Month: November 2014

Ain’t it the truth?


by digby

Via

Troll ‘o the day: An alien from another planet

by digby

The other creepy congressman named King:

“I think it would be very helpful if President Obama went and met with the police officer, or invited him to the White House and said, ‘You’ve gone through four months of smear and slander, and the least we can do is tell you that it’s unfortunate that it happened and thank you for doing your job,’” the New York Republican told Fox Business on Tuesday.

And maybe afterwards they could wave the confederate flag and sing Dixie.

I love the fact that he thinks the president should thank the officer for killing an unarmed teenager. Even Prosecutor McCullough had the decency to call the whole thing a tragedy and say that they should try to take steps that it never happens again.

These people are sick.

Rodney, Trayvon and Michael

by digby

I did a little meditation on Ferguson for Salon this morning. As I watched the broadcast last night and listened to the rambling statement of the prosecutor, it reminded me of an earlier incident:

I remember the night the Rodney King video first surfaced on Los Angeles television like it was yesterday.  In those days you didn’t see videos of police beatings unless a news camera happened to catch it  — video cameras were bulky items that people didn’t carry around with them. That footage of those police beating a man mercilessly, grainy and distant as it was, sent a shock wave though this city and in a very short period that shock wave was felt around the world. But at the time I think that most of white America probably either thought that this man must have “deserved” what he got or, if they were appalled by what they saw, believed the justice system could not ignore such vivid evidence and would have to punish these officers. Black America knew better, of course, but they too held out hope that the video proved what they had been saying for years. 

We all know how that turned out. 

It was one of those stunning events that makes you question some of your basic assumptions.  I thought we had decided as a society that we were not going to allow the police to beat suspects senseless. Yes, people had complained about it and I knew that it happened.  The streets of L.A. were hardly peaceful. But I thought that by the end of the 20th century if the police were caught doing it red-handed there was simply no way they could be exonerated. 

The day the verdict came back everyone in my office gathered around the TV in shock.  And as we looked outside the windows of our high rise building over the next few days we watched plumes of smoke all over South LA multiply by the hour until the mayor finally told everyone to go home and stay there as the city came under Martial Law. I watched Reginald Denny get beaten mercilessly on live TV. The 7-11 on the corner of an apartment I lived in for years was burned to the ground. It felt like L.A. was coming apart.
It didn’t.  

But it didn’t exactly come together either… 

read on …

The police trial in the Rodney King case was thought to be a slam dunk — and when it came back not guilty this city exploded. There was, obviously, a lot of pent-up rage that could no longer be contained. I think people thought if you can’t even convict officers of abuse with a video tape showing the abuse then what’s the point?

The Trayvon Martin case was initially like the Brown case— they didn’t even arrest George Zimmerman at first. But the prosecutors wisely decided to indict him and hold a trial to sort out the evidence in public and let the system work to best of its ability (which isn’t all that great, but it’s better than nothing.) Trayvon’s parents deserved that. Certainly any unarmed citizen who is gunned down deserves that. When the verdict came down, a lot of people weren’t happy. But they at least knew that the system hadn’t been rigged by a prosecutor who didn’t want to prosecute. It’s not much, but it’s something that both Rodney King and the Martin family got, as unsatisfying as it was.

Michael Brown’s family and the community of Ferguson didn’t even get that much.

We’re going backwards, people.

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Celebrating tragedy with snark and idiocy


by digby

Salon collected a few of the choicer wingnut tweets from last night. It’s amazing how people’s true colors, so to speak, come out at times like these. I must say that I’m a little shocked by Brit Hume joining in the fun. He’s a wingnut but I didn’t think nasty snark was his thing:

I don’t know what “facts” or “science” they think we are supposed to accept but that’s not really at issue here, is it?  There is “evidence” and testimony presented to a Grand Jury without any adversarial testing in a court of law by both sides  or a judge to determine its relevance and there is a decision not to indict.  This isn’t CSI with some kind of forensic determination of guilt in the final scene.  But hey, it was a cute line by a couple of bigfoot conservatives who clearly have an ax to grind. Too bad they’re full of shit.

