Month: July 2014

Best moment of the Sunday Shows

by digby

It happens so rarely …

Liberal radio host Stephanie Miller on Sunday explained to former Republican U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina that her study of medieval history would “come in handy” after the Supreme Court ruled that corporations like Hobby Lobby could deny birth control coverage to women for religious reasons.

“A lot women including me are sick of the ‘war on women’, and we saw it in spades on Monday after the Hobby Lobby case,” Fiorina told a CNN panel. “Somehow this is the long arm of business and the Republican Party reaching into the body of women. It’s ridiculous.”

“The war on women is shameless, baseless propaganda, there’s no fact to it, and it’s worked because it’s scared women to death,” she insisted. “Enough. Enough.”

“I respect you very much as a woman for your accomplishments,” Miller snarked in response. “I even read that you studied medieval history, which I think will come in handy with trying to defend the Republican war on women.”

Miller noted that every woman she knew was “furious about he Hobby Lobby decision.”

“This is not just a war against women, this is a war against science, Carly,” the radio host explained.

“Oh, for heaven sakes,” Fiorina gasped.

Fiorina went on to babble incoherently about 20 different kinds of birth control being mandated as if that had anything to do with it and basically sounded like a terrible crank. Which she is.

I have to say that watching modern Republican women who so obviously know this is utter nonsense go on television and pander on behalf of these neanderthals is depressing. But then, these TV celebrities are all wealthy so it’s not a problem for them or their daughters, so who cares, right?

That’s one of the characteristics that makes one a Republican. Just as some of them are simply misinformed and superstitious and others are believers in throwback patriarchal hierarchies,  the wealthy Republican believes that everyone is entitled to all the freedom they can buy. If you don’t have the cash,well,  who’s fault is that?

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Perspective

by digby

Think you have the worst job in the world? Not even close:

Karamani Kale emerged from the manhole, sewage clinging to his body. Next to him, Sona Bai gathered filth in a small round basket and carried it on her head to the end of the street. The unpleasant process had started at dawn and would continue for at least 12 hours.

This is how sewers are cleaned in most Indian cities, including Mumbai, the nation’s booming financial capital: Workers use metal scrapers, brooms or their bare hands to clear drainage and sanitation lines twice a year, before and after the annual monsoon rains.

In gutters, workers who earn about $5 a day stand in the waste, which reaches chest high, and use long wooden sticks to clear jams. In some areas, workers crawl through the sewage, wearing no protective gear.

Mumbai’s skyline is rising by the day, but the growth has come on the beleaguered backs of workers like these. Manual scavenging, as their work is known, was ruled illegal last year, but private contractors hired by the municipal government continue to employ them. Hundreds reportedly die from the work each year.

Many scavengers say they have no alternative.

“I have never been to school. But I want my kids to be educated. Therefore, I have to do various small jobs and this is one of them,” said Kale, a man in his mid-40s with wrinkles on his hands and face, who cannot read or write. “Nobody has ever told me that this is banned.”

Kale’s co-worker, Manu Pawar, described the humiliating experience of entering a manhole.

“Filth and human excrement are a given, but sometimes we come across a dead dog or a dead rat as well,” he said. Broken bottles lurk in the pitch-black sewer system too, he said, pointing at his leg, which was covered with scars and cuts.

Although sewage cleanup has become mechanized in some areas, government figures suggest that 770,000 people either work as sewage cleaners or are supported by them.

The Tata Institute of Social Sciences, an educational and research organization, found that 80% of the workers die before age 60 because of work-related health problems. In Mumbai, an average of 20 sewer workers die each month from accidents, suffocation or exposure to toxic gases, the study found.

Each month.

Oh God that’s awful.

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Conservative leader beams with pride at the havoc he causes

by digby

Congressman John Dingell had a few words to say on his way out the door:

In farewell remarks Friday that were both emotional and biting, Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who is retiring after 60 years as the longest-serving U.S. House member in history, cited Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge as a major reason he believes “Congress doesn’t work” as it used to…

Among the reasons for this cited by the veteran lawmaker are recent redistricting of House districts by state legislatures and the “Citizens United” decision opening the way for “spending unlimited amounts of unidentified money to allow certain people to swing elections.”

