Month: December 2014

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I do it so you don’t have to

by digby

All this discussion over the past few months about Americans’ relationship to government authorities, whether it be the federal agencies or the local police, has reminded me just how important the internet has become to our democracy. Whether it’s social media or access to a variety of news sources and opinion, it makes it more possible than ever for us to be informed citizens. All you kids out there who think this is a silly observation can’t imagine what it was like before when all you had was corporate mass media. (Also too: get off my lawn.)

I don’t know how much blogs contribute to that but I think they still have a place. For all the information and organizational capability we have, we still have limited time to sort out the wheat from the chaff, the real from the propaganda. Independent bloggers can help do that.

I spend many hours a day reading and writing about news and politics. And I hope that is helpful to my readers who have busy lives and other responsibilities and just need a touchstone to keep them aware of the zeitgeist and how someone who shares their values is interpreting it. After all this time you know how I think and how I approach the world and I hope you continue to stop by and check out my analysis and observation of whatever’s going on from time to time if only to measure it against your own impressions.

I plan to keep this blog going. I’ve invested years in this homely little project and I love doing it as much today as I did in the first few months. But I am only able to do that because of your support. Thank you so much for making that possible. I will always do my best to make it worth your while.

It’s time to play Guess The Village Scion

by digby

YN: Where did you go to high school?

RW: I actually did five years of high school. Two years at Georgetown Day School here in town, and then I decided I wanted to become a hockey player, so I went up to boarding school, repeated my sophomore year. It’s a normal thing usually to do in boarding school, so I did three years at Hotchkiss up in Connecticut.

YN: So you obviously grew up — your father was the son of immigrants — you grew up fairly privileged and went to a really quality high school and then a boarding school. Do you think that’s impacted that political philosophy at all, just even being around other people who are generally more privileged?

RW: So, at the boarding school they were definitely more conservative. A lot of the sons of Wall Street and daughters of Wall Street type of people. But Georgetown Day School was uber-liberal. You’re calling your teachers by their first names there. In my class, you have Zach Beauchamp who was at TPM [Talking Points Memo] for a while. It’s a very liberal school. So I don’t think it influenced my politics in the sense of it influenced my understanding of the world, it influenced what I read and the people I was talking to … but if GDS impacted my politics, I’d be a liberal right now.

YN: When you were at GDS, did you already consider yourself a conservative?

RW: I don’t think I had a leaning when I was there, really. I think I was too young, really. It wasn’t until I got to Hotchkiss. And then Haverford College is uber-liberal as well.

YN: Were you politically active in college?

RW: No, I volunteered for the McCain campaign when I was in college. I voted Republican when I was in college. But there wasn’t even a college Republican club on my campus. That club didn’t even exist. I think they’ve started it since I’ve left. I was not, though, doing debates with Democrats.

A Bush perhaps? The son of a powerful lobbyist?

Sadly no. That’s Fox’s “liberal” commentator Juan Williams’ son.

You’ll enjoy this, I’m sure:

YN: … Another way to get at the question is, what’s been your first-hand observation of your dad’s political views? He was at NPR. He certainly has never identified as a conservative.

RW: No, no, no. My dad — I would call him a blue-dog Dem if I had to classify it. He definitely is more liberal than I am. But I think it has to do with his life story. He was an immigrant from Panama, came here when he was 3, grew up in the projects of New York.

He really found opportunity through scholarships to schools, so he sees the value of having a social safety net. And then he sees the good that the government can do in his eyes, but he still thinks you have to work to take advantage of it and to make the most of it. That’s why I think he’s supportive of things like Obamacare or having welfare and that kind of stuff. So he lives his American dream in that, and I think seeing him achieve his American dream made me be conservative because I think there’s a lot of personal responsibility that leads to that, that leads to success.

And I think that it’s not a bad thing to have a social safety net — I think it’s important — but I think that having one that is too big does not push people to be the best they can be, does not encourage success in the way that I think is important. And I think his parents played a large role in encouraging him to have personal responsibility and personal drive.

He seems to think his “success” in life is due to his sense of personal responsibility. If he had any kind of safety net (like say, rich celebrity parents) who knows what kind of failure he’d become? Lulz…

I don’t think it’s possible to be less self-aware.

A quote from a presidential candidate

by digby

Via Roy:

The president “hasn’t projected enough strength and hasn’t shown a priority to the national defense. That is something that, were I in charge, I would.”

Rick Perry? Dick Cheney?

Nope. That’s Senator Rand Paul.

Just saying.

