Month: August 2014

There is literally nothing you can do to lose respect of the villagers. And a new generation carries on the tradition.

by digby

Oh look. Notorious right wing war criminals being treated respectfully as “experts” on MSNBC:

credit: MSNBC

How sadly predictable it was to see yet another Republican hawk with a very long history, the old foreign policy hand John Negroponte, appearing on MSNBC’s Ronan Farrow show Friday where he testified to the integrity of America’s spies and wrung his hands ineffectually over the child refugee crisis at the border. After all, the man is a virtual Zelig, having been an integral part of every foreign policy disaster for the past 30 years. Unfortunately, none of that came up. After allowing Negroponte to offer up a spirited defense of the intelligence community in which he declared that all of this unpleasantness should be hashed out in secret rather than in the public eye, Farrow sagely agreed that his own vast experience in the government proved the employees of the national security establishment to all be of the very highest caliber. At that point he asked Negroponte to share his insights about the border situation given his expertise on Central America as a former ambassador in the region. If Negroponte had been in the hands of a more skilled and knowlegeable interlocutor, we might have had an interesting exchange at that point.

Unfortunately that was not to be.

That’s an excerpt from my piece this morning at Salon. Read on …

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You mean “Benghazi!!!” was all manufactured outrage?

by David Atkins

Has there been in modern American politics a more ludicrous spectacle in manufactured scandalmongering than Benghazi? If so, I can’t remember it:

The House Intelligence Committee, led by Republicans, has concluded that there was no deliberate wrongdoing by the Obama administration in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, said Rep. Mike Thompson of St. Helena, the second-ranking Democrat on the committee.

The panel voted Thursday to declassify the report, the result of two years of investigation by the committee. U.S. intelligence agencies will have to approve making the report public.

Thompson said the report “confirms that no one was deliberately misled, no military assets were withheld and no stand-down order (to U.S. forces) was given.”

The Benghazi howls had only one purpose: to damage Hillary Clinton. They didn’t do the job. But there never any “there” there in the first place.

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The never ending story

by digby

This is very nice:

Jen Psaki

Department Spokesperson
Washington, DC
August 3, 2014

The United States is appalled by today’s disgraceful shelling outside an UNRWA school in Rafah sheltering some 3,000 displaced persons, in which at least ten more Palestinian civilians were tragically killed. The coordinates of the school, like all UN facilities in Gaza, have been repeatedly communicated to the Israeli Defense Forces. We once again stress that Israel must do more to meet its own standards and avoid civilian casualties. UN facilities, especially those sheltering civilians, must be protected, and must not be used as bases from which to launch attacks. The suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians. We call for a full and prompt investigation of this incident as well as the recent shelling of other UNRWA schools.

We continue to underscore that all parties must take all feasible precautions to prevent civilian casualties and protect the civilian population and comply with international humanitarian law.

I’m reminded of this from Robin Wright yesterday in the New Yorker recalling something she’s written back in the summer of 1982 from Beirut. She recounts the Israeli invasion of Lebanon:

Two days before I arrived, a Jordanian gunman shot Shlomo Argov, the Israeli Ambassador in London, as he left a diplomatic banquet at the Dorchester Hotel. Israel blamed the P.L.O. (Britain subsequently tied the attack to the Abu Nidal Organization, a radical group named after a renegade who had turned against Arafat. Its goal was apparently to discredit the P.L.O., which had been gaining acceptance in Europe, amid a peace initiative proposed by the Saudis. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher later said that a hit list, uncovered in the investigation of Abu Nidal’s London cell, included the P.L.O. representative in London.)

Israeli warplanes immediately pummelled Palestinian targets across Lebanon, especially in the warren of refugee camps near the airport. On the day I landed, President Reagan, pledging to increase U.S. diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict, urgently appealed to Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, for restraint along the border.

And so it went:

Washington condemned the P.L.O. repeatedly, but, as the siege dragged on, relations between the United States and Israel grew increasingly testy over the plight of civilians. In early July, Reagan pressed Israel to lift the blockade of West Beirut and to restore water and electricity. In late July, he put a hold on cluster bombs sent to Israel. On July 31st, Robert Dillon, the American Ambassador to Lebanon, angrily cabled Washington, “Simply put, tonight’s saturation shelling was as intense as anything we have seen. There was no ‘pinpoint accuracy’ against targets in ‘open spaces.’ It was not a response to Palestinian fire. This was a blitz against West Beirut. Our 21:00 ceasefire announced in advance over local radio stations was transformed instead into a massive Israeli escalation.”

