Month: November 2014

Pearl clutching strategists run screaming to the press

by digby

Oh good lord. If the Democratic Party wants to know what’s wrong with the Democratic Party it isn’t the “professional left” or the “emoprogs” it’s the institutional Democrats who run to press and whine like infants every time the Party looks like it’s about to an election — even if it was entirely predictable and is completely reversible 2 years later:

In conversations this past week with more than a dozen Democratic strategists deeply involved in this campaign — a few who were willing to speak on the record — there was widespread pessimism about the party’s chances Tuesday:

“Challenging,” acknowledged Ali Lapp, executive director of the House Majority PAC, a super PAC spending millions of dollars on ads to promote House Democrats, referring to the national dynamic

“It’s a very challenging environment,” agreed Penny Lee, a Democratic lobbyist and longtime political aide to former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell.

“Unsettled,” offered Democratic pollster Fred Yang.

“The trends are not good,” said Steve Rosenthal, a veteran Democratic and labor strategist.

There were lots (and lots) of reasons given for the difficulties Democrats are facing: The Senate map. The historic trends of second-term, midterm elections — a.k.a. the “six-year itch.” Voter apathy. But the one factor that virtually every person I talked to cited as the biggest reason for the party’s predicament was President Obama.

Whatever. I’m sure their next bit of sage advice will be for the President to pass the Tea party agenda as soon as possible. But could they at least STFU until people actually vote?

And anyway, as @DonnaDiva pointed out on twitter, aren’t these the people who are paid big bucks to win elections? Maybe they ought to take a look in the mirror.

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Is the DCCC even pretending to win? A Tale of Two New Hampshires

by Gaius Publius

I’ve written several times about how corporate-controlled Democratic party leaders are “Tea-Partying” progressives — here and here — sacrificing wins over Republicans for wins over progressives. This, from DWT, is a prime example — I call it “A Tale of Two New Hampshires” (my paragraphing and bolding):

I got another email from “Nancy Pelosi” (read: the DCCC) this morning on behalf of New Hampshire conservative New Dem Ann Kuster. She’s in the D+3 district that Obama won with 54% in 2012, not in the district next door that has a PVI of R+1 and which Obama only won with 50%. That’s the district Carol Shea-Porter has.

Kuster, who ran as a grassroots populist, sold out to Big Business the second she got to Congress, quitting the Congressional Progressive Caucus and joining the Wall Street owned and operated New Dems. Shea-Porter, on the other hand, is a portrait of integrity and a rare example of genuine virtue in Congress. So, of course the DCCC is putting their resources behind Kuster instead of Shea-Porter.

There are just two districts in NH, and the contrast in these races is striking. Never-punished former–”bold progressive” and current–New Dem Kuster runs in a D+3 district, and reliable progressive Shea-Porter runs in an  R+1 district. Who’s more at risk? The progressive, Shea-Porter. So where is DCCC money going? To the corporatist, Ann Kuster. (Think she’s not a corporatist? Start here.)

Now look at the polling:

The latest polling shows both Democrats leading their crazy Republican opponents– Shea-Porter narrowly, Kuster handily, reflections of the partisan makeup of the two districts.

The WMUR poll released Wednesday shows that when leaners are included, Kuster is ahead 53 to 30%. … They released a poll for NH-01 that same day and it is much tighter, Carol Shea-Porter ahead of Tea Party extremist and former Congressman Frank Guinta, 44 to 40% (including leaners). 

So just on the merits — assuming they do want to retain Democratic seats — which would the DCCC choose to back? Which would you choose to back? The candidate leading by 23 points or the one ahead only four? The DCCC chose the former; they put their money into the 23-points-ahead race and stiffed the progressive in the much-closer contest. This raises the question once again: Is this organization trying to win House seats or just rid its ranks of progressives?

Read the rest; DCCC dollars are mentioned as well. If Shea-Porter loses, whom would she have to blame? I say the DCCC, who would rather lose a House seat (or a dozen of them) than let a solid progressive like Shea-Porter win. Yet these are the people who are desperate for you, Mr. and Ms. Progressive, to give them money so they can … what?

It’s a fair question and deserves an answer. Based on behavior, what is the institutional goal of the DCCC? And while you’re pondering this question, consider another. If an organization — in this case, the corporate leadership of the Democratic party — doesn’t want itself to succeed, what’s the point of you helping them? Especially if that group hates you.