Speaking of Roy, do yourself a favor and click over to read the first installment of the Year in Bullshit. You won’t regret it.

And they have a different word for everything too!

by digby

This is the most watched cable news network in the nation:

During breaking coverage of missing Flight QZ8501, Kooiman asked former FAA spokesperson Scott Brenner if the “real reason” the plane had disappeared was because of the “different way other countries train their pilots.”

“Even when we think about temperature, it’s Fahrenheit or Celsius,” she pointed out. “It’s kilometers or miles. You know, everything about their training could be similar, but different.”

Brenner, however, said that the major difference between international pilots and U.S. pilots was the reliance on automatic pilot.

“And a lot of that… is because a lot of crashes are due to pilot error,” he explained. “So, if you try and eliminate any potential risk, you try and eliminate the pilot’s ability to make incorrect inputs into the aircraft.”

“It’s not just a difference in the way that we measure things?” Kooiman replied. “Is it not as safe in that part of the world? Because our viewers may be thinking, ‘International travel, is it safe? Is it not safe?’”

Then they talked about how American pilots fly their planes while foreign pilots all rely on auto-pilot. (Needless to say, that’s total nonsense. too.)

And then, this:

Co-host Charles Payne added that many of the recent international incidents could have occurred because foreign pilots did not have a “cowboy attitude” like American pilots.

Right, you want a “cowboy” piloting your airliner. You know, like this one:

The revolutionaries of evunthelibrul you-know-what

by digby

A TNR writer remembers:

Over the last century, TNR did not always live up to this original promise. In the 1930s, under editors who admired central economic planning, it sometimes veered toward an unthinking defense of Joseph Stalin. A decade later, publisher Michael Straight, son of the original owners and briefly a member of the famous Cambridge University ring of Soviet spies, turned it over to former Vice President Henry Wallace to serve as the organ of his left-wing third party presidential campaign. By the early 1970s, under owner Gil Harrison, it had relapsed into a boringly reliable liberalism. “If I had wanted a New Republic editorial,” I heard the philosopher Robert Nozick remark in 1973, after a particularly predictable Rosh Hashanah sermon, “I would have bought a copy.”

Under Peretz, a Harvard lecturer who bought TNR in 1974, the magazine moved away from conventional postwar liberalism. Contrary to what the critics have charged however, it did not simply move to the right. Peretz and most of his editors indeed believed that conventional liberalism had grown stale and ineffective. But few of them had any real sympathy for Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party — the most prominent of those who did, Charles Krauthammer, soon left to become a fixture of the conservative commentariat. Mostly, they longed for a new, regenerated liberalism that could compete more effectively with Reagan. In the spring of 1983, the magazine ran a cover story by Henry Fairlie (a brilliant and famously hard-drinking British journalist who periodically took up residence in TNR’s Washington offices) declaring that the Democratic Party needed to lose the 1984 election. Longtime liberal subscribers recoiled with horror. But Fairlie wanted a defeat that would shock a sclerotic party into reform and recovery, not a Republican triumph. In fact, the essay did a good job laying out the path that Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council would follow on the way to the election of 1992.

How inspiring.

As Corey Robin archly observes:

When The New Republic makes this argument from the right, TNR-style liberals like David Bell, writing in the LA Review of Books above, welcome it as a healthy dose of clear-eyed realism.

When leftists make this sort of argument from the left, TNR-style liberals like Sean Wilentz, murmuring darkly of “left-wing utopianism,” invoke Dostoevsky.

I also blame the Village, which is always running at least a decade, if not two, behind the times. When Peretz took over they undoubtedly were still clinging to the 1930s version and by the 1990s had moved up to the 1970s. The New Republic had been a centrist publication for a very long time even as the political establishment continued to use it as their avatar of liberalism, noting how remarkable it was every time they noticed that it was actually promoting centrism.

But we knew that. Robin’s point is more on target and it’s something I hadn’t thought of before. These “reformers”  thought it was good idea to let Reagan stay in office in order to “shock” the sclerotic Democratic Party into making what they believed to be necessary changes. How revolutionary of them. For all the caterwauling about lefties being nihilistic and destructive when they refuse to enthusiastically embrace the status quo etc, etc., it seems such tactics are ok as long as such a challenge comes from the right. Of course they are …

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Protesters aren’t giving up

by digby

Not that anyone noticed, but LA had a very large protest this past week-end

Just thought I’d mention it since the regular media forgot what with all the focus on the streets of NYC and the non-stop propaganda insisting that protests must stop.

