Month: July 2014

At least he doesn’t think the kids should suffer

by digby

Beck the apostate. He just doesn’t hate quite enough for the faithful:

“I’ve never taken a position more deadly to my career than this — and I have never, ever taken a position that is more right than this,” an emotional Beck said Tuesday on his show on TheBlaze TV.

“Everybody is telling me I’m seeing subscriptions down; I’m seeing Mercury One donations down,” he added. “I’m getting violent emails from people who say, you know, I’ve ‘betrayed the Republic.’ Whatever.”

Beck said he planned on going down to McAllen, Texas on July 19 with a tractor-trailer loaded with teddy bears, soccer balls, and hot meals for some 3,000 undocumented immigrants he repeatedly referred to as “illegals.” He said he’d be joined by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who has argued that President Barack Obama allowed migrants to flood the border in order to increase the share of Democratic voters in future elections.

The conservative commentator also asked viewers to consider donating to Mercury One, his charity, arguing that sending aid to the migrants wasn’t a political move.

“Through no fault of their own, they are caught in political crossfire,” Beck said of immigrant families. “And while we continue to put pressure on Washington and change its course of lawlessness, we must also help. It is not either/or. It is both. We have to be active in the political game, and we must open our hearts.”

It’s interesting that despite his clear objection to the policy of allowing these child refugees from Central America seek asylum in the US — he calls them “illegals” — he’s being lambasted for treating them with human kindness of any kind. Even bringing children supplies of food is engendering violent emails. I don’t think you need to know much more than that to understand what’s really driving this insane hysteria from the right.

By the way, we could use the money we currently spend keeping non-violent drug offenders behind bars to take care of these kids. We could divert funds from some useless military hardware. There are lots of places to find the money to take care of child refugees. We just don’t want to.

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Executive power outage

by digby

It’s tempting to dismiss John Boehner’s lawsuit against presidential power as a hail Mary pass to head off impeachment but as Paul Begala points out here, there may be more to this than Democrats grok. Despite the fact that many people have been saying the presidency is mostly a ceremonial position with little power to act and almost no influence on the political system, the fact is that the presidency does control one full branch of the US government. And that’s a problem for the party of no:

Boehner’s sue first, ask questions later strategy just might work. Not because the suit has merit but because the Supreme Court has several activist Republican justices. They recently rewrote the First Amendment to declare that corporations have souls and thus have freedom of religion. Soon, I expect them to grant sainthood to Koch Industries.

Obviously, I can’t get into Boehner’s head. It is entirely possible that there is no grand strategy here. Perhaps his lawsuit is just one strand of a handful of spaghetti he’s throwing against the wall just to get through the day and survive the latest tea party onslaught. And yet, there is a chance this one strand will stick.

On the other hand, progressives would do well to assume there is a method to Boehner’s madness. The court’s right wing plays a long game. Perhaps realizing that shifting demographics and a divided GOP will make it difficult to put a Republican back in the White House, they may seize on Boehner’s lawsuit and use it to further crimp the power of the chief executive.

Unable to marshal the votes to get their legislative agenda through the Senate and unable to earn the votes to recapture the White House, it may be that the Republicans’ strategy for the foreseeable future is to ignore their losses at the ballot box and leave the heavy lifting to the one place where five Republican votes can cancel out tens of millions of Americans’ votes: the Supreme Court.

I’ve been thinking the same thing. In the past conservatives have been reluctant to limit executive power while liberals tended to be for it. Today, both sides are for it, which would be an interesting phenomenon were it not for the fact that this particular majority is more blatantly politically partisan than we’ve ever seen before. We know Republicans are likely to have a rough time cobbling together a majority for the presidency in the near future so concentrating on limiting the executive branch’s ability to function makes a lot of sense. After all, it’s not as if GOP presidents will care about any of that unless it applies to the police and military functions (and they are more than willing to ignore restrictions on those powers and litigate them later if they have to.) These “frivolous” lawsuits could be a very useful way to ensure that a gerrymandered Republican congress can exercise its veto power without having to deal with some president coming along and using another branch of government which he controls to advance his agenda.

