Month: November 2014

It’s just his home that’s all

by digby

Here’s a sickening conversation between Bill O’Reilly and Journalist (and DREAMer) Jose Antonio Vargas to end your week with a bang:

“I don’t know if people know this, but more than half of undocumented people in this country have been here for 10 years or longer,” Vargas responded. “This has been our home, this is where we go to school, this is where we work, this is where we go to church, this is what we call to be our own communities.”

Vargas lamented that the President’s immigration actions were so politicized before O’Reilly cut in to tell him the real “deal.”

“It is a compassionate move, but it may not be a just move because you and the other people here illegally don’t deserve to be here,” O’Reilly said. “That’s harsh. It’s harsh, okay, but you don’t have an entitlement to be here.”

“Sir, I don’t feel entitled to be here,” Vargas responded. “I don’t ask for any sort of entitlement. All I know is this is where I grew up, this is my home, my family is here.”

Vargas was only 12 years old when he came here. It was not his choice. And even if it was, he’s been here for most of his life. Like most undocumented people he’s a contributing member of this society. He works. He pays taxes. He is part of the social fabric of the nation. And he’s certainly “entitled” to be treated like a human being rather than seen as some kind of a virus that’s destroying this great country’s culture of strip malls and fast food joints.

By the way, the “entitlement” O’Reilly likes to claim is a bit of a stretch too. Unless he is a native American he came from immigrants himself and up until the 1920s we didn’t consider immigrants to be illegal or legal. They just came. So, it’s a little bit much to claim this “entitlement” for yourself just because some old European great grandparent crawled on a boat and landed in the US back when almost all Americans were refugees, criminals, losers and dreamers. To hear these people talk you’d think they were all descended from British Royalty.

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The pastor with the Mean Girl sense of humor

by digby

That would be Mike Huckabee:

It is interesting that Obama cites Scripture as the justification for him taking unilateral action on illegal immigrants.

Funny how, for the first six years of his Administration, even the two years when he had unstoppable majorities in both houses, Scripture did not compel immediate action. But two weeks after the final election he’ll have to deal with, suddenly, Scripture requires us to do this.

It’s similar to the way that his Biblical beliefs led him to oppose same-sex marriage as a candidate for election. Then when he needed big campaign donations from gay liberals for his reelection, the Bible suddenly got rewritten.

I always thought that Scripture was eternal and unchanging, but apparently, now that Obama is President, Scripture gets rewritten more often than Bill Cosby’s Wikipedia entry.

Oh snap!

Eternal and unchanging? How about this:

Exodus 22:21
“Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

Exodus 23:9
“Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.

Deuteronomy 24:17
Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge.

Deuteronomy 24:18
Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this.

Deuteronomy 27:19
“Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow.” Then all the people shall say, “Amen!”

Oh, and I’m sure Pastor Huckabee will be giving up all his worldly goods and devoting himself to the poor very shortly. That’s in the Scripture too.

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Fighting over torture

by digby

This just boggles my mind:

Before White House chief of staff Denis McDonough came to brief Senate Democrats on Thursday afternoon, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had a little pep talk with his flock. Every Tuesday, during the weekly caucus lunches, he said, you all gripe and moan about the White House. But then when the White House comes by, there’s never a peep.

The talk may not have been necessary. The White House’s briefing to Democrats on immigration Thursday erupted instead into a confrontation over the Senate’s classified torture report, Senate sources told The Huffington Post.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, waited for the immigration discussion to end and then pulled out a prepared speech that she read for five or six minutes, making the case for the release of the damning portrayal of America’s post-9/11 torture program.

“It was a vigorous, vigorous and open debate — one of the best and most thorough discussions I’ve been a part of while here,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.).

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who served as intelligence committee chair before Feinstein, was furious after the meeting, and accused the administration of deliberately stalling the report.

“It’s being slow-walked to death. They’re doing everything they can not to release it,” Rockefeller told HuffPost.

“It makes a lot of people who did really bad things look really bad, which is the only way not to repeat those mistakes in the future,” he continued. “The public has to know about it. They don’t want the public to know about it.”

As negotiations continue, Rockefeller said Democrats were thinking creatively about how to resolve the dispute. “We have ideas,” he said, adding that reading the report’s executive summary into the record on the Senate floor would probably meet with only limited success. “The question would be how much you could read before they grabbed you and hauled you off.”