Keep in mind that these people are celebrating the fact that someone who shot and killed an unarmed teenager whose alleged crime was jaywalking and stealing a box of cigarillos was not even indicted. Even if they thought the officer was justified it’s a tragedy that it happened and a travesty that there was no public trial.  Decent people who think that this was a good decision should be decent enough to keep quiet about it right now. There’s nothing to celebrate here.

And, by the way, I think that when it comes to criminal justice it’s fairly clear on what side of the “libertarian” fence the Republicans will fall don’t you? The only time they ever give a damn about police power is when it’s federal or when somebody attempts to take a gun. Other than that they’re with the cops all the way.  If you like authoritarian police power — at least when it comes to killing unarmed citizens — you’ll love being in the GOP.

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Enough is Enough: An “Open Rebellion Caucus” forms in the Senate

by Gaius Publius

As regular readers know, I’ve been a fan of an “Open Rebellion Caucus” among progressive office-holders and insiders — the principled and conscience-led — for a long time. For example, in a pre-election piece titled Are Democratic Leaders Already “Tea Partying” The Progressives? I noted at the end:

“Open Rebellion Caucus” … a group that says No and openly defies corporate Democratic leadership. I believe I’ve seen one forming in the House already. Next time I’ll give an example of a golden opportunity to form an Open Rebellion Caucus in the Senate, an opportunity that was not taken. Stay tuned. 

I’ll come back to the situation in the House another time. That Senate “golden opportunity,” which was lost, occurred in January 2013 when progressive Senators proposed strong filibuster reform — and voted for weak reform — because that’s what the “bipartisan moderates” wanted. (Note: It’s not the progressive loss that I’m calling out; it’s the way pro-reform progressives voted.)

Why does Open Rebellion matter?

Why rebellion — progressive insurgency — against billionaire-controlled Democrats matters could become an essay in itself, and someday it will. But simply put, it matters for two main reasons. One, because conscience matters — yes, that — and two, because there are already cracks in all three layers of the progressive movement buried within the Democratic Party:

Cracks within all three groups are visible if you’re looking for them. I spent a week in Washington recently, selectively and explicitly looking for them. The intra-party war within the first two groups isn’t fully formed, yet, but it could be; the rumbles are loud enough. But among voters, the results appear to be in. When progressive policies are wildly popular as ballot measures, and corporate Democrats are rejected as “no solution at all,” the crack in the base is wide as a canyon and deep as a fracking well.

Now that widening crack is spreading to office-holders.

The “Hell No” caucus targets billionaire-serving Democratic leaders

Our first look at office-holders who refuse to play “follow the neoliberal leader” starts in the Senate. POLITICO noted the formation of a “Hell No” caucus led by people like Sen. Jeff Merkley, but carefully couched it as an anti-Republican group (my emphasis everywhere):

Liberal ‘hell no’ caucus rises

The defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline in the Senate marked a major show of muscle for next year’s new hell-no caucus: liberals. … [R]ed-state Democrats like Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mark Begich of Alaska are on their way out, and liberals like Jeff Merkley, Bernie Sanders and Sheldon Whitehouse — with Elizabeth Warren leading the way on messaging — may cause as many headaches for Senate Republicans as tea partyers caused Democrats in the past four years. …

Here’s that “Hell No” caucus in action, but with a different target. Elizabeth Warren, writing recently at Huffington Post, has this to say about Antonio Weiss, an Obama nominee for a senior post at the Treasury Department. As you read, tell me who she’s taking on, Republicans or her own billionaire-led party leaders:

Enough Is Enough: The President’s Latest Wall Street Nominee

I believe President Obama deserves deference in picking his team, and I’ve generally tried to give him that. But enough is enough.

