Month: August 2014

Rabid poodle

by digby

People like to condemn Bill Clinton for schmoozing Big Money Boyz to fund the Global Initiative, but at least he isn’t doing this:

Tony Blair gave Kazakhstan’s autocratic president advice on how to manage his image after the slaughter of unarmed civilians protesting against his regime…

Mr Blair, who is paid millions of pounds a year to give advice to Mr Nazarbayev, goes on to suggest key passages to insert into a speech the president was giving at the University of Cambridge, to defend the action.

Mr Blair is paid through his private consultancy, Tony Blair Associates (TBA), which he set up after leaving Downing Street in 2007. TBA is understood to deploy a number of consultants in key ministries in Kazakhstan.

Here’s the letter:

“Dear Mr President, here is a suggestion for a paragraph to include in the Cambridge speech. I think it best to meet head on the Zhanaozen issue. The fact is you have made changes following it; but in any event these events, tragic though they were, should not obscure the enormous progress that Kazakhstan has made. Dealing with it [the massacre] in the way I suggest, is the best way for the western media. It will also serve as a quote that can be used in the future setting out the basic case for Kazakhstan.”

In his own handwriting, Mr Blair added at the bottom of the letter: “With very best wishes. I look forward to seeing you in London! Yours ever Tony Blair.”

You have to give him credit, though. He knows how to spin:

Mr Blair advised his client to insert into his speech one paragraph beginning: “I love my country. I have worked hard to help it overcome the bitter legacy of its recent history. I have been at the helm as it has dramatically made these strides in living standards, wealth and prosperity for the people… I rejoice in the essential religious tolerance of the nation that allows people of different faiths to practise those faiths freely.”

ICYWW, he “won” election with 95% of the vote. Except for the killing and repression they apparently love him …

In its latest analysis of the country’s record, Human Rights Watch (HRW) concluded that: “Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record continued to deteriorate in 2013, with authorities cracking down on free speech and dissent through misuse of overly broad laws.”

But hey, that’s no reason not to make a coupla bucks, amirite? And doing it by using boilerplate “freedom ‘n tolerance” is really pretty brilliant.

(Oh, did I forget to mention that Kazakhstan is swimming in oil?)

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One murder by ISIS isn’t a national emergency

by David Atkins

In keeping with Digby’s points today about ISIS and presidential vacations, I feel it’s appropriate to repost part of another Washington Monthly piece I did yesterday on the subject:

It was a brutal, evil despicable act by a group of horrible human beings. But it’s not a national security crisis. The United States was well aware of the situation for months. A rescue operation was meticulously planned and executed but failed to reach him before he was moved to a different location. Per its policy, the United States did not pay a cash ransom. Probably as a response to the rescue attempt and as blackmail to encourage the United States to pay for the next prisoner, Foley was barbarically executed.

Everything about that situation is awful, and the perpetrators must be punished accordingly. But it doesn’t constitute a national crisis that demands a world leader cut short precious time being used to recuperate and relax from a very stressful job. The situation with ISIS is terrible now, and it’s going to remain terrible for the foreseeable future. Foley’s murder does nothing to change that, unless it alters the calculus for other hostages being held—in which case I would expect military and civilian leadership to make those changes as quietly as possible.

The conservative press knows this. It defended President Bush for taking vacation time during legitimate crises for which the Bush Administration was utterly unprepared. It also knows that no persuadable voters will remember this kerfuffle a month from now.

But they just can’t help themselves. The cheap opportunism is reflexive at this point.

Every time the Right and their little too-cool-for-school Village enablers like Dowd start talking, you realize how little they actually seem to know or care not only about the plight of the average worker, but even about basics like national security. They’re so petty and willfully obtuse that the thought of them being in charge of the nation’s security is frankly terrifying. Indeed, we saw what happened the last time we let them run things, from 2000 to 2008. They still haven’t proved themselves any more capable since.

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Hide yer money and yer wimmin, the liberals are invading!

by digby

The Upshot points out that the greatest threat of creeping liberalism isn’t caused by a bunch of child refugees at the border escaping death — it’s good old fashioned Americans migrating to Real America. And they’re bringing their Blue State ways with them!

