Month: January 2015

Cranking up the crazy, Jindal style

by digby

I don’t know if he’s misinformed or lying but this is the kind of lunacy that we are going to be seeing more of. It’s obvious that terrorism fear-mongering is back on the menu:

LONDON — In a foreign policy speech delivered Monday in London, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said that in the West, “non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of Sharia law as they can without regard for the laws of the democratic countries which provided them a new home.”

The Republican governor added that “it is startling to think that any country would allow, even unofficially, for a so-called ‘no-go zone’.”

Jindal remarks came during an address to the Henry Jackson Society in a committee room at the U.K.’s House of Commons with several British members of parliament attending.
[…]
In his speech, Jindal warned attendees that he was going to say things that would not be deemed politically correct. “So brace yourselves,” he said, noting that he had no interest in defaming any religion, but “dealing with reality and facts.”

“And the fact is that radical Islamists do not believe in freedom or common decency nor are they willing to accommodate them in any way and anywhere,” he said.

Jindal is traveling through Europe on a 10-day economic development mission that could also bolster his foreign policy credentials as he considers a possible presidential campaign.

“We spent several days here, had the chance to meet with several elected leaders and what you hear from them, for example, these so-called no-go zones,” he told NBC News in an interview. “I think it’s a mistake for any country to allow the development of areas within their country, whether it’s neighborhoods or other areas, where the same laws, the same values, the same rules, simply don’t apply.”

This is utter nonsense. There are no “no-go” zones where officials have just given up sovereignty and where the laws and rules of the state don’t apply. But you have to love the chutzpah of this moron prefacing all his lies and misstatements by saying he “dealing with reality and facts”. These are “reality and facts” that even Fox News has disowned and apologized for:

If Fox News anchors hadn’t gotten the message before, they will now: The network isn’t going to sanction loose and utterly unsupported chatter about Muslim “no-go zones” in Europe. In its programming last night, Fox News issued two corrections on the matter, one of which acknowledged that “we have made some regrettable errors on air regarding the Muslim population in Europe, particularly with regard to England and France.” That came from Julie Banderas during the Saturday night program “Fox Report.”

She continued: “To be clear, there is no formal designation of these zones in either country and no credible information to support the assertion there are specific areas in these countries that exclude individuals based solely on their religion.”

Later in the evening, Jeanine Pirro, host of “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” presented her own correction for the centerpiece of Fox News’s “no-go zone” week. On her Jan. 10 program, Pirro welcomed terrorism analyst Steve Emerson to speak about these zones, which Emerson described this way: “They’re sort of amorphous, they’re not contiguous necessarily, but they’re sort of safe havens. And they’re places where the governments, like France, Britain, Sweden, Germany — they don’t exercise any sovereignty so you basically have zones where Sharia courts are set up, where Muslim density is very intense, where police don’t go in.” Though Emerson claimed that this phenomenon plagued Europe very broadly, he zeroed in on Birmingham, England: “There are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” he said. (A separate no-go-zone correction was issued by”Fox & Friends” on Saturday morning.)

In her correction, Pirro laid responsibility for the bad information on Emerson, and on her failure to correct him: “Last week on this program,” said Pirro, “a guest made a serious factual error that we wrongly let stand unchallenged and uncorrected. The guest asserted that the city of Birmingham, England, is totally Muslim and that it is a place where non-Muslims don’t go . Both are incorrect.” She went on to provide 2011 census data noting that 22 percent of the city’s population self-identifies as Muslim and that there’s no evidence of the whole no-go thing.

Not bad, though a review of the offending segment reveals that Pirro’s errors extend beyond just the failure to challenge Emerson. She gave the impression that she was rooting for these falsehoods. “This is metastasizing into a simple takeover,” she said at one point of the Muslim presence in Europe.