Last Wednesday, President Obama announced his nomination of Antonio Weiss to serve as Under Secretary for Domestic Finance at the Treasury Department. This is a position that oversees Dodd-Frank implementation and a wide range of banking and economic policymaking issues, including consumer protection.

So who is Antonio Weiss? He’s the head of global investment banking for the financial giant Lazard. He has spent the last 20 years of his career at Lazard — most of it advising on international mergers and acquisitions. …

There’s so much more in Warren’s piece, and I’ll come back to some of it. But she’s taking on the (yes, neoliberal) president of her party, two weeks after an election in which her party lost the majority in her house of Congress to the hated Republicans, and one week after the Republicans said they would up their game against that very president. Has Warren joined the nominal enemy (Republicans), or has she taken the fight to the real enemy that controls both parties — the “billionaire class“?

Warren’s indictment of Obama’s appointment reads like this:

The second issue [with the Weiss nomination] is corporate inversions. Basically, a bunch of companies have decided that all the regular tax loopholes they get to exploit aren’t enough, so they have begun taking advantage of an even bigger loophole that allows them to maintain their operations in America but claim foreign citizenship and cut their U.S. taxes even more. No one is fooled by the bland words “corporate inversion.” These companies renounce their American citizenship and turn their backs on this country simply to boost their profits.

One of the biggest and most public corporate inversions last summer was the deal cut by Burger King to slash its tax bill by purchasing the Canadian company Tim Hortons and then “inverting” the American company to Canadian ownership. And Weiss was right there, working on Burger King’s tax deal. Weiss’ work wasn’t unusual for Lazard. That firm has helped put together three of the last four major corporate inversions that have been announced in the U.S. And like those old Hair Club commercials used to say, Lazard isn’t just the President of the Corporate Loopholes Club — it’s also a client. Lazard moved its own headquarters from the United States to Bermuda in 2005 to take advantage of a particularly slimy tax loophole that was closed shortly afterwards. Even the Treasury Department under the Bush administration found Lazard’s practices objectionable.

The White House and Treasury have strongly denounced inversions, and rightly so. But they undercut their own position by advancing Mr. Weiss.

Notice the word “exploit” above. Warren, here and elsewhere, correctly sees the “billionaire class” as predators, and she’s willing to call out the leaders of her party when those leaders advance predator interests.

[T]here’s the larger, more general issue of Wall Street executives dominating the Obama administration, as well as the Democratic Party’s, overall economic policymaking apparatus. I wrote about this problem a couple of months ago on The Huffington Post in more detail.

Here is what I wrote then:

Just look at the influence of one mega-bank — Citigroup — on our government. Starting with former Citigroup CEO Robert Rubin, three of the last four Treasury secretaries under Democratic presidents held high-paying jobs at Citigroup either before or after serving at Treasury — and the fourth was offered, but declined, Citigroup’s CEO position. Directors of the National Economic Council and Office of Management and Budget, the current Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the U.S. trade representative, also pulled in millions from Citigroup. …

Shortly before the [Eric] Cantor episode, another former member of Congress — Democrat Melissa Bean — took the same senior job at JPMorgan Chase previously held by Democrat Bill Daley before his recent service as White House Chief of Staff. Yes — this is just a single position at JPMorgan Chase, evidently reserved for the latest politician ready to cash in on Wall Street. …

In recent years, President Obama has repeatedly turned to nominees with close Wall Street ties for high-level economic positions. Jack Lew, who was a top Citigroup official, now serves as Treasury Secretary. The President’s choice for Treasury’s highest international position, Nathan Sheets, also comes from Citi. For the number two spot at the Federal Reserve, the President tapped Stanley Fischer, another former Citigroup executive. A Bank of America executive, Stefan Selig, was put in charge of international trade at the Commerce Department. The President’s two recent picks for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — including his choice for Chairman — are lawyers who have spent their careers representing big financial institutions.