Over the last few decades, residents of many traditionally liberal states have moved to states that were once more conservative. And this pattern has played an important role in helping the Democratic Party win the last two presidential elections and four of the last six. The growth of the Latino population and the social liberalism of the millennial generation may receive more attention, but the growing diaspora of blue-state America matters as well.

The blue diaspora has helped offset the fact that many of the nation’s fastest-growing states are traditionally Republican. You can think of it as a kind of race: Population growth in these Republican states is reducing the share of the Electoral College held by traditionally Democratic states. But Democratic migration has been fast enough, so far, to allow the party to overcome the fact that the Northeast and industrial Midwest contain a smaller portion of the country’s population than they once did…

These changes aren’t happening simply because the national population has grown over the same period, either. In fact, the red-born population in blue states shrank, to 7.3 million from 8.4 million, between 2000 and 2012. Some of this decline stems from the fact that California has become a less popular destination for people from all over the country, in part because of high housing costs. Illinois and Michigan, states that used to draw migrants seeking economic opportunity, have also become less attractive.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
Of course, not all blue-state migrants are liberal. And people’s political views can change over time. But enough of the migrants have the views of their home states to have made a difference. It’s no accident that the places in once-red states where migrants have tended to settle — like the Virginia suburbs of Washington, the Research Triangle of North Carolina and the Denver metro area — are the places that have allowed Democrats to overcome huge deficits elsewhere in those states. Many of these migrants are Northeastern Democrats.

Better arm up, boys. The hippies are on the march. An they don’t need a passport.

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Modo deja vu

by digby

So,Maureen Dowd has been clutching her pearls for 25 years over president failing to rush back to the White House every time Peggy Noonan decides a crisis is upon us. Today’s idiotic screed is here. But check this out:

CONFRONTATION THE GULF; Aides Worry About How Bush’s Vacation Looks in a Crisis

By MAUREEN DOWD, Special to The New York Times

Published: August 11, 1990

Noting that he keeps a telephone in his golf cart and in his Cigarette boat, President Bush today defended his decision to go on vacation only three days after sending American troops to the Middle East.

”Word of honor,” the President said, in an attempt to reassure the American people that he is surrounded by enough ”highly complex and highly efficient communications” to keep track of the volatile situation in the Persian Gulf.

”I’m determined that life goes on,” Mr. Bush said on Air Force One as he traveled from Washington to his coastal home in Maine for a 25-day vacation. ”The American people want to see life go on so long as they understand their President and top officials are on top of a troubled situation.”

I agree with Poppy. The last thing this world needs is for the president of the United States to look like he’s panicking.

And how about St. Ronnie when he invaded Grenada?

Reagan remained on vacation at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. Repeat: golf resort. Here are three strikingly presidential photos from Augusta — the golf resort! First, Reagan in his jammies being briefed on the Grenada plans, then, later hitting the links.

(Peggy Noonan must have swooned at the sight of those presidential toes…)

h/t to Eric Boehlert

They aren’t alien robots from outer space

by digby

Zack Beauchamp did a nice rundown on myths about ISIS over at Vox yesterday that’s worth reading. I’ll just excerpt with Myth #1:

If you want to understand the Islamic State, better known as ISIS, the first thing you have to know about them is that they are not crazy. Murderous adherents to a violent medieval ideology, sure. But not insane.

Look at the history of ISIS’s rise in Iraq and Syria. From the mid-2000s through today, ISIS and its predecessor group, al-Qaeda in Iraq, have had one clear goal: to establish a caliphate governed by an extremist interpretation of Islamic law. ISIS developed strategies for accomplishing that goal — for instance, exploiting popular discontent among non-extremist Sunni Iraqis with their Shia-dominated government. Its tactics have evolved over the course of time in response to military defeats (as in 2008 in Iraq) and new opportunities (the Syrian civil war). As Yale political scientist Stathis Kalyvas explains, in pure strategic terms, ISIS is acting similarly to revolutionary militant groups around the world — not in an especially crazy or uniquely “Islamist” way.