By all means, back progressives like Carol Shea-Porter. (Please back progressives like Carol Shea-Porter.) But when money-bought corporate types lose, don’t feel bad about not supporting them, even if it costs the party as a whole. It may surprise you to learn this, but it’s not your party until you take it back — it’s theirs. They control it, and they’re responsible for it.

As Richard Eskow told me in a recent interview (paraphrasing):

How much more fair can I be? I’m giving you [party leaders] two years notice. Give me a candidate I can support.

That’s what it means to “re-perp the perp.” If the Democrats won’t give you someone to vote for, it’s not your fault if you don’t vote for them — it’s theirs. They’re the perp in the story, not you.

More after the election. I’m not letting this go and neither should you, not with a neoliberal sun set to rise on the 2016 horizon. If you haven’t noticed, the president elected in 2016 has the last clear shot at truly addressing climate in the U.S., as opposed to just appearing to, or handing us Big Green–sponsored half-measures* like switching to methane for power production.

Which, if you care about climate, makes 2016 our last clear shot as well.

GP

* “Half-measures” — The proposed EPA regulations have us switching from coal and oil to “natural gas,” methane, a CO2-producing “bridge” fuel, instead of retiring carbon altogether in favor of 100% renewables. To understand why that’s a problem, imagine a fire in your house, and when the firefighters show up, they douse it with a less flammable “bridge fuel” instead of just … putting it completely out.

Now imagine the Fire Department is run by a company that sells the bridge fuel. Voilà methane and Obama’s proposed regulations.

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Seeing is believing?


by Tom Sullivan

Rachel Maddow this morning has a Washington Post op-ed about the biennial fear fest that so conveniently comes on the heels of Halloween. This year’s popular ghoulies: “Ebola, the Islamic State, vague but nefarious aspersions about stolen elections and a whole bunch of terrifying fantasies about our border with Mexico.” Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), for example, claimed “at least 10 ISIS fighters” were captured sneaking into Texas from Mexico. No one has seen them, but that is no proof they don’t exist.

About those “vague but nefarious aspersions”:

And in the conservative media, there is even more to worry about. Conservative blogs lost their minds recently over a surveillance video showing a Latino man delivering completed ballots to an elections office in Maricopa County, Ariz. Ballot stuffing! Blatant fraud! Caught red-handed! 

Actually, delivering other people’s ballots to elections offices is perfectly legal in Arizona. Even Republicans have asked Arizonans to bring their early ballots to campaign events this year, so they could be collected and dropped off at polling places. But when the person doing the same thing was Latino, the blogs made it seem like the guy was hiding under the bed, ready to grab your foot if you got up in the night.

The “voter fraud” fraud works like that, and from some of the same con artists who told repeated lies until two-thirds of the country believed Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks and had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Even after nothing was found, people believed. Because they’d become complicit in perpetuating the fraud. In the Arizona video, like James O’Keefe’s videos, the eyes believe they saw something they didn’t. It reminded me of this sleight-of-hand demonstration where Teller of Penn and Teller describes how people trying to read others’ intentions “aid and abet the trick”:

“Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” ― Benjamin Franklin
“People say believe half of what you see. Son, and none of what you hear.” ― Marvin Gaye

The Man Called Petraeus knows whereof he speaks

by digby

What’s that old saying about a conservative being a liberal who’s been mugged and a liberal being a conservative who’s been arrested? Well, what would you call a CIA chief who’s privacy has been invaded:

The former head of the Central Intelligence Agency is cautioning Canadian officials to keep in mind the delicate balance between security and privacy when crafting new laws.

In an interview with CBC Radio’s The House, retired U.S. general and former CIA director David Petraeus said that balance should be at the heart of an open and transparent debate.

“The general thrust of this always has to be, again, to strike that proper balance between taking measures that, at the end of the day, are in some cases intrusive, that is what surveillance is all about after all, and yet allow the freedoms as much as is absolutely possible, to the citizens of a country that prizes those freedoms greatly,” he said.

Following the tabling this week of a bill that would give the Canadian Security Intelligence Service more powers, the government has promised that there’s more security legislation coming. Already, critics, including Canada’s privacy commissioner, have warned the government not to go too far.

No, the General isn’t exactly climbing over the barricades to dismantle the NSA but he doesn’t sound like Panetta, Alexander or Hayden either, all of whom would be lecturing the Canadians about keeping the babies safe from the boogeyman.

