Month: October 2014

“They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.”
by Tom Sullivan

In a folder labeled “Spam – Right wing” dating from 2005 on, I have 200 or so examples of the kind of right-wing, pass-it-on spam you get from friends and relatives. (And yes, I have a “Spam – Left wing” folder, too, with fewer than ten. Pass-it-on spam is a phenomenon of the right.)
For awhile I even got right-wing chain-mail from a Republican elected official in Oxford, MS on whose personal list I landed somehow. They kept coming even after I responded and told her, no, I wasn’t who she thought I was so, no, I couldn’t send her that chicken recipe she liked so much.
But we’ll come back to that.

A week or so ago, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity came under fire for “hundreds of thousands of mailers with false information” that appeared in mailboxes across North Carolina, prompting hundreds of complaints from voters and drawing fire from state Democrats:

Casey M. Mann, N.C. Democratic Party executive director, filed the complaint Monday over the Americans for Prosperity Foundation voter registration mailers that included incorrect information on where to send applications, an incorrect registration deadline, and inaccurate information about getting answers to questions.

Addressees included a dead child and a cat.

But what caught the attention of Sue Sturgis at the Institute for Southern Studies over the weekend was the pattern of behavior by Americans for Prosperity:

Under North Carolina law, sending out a mass mailing or taking any other action where “the intent and effect is to intimidate or discourage potential voters” is a Class I felony. The elections board told The News & Observer that it has received at least 2,000 calls about the mailers, and has asked AFP to send accurate information to the homes that received the misinformation.
AFP has downplayed the significance of the mailers, releasing a statement that said they “contained a few administrative errors” that “were not substantive.”
However, this is not the first time that AFP has been embroiled in a controversy about misleading voters. It has faced similar accusations in at least three other states:
* West Virginia. This past April, West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant said voters in at least eight counties in her state received “misleading and confusing” leaflets that could have led them to wrongly believe they were not properly registered to vote in the May primary, The Charleston Gazette reported.
Wendy McCuskey, director of AFP’s West Virginia chapter, said the mailer was a nonpartisan effort targeting people who were not registered to vote. However, the leaflets encouraged residents to “update” their voter registration. McCuskey told the paper that there “may have been a few mistakes.”
* Virginia. Last year, voters in Virginia reported receiving a mailer from AFP that told them they were not registered to vote when in fact many were. The mailer also threatened to contact neighbors of the recipients and say that they weren’t registered, further angering those who received the mailing.
Larry Haake, the general registrar in Chesterfield County, Virginia, said he received complaints about the mailer. “It’s outrageous what they do,” Haake told the Chesterfield Observer, referring to AFP. “Most of their information is wrong. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.”

There was Wisconsin in 2011, as well.

As with legally dubious legislation passed in North Carolina and other states with GOP-led legislatures, the governing philosophy seems to be to step over the legal lines and dare anyone to stop them.

But what has always struck me about right-wing spam mentioned earlier is what Larry Haake observed about the AFP mailers: “They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.” Wrong in the sense of inaccurate as well as “you ought to be ashamed.” They aren’t. And neither is AFP.

Now, out of those 200 chain emails, maybe three or four are not outright lies, distortions, and smears. Easily debunked on Google in the time it takes to attach your email list and forward to all your friends. They are lies and, deep down, right wingers know it. Yet they pass them along dutifully, almost gleefully. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.

Whoever generates this crap, by all appearances their purpose is simply to get people angry and keep them angry about imaginary slights committed against them by liberal neighbors.

Pass-it-on spams don’t ask people to write their congressman or senator. They don’t ask people to get involved in or contribute to a political campaign. Or even to make a simple phone call. No. Once you’ve had your daily dose of in-box outrage, conservative reader, all these propaganda pieces ask is that you “pass it on” to everyone you know. So now that you’re good and angry — and if you’re a Real American™ — you’ll share it with all your friends so they’ll get and stay angry too.

Some of us are old enough to have seen Superman on black-and-white TV defending truth, justice, and the American Way. That was then. The saddest part of pass-it-on propaganda and AFP disinformation is that the people who raised us at the height of the Cold War warned us that commies would use propaganda and disinformation to destroy America from within. Now, many of those same Real Americans™ consider trafficking in propaganda and disinformation good, clean fun for the whole family. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.