Dingell also listed among his reasons for Congress not working is the anti-tax pledge of Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), in which candidates for Congress sign a written promise not to vote for new taxes or raise existing taxes.

Insisting that taxpayer-funded programs are needed for “Americans living in the most dangerous circumstances,” the Michigan lawmaker charged that “the Grover Norquist pledge is to carry out [Norquist’s] goal of shrinking the size of government until you can drown it in a bathtub — his words, not mine.”

The snotty Norquist had this to say in response:

“I know you are but what am I!”

No, actually he said this, which is just as sophomoric:

“It’s very flattering and there’s real wisdom in his words. Mr. Dingell is wrong in citing me, but quite correct in citing the pledge as a substantial blow to the left. This is a high honor.”

Sadly, Norquist is correct in taking pride in his work. He’s been instrumental in making the government work much for efficiently for rich people. That’s quite an achievement.

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Chart ‘O the Day

by digby

I’ve been watching Republicans on television all morning fulminating about the Emperor Obama using his Imperial Superpowers to thwart the will of the people.

Guess what?

The only presidents who used fewer executive orders than Obama were one term presidents.

This is a standard phony GOP hissy fit  — and from their tepid responses on the shows this morning, the Democrats are in danger of falling for it. Again.

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If you store it they will access it


by digby

Barton Gellman has a blockbuster piece in today’s Washington Post, perfect for 4th of July week-end:

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

This was the “debate” that Snowden hoped to spark: are the massive privacy violations and potential for grievous harm to innocent individuals worth the intelligence these programs provide. I’ve always thought that was way too abstract — the vast majority of Americans would say yes, of course. Because as far as they know, their personal lives are not being scrutinized by the government and/or the government has no reason to use whatever information it is collecting against them. For today at least.

Most of the people caught up in those programs are not the targets and would not lawfully qualify as such. “Incidental collection” of third-party communications is inevitable in many forms of surveillance, but in other contexts the U.S. government works harder to limit and discard irrelevant data. In criminal wiretaps, for example, the FBI is supposed to stop listening to a call if a suspect’s wife or child is using the phone.

There are many ways to be swept up incidentally in surveillance aimed at a valid foreign target. Some of those in the Snowden archive were monitored because they interacted directly with a target, but others had more-tenuous links.

If a target entered an online chat room, the NSA collected the words and identities of every person who posted there, regardless of subject, as well as every person who simply “lurked,” reading passively what other people wrote.

“1 target, 38 others on there,” one analyst wrote. She collected data on them all.

In other cases, the NSA designated as its target the Internet protocol, or IP, address of a computer server used by hundreds of people.

The NSA treats all content intercepted incidentally from third parties as permissible to retain, store, search and distribute to its government customers. Raj De, the agency’s general counsel, has testified that the NSA does not generally attempt to remove irrelevant personal content, because it is difficult for one analyst to know what might become relevant to another.

That’s so true. You just don’t know what personal information about innocent citizens you’re going to need until they do something you need it for. (Or maybe, you never know, you need their cooperation on something and having this sort of info make the “persuading” just a little bit easier…)Best to keep as much information stored about everyone as possible. After all, the government may need to target you for something someday and it would be a shame if they didn’t have all of your communications stored in a nice digital file somewhere. Just in case.

Oh, and also too. They lied. Again:

U.S. intelligence officials declined to confirm or deny in general terms the authenticity of the intercepted content provided by Snowden, but they made off-the-record requests to withhold specific details that they said would alert the targets of ongoing surveillance. Some officials, who declined to be quoted by name, described Snowden’s handling of the sensitive files as reckless.

In an interview, Snowden said “primary documents” offered the only path to a concrete debate about the costs and benefits of Section 702 surveillance. He did not favor public release of the full archive, he said, but he did not think a reporter could understand the programs “without being able to review some of that surveillance, both the justified and unjustified.”