Please do read the whole thing. The phrase “piling on” was invented for exercises like these. Notice that she makes “the President” personally responsible. She closes where she began, by referencing her only other No vote on an Obama nominee and implying strongly that Weiss will be treated the same:

Enough is enough.

Indeed. This is a fight to watch.

Will the “Hell No” caucus declare Open Rebellion against Weiss? Will they extend their reach?

Back in the POLITICO article, progressive Senators Merkley, Sanders and frequently-progressive Sen. Whitehouse were named as part of their fancifully named “Hell No” caucus — meaning “hell no” to Keystone and Republicans. But Keystone is a billionaire-led Democratic favorite as well, one which senators like “No-to-Reid” Claire McCaskill supports. Without really saying so, POLITICO has found the crack in the Democratic Senate. Will an Open Rebellion Caucus (my own fanciful naming) work to widen that crack?

I earnestly hope so. If you’re in my camp, or just interested in watching this battle, here are three things to notice:

1. Watch what happens to the Weiss nomination. Especially, watch the vote. Weiss is Money-to-the-core — the billionaire’s next nominee for Treasury — so he’ll get Republican Yes votes. But he’s Obama’s nominee, so he’ll draw Republican No’s as well.

If the nomination fails, every Democratic No has joined with Warren and become an Open Rebellion candidate going forward. Voting No in a winning cause will take real courage — “I decline to follow the leader” courage — and every man and woman who does so deserves your praise and support. The crack in the Democratic caucus will widen and the insurgency will grow.

But if the nomination succeeds, Democratic No votes could be real or just for show (“It’s safe to vote No, ’cause he’s gonna pass anyway”). Any No vote in a losing cause is always suspect, because there’s no way to tell who’s sincere and who’s been given “permission” to vote against the rest of the caucus “for the folks back home.”

2. Watch what Harry Reid does. In my travels I heard a number of mixed reports about Harry Reid. Those opposed to or concerned about his past Senate leadership consider him unreliable — good on issues like TPP, but too willing to compromise elsewhere in order to “keep the caucus together.” But I also spoke with several close observers who say that Reid-in-opposition — a Reid who no longer has to hold his majority together with anti-progressive decisions — may prove a strong progressive ally. 

Which Reid is the real one? Only the deep insiders know for sure. But if better-Reid is on the horizon, now is the time to show it — with deeds that can be seen and understood from outside the Beltway. Watch carefully. The Weiss nomination, if it moves through the lame duck Senate to conclusion, could make an interesting test of which Reid we’ll have in the next two years — progressive-ally Reid, or party-first Reid.

I’m eager to see which Reid raises his head. A true progressive insurgency in the Senate, if it solidifies, will have to go forward through Reid or with Reid. Going through Reid is obviously the harder course. Going with Reid, in my opinion, will benefit both Reid and Democrats. Saying No to billionaires is the path back to the majority as I see it, and I believe the 2014 losses confirm that observation.

3. Watch the nomination of Loretta Lynch for Attorney General. If Elizabeth Warren thought Antonio Weiss was bad, consider Loretta Lynch. Yes, she’d be the first African-American woman Attorney General. She’s also deep in the Eric Holder mold — no Wall Street crime is too criminal to prosecute. She’s a “white shoes” lawyer who signed off on the white-washed HSBC settlement:

According to a Matt Taibbi blockbuster in Rolling Stone, HSBC, indirectly and directly, laundered hundreds of millions of dollars for entities that included Mexican drug cartels, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Russian gangs, Iran, and North Korea.

“Money laundering” means “being a banker” for people who cut people’s heads off (click; it’s the Mexican cartels I’m talking about). I mentioned “conscience” above; this settlement is conscienceless. As the article notes, it was “an exclusively financial settlement without criminal prosecution.” About Lynch as AG, lawyer Mike Papantonio says in the video below:

She’s going to make the lives of Wall Street criminals a cake walk, not a perp walk.

