Month: September 2014

Must be the “illegals”


by digby

The charming, decent and humane Laura Ingraham:

Immig Sob story Alert! “The Border Kid Crisis Hits the Courts” http://t.co/fYrZkpW6Tn via @CEDickson
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) September 19, 2014

Speaking of sob stories…

What uncontrolled illegal immig, sanctuary city policies have done to Calif’s GOP, the Dems hope will do to Texas, Colorado, VA, etc.
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) September 19, 2014

What specifically is she talking about here? Ah:

Calif GOP at historic low in voter reg., vastly outgunned financially, unlikely to elect a statewide candid. in Nov. http://t.co/ksVPOPxaCU
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) September 19, 2014

Boo hoo hoo.  It’s all those refugee kids illegally voting for Democrats. Because no Real American would ever vote for Democrats, amirite?

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Tell us what you really think

by digby

Jonathan Schwarz found a little document prepared by our betters explaining why we need them to do our thinking for us. It an excerpts of a recently declassified CIA Magazine article (Who knew the CIA had a magazine or that it classified it?) It’s about the CIA’S drug running during the 1980s:

…ultimately the CIA-drug story says a lot more about American society on the eve of the millennium than it does about either CIA or the media. We live in somewhat coarse and emotional times—when large numbers of Americans do not adhere to the same standards of logic, evidence, or even civil discourse as those practiced by members of the CIA community.

I think this is probably pretty indicative of their general attitude toward the polloi. Indeed, there was a time when they were all recruited out of the Ivy League (maybe they still are) for their superior genetic and social ties, so it stands to reason they would have these patrician attitudes.

Maybe you think that’s fine. After all, they do such important work you wouldn’t want to trust it someone who doesn’t understand that the American people are little better than wild animals. For instance, could we expect your average coarse, illogical, overly-emotional American to properly torture someone? I didn’t think so.

Click over to A Tiny Revolution to see another perfect illustration of their civilized behavior.

Scotland votes no


by Tom Sullivan

In a historic referendum, Scotland yesterday voted to remain part of the United Kingdom. With a margin of 55% – 45%, the vote went solidly against Scottish independence in what one writer hyperbolically described as “the greatest existential challenge to the British state since Spitfire dogfights in 1940.” Turnout was 84.5%. UK Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to honor agreements to yield more power to the Scottish parliament if Scotland rejected independence.
As Scots living abroad weighed in, Valerie Wallace in Wellington, New Zealand approved Scotland remaining in the UK.

Scotland is, in fact, already a separate country – but a separate country within a larger polity. I am a Scot, but I am also a Briton, and those two things for me have never been mutually exclusive. With Scottish parents, English grandparents, Irish ancestry and a Welsh name, my Britishness can’t just be ‘unmade’.

Perhaps, but there will be some long faces this morning among American secessionists, particularly in Texas.

Exceptional Oxymoron

by digby

The land of the free imprisons more people than any other nation in the world:

Both in raw numbers and by percentage of the population, the United States has the most prisoners of any developed country in the world — and it has the largest total prison population of any nation. That didn’t change in 2013. After several years in which the prison population dropped slightly, the raw number of inmates in United States custody went up again in 2013.

More than 1.57 million inmates sat behind bars in federal, state, and county prisons and jails around the country as of December 31, 2013. In the federal prisons, more than half of those sentenced to a stints of a year or longer are still there for drug crimes. In states including Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, and Georgia, at least 1 percent of male residents were in prison on December 31. And across the country, racial disparities persist. Black men are six times more likely than white men to be in prison. Hispanic men are 2.4 times more likely, according to a Sentencing Project analysis of the data.

This doesn’t paint the full picture of the U.S. incarceration system. Many have estimated the total number of U.S. incarceration to be more than 2.4 million. This is in part because another estimated 12 million individuals cycle through the county jail systems in a given year for periods of less than a year, and are therefore not factored into a snapshot on December 31. There are also other mechanisms of incarceration not factored into this figure, including immigration detention, civil commitment, and Indian Country facilities, according to a Prison Policy Initiative briefing.