Maybe he would have always spoken this way but you have to wonder if the fact that details of his private life were poured all over the media might have made him just a teensy bit skeptical of government spying power. Was it absolutely necessary for the FBI to go as far as they did with that tawdry business? I don’t know. But I do know that if it happened to you or to me we wouldn’t like it. If your sex life isn’t private then nothing is.

And, by the way, we’re a long way from “balance” right now.

“Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, [Alexander’s] approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack,’ ” said one former senior U.S. intelligence official who tracked the plan’s implementation. “Collect it all, tag it, store it. . . . And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”

None of that has changed. That’s the program. Note the “whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”

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“All governments must protect the ability of journalists to write and speak freely”

by digby

This is very special:

The White House
Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release November 02, 2014 

Statement by the President on the First-Annual International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists

History shows that a free press remains a critical foundation for prosperous, open, and secure societies, allowing citizens to access information and hold their governments accountable. Indeed, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reiterates the fundamental principle that every person has the right “to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Each and every day, brave journalists make extraordinary risks to bring us stories we otherwise would not hear – exposing corruption, asking tough questions, or bearing witness to the dignity of innocent men, women and children suffering the horrors of war. In this service to humanity, hundreds of journalists have been killed in the past decade alone, while countless more have been harassed, threatened, imprisoned, and tortured. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, the perpetrators of these crimes against journalists go unpunished.

All governments must protect the ability of journalists to write and speak freely. On this first-ever International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, the United States commends the priceless contributions by journalists to the freedom and security of us all, shining light into the darkness and giving voice to the voiceless. We honor the sacrifices so many journalists have made in their quest for the truth, and demand accountability for those who have committed crimes against journalists.

Well, some of the time anyway.

In a speech today in Washington, AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt [said]:

The actions of the DOJ against AP are already having an impact beyond the specifics of this case. Some longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking with us — even on stories unrelated to national security. In some cases, government employees we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone. Others are reluctant to meet in person.

In one instance, our journalists could not get a law enforcement official to confirm a detail that had been reported elsewhere.

Imagine: officials were so fearful of talking to AP they wouldn’t even confirm a fact that had already been reported by numerous other media.

And I can tell you that this chilling effect on newsgathering is not just limited to AP. Journalists from other news organizations have personally told me that it has intimidated both official and nonofficial sources from speaking to them as well.

Now, the government may love this. But beware a government that loves too much secrecy.

There is this too, coming at that press freedom from the other diretion:

[T]he Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else since the American Revolution. It’s important – and telling – to note that the bulk of that time is the 35 years in Fort Leavenworth handed down to Chelsea Manning.

It takes a bit of digging to find all this information. As my public service for the day, here’s a rundown of every leak case, the sentence (if there was one), and its current disposition.

Pre-Obama Cases

Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo (1973). Famous national security whistleblowers prosecuted for releasing the Pentagon Papers. Sentence: Charges dropped after revelations that President Nixon’s henchmen burglarized Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst looking for dirt and tried to bribe the judge in their case with the directorship of the FBI.

Samuel Morison (1985). Naval analyst who sent pictures of the Soviet navy to Jane’s Fighting Ships, a reference book on the world’s warships. Sentence: 24 months. He was subsequently pardoned by President Clinton, despite CIA objection.

Larry Franklin (2005). Pentagon analyst charged with leaking Iran-related intelligence material to lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Sentence: 10 months at a halfway house and 100 hours of community service.

Obama Cases

Thomas Drake (2010). NSA whistleblower. Revealed waste at the agency in connection with the Trailblazer Project. Sentence: All espionage charges were later dropped, and Drake pled guilty to a misdemeanor. He was sentenced to a year of probation. The judge called the government’s conduct in the case “unconscionable.”

Shamai Leibowitz (2010). Orthodox Jewish FBI translator, concerned about ill-considered Israeli airstrike against Iran, revealed U.S. spying against Israeli diplomats to blogger. Sentence: 20 months. Amazingly, the sentencing judge said, “I don’t know what was divulged other than some documents, and how it compromised things, I have no idea.”

Chelsea Manning (2013). Wikileaks. Sentence: 420 months (35 years). As noted, it’s heaviest sentence in history, almost twenty times the pre-Obama record.

John Kiriakou (2013). CIA analyst and case officer. Kiriakou was the whistleblower who revealed the secret CIA torture program. Sentence: 30 months.

Donald Sachtleben (2013). FBI agent and contractor alleged to have disclosed to the Associated Press details of a disrupted Yemen-based bomb plot. The wildly overbroad subpoena the Justice Department sent to the AP as a follow-up made national headlines. Sentence: 43 months. Longest ever imposed in civilian court.

