Month: October 2014

1300 Years of Islamic History in 3 Minutes

by Gaius Publius

Several years ago I had the opportunity to travel in Egypt. While there I hired a guide, a really well-informed man named Hussam, who walked and drove with me through Cairo and the region, showing Muslim sites and telling his nation’s Muslim history.

I’d never heard a word of that history till then. What on earth was the “Umayyad Caliphate”? Who were the Abbasids? It became obvious there was a huge hole in my sense of history. I knew more about the Chinese world — at least I’d heard of the Mings and Mongols — than I did about the region America is determined to burn its future in. (Literally “burn its future” — it’s still about unmonetized carbon emissions, right?)

So let’s begin to correct that together, starting with this cool video I found at Juan Cole’s Informed Comment. “1300 Years of Islamic History in 3 Minutes” …  enjoy.

A good place to get oriented relative to European history: As the video starts, the Byzantine Empire sits strong in the upper left corner. Watch as it gets swallowed, piece by piece. And keep your eye on the white box with the date. It sometimes contains other information as well.

GP

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I smell voter fraud at the very least

by digby

IOKIYAR:

Larry Pressler, who is running for Senate in South Dakota as an independent, has his principal residence in Washington, according to District of Columbia tax records.

Pressler, who served as a Republican in Congress from 1975 to 1997, and his wife receive the homestead deduction, a generous tax break meant for people who use their D.C. home as their “principal residence,” according to the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue. The tax break reduces a property’s “assessed value by $70,200 prior to computing the yearly tax liability,” the District says.

The Presslers’ apartment is a 2,200-square-foot, two-bedroom, 2½ bathroom condo in Foggy Bottom, close to The George Washington University and the State Department. Property records show Pressler paid $690,000 for the apartment in 2003.

Reached on his cellphone — with a D.C. area code — Pressler said Thursday evening the apartment is indeed his, and he remained in Washington after losing his Senate seat because his wife works in D.C. He noted that they are “longtime voters in South Dakota.”

The South Dakota Senate race has suddenly turned competitive. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said Wednesday it would put $1 million into television ads in the state, and an outside group told POLITICO Friday it is spending $400,000 to attack Pressler. Former Republican Gov. Mike Rounds was the early favorite in the contest. He faces Democrat Rick Weiland and Pressler. A recent SurveyUSA poll showed 35 percent of voters favoring Rounds, 32 percent supporting Pressler and 28 supporting Weiland.

Homestead deductions have been a political issue in the past. Members of Congress have caught heat for taking a tax break for their residence in D.C.

When he goes to South Dakota, Pressler said he has stayed in Humboldt, where he owns an “interest” in his family farm. On Pressler’s financial disclosure form, he says that he has interest in two farms in South Dakota: one in Gregory, worth between $50,000 and $100,000 and one in Humboldt worth between $15,000 and $50,000.

He said he is not “a rich man and cannot afford to buy more than one house.” His financial disclosure says that he and his wife are worth at least $847,000 and have no debt.

But Pressler has also been an owner of two apartments in Manhattan. He currently owns on East 57th Street between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue. He bought that unit in 2008 for $655,000, and took out a $200,000 mortgage, according to New York City property records. He previously owned an apartment in the Trump Parc on Central Park South, the swank street that runs the length of the south end of the legendary park. He bought that in 2006 for $360,000, and sold it for $435,000 in 2007. He didn’t respond to an email seeking comment about the New York apartment.

Here’s what he’s done since he left the Senate — none of it took place in South Dakota:

After his defeat, Pressler passed the New York bar and worked again as a lawyer. Pressler subsequently became senior partner of the law firm O’Connor and Hannan, where he served for six years, and then formed his own law firm, The Pressler Group. Pressler is a member of the New York Bar, the Washington DC Bar, and the Supreme Court Bar.

He has also lectured at more than twenty universities in China, India and the U.S., and has been granted two lifetime Fulbright teaching awards.[12]

Pressler has remained active in the political arena. In 2000, he was a member of Republican Presidential Candidate George W. Bush’s Information Technology Steering Committee, and also served on the Bush Presidential Transition Team in 2001.[13]

Pressler attempted a political comeback in 2002 by running for South Dakota’s open at-large House seat but he essentially discontinued his campaign when Republican Governor Bill Janklow unexpectedly entered the race.

