Month: July 2014

What is this attorney client privilege you speak of?

by digby

Unbelievable:

Jailhouse conversations have been many a defendant’s downfall through incriminating words spoken to inmates or visitors, or in phone calls to friends or relatives. Inmates’ calls to or from lawyers, however, are generally exempt from such monitoring. But across the country, federal prosecutors have begun reading prisoners’ emails to lawyers — a practice wholly embraced in Brooklyn, where prosecutors have said they intend to read such emails in almost every case.

The issue has spurred court battles over whether inmates have a right to confidential email communications with their lawyers — a question on which federal judges have been divided.

An incarcerated former Pennsylvania state senator got into further trouble in 2011 when prosecutors seized his prison emails. In Georgia, officials built a contempt case against a man already in federal prison in part by using emails between him and his lawyers obtained in 2011. And in Austin, Tex., defense lawyers have accused members of law enforcement of recording attorney-client calls from jails, then using that information to tighten their cases.

Isn’t that special? And guess what their excuse is? You won’t believe it:

[Judge] Dora L. Irizarry, ruled against the government last month, barring it “from looking at any of the attorney-client emails, period.”

She seemed to take particular offense at an argument by a prosecutor, F. Turner Buford, who suggested that prosecutors merely wanted to avoid the expense and hassle of having to separate attorney-client emails from other emails sent via Trulincs. The government was not otherwise interested in the contents of those messages, he said.

It’s too expensive. They’re just trying to save the taxpayer’s money, dontcha know:

Prosecutors once had a “filter team” to set aside defendants’ emails to and from lawyers, but budget cuts no longer allow for that, they said.

While prosecutors say there are other ways for defense lawyers to communicate with clients, defense lawyers say those are absurdly inefficient…

Dr. Ahmed’s case includes 50,000 pages of documents so far, including “Medicare claim data and patient information that we need Dr. Ahmed’s assistance to understand,” Mr. Fodeman wrote. Especially since he is acting as a public defender in this case — meaning the government pays him at $125 per hour — Mr. Fodeman argued that having to arrange an in-person visit or unmonitored phone call for every small question on the case was a waste of money and time.

There seems to be a real shift in people’s perceptions of our legal system. There used to be a common understanding that everyone deserved a fair trial and that defense lawyers were a necessary part of the system. We’re now seeing attorneys being denied confirmation to government posts on the basis of who they have represented and those who are running for office are being attacked for the same reason. Some have even done time for what would have been considered minor infractions in the past because they are representing a convicted terrorist. Now we see that prosecutors are commonly reading privileged communications between accused criminals and their lawyers. And according to the article, despite the reaction of the judge in the excerpt above, plenty of other judges are a-ok with that.

I guess we just don’t have enough people in prison so we need to rig the system even more:

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Stretch’s gotcha

by digby

Greg Mitchell does the honors:

Transcript of predictably weak “Meet the Press” David Gregory interview with Netanyahu today. The Israeli leader lies flat out about maybe Hamas rockets wrecking that UN school (see below). He claims Israel not targeted “a single civilian” and anyway there are “plenty of places” they can flee to.

This is standard stuff. But Gregory then commits one of the worst journalistic ethical lapses of recent weeks. After letting Netanyahu claim, again, that Israel may be blameless in the school massacre, he brings on UNWRA spokesman Chris Gunness–and blindsides him by showing a tape just released within the hour by Israel allegedly showing a Hamas rocket being fired from the grounds of a UN school. Yet Gregory says NBC has not “verified” that it’s accurate–and admits that Gunness cannot view and has never seen seen it. Yet asks Gunness to respond! Gunness naturally protests the unfairness–and then the segment quickly ends.

And the video he’s showing is completely vague and unverifiable to anyone just looking at it anyway — some black and white blurred images of something that looks like a projectile coming out of what what appears to be some kind of checkerboard pattern. (And yet I’m pretty sure I saw some aluminum tubes and some yellow cake stashed down in the lefthand corner…)

The UN guy was justifiably upset. He had just gone through a lengthy explanation of how the UN is operating in Gaza and what they are trying to accomplish and Gregory basically says “whatever … that’s nice … now EXPLAIN THIS!!!”