The point is that, while individual members of ISIS show every indication of espousing a crazed ideology and committing psychopathically violent acts, in the aggregate ISIS acts as a rational strategic enterprise. Their violence is, in broad terms, not random — it is targeted to weaken their enemies and strengthen ISIS’ hold on territory, in part by terrorizing the people it wishes to rule over.

Understanding that ISIS is at least on some level rational is necessary to make any sense of the group’s behavior. If all ISIS wanted to was kill infidels, why would they ally themselves with ex-Saddam Sunni secularist militias? If ISIS were totally crazy, how could they build a self-sustaining revenue stream from oil and organized crime rackets? If ISIS only cared about forcing people to obey Islamic law, why would they have sponsored children’s festivals and medical clinics in the Syrian territory they control? (To be clear, it is not out of their love for children, whom they are also happy to murder, but a calculated desire to establish control.)

This isn’t to minimize ISIS’ barbarity. They’ve launched genocidal campaigns against Iraq’s Yazidis and Christians. They’ve slaughtered thousands of innocents, Shia and Sunni alike. But they pursue these horrible ends deliberately and strategically. And that’s what really makes them scary.

In other words, they are not aliens from outer space. They are barbaric human beings. The president doesn’t need to rush back to Washington to declare war on evil and personally ride a nuclear bomb down to Mosul. The world has seen their ilk before.

Read the rest of the explainer. It’s well done.

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The lonely Republican dove

by digby

Going for the gullibles:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) called former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a “war hawk” and added that if she decides to run for president in 2016 voters will question whether she wants to bring the U.S. into another war in the Middle East.

Paul, himself a potential 2016 candidate, made the comments during an appearance on NBC’s Meet The Press.

“I think that’s what scares the Democrats the most, is that in a general election, were I to run, there’s going to be a lot of independents and even some Democrats who say, ‘You know what? We are tired of war,” Paul said, according to The Associated Press. “We’re worried that Hillary Clinton will get us involved in another Middle Eastern war, because she’s so gung-ho.”

A legitimate concern, I’d say. I know I’m concerned about it.

But why exactly is Rand Paul running in the Party who’s membership is currently peeing its pants and running around hysterically exhorting the current president to start bombing/invading/killing something immediately because the boogeyman is coming to kill-all-our-babies-oh-my-God!!!!

For instance:

House Intelligence Committee Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said Sunday that he believes the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has put the U.S. in more danger than it was in the lead up to the Sept. 11 attacks more than a decade ago.

“Before 9/11, there were single-level threat streams coming to the United States. So, pretty serious. Obviously they got in and conducted the attacks on 9/11. Now you have multiple organizations, all al Qaeda-minded, trying to accomplish the same thing,” Rogers said in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “Now you have two competing terrorist organizations, both of them want to get their credentials to the point where they can say, ‘We are the premier terrorist organization.’ Both want to conduct attacks in the West for that reason. And guess what? That means we lose at the end. If either one of those organizations is successful, we lose.”

“The threat matrix is so wide and it’s so deep. We just didn’t have that before 9/11,” Rogers said.

The ever-distraught Huckleberry Graham:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday called for President Obama to target leaders of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Syria after the beheading of an American journalist last week.

“It’s about time to assume the worst about these guys,” Graham during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “They’re not the JV team anymore, they’re the most prominent terrorist organization in the world.”

ISIS leaders released a video last week of a man who appeared to have a British accent beheading journalist James Foley.

Graham said it would be easy for ISIS to target locations in the U.S. if they are not confronted directly by the Obama administration because members hold western passports.

“I would argue that the intel that we’ve been provided in Congress is that there are hundreds of Americans citizens holding U.S. passports, there are European citizens going to the fight,” he said. “They’ve expressed a will to hit the homeland. That’s part of their agenda to drive us out of the Mideast.

“There’s no way you can solve the problem in Iraq without hitting them in Syria,” the South Carolina Republican said.
“The goal is to hit ISIL in Syria to deal with their command and control,” he added.

