s was an inspiration to certain people in Germany? It’s true. DDT as well.  Read on for the details. It’s enough to make your hair stand on end.

Mexican contract workers undergo medical inspection before being sprayed with pesticides, ca. 1942. The disinfections along the U.S.-Mexico border continued until the late 1950s.

It’s xenophobia, pure and simple.

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Economics will always be intensely political

by David Atkins

Paul Krugman makes a good and important point about the profession of economics, using the bizarre opposition to easy money policies in a poor economy. But I think he gets it only mostly right:

Complaints about low interest rates are usually framed in terms of the harm being done to retired Americans living on the interest from their CDs. But the interest receipts of older Americans go mainly to a small and relatively affluent minority. In 2012, the average older American with interest income received more than $3,000, but half the group received $255 or less. The really big losers from low interest rates are the truly wealthy — not even the 1 percent, but the 0.1 percent or even the 0.01 percent. Back in 2007, before the slump, the average member of the 0.01 percent received $3 million (in 2012 dollars) in interest. By 2011, that had fallen to $1.3 million — a loss equivalent to almost 9 percent of the group’s 2007 income.

That’s a lot, and it surely explains a lot of the hysteria over Fed policy. The rich are even more likely than most people to believe that what’s good for them is good for America — and their wealth and the influence it buys ensure that there are always plenty of supposed experts eager to find justifications for this attitude. Hence sadomonetarism.

Which brings me back to the politicization of economics.

Before the financial crisis, many central bankers and economists were, it’s now clear, living in a fantasy world, imagining themselves to be technocrats insulated from the political fray. After all, their job was to steer the economy between the shoals of inflation and depression, and who could object to that?

It turns out, however, that using monetary policy to fight depression, while in the interest of the vast majority of Americans, isn’t in the interest of a small, wealthy minority. And, as a result, monetary policy is as bound up in class and ideological conflict as tax policy.

The truth is that in a society as unequal and polarized as ours has become, almost everything is political. Get used to it.

I’m not certain that this was ever not the case, though. Much of economics at a granular level is indeed a hard science that can make some verifiable predictions in closed systems given certain inputs. But at the macro level it depends on models of human behavior and as such is very much a social science.

And like all social sciences, the outcomes tend to vary quite greatly depending on the model of human behavior you use. As of the early 21st century, we actually have a remarkably limited understanding our own species, particularly as it relates to our behavior in groups and our reactions to various inputs.

It isn’t just that it’s convenient to the rich to, say, oppose easy money policies. It’s also that it’s convenient to the rich to assume that people are purely rational economic actors with foresight, intense attention to value, easy ability to fill gaps in the marketplace, and adequate access to market information. If you assume that, then there’s nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, and the only thing that can go wrong is government sticking its fingers where it shouldn’t.

If, on the other hand, you assume that people often behave irrationally especially in groups, that greed and superstitions often overwhelm foresight, that most people would rather get a root canal than spend endless hours searching for the best product at the lowest cost or finding out which corporation in the food supply chain was responsible for poisoning their child, that monopolies form naturally often without the ability of competitors to naturally supplant them, and that large corporations hold insurmountable power over consumers due to a yawning information gap, then you’re likely to favor a lot of Keynesian intervention.

Now, the balance of the evidence suggests that the latter view is correct. But you can’t easily prove that with a formula. Which means that until we get a big enough aggregate of big data over time and powerful enough computers to answer some of these big social questions definitively, the science of economics (like so much else in the social sciences) is always going to be intensely political. It can’t help be otherwise.

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Americans like their privacy after all

by digby

At least according to this poll:

Fifty-nine percent of the survey’s respondents said the programs that collect phone and Internet communications as a way to prevent terrorism collect too much information about Americans, while only 20 percent said the government strikes the right balance in deciding what data to collect. Six percent said the government doesn’t go far enough in collecting that information.

Many Americans aren’t even convinced that the surveillance programs do much to fight terrorism. A combined 43 percent said the phone and Internet data collection efforts are very likely (13 percent) or somewhat likely (30 percent) to have prevented a terrorist attack. But 47 percent said they were somewhat unlikely (23 percent) or very unlikely (24 percent) to have done so.

The poll was conducted after The Washington Post reported that most of the Internet communications intercepted and stored by the National Security Agency came from accounts belonging to ordinary citizens, including many Americans, who were not the intended targets of the surveillance. The Post report also found that the NSA’s online surveillance had led directly to the capture of at least two terrorism suspects.

Forty-one percent of Americans in the new survey said the government is likely to have recorded their own emails or telephone calls. Only 18 percent said their communications haven’t been recorded, while another 42 percent weren’t sure.

Moreover, 57 percent think data collection programs that sweep in Americans’ phone and Internet data are “an unnecessary intrusion into Americans’ lives,” while only 23 percent think those efforts are “justified as a way to combat terrorism.”

Whether or not their votes would be affected by this belief is another story. Let’s just say I doubt it:

The “goes too far” view was shared by 66 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of independents and a 48 percent plurality of Democrats.

I’m pretty sure we can flip the Republicans and Democrats depending on who’s president. Recall this:

Opinion about the legality of Bush’s [wiretapping] actions varies widely by political affiliation. Seventy-seven percent of Democrats believe Bush broke the law, compared with 58% of independents and 16% of Republicans.

Similarly, 80% of liberals believe Bush broke the law, compared with 55% of moderates and just 26% of conservatives.

It’s not exactly the same question but its close enough to illustrate the point.

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Cutting off your own constituent’s nose to spite your face


by digby

WTH?

Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) released a draft resolution on Thursday that would authorize the House to move forward with a case against Obama for what House Republicans see as abuse of executive power.

The litigation will focus solely on the 2013 delay of the employer mandate. According to the resolution, that was an instance where Obama changed the law without congressional approval.

“That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work. No president should have the power to make laws on his or her own,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said.

So, the Republicans are going to court to enforce a mandate which they voted against and to which they are completely opposed?

Ok. One can only assume they couldn’t find an example of Imperial Executive Overreach that harms their own constituency. After all, they like to fashion themselves as the party of small business which was granted a reprieve from the mandate with this executive order. I guess the Republicans can’t stand the idea that small business owners were cut a break if others weren’t. Or something.

Also too, the great black whale of Obamacare is just irresistible. They’re going to go after it even if it makes no sense at all.

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Good Question

by digby

I think many of us have wondered why the Big Blubbering Babies who run business and Wall Street are so upset  when they seem to be making out like bandits. It wasn’t always this way.  They used to consider themselves civic leaders with pride in a thriving nation of successful people.  Now all they do is whine about not being properly worshiped by the plebes. James Surowiecki in the New Yorker has an interesting theory:

If today’s corporate kvetchers are more concerned with the state of their egos than with the state of the nation, it’s in part because their own fortunes aren’t tied to those of the nation the way they once were. In the postwar years, American companies depended largely on American consumers. Globalization has changed that—foreign sales account for almost half the revenue of the S&P 500—as has the rise of financial services (where the most important clients are the wealthy and other corporations). The well-being of the American middle class just doesn’t matter as much to companies’ bottom lines. And there’s another change. Early in the past century, there was a true socialist movement in the United States, and in the postwar years the Soviet Union seemed to offer the possibility of a meaningful alternative to capitalism. Small wonder that the tycoons of those days were so eager to channel populist agitation into reform. Today, by contrast, corporate chieftains have little to fear, other than mildly higher taxes and the complaints of people who have read Thomas Piketty. Moguls complain about their feelings because that’s all anyone can really threaten.

They just want to be loved. It’s the only thing left their money can’t buy.

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