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No, today’s teenagers aren’t going to grow up more conservative

by David Atkins

David Leonhardt puts a looking glass to the youngest and post-millennials and figures that they may wind up more conservative because the economy isn’t doing well for regular people under a Democratic administration:

In the simplest terms, the Democrats control the White House (and, for now, the Senate) at a time when the country is struggling. Economic growth has been disappointing for almost 15 years now. Mthat ost Americans think this country is on the wrong track. Our foreign policy often seems messy and complex, at best.

To Americans in their 20s and early 30s — the so-called millennials — many of these problems have their roots in George W. Bush’s presidency. But think about people who were born in 1998, the youngest eligible voters in the next presidential election. They are too young to remember much about the Bush years or the excitement surrounding the first Obama presidential campaign. They instead are coming of age with a Democratic president who often seems unable to fix the world’s problems.

…

President Obama and many other Democrats argue that they could help lift this funk if congressional Republicans weren’t blocking nearly every Democratic proposal. The Democrats essentially won that debate in 2012 and will probably be favored to win it again in 2016. But the case will become harder to make with each passing year if living standards do not start to rise at a healthy clip for most households — which has not happened since the 1990s.

This dynamic is likely to be Hillary Clinton’s biggest weakness, either as a candidate or as a president. Talking about the Clinton-era 1990s boom — as she’ll surely do, to distance herself from today’s economy — will go only so far with voters too young to have any memories of the 1990s.

Some political analysts believe that teenagers are already showing less allegiance to the Democratic Party than Americans in their 20s, based on recent polling data. My own sense is that their argument rests on small, noisy sample sizes, and Mr. Taylor, of Pew, is also skeptical. The larger point, however, remains: The Democrats face challenges with today’s teenagers that they did not face with today’s 25- or 30-year-olds.

These are fair points from a certain perspective, but they in no way indicate that today’s teenagers will become more conservative. The one does not follow from the other. If the Democratic Party fails to assert a strongly economically progressive stance and prove that its policies can work, at least at a statewide level (since obstruction is the name of the federal game), then it stands completely to reason that many of today’s youngest voters would become disenchanted with politics or even reject the Democratic Party as ineffectual. One unmistakable trend among younger voters is toward not registering with either major political party.

But that’s a trend among older, decidedly more progressive Millennials as well. That bespeaks a disenchantment with the political process and a belief that both parties are at least partially in hock to corporate interests. But it doesn’t indicate centrism, much less conservatism.

If today’s teenagers feel that the Obama Administration didn’t do enough to fix the country, they’re not going to suddenly embrace the party or the ideology that wants to kill public education and food stamps, lower corporate taxes, deny women contraception and put gays back into the closet. There is almost zero chance of today’s teenagers favoring those policies any more than their older Millennial counterparts do. They may or may not distance themselves from partisan politics itself and from the Democratic Party–a move I feel would be unwise in our binary system. But the fact that they may fail to vote at all doesn’t mean they’re about to start voting more Republican. They won’t.

Obviously, Democrats need strong turnout numbers from progressively-minded voters to win, so a dispassionate and anti-partisan electoral bloc might be a challenge. But that’s different from a hostile voting bloc.

And even then, conservatives might not want to take solace in that. Angry young people who have been denied the economic opportunities of their parents and who believe that the political system cannot give them redress, tend to be destructive to status quo power hierarchies in unpredictable ways that generally aren’t described as “conservative.”

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Republicans shocked by racial attacks — on each other


by digby

So, Republicans are upset about other Republicans using race to tar an opponent. Imagine that:

Missouri GOP Chairman Ed Martin e-mailed letters to Priebus and RNC members Tuesday afternoon expressing concerns over ads reported by Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper that sought to link McDaniel to a Ku Klux Klan ally, suggested that the tea party has “racist” ideas and warned that a vote for McDaniel could mean losing food stamps and other government programs.

Martin’s concerns came a day after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) slammed the “D.C. machine” for “racially charged false attacks” against McDaniel. And they arrived as McDaniel’s campaign was gearing up to challenge the results of the election, which were certified Monday.

“Last week, the Clarion-Ledger was able to tie McDaniel’s campaign to an ally of the Ku Klux Klan,” said the narrator of one of the ads reported by the Daily Mail, an apparent reference to a newspaper report about a McDaniel supporter named Carl Ford, who reportedly had Klan ties. The same narrator said in another commercial that “if the tea party with their racist ideas win, we will be set back to the ’50s and ’60s.”