On August 1st, on the eve of a meeting with Israel’s foreign minister, Yitzhak Shamir, Reagan told reporters, “The bloodshed must stop,” adding that he would make sure that the Israelis “understand exactly how we feel about this.” Pressed on whether he was losing patience, Reagan replied, “I lost patience a long time ago.”

At the meeting the next day, the President told Shamir, “When P.L.O. sniper fire is followed by fourteen hours of Israeli bombardment, that is stretching the definition of defensive action too far.” Both men were noticeably grim-faced in the official photographs.

Reagan had begun to feel repercussions at home and abroad. The American media savaged his Administration as weak and without direction. Time’s Walter Isaacson wrote,

Israeli attacks on West Beirut reinforced the impression that the U.S. is a helpless giant that can neither influence Israeli actions nor come to grips with events in the Middle East. Signs of U.S. ineffectualness in the current crisis have been conspicuous since the day in June when Reagan sent a well-publicized message from the Western economic summit meeting at Versailles urging Begin not to invade Lebanon. Begin sent his troops in the next day. … The stability of the Middle East and the credibility of American diplomacy hinge on whether words or rockets settle the status of the PLO in West Beirut.

The siege lasted ten weeks. More than seventeen thousand Lebanese and Palestinians died; most were civilians. Lebanese officials claimed that a quarter of them were under fifteen years old. Israel lost more than three hundred and sixty troops.

That was 32 years ago. In case you’re wondering why some people my age react rather numbly to the Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed, it’s probably because it’s been happening with some regularity as long as we can remember. And we’re old. The horror is undiminished over time but it takes on the quality of a recurring nightmare.

And consider this:

The Israeli campaign did little, however, to solve the problem of rival nationalisms vying for land to call their own. And its consequences triggered an entirely new set of challenges. The Arab world had given only lip service to the P.L.O. during the siege. Iran was the only country to step in, dispatching eighteen hundred Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley. They did not engage Israel—they quietly fostered, funded, and armed the embryo of what became Hezbollah. After the P.L.O. departed, Hezbollah launched its first suicide bomb—then a novel tactic—against Israeli military targets. On April 18, 1983, a car bomber attacked the American Embassy in Beirut, killing sixty-three people. Six months later, suicide bombers blew up a barracks housing U.S. Marines who had deployed to oversee the Palestinian withdrawal. Two hundred and forty-one American servicemen died.

In 1985, Israel’s defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, looked back on the war and reflected,

I believe that, among the many surprises, and most of them not for the good, that came out of the war in Lebanon, the most dangerous is that the war let the Shiites out of the bottle. No one predicted it; I couldn’t find it in any intelligence report. … If, as a result of the war in Lebanon, we replace P.L.O. terrorism in southern Lebanon with Shiite terrorism, we have done the worst [thing] in our struggle against terrorism. In twenty years of P.L.O. terrorism, no one P.L.O. terrorist made himself a live bomb. … In my opinion, the Shiites have the potential for a kind of terrorism that we have not yet experienced.

Yes. War has a funny way of doing things like that:

Extremists Seize 3 More Towns in Iraq After Routing Kurdish Forces

sigh

America changing

by digby

Courtesy Vox

You’d think we’d have better healthcare and social services …

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Right wing priorities courtesy Gov. Goodhair

by digby

A rare moment on Sunday talk:

Perry said his constituents in Texas are concerned about “the 90 percent-plus of individuals who don’t get talked about enough that are coming into the United States illegally and committing substantial crimes.”

He said that the 203,000 illegal immigrants who have come into Texas since 2008 and booked into Texas county jails have been responsible for over 3,000 homicides and almost 8,000 sexual assaults. 

Crowley, the host of CNN’s “State of the Union,” called Perry’s claim “wildly off.”

“Governor, I have to point out that a number of fact- checkers have said that that 3,000-homicide figure is wildly off,” she said.

That’s awesome. Unfortunately, Perry simply ignored her and went on, unopposed:

“I do stand by them [the statistics] by the way, but what are the number of homicides that are acceptable to those individuals? How many sexual assaults do we have to have before the president of the United States and Washington, D.C., acts to keep our citizens safe?” he said.

Even one homicide by an undocumented worker is too many. Obviously, we should send soldiers to the border to kill them all. (Why else would you nee soldiers? They’re not social workers.)

Then maybe the Governor could think about doing something about this little problem with keeping his own constituents safe:

On Wednesday evening, Ronald Lee Haskell, disguised as a FedEx delivery man, gained entry to the home of his sister-in-law and her spouse, Stephen and Katie Stay, demanding the whereabouts of his estranged ex-wife. According to statements by the Harris County police and prosecutors, he then allegedly tied up the Stays and their five children, ages 4 to 15, and shot them execution style, killing all but his 15-year-old niece, who played dead. Haskell then began driving to the home of the children’s grandparents, possibly to continue his rampage, but his critically injured niece managed to call 911. He was apprehended on the way by law enforcement. After a three-and-a-half-hour standoff three miles from the scene of the killings, Haskell surrendered and was arrested.