Stephen Kim (2014). State Department advisor who disclosed information about North Korea’s plans to test a nuclear bomb to a Fox News reporter. The reporter was investigated by the FBI as a possible “co-conspirator” for mere act of newsgathering. Sentence: 13 months.

Jeffrey Sterling (case pending). Alleged to have been James Risen’s source.

Edward Snowden (case pending). Revealed secret law allowing wholesale, covert surveillance of innocent people by the NSA. Charges against him carry decades in prison.

Wow. That’s a long list. And as we’re now waging a new war we are told could take years, it’s a list that will only get longer.

With all due respect to the administration, this trend line should be going in the opposite direction. The modern national security state is more powerful than ever – more powerful even than during the Cold War. It demands democratic accountability. The last and best source of that accountability is a free press.

And remember this?

The head of the embattled National Security Agency, Gen. Keith Alexander, is accusing journalists of “selling” his agency’s documents and is calling for an end to the steady stream of public disclosures of secrets snatched by former contractor Edward Snowden.

“I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000—whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these—you know it just doesn’t make sense,” Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department’s “Armed With Science” blog.

“We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on,” the NSA director declared.

That’s a lot of respect for journalists and the first amendment.

I guess nobody really cares about any of this. We’re (probably) about to see Mark Udall get kicked out of the Senate at the hands of some authoritarian neanderthal. Still it’s shameful to see the White House offer up sanctimonious lectures about press freedom when they’ve been busily eroding one of America’s few values that actually stood out as being unique in this world — the values of 1st Amendment.

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The 51%

by digby

Ann Coulter sez: “If they can get the bottom 51 percent of voters in terms of knowledge and IQ, they’re perfectly happy. I can fool 51 percent of the people, that’s enough to win. And hopefully, we’ll overcome that.”

She seems to be talking about women voters.

She famously believes that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote so that’s nothing new:

I think [women] should be armed but should not vote … women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it … it’s always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care.

It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. In fact, in every presidential election since 1950 — except Goldwater in ’64 — the Republican would have won, if only the men had voted.

If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women.

Yes, yes, I know she’s a clown. But she’s a popular clown and to a certain kind of younger GOP voter an avatar of the modern Republican woman. Think about that.

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Here comes the CW

by digby

This from Vox is representative:

Keeping the Senate was always going to be a challenge for Democrats this year, since they were defending so many seats in deep red states. But losses in Iowa and Colorado, swing states that Obama twice won, will be tougher to explain away if they transpire. And though Democrats will face a much more favorable map of Senate seats up in 2016, a larger GOP win this year would make it more difficult for the Democrats to regain control next cycle.

No, it’s not tough to explain why a Senate seat in a swing state in an off year election would go to the other party. That’s why they call it a swing state. They swing. It’s heartbreaking to see Harkin’s seat go to a cretin and for a good civil libertarian like Udall to be defeated by a liar but it’s not surprising, not at all.

And no, this election means nothing for 2016. Nothing. It’s a clean slate starting on Wednesday and the presidential race will shape what happens. If the 2010 wave didn’t shift the 2012 race then this one won’t shift the 2016 race either.

There is one consequence of a loss that nobody’s discussing and it’s the most pernicious. When Democrats lose it’s always seen as another sign they should move right. There are many incentives, both financial and political, for the Party to embrace that message and insist that whatever liberalish message they used in the losing campaign was the reason. I could see them deciding to soft-pedal the War on Women and possibly even have Hillary Sistah Soljah the feminists. (I hope not, but if the polling shows that women didn’t break for the Dems in the numbers they expected I could see it happening.)

The only thing that will be surprising on Tuesday is if somehow the Democrats manage to hang on to the majority or lose fewer than expected.

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QOTD: Lawrence Lessig

by digby

On Citizenfour:

[It] is the most hopeful fact about our democracy that exists anywhere today.

The reasons? Not because he thinks anything will change imediately but because of this;

[T]hat this film is playing is the reason there is hope.

There will be plenty who will continue to hate Edward Snowden. There will be plenty who will continue to justify a system that would prosecute him, but not the officials who blatantly lied.

But there is a core who will be moved. And I suspect that if you are a public official on the wrong side of this fight, that core will stand against you. They are young. They still believe. They will catch all the internal references (the EFF sticker; Cory Doctorow’s book). And so far, when they have turned out, they have won.