Besides Rockefeller, Sens. Martin Heinrich (N.M.), Ron Wyden (Ore.), Mark Udall (Colo.) and Mark Warner (Va.) all spoke up in defense of Feinstein, a source with knowledge of the situation said.

What a goddamned sideshow. How in the world can anyone talk about America’s great moral leadership after this?

Here’s your quote ‘o the day from the likely incoming head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, North Carolina’s Richard Burr. His legislative ACLU score on civil liberties is zero, and the zealously pro-CIA-and-NSA Burr once famously declared: “If I had my way, with the exception of nominees, there would never be a public intelligence hearing.”

Why bother even having a Senate Intelligence Committee?

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Compassionate at birth
by Tom Sullivan

Genesis 4

9 And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?

One of the takeaways from the Genesis account of Cain’s murder of his brother is, yes, you are. And we are wired that way, suggest experiments involving young children. Cognitive scientist Paul Bloom, author of Just Babies told Inquiring Minds last week that a basic sense of morality likely developed via Darwinian evolution:

“I think all babies are created equal in that all normal babies—all babies without brain damage—possess some basic foundational understanding of morality and some foundational moral impulses,” says Bloom on the Inquiring Minds podcast.

The question is how much of our moral sensibility is innate and how much is acculturation? By studying babies before they receive instruction and language, Bloom and other researchers hope to get at that answer. Using simple puppet plays , researchers find that babies and toddlers exhibit a sense of fairness, and a preference for “helping” characters. They avoid “hindering” ones.

Interestingly, as the toddlers get a little older, this sense of fairness seems to morph into pure egalitarianism—at least when it comes to distributing other people’s stuff. “There’s a lot of research suggesting that when it comes to divvying up resources that strangers possess, they are socialists—they like to share things equally,” says Bloom.

When asked to hand out treats to other people or to stuffed animals, 3- and 4-year-old children will divide resources equally, if at all possible. Even if they know that one person deserves more of a resource than another because she worked harder for it, they will still opt for equal distribution. In a study of 5-to-8-year-olds, when it was impossible to divide resources equally—for example, if the children were given five erasers to distribute to two people—they would even throw the extra eraser in the trash instead of giving more to one person than the other.

“But this compassion and this helping, it all pertains to the baby’s own group,” says Bloom. They are less naturally generous with out-group members.

By our natures, we strongly value those around us over strangers. And to the extent that you and I don’t, to the extent that you and I might recognize that somebody suffering, I don’t know, from the Ebola virus in Africa, is a life just as valuable as those of our closest friends and family, that’s an extraordinary cultural accomplishment. And it’s something that’s not in the genes. It’s not what we’re born with.

What strikes me is how this research echoes something paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey said about Turkana Boy in speculating about the development of compassion in early Man:

Bipedalism carried an enormous price, where compassion was what you paid your ticket with. You simply can’t abandon somebody who’s incapacitated because the rest will abandon you next time it comes to be your turn.

There but for the grace of God. Compassion has an evolutionary advantage, Leakey suggests. Perhaps it is what helped us rise above the law of the jungle.

The irony is that a libertarian-leaning conservative posted the Mother Jones article on Bloom — “Science Says Your Baby Is a Socialist” — to a Facebook forum as a tweak to lefties (socialist babies, I suppose). In fact, it would seem that a movement that sneers at being your brother’s keeper in organizing human society is hardly an accomplishment, cultural, political, or evolutionary.

Let it snow!

by digby

Somebody’s having too much fun:

Megyn Kelly accidentally tells the truth

by digby

Ooops:

“Amnesty is citizenship and that’s not what [Obama] is talking about. That’s a hot-button term that the right uses to sort of get people upset.”

Of course every person on Fox has used the term including Kelly. Still, it’s nice to see her admit what her job really is — to get people upset. And she does it well.

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What does “poisoning the well” really mean?

by David Atkins

The pushback against the noxious idea that Obama’s move on immigration reform has somehow “poisoned the well” with Republicans has been delightful to see. American Bridge, Daily Kos and Huffington Post have all been on the case, showing how often the Republicans have cried out about the President “poisoning the well.”

Two things stand out about it. The first is that a simple google search shows that the phrase was almost never used to describe George W. Bush’s presidency. Somehow, no matter how outrageous and vindictive the Bush Administration became, nothing they did ever seemed to eliminate the possibility of some sort of cooperation between the Administration and Democrats. Democrats were always eager to cooperate to pass bills if there was something on which common ground could be found.