The Emerson-Pirro exchange mushroomed into a big problem for Fox News. Not only did the usual media-watchdog suspects hammer the network for trading in nonsense, the British prime minister did as well. “When I heard this, frankly, I choked on my porridge and I thought it must be April Fools’ Day,” said David Cameron, who finished with this rip against Emerson: “This guy’s clearly a complete idiot.”

Even before Emerson embarrassed Fox News on an international level, the network was pushing the no-go myth. On Jan. 7, three days before Emerson’s assertions, Fox News host Sean Hannity said this: “It seems if you watch in recent years, it’s not just France but all of Europe, there’s been a major influx, immigration, people from Muslim countries. They’ve even — and they’ve not assimilated, they’ve separated,” said Hannity. “They have no-go zones. If you’re non-Muslim, you’re not allowed. Not police, not even fire department if there’s a fire. Sharia courts have been allowed to be established. Prayer rugs in just about every hotel.”

Here’s Punditfact:

Sometimes a claim is so egregious that a prime minister chokes on his porridge.

So infuriating that international backlash spurs a sassy hashtag and leads the speaker to apologize profusely the very next day.

So wrong that even though it’s already been widely debunked, people are still asking that we give it the PunditFact treatment.

Such is the case with a comment about Birmingham, England, by news pundit Steve Emerson, who appeared as a guest Jan. 10, 2015, on Fox News’ Justice with Judge Jeanine.

Host Jeanine Pirro introduced Emerson as founder of The Investigative Project on Terrorism for a segment about “no-go” zones for non-Muslims in Europe. Emerson said the zones exist in France and throughout the rest of Europe as “safe havens” for Muslims ruled by Sharia courts and not a country’s own laws.

“In Britain, it’s not just no-go zones,” Emerson said. “There are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in. And parts of London, there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn’t dress according to Muslim, religious Muslim attire.”

Western Europe is just not dealing with the situation, he said.

Western Europe, meanwhile, did not seem amused by his comment. And make no mistake, the claim is wrong.

The city of Birmingham, situated north and west of London, has more than 1 million residents. There are more whites and Christians than any other ethnicity or religion, we found.

According to a report of the 2011 UK Census by the Birmingham City Council, 46 percent of residents said they were Christian and 22 percent, or 234,111 people, identified as Muslim.

No doubt, Islam is a growing and popular faith in Birmingham, up 7.5 percentage points from 2001 to 2011. Three Birmingham wards, Heath, Bordesley Green and Sparkbrook, had Muslim populations that exceeded half of the population, all ranging from 70 percent to about 77 percent.

Not that this gives any credence to Emerson’s claim about the city of Birmingham as a whole. This does not amount to the city “being totally Muslim.”

Emerson apologized on his website and on the BBC, among other forums, for his remarks. He attributed his statement about Birmingham to sloppy fact-checking. (No kidding.) Here is the apology:

I have clearly made a terrible error for which I am deeply sorry. My comments about Birmingham were totally in error. And I am issuing this apology and correction for having made this comment about the beautiful city of Birmingham. I do not intend to justify or mitigate my mistake by stating that I had relied on other sources because I should have been much more careful. There was no excuse for making this mistake and I owe an apology to every resident of Birmingham. I am not going to make any excuses. I made an inexcusable error. And I am obligated to openly acknowledge that mistake. I wish to apologize for all residents of that great city of Birmingham.

Steve Emerson

PS. I am making (a) donation to Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who really did say the remark caused him to choke on his porridge, called Emerson a “complete idiot.”

“He started with an apology,” Cameron said. “That’s not a bad start. But what he should do is look at Birmingham and see what a fantastic example it is bringing people together of different faiths and different backgrounds and building a world-class brilliant city with a great and strong economy.”

Birmingham is about 20% Muslim.

This is the kind of hysteria we managed not to stoke to much after 9/11. When someone like Jindal just ignores the facts even when Fox News apologizes and retreats, it’s easy to see where this is headed.

