Month: January 2015

Clout

by digby

This piece by Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post will be read by a lot of Villagers. And I have no doubt they will begin in earnest to form a critique of Warren as a Ted Cruz bomb thrower. (If they haven’t already.) As I wrote in this piece in Salon a couple of weeks ago: let ’em. It can only help the ball team.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has an explanation for the singular nature of her power.

“I’ll always be an outsider. That’s how I understand the world,” the Massachusetts Democrat said in an interview. “There’s a real benefit to being clear about this. I know why I’m here. I think about this every morning before I open my eyes, and I’m still thinking about it every night when I go to sleep.”

Being the target of that kind of focus can be an excruciating experience — the freshest case in point being investment banker Antonio Weiss, whom President Obama put forward last year as his nominee for Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance.

Initially seen as a highly credentialed and noncontroversial pick for a low-profile post, Weiss found himself up against a storm of opposition, led by Warren, who said he was yet another example of Wall Street cronyism within the Obama administration.

On Monday, Weiss wrote a letter to the president asking that his name be taken out of consideration.

The tussle sent yet another signal, maybe the clearest yet, of how Warren intends to wield her growing clout. It showed that she and her brand of populism are forces to be reckoned with — not only by Obama and his team, but also by the Democrats’ likely 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“It’s not about Antonio Weiss personally,” said Simon Johnson, an outspoken Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and former International Monetary Fund chief economist who admires Warren and shares her views. “What it’s really about is the presidential election.”

No small amount of speculation has centered on whether Warren herself will run for the White House in 2016. She insists that she will not. But her advisers and longtime allies say that she intends to keep the pressure on Clinton, to make sure the former secretary of state pays more than lip service to the issues that matter to Warren.

She is training her heat vision not on the Oval Office, but two doors down the hall on the Cabinet Room. Warren wants to make sure that Wall Street-aligned figures who have shaped the Clinton and Obama brand of economic policy for the past quarter-century, going back to former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, are not the only ones at the oval mahogany table.

It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

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Losing our collective nerve
by Tom Sullivan

Besides suffering Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the decade saw (IIRC) parents bringing the kiddies to the mall on Saturday to be photographed and fingerprinted. Maybe bringing dental impressions to help identify their bodies. We called these “child safe” programs. In the 1950s, it was commies hiding in the woodpile. By the 1980s, it was child abducters hiding behind every tree. Heaven forfend that little Johnny or Janie should walk or ride a bike to school or to the playground without a hypervigilant parent for a bodyguard. Well, somebody is finally trying to beak the spell:

On a recent Saturday afternoon, a 10-year old Maryland boy named Rafi and his 6-year old sister, Dvora, walked home by themselves from a playground about a mile away from their suburban house. They made it about halfway home when the police picked them up. You’ve heard these stories before, about what happens when kids in paranoid, hyperprotective America go to and from playgrounds alone. I bet you can guess the sequence of events preceding and after: Someone saw the kids walking without an adult and called the police. The police tracked down the kids and drove them home. The hitch this time is, when the police got there, they discovered that they were meddling with the wrong family.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv explicitly ally themselves with the “free range” parenting movement, which believes that children have to take calculated risks in order to learn to be self-reliant. Their kids usually even carry a card that says: “I am not lost. I am a free-range kid,” although they didn’t happen to have it that day. They had carefully prepared their kids for that walk, letting them go first just around the block, then to a library a little farther away, and then the full mile. When the police came to the door, they did not present as hassled overworked parents who leave their children alone at a playground by necessity, or laissez-faire parents who let their children roam wherever, but as an ideological counterpoint to all that’s wrong with child-rearing in America today. If we are lucky, the Meitivs will end up on every morning talk show and help convince American parents that it’s perfectly OK to let children walk without an adult to the neighborhood playground.

There’s video here.

For a culture that once boasted of rugged individualism and John Wayne, we’ve become awfully skittish in the last half century. Nothing like defeating the Axis, staring down the Russians, and landing a man on the moon to build a nation’s confidence. Nothing like Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Beirut Marine barracks bombing to shake it. By the mid-1980s, Americans were in full moral panic mode over Satanic ritual abuse and alien abductions. After September 11, we’d become a nation of bedwetters convinced that bearded men with long, curved knives are coming to kill us all in our beds. We’re packing heat and opening fire on anything that goes bump in the night either at home or abroad.