“I think the purpose of going into Syria is deal with the threat to the homeland,” Graham said.

Bill Kristol on This Week:

“I would like a little overreaction now!”

Meanwhile, the Democrats (so far) are the ones who are keeping their cool. Senator Jack Reed:

“We have to begin with the assumption that they could be such a threat, then we have to evaluate what their capabilities are, what their intentions,” he said. “I don’t think we can simply dismiss , but to jump from what they’ve done with this horrific incident with Mr. Foley to the idea that they would be an immediate threat to the homeland, I don’t think you jump to that.”

Senator Mark Pryor:

I don’t think most Arkansans believe that we should be the world’s policeman,” Pryor said this week, according to the Baxter Bulletin.

“We need to work with our allies. We need to try to help and provide a stable situation, and certainly look out for the humanitarian concerns, but at the end of the day, a lot of these countries, they just have to take responsibility for their own countries,” he said.

Yes, Democrats are warmongers too and perhaps Hillary Clinton is as hawkish as Rand Paul says she is. But unless Rand Paul is willing to govern with a Democratic majority and face impeachment from his own, he’s not going to have any room to be a dove. Even Obama is getting hit hard and he’s hardly an isolationist. How in the world could Paul hope to fight that martial impulse as a GOP president? It makes no sense. If there is one thing you can count on in the modern Republican Party it’s the bloodlust for war.

Again, the question is,  if Paul wants to run on the peace platform, why in the world is he a Republican? They have about four people in the whole party who don’t believe we should be bombing the hell out of the entire middle east right now. At least on the Democratic side leaders are taking a short breath before they run around in circles, rending their garments and wailing about the threat to “the Homeland.” I’m sure it won’t be long before they join in the hysteria, but it does show at least a couple of degrees of difference between the two parties.

On the other hand, Democrats believe in Social Security and Health Care. And fighting the war against those programs is a war Rand Paul is more than willing to lead. Priorities.
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“Moderate” Republicans hobbled by Hobby Lobby

by David Atkins

Yesterday at Washington Monthly I examined, among other things, the impact of the Hobby Lobby case on conservative Republicans posing as moderates in purple districts:

The case puts conservative legislators in a bind: most people do not, in fact, believe that corporations should have religious rights. Most people don’t believe that contraception is a bad thing, or that employers should get to interfere in whether an employee’s insurance can cover contraception.

Republican lawmakers who claim to be moderates on reproductive rights are especially challenged. Many Republicans who claim to have a more tolerant philosophy on reproductive freedom nevertheless cast votes that align with their more extreme partisan counterparts, and paper it over by saying that they aren’t trying to ban abortion or contraception, but simply that they’re trying to make it “safer.”

The Hobby Lobby case removes that cover. Either you think it’s OK for corporation to decide not to cover birth control out of extremist religious objection, or you don’t.
Take the case of Jeff Gorell, Republican Assemblymember in California and candidate for Congress against freshman Congresswoman Julia Brownley. Gorell calls himself “pro-choice” even though he has a 0% rating with Planned Parenthood, and a 90% rating from the California Pro-Life Council. He has been silent on the Hobby Lobby case despite repeated requests for comment. There’s even video of him stonewalling a questioner on the subject.

My tweets to both the NRCC and Mr. Gorell have also gone without response.

They’re silent, of course, because they have no good answer. If Mr. Gorell and Republicans like him all across America stand with Scalia and Alito on Hobby Lobby, they will betray themselves as far too extreme for the voters of their districts. If they disagree with the ruling, their rabid Tea Party base will stay home or actively nip at their heels from the right.

So they just hope the issue will go away and people will stop talking about it. It won’t, of course. Republicans across the board will eventually have take a stand on whether they think corporations should have the religious right to prevent their employees from receiving birth control coverage.

Hobby Lobby isn’t the only issue for which this is true. Equal pay for women, marriage equality, minimum wage increases and a host of other important public policy matters serve to accomplish the same goals. But there’s something about the ridiculousness of pretending a corporation is a “person” with religious rights that can insist on not allowing an employee to be covered for birth control even if the employer doesn’t have to pay for it that sounds like a throwback to before even Archie Bunker.