What do they believe anyway?

by digby

Somebody actually went out and asked. This is from the Pew poll in 2013:

More than two years after the death of Osama bin Laden, concern about Islamic extremism remains widespread among Muslims from South Asia to the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa. Across 11 Muslim publics surveyed by the Pew Research Center, a median of 67% say they are somewhat or very concerned about Islamic extremism. In five countries – Pakistan, Jordan, Tunisia, Turkey and Indonesia – Muslim worries about extremism have increased in the past year.

Against this backdrop, extremist groups, including al Qaeda, garner little popular support. Even before his death in 2011, confidence in al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had plummeted among many Muslims. Today, al Qaeda is widely reviled, with a median of 57% across the 11 Muslims publics surveyed saying they have an unfavorable opinion of the terrorist organization that launched the twin attacks on New York City and Washington, DC more than a decade ago.

The Taliban, who once shared Afghanistan as a base of operation with al Qaeda, are viewed negatively by a median of 51% of Muslims in the countries polled. Hezbollah and Hamas fare little better. Hezbollah, in particular, has seen its support slip in key Middle Eastern countries, including a 38 percentage point drop in favorable views among Egyptian Muslims since 2007.

In many of the countries surveyed, clear majorities of Muslims oppose violence in the name of Islam. Indeed, about three-quarters or more in Pakistan (89%), Indonesia (81%), Nigeria (78%) and Tunisia (77%), say suicide bombings or other acts of violence that target civilians are never justified. And although substantial percentages in some countries do think suicide bombing is often or sometimes justified – including a 62%-majority of Palestinian Muslims, overall support for violence in the name of Islam has declined among Muslim publics during the past decade.

These are among the key findings from a survey of 11 Muslim publics conducted by the Pew Research Center from March 3 to April 7, 2013. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 8,989 Muslims in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Palestinian territories, Senegal, Tunisia and Turkey. The survey also finds that Nigerian Muslims overwhelmingly oppose Boko Haram, the extremist movement at the center of a violent uprising in northern Nigeria. One of Boko Haram’s stated aims is to establish sharia, or Islamic law, as the official law of the land. Nigerian Muslims are divided on whether their country’s laws should closely follow the teachings of the Quran.

Here’s Gallup with a slightly different question:

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, social scientists and counterterrorism experts have been struggling to understand what provokes someone to deliberately take the lives of innocent people. The religious veneer of al Qaeda’s public posture led many analysts to search for answers in Islam’s teachings. Some analysts have even argued that a wholesale revision of Muslim theology is the only way to defeat violent extremism.

Empirical evidence paints a different picture. Gallup analysis suggests that one’s religious identity and level of devotion have little to do with one’s views about targeting civilians. According to the largest global study of its kind, covering 131 countries, it is human development and governance – not piety or culture – that are the strongest factors in explaining differences in how the public perceives this type of violence.

The implications of these findings on public policy are far-reaching. The research suggests that to increase the public’s rejection of targeting civilians, leaders would do well to focus far more on education and government accountability, and far less on religious ideology.

Human Development and Societal Stability Linked to Public Rejection of Violence

Rather than look to religion to explain public acceptance of violence, Gallup’s analysis suggests that leaders should consider social and economic development and better governance. The way individuals think about violence against civilians, whether it is committed by the military or by an individual actor or small group, directly relates to the development and stability of society more broadly. Gallup analysts, however, cannot determine the direction of causality from the correlation.

Measuring Public Attitudes About Targeting Civilians

Gallup analysts set out to measure global opinion about the deliberate targeting of civilians by state and non-state actors, and its relationship to independent indicators, rather than attempt to define “terrorism.” The Geneva Conventions of 1949, which deal with the protection of civilians, informed our survey question about military attacks on civilians. The U.S. Department of State report on Patterns of International Terrorism[1] guided our measurement of public attitudes toward individual or small group violence aimed at civilians. It is important to note that the questions specifically address the “targeting” of civilians, not simply their unintended harm as collateral damage.

Gallup scientists asked people to choose between absolutely rejecting targeting civilians as “never justified” and conditionally accepting the tactic as “sometimes justified.” This simplification makes it easier to ask the same question globally.

Make of this what you will …

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Thank you Miles O’Brien

by digby

Finally:

PBS science correspondent Miles O’Brien on Sunday bemoaned the media’s coverage of Ebola, criticizing Fox News in particular.

“I wish everybody could take a deep breath and take a break from trying to pull viewers in by scaring them. And that’s what we’re seeing here. It borders on irresponsibility when people get on television and start talking that way when they should know better,” he said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

O’Brien said that journalists have been hyping the Ebola outbreak and the first case in the United States just to draw in viewers.