Carry on …

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Accountability and obeisanceby Tom Sullivan While munching on vegetarian everything at a Harmonic Convergence potluck in 1987, people quietly fled the kitchen when a friend and I (two engineers) began discussing the military’s propensity for buying guns that can’t shoot straight and amphibious vehicles that sink. It was one thing for lefties to oppose Pentagon spending, and quite another to besmirch your white-vinyl soul by knowing anything about it. The Atlantic has in its current issue an article about a rifle the Pentagon is still buying, one designed over a half century ago. For James Fallows, lack of accountability for the military in both performance and procurement stems from the Washington-like bubble we insist the military inhabit. As Fallows begins in his latest for the Atlantic, “[W]e love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them.” With less than one percent of Americans at risk under fire, “Fewer and fewer people know anyone in the military. It’s become just too easy to go to war.” On the history of that disconnectedness, Fallows writes:

If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously.

Much as we discussed in that kitchen conversation 30 years ago, military procurement is still a problem fraught with political machinations. There is a lot of money at stake in maintaining a global empire, and it persists unchecked even as we cut spending at home, you know, for food (SNAP). As I wrote in 2012:

Just for comparison, the Pentagon had a “base” budget of $515 billion in 2009 to staff and maintain 545,000 facilities at 5,300 sites both in the United States and around the globe (not including tens of billions in GWOT supplementals and other off-budget and “black” budget costs). Thus, it is not easy to determine how much all U.S. security agencies spend on defense annually, nor to separate out how much the Pentagon alone spends just to maintain the offshore portion of our global empire. But drawing on various sources, assumptions, and the fact that one-quarter of U.S. troops are stationed abroad, the Institute for Policy Studies estimated the 2009 costs of our overseas operations (wars included) at $250 billion annually “to maintain troops, equipment, fleets, and bases overseas.”

Fallows continues on that process:

… such is the dysfunction and corruption of the budgeting process that even as spending levels rise, the Pentagon faces simultaneous crises in funding for maintenance, training, pensions, and veterans’ care. “We’re buying the wrong things, and paying too much for them,” Charles A. Stevenson, a onetime staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former professor at the National War College, told me. “We’re spending so much on people that we don’t have the hardware, which is becoming more expensive anyway. We are flatlining R&D.”

The latter half of Fallows’ piece examines the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. That it is insanely over budget and wracked with technical issues should come as no surprise. One wonders how many joints were involved in its conception. Fallows also looks at how our relationship to the military has changed since WWII when 10 percent of Americans were serving in it. As we have become more disconnected from the military, we have fallen into rote “’salute to the heroes’ gestures that do more for the civilian public’s self-esteem than for the troops’.” That disconnectedness leads to a lack of accountability. Lincoln removed generals for military failings. We remove them for personal foibles. But what Fallows does not address is whether the disconnectedness and lack of accountability he describes — combined with our nagging economic uncertainty and fear-flogging by the press — fosters tolerance for growing authoritarianism. Or at least a deference to it. The same unquestioning, knee-jerk obeisance we’re supposed to give “our troops” seems now to extend to the police as well. In light of the recent police shooting incidents and the reaction of the NYPD, it seems police now expect demand obeisance and immunity from accountability.

The GOP crazy train left the station long ago

by digby

So GQ came up with a list of 20 craziest politicians and 17 of them were Republicans. (The 3 Democrats were Hank Johnson, Joe Biden and Sheila Jackson-Lee.) Whateves.

Needless to say the rightwingers are very, very upset. So the New York Post came up with it’s own list of crazy politicians who they see as being in the mode of Louis Gohmert and Steve King:

Chris Hughes, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Jonathan Gruver, Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Samantha Power, Steve Israel, Marty Landrieu, Wendy Davis, Bernie Sanders, Kay Hagan, Barbara Lee and Mark Udall.

Except for the fact that some of them aren’t politicians it’s an excellent list of total wacko-bird freaks. In Bizarroworld.

The truth is that there are a lot of things for which you can criticize Democrats, including some of those on that list. You can read all about it on this blog. Competing with Republicans to be the conductor of the crazy train? I’m afraid not.

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When is Giuliani time going to be over?

by digby

Why is he on our TVs?

“When I reflect on all the police officers turning their back, I don’t know, I guess as an ex-mayor, I feel uncomfortable about that, you turn your back on the mayor,” Giuliani explained. “On the other hand, I think at this point I have to say, he’s bringing it on himself. He should have apologized.”