Does that make any sense at all?

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We just disagree

by digby

Pew has a new poll out on the differences among conservatives and liberals in their approach to teaching children.  It says a lot:

Nothing particularly surprising in that. But I can’t help but wonder where Jesus would come down.

I also wonder if capitalism would survive if everyone were conservative. Without valuing curiosity and creativity it’s hard to see how it would. On the other hand, who would be the security guards at the store?

We do have a lot in common too:

I’m a little confused by the conservatives saying they value good manners, though.
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Blowback to homegrown terrorism

by digby

So James Clapper changed his story once again and says he didn’t lie to congress, that it was a “mistake”, which is crap.(He was informed of the exact wording of the question before the hearing.) But whatever. We can twist ourselves up into a pretzel over whether he deserves to be sanctioned and he never will be so that’s that.

He appeared today at an intelligence summit in Washington sponsored by two major industry groups. And he’s described as being depressed and down, presumably because he feels unfairly maligned. But he is also upset that the government has been forced to be accountable to the public, apparently believing that we’re all in danger because of it. I thought this was particularly interesting:

In a question and answer session afterward, Clapper said the disruption of a plot to behead people by supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group in Australia underscored the threat posed by homegrown sympathizers of the group, which he said is adept at motivating and recruiting followers.

From what we know of this plot (at least what the Australian government has told us) is a scary prospect. Now, whether it was a bunch of yahoos just jumping on the bandwagon is unknown and since we’ve seen a lot of allegedly scary homegrown plots revealed to be less than what they initially appeared. And yes, there have been a couple here in the states that were deadly, like Ft Hood and the Boston Marathon bombings. And that raises the question Robert Wright raises in this interesting piece:

The perpetrators of these attacks weren’t people who had been lured abroad by Jihadists, given terrorism training, and dispatched to America with a mission. They were people who, while in America, got alienated, got inspired by Jihadist propaganda, and, if any expert instruction was necessary (like how to make the bomb the marathon bombers used), got it via the internet. Apparently the kind of terrorism that’s hardest to fight is the kind that ferments at home.

And what makes it ferment? In both the Boston Marathon and the Fort Hood cases, the attackers seem to have been driven by the perception that the US is at war with Islam, as evinced (in their minds) by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, if homegrown terrorism is fostered by the perception that the US is at war with Islam, what should we do to counter that perception? Here’s what I don’t recommend: Declare war on an entity that calls itself the Islamic State, enmeshing yourself in combat that will last for years.

Obviously, this entity doesn’t deserve to be called the Islamic State, because its values don’t align with the values of the great majority of the world’s Muslims. But the relatively small number of Muslims who are vulnerable to the appeal of terrorism will consider a war against this “Islamic State” a war against Islam.

The problem of terrorism is complicated, and so is the problem of ISIS. I’m not saying that our thinking about how to respond to ISIS should begin and end with the question of whether declaring war on it will foster homegrown terrorism. But, given that, since 9/11, homegrown terrorism is the only kind of Islamic terrorism that has shown much in the way of an ability to actually kill people in the United States, it would be nice if the debate over how to handle ISIS at least included some discussion of the question.

You’d think so. But instead we have leaders beating their chests about “destroying ISIL” and hand-wringing from the nation’s spooks over the fact that they have to be even the slightest bit restrained when one of the major factors driving this phenomenon is that we keep waging war on Muslims. Maybe we could try not doing that.

Wright concludes his article with this:

Again, I’m not saying that the prospect of homegrown terrorism, or even of blowback in general, is by itself a killer argument against Obama’s de facto declaration of war (though I do think that, all told, the declaration was a mistake). I’m mainly just saying that America’s national security discourse is in need of repair. When we face a crucial foreign policy decision, we fail to factor in glaringly obvious considerations.