Court records show that in Utah in 2008, Haskell was charged with domestic violence and simple assault against his wife. She reported that he had hit her in the head and dragged her by the hair, according to police and court records. He pleaded guilty to the assault charge and had the domestic-violence charge dismissed as part of his plea deal. In July 2013, Haskell’s wife filed a protective order against him in Cache County, Utah, where they lived at the time. The order applied to her and their four children. She then moved away and filed for divorce about a month later. The divorce was finalized this past February.

Nobody knows where he got his guns. But we can assume that Governor Perry figures he had an All American, God given right to have as many as he wanted. There’s zero chance he has any intention of doing anything about this:

Three different bills that would strengthen federal law are currently stalled in Congress, in part due to lobbying efforts of gun rights groups, including the National Rifle Association. Federal law prohibits convicted felons, subjects of permanent domestic-violence protective orders, as well as current and former spouses, parents, and guardians who have been convicted of domestic-violence misdemeanors from possessing a gun. But this leaves many situations where potential abusers are allowed to keep their guns. The current law doesn’t apply to misdemeanant stalkers, domestic-violence misdemeanants who are current or former dating partners but who’ve never cohabitated or had a child together, as well as accused partners subject to a temporary (rather than permanent) restraining order. This is concerning, especially considering that in more than half of all states, fatal violence between intimate partners is most often perpetrated with a firearm.

But sure, by all means, let’s put every effort into stopping non-existent crime among immigrants and child refugees down at the border. That’s what we call conservative “problem solving.”

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QOTD: despair edition

by digby

Here’s a lovely irony:

“Even Hitler was a child,” reads graffiti currently sprayed near the entrance to Netivot.

Here we are fighting with each other all over the planet, killing and degrading children, downing passenger planes,  excusing torture while, as a well informed friend of mine tells me via email, climate scientists are rapidly concluding that it’s far, far worse than we realized.

I’ve been told that we should stay away from our beach today because lightening is likely to strike and may kill people again.  That’s not a normal thing here.  Not at all:

I rarely feel despair but today I do. This is a species problem. The human species. I can’t see how we’re going to make it as long as we persist in this horrifying violence (where people excuse the killing of innocent children by suggesting that they might be a future Hitler!) while the planet literally burns.

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Poor put upon plutocrats. These rubes just won’t do as they’re told.

by digby

The Wall Street Journal is very upset with those icky Tea Partiers for ruining their perfect plutocrat plan:

“House Republicans may have scrambled enough on Friday to save themselves from a total meltdown. But this latest immigration debacle won’t help the party’s image, which is still recovering from the government shutdown debacle of 2011. A party whose preoccupation is deporting children is going to alienate many conservatives, never mind minority voters,” the op-ed read.

The Journal’s editorial page pointed out that the last-minute drama on the House floor drew attention away from the Senate, which was unable to marshal enough votes to move its own bill addressing the border crisis.

“This Democratic use of border children as midterm-election pawns should be the story, but instead the Deportation Republicans played into Mr. Obama’s hands,” the op-ed said. “Right on cue, the President held a press event on Friday at the White House that tattooed the GOP for refusing to solve the problem they claim is a crisis. The truth is that Mr. Obama doesn’t even care if the border bill passes. What he really wants is the immigration issue to bash Republicans and drive Hispanic and other minority turnout in states like Colorado that could determine Senate control.”

It just makes them look so bad to the Hispanics who would allegedly otherwise vote for people who hate their guts. What a mistake.

Poor plutocrats. They’ve funded and nurtured a party full of racists, xenophobes and nativists and now they’ve lost control of them. I guess they’ll have to rely on the Democrats to do all their dirty work for them. And oh hell, they’ve got a bunch of hippies to contend with.

Waddayagonnado?

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Diseased minds

by digby

A letter to the Washington Post from a sane person:

John Armstrong, Florida’s top health official , sent a letter last month to the heads of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — taking the extra step of copying the media — requesting that they tell him how many of the children who recently crossed the U.S. border from Mexico are in Florida and what illnesses they have. In asserting that this information was “urgently needed and is vital to guarding the health and safety of Florida communities, ” Armstrong fanned anxieties that the influx of children from Central and South America poses a large-scale threat to public health.

Likewise, Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey, a chair of the GOP Doctors Caucus,penned a letter last month to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden requesting a national threat assessment, claiming he had heard reports of children crossing the border “carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus, and tuberculosis.” The congressman later added smallpox to his list of diseases of concern. 