Pressler was appointed an official observer of Ukraine’s national election in December 2004.[14]

Pressler endorsed Barack Obama for President in 2008 and 2012.[15]

On November 10, 2009, President Obama named Pressler to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad.[16] He also serves on the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission.[17]

In October 2012, based on veterans’ issues, Pressler endorsed Obama for a second term with an article in the Huffington Post and on national television networks.[18] Pressler campaigned in a bipartisan team for Obama in the fall of 2012, speaking on behalf of the Obama ticket to certain veteran’s groups in Virginia.[19]

He taught as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Sciences Po University, Paris, France, and Reims, France, in the Fall of 2012.[20] He chiefly teaches international relations to graduate students.

I guess people don’t care about this. Hillary famously moved to New York after leaving the White House in order to run for the Senate and Scott Brown is running in New Hampshire as a newly minted resident.

But I question whether or not Pressler and his wife are entitled to vote in South Dakota.She clearly lives in DC, he admits it. And he hasn’t done anything in decades that could be construed as South Dakota based. Republicans are making a fetish out of the smallest details of voting laws to ensure that every last person dots every last “i” or face the consequences, no exceptions, not even for elderly people who’ve been voting since Roosevelt’s time.

Here is the South Dakota voting law:

Definition of Residency for Voter Registration (SDCL 12-1-4)

For the purposes of this title, the term, residence, means the place in which a person has fixed his or her habitation and to which the person, whenever absent, intends to return.

A person who has left home and gone into another state or territory or county of this state for a temporary purpose only has not changed his or her residence.

A person is considered to have gained a residence in any county or municipality of this state in which the person actually lives, if the person has no present intention of leaving.

If a person moves to another state, or to any of the other territories, with the intention of making it his or her permanent home, the person thereby loses residence in this state.

I guess “intention” is a vague term. But if you are taking a tax deduction for you permanent residence someplace, it seems to me your intention is pretty lear. Especially since you’ve been living there since the 1970s and run your business from there:

In a followup email, Pressler told POLITICO that he “made a decision after my loss in 1996 to support my wife and her business by helping her keep a residence where she built her business. My wife has supported me by traveling home to South Dakota to support me with my work as well.”

“My wife has been the primary co-owner of our Washington, DC residence for decades,” he wrote. “Her principal residence and career work has been in the city for more than three decades, which qualifies her for the Homestead Tax Exemption. Furthermore, she has always paid her Washington, DC Income Taxes all these years which is also a qualifying factor for the Homestead Tax Exemption.”

I guess he was commuting from Sioux Falls to Manhattan and the Sorbonne.

And truthfully, you might be able to call Pressler himself itinerant enough to qualify as a resident simply because he works in a lot of places.  ( Of course he should have registered as a DC or New York voter after 1996. )But the wife has been in DC all these years and long after Pressler left politics. Sounds like voter fraud to me. And we can’t have that.

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Yes, they are killing young black males


by digby

Yes, your intuition is correct:

Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater i, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings.

The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.

One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica’s analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring – 185, more than one per week.

ProPublica’s risk analysis on young males killed by police certainly seems to support what has been an article of faith in the African American community for decades: Blacks are being killed at disturbing rates when set against the rest of the American population.

This analysis was based upon the very incomplete and FBI database, but according to experts it’s highly doubtful that a more complete record could alter the basic trendlines.

This pretty much says it all:

Appalling. And you don’t even want to think about the disparity in our prisons.

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A new prairie populism?


by Tom Sullivan

Somebody described the DNC’s presidential campaign strategy as counting on large, reliable blocks of Electoral College votes from the East and West coasts, then betting on hitting a triple bank shot and pick up enough votes in a couple of big, Midwest states to total 270. The less-populous “flyover states” in the heartland and the South they abandoned to Rush Limbaugh and the GOP long ago.

