Month: September 2014

UPDATE: Why Does Fox News Side with Abusers like Ray Rice?

by Spocko

Today’s Ray Rice story is still developing, but one thing it illustrates is the role outsiders can play in demanding justice and then expecting change from an institution that failed to act–or failed to act with sufficient seriousness about a problem.

Digby and Perlstein wrote today about what happened when we failed to hold individuals accountable for malfeasance.  When institutions protect individuals, by explaining away their actions, it prevents change from happening.

The other thing it is illustrating is how great it is to have a group of people like Fox News or the RW media on your side, even if only temporarily.

Last week I wrote this piece, CEO Abuses Puppy. Why RW Media Supports Abusers Instead of Victims. I wondered how the RW media would act when they were told to be on the abusers’ side.

Well today we saw just a peek of what that might look like on Fox and Friends. Now they aren’t totally on the side of Rice, but they are able to get in some victim blaming and pass on some protective advice to their abusing buddies.

“We should also point out, after that video — and now you know what happened in there — she still married him,” host Steve Doocy explained. “They are currently married.” 

“Rihanna went back to Chris Brown right after [he assaulted her],” co-host Brian Kilmeade noted. “A lot of people thought that was a terrible message.”

“I think the message is take the stairs,” he added, as co-host Anna Kooiman giggled. 

“The message is, when you’re in an elevator, there’s a camera,” Doocy concluded.

Kilmeade says to avoid the situation whereas Doocy, the really brains of the outfit, says to avoid the cameras. The person who might be the most righteously upset, Anna Kooiman, first defends football in general (avoiding addressing NFL’s policies) and then giggles at a lame joke.

The message isn’t “don’t do something nasty,” but “don’t get caught doing nasty things on video.”

I’ve read that Rice has now been fired and supposedly some changes will happen at the NFL.  Enough people were outraged, and let them know it, that the NFL’s weak measures were deemed not enough.  The firing is important, but it is the promised changes that we hope will have a lasting impact, we need to keep an eye on.

Will there be any changes at Fox and Friends for their victim blaming? Nope, of course not. Because their institution is doing exactly what it was designed to do, protect the abusers in their club, instead of the victims.

Fox and Friends aired before Rice had been drummed out of their club, so they didn’t have to defend him full throatily.  If they had, they might have started talking about how, “He’s the real victim here” because of concussion damage from football. But they got the word from on high, the real client is the NFL.

They will be defending the NFL in the future, and whatever actions they were forced to take to get the rabble to simmer down.

Fox knows that the real clients are the members of the club who pay their bills. The $9 billion dollars a year in revenue, non-profit club calling themselves the NFL.

UPDATE from Raven’s Press conference.

I just watched the Raven’s Press conference. I don’t want to bag on the reporters, they are probably used to asking athletes questions and getting answers like, “We came to play,” but when talking to the coach about this issue, they could have pressed harder, this is hard news.

Reporter: Why didn’t you have access to the tape before today?

Raven’s Coach: I have no answer to that. 

(Short Educational video link for  the purpose of media criticism)

And that was it. No follow ups. A few “How do you feel?” questions that the coach batted way.  Okay then.

No follow up like, “Well can we talk to someone who DOES have the answer?”

So to follow up on my theme, in my “CEO kicks dog” post, Knowing who controls and uses a powerful video like is a big fraking deal,  Who sees the video and when they see it can be a huge power play story. Politicians get this.

I understand that the sports reporters are used to being deferential to the coach, but will else anyone dig into this?   I’m guess we won’t know anything more until Rice’s lawyers file the “wrongful termination” suit and everyone will lawyer up and the case will be sealed.

I want something besides spectacle  to come from this. I want people to think about what they want when they see this kind of video. Do you want some changes in the NFL around domestic violence?  Do you want to get them to admit it’s not just about cutting loose a “bad apple” and an “isolated case?” but a systemic, and institutional problem? That could be one of the outcomes from this kind of evidence. Is that blackmail? Or is it leverage?

It worked

by digby

The hysterical pearl clutching of the panic artists like Lindsay Graham and his helpmates in the media has succeeded:

Americans are increasingly concerned that ISIS represents a direct terror threat, fearful that ISIS agents are living in the United States, according to a new CNN/ORC International poll. Most now support military action against the terrorist group.
Seven in 10 Americans believe ISIS has the resources to launch an attack against the United States, just days before President Barack Obama plans to address the nation on the subject.
The poll released Monday shows that Americans favor: 

— Additional airstrikes against ISIS (76% favor, 23% oppose)

— Military aid to forces fighting ISIS (62% favor, 37% oppose) 

— Providing humanitarian aid to people fleeing ISIS (83% favor, 16% oppose)

They do not favor boots on the ground though although I don’t know why. If these monsters are here in der Homeland plotting to invade Dubuque you’d think Americans would want the government to pull out all the stops. But I guess they figure we can use our “superpowers” to defeat the crazed terrorists over there so they won’t deploy their evil plots here without having to lose any soldiers. We just have to use our best secret laser beam technology to “take out” the bad guys without risking the lives of anyone important. We can do that. We’re that good.