I tweeted this after he said it:

I’m beginning to think Luke Russert actually would be an improvement …
— digby (@digby56) July 27, 2014

Graph ‘o the Day

by digby

That’s a lot of sluts who should have kept their legs closed. Literally millions of them.

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Take That, F. Scott Fitzgerald! 

by tristero

Fitzgerald once said, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.“

Not so fast.  Some new, fascinating research suggests that actually, genetically, rich and poor aren’t so different after all.

According to a study released this week by geneticists at Cornell University, substantial evidence indicates that rich people and poor people—disparate populations long thought to be entirely unrelated—may have once shared a single common ancestor. “After conducting careful DNA analysis, our research team was taken aback to discover that the wealthy and the working class actually have a considerable number of genetic similarities,” said study co-author Kenneth Chang, adding that despite the disparity between the modern-day affluent and low earners in terms of behavior, appearance, and lifestyle, numerous genetic markers revealed that their predecessors may have once lived beside one another without any noticeable differences. 

I know, it does sound incredible, almost like a fake news story, but it is hard to argue with a news source as credible as The Onion.

However, if poor and rich once actually did live side by side with few noticeable differences – it is clear from the article that Dr. Chang is merely speculating and has no empirical data – that was a very long time ago. Today, when rich and poor share an apartment building, we deem it not only socially acceptable but essential for there to be separate entrances.

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Conservatives should be able to get behind a universal basic income, too

by David Atkins

Yesterday at the Washington Monthly I riffed on my own Hullabaloo bit from Friday on universal basic income, but more importantly on Max Ehrenfreund’s at the Washington Post to explore the potential bipartisan appeal of UBI:

This is one of the beautiful things about universal basic income: it has legitimate cross-partisan appeal, even if it seems wacky at first glance to centrists (who are often the very last people to recognize a good policy idea when they see one.)

To a conservative, a direct money grant is an opportunity to shed cumbersome government bureaucracy, consolidating a number of overlapping needs-based targeted grants with a single, universal, simplified program that costs far less to administer.

To those of a more futurist and progressive slant like myself, the basic universal income is an answer to the problems of globalization, mechanization, deskilling and flattening of the labor force. While there have certainly been myriad political decisions made to further the interests of the very wealthy over those of the middle class, there has also been a “natural” workforce shift in which a large number of jobs that used to be done by humans are either done by machine, or have simply become redundant with the advent on online business models, or have been replaced with much cheaper labor abroad.

Part of this is natural technological churn that has been with us since the industrial revolution. But the advent of both the Internet and smart machines combined with the rapid pace of globalization make the current mechanization phenomenon different from those that have come before. A huge number of manufacturing jobs are already gone as we already know. Service jobs are following on their heels both due to online business models and mechanized replacement: self-driving cars will put cabbies, truck drivers and the entire auto sales industry out of business; chain restaurants are already taking orders using tablets; etc.

Soon enough the white collar jobs will follow as big data analysis sees everyone from stock analysts to diagnosticians replaced with programs that can do their jobs better than any human.

There just aren’t going to be enough jobs to go around. That doesn’t mean there isn’t enough productive work to be done, whether it be in rebuilding America’s infrastructure, implementing an Apollo program for green energy and conservation, or just giving people the freedom to be creative, build businesses, and follow their dreams without fear of ruin. But the old model of capital ownership grudgingly needing human labor at a decent price in order to take surplus value and profit off of that labor isn’t going to work anymore for the majority of people.

We’re going to get there, or we hit some sort of history-changing technological singularity, or society breaks down. Or some combination of the above.

It would be nice if we could move the process along a bit faster and stop spending so much time defending the systemically unsustainable and morally untenable status quo.

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Accomplices to the extreme

by digby

Norm Ornstein had a nice historical piece this week on the history of extreme elements becoming mainstream in political parties. His particular focus unsurprisingly, was on the current GOP and how it came to be so nutty. Those of us who have been covering this evolution in real time won’t be surprised by his thesis but if it seems as if this just pops up overnight this is a good overview.