In this case, we were too busy reacting to actually think. Once we saw a couple of gruesome videos that seem to have been designed to freak us out, we obligingly freaked out. And virtually nobody of stature said, “Wait, let’s not get emotional; let’s think this through carefully.” Certainly not Secretary of State John Kerry, who said that ISIS, manifesting “sheer evil” was a “cancer” that must be stopped. (Dubious metaphor; with cancer, the medicine doesn’t risk making the cancer itself stronger, the way Kerry’s prescription for fighting ISIS does.) And certainly not Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who said ISIS poses “an imminent threat to every interest we have.” Every single interest!

A central lesson of the disastrous Iraq War is that one job of a post-9/11 president is to calm fears, not feed them. Some of us voted for Barack Obama thinking he would do that, and help restore reason to foreign policy discourse. For a while it looked like we were right. Now it looks like we weren’t.

Sigh …

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“Compassionate conservatism” is definitely out of fashion

by digby

Arkansas is number 13 out of 50 states in food stamp participation, with 16.5% of the population needing them.

But, you know, to hell with those people.

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Are we ready to grapple with the truth?

by digby

If you read nothing else today, read this piece by Matt Stoller about the untold history of our foreign policy in the Middle East. Since we seem to have finally been reduced to an almost cartoon-like campaign leading into this latest round, it’s vital that at least some people start looking at this from another angle and grapple with what we’re really involved in. (I flagged this piece in the New Yorker the other day about the still classified 28 pages of the 9/11 report. Somebody needs to leak those pages.)

We are facing a real existential crisis with climate change. And it’s being driven by greenhouse gasses and our addiction to oil. So is our foreign policy and the 23 year war we’ve been involved in in Iraq. This is all of a piece. Stoller says that we must discount the propaganda and stop the censorship (which is the right word to describe our insane classification system.) He concludes his piece on an optimistic note:

Adopting a realistic policy on ISIS means a mass understanding who our allies actually are and what they want, as well as their leverage points against us and our leverage points on them. I believe Americans are ready for an adult conversation about our role in the world and the nature of the fraying American order, rather than more absurd and hollow bromides about American exceptionalism.

Until that happens, Americans will not be willing to pay any price for a foreign policy, and rightfully so. Fool me once, shame on you. And so forth.

Unwinding the classified state, and beginning the adult conversation put off for seventy years about the nature of American power, is the predicate for building a global order that can drain the swampy brutal corners of the world that allow groups like ISIS to grow and thrive. To make that unwinding happen, we need to start demanding the truth, not what ‘national security’ tells us we need to know. The Constitution does not mention the words ‘national security’, it says ‘common defense.’ And that means that Americans should be getting accurate information about what exactly we are defending.

I couldn’t agree more. Earlier in the piece, Matt references Rick Perlstein’s observation in Invisible Bridge that we were at that moment in the mid-70s and lost our nerve. We succumbed to the cheery delusions offered up by Ronald Reagan in order to feel better and avoid facing the hard work of reckoning with our power and responsibility. I hope he’s right that people are ready now to grapple with it. We’d better be.

Update: Also too, this

What’s all this I hear about that silly bad flu bug?

by digby

My piece in Salon this morning takes a look at the fear scale — and wonders why the right wing is hysterical over ISIS and thinks the president is wasting time and money trying to stop Ebola:

It certainly seems as though there have been a lot of fearful events over this long hot summer of 2014. Yahoos with too much firepower are blowing airliners out of the sky, terrorists are videotaping themselves beheading journalists, and police are shooting unarmed kids down in the streets of America, just to name a few incidents of the past few months. But it’s hard to imagine anything more scary than a rapidly mutating contagious killer disease pandemic that features all the worst symptoms of the flu until it culminates in bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and rectum, the eyes swell shut, your genitals swell up, all of your skin hurts and you have a blood-filled rash all over your body. And then you die. In the panoply of things to be afraid of you’d think everyone could acknowledge that this is the big one.