Lenore Skenazy found herself declared “America’s worst mom” by multiple news outlets after writing about letting her 9-year-old ride the New York subway alone. America is having a “hysterical moment,” she writes:

That weekend I started my Free-Range Kids blog to explain my philosophy. Obviously, I love safety: My kid wears a helmet, got strapped into a car seats, always wears his seat belt. But I don’t believe kids need a security detail every time they leave the house. When society thinks they do — and turns that fear into law — loving, rational parents get arrested.

Just checking Mapquest, my parents would have been arrested in two states on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. As a child living in a major city in the early 1960s, I and my classmates walked to a grade school about half a mile away in sun, rain, and snow. (Few families had more than one car anyway.) In a smaller, southern city, I occasionally rode a bike to school 3.5 miles away. The horror.

We as a country would be lot less dangerous to ourselves and to the world if we actually accepted the risks we used to before losing our collective nerve.

Isolationist?  I don’t think so.

by digby

For those who are under the impression that people who call themselves Tea Partiers don’t have hawkish views, I think this is a fairly good indication that they actually do:

Not that they are the only ones, obviously.  But I think people should be a little bit skeptical of their alleged devotion to isolationism.

And this …

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He’d think you were jerks #MLK

by digby

This crude divide and conquer strategy is bound to fail. African Americans can’t be fooled as easily as some other people:

On Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, we must ask how would he feel about: 20 percent African Americans unemployed or underemployed; About giving amnesty and jobs to 11 million illegal aliens with so many jobless Americans; About admitting 30 million more immigrant workers when 17 percent of Hispanic Americans are having trouble finding work; About Americans of all races not seeing a wage increase in 40 years.

Was that Dr. King’s dream?

Yeah, they really care.

I’ll just quote this passage from King’s “Letter from a Birmingham jail”:

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

The right is desperate to appropriate the legacy of Martin Luther King because it’s so powerful. He was a giant in American public life and the best they can do in response is lift up some callow movie actor who couldn’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy in response. But it won’t fly. He was not a conservative. That’s just a fact.

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Our close allies the Islamic extremists


by digby

Another day another beheading:

Gruesome footage circulating on social media shows Saudi authorities publicly beheading a woman in the holy city of Mecca earlier this week. The execution is the tenth to be carried out in country in the last two weeks; setting 2015 up to be even more bloody than last year, when 87 people were punitively killed by the state.

Rare video of Monday’s killing shows the woman, a Burmese resident named as Lalia Bint Abdul Muttablib Basim, screaming while being dragged along the street. Four police officers then hold the woman down before a sword-wielding man slices her head off, using three blows to complete the act.

In the chilling recording, Bashim, who was found guilty in a Saudi Sharia court of sexually abusing and murdering her seven-year-old step-daughter, is heard protesting her innocence until the very end. “I did not kill. I did not kill,” she screams repeatedly.

Filming of executions is normally strictly prohibited by Saudi authorities raising speculation that a security official may have covertly videoed the killing.

In a statement released on their official website, the Saudi Ministry of Interior said that the brutally delivered death penalty was warranted due to the “enormity of the crime,” and was carried out to “restore security” and “realize justice.”

“[The punishment] implements the rulings of God against all those who attack innocents and spill their blood. The government warns all those who are seduced into committing a similar crimes that the rightful punishment is their fate,” the statement said.

Saudi Arabia bases its legal system on a strict Wahhabi interpretation of Sharia law that imposes a wide-range of physical punishments for a number of crimes. The death penalty can be given for several offences including, armed robbery, drug-related offences, sorcery, adultery, murder, and rape.

Huh. Another beheading in Saudi Arabia. And yet:

There is nothing wrong with US officials meeting with any and all foreign officials.  It’s a good thing to have a dialog. But the American relationship with Saudi Arabia is a very, very close. It’s been intertwined for more than 30 years in ways that defy logic, particularly since 9/11 when the majority of the terrorists who took down the World Trade Center were Saudis and practiced the official state religion, a radical form of Islam that everyone agrees is feeding this extremist ideology that’s growing in the middle east.