Martin, who said he was neutral during the primary and runoff, said his concern is that Republican National Committee member Henry Barbour could be partially responsible for the ads. The Daily Mail report suggested that Barbour, who ran a pro-Cochran super PAC, could have ties to the group that ran the ads, Citizens for Progress. The group has no record at the Federal Election Commission.

“We cannot object to the Left smearing conservatives with such labels if we do not rebuke those on our side who sink to such tactics,” Martin wrote in his letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

In an interview, Barbour said his group ran no racially charged radio ads and that he has no idea who sponsored the commercials cited in the Daily Mail report, which he said he has not heard.

“We ran no radio ads that had anything to do with the KKK or race, or anything like that,” Barbour said.

That would be terrible if they did that. Don’t they know that there are rules about these things?

This is how it’s done:

You know, subtle …

High praise

by digby

New book by @PatrickBuchanan from @CrownForum is “amazingly fine,” “a masterpiece,” says Ben Stein. http://t.co/2XWWAds325
— American Spectator (@AmSpec) July 8, 2014

Grover Norquist retweeted …

Still here in Sandpoint, Idaho, and it is too darned hot. It’s often hot in the middle of continents in summer and this is no exception. The real problem is the humidity though. We left D.C. to escape the humidity. It was unbearable, like being in a steam room with your suit and tie on. We do not have much humidity in L.A., but we sure have plenty of it here in North Idaho this summer.
However, it’s all fine. There are hundreds of friendly people out on City Beach, many wanting to say hello and pose for pictures with this old fellow. There is incredibly tasty kettle corn. And there is Lake Pendoreille, limitless cool blue expanse of water, blue sky, clouds, and mountain forests. My brilliant, world-traveling sister, called me to report on her just concluded trip to Tanzania. She generously noted that while it was beautiful, it was no more beautiful than North Idaho, and then added, “No place is.” 

I spent a good chunk of the day reading Pat Buchanan’s amazingly fine new book, The Greatest Comeback, on his association with Richard Nixon from late 1965 until Nixon’s amazing victory in the ’68 election for President. The book is a masterpiece. Others, better at reviewing than I am, will review this book. I will just say I was entranced, astonished, overwhelmed by Pat’s observations, his insights, his poetry, the scope of his vision. He is not afraid to be politically incorrect. He is overwhelmingly pro-RN, of course, but compelled to point out logical and historical mistakes in Nixon’s worldview. Above all, The Greatest Comeback is the ultimate insider’s guide to how the great game of presidential politics is played. I cannot think of a better way to spend your time or your book-buying dollar than on this book. The section on Nixon and Pat’s trip to Africa in 1967 and what happened to the leaders they met on that trip will make you gasp. 

All in all, for anyone interested in 20th century politics and how the human spirit works within the political process, and the most fascinating man ever to sit in the Oval Office, The Greatest Comeback is must reading. Chapter and verse to follow from the reviewers. 

Then, nappy sleep, and then out on the mighty Cobalt to dinner in Hope…

Do read on — if you’re interested in Ben Stein’s stream of consciousness descriptions of his food and musical tastes.

Morning Joe should not be casting stones

by digby

Apparently Joe Scarborough was very upset to learn the Hillary Clinton once defended a rapist in her early career as a lawyer when she was assigned the case by a judge. He said:

“Hillary Clinton chose to do this,” he snapped. “This completely changes the conversation.”

Scarborough pointed out that many other female lawyers would not take the case. “And furthermore, I’m sure they wouldn’t brag about getting this child rapist a plea deal,” he said. ”[She] also suggested she knew he was lying because he passed a polygraph test.”

“This is really troubling Mark, on many layers.”

How interesting that Scarborough has such high standards for what cases defense attorneys should take. Especially considering his own record. This story is from 2009, right after Dr George Tiller was murdered in Kansas:

In 1993, David Gunn was killed in Pensacola, Florida, and Michael Griffin, an anti-abortion zealot, was accused of the crime. (Griffin was later convicted and jailed.) And Scarborough — who the following year would run for Congress as a Republican abortion foe — made several court appearances, pro bono, on Griffin’s behalf.

