Month: July 2014

Opportunity for all (if you have the bucks)

by digby

You know what this country needs more of? It needs more participation in the political process by the 1%:

Two top veterans of President Obama’s campaigns are asking political campaigners to pay $5,000 per person for the chance to learn their secrets and then work for five weeks in an unpaid campaign job somewhere in America.
Democratic operatives and progressive activists are questioning this training program launched by Obama campaign architects Mitch Stewart and Jeremy Bird. The $5,000 program promises access to the wizardry of Obama’s presidential bids — and a five-week, unpaid gig on an “important Democratic campaign.”

Run by Bird and Stewart’s consulting company, 270 Strategies, the new program’s emphasis on placing paying customers in essentially volunteer roles on Democratic campaigns is atypical in the campaign training industry, and some Democrats say it sets a dangerous precedent. The firm’s first-ever “270/360 Training Intensive” program is scheduled to begin in September.

The program’s website describes a six-week program, consisting of five days of “intensive” campaign training at 270’s Chicago HQ featuring Stewart and Bird and other “architects of the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns,” followed by five weeks of volunteer work on an “an important Democratic campaign in the United States.”

The cost for the five-day training with Bird and Stewart is $3,500. It costs $1,500 more if a student wants the five weeks of work experience. Critics say those costs are way above the market rate for campaign trainings.

“It’s deeply concerning that leaders in our party are launching a ‘pay to play’ system for would-be campaign staff,” said a Democratic campaign veteran. “As Democrats, we should be working together to eliminate workforce barriers — such as unpaid internships — rather starting programs that further discourage participation in electoral work.”
[…]
To Mikey Franklin, a former progressive field staffer who’s now trying to end the D.C. practice of unpaid internships, asking people to pay to to volunteer goes against progressive values.

“It’s a basic principle that people should work for pay; they shouldn’t pay to work,” Franklin said. “It’s shameful that 270 Strategies are throwing their progressive values out of the window by charging $5,000 for a 5-day training and an unpaid internship. How will we win for the 99% if we only recruit from the 1%?”

I’m going to guess that “progressive values” aren’t really the point. The point is parlaying the Obama system, developed on the backs of millions of small donors, into big bucks. As our Democratic elites keep telling us, the problem isn’t “income inequality” it’s lack of “opportunity” to become rich. This just happens to be a rare opportunity. God bless America.

By the way, these are the same guys behind the centrist Ro Kanna’s attempt to take out liberal Mike Honda in California, further proving that “progressive values” really aren’t in play here.

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Man, we really are exceptional

by digby

Via Matt Ford in The Atlantic:

How large is America’s prison problem? More than 2.4 million people are behind bars in the United States today, either awaiting trial or serving a sentence. That’s more than the combined population of 15 states, all but three U.S. cities, and the U.S. armed forces. They’re scattered throughout a constellation of 102 federal prisons, 1,719 state prisons, 2,259 juvenile facilities, 3,283 local jails, and many more military, immigration, territorial, and Indian Country facilities.

Compared to the rest of the world, these numbers are staggering. Here’s how the United States’ incarceration rate stacks up against those of other modern liberal democracies like Britain and Canada:

How is this explained by people defending America as the land of the free? It would seem to be a rather obvious contradiction in terms.

The good news is that prison reform seems to be floating up on the agenda of both parties. I’m not quite sure why — traditionally, nobody has cared much about the issue. But maybe some advocacy groups are making some strides in the beltway and polling is showing that it isn’t the loser these politicians have always believed. (I wish I thought it came from a spontaneous attack of conscience among our leaders, but I think that’s a long shot.)Whatever it is, it would be nice if it actually added up to something. That chart is absolutely shameful. Even setting aside the issues of justice, morality and decency, the cost of this prison state (especially combined with our outlandish global military empire) is obviously unsustainable.

Frontline recently did a comprehensive program on our prison system. Oy.

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Is no place sacred? 


by digby

Today at Salon I talk about some horrible people who are showing up at Dealey Plaza in Dallas waving around guns and passing out literature spewing hatred for the president. This is not the first time people have done that. But it ended very badly last time.

The morning of November 22, the Dallas Morning News featured a full page ad “welcoming” the president to Dallas. After a preamble in which they proclaimed their fealty to the Constitution and defiantly asserted their right to be conservative, they demanded to be allowed to “address their grievances.” They posed a long series of “when did you stop beating your wife” questions asking why Kennedy was helping the Communist cause around the world. Here’s an example:

WHY has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party praised almost every one of your policies and announced that the party will endorse and support your re-election in 1964?

WHY have you banned the showing at U.S. military bases of the film “Operation Abolition”–the movie by the House Committee on Un-American Activities exposing Communism in America?

WHY have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership?