Cake walk, not a perp walk. That’s your next Attorney General unless our nascent, Warren-inspired “Open Rebellion Caucus” is willing to partner with other Democrats and Republicans to stop it. I will take courage for Democrats to do this — one of today’s themes. Not only will they be partnering with the hated Republicans, they’ll go against many prominent liberal cheerleaders. What will they do, act on the principle already demonstrated by Ms. Warren in the Weiss case, or … fold?

Courage and conscience — who has it and who doesn’t?

We live in times that test us. Sad that, but it can’t be helped. I would not want to be a Clinton — a triangulating billionaire-serving Democrat — as the day’s issues grow more stark and the bright lines more clear. And I’m not sure I’d want to be a party-loyal, on-the-fence progressive either. Yet that way victory lies, the way of courage.

Just look who won and who lost in the last set of fights. Marriage equality won — because gays went toe-to-toe with Obama and defied their own “triangulating” organizations, like Human Rights Campaign. Immigration reform is winning — because immigration activists pushed La Raza to call Obama the “deporter-in-chief” and he didn’t like it.

Courage and conscience. Do progressive Senators have what it takes? Does Harry Reid have what it takes to support them? I can’t wait to find out. Here’s that Papantonio–Loretta Lynch video. It’s short; enjoy!

By the way, Thom Hartmann’s The Big Picture makes a great pre-MSNBC watch. Check it out when it returns to Free Speech TV. Just a thought.

GP

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Big black hulk

by digby

Last night on twitter as the reaction to the Grand Jury decision came in I got lots of pushback from wingnuts about the fact that I claimed the problems wasn’t “mistrust of the police” as president Obama but that it was the police killing unarmed citizens. Most of the tight wingers claimed that Michael Brown was armed — with his big body — and therefore Wilson was justified. Apparently, it was so big that it was a lethal weapon even when it was 20 feet from the police car.

Anyway, here’s how Darren Wilson described Brown in his testimony:

“I go to open the door and I say, hey, come here for a minute to Brown. As I’m opening the door he turns, faces me, looks at me and says, “What the fuck are you going to do about it,” and shuts my door, slammed it shut. I haven’t even got it open enough to get my leg out, it was only a few inches.

I then looked at him and told him to get back and he was just staring at me, almost like to intimidate me or to overpower me. The intense face he had was just not what I had expected from any of this…

And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.”

Wilson testified that Brown punched him twice through the patrol car’s door, and he was nervous that a third punch “could be fatal.” After his gun fired twice during the encounter, Brown ran away. Brown did not get on the ground, Wilson recounted, as per his order. Instead, he started to charge back toward Wilson:

“At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots. Like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”

“Bulking up to run through the shots?” It seems he saw him literally as The Hulk.

This is not an excuse for shooting an unarmed man. It is the sign of an immature, unqualified police officer with issues.

When you hear testimony like that you have to wonder what it would have been like if a real trial could have been held with a real prosecutor. I’d guess that statements like that might have been challenged.

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No indictment
by Tom Sullivan

Still processing last night’s Ferguson, MO press conference by St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch. CNN’s legal expert, Jeffrey Toobin, called the decision to announce the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson at night “clueless.” Grand jury documents are available in several places including here.

If nothing else, McCulloch’s color commentary on public and social media reaction to the killing was unnecessary and inappropriate. Ben Casselman at FiveThirtyEight observes, “Grand juries nearly always decide to indict.” Unless the cases involve police officers.

Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.

Casselman continues:

… But newspaper accounts suggest, grand juries frequently decline to indict law-enforcement officials. A recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that “police have been nearly immune from criminal charges in shootings” in Houston and other large cities in recent years. In Harris County, Texas, for example, grand juries haven’t indicted a Houston police officer since 2004; in Dallas, grand juries reviewed 81 shootings between 2008 and 2012 and returned just one indictment. Separate research by Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip Stinson has found that officers are rarely charged in on-duty killings, although it didn’t look at grand jury indictments specifically.