“That’s a shame to even say that, and I get embarrassed for our brethren in journalism,” he said.

CNN host Brian Stelter then played a clip of Fox News’ Andrea Tantaros warning that Africans will “seek treatment from a witch doctor” if infected with Ebola.

“Well, we could digress into what motivated that, and perhaps the racial component of all this, the arrogance, the first world verses third world statements and implications,” O’Brien said about the clip. “It’s offensive on several levels. And it reflects a level of ignorance, which we should not allow in our media and in our discourse.”

I wrote about the witch doctor thing here.

The bigger problem, as I see it, that the news nets are conflating “threats” all the time ISIS-Ebola-Border-Immigrants-Beheadings into one big story about how the world is exploding and we’re right in the middle of it all — indeed, we’re the focus of it all. It’s just one big, horrible threat.

Irresponsible is too tame a word. Immoral is more like it.

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Sunday funnies

by digby

Tom Tomorrow:

Oh, they have a message alright

by digby

Joe Scarborough said this morning that the Republicans don’t have a message:

I am pretty sure that they do have a message actually:

Runferyerlives!! OHmyGodtheebolaterroristbeheadersarecomingtogetya!!!!!

They have a message. And it’s tried and true. Lucky for them the media is helping them by fomenting the idea that we are all in imminent danger of dying from some exotic, lurid foreign cause.

Update: Now we’re talking

Protest ‘O the Week

by digby

There were a lot of them. The protests in Hong Kong were huge and potentially very significant.  But my vote goes to this one, which I think was quite amazing:

Protesters rallying over the slaying of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown left the streets on Saturday night, put on sports coats and fancy dresses and sat in on the St. Louis Symphony.

During the intermission of a performance of Brahms Requiem, the 23 protesters sitting in various parts of the auditorium stood up and sang, “Requiem for Mike Brown.”

“Justice for Mike Brown is Justice for us All,
Which side are you on friend? Which side are you on?”

As they began to sing, protests unfurled banners from the balcony that encouraged symphony patrons to “join the movement.”

The group was surprised by the response, said Derek Laney, an organizer for Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment. Instead of being ushered out in handcuffs by police, some patrons of the symphony — and some symphony members themselves — applauded the tuneful message. The group left on their own after about a minute and a half of singing, while they chanted “Blacks Lives Matter.”

“It went to show that there are people among that crowd who think that the protests matter and that it’s not okay to just kill black children, and they’d be receptive to hear that message,” Laney said. “It was a perfect moment. As we left, people were smiling and reaching out to shake our hands.”

They’ve been here a good long while

by digby

After watching hysterical wingnuts calling for the closing of the borders all morning I thought this might be important to share:

The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S.—11.3 million in 2013—has stabilized since the end of the Great Recession in 2009, according to new Pew Research Center estimates. The marked slowdown in new arrivals means that those who remain are more likely to be long-term residents, and to live with their U.S.-born children. In 2013, adult unauthorized immigrants had lived in the U.S. for a median time of nearly 13 years, up from 7.5 years in 2003.

But hey. Never let a full-blown xenophobic panic go to waste, eh?

Update: For instance:

Lawmakers, candidates and pundits have expressed concern that the disease will enter the U.S. either from immigrants or due to terrorism, prompting “Fox News Sunday” host Christ Wallace to ask Fauci about potential threats.

“What are the chances that illegal immigrants are going to come over our porous southern border with Ebola or that terrorists will purposely send someone here using Ebola as a bioterror weapon?” Wallace asked.

Fauci said that both scenarios were incredibly unlikely.

“I wouldn’t be worrying about illegal immigrants coming from southern borders when we have an issue right now with Ebola in West Africa. That’s a hypothetical that’s very far-fetched,” he told Wallace.

“As far as terrorism, nature right now Chris, is the worst bioterrorist. I’m worried more about the natural evolution in West Africa than I am about a terrorist,” Fauci continued.

Wallace then concedes that Ebola would not be the best weapon.

“I also suppose if you’re going to do a bioterror weapon, Ebola isn’t the most effective one,” he said.

And Wallace is one of the more respectable ones….

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”I don’t want to have any voting registration happening on this campus”
by Tom Sullivan

During a recount here in November 2012, I was at the local Board of Elections when a T-party member flashed a handwritten sign at a young woman from Warren Wilson College: “You are a law breaker.” A redistricting error by the GOP-controlled legislature — a precinct line drawn down the middle of the campus — allowed a handful of students’ votes to decide control of the county commission in Buncombe County, North Carolina. Democrats held the majority by 17 votes.