There is a corruption at the core of our democracy: our democracy rests on ideals; it needs leaders who believe in those ideals; yet ours are “a priesthood that [has] lost their faith [but] kept their jobs.”

They don’t believe in representative democracy any more. That’s why we have the corruption I call Tweedism.

Nor do they believe in liberty anymore. That’s why we have the story told in this film.

But we can see this film.

Which means we may still have the power to do something about it.

Which means there still is a reason to try.

Of course you keep trying. Even if the best you can hope for is to keep them to two steps forward one step back it’s better than completely accepting it — or worse, embracing it. There’s always a tension in our system between our Bill of rights and the natural tendency of authority to try to circumvent them. If the civil libertarians don’t play their part, don’t take it seriously, we’ll go completely off the deep end.

Because we have done it before. There was a time when the government and the film industry colluded to ruin film makers and other artist for their political views. And it wasn’t all that long ago. Nobody should be too sanguine that it can’t happen again.

Election Day wild cards
by Tom Sullivan

Spent some quality time yesterday in the wind and snow and cold electioneering outside a couple of North Carolina early voting locations. It was the last day of early voting and it snowed all day. My wife got a push-poll on Friday knocking Barack Obama and asking if the info would make her more or less likely to vote this year, etc. Republicans here are still running against Obama.

Turnout in North Carolina is way up over 2010. In a blog post considering the impact of the Moral Monday Movement, FishOutofWater writes, “Democratic votes are crushing Republican votes 48.5% to 31.2% with over one million votes accepted.” That’s statewide. Where I live, Democrats are outperforming the GOP and independents in early voting in our county by about 2:1. It’s 49-25-26.

Here’s the catch, according to Michael Bitzer, from the political science department at Catawba College:

One of the key things to consider is the division between urban and rural Democrats: urban Democrats tend to be more liberal than their rural counterparts (in fact, there is still the generation of rural North Carolina Democrats who are generally more conservative and, in all actuality, vote Republican in the voting booth).

Politicos around here know not to trust that all registered Democrats vote for Democrats. Nobody seems to have a good handle on how the independents will break. Still:

Democratic turnout, measured against the same day in 2010, is 24 percent higher, while Republicans have voted slightly above the same level. Of those who have voted early, 49 percent were registered Democrats and 31 percent Republicans.

There has been a stronger showing of African-American voters, 25 percent of the early voting, compared to 20 percent in 2010, which is expected to benefit Hagan.

Unaffiliated and Libertarian voters appear motivated this year. They have cast 1 in 5 of the early ballots, 42 percent more than they did over the same period in 2010. Thirty-two percent of these voters didn’t participate in the 2010 election in the state, Bitzer’s analysis shows.

Another wild card for North Carolina: the GOP eliminated straight-ticket voting this year for the first time since 1925. This will, no doubt, add to lines at the polls:

Black and Democratic voters have long cast more straight-ticket ballots than white and Republicans have. In 2008, Democrats racked up a 401,000-vote cushion among the 2.2 million voters who voted a straight ticket. Elizabeth Dole beat Kay Hagan among those voters who didn’t pull the straight-ticket lever, but that wasn’t enough to dig out of the hole.

In 2012, straight-ticket voters gave Democrats a 308,000-vote lead, including a 78,000-vote edge in Mecklenburg County. Trevor Fuller, now the chairman of the county board of commissioners, actually lost to Michael Hobbs (who?) among voters who assessed each race individually.

Those kinds of numbers surely prompted Republicans to kill the practice, and it seems likely to help the GOP. In Mecklenburg, Democrats in down-ballot races like clerk of court appear to have the most at risk. That will hinge, though, on whether past straight-ticket voters walk out or brave the rest of the ballot.

But another catch. A friend reported that a Republican woman this week sniffed, “I only vote on Election Day.” My friend concluded why: Her voting early would only prove early voting is useful.

The first day of early voting here in North Carolina there were lines at the polls, as there were yesterday. Without straight-ticket voting, people were taking longer in the booths. But with the Democrats’ nominal lead in early turnout numbers, Republicans have to make up a significant difference on Election Day to win. And their older, whiter voters will have to stand in the same lines their party created to do it.

Should the NCGOP lose seats in the legislature on Tuesday and should Kay Hagan keep her seat in the U.S. Senate, count on the NCGOP to attempt to eliminate early voting altogether.

Floating weed: Birdman

Draw this pirate: Art and Craft