Month: September 2014

A North Carolina Bridgegate?
by Tom Sullivan

As corporate-carpetbagger friendly as the NCGOP has made North Carolina since taking control of the legislature in 2010, they keep surprising. This latest revelation Monday from North Carolina echoes the billion-dollar, Hudson Lights real estate deal thought connected to Gov. Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal. WCNC-Charlotte has video here.

One of the most baffling of the Republicans’ passions has been the hard sell to privatize public infrastructure. Okay, maybe not that baffling considering state House Speaker Thom Tillis and Rep. Tim Moffitt, R-Buncombe, both sit on the board of ALEC, Tillis received ALEC’s Legislator of the Year award, and Moffitt co-chaired the state’s House Select Committee on Public-Private Partnerships with Rep. Bill Brawley, R-Mecklenburg. Gov. Pat McCrory only cancelled plans for a keynote speech to ALEC’s annual meeting in Dallas this summer because of a budget impasse in Raleigh.

ALEC’s entrepreneurial derring-doers love to capitalize on, well, any public infrastructure someone else built so they can profit from it at public risk. (No safety nets for you, but as a consolation prize, you get to pay for theirs.)

So if you value your public drinking water, sewer, schools, and roads, listen up. Because if they haven’t tried this gambit yet in your state, it’s coming.

Just last week, Gov. Pat McCrory rolled out his 25-year vision for the enhancing the state’s transportation. No suprise, it relies on public-private partnerships (P3s), an ALEC favorite: “Optimize the use of public-private partnerships, innovative managed lanes [read: tolls] and other fee-for-service projects.”

Here’s how those “innovative ideas” have worked elsewhere:

Just yesterday (9/22/14), debt-ridden Spanish-Australian Cintra-Macquarie infrastructure group filed for bankruptcy on its 75-year contract to operate the Indiana Toll Road. After just eight years.

Moody’s, the rating agency, declared Cintra’s 50-year Texas toll road concession in default in July. After just two years.

After opening in 2007, Macquarie’s 35-year concession for the South Bay Expressway (San Diego) went bankrupt in 2010. After just three years.

Nevertheless, North Carolina is signing contracts with Madrid-based Cintra for a 50-year toll lane project (HOT lanes – High Occupancy Toll) on I-77 north of Charlotte in Speaker Thom Tillis’ district, with Tillis’ enthusiastic support and backed with federal and state tax dollars. Yours.

Now, Tillis already has taken lots of heat from his own base over this deal. The local tea party wants his head on a platter. Local Republican politicians oppose it, and local small businessmen as well, many of them Republicans. Much of that I detailed in a recent op-ed here.

More recently, Tillis and McCrory’s lieutenants have fanned out to face down angry crowds of their own voters. Brawley recently faced tough questions in Cornelius, NC from unaffiliated and Republican constituents at a town hall about tolling I-77 (video here). Speaker Pro Tem “Skip” Stam was scheduled to appear a week ago to rebut a presentation to the Southern Wake Republican Club by NC Citizens Against Toll Roads.

Sure, much of the impetus behind the Republican P3 deals is simply Koch-fueled, metastasized capitalism. But with the strong pushback from their own base, the question hanging in the local air has been why are they so awfully fixated on it?

WCNC-Charlotte has one possible explanation. It starts with some prime real estate, a farm called Augustalee near the interstate:

Before the great recession, developers dreamed of turning this old farm into something like Birkdale Village. They planned a half billion dollar complex with shopping, office space, a hotel and condos.

But in the recession the deal went bust. The bank took the land. Then a couple of years ago a group of executives from a company called ACN bought Augustalee at the relative bargain price of $7 million…

When ACN executives invested in the prime Cornelius property, they needed one key thing to develop Augustalee – a new exit ramp off I-77.

An exit that — courtesy of the taxpayers and a bill introduced by Brawley — developers now won’t have to pay for themselves, a gift that could make them millions. The money will come from a bonus fund for local governments that accept toll projects, says WCNC. “A little sweetener slipped into the bill” to make up for “the bitter pill of a half century of tolls.”

WCNC-Charlotte has a detailed investigative report with video. Except for the part about Donald Trump, you can probably guess the rest: a superPAC, several “perfectly legal” campaign contributions, and “purely coincidental” timing.

And that may be. But campaign donations aside, knowing ALEC and seeing “Incentives for Local Funding and Highway Tolling” attached to a bill titled Strategic Transportation Investments, the bonus funds in the new law seem clearly aimed at buying off local opposition to seeing decades of toll revenues extracted from the local economy and sent offshore. Just shut up and take the money.

Better watch out for that gambit wherever you live.

Cui bono

by digby

Who knows?