Howard Dean thought that was nuts. The DNC thought Howard was nuts. And even after Dean as DNC Chair implemented his Fifty State Strategy and Democrats started winning in places that had not seen the DNC in decades, Beltway Democrats pitched Dean’s strategy as soon as Dean left.

Mike Lux sees a new populism lifting Democratic fortunes in the Plains States in a way Dean would approve. In Oklahoma and North Dakota Democrats are surprisingly competitive this year. And more:

In my home state of Nebraska, the open seat Governor’s race is very competitive, with prairie populist Chuck Hassebrook within 7 points in the latest public poll of close friend of the Koch brothers (He spoke at their secret meeting in June), Pete Ricketts. Hassebrook has spent his career advocating for small farmers and small town businesses at the Center for Rural Affairs, while Ricketts’ Koch-style extremism has gotten him into hot water. (First bias alert: Hassebrook is a long time friend.) Meanwhile, the Democrat running for the House in the Omaha district, Brad Ashford, is in a dead heat race with Republican incumbent Lee Terry. 

In Kansas, as anyone following politics has become aware of in recent weeks, both incumbent Republican Governor Sam Brownback and incumbent Republican Senator Pat Roberts are in very deep trouble, with high unfavorability numbers and trailing consistently in the polls. The Roberts campaign has been awful, but a big part of the reason for the problems these Republicans are having is that Brownback’s extreme tax and spending cut agenda have badly alienated voters. 

Finally in South Dakota, in a race long written off by many pundits and national Democrats, support for Republican Mike Rounds has been collapsing in a 4 way race, and Democrat Rick Weiland (2nd bias alert, Rick is also a good friend whose campaign I am helping) is now close enough in the polling that both the DSCC and several progressive groups are putting real money into the state to help him. Rick is running a classic folksy prairie populist campaign against big money, including writing his own lyrics and singing songs like this one on the campaign trail:

Someone complained to me yesterday about Sen. Kay Hagan ignoring rural counties in western North Carolina. She parachutes into the cities for high-dollar fundraisers and high-profile events, but is invisible in redder counties with few Democrats with fat checkbooks. If your priorities run in election cycles, that makes a kind of sense. Lux offers observations taking a longer view [Emphasis mine]:

The first is that these Democrats are campaigning with gusto in small towns and rural counties. There is a very large part of America that Democrats can’t win without appealing to rural voters, and as Democrats have become more oriented over the years toward focusing on big cities and the suburbs, they have sometimes forgotten to reach out to folks in small towns and on farms and ranches. That has made red states redder, and it has made it harder for Democrats to win a majority in the House. But Democrats in the Plains States are making campaigning in small towns and rural counties a cornerstone of their campaigns. Hassebrook, as I mentioned, has been an advocate for rural folks his whole career, and had robust, active steering committees set up in every county in Nebraska from early in his campaign. He fully expects to win or come close in a lot of rural counties where the last Democratic candidate for Governor, Bob Kerrey, did not get to 30%. In South Dakota, Rick Weiland made as the centerpiece of his campaign strategy the idea that he would become the first candidate to ever go to all 311 South Dakota towns, making quite a contrast with Rounds who has spent most of his campaign raising money on the east and west coasts. The bottom line is that rural voters are like anyone else: if you ignore them, they won’t like you. National Democrats have been ignoring rural America for too long, but these Plains States Democrats are proving that they can win a lot of rural votes if they just work at it.

Are we willing to?

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Vote suppression is in their DNA

by digby

Keep in mind that there is zero evidence of any systematic voter fraud in this country and zero evidence that any election has been illegitimately won on the basis of voters pretending to be someone they are not:

In a small one-story house filled with knickknacks and stuffed animals, Joy Dunn sat at her dining room table going over her absentee ballot. Turning the pages with long fingernails painted fire engine red, she said she wanted to make sure she had everything in order, as the vote she cast in March’s special election was never counted.

“I got a letter saying my vote wasn’t counted because I didn’t have ID. But I’ve been voting in this state since 1954 and I never had to have ID,” she told ThinkProgress. “I didn’t know I was supposed to send in an ID this time. Nobody told me.”