Meanwhile, Ferguson, MO caught fire and protests erupted across the country after the presser:

In Seattle, Los Angeles, Oakland, Denver and elsewhere, protesters blocked intersections with “die-ins,” throwing themselves on the pavement, some outlining their bodies with chalk, to symbolize Brown and other unarmed people who died in encounters with police. They lay on the ground for four-and-a-half minutes to represent, they said, the four-and-a-half hours Brown’s body was left in the street after he was shot and killed. Choruses of “hands up, don’t shoot” and “black lives matter” rang out as protesters shut down bridges, freeways and major thoroughfares.

There was a poetry and a sad sort of symmetry to many of the protests that found their way to major highways. Brown died on a neighborhood street, not far from his home, after defying Wilson’s orders to stop walking in the middle of it, as Wilson testified before the grand jury.

One has to wonder what sort of dynamic led from asking two men to walk on the sidewalk into a deadly shooting. For now, it’s back to the transcripts to look for answers.

Police: try love

by digby

Retired Philadelphia Police captain Ray Lewis in front of #Ferguson PD in solidarity with protestors #DarrenWilson pic.twitter.com/XSFoXSgSwf
— Shadi Rahimi (@shadirahimi) November 24, 2014

Fingers crossed that everything stays calm.

QOTD: Turkish president Erdogen

by digby

He’s just telling it like it is:

“You cannot put women and men on an equal footing,” he told a meeting in Istanbul. “It is against nature.”
[…]
Mr Erdogan has previously urged women to have three children, and has lashed out against abortion and birth by Caesarean section.

His latest remarks were delivered at a women’s conference in Istanbul.

“In the workplace, you cannot treat a man and a pregnant woman in the same way,” Mr Erdogan said, according to the Anatolia news agency.

Women cannot do all the work done by men, he added, because it was against their “delicate nature”.

“Our religion regards motherhood very highly,” he said. “Feminists don’t understand that, they reject motherhood.”

He said women needed equal respect rather than equality.

That’s clever. I wonder why some of our more “traditional” Americans haven’t thought of using that rationalization?

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Lyin’ Ryan’s at it again — tax reform for dummies

by digby

I hear good old Paul Ryan is upset with the president. He thinks he’s being awfully foolish to strike the hornets nest because now it won’t be as easy for them to come together in bipartisan comity to solve the crisis of high taxes for corporations and rich people. Darn it all. Anyway, I wrote about it for Salon today:

Today everyone says the Grand Bargain is dead. It certainly does not appear at this point that President Obama is going to put Social Security back on the chopping block, although it’s always possible. But what about that last piece of the bargain, “tax reform”? Well, this is one zombie that hasn’t died even in this age of total obstruction. And guess who’s talking it up?

Rep. Paul Ryan, the incoming chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, laid out an expansive agenda Wednesday for 2015, including a GOP alternative to the Affordable Care Act and a fix for the looming shortfall in the federal disability insurance program.

An overhaul of the nation’s tax laws will also rank high on the agenda when Ryan (R-Wis.) takes the helm of the tax-writing panel in January.

Paul Ryan used to be considered a potential White House partner in the Grand Bargain. He had a reputation as a Very Serious policy guy who wasn’t an ideologue and could be persuaded to work with Democrats. This was despite his extremist Ayn Rand philosophy and his penchant for fudging numbers and misleading statistics. Over time it became clear that he was a flim-flam artist and his image took a hit. And then he signed on as Mitt Romney’s side-kick and that was the end of that. But Ryan’s new position as Chairman has put him back in play and it’s unknown if the White House has any interest in playing with him on tax reform. It is to be fervently hoped at this point that they are not.

Read on to find out what Lyin’ Ryan is up to now …