Update: Here’s Allen West complaining that a meeting of American Muslims to denounce ISIS and islamophobia is “incendiary” at a time like this.  He didn’t hold up the Charlie-Hebdo cover but I’m sure he would have done it without the slightest sense of irony:

Update II: @AndyWitney noted the fact that we have some Americans who believe in “no-go zones” right here at home. Cliven Bundy comes to mind … he and his friends fought off federal agents with firearms.

But that’s completely different, of course. Because Muslims.
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The Martin Luther King speech everyone ignores

by digby

I’m going to guess this speech by the right wing appropriators of Martin Luther King’s legacy isn’t one to which they sign on. He gave it in April 1967. He was killed almost exactly a year later.

Here’s an excerpt from Beyond Vietnam: a time to break silence:

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years — especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission — a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for “the brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men — for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the “Vietcong” or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

Somehow, I don’t think the South Carolina Tea Party folks would agree with that.

Read the whole speech today. It’s as radical as it gets.

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The super-rich won’t be happy until they have it all

by digby

And people wonder why the world feels so unstable right now:

Billionaires and politicians gathering in Switzerland this week will come under pressure to tackle rising inequality after a study found that – on current trends – by next year, 1% of the world’s population will own more wealth than the other 99%.

Ahead of this week’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in the ski resort of Davos, the anti-poverty charity Oxfam said it would use its high-profile role at the gathering to demand urgent action to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

The charity’s research, published on Monday, shows that the share of the world’s wealth owned by the best-off 1% has increased from 44% in 2009 to 48% in 2014, while the least well-off 80% currently own just 5.5%.

Oxfam added that on current trends the richest 1% would own more than 50% of the world’s wealth by 2016.

Unfortunately, far too many of the 99% in Western democracies would rather attribute their troubles to those who are below them on the social and economic ladder. It seems to be a common characteristic of human nature. And it plays right into the hands of those who are so greedy that they have to have every last penny they can lay their hands on.

Oxfam made headlines at Davos last year with a study showing that the 85 richest people on the planet have the same wealth as the poorest 50% (3.5 billion people). The charity said this year that the comparison was now even more stark, with just 80 people owning the same amount of wealth as more than 3.5 billion people, down from 388 in 2010.

That is sickening. And morally incomprehensible.

Check out this BBC documentary about the Super rich if you want to see just how deluded they are about their “contribution” to society. It’s worth a couple of hours if you have the time:

Now why would they do this?

by digby

Arkansas, 2015:

By pointing out this sign I’m the real racist.

During his speech at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition convention yesterday, conservative entertainer and YouTube celebrity “Wild Bill” Finley claimed ownership of slain Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

“How appropriate that we are here right at the Martin Luther King holiday,” he began. “Martin Luther King had a dream, and it was a good one — a day when skin color wouldn’t matter anymore. A time when character would be more important than skin color.”

“But when we look at what’s going on in America today, it’s pretty easy to see that Dr. King’s dream got hijacked,” Finley continued. “I believe racism in this country would’ve died out a long time ago, except that some people figured out that racism can be very profitable — both financially and politically.”

“And now, those who are most vocal about Martin Luther King being their hero seem to be the most race-driven people in America. The left have mastered the art of turning every issue into a skin-color issue, character be damned,” he said.

“Manufacturing racism for political purposes is a big business in the USA, and manufactured racism has been used to hurt the Tea Party from Day 1. There’s no doubt in my mind that if Martin Luther King Jr. was alive today the liberal left would spit in his face because he would be such a threat to their political agendas.”

“We are the people,” Finley said, “who practice Dr. King’s dream. It is the Tea Party where people are not judged by the color of their skin, and it’s Tea Party Americans who believe that character still counts.”

“So today, I am officially announcing that the Tea Party is taking Martin Luther King away from the liberal left,” he said. “And to you race-baiting promoters of division and hatred, you’re not getting him back until you renounce your shameful skin-color politics and start practicing the politics of character.”