We Americans don’t go by “keep calm and carry on” or even “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”   Our credo is:

 “ohmygodbombsomethingnowtheyarecomingtokillusallinourbeds!”

Very impressive.

In case you were wondering, the actual experts are saying something quite different from the Chicken Littles:

There is no specific or credible threat of an ISIS terror attack on the US.

“No, we don’t have any information about credible planning for an attack”

“At this point, we have no credible information that ISIS is planning to attack the United States,”

While there’s no credible threat to the U.S. as a result of recent American airstrikes in Iraq, officials remain concerned that Islamic State supporters could attack overseas targets with little warning.

Update: Via twitter, Tom Tomorrow reminds us of this one:

QOTD: Ronald Reagan

by digby

On “Roots” back in 1977:

“Very frankly, I thought the bias of all the good people being one color and all the bad people being another was rather destructive.”

Right. In fact, it’s racist to suggest that American slavery was a racial issue.

Via Perlstein on Facebook who pointed this out in response to the brouhaha over this.

The “invasion” has been repelled

by digby

Laura Ingraham can rest easy. The rampaging hordes of little Central American children are staying in their home countries to be tortured and killed. The wingnuts must be so proud:

We can feel secure now that the threat of forced beer drinking and tortilla eating has ended.  The American way of life is secure.

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The ramifications of the pardon

by digby

Salon is featuring a great read this morning from Rick Perlstein on the Nixon pardon and he makes a point which I don’t think most people realize: it was hugely unpopular at the time but was later accepted as something that “bound up the nation’s wounds” and provided a sense of stability. (It’s funny — I thought it was a good idea at the time and later came to realize that I was completely daft for thinking that. My only excuse is that I was very young.)

Perlstein writes:

For political elites took away a dangerous lesson from the Ford pardon—our true shame: all it takes is the incantation of magic words like “stability” and “confidence” and “consensus” in order to inure yourself from accountability for just about any malfeasance.

In 1975 the Senate and House empaneled committees to investigate the CIA, FBI, and, later, the NSA after it was discovered these agencies had operated unethically and illegally. The House committee, under Rep. Otis Pike, who died last year in obscurity, discovered not merely that the CIA was out of control, but that it was incompetent—for instance, predicting Mideast peace the week before the Yom Kippur War broke out. Frank Church’s Senate committee, meanwhile, proved the NSA was illegally gathering the telegraph traffic of American citizens, without even top executives of the telegraph companies being aware of it.

But, in the spirit of the Nixon pardon, the idea of holding elite institutions to reckoning had fallen out of favor. At the height of the intelligence investigations Washington Post’s publisher Katharine Graham complained of the media’s tendency to “see a conspiracy and cover-up in everything.” Senator J. William Fulbright said “these are not the kind of truths we need most right now”—that the nation demanded “restored stability and confidence” instead. The CIA had no trouble promptly drumming up a disingenuous propaganda campaign that all but neutered reform. And, 39 years later, these institutions are still largely broken, and still almost entirely unaccountable.

Perlstein sees it as a seminal moment for our country and I agree. It’s rare that you have such clear evidence of outright corruption and abuse of governmental power in high office in real time. That pardon sent a message loud and clear — only history will judge you. I’m sure that’s a tough thing for a politician to take but it isn’t the same as being forced to face what you did and be accountable for it. I can think of a million ways a person can rationalize their decisions for history. (George W. Bush: “History? Who knows? We’ll all be dead…”) But having to explain yourself under the legal system is a very different thing.

I would just add that the embarrassing farce that was the Clinton impeachment put the final nail in the coffin. The soaring rhetoric about “the rule of law” and the feigned moral outrage over such a mundane, private matter showed the entire world that the United States’ high minded notions of morality and justice had finally evolved into nothing more than a vulgar joke.

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Privileged lanes
by Tom Sullivan

Can’t stop thinking about Ferguson, MO.

Over at A Little More Sauce, jdowsett draws an analogy between bicycle riding and white privilege that doesn’t rely on impugning anyone’s character. But he very cleverly uses the highway infrastructure’s bias towards cars over bicycles to illuminate how the social infrastructure is skewed in ways many rarely notice.

I can imagine that for people of color life in a white-majority context feels a bit like being on a bicycle in midst of traffic. They have the right to be on the road, and laws on the books to make it equitable, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are on a bike in a world made for cars. Experiencing this when I’m on my bike in traffic has helped me to understand what privilege talk is really about.

Now most people in cars are not intentionally aggressive toward me. But even if all the jerks had their licenses revoked tomorrow, the road would still be a dangerous place for me. Because the whole transportation infrastructure privileges the automobile. It is born out of a history rooted in the auto industry that took for granted that everyone should use a car as their mode of transportation. It was not built to be convenient or economical or safe for me.