The strikes in Syria occurred without the approval of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose government, unlike Iraq, did not ask the United States for help against the Sunni militant group. Mr. Obama has repeatedly called on Mr. Assad to step down because of chemical weapons attacks and violence against his own people, and defense officials said Mr. Assad had not been told in advance of the strikes.

But administration officials acknowledge that American efforts to roll back the Sunni militant group in Syria cannot help but aid Mr. Assad, whose government is also a target of the Islamic State.

Oops:

BREAKING: Damascus says Washington informed Syria’s UN envoy before striking Islamic State in Syria
— The Associated Press (@AP) September 23, 2014

I’m watching all the gasbags gurgling merrily about the new arab Muslim coalition of the willing participating in the bombing inside Syria tonight (one guy said on CNN he was darned proud to have trained them.) They are Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates and I just can’t stop thinking about this piece by Steve Clemons from a few months ago:

“Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar,” John McCain told CNN’s Candy Crowley in January 2014. “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar, and for our Qatari friends,” the senator said once again a month later, at the Munich Security Conference.

McCain was praising Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services and a former ambassador to the United States, for supporting forces fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham had previously met with Bandar to encourage the Saudis to arm Syrian rebel forces.

But shortly after McCain’s Munich comments, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah relieved Bandar of his Syrian covert-action portfolio, which was then transferred to Saudi Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. By mid-April, just two weeks after President Obama met with King Abdullah on March 28, Bandar had also been removed from his position as head of Saudi intelligence—according to official government statements, at “his own request.” Sources close to the royal court told me that, in fact, the king fired Bandar over his handling of the kingdom’s Syria policy and other simmering tensions, after initially refusing to accept Bandar’s offers to resign. (Bandar retains his title as secretary-general of the king’s National Security Council.)

The Free Syrian Army (FSA), the “moderate” armed opposition in the country, receives a lot of attention. But two of the most successful factions fighting Assad’s forces are Islamist extremist groups: Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the latter of which is now amassing territory in Iraq and threatening to further destabilize the entire region. And that success is in part due to the support they have received from two Persian Gulf countries: Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Qatar’s military and economic largesse has made its way to Jabhat al-Nusra, to the point that a senior Qatari official told me he can identify al-Nusra commanders by the blocks they control in various Syrian cities. But ISIS is another matter. As one senior Qatari official stated, “ISIS has been a Saudi project.”

He’s my enemy, he’s my friend. He’s my enemy and my friend …

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Right wing whining about the polarization they’ve created

by digby

Justice Roberts says:

It’s not like it’s always been that way,” Roberts said. “Justice (Antonin) Scalia, I think, was confirmed unanimously. I think Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg was confirmed unanimously. Neither one of them would have a chance today. And that doesn’t make any sense. That’s bad for the judiciary.”

It would be if it weren’t patently obvious that only Ginsburg would not be confirmed. Scalia would make it through. How do we know this? Because Samuel Alito did. And he’s even more of a partisan wingnut than Scalia (although not quite as dyspeptic — but give him time.)

I think it’s very nice that Roberts is concerned about polarization and partisanship. But he’s been around since the 1980s when the Reagan revolutionaries started their Shermanesque March through American politics, lighting fire to every norm, tradition, rule and common understanding that previously existed. He’s been part of it throughout his entire career. So one must be pardoned for thinking that what he really means is that liberals need to admit they’ve been defeated and stop fighting because the conservatives aren’t getting everything they want. That’s what they usually mean when they start whining about partisanship.

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They really don’t get it do they?

by digby

Take a look at this ad then think of all the ways in which it’s sexist, offensive and just plain dumb:

The ad is paid for by:

John Jordan, a California winery owner and head of the group Americans for Shared Prosperity whose work in outside groups has gained attention in the past year, is planning to air two women-focused spots nationally over the next few days during major news shows like “Meet the Press” on NBC and on Fox News, as well as digitally across national print publications, including POLITICO.

Jordan said he is bothered by the Democrats’ focus on a “war on women” that emerged in the 2012 campaign cycle, but also believes Republican messaging has been weak in pushing back.

He’s right. And I think this is just the right ad to appeal to that super-elusive swing voter — the Rush Limbaugh fan. This ad will lock them up for the Republicans, guaranteed.