Update: Texas celebrates Confederate heroes day today as well.

Jamelle Bouie explains the history of this bizarre pairing, here.

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Quite Simply, a Masterpiece 

by tristero

Sally Satel, an oft-published scholar at the august American Enterprise Institute, has written a masterpiece for the NY Times this morning entitled Will the F.D.A. Kill Off E-Cigs? I strongly suggest reading the entire thing. It’s not long, but oh, how brilliantly written. Consider the truly dazzling first sentence:

ELECTRONIC cigarettes, battery-powered devices that convert a solution of nicotine and other chemicals into a vapor that can be inhaled, or “vaped,” have the potential to wean a vast number of smokers off cigarettes.

What an elegant structure! It’s got a clause within a clause terminated by soft, fuzzy positive words – “potential,” “wean” – and a grandiose, hopeful final phrase: “vast number off cigarettes!” The sentence is so complex that many a reader may not notice that Satel openly admits she has zero evidence that so much as a single smoker has – let alone will – trade in her Marlboros for vaping.

While clearly influenced by Bill Kristol‘s sloppiness, still,  it takes no small amount of courage on Satel’s part to present her failure to locate facts in support of her opinion in the lede of an op-ed for the New York Times. But she’s only getting started. Graf 2, start of sentence 1:

The problem is, not enough smokers are switching to e-cigarettes, despite their relative safety…  

She is so right. Vaping is undoubtedly relatively safe. As in relative to going for a nice long swim in a river filled with starving piranhas. Or relative to jaywalking on the San Diego Freeway. Or relative to rectal feeding. Indeed, the list of behaviors that are more dangerous relative to vaping are truly endless. And never you mind that an added flavor ingredient in e-cigs can cause a condition called popcorn lung, “an irreversible disease which scars the lung and makes it impossible to breathe properly.” That’s just “barraging” us with unpleasant facts, as Satel’s next sentence makes clear.

One of my favorite parts of this extraordinary essay is her suggested health labeling for e-cig packages:

 “While more research is needed, it is likely that e-cigarettes meeting F.D.A. interim safety guidelines are much safer than smoking.”

Here, with just 20 words, Satel set a new standard for industry-sponsored disinformation. Because translated into normal English, her proposed label actually says:

“No one has any idea whatsoever how deadly e-cigarettes can be for people dumb enough to use them. But the tobacco industry has paid handsomely to bypass FDA regulations while innocent animals get tortured to find out. What we do know, however, is that real cigarettes will kill you with more efficiency.”

Satel will have to work mightily to top this effort. And no worries: I’m sure she’s being compensated well-enough to try.

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The courts: Targets of opportunity
by Tom Sullivan

An acquaintance asked Saturday what happens if the Supreme Court rules this summer to lift gay marriage bans across the country. It seems unlikely the Roberts court will overturn rulings in 36 states, he said. He worried that, since so many of the shifts on gay marriage across the country originated in the courts, that the right will not simply use the decision to energize their base in 2016, but to further colonize and control the courts. In fact that has already been occurring, according to Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies:

Today, special interests are spending record amounts of money on court elections in the 38 states that elect justices to the bench. As a Facing South/Institute for Southern Studies report showed, more than $3 million poured into races for North Carolina’s higher courts in 2014, the first election since state lawmakers — with the help of millionaire donor and political operative Art Pope — eliminated North Carolina’s judicial public financing program.

The controversy over Big Money’s attempted takeover of the courts is now coming to a head. Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing Williams-Yulee vs. The Florida Bar, a case involving a challenge to Florida’s law barring judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign contributions.

A constellation of groups have filed an amicus brief calling on the Supreme Court to uphold Florida’s ban as a necessary measure to protect the integrity of state courts. As Bert Brandenburg of the court watchdog group Justice at Stake said in a statement unveiling the brief, “Our courts are different from the other two branches of government. If money influences what a legislator or a governor does, it reeks. But if campaign money influences a decision in the courtroom, it violates the Constitution.” 