“While people may disagree about where to draw the line on publication, I know that you and The Post have enough sense of civic duty to consult with the government to ensure that the reporting on and handling of this material causes no harm,” he said.

In Snowden’s view, the PRISM and Upstream programs have “crossed the line of proportionality.”

“Even if one could conceivably justify the initial, inadvertent interception of baby pictures and love letters of innocent bystanders,” he added, “their continued storage in government databases is both troubling and dangerous. Who knows how that information will be used in the future?”

For close to a year, NSA and other government officials have appeared to deny, in congressional testimony and public statements, that Snowden had any access to the material.

I’m sure most people just assume that they aren’t among the million or so people whom these documents indicate are under surveillance. It must be someone else.

But what if it isn’t?

My feeling has always been that the only way this would be seen as truly pernicious is if there was a political component to it — that members of the government were using the information for their own purposes. We don’t have the proof of that. But we can certainly see the potential:

At one level, the NSA shows scrupulous care in protecting the privacy of U.S. nationals and, by policy, those of its four closest intelligence allies — Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

More than 1,000 distinct “minimization” terms appear in the files, attempting to mask the identities of “possible,” “potential” and “probable” U.S. persons, along with the names of U.S. beverage companies, universities, fast-food chains and Web-mail hosts.

Some of them border on the absurd, using titles that could apply to only one man. A “minimized U.S. president-elect” begins to appear in the files in early 2009, and references to the current “minimized U.S. president” appear 1,227 times in the following four years.

Apparently the presidents calls are being logged and recorded too. How nice for history.

In order to ensure that you are not among those under surveillance, you should probably avoid having any conversations like this. Ever. With anyone:

Even so, unmasked identities remain in the NSA’s files, and the agency’s policy is to hold on to “incidentally” collected U.S. content, even if it does not appear to contain foreign intelligence.

In one exchange captured in the files, a young American asks a Pakistani friend in late 2009 what he thinks of the war in Afghanistan. The Pakistani replies that it is a religious struggle against 44 enemy states.

Startled, the American says “they, ah, they arent heavily participating . . . its like . . . in a football game, the other team is the enemy, not the other teams waterboy and cheerleaders.”

“No,” the Pakistani shoots back. “The ther teams water boy is also an enemy. it is law of our religion.”

“haha, sorry thats kind of funny,” the American replies.

I would imagine that if you are a journalist you should probably assume they are collecting and analyzing every phone call you make. If that puerile exchange is worthy of collection, reporters speaking to sources certainly is.

Remember, “minimizing” just means they redact the information about your identity for the purposes of reporting. It doesn’t mean they delete what you say. If they find they need to look at your communications at some point, it will be accessible.

Oh, and keep this in the back of your mind:

Stockman asks NSA for Lois Lerner metadata after IRS claims ‘glitch’ erased all incriminating emails

Jun 13, 2014 Press Release

WASHINGTON – Congressman Steve Stockman Friday asked the National Security Agency to turn over all its metadata on the email accounts of former Internal Revenue Service Exempt Organizations division director Lois Lerner for the period between January 2009 and April 2011.

The request comes just hours after the IRS claimed it “lost” all of Lerner’s emails to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups during that period, in which she allegedly coordinated with the White House, House Democrats and political groups to harass and deny tax-exempt status to groups critical of the President. The IRS blames a “computer glitch” for erasing the emails which could have implicated Agency employees in illegal activity.

“I have asked NSA Director Rogers to send me all metadata his agency has collected on Lois Lerner’s email accounts for the period which the House sought records,” said Stockman. “The metadata will establish who Lerner contacted and when, which helps investigators determine the extent of illegal activity by the IRS.”

“The claim incriminating communications were erased by a glitch conjures memories of Rose Mary Woods,” said Stockman. “Barack Obama has brought us Jimmy Carter’s economy and Richard Nixon’s excuses.”

The text of the letter follows:

June 13, 2014

Admiral Michael S. Rogers
Director, National Security Agency
Fort Meade, MD 20755

Admiral Rogers:

First, thank you for your 33 years of, and continued service to, our country.