Here’s just one of the idiotic rightwing pundits:

“I’m just getting very confused about the nature of this enemy. Is it those scary little worms that Drudge always has on the Drudge Report? The scary little Ebola worms? Is that the real threat to national security?”

That’s Laura Ingraham. The Ivy Leaguer.

I didn’t mention in the piece that there is one right wing pundit who seems to get why the president might be a tad concerned aboutthis disease. He happens to have gone to medical school:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Look, I applaud what the president is doing. This is America at its best. Our armed forces are essentially the biggest NGO on the planet for helping people, the way we did in the tsunami, the way we do in Haiti. It is organized to go and to establish institutions and structures, and that’s what it’s going to do.

Now, the reason that we are doing this is, a, this could destroy West Africa. In other words, it could destroy all of the existing social structures rapidly, because it’s now in urban areas, which has never happened with Ebola.

The other thing, which is unstated because you don’t want to start a panic, is that it is possible, extremely unlikely, but possible that the virus mutates and becomes more easy to transmit, perhaps even by respiratory means. If it does, it becomes like the flu of 1918. So it’s because of that remote possibility, which we don’t even speak about because it is sort of impossible to imagine, that we want to make sure that it stays in West Africa, and deploying the military and all of our resources is a good thing to do. It’s humanitarian and it’s protective.

But hey it’s nothing to the imminent threat of ISIS Ninjas sneaking across the border and killing us all in our beds. So, let’s be sure to keep our priorities straight.

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Changing everything

by Tom Sullivan

Naomi Klein appeared last night on All In with Chris Hayes to discuss her new book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate.” Extending arguments from her earlier work, Klein calls for a reevaluation of “the values that govern our society.” She writes that, “our economic system and our planetary system are now at war … there are policies that can lower emissions quickly, and successful models all over the world for doing so. The biggest problem is that we have governments that don’t believe in governing.”

I haven’t read it yet, but I wanted to comment on the backlash we are sure to see.

Klein believes trying to address climate alone — as the environmental movement has — gets the issue wrong. As the Guardian put it, “[I]t’s about capitalism – not carbon – the extreme anti-regulatory version that has seized global economies since the 1980s and has set us on a course of destruction and deepening inequality.” Klein told Chris Hayes, “It’s not the end of the world. It’s just the end of that highly individualistic, zero-sum game kind of thinking.”

This, of course, will set lots of hair on fire on the right. In fact, Hayes led off the segment with a few choice quotes from some spokesmen on the right who believe climate change is a left-wing conspiracy to threaten mom and apple pie. Rush Limbaugh: “That’s what global warming is. It’s merely a platform to advance communism.”

Please. I was born during the second Red Scare. I was a tot when they launched Sputnik. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was half a century ago.

A quarter of a century after that, the Berlin Wall fell and American conservatives declared that Saint Ronald of Reagan had slain the Evil Empire and won the Cold War. And a quarter of a century after that, they’re still looking for commies in woodpiles and for Reds under their beds before they cower beneath the sheets.

Last year, even Forbes gave communism all the relevance of a Renaissance festival.

Not even the Chinese are communists anymore. Have you seen Shanghai lately? China has about cornered the free market in glass-and-steel skyscrapers and the cranes and concrete to build them. They sure as hell cornered a chunk of investment by Republican donors.

It took most of the 1990s, but with the former Soviet Pacific fleet rusting away at the docks in Vladivostok, even the Pentagon figured out communism wasn’t the Red Menace anymore. It took Russia less than a decade after the Wall fell to revert to the oligarchy it was before the Bolshevik Revolution – peasants and plutocrats. Which is where we’re headed, if you haven’t noticed.

If conservatives’ would-be leaders are so worried about the U.S. emulating the Roosskies, they might want to stop licking the boots of our domestic plutocrats. They might want to get their heads out of their anti-communism and join the rest of us in addressing the challenges of the twenty-first century.