“He should have apologized, not for the murder — he’s not responsible for the murder, he shouldn’t resign, he’s been elected by the people — but he did create an atmosphere of anti-police bias and feeling for a long, long time,” the former mayor continued. “It’s time to say, ‘Maybe I had the wrong perception of my police department. First of all, my police department is not a white police department. Everybody’s a minority in the New York City Police Department.'”

Giuliani admitted that the “feeling” de Blasio had created about the NYPD had not contributed to the recent murder of two officers, but he said that the mayor had made people think that “police officers are in the main racist.”

De Blasio has spoken out about how he felt that he had to give his his biracial son, Dante, special instructions about hot to behave during encounters with police because of his skin color. But Giuliani said that white children were also given the same instructions by their parents.

“We’re not talking about the South in the 1960s. We’re talking about guys that grew up next to an Asian kid, next to a black kid, next to a white kid. Everybody’s familiar with it, we all play football with each other,” Giuliani insisted. “This is not what he has allowed to be created when he made all those statements about his son.”

Oh shut your pie-hole and read this:

Innocent New Yorkers have been subjected to police stops and street interrogations more than 5 million times since 2002, and that black and Latino communities continue to be the overwhelming target of these tactics. Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent, according to the NYPD’s own reports:

In 2002, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 97,296 times.
80,176 were totally innocent (82 percent).

In 2003, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 160,851 times.
140,442 were totally innocent (87 percent).
77,704 were black (54 percent).
44,581 were Latino (31 percent).
17,623 were white (12 percent).
83,499 were aged 14-24 (55 percent).

In 2004, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 313,523 times.
278,933 were totally innocent (89 percent).
155,033 were black (55 percent).
89,937 were Latino (32 percent).
28,913 were white (10 percent).
152,196 were aged 14-24 (52 percent).

In 2005, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 398,191 times.
352,348 were totally innocent (89 percent).
196,570 were black (54 percent).
115,088 were Latino (32 percent).
40,713 were white (11 percent).
189,854 were aged 14-24 (51 percent).

In 2006, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 506,491 times.
457,163 were totally innocent (90 percent).
267,468 were black (53 percent).
147,862 were Latino (29 percent).
53,500 were white (11 percent).
247,691 were aged 14-24 (50 percent).

In 2007, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 472,096 times.
410,936 were totally innocent (87 percent).
243,766 were black (54 percent).
141,868 were Latino (31 percent).
52,887 were white (12 percent).
223,783 were aged 14-24 (48 percent).

In 2008, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 540,302 times.
474,387 were totally innocent (88 percent).
275,588 were black (53 percent).
168,475 were Latino (32 percent).
57,650 were white (11 percent).
263,408 were aged 14-24 (49 percent).

In 2009, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 581,168 times.
510,742 were totally innocent (88 percent).
310,611 were black (55 percent).
180,055 were Latino (32 percent).
53,601 were white (10 percent).
289,602 were aged 14-24 (50 percent).

In 2010, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 601,285 times.
518,849 were totally innocent (86 percent).
315,083 were black (54 percent).
189,326 were Latino (33 percent).
54,810 were white (9 percent).
295,902 were aged 14-24 (49 percent)

In 2011, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 685,724 times.
605,328 were totally innocent (88 percent).
350,743 were black (53 percent).
223,740 were Latino (34 percent).
61,805 were white (9 percent).
341,581 were aged 14-24 (51 percent).

In 2012, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 532,911 times
473,644 were totally innocent (89 percent).
284,229 were black (55 percent).
165,140 were Latino (32 percent).
50,366 were white (10 percent).

In 2013, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 191,558 times.
169,252 were totally innocent (88 percent).
104,958 were black (56 percent).
55,191 were Latino (29 percent).
20,877 were white (11 percent).

During the first three-quarters of 2014, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 38,456 times.
31,661 were totally innocent (82 percent).
20,683 were black (54 percent).
10,483 were Latino (27 percent).
4,590 were white (12 percent).

Now take a look at this:

I think we can all see the problem here, can’t we? And why anyone who is black or hispanic or has a bi-racial or multi-racial loved one might be concerned?

Giuliani is a very typical white, wingnut authoritarian who sees absolutely nothing wrong with harassing innocent citizens of color. Anyone who questions it is an un-American cop-hater. And for the past few days, he and others like him have been pontificating virtually unopposed on television.

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QOTD: crazy lefty edition

by digby

Let’s all debate under which circumstances police are allowed to electo-shock and kill unarmed people, shall we? I’m sure it will be very lively.

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