WHY has the Foreign Policy of the United States degenerated to the point that the C.I.A. is arranging coups and having staunch Anti-Communists Allies of the U.S. bloodily exterminated.

WHY have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the “Spirit of Moscow”?

MR. KENNEDY, as citizens of the United States of America, we DEMAND answers to these questions, and we want them NOW.

You get the drift. And you probably recognize the tone. The subject may have changed somewhat but the arrogant attitude combined with the aggrieved victimization is a hallmark of right wing politics even today.

As we all know, later that day the President was gunned down in Dealey Plaza. The entire world was shocked and traumatized by that event and the course of history was changed.

You’d think these allegedly patriotic Americans would have some respect. But that would be too much to ask. They are a vulgar lot who obviously cannot see that their hideous display on such hallowed ground is truly repulsive to decent people. It’s sick.

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Telling married women to “close their legs” doesn’t seem to be working out for them

by digby

Who would have guessed that the party which characterizes women who used birth control as evil sluts would have trouble getting women to vote for them?

Republicans launched a new crop of super PACs, recruitment programs and messaging campaigns to boost the GOP’s female candidates and win over women who vote. The latest such effort, an unrestricted super PAC unveiled in June by former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, cleared $1 million in its first four weeks.

“We cannot permit liberal orthodoxy to marginalize women or suppress their enthusiasm for our candidates,” declared Fiorina, chairwoman of the American Conservative Union Foundation, in the mission statement for her new Unlocking Potential Project. The Unlocking Potential PAC’s top donors last month were Marmik Oil Co. President Michael Murphy and his wife, Arkansas designer Sydney Murphy, who each gave $500,000.

But female Republican fundraisers, PAC organizers and candidates remain badly outgunned by their Democratic counterparts, particularly in Senate contests. Democratic women in this midterm’s most competitive Senate races uniformly raised more than their GOP opponents. Polls in the Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire and North Carolina Senate races all show sizable gender gaps.

And controversies related to women seem to keep dogging the GOP. The Supreme Court’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling granting religious employers an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate gave Democrats fresh fundraising fodder. The ruling helped push receipts at EMILY’s List, the Democratic women’s political action committee, to well more than a half-million dollars in June alone, the group’s biggest haul in any month this year. The ruling has sparked proposed legislative fixes on both sides of the aisle.

“That is a huge motivator, both for voters and for donors,” Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman Justin Barasky said about the Hobby Lobby ruling, “and Republican Senate candidates are on defense about it — especially in Colorado.”

I’m fairly pessimistic about the right wing’s alleged impending destruction — they’ve always been around and I’m going to guess they always will be. And they’ve rigged a system that’s fairly easily rigged (by design) to allow outsized influence even if they are a minority party. But this insane attack on birth control may just make a difference. Public opinion on abortion has remained the same even as the right has successfully rolled back access in much of the country. The stigma has never fully been removed. But birth control? 95% of American women have used it and the birth control methods which are under assault by the right wing are the birth control methods favored by married women. These are the “sluts” these neanderthals are telling to just “close their legs” if they don’t want to get pregnant. It strikes me as a very foolish move.

I have been burned too many times in predicting that they must have gone to far with one thing or another. But these men in congress declaring that they shouldn’t have to “pay for” maternity leave, the ignorant statements that women’s bodies won’t allow them to become pregnant from rape and now this idiotic jihad against birth control as if the only women who “need” it are nymphomaniacs could actually be hurting them. It doesn’t take much of a defection from their ranks for that “demographic” (an insulting way of looking at half the population) to make it impossible for them to win. The only female GOP majority in recent years has been white, married women. Screaming that they’re all a bunch of whores probably isn’t a good way to retain their loyalty.

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The right-wing conning of America continues

by David Atkins

The Republican big money men are literally making Americans more ignorant about basic science for this own profit, and making America both a laughingstock and an impediment to fixing the world’s most pressing crisis:

A new international survey shows that Americans are more divided and doubtful about climate change than people in other leading countries, even as the scientific evidence supporting it keeps piling up.

Ipsos-MORI, one of the largest market research companies in Great Britain, released its new Global Trends 2014 survey covering data from 200 questions with over 16,000 interviewees in 20 countries. The survey asked about a variety of issues, including technology, the economy, privacy, government and the environment.

When asked if they agreed with the statement, “The climate change we are currently seeing is largely the result of human activity,” just 54 percent of Americans surveyed said yes. Although this number indicates a majority, the United States still ranked last among 20 countries in the poll.

The U.S. number was ten points lower than the next lowest countries on the list, Britain and Australia, where 64 percent agreed that humans are causing climate change. China topped the list, with 93 percent of its citizens agreeing that human activity is causing climate change. Large majorities also agreed in France (80 percent), Brazil (79 percent), Germany (72 percent) and other countries.