Dunn, who just turned 79, has several forms of valid ID, but says she was never notified that she had to include a copy of it with her absentee ballot. Arkansas is one of a tiny handful of state to require copies of ID from absentee voters, and the only state in the nation to make those over age 65 do. The only exceptions to this rule are for active duty service members and their spouses and residents of long-term care or residential care facilities.

This time, Joy is aware of the requirement, but it hasn’t been easy for her to meet it. Because of a foot injury that left her unable to drive, she had to ask a neighbor to take her drivers’ license to the library and bring her back a photocopy to include with her ballot. “I had to depend on somebody to go do it for me and that’s a hardship on me,” she said. “And most people don’t even have that kind of help! I think it’s unfair for a lot of us older people.”

She said this hardship reminded her of the very first time she cast a ballot, in Little Rock in 1954. She was forced to pay a $2 poll tax, which she said was “not much more” than people made working a full day’s shift. “It was a little white slip, looked like a rent receipt,” she said. “You had to have that slip to vote.”

The idea then was the same as the idea now: to keep African Americans and Latinos from voting. And when one roadblock falls they figure out a way to put up another one. It’s so obvious that I cannot believe they can deny it with a straight face. But they do — and then they start screaming something unintelligible about black panthers.

Believe me when I say that voter ID isn’t the end of it. Even if every voter in the country gets bar-coded the conservative party will find another way to suppress the vote of their opponents. It’s in their DNA at this point.

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To protect and to serve

by digby

Here’s an officer who understands that his job isn’t to fight the War of the American Streets and Kill Bad Guys — it’s to ensure public safety. Which isn’t the same thing.

A Michigan public safety officer has made good on his promise to protect and serve the people in his community. On Oct. 4, Officer Ben Hall of Emmett Township, Mich., received a call to investigate a car in which, reportedly, an unsecured child was observed. Alexis DeLorenzo and her daughter were riding in this car with a friend. When Hall pulled them over, things didn’t go as expected. When Hall walked over to the car, he saw that DeLorenzo’s 5-year-old daughter was wearing a seat belt but was not secured in a booster seat. In Michigan, child safety restraints are required for children under the age of 7. “When I spoke to [DeLorenzo], she was very forthcoming and knew that the child should be in a booster seat,” Hall said. He added, “She admitted that she was wrong and that she had recently fallen on hard times.”

Hall said DeLorenzo told him that her car had been repossessed that day with her daughter’s booster seat in it, and she simply couldn’t afford a replacement booster seat. Instead of writing DeLorenzo a ticket, Hall decided to address the problem with, to his mind, a more productive solution. “A ticket doesn’t solve the situation,” Hall told WXMI-TV. “What solves it is the child being in the booster seat like she should be.” Hall instructed DeLorenzo to meet him at the local Walmart. There, instead of writing her a ticket, he purchased a booster seat for her. DeLorenzo was overwhelmed by the officer’s understanding and compassion. Hall didn’t seem fazed; he said, “It was the easiest 50 bucks I ever spent.” DeLorenzo made sure that Hall’s actions were recognized, posting to the Emmett Township Police Department’s website her thanks.

A lot of cops would have chosen to believe she was lying or trying to get away with something. A lot of them wouldn’t have cared one way or the other. This officer understood that the important thing was to protect the kid and took a chance that helping her mother do that would be the best way to insure it. There’s nothing radical about assuming that helping a mom protect her child is better than making things worse for the mother by punishing her. Or, at least, there shouldn’t be.

Good for Officer DeLorenzo for being a decent human being and a smart, empathetic cop. There are many thousands of them in towns and cities across the country and we’d all be better off if they were the models for all the rest.

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Meet the Koch … sisters

by digby

THE BROTHERS: Have spent and raised hundreds of millions of dollars to influence elections and have vowed to spend even more.

THE SISTERS: Believe there is too much money in politics and it can have a corrupting influence on policy making.

Karen and Joyce may just be a couple of ordinary middle class women but their insights and ideas about America and what it stands for are heads and shoulders above anything the Koch Brothers have said and done in decades.

You can see more about this campaign here at Kochsisters.org. It’s very clever.

For some reason this cracks me up:

Friday Fun Happy Feet Edition


 by Spocko

 

We all have different ways to cheer us up after a week of hearing about drone strikes, RWNJs and ineffective media. For me it’s watching joyful dancing.