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Hey liberals — Rand Paul isn’t the only anti-war, civil libertarian in government

by digby

I was irked last week at the way everyone was fawning over Rand Paul and his speech about Syria and I wrote about it in Salon today. I feel as if he is getting far more credit among liberals for being “principled” when in reality his position on the new war is exactly the same as Bernie Sanders’ who’s dismissed by the media and far too many liberals as an irrelevant crank. Anyway, I took a look at his much lauded speech and then talk a bit about the fact that his influence on his party is likely to be a tiny bit less than meets the eye:

The question is why everyone is so interested in what Paul says about this one way or the other. He’s running for president but so is half the Republican Party. He represents a small handful of reluctant GOP warriors even on his best day. True, there are likely to be a few more partisan Republicans who will take the opportunity to oppose anything a Democratic president wants to do but that will most often be because they believe he isn’t going far enough, not that he’s going too far. For instance, Florida GOP congressman Tom Rooney, who said of arming the Syrian rebels, “It’s clearly not enough. If ISIS is truly a national security threat that needs to be destroyed, then we need to destroy them. And anybody you talk to who knows what they’re talking about believes that arming the rebels is insufficient.” Some are even arguing for combat troops. Member of the House Republican leadership Pete Sessions of Texas said, “If we’re in this to win then boots on the ground not only will be necessary but that will be something that will save American lives ultimately in the long run.”

On the other hand there is a good-size faction in the Democratic Party that is consistent on all the issues over which Rand Paul makes headlines and nobody ever talks about them. Sure, it stands to reason that a Republican will gain some attention for being a (sometimes) war skeptic because they are so rare. But it’s unfair that Democrats with equal or better records on civil liberties and war are given such short shrift and ignored by the media as if they’re irrelevant…

Rand Paul is not the spokesman for the entire civil liberties community or the anti-war faction of this nation. In fact there are principled Democrats and Independents whom liberals should celebrate on these issues instead — after all, they aren’t going to vote against NSA spying with one breath while cutting Social Security and Medicare the next. They’re not going to demand that the government get out of our lives today and then vote to restrict a woman’s right to control her own reproduction tomorrow. They won’t rail about liberty even as they fight to ensure that gay people don’t have the freedom to marry. You can’t have it all, none of these people are perfect. But you can have everything Rand Paul is offering — and a whole lot more common human decency.

There are far too few Democrats who will stand up on this issue to be sure. But there are a hell of a lot more of them who have been consistently skeptical of all these wars and are stalwart defenders of civil liberties too. It would be nice if they weren’t treated like ciphers by those with similar values while Rand Paul is treated as their lone defender. The incentives are all wrong.

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Trump-Palin 2016?

by digby

I think it could work:

Schmaht as whip ….

Inequality is a woman’s issue in more ways than one

by digby

Dylan Scott at Talking Points Memo has been looking at Hillary Clinton’s speeches and discerns a set of economic themes she’s begun to talk about. First of all she’s taking a page from the Elizabeth Warren book (Bill Clinton’s too) and talking a lot about the plight of the middle class which is always smart. (And important.) I expect any Democrat would do the same in this era.

But I thought this was pretty fresh:

Clinton has also been enthusiastically putting a progressive and populist framing on these issues.

“Americans are working harder, contributing more than ever to their companies’ bottom lines and to our country’s total economic output, and yet many are still barely getting by, barely holding on, not seeing the rewards that they believe their hard work should have merited,” she said at New America in May.

“And where’s it all going? Well, economists have documented how the share of income and wealth going to those at the very top — not just the top 1 percent, but the top .1 percent or the .01 percent of the population — has risen sharply over the last generation,” she said. “Some are calling it a throwback to the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons.”

So income inequality has been a big part of the message. But it’s also been married to inequality between the sexes. At both the New American and CAP events, the same factoid made an appearance: That three-quarters of jobs that rely on tips — like “waiters, bartenders and hairstylists” as she said on both occasions — are held by women.

“Forget about a glass ceiling,” Clinton said Thursday. “These women don’t even have a secure floor under them.”

And she said Thursday that these issues should be used to mobilize voters — in the 2014 midterms and moving forward.

“When we can turn an issue into a political movement that demands people be responsive during the election season, it carries over,” Clinton said. “These issues have to be in the lifeblood blood of this election and any election.”

I haven’t heard many politicians mix those issues in a way that makes sense and I think it’s a good idea. Women have been especially screwed economically in this epic down turn (well, actually, forever) and tying their equality in with income inequality is a very interesting political approach. Now whether or not she’s going to propose policies that will reflect that rhetoric is something else again, but the rhetoric in presidential campaigns can be important so this is promising. Making a head-on appeal to female voters on an economic basis is something I might not have thought the (presumptive) first woman nominee would do.

Of course, there’s the whole area of national security foreign policy where she will undoubtedly be proving her macho bona fides so I suppose she has plenty of running room. Unfortunately.

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Is it just a game?

by digby

The climate march on Sunday featured the usual colorful array of citizens and the usual mocking by the other side. Just as we on the left mocked the Tea Partiers a couple of years back for their misspelled signs and funny costumes, so too the right wingers had a gay old time making fun of the marchers for climate change awareness. I think that’s probably always been the way of things.