The second is that it’s a thinly veiled indication that Republicans cannot control their own caucus at all.

What does it mean that a Democratic president is constantly guilty of poisoning the bipartisan well (besides being a meaningless rightwing talking point, of course)?

It means that the Republican Party intends to obstruct absolutely everything and wants to blame the President for it when they do. But it also means the leadership of the GOP that needs it to looks slightly less than totally insane will be unable to control their rowdies.

In essence, the GOP leadership is telling the President that if he does anything at all to help people, the crazies that make up the majority of the GOP caucus will get out of line and do crazy things, and that would be bad.

What I don’t understand is why the President would help out GOP leadership on this front? What possible incentive does he have to do that, since GOP leadership hasn’t been the least bit cooperative with him in the past?

Live by the crazy, die by the crazy. That well is already long since poisoned

Obama+Immigrants= Haters in full effect

by digby

Right Wing Watch caught up with everyone’s favorite “self-deporter”, Kansas Secretary of State and all around xenophobe, Kris Kobach. He is very frightened.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a leader in the anti-immigrant movement, said during his Sunday radio program that it’s possible that a Hispanic majority in the U.S. could conduct an “ethnic cleansing.”

Kobach made his remarks in response to a caller who asked, “What happens, if you know your history, when one culture or one race or one religion overwhelms another culture or race?”

Claiming that immigrant rights groups are “calling for the return of the Spanish territory, which could be almost half of the United States,” the caller warned, “When one race or culture overwhelms another culture, they run them out or they kill them. And it’s a bigger issue than just being Democrats. And they know in numbers, once the numbers are so bad, they can pretty much do whatever they want to do.”

He’s got a point. That is,after all, what the Europeans, our white American forefathers, did to the natives here in the Americas. When they weren’t committing all-out genocide anyway. But that was a long time ago. More recently, you may recall that Kobach is the guy who came up with Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” plan which bears more than a passing resemblance to ethnic cleansing. Adam Serwer described it this way:

“Self-deportation” might sound like something you don’t want your parents to catch you doing, it’s actually an old euphemism for an immigration strategy of “attrition through enforcement.” What “self-deportation”—the favored approach to immigration of the GOP’s right-wing—actually means is making life so miserable for unauthorized immigrants that they “voluntarily” leave. Here’s Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies (the anti-immigrant think tank that tried to mainstream the “terror baby” conspiracy theory) explaining the concept in 2005:

Among the other measures that would facilitate enforcement: hiring more U.S. Attorneys and judges in border areas, to allow for more prosecutions; passage of the CLEAR Act, which would enhance cooperation between federal immigration authorities and state and local police; and seizing the assets, however modest, of apprehended illegal aliens.

These and other enforcement measures would enable the government to detain more illegal aliens; additional measures would be needed to promote self-deportation. Unlike at the visa office or the border crossing, once aliens are inside the United States, there’s no physical site to exercise control, no choke point at which to examine whether someone should be admitted. The solution is to create “virtual choke points”—events that are necessary for life in a modern society but are infrequent enough not to bog down everyone’s daily business. Another analogy for this concept to firewalls in computer systems, that people could pass through only if their legal status is verified. The objective is not mainly to identify illegal aliens for arrest (though that will always be a possibility) but rather to make it as difficult as possible for illegal aliens to live a normal life here.

This is the right-wing’s answer to the question of how you deport 11 million unauthorized immigrants: You don’t. You force them to “deport themselves.” Although immigration reform advocates would prefer a solution that involves a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants already here, Romney and his top immigration advisers believe they can remove millions of people through heavy-handed enforcement that makes life for unauthorized immigrants intolerable. This approach is notable for its complete lack of discretion and flexibility. Unauthorized immigrant parents with citizen children who need to go to school? Americans who are married to an undocumented immigrant who needs medical treatment? “Self-deportation” hits them all with the same mailed fist.

I can think of somebody else who had that idea and implemented it for a few years until he decided that more drastic steps were needed.

It’s interesting that someone who came up with such a plan would project it back on to the very people he sought to “cleanse” the nation of. There’s some heavy duty psychological baggage operating there.