Having rigged most everything else, Republicans were already mucking about with the courts in North Carolina last summer in a way not seen in any other state:

After passing laws imposing new conditions on abortions and elections, taking away teacher tenure and providing vouchers for private school tuition, Republican state legislators have seen those policies stymied in state and federal courtrooms.

So they have passed another law, this one making those kinds of lawsuits less likely to succeed when filed in state court. Beginning in September [2014], all constitutional challenges to laws will be heard by three-judge trial court panels appointed by the chief justice of the state Supreme Court.

To help ensure passage, GOP lawmakers inserted the provision into four different bills.

Conservative Christian and political leaders seem already to have conceded the legal fight on marriage equality. Per comments at Huffington Post, they plan instead to “shore up the theology around holy matrimony, and fight to defend their religious liberty rights to oppose same-sex marriage.” Still, far be it from the right wing to shun using the animus in its base over hot-button social issue to rally its voters at election time. That’s expected if SCOTUS strikes down remaining gay marriage bans.

But the right also has a knack for blindsiding political opponents legislatively. For example, North Carolina’s 2013 “motorcycle abortion” bill, and the voting restrictions legislation that ballooned overnight from 17 to 57 pages. And since we’ve seen quite a lot of that here in North Carolina, the question about control of the courts prompts one to ask how the GOP might use the SCOTUS ruling to further consolidate power there. Frankly, I don’t know, but it is worth considering now and keeping a watchful eye on later.

Anticipating unfavorable demographic shifts, in 2008 the GOP began investing heavily in the Redistricting Majority Project, or REDMAP, to gain control of state legislatures, and thus, once-a-decade redistricting in 2010:

“The rationale was straightforward,” reads the memo. “Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn. Drawing new district lines in states with the most redistricting activity presented the opportunity to solidify conservative policymaking at the state level and maintain a Republican stronghold in the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade.”

Democrats got caught napping (or at least underfunded). It led to the largest GOP majorities we’ve seen in Congress for decades. Furthermore, GOP-controlled state legislatures implemented a raft of voting changes in states across the country to erect roadblocks to voting that, on balance, would hurt Democrats more than Republican voters: voter identity cards, shortening or eliminating early voting, voting roll purges, etc.

In North Carolina and elsewhere, new Republican policies seem designed to blow holes in municipal budgets, especially in large cities where the big blocks of Democratic voters are. They are cutting state taxes, pushing costs down to the cities, limiting local taxing authority, and privatizing public services to cut into cities’ revenue streams. In short, either driving cities into insolvency or leaving them no choice but to raise taxes and/or cut popular services. It’s the next phase of Defund the Left. And since the tax cuts and privatization are big, wet kisses for corporate sponsors, the strategy is a twofer.

In a few years, Republicans will run on Democrats’ “mismanagement” of city governments in fiscal crisis, counting on voters to have forgotten who engineered the crises. Here, they could either dissolve city governments or, elsewhere, take them over through emergency manager acts, as happened to Detroit. As is still happening in Detroit.

Republicans and their backers are playing the long game and they’re playing to win. They use losses as opportunities to further expand their influence. They’ve been very methodical. They’ve anticipated and planned to win the future much as the left has not.

The comments I heard Saturday about the future of the courts made me wonder what we might need to watch out for next.

A little sunshine burns the suits

by digby

Think Progress reports:

After leaked emails in the Sony hack showed unequal pay between male and female actors, Charlize Theron insisted she get the same pay as her male co-star Chris Hemsworth for “The Huntsman.” 

She succeeded, netting a $10 million increase that puts her on par with Hemsworth.