Similarly, 91 percent of those from China agreed with statement, “We are heading for environmental disaster unless we change our habits quickly.” Only 57 percent of Americans thought so — again, last among 20 nations surveyed.

Still, there’s hope:

Keith Gaby, communications director for climate and air at the Environmental Defense Fund, told CBS News that while American opinion is divided, there is some common ground. He noted a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that found 61 percent of respondents believe some type of action is needed against global climate change. Two-thirds in that survey said they either strongly or somewhat supported carbon emission caps.

“But it is true that a very loud minority has made action on climate change more difficult. I think that’s because the issue — which should be judged on science — has gotten caught up in partisan politics,” Gaby told CBS News in an email. “We need to [reopen] a productive, [bipartisan] dialogue about solutions that will help our environment and our economy.”

By the time the world’s sociopathic wealthy are finished with their conman routine designed to prevent rapid moves away from the fossil fuel industry, most of them will be departed from this earth, having passed away comfortable and rich.

The least we can do is curse their memories and make sure their heirs don’t stand to gain disproportionately from the blood money they’ve stolen at all of our expense.

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QOTD: An American patriot

by digby

… or ignorant sociopath, you decide. This is William Gheen, head of the anti-immigrant group known as ALIPAC — the group that exhorted its members to send used underwear to the border for the kids down there:

“Well, what the illegals that are coming — and especially the ones that are coming from China — are going to do to America are much more powerful and lasting impacts than anything Al Qaeda could blow up, short of a nuclear detonation.”

“And how do you put a price tag on a family, let’s say that’s been in the United States for 300 years, and four or five different members of that family have gone off to World War II and Korea and maybe World War I to fight for the American way of life, and then finally they get to their grandson that’s alive in the year 2020 who doesn’t get to go to the college of their choice because invaders have been brought in the country and put in those seats ahead of him. That child’s life, that negatively impacts that child’s ability to self-actualize, to be all they can be, impacted because the future has been stolen by this usurpation, this treason, this treachery from the highest levels of our own government right here in the United States of America.”

“Once they get enough people in here to get the boat really sinking, and then they get the borders destroyed and they start taking up all the guns and we’ve got wave after wave of future illegal immigrants just pouring in, pouring in, pouring in, the existing stock of Americans are going to be so politically and economically buried under this wave, that it’s a weapon from which we can never recover.”

Runferyerlives!!!

Friendly reminder for all uninformed morons:

While the number of unaccompanied youth crossing the border has doubled to nearly 60,000 in the past year, the total number of undocumented immigrants has mostly declined. About 1 million people have been caught crossing the border nearly every year between 1983 until 2006, but that number has dropped to about 400,000 in 2013.

Via Right Wing Watch.

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Making everyone frustrated is a feature not a bug

by digby

My piece in Salon today discusses the new call from Chuck Schumer for jungle primaries like we have in California all over the country.  What a great idea it is — if you’re a centrist bucket of lukewarm spit:

If this were to work the way they want it to work what you’d end up with … is the partisan minority voters having to hold their noses and vote for someone they really don’t like in order to elect someone the majority in the district also doesn’t like. (And the worst case scenario is when a bunch of candidates of the same party cancel each other out in a district that should go their party’s way and leave their voters to choose between two candidates from the opposing party. )

Yet we’re supposed to believe this system is designed to make everyone excited about the political process and get them engaged once again? Hardly. This is pretty obviously designed to drive down participation by wringing every bit of political passion and ideological commitment out of it and leave politically involved citizens with a very bad taste in their mouths. The only people who could possibly be excited by this are the people who hold the purse strings and have a strong interest in maintaining the status quo. Making everyone frustrated is a feature, not a bug.

Read on. There are some examples that show this only works part of the time.  But it’s playing more and more into the political establishment’s hands.  Considering the discipline and cohesion among Republicans, Democrats would only play along if they want a good excuse to pretend to have been rolled by Republicans when they do the bidding of the big money special interests. Because that’s the result. And they know it.

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“Minority Report” for dummies

by digby

Jeremy Scahill is out with a blockbuster story about the criteria the government uses to put you on a list of suspected terrorists. It’s terrifying, all right. The rules are so loose and contradictory it basically can put anyone on there it chooses:

“Instead of a watchlist limited to actual, known terrorists, the government has built a vast system based on the unproven and flawed premise that it can predict if a person will commit a terrorist act in the future,” says Hina Shamsi, the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “On that dangerous theory, the government is secretly blacklisting people as suspected terrorists and giving them the impossible task of proving themselves innocent of a threat they haven’t carried out.” Shamsi, who reviewed the document, added, “These criteria should never have been kept secret.”