So it was no real surprise to see this the other day:

The head of the College Republicans at one North Carolina college is determined to stop voter registration drives on her campus, whether they’re being sponsored by conservative or liberal groups.

According to MSNBC, Chairwoman Leigh Thomas of the High Point University College Republicans was caught on camera on Wednesday telling a conservative group that it could not register voters on campus because she wasn’t comfortable with it.

[…]

“I don’t approve of it whatsoever—on a campus like High Point University,” she said. ”I don’t want to have any voting registration happening on this campus, with students.”

During the 2012 recount, T-party members argued that students legally registered at their school should not have their votes counted. It didn’t matter what the law said. (The Board chair quoted it to them.) The T-party charged voter fraud (naturally) and argued, essentially, that the law should be what what they wanted it to be. Ironically, they would lose because the GOP’s high-paid mapmakers failed to safely sequester all of the campus in the liberal ghetto created for the city of Asheville, a.k.a. The Cesspool of Sin.

As the High Point University incident this week demonstrates, Republicans don’t want people voting. Paul Weyrich admitted as much in 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” What they want to ensure is that only the right people vote.

So North Carolina holds its breath this weekend as the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether or not to enforce a stay on implementing two key provisions of North Carolina’s restrictive, new voting law.

In North Carolina, the Oct. 1 decision by a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals restores same-day registration for early voters and out-of-precinct voting in the upcoming election. The panel overturned a U.S. District Court decision that found implementing the controversial 2013 law would not cause “irreparable harm” to voters. Voting rights advocates requested a preliminary injunction blocking the law for this year’s election as the broader lawsuit on the constitutionality of North Carolina’s law will be tried next July.

In his job as N.C. Attorney General, Democrat Roy Cooper has asked the Supreme Court to block the ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts oversees the Fourth Circuit and could rule any day.

Why Did We Give JPMorgan Chase Months To Prepare for the Breach Announcement? by Spocko

Did you know that banks are not required to report data breaches unless it results in a financial loss to customers?

The intrusion also highlights a possible gap in United States regulations. Banks are not required to report data breaches and online intrusions unless the incident is deemed to have resulted in a financial loss to customers. Breach notification laws differ by state, but most laws require only that companies disclose a breach if customer names were stolen in conjunction with other information like a credit card, Social Security number or driver’s license number. 

In some states, companies can wait up to a month to inform customers of a breach. Other state laws are more vague.

New York Times Dealbook By Matthew Goldstein, Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger

Lots of people have read that the JPMorgan Chase data intrusion started in June and went until mid-August. Maybe you read some of the technical publications that covered it like ARSTechnica, The long game: How hackers spent months pulling bank data from JPMorgan or maybe some business press back then JPMorgan Hackers Came In the Front Door — in June. Two Months of Mayhem (warning video autostart)

As one of the 83 million Chase customers whose data was exposed, I wanted to have known sooner than October 3.  Do you want to bet that a lot of really big customers did find out in advance? Anyone bother to ask them when? Did they stay or quietly move their accounts? Or were they informed that nine other financial institution were hacked and that the public doesn’t know because the Treasury is afraid of a financial panic/meltdown?

As the favorite, too big to fail bank, the US Government was there to help JPMorgan Chase as much as possible. I guess they felt guilty, what with forcing them to pay that big fine for their earlier massive fraud and asking them help with US imposed sanctions on Russia.

What is interesting to me is that I’ve read about 30 stories now about the data breach and most are still treating JPMorgan Chase with kid gloves. Some are downplaying the seriousness of this when asking questions. One story asked people on the street, and determined it’s a boring story and nobody cares.

Maybe all my questions have been asked and answered and I’m just slow. These questions might seem dumb or “out of the loop” by the savvy business press, but I’m just your average consumer Vulcan so I wrote the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and asked a few questions:

• Do you have any comment about JPMorgan Chase’s announcement of the data breach from last June that was revealed more fully in October?
• What are your thoughts about their response, specifically their decision to tell people they don’t have to change passwords and that they aren’t offering credit monitoring?
• If there aren’t any requirements that they had to reveal the info sooner, why did they reveal it now? Was it only the SEC requirements that forced them? Different states have different laws about disclosure, did they violate any of these laws?

The burden of follow up and spot fraud was placed on the consumer following Chase’s failure to keep its network secure. 

Saturday Night at the Movies






Start the revolution without me: The Last Days of Vietnam and The Liberator

by Dennis Hartley

Goodnight Saigon: The Last Days of Vietnam