And so people in cars—nice, non-aggressive people—put me in danger all the time because they see the road from the privileged perspective of a car. E.g., I ride on the right side of the right lane. Some people fail to change lanes to pass me (as they would for another car) or even give me a wide berth. Some people fly by just inches from me not realizing how scary/dangerous that is for me (like if I were to swerve to miss some roadkill just as they pass). These folks aren’t aggressive or hostile toward me, but they don’t realize that a pothole or a build up of gravel or a broken bottle, which they haven’t given me enough room to avoid–because in a car they don’t need to be aware of these things–could send me flying from my bike or cost me a bent rim or a flat tire.

I’ve been there. Most drivers are courteous or else oblivious, and even that has its hazards. Still, back in the day I had cans and bottles thrown, was yelled at, run off the road — even shot at. As a cyclist, if you’re not invisible you’re at best a second-class citizen. And for a few drivers, a target of opportunity. The analogy rings true.

It’s a way of trying to make visible the fact that system is not neutral, it is not a level-playing field, it’s not the same experience for everyone. There are biases and imbalances and injustices built into the warp and woof of our culture. (The recent events in Ferguson, MO should be evidence enough of this–more thoughts on that here). Not because you personally are a racist, but because the system has a history and was built around this category “race” and that’s not going to go away overnight (or even in 100 years).

Radley Balko provided some of the political history leading up to the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson in the Washington Post . It’s a long, but worthwhile read.

(h/t Dave Neiwert)

Was Jesus for the death penalty?

by digby

Apparently quite a few people think he would be ok with it:

Not being a religious person I can’t really speak to this. I know the old testament was all eye-for-an-eye. But I thought Jesus was a different kind of guy.

I’m going to guess that it isn’t a theological disagreement that explains the difference between all these white Christians and the black and brown ones though.

The good news is that the death penalty is a lot less popular than it used to be.  Then again, for reasons that should be obvious, it was a lot less popular before 1968 than it is now when political leaders started demagoguing “law and order” and suddenly a whole bunch of people decided it was a really good idea after all. We still haven’t reverted back.

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Border haggis

by digby

Are they kidding?

The leader of the UK Labour Party, Ed Miliband, has warned that a ‘Yes’ vote would lead to guards being sent to patrol England’s northern border with Scotland.

“If you don’t want borders, vote to stay in the United Kingdom,” Miliband, who is Leader of the Opposition at Westminster, told the Scottish Mail on Sunday newspaper.

A spokesman for Miliband later added, “The last time I looked there were two sides to the border – and we would be in charge of one of them. It would be up to us, not Mr. Salmond, to secure our northern border.”

I guess roving bands of bagpipe clans  will be sneaking over the border to steal cattle and hobnobs?

What in the hell is going on here?

A man with a plan

by digby

So Republican Senator Marco Rubio went on television to reassure America:

Sen. Marco Rubio said on Sunday the Islamic State presents a threat “here in the homeland” thanks to hundreds of European and American fighters whose passports could grant them easy access to the United States.

“This group has among their ranks hundreds, if not thousands, of people with the capacity of entering the United States quickly and easily,” the Florida Republican said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Oh my dear God! They’re coming to kill us all in our beds! Thank goodness we have leaders like Marco Rubio with a real plan to save us:

Rubio called for a “sustained air campaign” in Syria that targets ISIL leaders, supply lines and even oil refineries they control and use to generate revenue.

Yep, there you have it. According to all the beltway Chicken Littles, the monsters are coming to kill us, thousands of them but we can stop it with a bombing campaign in Syria to kill the leaders and disrupt their supply lines (“even oil refineries — gasp!).

Apparently, they are planning to invade via Damascus. Perhaps using Saddam’s old crop dusters, I don’t know.

If ISIS is sending in thousands of American and European terrorists to kill us here in “der Homeland” I’m going to guess that blowing up their supply lines in Syria isn’t going to make much of a difference. Killing their leaders is always nice and perhaps a bombing campaign will get that done. One thing’s for sure: it will definitely kill somebody.

Oh, and by the way, this man is considered qualified to be the president of the United States.

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It’s a miracle they haven’t killed each other

by digby

Batshit crazy:

Conservationists studying bats in Arizona were recently confronted by a group of armed militia members who confused them for border crossers or smugglers, a local sheriff told television station KOLD.

The TV station reported on Tuesday that Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada said the militia members were wearing camouflage and were heavily armed when they arrived on ATVs and confronted the scientists on the night of Aug. 23.

“Obviously they mistook them for smugglers or illegal entrants,” said Estrada. “They were armed. They put a spotlight on them.”

We have enough trouble with thousands of yahoo cops running around armed like they’re patrolling Mogadishu. Do we really need these juvenile idiots playing army with real guns? People are going to get hurt.

By the way, the “militia” group was from Colorado.

Sheriff Estrada says Santa Cruz County does not welcome border militia groups.

“These people that are completely out of their environment. They really don’t know the area. They don’t know the terrain. They have little knowledge of the dynamics of the border. So it can be a real problem,” Estrada says. “We really don’t want them here.”

“It can be a problem for them. It can be a problem for the people, just like in this particular case. Things could have gone terribly wrong.”

I’m going to guess that Arizona has enough armed nutballs of their own to deal with.

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