But this one should be a bit different than your usual politics/team sport/war I would think. I guess I just can’t get past the idea that conservatives have decided that this is a hoax at worst or something they just have no need to worry about at best. This really isn’t a partisan issue, but they’ve decided it is and are trating it as such.

The mockery of the people at the march yesterday is probably fine, if mean. But I’ve been plenty mean myself on similar occasions so I’m not going to get on my high horse. But the mockery of the issue itself is something else again — and the ignorant, head-in-the-sand pride they take in denying that scientific consensus exists on this or that the threat is even worth taking seriously is a big problem.

Here’s just one example of their juvenile “cleverness” about the issue itself from Twitchy:

That’s truly Pee-Wee Herman level discourse.

Consider that the mockery the left deployed against the Tea Party was in service of a moderate set of health care reforms — reforms which can be rolled back by a Republican congress if the people decide they don’t like them. Climate change cannot be “rolled back” with a simple vote. Unlike health care or the deficit or “gun rights” this issue is beyond the usual politics and transcends ideology. If there are arguments to be made about what to do or how to do it, that’s one thing. But this silly denialism is just depressing. By the time these people realize that this isn’t the usual partisan game it will be too late.

Via Wonkette

Had I been a gun “enthusiast,” Saturday night might have ended in tragedy

by David Atkins

Cross-posting in full from my Washington Monthly piece yesterday on an incident that occurred Saturday night:

Last night at around 9pm as my wife, my brother and I were in our apartment watching a movie, a large man was prowling around our patio in the dark. We first heard him when he tried to open our sliding glass door.

I quickly threw on my shoes, opened the front door and stepped out onto the balcony. I asked him what was going on and why he was there. He said “Nothing, sorry” and walked past me toward the stairs (I live on a second story corner apartment.) My wife called the police. The man was obviously under the influence of narcotics, which made him lumber slowly but methodically; he then walked down the stairs and sat at the bottom. I asked if I could help him, and he said no. My wife and my brother went the other direction up the stairs to get out of harm’s way and wait for the police, while I stood by the front door.

The police didn’t arrive for another 45 minutes. During the next half hour, the man went up and down the stairs a few more times, once trying to come back toward the front door. Each time I asked if I could help him and he said “no.” Finally he took a call from a friend, and his confused conversation seemed to indicate he was at the wrong building. I surmised which building he was looking for, asked him if he was looking for that address, and when he nodded yes I gave him directions.

The police didn’t arrive until 10 minutes after he had left for good. Which is unfortunate, less for my sake than for the intruder’s.

Had I been a different person–a “gun enthusiast”, let us say–the man might be dead or seriously injured. It would have been an unjustifiable homicide against a mostly innocent man for the crime of being high and lost. Many people all across America die or are horribly injured that way all the time.

That’s unconscionable. Most encounters that end in tragedy need not have done so. Last night was just another reminder of that.

But it goes further. Many gun owners are itching for an excuse to mow down someone. It’s not just that incidents like this are preventable. It’s that many gun owners actively seek out the opportunity to cause harm in the name of self-defense.

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If it’s “ahistorical,” is it “ahysterical”?

by Tom Sullivan

It’s getting hard to recall when Americans weren’t hysterical. When once we admired the tall, quiet, western hero — soft-spoken and brave, but slow to anger, devoted to justice. Not brash, boastful, or reckless.

It’s getting hard to recall when Americans were the good guys (at least in the movies) and not just heavily armed wannabes. The movie good guys finished a lot of fights, but started few. You had to push them, hard, before they fought back, but then only with good reason and right clearly on their side. No question.

It’s getting hard to recall a time when the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. A time when a confident America refused to be terrorized. Now (as Digby noted yesterday), conservative pundits stare out of TV screens as if reading from a badly written, made-for-TV script and sternly warn an America already armed to the teeth, “You need to be afraid.” It’s just what ISIS wants (along with Glock, Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Heckler & Koch, and Colt Industries). And like the Eloi entranced, Americans again trudge numbly down to the gun store.

It’s getting hard to recall when Americans weren’t so jumpy that they’d go to guns with any stranger over a perceived threat, over any noise in the night (maybe a daughter), and with any actor, state or stateless, who looks at us sideways on the street, because Omigod! American leaders — trained police too — weren’t that easily rattled. Politicians didn’t stare wildly out of TV screens and rave about the gates of hell being unleashed and terrorists coming to kill us in our beds. Those were the poseurs, the weak-kneed, movie bureaucrats we cheered to see finally humiliated and deposed in Act 3 when the real hero stepped in. The one with a quiet strength who could keep his/her cool and act, not react.

The jumpiness smacks of an empire in decline, bereft of self-confidence, desperate to prove to itself through bombing something that it’s still got it. It says more about us than about our adversaries.

And it’s getting hard to recall a time America wasn’t at war with Whomeva.