I’ve set this Dancing with the Stars clip at 1:34 seconds, a few seconds before the start of the dance. I recommend you click on the gear/settings and set quality to 720 HD and annotations off. Go to YouTube if you want to go full screen. Then put on your earphones or turn on the speakers and listen to Tom Jones singing “It’s not Unusual” and watch “The Carlton Dance.”

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Keith’s mea culpas

by digby

This is quite interesting in light of Olbermann’s aggressive hostility toward Hillary Clinton in 2008:

I don’t know what permutation the Clinton scandals are going to take in this next round. But they’ll be there, I guarantee it. It’s part of the deal.

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Torturers R Us

by digby

Wow, does this ever make me proud to be a Democrat:

One of the appealing factors for a Jerry Cannon congressional campaign was his perceived squeaky clean record as a member of the military and the Kalkaska County Sheriff. He told Politico last year that “I don’t have a record that people can attack,” which was a big reason national Democrats took such an interest in him. However, the Democratic nominee in the 1st Congressional District, who is facing U.S. Rep. Dan Benishek (R-Crystal Falls) in one of the state’s most competitive congressional races, may not be exactly devoid of controversy.

Cannon’s name was wrapped into at least one civil suit regarding inhuman treatment at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp Delta when he was the head of the detention detail from July 2003 to August 2004. According to a Washington Post article from 2004, FBI agents and officials witnessed the use of growling dogs to intimidate detainees at Guantanamo Bay. In another instance from August 2004 at Camp Delta, a detainee is said to have been wrapped in an Israeli flag and bombarded with loud music in an attempt to soften his resistance to interrogation. The New York Times reported in October 2004 that uncooperative prisoners at Camp Delta were told to “strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endorse strobe lights and screamingly loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air conditioning was turned up.”

Cannon was named as a defendant in four different detainee lawsuits and named specifically in the closing arguments in the case of Mohammad Jawad by Major David J.R. Frakt. “It is my recommendation that charges be preferred against MG Cannon under the MCMJ for cruelty, maltreatment and abuse, dereliction of duty and violation of a lawful order at the earliest opportunity,” Frakt said. “He completely and utterly failed to prevent the flagrant abuse of a detained under his protection. It is high time that someone in a position of authority be held accountable, and not just the guards who were carrying out orders this time.” Jawad ended up staying in Gitmo until 2009 before a district court judge ordered his release back to Afghanistan after being found not guilty of the charges leveled against him.

To show that Cannon was aware of the tactics used at Camp Delta, America Rising referenced a Human Rights First article about how detainees were moved around eight times a day or every three hours with the goal of keeping detainees “off balance.” Apparently, Cannon and military leadership were aware of the “frequent flyer program,” designed to deprive inmates of sleep, and no one questioned the program’s legality. During an interview with Roll Call a year ago, Cannon said the Red Cross checked off on its detention operation during their biannual inspections. “It was a great mission,” he said. “I don’t see that ever being an issue, that someone, if they really understand the entire circumstances, would think that could be a liability.”

However, the New York Times reported on Nov. 30, 2004 that the Red Cross found techniques “tantamount to torture” after its June 2004 visit. The prolonged exposure to the cold and loud music was designed to break the will of the detainees. “The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture,” read the Red Cross report. Cannon never had formal charges filed against him for anything he did or didn’t do at Camp Delta.

The Republicans are unctuously declaring that they are shocked, simply shocked by such behavior of course, which is ridiculous.

Cannon was also deputy commander of “detainee operations” in Iraq and had this to say when the US turned over it’s prisons to the Iraqis:

Maj. Gen. Jerry Cannon, the deputy commander for detainee operations, said that the U.S. military would continue to train its Iraqi counterparts on international standards for human rights and that it is prepared to look at cases of alleged abuse. “We’ve given detainees world-class care,” Cannon said Thursday, adding that it would take time for Iraqis to offer the same standard of care as American-run facilities. “If you want to be in custody, you’d probably want to be in our custody,” he added.

This fine fellow was recruited by the DCCC.

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