It’s too bizarre. If supposedly moderate Republicans can’t even bring themselves to oppose that weirdness, then they don’t have much a fig leaf to stand behind. They’re just another group of patriarchal Tea Partiers, except they’re savvy enough to pretend they’re something else.

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Dog days and ragnaroks, meaningless nouns

And all he got was this stupid T-shirt: The Dog

Move over, Smaug: Ragnarok

How many of these police killings are there?

by digby

Apparently, no one has any idea. And when an enterprising reporter attempted to find out, it turned out it was nearly impossible:

The biggest thing I’ve taken away from this project is something I’ll never be able to prove, but I’m convinced to my core: The lack of such a database is intentional. No government—not the federal government, and not the thousands of municipalities that give their police forces license to use deadly force—wants you to know how many people it kills and why.

It’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence. What evidence? In attempting to collect this information, I was lied to and delayed by the FBI, even when I was only trying to find out the addresses of police departments to make public records requests. The government collects millions of bits of data annually about law enforcement in its Uniform Crime Report, but it doesn’t collect information about the most consequential act a law enforcer can do.

I’ve been lied to and delayed by state, county and local law enforcement agencies—almost every time. They’ve blatantly broken public records laws, and then thumbed their authoritarian noses at the temerity of a citizen asking for information that might embarrass the agency. And these are the people in charge of enforcing the law.

The second biggest thing I learned is that bad journalism colludes with police to hide this information. The primary reason for this is that police will cut off information to reporters who tell tales. And a reporter can’t work if he or she can’t talk to sources. It happened to me on almost every level as I advanced this year-long Fatal Encounters series through the News & Review. First they talk; then they stop, then they roadblock.

He’s got a crowd sourcing project called Fatal Encounters if you’d like to participate.

Ponder this: our government is systematically collecting vast amounts of data and information on US citizens and foreigners around the world and analyzing it for threats. But it is not systematically collecting or analyzing information of US citizens killed by government authorities and actively blocks citizens who try.

Hmmm.

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Rand Paul’s care campaign

by digby

So Rand Paul went to Guatamala to make a campaign commercial showing himself as someone who cares and then gave an interview to Breitbart news saying that he’s all for restarting deportations of the DREAM kids as soon as possible. Huffington Post reports:

As Boyle’s email suggests, support for repealing DACA has been building in Senate GOP circles recently, with the backing of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.).

Paul is the latest in a string of likely Republican presidential candidates in the Senate to call for an end to the program. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — who in the past have supported principles similar to DACA — beat Paul to the punch.

The movement poses potential hurdles for that Senate triumvirate of presidential aspirants. More than 550,000 undocumented immigrants (so-called Dreamers) have taken advantage of DACA. The program is popular in immigrant communities, and its repeal would effectively restart deportations of young people who have lived in the United States for years. For a Republican Party eager to court Hispanic votes, running against one of the biggest bright-spot actions of the Obama era carries obvious risks.

Clearly, they don’t see that and think they can leverage every last white person to vote for them on the basis of shared bigotry and xenophobia. But never let it be said that Rand is oblivious to the potential problems with that strategy. He went to Iowa and explained that Republicans need to try to hide their loathing for Latinos by pretending to “do something about them”:

In addition to softer policy edges, Paul has argued that the Republican Party needs to have a more inclusive message. He has barnstormed the country in an attempt to woo minority voters.

“Until you show that you care about them and that you want to do something about them, you’re not going to win,” he told an audience in Iowa two weeks ago. “So if we want to win, we’re going to have to change.”

I’m going to guess that even though right wing neanderthals inexplicably believe they are intellectually superior to Hispanics the latter are fully capable of figuring out when they’re being patronized and pandered to by a bunch of bigots who not only don’t care about them but actively hate them. And the deportation of half a million American kids whose parents happen to not be citizens is one big honking clue as well.

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