Second, as you probably read, the Internal Revenue Service informed the House Ways and Means Committee today they claim to “lost” all emails from former Exempt Organizations division director Lois Lerner for the period between January 2009 and April 2011.

According to chairman Camp, “The IRS claims it cannot produce emails written only to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups, such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices” due to a “computer glitch.”

I am writing to request the Agency produce all metadata it has collected on all of Ms. Lerner’s email accounts for the period between January 2009 and April 2011.

The data may be transmitted to our Communications Director at Donny@mail.house.gov.

Your prompt cooperation in this matter will be greatly appreciated and will help establish how IRS and other personnel violated rights protected by the First Amendment.

Warmest wishes,

STEVE STOCKMAN
Member of Congress

That should give you a clue about just how much respect some members of our government have for the idea that this is only to be used for “terrorist” surveillance. Certainly, one can see right there in living color the potential for political mischief. The potential for police agency mischief is even greater …

If you store it, they will access it.

Update: Read the whole article to see just how rigorous the standards for “foreignness” are. I will bet that you have fallen into that definition many, many times. We all have. Read on …

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Wingnut patriotism

by David Atkins

This is what “patriotism” looks like in wingnutland:

A Fourth of July parade float that depicted a figure standing outside an outhouse labeled the “Obama Presidential Library” has created a stir on social media and is also receiving criticism in Norfolk, Nebraska.
The float, in Norfolk’s annual Independence Day parade, was on a flatbed trailer being pulled by a blue pickup truck. The figure was dressed in overalls and standing next to a walker outside of the outhouse. The hands and head of the figure were greenish and appeared to be zombielike; the hands were pressed against the sides of the figure’s head. Miniature American flags were atop the float and on the truck.

Neither the float nor the pickup identified a sponsor; a sign in the windshield said it was entry No. 29.

Liz Guthrie of Pierce, Nebraska, took a photo of the float that has been widely circulated on social media and shared about 1,000 times on Facebook.
From where she watched the parade, Guthrie said she could hear the crowd laughing and clapping as the float passed by.

…

Norfolk City Councilman Dick Pfeil also voiced his displeasure with the float. “The City of Norfolk doesn’t condone that,” Pfeil said.

The councilman noted, however, that it was up to the Odd Fellows to approve the floats. A representative of the Odd Fellows did not return a phone message from a World-Herald reporter Saturday evening.

However, parade committee member Rick Konopasek told the Lincoln Journal-Star that the float wasn’t meant to be any more offensive than a political cartoon. He also said the outhouse float was the most popular one in the parade, and the three judges awarded it an honorable mention.

I remember back when we had a Republican president, conservatives seemed eager to demand that liberals “respect the office of the Presidency” like good patriotic Americans.

Hmmm.

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How conveeeenient. Millionaire villagers all agree that nobody cares about income inequality.

by digby

So the Democrats are officially abandoning any kind of populist rhetoric that actually makes people vote in favor of the usual meaningless pablum that’s guaranteed to result in keeping the status quo:

“It was clear in 2013 that income inequality was the top narrative for the White House, but they abruptly switched away from it,” said Jim Kessler, senior vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank that has advised the White House and Democrats to avoid excessive populism. “Income inequality seems like it’s on the back burner now — at least in terms of their rhetoric.”

The shift hints at a broader repositioning of Democratic messaging ahead of the midterm elections and, perhaps, the 2016 presidential race. House and Senate strategists and their pollsters have concluded that they should focus less on the wealth gap and more on emphasizing that all Americans should have economic “opportunity” to get ahead or a “fair shot.”

“Both the White House and the Senate agreed that the decline of middle-class incomes was the most serious issue we face in this country, but the focus had to be on how to get middle-class incomes up, rather than drive other people’s incomes down,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), the messaging chief for Senate Democrats.

How convenient for those who are buying up the political system. After all, these politicians come cheap — political bribes cost no more than the change these billionaires find between the soft leather cushions on their Lear jets. In fact, most of the politicians are rich too so they’re personally invested in the idea that it’s just ducky for the wealthy to be exalted as overlords, a status which the rubes can be convinced they too can achieve if only they are “good” enough. What a racket.