This paranoia is getting completely out of hand on the right, however. They truly seem to believe that a vast horde of latinos are going to go on a rampage and kill them. I’m not kidding. This is the leap they have made. Just listen to Laura Ingraham or watch Fox. They are working the right wingers into total hysteria.

Here are just a few of the stories Right Wing Watch has captured:

Anti-Immigrant Activists: Obama Inciting Civil War By Making Immigration Announcement On Mexico’s Revolution Day

Arrest Obama for his Immigration Action

Fighting Obama’s immigration action is like fighting ISIS

The immigration announcement could lead to civil war

Allen West predicts demand for impeachment over immigration

Rep. Kelly says Obama dragging America into a civil war

Heritage: Obama will use government goodies to replace Americans with Latinos

Viguerie: Both Republicans and Democrats want to impeach Obama over immigration

And on and on and on. They are having a hissy fit of epic proportions. Whether they can work up a Tea Party level lather over it is still unknown. But they’re trying.

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There’s always impeachment

by digby

The Republicans are looking at every way possible to stop the horror of Emperor Obama doing what Ronald Reagan did:

It would be “impossible” to defund President Obama’s executive actions on immigration through a government spending bill, the House Appropriations Committee said Thursday.

In a statement released by Committee Chairman Hal Rogers’s (R-Ky.) office hours before Obama’s scheduled national address, the committee said the primary agency responsible for implementing Obama’s actions is funded entirely by user fees.

Oh heck. Congressman Steve King is having none of it.He says he doesn’t believe that and that people just want to go home and have Thanksgiving instead of defunding the INS. Because they are communists. (No, I just made that last part up. But I’m sure he was thinking it.)

Unfortunately, he appear to be right, at least about the part about defunding. And Senator Jeff sessions agrees. But it’s pretty complicated and will probably fail:

Budget expert Stan Collender, executive vice president at Qorvis MSLGROUP, said Sessions is correct that something can be done.

“Congress can, if it wishes, use an appropriations bill to include authorization language,” he said. “There’s no constitutional prohibition against that.”

But while Collender warned to take Rogers’ words with a “grain of salt,” he said defunding the order would face major hurdles.

Even if a bill defunding Obama’s actions made it to the Senate floor, there would likely be a point of order that would require 60 votes to waive, Collender said.

On top of that, President Obama would almost certainly veto the bill, and Congress likely wouldn’t have the two-thirds majority needed to override it.

Don’t worry though. They have many other ideas up their sleeves to thwart the Emperor Obama and keep him from doing what all other presidents have done:

Another idea Rogers had advanced for dealing with Obama’s order was for Congress to pass a funding bill for the entire government this year, and then look to rescind funds related to the executive order in January, when Republicans will have control of both the House and the Senate.

Asked if a rescission bill would be irrelevant now, Hing said, “right,” but then added that this could change based on the executive order’s provisions.

“Later on, if we find out down the road that … other agencies have some piece of it, then we can go back and specifically look at those agencies,” she said.

Congress could also pass an authorization bill to shift the funding authority for CIS to lawmakers.

But Rogers argued that couldn’t be part of an appropriations bill.

“To alter or change the fee matter, it would take a change of law — an authorization — to change an immigration act. It would take an act of Congress,” Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said.

That sounds exciting. Maybe congress could just pass a law that removes all discretion from the Executive branch unless the president is a Republican. That would solve the issue too.

On the other hand, there’s always this:

The Appropriations panel, meanwhile, is moving forward with a 12-bill omnibus spending package.

“We’re making good progress on negotiations and we expect to have the bill on the floor the week of December 8,” Hing said.

Congress must pass a new spending bill by Dec. 12 or the government will shut down.

So what’s the problem?

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QOTD: “In your heart you know he’s right” edition

by digby

“We went down the government-shutdown route before, and the results didn’t hurt the Republicans at all,” says Rick Tyler, a onetime spokesman for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “Republicans got reelected to the majority.”

What’s the problem with his logic? I can’t see it. The Republicans acted like hooligans in the last congress and got richly rewarded at the ballot box. Why wouldn’t they keep doing what they’re doing?

Now, this might be one of those sticky situations where the owners of America don’t like this sort of behavior and believe they’ve bought themselves protection from it by buying up most members of both parties. But that doesn’t mean the Republicans won’t do it anyway. The election told them that they can do whatever they please and it doesn’t matter whether the Big Money Boyz like it or not. Why would they think otherwise?

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