I would take issue with one thing however. He doesn’t discuss the crucible of a partisan impeachment against the will of the people, much of it driven by the political and media establishment.  Neither does he point to the subsequent shock of the subsequent Supreme Court decision in election 2000 in which the press and the beltway institutions also enabled the right wing to get away with unprecedented undemocratic behavior. These are important moments that signaled a fundamental shift in norms.

He’s right that the New Left in the 1960s and the party upheaval in the 1970s created much turmoil within the Democratic Party.  But it was hardly aided and abetted by the establishment, particularly the media, unless you want to say that someone like Walter Cronkite coming out against the war was a sign of extremism.  In fact, the morphing of right wing extremism into mainstream politics has been largely made possible by a media which decided very early on in the 60s revolution to identify with the “Silent Majority” and then allowed itself to be cowed by the relentless right wing propaganda campaign to vacuously portray them as liberal — which they weren’t. It culminated in the shameful performance of the 1990s and the nearly delirious approbation offered to George W. Bush, resulting in an insane war we’ll be paying for for a long time.

None of this is to let Democrats off the hook for their irrational fear of hippies, which remains to this day. Neither does it absolve the Republicans for their extremism, which has building unabated for the last 50 years. But you cannot understand all this without looking at the behavior of the bipartisan political establishment and the press. They are accomplices.

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Your disconcerting thought for the day

by digby

We got lucky:

Back in 2012, the Sun erupted with a powerful solar storm that just missed the Earth but was big enough to “knock modern civilization back to the 18th century,” NASA said.

The extreme space weather that tore through Earth’s orbit on July 23, 2012, was the most powerful in 150 years, according to a statement posted on the US space agency website Wednesday.

However, few Earthlings had any idea what was going on.

“If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire,” said Daniel Baker, professor of atmospheric and space physics at the University of Colorado.

Instead the storm cloud hit the STEREO-A spacecraft, a solar observatory that is “almost ideally equipped to measure the parameters of such an event,” NASA said.

Scientists have analyzed the treasure trove of data it collected and concluded that it would have been comparable to the largest known space storm in 1859, known as the Carrington event.

It also would have been twice as bad as the 1989 solar storm that knocked out power across Quebec, scientists said.

“I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did,” said Baker.

What middle class decline?

by digby

I’m not surprised by the fact that the middle class net worth has declined, but I confess that the scope of that decline is startling:

Economic inequality in the United States has been receiving a lot of attention. But it’s not merely an issue of the rich getting richer. The typical American household has been getting poorer, too.

The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution — the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower. But during the same period, the net worth of wealthy households increased substantially.

The Russell Sage study also examined net worth at the 95th percentile. (For households at that level, 94 percent of the population had less wealth and 4 percent had more.) It found that for this well-do-do slice of the population, household net worth increased 14 percent over the same 10 years. Other research, by economists like Edward Wolff at New York University, has shown even greater gains in wealth for the richest 1 percent of households.

For households at the median level of net worth, much of the damage has occurred since the start of the last recession in 2007. Until then, net worth had been rising for the typical household, although at a slower pace than for households in higher wealth brackets. But much of the gain for many typical households came from the rising value of their homes. Exclude that housing wealth and the picture is worse: Median net worth began to decline even earlier.

“The housing bubble basically hid a trend of declining financial wealth at the median that began in 2001,” said Fabian T. Pfeffer, the University of Michigan professor who is lead author of the Russell Sage Foundation study.

It’s not housing. It’s not the fallout from the financial crisis. So what is it?

Hmmmm.

Meanwhile, if there’s one thing the keepers of the staus quo have going for them it’s this:

Researchers at the University of Hannover in Germany propose a simpler reason: Voters don’t demand more redistribution because they don’t grasp how deep inequality is.

Using data from the International Social Survey Programme, in which respondents were asked to locate their relative income status on a scale of 1 to 10, Carina Engelhardt and Andreas Wagener built a measure of perceived inequality, defined as the gap between the median income, smack in the middle of the distribution, and the average income of the population.