The document’s definition of “terrorist” activity includes actions that fall far short of bombing or hijacking. In addition to expected crimes, such as assassination or hostage-taking, the guidelines also define destruction of government property and damaging computers used by financial institutions as activities meriting placement on a list. They also define as terrorism any act that is “dangerous” to property and intended to influence government policy through intimidation.

This combination—a broad definition of what constitutes terrorism and a low threshold for designating someone a terrorist—opens the way to ensnaring innocent people in secret government dragnets. It can also be counterproductive. When resources are devoted to tracking people who are not genuine risks to national security, the actual threats get fewer resources—and might go unnoticed.

“If reasonable suspicion is the only standard you need to label somebody, then it’s a slippery slope we’re sliding down here, because then you can label anybody anything,” says David Gomez, a former senior FBI special agent with experience running high-profile terrorism investigations. “Because you appear on a telephone list of somebody doesn’t make you a terrorist. That’s the kind of information that gets put in there.”

The fallout is personal too. There are severe consequences for people unfairly labeled a terrorist by the U.S. government, which shares its watchlist data with local law enforcement, foreign governments, and “private entities.” Once the U.S. government secretly labels you a terrorist or terrorist suspect, other institutions tend to treat you as one. It can become difficult to get a job (or simply to stay out of jail). It can become burdensome—or impossible—to travel. And routine encounters with law enforcement can turn into ordeals…

In 2012 Tim Healy, the former director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, described to CBS News how watchlists are used by police officers. “So if you are speeding, you get pulled over, they’ll query that name,” he said. “And if they are encountering a known or suspected terrorist, it will pop up and say call the Terrorist Screening Center…. So now the officer on the street knows he may be dealing with a known or suspected terrorist.” Of course, the problem is that the “known or suspected terrorist” might just be an ordinary citizen who should not be treated as a menace to public safety.

So if any of you have been having trouble getting work or feel unusually harassed by authorities perhaps you should ask if you’re on the “Watch List.” Of course, they won’t tell you. Then they’d have to kill you.

Read the whole story. It will scare you and not just because the government has assumed the power to arbitrarily “categorize” its citizens as threats to the state, although that’s plenty scary. What’s truly alarming is the fact that this manual makes almost no sense and is completely irrational and contradictory. If this is how they are allegedly protecting the nation, I’d start building some bomb shelters and safe rooms. These people have totally lost the thread.

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Prince of the Village


by digby

So rumors have David Gregory on the ropes with NBC planning to fire him, the only question is whether to wait until after the mid-terms. His ratings are the worst of the Sunday morning shows and are down almost 50% from Monsignor Tim Russert’s day.

Replacements mentioned are Chuck Todd, Savannah Guthrie or Morning Joe and Mika. (Not kidding …)

But let’s be serious here folks.  We know who the real heir to the MTP throne is, don’t we?

Amirite???

Why wait? You know it’s going to happen eventually …

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The libertarian legal game plan to repeal Obamacare is truly mind-boggling

by digby

Dave Weigel explains something that I had not fully understood before — the Obamacare repeal legal game plan:

At least 4 million people, who signed up for Obamacare in states that chose not to set up exchanges (or in the case of Oregon, tried and failed to set up their own), are currently panicking about the threat of erased subsidies and higher payments. Why do I attribute this to libertarians? Like I wrote in 2013, and like Alec MacGillis has been writing, the Halbig case’s chief advocate was Michael Cannon, a Cato Institute scholar who had previously campaigned to stop states from setting up their own exchanges.

Cannon’s goal, stated bluntly and frequently, was that Obamacare had to be brought down by any means necessary. States that did not set up exchanges were in a better position to sue the government. Fewer people in the exchanges meant higher overall costs. To insurers, the “death spiral” was an apocalypse scenario; to Cannon, it meant freedom.

“A victory for the Halbig plaintiffs would not increase anyone’s premiums,” he wrote Monday.* “What it would do is prevent the IRS from shifting the burden of those premiums from enrollees to taxpayers. Premiums for federal-Exchange enrollees would not rise, but those enrollees would face the full cost of their ‘ObamaCare’ plans.”

This is the Leninism I’m referring to in my headline. Cannon’s no socialist—quite the opposite!—but he saw a solution to the Republican crisis of watching people grow used to new entitlements. Rip the entitlement away, weaken the system, and a painful short term would give Congress no choice but to undo the law. Take away some of the beams, and what do you know? The roof collapses.

An what “undoing” the law means in this context is removing the requirements for pre-existing conditions and the basic package of coverage — which means that people affected will go uncovered or pay an unaffordable price for an inadequate policy. You know, like it used to be. Which in their minds was a great system apparently.

Remember, this is how they really feel about this: