Month: November 2014

The head-cracking candidate

by digby

The following is rom Chris Christie’s Today Show interview this week when he was asked about telling a citizen to sit down and shut up:

LAUER: That kind of response is something your staunch supporters love. It makes other people queasy. Are you going to have to control that side of your personality to be seen as presidential outside the rough-and-tumble world of New Jersey politics?

CHRISTIE: First of all, you’re assuming I wasn’t controlled. And you know, I sat and took it for a while. And then other people, the hundreds of people that were there, deserved to hear what we had to say that day. That person had their say. I’d sat and listened to it. It was time for them to sit down. And I’m not going to change, Matt. This is who I am.

LAUER: Maybe I should say instead of controlling that side, do you have to hide that side of your personality outside of New Jersey?

CHRISTIE: There’s no hope of that.

No he’s not going to hide it. He considers it an asset. So do his handlers, especially if he ends up in a general election fight with Hillary Clinton. I think they’ve decided that any man running against a woman will be dogged by accusations of sexism and aggression and I think they probably believe that helps them get out their base and possibly dig into the more macho elements of the Democratic party. (Yes, there are plenty of them.)

They foresee a straight-up Bros vs the Hoes battle. Which will be terrible for out politics and our culture. But you can see why they might think it’s a way to win presidential elections. They have to find a way to get some piece of the Democratic presidential coalition or they cannot win.

Certainly, they can count on the media to help them frame this the way. They love a good battle of the sexes.   (The only problem, of course, is that there are Republican women out there too. ) This is not unprecedented. George W. Bush had an element of this and they loved him for it. I wrote about it a long time ago, calling him “America’s angry ex-husband.”

He’s the dad who is always mad. Surly, unpredictable, spoiled. You know the type. “I’m the commander in chief, see. I don’t need to explain … Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

Chris Christie is a classic conservative archetype and who better to take it to an uppity women candidate?

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The strategy worked

by digby

From the man who brought you the Jesse Helms “hands” ad and works at CNN as part of the “best political team on television”:

elec proved that when dems fail in governing, D’s don’t vote & R’s win MT @BenRodriguez413: @ron_fournier @maggiepolitico @krauthammer
— Alex Castellanos (@alexcast) November 9, 2014

Obstruction  works.  I think it’s unlikely they’re going to change course now, don’t you? Why mess with a winning strategy?

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The future of unemployment

by David Atkins

GE has a cute little ad called “The future of work” praising their advances in 3D printing automation:

We’ll gloss over the fact that no one in the copyediting process caught the misuse of “beg the question”, and get to the heart of the matter. GE wants us to praise the awesome revolution in manufacturing that is supposed to take place with 3D printing. Fair enough–it is rather exciting to consider the implications of automatically constructed on-site objects from houses to livers.

But the sleight of hand here is all the people in hardhats. Notice how all these supposedly busy people are designing and shaping and programming in factory conditions, even as the voiceover talks about factories that build themselves. In order to show visual movement, the people have to be given things to do on camera–most of which, if you look carefully, involves shifting around and setting up laptops, and the rest of which involves mapping out and designing objects.

In reality there will be no need for all of these people. The vast majority of objects will be designed off-site by a few designers, who will send the designs wirelessly to the printers. A few very low-wage employees will push whatever buttons are necessary. A few more very low-wage employees will move around or assemble the stuff the printers spit out, which will then be shipped in self-driving trucks to a destination of choice.

The future of work, indeed. This is the future of unemployment.

Not that that’s a bad thing, mind. The human condition is better off with humans not driving trucks long distances or working in dangerous factory assembly lines. Technology that replaces needless human and animal labor is a good thing, and has been ever since the invention of the wheel.

But let’s not kid ourselves. The jobs are simply going to disappear, and they’re not going to be replaced with “design” jobs–even if those blue collar workers could be retrained as designers, which they mostly can’t be. Capitalism as we know it, centered around a delicate balance between labor and ownership, is going to start fraying at the seams before it ultimately breaks down. Not because of anything Karl Marx or Thomas Piketty predict, necessarily, but because there just won’t be enough viable, high-paying jobs to sustain a customer base.

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Underground railroading


by Tom Sullivan

On Friday, we were in Greensboro, NC when the International Civil Rights Center & Museum was open. We’d been meaning to stop in for years. We even managed to get through the tour of the old F. W. Woolworth lunch counter without crying. (OK, barely.) The word unequal kept coming up in the tour. That and the funeral earlier of a black friend had me mulling over how many white people still resent sharing the country with Others they consider unequal.

Demographic shifts are bringing them kicking and screaming to the realization that they must.

Losing power is very personal for people on the right. Both left and right talk about taking “their country” back, but it seems much more personal for conservatives. In their America, it seems, there is no we, just i and me.

One place you hear it is in their rhetoric about voter fraud. It is a very personal affront to them that the power of their votes might be diminished by the Other. Every time someone ineligible casts a fraudulent ballot, they insist, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They have convinced themselves that there are thousands and thousands of invisible felons stealing their votes every election. Passing more restrictive voting laws is a matter of justice and voting integrity, of course. What other motivation could there be for railroading eligible poor, minority, and college-age voters?

The Others they suspect of this heinous activity are people who do not believe as they do nor vote as they do. Voter fraud itself is a code word, the way Lee Atwater used “forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.” It’s “much more abstract,” as Atwater said. The issue is not really whether the invisible “those people” are voting illegally or not. It is that they are voting at all. Sharing in governance, sharing power, is a privilege for deserving, Real Americans, not for the unwashed Irresponsibles. That Others do so legally is just as much an affront. Right now they’re targeting the invisible Others. Restricting voting to Real Americans comes later, I guess.

Being a racist in the South in 1954 may have been de rigueur, but as Atwater said about the N-word being unacceptable by the late 1960s, being racist today is terribly unfashionable. Not even racists want to see themselves as racists.

Racism itself might not be as dead as conservative pundits insist. It has just been driven further underground. Some have so thoroughly convinced themselves that political animus towards the poor and minorities is not racist, that if liberals even raise the subject, it must be liberals who are the racists. I guess it is a kind of progress that people work so hard at painting themselves as anything but.
During early voting here, a Republican electioneer got into my wife’s face and accused her of being a racist for offering sample ballots and Democratic materials to black voters.

In a conversation overheard recently, two conservative men were discussing their dislike for Barack Obama. It wasn’t that he was black, no. They had no problem with a black president even. It was that Obama’s actions as president were so radical, so in your face and overreaching. One got the distinct impression that his doing anything at all made him radical.

So it goes.

*Dennis is off this week so I’m reprising this Veteran’s Day post from a few years back  — d




Saturday Night At The Movies


The worst years of our lives

By Dennis Hartley

The bad news bearers: Harrelson and Foster in The Messenger

Well, it took long enough. Someone has finally made a film that gets the harrowing national nightmare of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars right. Infused with sharp writing, smart and unobtrusive direction and compelling performances, The Messenger is one of those insightful observations of the human condition that quietly sneaks up and really gets inside you, staying with you long after the credits roll. This is easily one of the best films I have seen this year (and one of the few with real substance). First-time director Owen Moverman and co-writer Alessandro Camon not only bring the war(s) home, but they then proceed to march up your driveway and deposit in on your doorstep. Quite literally.

Knock, knock.

“The Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret that your (son, daughter, husband, wife) (died/was killed in action) in (country/state) on (date). The Secretary extends his deepest sympathy to you and your family in your tragic loss.”

Those are words that no one ever wants to hear, and I can’t imagine any job in the world that could possibly be any worse than being the person assigned to deliver that message. “There’s no such thing as a satisfied customer,” deadpans Casualty Notification Officer Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson) to his new apprentice, Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), who is emotionally shattered by his virgin encounter with bereaved “NOK”.

Sgt. Montgomery is a decorated, recently returned Iraq War vet whose enlistment is almost up. Although he accepts this one last thankless assignment with the stoic obedience expected from a professional soldier, he appears to privately suffer from PTSD; a condition that makes an odd bedfellow with his new responsibilities. Stone is a hardass, a cynical careerist who carries a fair share of personal baggage himself. When he bluntly asks Montgomery if he is “a head case” right after meeting him, you suspect that this may be a case of “it takes one to know one”. Stone (and Harrelson’s portrayal) is reminiscent of SM1 “Bad Ass” Buddusky, Jack Nicholson’s character in The Last Detail.

In fact, there is a lot about this film that reminds me of those episodic, naturalistic character studies that directors like Hal Ashby and Bob Rafaelson used to turn out back in the 70s; giving their actors plenty of room to breathe and inhabit their characters in a very real and believable manner. A subplot involving a relationship between Montgomery and a recently widowed Army wife (Samantha Morton) strongly recalled one of my all-time favorite sleepers from that particular era and style of filmmaking, Mark Rydell’s Cinderella Liberty (worth seeking out, if you have never seen it, BTW).

Although the filmmakers hold back from making any overt political statements, the notification scenes in the film say it all-we continue to ship scores of young American men and women overseas whole of limb and spirit, and return many of them home sans either or both (or in a box)…and for what justifiable reason, exactly? And as heartbreaking, gut-wrenching and hard to watch as these scenes are-I am sure they pale in comparison to the agony of those families and loved ones who have answered the door and received that news for real. In fact, I’ll take this one step further. I challenge anyone out there who feels we “need” to dig ourselves in deeper into our present Middle East quagmire to watch this film, reassess their justifications, and get back to me. Go. I’ll wait.



All power to the people

























And speaking of lost causes… there’s a fascinating new documentary making the rounds that you might want to keep an eye out for. William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe is a sometimes stirring, sometimes confounding but ultimately moving portrait of the iconoclastic and controversial defense lawyer who was sort of the Zelig of the radical Left throughout most of the 1970s. Somehow, he became THE key legal champion for the Chicago 7, The Black Panther Party, anti-war activist Father Daniel Berrigan, the American Indian Movement and the ill-fated inmates who initiated the Attica prison riots.

However, beginning sometime in the 1980s (for reasons known only to himself, or perhaps just merely in keeping with the inherently contrarian nature of a defense lawyer) he slowly but surely turned to The Dark Side (at least in the opinion, and to the chagrin, of many of his professional cohorts and former “co-conspirators”). He started to take on high-profile cases involving clients who were, well, decidedly less sexy to the dedicated followers of fashionable radical chic; terrorists (including the chief planner of the first World Trade Center attack and the man accused of murdering Rabbi Kahane), mobsters (John Gotti and other Gambino family associates), notorious murderers (L.I. Railroad killer Colin Ferguson) and rapists (the Central Park jogger assault case)-to name a couple.

The filmmakers may have more personal reasons than anyone else to be stymied by this apparent mass of contradictions that constituted Kunstler’s persona, and are arguably the best qualified to take a stab at earnest analysis-because after all, he was their Dad. Luckily for us, Emily and Sarah Kunstler were precociously budding filmmakers from an early age; they were able to capture a lot of wonderfully un-self conscious vintage home movie moments from a man who was almost always otherwise playing to the news cameras with the Right Profile and the Grand Gesture. These moments temper the usual talking heads reminiscences and archival news footage in a unique fashion, adding an unusually intimate element to the film. To their credit, they don’t sugarcoat that they were truly horrified by some of their father’s professional choices (not to mention the fact that some of those choices precipitated some all-too-real death threats against the family).

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Kunstler’s eventual decision to seemingly pull any defendant’s name out of the Fuckit Bucket and give it his all, regardless of the political correctness involved, the real takeaway you get from the film is the same one his daughters touchingly acknowledge in the denouement-there’s never anything wrong with making a stand against social injustice, even if you’re the only one who perceives it may be taking place. This point is brought home beautifully when Emily and Sarah remind us that the young African Americans who were originally brought to trial in the 1989 Central Park jogger case, roundly vilified in the media and vigorously defended by their father were exonerated in 2002, when DNA linked a murderer to the rape. And so it goes.

Previous posts with related themes:

Stop-Loss

Lions for Lambs

Chicago 10


Dennis Hartley

“The why is elusive”

by digby

Are people aware that four of the five kids who were shot in that school shooting near Seattle a couple of weeks ago died one by one since it happened?

I don’t think anyone but the locals are following this story anymore but it’s truly awful. Only one victim survived:

A fourth victim shot by a classmate at Marysville-Pilchuck High School has died at Harborview Medical Center.

Andrew Fryberg, 15, died Friday evening. He had been in critical condition in the intensive care unit at Harborview in Seattle since the shooting two weeks ago.

Fryberg is the fifth student to die, including Jaylen Fryberg, who shot his friends Oct. 24 in the school cafeteria before fatally shooting himself. Zoe Galasso, 14, died that day in the cafeteria. Gia Soriano, 14, died at Everett’s Providence Regional Medical Center two days later, and Shaylee Chuckulnaskit, 14, died at Providence a week after the shooting…

Nate Hatch, the fifth person shot, was released from Harborview on Thursday after undergoing surgery to repair his jaw. The three boys were cousins and enrolled members of the Tulalip Tribes.

It’s been non-stop horror ever since the shooting. And nobody knows why it happened. The story of this kid just doesn’t explain it. It’s like a perfectly normal kid just went nuts one day.

The five students targeted in Friday’s shooting at Marysville-Pilchuck High School were invited to the cafeteria by the freshman who shot them, authorities revealed Monday.

The 15-year-old shooter, Jaylen Fryberg, texted the other students on Friday morning asking them to all meet him for lunch, Snohomish County Sheriff Ty Trenary said during a news conference in Everett.

Once the five were seated at a round table in the school’s main cafeteria, Fryberg opened fire with a handgun, fatally shooting two and wounding three others before taking his own life.

The .40-caliber Beretta handgun used by Fryberg was legally purchased, registered and owned by one of the teen’s relatives, Trenary said.

Trenary said investigators with the Snohomish Multi-Agency Response Team are working to determine how Fryberg obtained the weapon.

He declined to say whether the teen left a suicide message or note, saying investigators were still wading through a “tremendous amount of telephone and text messages.”

The investigation could take months to wrap up and, even then, he said, Fryberg’s motive may never be completely understood.

Described as a “golden boy,” Fryberg was a well-liked member of the football team who a week before the shooting had been crowned freshman homecoming prince. Some believed he could have become a leader of the Tulalip Tribes.

Some students have said he had been experiencing problems with a girl; others indicated he may have had some type of dispute with fellow students. But the victims who were gunned down were relatives and friends of Fryberg’s.

“The question everybody wants is why and quite candidly I don’t know the why is something we can provide,” Trenary said.

Investigations into school shootings all over the country have taught that “the why is elusive,” he said.

But we do know the “how”, don’t we? And the “with what.”

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Meanwhile, there’s the New Cold War

by digby

We’ve been doing a lot of political navel gazing these past couple of weeks and haven’t really focused on some of the other things that have happened around the world.  One of the more interesting events has been the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and a couple of interesting speeches from both Vladimir Putin and Mikail Gorbachev.

Putin’s speech was quite amazing. This piece in Salon dissects it in an interesting way all round but I think this gets to the heart of it:

In essence — the speech is long, carefully phrased and difficult to summarize — Putin argues that the New World Order the Bush I administration declared as the Soviet Union collapsed was a fundamental misreading of the moment. It is now a 20-odd-year failure hacks such as Tom Friedman compulsively term the successful spread of neoliberalism in the face of abundant evidence otherwise.

“A unilateral diktat and imposing one’s own models produces the opposite result,” Putin asserted. “Instead of settling conflicts it leads to their escalation, instead of sovereign and stable states we see the growing spread of chaos, and instead of democracy there is support for a very dubious public ranging from open neo-fascists to Islamic radicals.”

Such is Putin’s take on how we got here. His view of where we have to go now is yet more compelling. Our systems of global security are more or less destroyed — “weakened, fragmented, and deformed,” in Putin’s words. In the face of this reality, multipolar cooperation in the service of substantial reconstruction agreements, in which the interests of all sides are honored, is mandatory.

“Given the global situation, it is time to start agreeing on fundamental things,” Putin said. Then:

What could be the legal, political and economic basis for a new world order that would allow for stability and security, while encouraging healthy competition, not allowing the formation of new monopolies that hinder development? It is unlikely that someone could provide absolutely exhaustive, ready-made solutions right now. We will need extensive work with participation by a wide range of governments, global businesses, civil society, and such expert platforms as ours. However, it is obvious that success and real results are only possible if key participants in international affairs can agree on harmonizing basic interests, on reasonable self-restraint, and set the example of positive and responsible leadership. We must clearly identify where unilateral actions end and we need to apply multilateral mechanisms.

It is essential to read this as an attack on the U.S. because it is one. But there is a follow-on recognition not to be missed: This is the speech not of some kind of nostalgic empire builder — Putin dismisses the charge persuasively — but of a man genuinely afraid that the planet is close to tipping into some version of primitive disorder. Absent less adversarial international relations, we reach a moment of immense peril.

That speech is especially interesting in light of the other speech by Gorbachev in which he said this:

The 83-year-old accused the West, particularly the United States, of giving in to “triumphalism” after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the communist bloc a quarter century ago. The result, he said, could partly be seen in the inability of global powers to prevent or resolve conflicts in Yugoslavia, the Middle East and most recently Ukraine.

“The world is on the brink of a new Cold War. Some are even saying that it’s already begun,” Gorbachev said at an event marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, close to the city’s iconic Brandenburg Gate.

Apparently, Gorbachev has been feeling this way for a while. This piece in Huffington Post explains:

Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Gorbachev could not be more different as leaders. But they are both proud Russians who don’t think their nation is getting its due. They are like “ bent twigs springing back after being stepped on,” in the phrase Isaiah Berlin used to describe how resentment and aggressive nationalism are rooted in the backlash against humiliation.

Here is what Gorbachev told me in 2005:

Americans have treated us without proper respect. Russia is a serious partner. We are a country with a tremendous history, with diplomatic experience. It is an educated country that has contributed much to science.

The Soviet Union used to be not just an adversary but also a partner of the West. There was some balance in that system. Even though the U.S. and Europe signed a charter for a new Europe, the Charter of Paris, to demonstrate that a new world was possible, that charter was ignored and political gains were pursued to take advantage of the vacuum. The struggle for spheres of influence — contrary to the new thinking we propounded — was resumed by the U.S. The first result was the crisis in Yugoslavia in which NATO was brought in to gain advantage over Russia.
We were ready to build a new security architecture for Europe. But after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact, NATO forgot all its promises. It became more of a political than a military organization. NATO decided it would be an organization that intervenes anywhere on “humanitarian grounds.” We have by now seen intervention not only in Yugoslavia, but in Iraq — intervention without any mandate or permission from the United Nations.

So much for the new thinking of 20 years ago the West so eagerly embraced when I announced it.

I do not find these attitudes surprising and it’s not because Vladimir Putin is hostile to America although he is. And Gorbachev has a point. Any country whose leaders strut about declaring itself “the essential nation” and exempting itself from international laws and norms by evoking its own “exceptionalism” is going to face that kind of criticism sooner or later. There is a price to be paid for unilateralism even if your heart is pure (and even if you cover it with figleaves like “coalitions of the willing.”) In the eyes of others it often looks like domination. The Russians are not a good gauge of such thinking, of course, but it’s still worth keeping in mind. Other people don’t understand that in our country we have decided that our leaders’ rhetoric is completely irrelevant. They still think they’re saying something when they speak.

I’d urge you to read this piece at least which offers a fascinating retrospective of US, Russian and European leaders on the events that led to the fall of the Wall. It was more accidental than I realized but then most big historical events feature a large element of chance.

Perhaps most interesting to me is the fact that Margaret Thatcher sounds like total lunatic, pretty much writing off Germany for all time because of the “character of its people,” and accusing them of a racism that could never exist in England. She said this in 1995! George Bush Sr, on the other hand, comes off like a smart diplomat who understood that American “triumphalism” would lead to bad ends — in that moment anyway.

It’s a time capsule worth reading if you’re interested in such things.

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Torture: no brainer-no biggie

by digby

Jason Leopold of VICE News says he’s got a hold of the Executive Summary of the Torture Report. Here’s a little excerpt of Leopold’s story:

Feinstein has said her committee’s report is the “definitive review” of the CIA’s interrogation program. But neither the committee nor the CIA have records of the briefings former CIA Director George Tenet and other CIA officials gave to committee leaders in 2002 and 2003, when the CIA said the interrogation program started, according to people familiar with the Senate study.

The committee’s executive summary, however, singles out Michael Hayden, who became CIA director in 2006 and is a staunch defender of the use of EITs. He is accused of lying to the panel during a briefing nearly a decade ago when he sought to revamp the CIA’s interrogation program.

People familiar with the executive summary said the committee obtained records about Hayden’s briefings and carefully reviewed what he told committee members. The report concludes that the former CIA director erroneously told the committee that there were fewer than 100 detainees held captive by the CIA when in fact that number was higher. (The committee’s full report says the CIA detained 119 men). Hayden is also criticized for telling the committee that the enhanced interrogation program was “humane.” The committee’s report concludes that Hayden misrepresented the scope of the program and was not being truthful. Hayden did not respond to VICE News’ request for comment.

Other former CIA officials singled out for criticism in the executive summary include James Pavitt, the CIA’s former deputy director of operations who resigned in 2004; John McLaughlin, a veteran CIA official who served as deputy director and acting director after Tenet resigned; John Rizzo, the CIA’s former general counsel; and Jose Rodriguez, the Director of the National Clandestine Service who ordered the destruction of more than 90 interrogation videotapes, one of which showed a high-value captive being waterboarded. The destruction of the videotapes is what led the Senate Intelligence Committee to launch its review in March 2009.

Although he is identified in the Senate report, the committee did not level any criticism against Stephen Kappes, who was deputy director of the CIA while the interrogation program was up and running. Kappes allegedly played a role in covering up the death of a detainee who froze to death in 2002 at a CIA operated prison in Afghanistan called the “Salt Pit.” The death of the detainee is highlighted in the Senate report.

Kappes had been Feinstein’s choice to head the CIA after Barack Obama was sworn in as president in 2009. Feinstein is on record stating she would not support Panetta’s nomination unless Kappes was named as his deputy, a position he served in until 2010. One former CIA official said Kappes is “Feinstein’s boy,” suggesting that he was spared criticism because of his close relationship with the Intelligence Committee chairwoman.

The committee’s executive summary also accuses the CIA of interfering with Congress’s oversight during the early days of the program by refusing to turn over documents and refusing to grant some committee members access to the black site prisons it operated. But former CIA officials said the agency’s refusals were based on orders it received from the Bush White House.

Sadly, this will likely lead to even greater respect in the Village for the torturers. Hayden will continue to make huge sums of money sharing all his “knowledge” with the private sector (which is like, totally ok and nothing like what those awful reporters did in publishing that “knowledge” for the public to see.) He will be invited into decent company as if he’s some kind of patriotic hero. But then Dick Cheney is still considered a respected elder statesman and he has publicly called the decision to employ water-boarding a “no-brainer”.

The lesson will be that any torture they deem necessary in the future must be legalized by the congress — which shouldn’t be a problem. It rarely is.

Also too, read Emptywheel’s treatment of this bizarre story in the NYT from a week ago which was ostensibly about President Obama’s crisis management. Here’s the excerpt:

Over the Columbus Day weekend, the White House chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, traveled to the San Francisco home of Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to negotiate personally over redactions in a Senate report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation policies after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

That Mr. McDonough would get involved in such an arcane matter puzzles some legislative aides on Capitol Hill, given the other demands on his time.
[snip]
Some liberals have been deeply disappointed with Mr. Obama’s slowness in embracing the Senate report, and have questioned Mr. McDonough’s involvement in redacting it, noting his close ties to the C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, with whom he served as a deputy national security adviser during the president’s first term. Mr. McDonough said he traveled to Mrs. Feinstein’s home because he views the role of Congress in foreign policy as sacrosanct.

“This is an important case study of the role of Congress in foreign policy,” he said, “and I want to get it right.”

Marcy writes:

Forgive me if you spat up your drink, reading about McDonough’s deep respect for Congress’ “sacrosanct” role in foreign policy. What a load of baloney!

But of course McDonough needed to provide an alternate explanation for the real one — the one that explains why McDonough’s investment in the torture report is no surprise.

President Obama’s White House has been heavily involved in the torture declassification process for years, since when National Security Advisor James Jones intervened to keep a short phrase secret making it clear torture was authorized by a Presidential finding, not by OLC memos. This is more of the same (and probably arises out of precisely the same instincts). That’s not in the least news, even if the NYT hasn’t acknowledged what is going on.

The headline for this story should be, “BREAKING White House intervening to protect torture.” Instead, the NYT has taken a No Drama Obama story and turned into a demand for MOAR PANIC.

And this should make your day:

When the Bush administration revealed in 2005 that it was secretly interpreting a treaty ban on “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” as not applying to C.I.A. and military prisons overseas, Barack Obama, then a newly elected Democratic senator from Illinois, joined in a bipartisan protest.

Mr. Obama supported legislation to make it clear that American officials were legally barred from using cruelty anywhere in the world. And in a Senate speech, he said enacting such a statute “acknowledges and confirms existing obligations” under the treaty, the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

But the Obama administration has never officially declared its position on the treaty, and now, President Obama’s legal team is debating whether to back away from his earlier view. It is considering reaffirming the Bush administration’s position that the treaty imposes no legal obligation on the United States to bar cruelty outside its borders, according to officials who discussed the deliberations on the condition of anonymity.

What a good idea, especially since ISIS is consciously using these torture methods as we speak, sanctimoniously pointing to the US precedent as their phony excuse. Let’s give them some more ammunition. Excellent idea.

Meanwhile we have gobbldeygook like this coming from the administration:

Bernadette Meehan, a National Security Council spokeswoman, said Mr. Obama’s opposition to torture and cruel interrogations anywhere in the world was clear, separate from the legal question of whether the United Nations treaty applies to American behavior overseas.

“We are considering that question, and other questions posed by the committee, carefully as we prepare for the presentation in November,” Ms. Meehan said. “But there is no question that torture and cruel treatment in armed conflict are clearly and categorically prohibited in all places.”

So it’s prohibited. Also wrong. But maybe not illegal. Basically, nobody should do it but if they do they shouldn’t be punished for it. Because, well, they just shouldn’t.

Let’s hope the civilized members of the administration win this one.

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Dr. Carson throws his tin foil hat into the ring

by digby

It’s very tempting to think that Dr. Ben Carson’s presidential run will be a joke along the lines of Herman Cain or Michele Bachman. And maybe it will be. But this is bound to impress a lot of people at least in the beginning because it’s impressive as hell:

Following an ABC News report that Fox News contributor Ben Carson is set to air an hourlong ad/documentary* “introducing himself to the American people” as part of a 2016 Republican presidential bid, Fox News has cut ties with him, according to aFox spokeswoman. The video is titled “A Breath of Fresh Air: A New Prescription for America” and, according to ABC News, will be heavily biographical, addressing Carson’s “rise from being born to a single mother with a poor childhood in Detroit to director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins for almost 40 years, known for his work separating conjoined twins.”

I wrote about Carson at Salon a while back. He is a very accomplished person.

He is also political nut who makes Cain and Bachman look like Howard Baker and Everett Dirkson by comparison.

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Don’t worry ladies, it will never happen to you

by digby

Well, hopefully:

WITH the success of Republicans in the midterm elections and the passage of Tennessee’s anti-abortion amendment, we can expect ongoing efforts to ban abortion and advance the “personhood” rights of fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses.

But it is not just those who support abortion rights who have reason to worry. Anti-abortion measures pose a risk to all pregnant women, including those who want to be pregnant.

Such laws are increasingly being used as the basis for arresting women who have no intention of ending a pregnancy and for preventing women from making their own decisions about how they will give birth.

How does this play out? Based on the belief that he had an obligation to give a fetus a chance for life, a judge in Washington, D.C., ordered a critically ill 27-year-old woman who was 26 weeks pregnant to undergo a cesarean section, which he understood might kill her. Neither the woman nor her baby survived.

In Iowa, a pregnant woman who fell down a flight of stairs was reported to the police after seeking help at a hospital. She was arrested for “attempted fetal homicide.”

In Utah, a woman gave birth to twins; one was stillborn. Health care providers believed that the stillbirth was the result of the woman’s decision to delay having a cesarean. She was arrested on charges of fetal homicide.

In Louisiana, a woman who went to the hospital for unexplained vaginal bleeding was locked up for over a year on charges of second-degree murder before medical records revealed she had suffered a miscarriage at 11 to 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Florida has had a number of such cases. In one, a woman was held prisoner at a hospital to prevent her from going home while she appeared to be experiencing a miscarriage. She was forced to undergo a cesarean. Neither the detention nor the surgery prevented the pregnancy loss, but they did keep this mother from caring for her two small children at home. While a state court later found the detention unlawful, the opinion suggested that if the hospital had taken her prisoner later in her pregnancy, its actions might have been permissible.

In another case, a woman who had been in labor at home was picked up by a sheriff, strapped down in the back of an ambulance, taken to a hospital, and forced to have a cesarean she did not want. When this mother later protested what had happened, a court concluded that the woman’s personal constitutional rights “clearly did not outweigh the interests of the State of Florida in preserving the life of the unborn child.”

Anti-abortion reasoning has also provided the justification for arresting pregnant women who experience depression and have attempted suicide. A 22-year-old in South Carolina who was eight months pregnant attempted suicide by jumping out a window. She survived despite suffering severe injuries. Because she lost the pregnancy, she was arrested and jailed for the crime of homicide by child abuse.

There is no way to escape the logic that if you assume that a blastocyst is a full human being with all the rights conferred by “personhood” then this is a possible consequence.

No, it probably won’t happen every time a woman miscarries. But it could happen. And it could be you or your daughter or your best friend or your wife.

The risk of pregnancy is going up and up and up in this country.

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