Perhaps it would be useful to take a look at how all this started.  Certainly, it’s about oil. Saudi Arabia is where the oil is and huge American and multi-national companies make vast sums of money from it. And plenty of people make the case that the national interest is always best served by making sure we’re on the right side of the world’s supply of fossil fuels.  (It’s another question as to why we don’t work harder to get off fossil fuels but I’d guess it has to do with all those vast sums of money.)

But there’s more to it. Despite the fact that for political reasons, the CIA and all the cold-warrior hawks had vastly overestimated the Soviet threat for many years, Reagan came into office with his “doctrine” of rolling back Communism first on his agenda:

The problem for Reagan was that his doctrine was expensive and America was exhausted. Still recovering from Vietnam, there was little public support for adventures in the Third World. But Reagan believed that his predecessors’ failure to turn back Soviet advances in Angola and Ethiopia and elsewhere in the mid-1970s had only emboldened the Soviet Union. 

To high-level administration officials, it became clear that to roll back the communists would be costly. CIA Director William J. Casey set out to find others to provide arms and money. The possibility of Saudi Arabian assistance dawned on the administration very early on. Not only could they provide the help Reagan wanted, but with the shah of Iran gone, the Saudis could also play a more prominent role as an oil-rich ally in a turbulent region. 

Saudi Arabia had its own reasons for helping America fight the Soviets. First, the United States was instrumental to protecting Saudi oil fields and was a country with which the Saudi leadership wanted to stay on good terms. Second, Saudi Arabia was gravely concerned about the advancing Soviet Union. Riyadh interpreted Moscow’s Afghanistan adventure as part of a Soviet-directed campaign to encircle the Arabian Peninsula with radical regimes and subvert the oil-rich monarchies. Soviet involvement in Yemen and Ethiopia bolstered that view. And third, it was awash in petrodollars, and could afford to help. 

So the Reagan administration figured out how to integrate Saudi Arabian global concerns and surplus cash into U.S. foreign policy. In Afghanistan, the kingdom matched U.S. contributions dollar for dollar. Eventually, Washington and Riyadh poured about $3 billion into that broken country. Saudi Arabia also put $32 million into Nicaragua to fund the Contras, a fact that emerged in the Iran-Contra scandal. Saudi Arabia funneled money into Ethiopia’s neighbor, Sudan, in order to pressure Ethiopia’s pro-Soviet Mengistu government. Saudi Arabia assisted Angola’s rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi, in support of U.S. goals, by providing Morocco with money for a UNITA training camp. Yet Saudi Arabia provided more than just funding. The kingdom provided an ideologically compatible partner in the battle against godless communism. In a neat division of labor, America attacked communism and Saudi Arabia targeted godlessness. During his tenure, Reagan regularly rattled off a list of countries of concern: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia and Nicaragua. What few realized was that Saudi Arabia was either directly or indirectly involved in four of these five cases. The close partnership inspired Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, to confide to a journalist in 1981 that “if you knew what we were really doing for America, you wouldn’t just give us AWACS, you would give us nuclear weapons.”

What’s my point?  Only that the world is a complicated place for a variety of reasons and that it’s a big mistake for Americans to be so self-righteous about Islam and the middle east.  We have been right in the middle of it all, even to this day remaining close friends and allies with a nation that’s at the heart of Islamic extremism.

The tactics by ISIS, many of which are designed to scare the hell out of the populace and force them to conform are no different than Saudi Arabia’s.  They are both barbaric throwbacks to an earlier period of human history and it’s sickening. But there is absolutely no way the West can continue to wring its proverbial hands over ISIS while having its presidents literally hold hands with Saudi royals and kiss them on the lips. Americans may be too stupid to understand how seriously that undermines all of our protestations of civilized morality but you can be sure the people of the Middle East understand it very well.

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“Job creators” trickling $1700 glasses of wine down on all of us

by digby

Here’s what the 001% are spending their ill-gotten gains on:

It’s no secret that the the fine art market is as strong as it’s ever been with dozens of new records and $20-million plus prices achieved in 2014. But the hunger for the best of the best by the world’s so-called trophy hunters extends to a wide range of categories including wine, watches, photography, and older historic works such as antiquities and Old Master paintings. Here are the top-selling objects—and the often intriguing stories that accompany them—in each of these categories.