Evidently, nobody has a clue: In every one of the 26 nations, most of them in the developed world, for which they collected data, people believe that the income gap is smaller than it really is. And using perceived rather than actual inequality, the median voter theory works much better: Where people believe inequality is worse, governments tend to redistribute more.

“If citizen-voters see an issue, politics has to respond – even if there is no issue,” they concluded. “Conversely, if a real problem is not salient with voters, it will probably not be pursued forcefully.”

This could go some distance toward explaining the American experience. People in the United States not only tolerate one of the widest income gaps in the developed world, but its government also ranks among the stingiest in terms of efforts at redressing the imbalance.

Unsurprisingly, Americans suffer from a pretty big perception gap. They think an American in the middle of the income distribution makes only 4 percent less than the national average, according to Ms. Engelhardt and Mr. Wagener’s research. In truth, the American in the middle makes 16 percent less.

Shhhhh. Don’t tell anyone.

The good news is that there’s almost no chance anyone in politics will seek to inform them of the truth so that they can vote their own self-interest. That would undoubtedly upset the “markets” and then all hell would break loose…

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Oxford Union for dummies

by digby

Hilarious:

Four men stood before a packed crowd at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., on Thursday night, and for nearly two hours hashed out the relative merits of libertarian and conservative political philosophy. More than 400 people turned up to hear them; the Institute’s auditorium was filled to capacity, and latecomers even stood to watch the debate screened into small rooms around the building. Nearly 500 more people watched online.

The men were not experts or politicians, but college students—summer interns at the libertarian Cato Institute and the conservative Heritage Foundation. They’d gone through several rounds of tryouts to win the privilege of representing their summer employers in Cato’s fourth annual intern debate—or, as one of the fresh-faced debaters called it, “a referendum on freedom.”

The freedom-referendum was moderated Matt Lewis, of the Daily Caller, who applauded the event’s very existence. “The Left isn’t having this public debate,” he said. “They’re toeing the line, staying quiet about their differences. The side most willing to publicly hash out their differences will win in the free market of ideas.”

That’s so true. If the left is known for anything it’s known for its discipline.

But be that as it may, if this is the future of right, I’m afraid it’s going to lose by virtue of its snooze-inducing predictability:

Team Conservative featured Mark DiPlacido, a rising senior at Yale who argued that “unabashed sexual license” is the “number one cause of pain and suffering in this country,” and Louis Cona, a senior at Georgetown who was distraught over the “crisis of broken families and single mothers” and convinced that moral relativism is destroying Western society. Team Libertarian was represented by Georgetown Law student Jack Bussell, who believes “good cannot be defined and imposed from above,” and rising Brown senior Philip Trammell, who argued that “anyone who believes in private property cannot deny we have the right to take drugs.”

Both sides delivered stock answers on drug legalization, immigration policy, and Edward Snowden. The debate ended in a draw, I guess.

Smell the excitement …

The torture cover-up continues

by digby

This article in today’s New York Times is enough to put me in a bad mood already. Apparently, George Tenent’s protege, John Brennen, is going out of his way to protect his former bosses reputation (and his own) with this outrageous attempts a cover up of the torture report:

Just after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted in April to declassify hundreds of pages of a withering report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program, C.I.A. Director John O. Brennan convened a meeting of the men who had played a role overseeing the program in its seven-year history.

The spies, past and present, faced each other around the long wooden conference table on the seventh floor of the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Northern Virginia: J. Cofer Black, head of the agency’s counterterrorism center at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks; the undercover officer who now holds that job; and a number of other former officials from the C.I.A.’s clandestine service. Over the speakerphone came the distinctive, Queens-accented voice of George J. Tenet.

Over the past several months, Mr. Tenet has quietly engineered a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report, which could become public next month. The effort to discredit the report has set up a three-way showdown among former C.I.A. officials who believe history has been distorted, a White House carefully managing the process and politics of declassifying the document, and Senate Democrats convinced that the Obama administration is trying to protect the C.I.A. at all costs.