Speaking this morning on Morning Joe, Scarborough didn’t mention having represented Griffin. Rather, he said he was asked by Griffin’s family, who knew his own family, to find a lawyer for Griffin. (“The family hired me and they wanted me to find him a lawyer, to make sure he didn’t use the Bible as his self-defense in court,” he said) He implied that a number of people expressed interest in taking on the case in order because of its political implications (“for all the wrong reasons”) and that he was wary of such people. Eventually, he said, he found a “progressive, pro-choice” lawyer who nonetheless understood that everyone has the right to counsel. Scarborough went on to talk about the need to return to civility in American politics.

But when the Village Voice dug into the episode for a cover story on Scarborough last year, it found evidence suggesting Scarborough had sought to play a large role in the case.

Despite Scarborough’s claim that he was merely trying to find a lawyer for Griffin, the paper reported:

Griffin already had a court-appointed attorney, and when that attorney made a motion to substitute Scarborough at a June hearing, Scarborough said: “I understand that I come in this case if another attorney is not brought on board, that I will be responsible for representing Mr. Griffin at trial.”

In fact, Scarborough began representing Griffin shortly after the March murder and didn’t find a trial lawyer, Bob Kerrigan, until late June, when he wrote a letter withdrawing from the case.

And Griffin himself told the the Voice, in a letter written from prison, that he signed papers, brought to him by Kerrigan and Scarborough, that would have kept Scarborough on as co-counsel, until a judge rejected the plan. The Voice continued:

According to Griffin, Joe told him “several times” that he would represent him at trial and that he “had three friends still in law school who would help him,” adding: “I have an exact memory on this point.” read on …

Scarborough had a perfect right to step up and represent an accused murderer pro-bono. Much of our legal system relies on such arrangements. But he should be careful about trying to split hairs over Hillary Clinton’s decades ago court mandated duty. It’s pretty clear that Scarborough’s actions in this murder case were far more questionable — and recent — than Clinton’s.

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Insane chart of the day

by digby

Via Krugman:

This is nearly all attributable to political insanity in Washington: extremist Republicans vetoing any sane policy they can veto and dizzy Democrats joining a ludicrous political framework that put spending cuts and deficits at the top of the agenda in an epic political downturn.

Krugman writes:

And if no deal is made on the federal highway fund, it will soon plunge even further.

It’s important here not to get caught up too much in the details. Yes, it’s absurd that the federal gasoline tax has been flat in nominal terms since 1993, which means that in real terms it has fallen 40 percent. But highways don’t have to be paid for with gas taxes — the fund could be (and has been) topped up with transfers from general revenue. And federal borrowing costs remain incredibly low by historical standards.

So the highway issue should be seen as part of the larger craziness of infrastructure policy, in which spending has crashed at a time when by any reasonable criterion we should have been building much more.

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Suckers born every minute

by digby

My piece for Salon today takes a look at the latest iteration of the Wingnut Welfare racket. It’s looking good for Mississippi Tea Party Icon Chris McDaniel:

Nothing fires up the Tea Party faithful like accusations of illegal voting, especially of the African-American kind. McDaniel has a built-in cause should he decide to accept it. But that’s not the only avenue for his comeback. Chris Chocola is a former congressman who left the government in frustration and now heads the Club for Growth, which not only backs economic extremists for office but is also spearheading some of the main legal challenges to the tattered remains of this nation’s campaign finance laws. Perhaps McDaniel could take over the leadership of the Tea Party “voter fraud” group True the Vote and in a Palin-like jujitsu move star in a reality TV series featuring God-fearing Real Americans traveling all over the country rooting out voter fraud in “urban” areas.

And one cannot overlook the Tea Party’s most audacious leader, former congressman Allen West who has collected millions doing absolutely nothing but sending out fundraising letters for his “Allen West Guardian Fund” (which is evidently tasked with guarding Allen West’s wallet). McDaniel is showing some flair for this sort of wingnut welfare scam already — his “reward” gambit is sure to end up gathering a fair amount of money from angry Tea Partyers without having a snowball’s chance in Mississippi of adding up to anything but profits for McDaniel.

He’s pretty good. And he’s got Cruz on the case now too. Undoubtedly the big bucks will really start rolling in.