The hacked emails unearthed significant pay gaps between male and female stars. For their work in the movie “American Hustle,” male actors Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, and the director David O. Russell all got 9 percent of back-end profits, while Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence, the movie’s two female leads, were each getting 7 percent. (Lawrence was originally going to get 5 percent but her pay had been raised.) At the time, Adams had been nominated for four Academy Awards, more than Renner and Cooper combined, and Lawrence had won one while also starring in the smash hit The Hunger Games. Perhaps worse, in the email exchange Sony Pictures Chairman Amy Pascal responded to the critique that the pay was unequal: “there is truth there.”

A pay gap was even revealed between staff at the studios themselves. Among 6,000 employees at Sony, just one of the 17 who made $1 million or more was a woman. And while Michael De Luca and Hannah Minghella have the same job as co-presidents of production at Columbia Pictures, De Luca makes nearly $1 million more.

I am not in favor of hacking, needless to say. But this revelation is important. It’s been an open secret in Hollywood for years but this may have made it impossible to pretend that it wasn’t so.

And on what planet can it possibly be true that Chris Hemsworth is worth 10 million dollars more than Charlize Theron? It’s ridiculous.

(I actually can’t believe anyone is worth that kind of money but that’s a different subject … )

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Analyzing the threat

by digby

The quality of discourse on Fox News:

The terrorist takeover of Alaska is particularly surprising. Who knew?

h/t @billmon1

Sunday Funny: “Shake it off” edition

by digby

Love this:

And I think this is a great PR stunt by a police department. It’s ok for police officers to make fun of themselves. The more people see cops as human beings and the more cops act like human beings the better understanding we’ll have.

And by the way, the next time the NYPD gets its feelings hurt because the mayor doesn’t back their every move they should shake it off.

“A more aggressive form of terrorism”

by digby

Leon Panetta just said on Fareed Zakaria that we should all run for our lives because the terrorists are coming. Well, not exactly. He said that while it’s true that we have raised our intelligence capabilities since 9/11 and unlike in Europe, Muslims in America are able to assimilate, we’re still in grave danger:

Foreign nationals are still allowed to come back into our country and there are thousands of these nationals that are overseas in Syria and Iraq and yemen. I think it still represents a serious danger to the United States. I don’t think we can take anything for granted. I think we are dealing with a much more aggressive form of terrorism coming at us from different directions and the United States ought to continue to remain very vigilant in going after this kind of terrorism.

Shooting up an office building is more aggressive that flying planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? Really? That’s ridiculous and yet I hear all these intelligence people saying this.

The whole discussion is around certain lone wolves or sleeper cells finding their way into the country to launch attacks like Charlie Hebdo. I agree that would be awful. All such violence is awful. And lord knows we don’t need any more mass shootings in America. We have plenty already.

Yes, I know the intention is different than our homegrown massacres, but so what? Nobody in their right minds can believe that such acts will result in Muslim extremists taking over the country. It’s a violent political act designed to frighten a people into making bad decisions, whether it’s a misguided war or accepting authoritarianism or perpetrating immoral acts like torture which they can use to recruit more extremists. They cannot destroy us so they do these things to provoke us into destroying ourselves. It’s a cliche but it happens to be true. If we don’t panic they don’t get what they want.

I brought this up the other day but it’s worth repeating. We have had a more recent attack than 9/11 which resembles the Charlie Hebdo massacre: the Boston Bombing. It was perpetrated by a couple of misfit Muslim extremist brothers who had been radicalized by who knows what and they decided to launch an attack on civilians.  In some ways it was even more horrible that Charlie Hebdo because it targeted an apolitical event. But despite some overreach by the authorities in shutting down the whole city for a short period, in the main we kept our wits about us and did not immediately start talking about giving the government more power or cracking down on Muslim populations.  Indeed, we were remarkably mature about the whole thing. Today the surviving bomber is on trial in Boston.

But this attack in Europe seems to have gotten everyone’s juices flowing again and we have Panetta et al on TV blathering on about a “unique” threat even though it’s not unique at all and we deal with nuts shooting up the place all the time. I guess we’re just ready to get our blood up again…