Gosh I wonder why some people are skeptical of secret government.  It’s not as if they ever do anything wrong. Sure, they may have “gone a little far”  in their zeal to protect us from the evil ones, but they’ll never do it again I’m sure. And sure, the fact that it was not only immoral but also completely ineffective should not in any way require an accounting:

The April meeting at C.I.A. headquarters highlighted how much of the agency is still seeded with officers who participated in the detention and interrogation program, which Mr. Obama officially ended during his first week in office in 2009.

At one point during the meeting, the current head of the counterterrorism center, an officer with the first name Mike, told Mr. Brennan that roughly 200 people under his leadership had at some point participated in the interrogation program. They wanted to know, he said, how Mr. Brennan planned to defend them in public against accusations that the C.I.A. engaged in systematic torture and lied about its efficacy.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
Wagging a finger at the correspondent, Scott Pelley, Mr. Tenet said over and over, “We don’t torture people.”

“No, listen to me. No, listen to me. I want you to listen to me,” he went on. “Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through: The palpable fear that we felt on the basis of that fact that there was so much we did not know. I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is expected to directly challenge this contention. Several people who have read the report said that it concludes that the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods broke up no terrorist plots and that agency officials repeatedly inflated the value of the program.

No kidding. It makes you wonder if what they’re really covering up the fact that they tortured for the fun of it. We know they’re covering up the fact that they lied repeatedly to the “overseers” — which, once again, makes a mockery of the idea that “oversights” alone is enough to keep the government from running amock. (Of course, if you think torturing prisoners is a good idea then you’ll think this is all a-ok.)

This is getting intense:

A senior Senate Democrat is firing a warning shot at the White House against stalling the release of a report about the past use of torture by the U.S. intelligence community.

Sen. Ron Wyden is talking with his colleagues about the possibility of using a seldom-invoked procedure to declassify an Intelligence Committee report on the use of torture in the event the White House does not move ahead quickly.

Speaking with reporters on a variety of subjects Thursday, the Oregon Democrat referred to the Senate’s “Resolution 400″ — the Abraham A. Ribicoff-sponsored resolution that established the Intelligence Committee back in 1976.

Wyden said he was discussing invoking the resolution “in order to move this along if we have to, through the committee process, to get it declassified.”

Matt Bai of Yahoo! News reported earlier Thursday that Wyden mentioned the same procedure to him. And it was not the first time he’s discussed the possibility. Wyden previously explained the provision in October 2013, KATU reported.

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted on April 3 to provide for declassification of the report into the use of harsh interrogation practices by the CIA during the administration of President George W. Bush. That action set the gears in motion for declassification review. The report is now in the hands of the White House.

Asked Thursday about a senator discussing the prospects of using legislative action to release the report, the National Security Council press office sent along a lengthy statement that did not outline a timeline for release.

This is a very interesting dynamic. You have a Democratic White House covering up for the CIA and a former Republican White House and the Republican minority in the Senate staying quiet to protect the reputation of the CIA and their former Republican White House. And you have the Democratic majority in the Senate in the unpleasant position of having to defy a Democratic White House to reveal the cover-up. Who knows if they will actually do it? For all the “hair on fire” hand signals and hints in Pig Latin from the Democrats who have allegedly been appalled by the government’s secret, unethical behavior in the GWOT, there has yet to be any real confrontation between the branches. Senators have power too — and yet even they know that to exercise it will bring the government hammer down hard on them and they will be vilified by much of the public who will undoubtedly consider them traitors. This is what we rely on for “oversight.”

On the other hand, if you can’t take a principled stand against torture then maybe being a political leader isn’t really your calling. This one isn’t a tough decision. The US cannot ever be considered a decent nation if it doesn’t grapple with this honestly and openly. Even if nobody is ever held accountable — which would be yet another barrier to any claim to morality — the truth absolutely must be told and the government must admit to what it did. These institutions should not be allowed to protect their reputations (not that the individuals who conceived it, legalized it and ordered it shouldn’t be punished as well…)

I still find it hard to wrap my mind around the fact that this is even controversial. Torture.

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