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Innocents

by digby

The human species is the problem:

Wildlife SOS, a group established in 1995 to protect endangered wildlife in India, set out to rescue Raju on the night of July 2. Raju is around 50 years old and was likely captured as a baby and bought and sold many times over the course of his life. He was forced to work as a begging elephant in Allahabad. His legs were bound in spiked chains that made walking difficult and left him with chronic wounds. He was also beaten.

Wildlife SOS found out about Raju’s story through India’s Forestry Commission. When the group attempted to rescue Raju on the night of July 2 in the Uttar Pradesh region of India, his owner and mahout — an individual who rides elephants — apparently attempted to dismantle the effort with a standoff, Nikki Sharp, the executive director of Wildlife SOS-USA, told The Huffington Post Monday.

Raju’s captors layered tighter chains on him and attempted to confuse him by shouting commands, but their efforts proved futile. A team of 10 veterinarians and experts from Wildlife SOS along with 20 Forestry Commission officers and two policemen managed to rescue the abused elephant, according to the Mirror, a British tabloid.

“Raju was in chains 24 hours a day, an act of ­intolerable cruelty. The team were astounded to see tears roll down his face during the rescue,” Pooja Binepal, a spokesman for Wildlife SOS, said, per the Mirror. “It was incredibly emotional. We knew in our hearts he realized he was being freed. Elephants are majestic and highly intelligent animals. We can only imagine what torture the past half a century has been for him.”

Sharp echoed Binepal’s statement while speaking with HuffPost.

“They [the rescue team] went in to rescue him and they [his captors] had bound him up so tightly that he was in a lot of pain,” she said. “The vet and our team came with fruits and just started speaking softly to him and to reassure him that we were there to help, and it was at that time that tears flooded down his face. The founder of Wildlife SOS, who was there are the time of the rescue, said …. that really caught him off guard. They’ve done a lot of elephant rescues and the fact the the tears were just coming down … he was weeping. It was an emotional moment and everyone was more motivated to get him on the truck and to safety.”

Oh God.

I’m guessing that those who owned this poor old elephant were in dire need of money and had little education, so their cruelty probably seemed ordinary to them. It used to seem ordinary to most everyone, I think.

Needless to say, the torture and exploitation of fellow humans, especially children, is even more horrible. The good news is that here in America we are above such things:

A pastor and two members of a Corona church pleaded guilty Monday to state charges of beating and threatening the life of a 13-year-old boy, who was forced to dig his own grave, authorities said.

Lonny Lee Remmers, 56, Nicholas James Craig, 24, and Darryll Duane Jeter Jr., 30, tortured the boy in the church-run group home where he lived, according to a witness report in affidavits for search warrants.

Remmers was then the pastor of Heart of Worship Community Church and ran the group home where Craig, Jeter and the victim lived. It was unclear Monday whether Remmers was still the pastor.

The March 2012 incidents included Craig and Jeter driving the victim to the desert and forcing him to dig his own grave. They then made him get in and threw dirt on him. They were responding to Remmers’ instruction to “scare” the boy, according to the affidavits.

While the boy was showering, one of the men rubbed salt into the cuts on his back, according to Steven Larkey, who lived in the group home and provided the witness report in the affidavit. He told investigators he could hear the boy screaming and saw blood all over the shower the next day.

The victim was later tied to a chair with zip ties and placed in the shower. Mace was sprayed on his face, causing it to bleed, and he was not allowed to rinse off for about 30 minutes, according to the victim’s account in the affidavit.

At a Bible study later that evening at Remmers’ home, Remmers asked the boy to sit in the middle of the group and then squeezed his nipple with pliers.

The boy, his mother and sister were members of Remmers’ church. His mother and sister lived in a women’s group home, but the boy said he had been moved to the men’s home as a disciplinary action.

Remmers entered guilty pleas to inflicting bodily injury on a child and assault with a deadly weapon. He will receive a sentence of up to two years in state prison.

Two years?I guess that once you decide torture ain’t no big thing a couple of years in the clink is the best you can hope for. Also too: religious conscience.

“Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God, and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case.”
-Bertrand Russell in London Calling (1947), p. 18

Condolences, Cleveland 

by tristero

Cleveland’s such a nice city, with a really terrific orchestra. It’s a pity, but somebody has to host those schmucks, I guess.

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