He continued:

“There are some who believe it’s better to talk about the negative parts of wealth that people have accumulated, but our polling data show people care less about that and more about how we’re going to help them.”

Oh goodie. He’s going to “help” us. Maybe we’ll get some across the board tax cuts.

The good news is that there is a consensus emerging on this issue, an orgasmic prospect for the Village:

Other conservatives, however, see room for agreement between Obama’s focus on mobility and Republicans, who have also been searching for better ways to address middle-class anxieties.

“I think it actually reflects not necessarily a consensus, but a growing recognition that there is a distinction between inequality itself and a deeper concern about whether there are some people who lack the ability to move up the economic ladder,” said Stuart Butler, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Well ok then.

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Success for#MaydayPAC — now here are some good candidates for them to support

by digby

So the Mayday PAC made its goal yesterday and will have the money it set out to raise to help finance elections. Here’s their plan:

Our plan for reform has four stages:

In 2014, we will pilot the idea of a superPAC intervening in elections to support candidates who favor reform. The objective of this pilot intervention will be to both (a) convince Congress of the salience of this issue to voters, and (b) determine how best to intervene to move voters on the basis of this issue.

Based on what we learn in 2014, in 2016 we will engage in as many races we need to win a majority in Congress who have either cosponsored or committed to cosponsor fundamental reform legislation.

In 2017, we will then press to get Congress to pass, and the President to sign, legislation that fundamentally reforms of the way elections are funded.

After a Congress has been elected under this new system, we will push for whatever constitutional reform is necessary to secure the gains from this reform.

Here’s a nice list of candidates all of whom have committed to support this kind of reform — and they did it of their own volition regardless of getting any PAC money from anyone. They truly believe in this, which means they aren’t going to fold when the lobbyists and the political establishment comes calling with big checks and promises of committee assignments:

Blue America 14 House Races
Stanley Chang HI-01
Paul Clements MI-06
Alan Cohn FL-15
Alan Grayson FL-09
Tom Guild OK-05
Ted Lieu CA-33
Mike Obermueller MN-02
Pat Murphy IA-01
Gloria Bromell Tinubu SC-07
Michael Wager OH-14
Bonnie Watson Coleman NJ-12
Kelly Westlund WI-07
Rob Zerban WI-01

Blue America 14 Senate races:
Shenna Bellows Maine
Jeff Merkley Oregon
Brian Schatz Hawaii
Rick Weiland South Dakota

In many of these states a little goes a long way. Mayday PAC could make the difference.

Meanwhile, if you would like to directly support some candidates who will vote to take money out of politics as a matter of principle and conviction, click those links.

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The oldest form of polarization

by digby

Think about this for a minute: this map shows that half of all the people in the United States live in the areas shaded in blue.

There’s a lot of talk about “polarization” these days. But one of the oldest and most enduring forms of polarization — everywhere in the world — is that between the city mice and the country mice.

Paul Rosenberg has an interesting analysis of the latest polarization polling from Pew that’s well worth reading. This struck me as particularly important:

But not only are Republicans and consistent conservatives more negative about the other side, objective reality gives them less reason. Despite right-wing fears, today’s Democratic Party is not that different from the Democratic Party of 20 years ago — or even earlier. This is particularly evident by looking at how the 90 percent Democrat level of liberalism has barely moved a whisper since the 1960s in the House, according to Poole’s DW-Nominate score. In the Senate,  90 percent of Democrats are actually more conservative than they were in the early 1960s. So on both counts, Republicans have no objective reason to be so much more negative toward Democrats.

The reverse is not the case, however. In both chambers, the 90 percent Republicans are substantially more conservative than they were in the 1960s and ’70s — in the House, dramatically so. Thus, Republicans are over-responding to an increased Democratic liberalism that’s mostly all in their heads, while Democrats are under-responding to an increase in Republican conservatism to levels without historical precedent — at least not without going back well before the Great Recession.

Regardless of how the voters answer the questions in Washington polarization is clearly driven by conservatives. It just isn’t a matter of dispute:

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