Let’s everybody calm down. No one has ever been infected with Ebola in the Western Hemisphere, dengue fever isn’t transmitted from human to human, only one confirmed case of flu has been found so far among the children and smallpox has been eradicated worldwide.

That leaves tuberculosis, an infectious disease that actually is of great public health concern. TB is an airborne illness, caused by a bacterium that can infect any part of the body, though it typically affects the lungs.Symptoms include severe weight loss, lethargy and bloody coughing. It can be fatal without treatment.

I certainly share the concern that the American public is not adequately protected from TB. But as a doctor who led the response to an actual TB epidemic in New York City in the 1990s, I feel compelled to explain that tuberculosis already exists in the United States. It has always been here. By far the most effective way of protecting Americans from it is to provide the public health system with the resources it needs to treat and prevent the disease in our communities every day.

The United States faced a TB epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s that was the direct result of years of gutted federal and local funding for basic control activities. Ultimately, it cost a billion dollars to stop the spread of the disease just in New York — far more than it would have cost if we had simply maintained the basic infrastructure needed to diagnose and treat those infected.

As a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine laid out, health officials working to control TB today are facing funding challenges similar to what we faced then. According to the report, municipal funding for TB control has been cut by more than half since the 1990s, and federal spending on anti-TB efforts has dropped 15 percent. In fact, in 2012,Armstrong himself oversaw the closing of Florida’s A.G. Holley Hospital — one of the nation’s leading TB treatment facilities.

Such neglect has already led to serious shortages of TB medications and diagnostics. Notably, since 2005, there have been major disruptions in the supply of the TB drug isoniazid, as well as tuberculin, which is used to diagnose TB infection.

As a result, there is a rash of new TB cases in this country, mostly in large urban settings, where population densities are conducive to transmission. Most recently, a Sacramento school experienced an outbreak in which 120 students and employees have been found to be infected since February.

If U.S. leaders are concerned that tuberculosis poses a threat to public health, they’re right. But that threat doesn’t stem from the recent influx of undocumented children. It has arisen from years of neglect of our core institutions tasked with preventing and treating TB.

Paula I. Fujiwara August 1
The writer is the scientific director of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

The world is upside down.

And I’d be seriously concerned if I lived in Florida. The public health system is obviously being run by tea partying lunatics.

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This is why we need a fighter, not a conciliator, in the White House

by David Atkins

Kevin Drum riffs on Dave Weigel, who noted that all the public knows is that there’s a border crisis, Obama is president, and they blame him for not fixing it:

Republicans can basically do anything they want and never get blamed for it. Most voters don’t even know who’s in control of Congress anyway. When something goes wrong, all they know is (a) something went wrong, and (b) Barack Obama is the president and he should have done something about it.

That being the case, what incentive do Republicans have for making things go right? Pretty much none. This is, roughly speaking, a fairly new insight, and it explains most of what you need to know about American politics in the Obama era.

That’s fine insofar as it goes: most Americans tend to see the President as a sort of dictator-god with magic control over the economy and everything else. If things go badly, the President gets the blame. If they go well, (s)he gets the credit.

But the corollary to that is as follows: if an opposition Congress is cynically sabotaging the entire government in order to make the President and his/her party seem weak and ineffectual, then the President’s only option legislatively is to do whatever is possible by executive order.

More importantly, though, politically speaking the President has no choice but to drop all pretense of good-faith negotiation and conciliation with Congress, and make it very clear to the American public that (s)he would like to do X, Y, and Z popular thing, but Republicans in Congress stand in the way. As long as nothing is getting done anyway, not a day should go by without that point being made again and again and again. Sure, the Village will get restless and say the gridlock is due to partisan bickering and a lack of “leadership” from the White House–but they’re going to say that anyway. Because that’s what the Village does, and that’s why it’s a cancer on the body politic.

There has to be an acknowledgment from the Executive Branch that Republicans in Congress are saboteurs, not legislators. Presidents tend to be reluctant to acknowledge the boundaries of their power so that the public doesn’t perceive them as weak. But that ship has sailed. The government’s clear inability to accomplish almost anything has already made that case. All that’s left is to adjudicate the blame.

There’s no reason not to simply come forward with a popular progressive legislative wish list, hold symbolic votes in the Senate, do whatever is possible via Executive Order, watch the lawsuits and impeachment threats roll in, and remind the American public every day through Election Day how Republicans are sabotaging the country.

Now more than ever, the country needs a fighter in the Oval Office–not a conciliator.

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Drowning in a sea of schmaltz: Mood Indigo