Manet, Giacometti and Warhol are very grateful to these find job-creators for the work. Or they would be if they weren’t dead.

Here’s the one that gets me:

6. Wine: the Superlot of Romanée-Conti (1992-2010)
Sotheby’s broke the world auction record for the most expensive wine lot when it sold the Romanée-Conti Superlot for $1.6 million. The price achieved per bottle of the 114-bottle Superlot was $14,121, which equals $1,700 per glass for 912 glasses.

Let them drink Romanée-Conti …

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The gentlelady from North Carolina is out of order

by digby

Ok, now we’ve got a genuine internal GOP problem:

Republican lawmakers are raising concerns that the party will alienate young voters and women by voting for an antiabortion bill coming to the House floor next week, on the 42nd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.

In a closed-door open-mic session of House Republicans, Rep. Renee Ellmers spoke out against bringing up the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would ban abortion after 20 weeks, telling the conference that she believes the bill will cost the party support among millennials, according to several sources in the room.

“I have urged leadership to reconsider bringing it up next week.… We got into trouble last year, and I think we need to be careful again; we need to be smart about how we’re moving forward,” Ellmers said in an interview. “The first vote we take, or the second vote, or the fifth vote, shouldn’t be on an issue where we know that millennials—social issues just aren’t as important [to them].”

There is no political article of faith more important to the Christian Right than abortion. The GOP is their home and they just won’t stand for this, especially after the Republicans pretty much caved on marriage equality.

I predict a shit storm. The GOP can’t turn around on social issues and certainly not because of “optics.” The social conservatives are their foot soldiers and denying them their vote on something like this is the equivalent of starving them. I can’t imagine this will fly.

Moreover, the idea that millenials are more sensitive on the abortion issue unfortunately isn’t true:

[S]trong millennial support for gay marriage has not translated into an uptick in acceptance of other sexual freedoms, like the right to an abortion. The Public Religion Research Institute notes that popular support for keeping abortion legal has dipped a percentage point since 1999, and young Americans are not swelling the ranks of abortion rights supporters. Today, while 57 percent of people under 30 see gay sex as “morally acceptable,” only 46 percent of them would say the same thing about having an abortion.

The institute calls this a “decoupling of attitudes.” Support for same-sex marriage and abortion rights have traditionally gone hand-in-hand, and that’s changing. Though young people today are “more educated, more liberal, and more likely to be religiously unaffiliated” than their parents—all factors traditionally correlated with support of abortion rights—they are not actually more likely to support abortion.

Here’s one explanation for the decoupling: Youth support of same-sex marriage does not reflect an embrace of progressive values, but rather an expansion of conservative ones. Over the past several decades, the mainstream gay rights movement has aligned its priorities with fundamentally conservative institutions: Gays and lesbians want the right to get married, adopt children, and serve in the military. These family-friendly, all-American demands appeal to the conservative base, and work in direct contrast to the lingering stereotyping of gays as promiscuous Communists. Today, support for gay marriage is nearing 50 percent among even the most conservative of American youth, like Republicans and white evangelical Christians.

The anti-abortion wingnuts aren’t going to stand for this. Here’s Erick Erickson:

Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) is a lying waste of oxygen.

First, she campaigned aggressively in 2014 against amnesty, executive overreach, etc. Then she promptly got back to Washington and reversed herself on everything she had campaigned on.

Now, her knickers are in knots over pro-life legislation. Just as the GOP has decided to stand firm on a piece of legislation supported by +60% of the nation, she’s scared people won’t like her.

That’s right. The “pro-life” congresswoman now claims that putting pro-life legislation on the floor of the House of Representatives would be a terrible, awful thing to do.

She lied about her immigration position. Now she’s lying about her pro-life position.

Her phone number is 202-225-4531 and I hope you might call her and tell her to stand firm and stop being a sniveling liar.

He is a sniveling liar too, of course. 60% of the nation does not support the 20 week abortion bill or the requirement that women must officially report a rape to qualify for the “exception” (to allow her to exercise her fundamental human right to control her own reproduction.)

But he sounds pissed. I can only imagine what Ralph Reed and the boys are thinking. This is their bread and butter we’re talking about.

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A foreign policy election it is

by digby

Oh for goodness sakes:

As Mitt Romney’s supporters push the idea that the 2012 Republican nominee might run for president again, one of their core talking points is that Romney was a foreign policy prophet in the last campaign. His vindication on several scores, they argue, gives him a rationale to run again — and a leg up on his potential Republican rivals.

“The results of the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama foreign policy have been devastating,” Romney declared at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting in San Diego on Friday. “The world is not safer.”

But, as Democrats point out, any losing candidate can cherry-pick a few issues that later broke his way. And Romney’s batting average was hardly perfect. Nor do bragging rights on a few specific issues necessarily translate to a popular foreign policy vision overall.

How pathetic. First of all, the world is always getting more and less dangerous in various ways and anyone running against an incumbent is going to claim that what their rival is doing will make the world less safe. Whatever. But the pathetic part of this is that Romney is actually going to claim some foreign policy expertise on that basis when his only experience with it was when he was in Paris during the Vietnam War and when he greeted Russian athletes during the Utah Olympics. In the last election his most memorable foreign policy moment was being taken downtown by Candy Crowley in a debate. This is not his strong suit and the fact that he thinks it’s a big selling point to have said Barack Obama was wrong about something in 2012 makes it so is well … pathetic.

It does signal something I have thought was an true for a while, however. This is going to be a foreign policy election. There are a few reasons for that. The first is that the economy is slowly recovering and it doesn’t have the immediate salience it had in 2012 and in the latter days of the 2008 elections. People are tired of hearing about it. And anyway, national security elections are sexier in any case. They make people feel stimulated rather than ennervated like depressing campaigns about an economy that’s barely chugging along. National security is a fantastic distraction from the ongoing underlying anxiety of a society riven by big economic forces that can only be fixed with some very difficult political solutions. Much better to have people shouting USA! USA! in the streets.

Finally, it stands to reason that the prospect of the first woman nominee being a Democrat would make the Republicans pull out all the stops to out-macho her. They do that with men, even war heroes, so they are licking their chops at the prospect of a campaign designed to show that a woman isn’t capable of keeping the country safe. And sadly, they have good reason to do that:

If they can pick off a few men who might vote for a Democrat if it weren’t for the fact that a woman was on the ticket they think they can win. And they might. But they need issues that speak to these underlying attitudes. National security is the issue that puts a woman at her greatest disadvantage. Hillary Clinton has plenty of experience but these weaknesses are due to ancient stereotypes which play into GOP hands. This is why they flogged Benghazi! so hard even though it made little sense: just preparing the battlefield.

I always said that I thought the first woman president would have to be a Republican to overcome this. (Insert joke here about Hillary Clinton being a Goldwater girl… hahahaha.) But the reason was that I assumed these attitudes to be such a high bar to overcome that any woman would need the validation of the warmongering Daddy Party to win. I’m not sure about that now. I think we have probably progressed beyond that — and that the electoral structure of the two parties may be enough to overcome it regardless. Nonetheless, the Republicans will use whatever they have to try to win the White House and keep their majority. So foreign policy it will be. Mitt’s just being Mitt and going whichever way the wind is blowing.

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Please don’t flog the bloggers


by Tom Sullivan

Why, how Enlightenment of them:

The case of a Saudi blogger sentenced to 1,000 lashes has been referred to the Supreme Court by the king’s office, the BBC has learned. 

Blogger Raif Badawi’s wife said the referral, made before he was flogged 50 times last Friday, gave him hope that officials would end his punishment. 

A second round of lashings was postponed for medical reasons. 

The punishment of Badawi, who was also fined and sentenced to 10 years in prison, caused international outcry. 

Badawi established Liberal Saudi Network, a now-closed online forum that sought to encourage debate on religious and political matters in Saudi Arabia in 2008.

Ah! Can’t have that. Nope.

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I gotcher apology for yah rightcheaya

by digby

“I conceded to an abortion. That decision still haunts me today.”

“I should’ve manned up and I should’ve fought for you and — I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry for men not taking a greater stand in this area.”

“I’m sorry that, I’m sorry that this is available.

“Somebody should’ve been there to rescue you, but you do have a rescuer. You don’t have to live in shame and darkness, you can run to God’s light.”

I’m sorry for using bad language but — go fuck yourselves.

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