Month: January 2015

More grown-up governance

by digby

Here’s another example of the GOP proving to the great middle of America that they are serious about governing:

The GOP’s Senate takeover means the chamber’s leadership positions will be filled with Republicans next year. That’s bad news for the environment: The Senate’s worst climate change denier, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, will likely chair the Environment and Public Works Committee. But it’s also bad news for science: Texas Senator Ted Cruz, another climate denier, may be next-in-line to become chair of the Subcommittee on Science and Space, which oversees agencies like the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

In a February interview with CNN, Cruz said he doesn’t think the Earth is warming.

“You know, you always have to be worried about something that is considered a so-called scientific theory that fits every scenario. Climate change, as they have defined it, can never be disproved, because whether it gets hotter or whether it gets colder, whatever happens, they’ll say, well, it’s changing, so it proves our theory.”

Inhofe is a cretin who may not know better. Cruz has no excuse. He’s extremely well educated and not dumb by any means. He’s purely an opportunistic jerk who doesn’t even love his own children because what he’s really saying is that none of this matters because he’ll be dead before his policies burn up the planet.

How to explain tax cuts to brainwashed people

by digby

I don’t think it’s hard any more to make the case that trickle down doesn’t work. These last few years of the rise of the 1% makes that clear.

This would be a scandal if we really gave a damn

by digby

And no, it’s not stupid crapola about Fast and Furious or Benghazi!. It’s not about some lowly clerks at the IRS not being able to decode the campaign finance laws without looking like they’re involved in partisan politics. This is for real and it’s important.

Dan Froomkin:

The outrageous whitewash issued yesterday by the CIA panel John Brennan hand-picked to lead the investigation into his agency’s spying on Senate staffers is being taken seriously by the elite Washington media, which is solemnly reporting that officials have been “cleared” of any “wrongdoing“.

But what the report really does is provide yet more evidence of Brennan’s extraordinary impunity.

The panel concluded that CIA officials acted reasonably by scouring Senate computer drives in early 2014 when faced with a “potential security breach”. (That “breach” had allowed Senate staffers investigating CIA torture to access, more than three years earlier, a handful of documents Brennan didn’t want them to see.)

But the CIA yesterday also released a redacted version of the full report of an earlier investigation by the CIA’s somewhat more independent inspector general’s office. And between the two reports, it is now more clear than ever that Brennan was the prime mover behind a hugely inappropriate assault on the constitutional separation of powers, and continues to get away with it.

Most notably, the official who ran the CIA facility where the Senate staffers had been allowed to set up shop wrote in a memo to the inspector general that Brennan, after speaking with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough about the errant documents, called him and “emphasized that I was to use whatever means necessary to answer the question of how the documents arrived on the SSCI side of the system.”

SSCI – pronounced “sissy”— is how the CIA refers to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And “whatever means necessary” quickly turned into a foray into the Senate’s private workspace.

The scandal isn’t the whitewash, although that’s a scandal too. This is the part that would normally cause a stir:

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General.

The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before ordering CIA employees to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal documents had wound up in Senate investigators’ hands.

Brennan’s consultation with McDonough also came before the CIA revealed the search to then-Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), whose staff was the target of the snooping.

The new information suggesting the White House was aware of — and did not stop — the CIA’s computer snooping is unlikely to improve the existing distrust between Senate committee members and the executive branch. Feinstein has said that the CIA’s computer search likely violated the constitutional separation of powers, an allegation the White House has declined to directly address.

This suggests a much bigger role for the White House in the torture cover-up than we knew until now. They have been playing the part of “mediatorY, giving the impression that they were somehow standing between the CIA and the Senate, trying to give both parties what they needed to do their jobs. yes, they insisted on redactions and slow walked the report for many months, but it wasn’t because they didn’t want the report to come out, but just that they wanted to make sure that CIA employees were put in no danger.

It’s not that everyone believed that, of course. It certainly appeared that the White House was protecting the CIA. But this is the first time I’ve seen evidence that they colluded with the CIA during the investigation and actively participated in helping them cover up their torture history. That is, in the immortal words of Joe Biden, a Big Fucking Deal.

If the report was about anything but torture, which Republicans love and want to protect even above their desire to hurt President Obama, I would think this would have the makings of a serious congressional investigation. Unfortunately, most members of both parties are either outright advocates of torture or see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, so that won’t happen.

I guess I’ll just be the first, and probably among a very few, to ask: “what did the president know and when did he know it?”

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Heritage flim-flam

by digby

I wrote a piece for Salon today about the hilarious idea in the beltway that the Heritage Foundation is really leading a moderate “reform” movement in the GOP:

First, let’s dispense with the ludicrous idea that Paul Ryan represents the “intellectual wing” of the Republican Party. He represents the flim-flam wing of the Republican Party, which is admittedly a very large faction, but it can hardly be defined as “intellectual.” Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are actual intellectuals. (And at this point they are practically the only ones.) But it doesn’t take an intellectual to see that policies benefiting the non-college-educated, blue-collar, “Sam’s Club” voter would be useful to a party that must win the vast majority of white votes in order to even have a dim chance at obtaining the presidency. This is the stuff of Fox News analysis, not intellectual inquiry. Obviously, Marco Rubio is no intellectual and Mike Lee is a policy entrepreneur in the sense that he is an extremely conservative civil liberties advocate, which has just enough currency in the GOP to attract four young nerds and a few of Ron Paul’s old fishing buddies.

The article also points out that Heritage Action has recently been ostracized in Washington for taking on the political establishment. They were even barred from attending the meetings of the Republican Study group, which is the D.C. Republican equivalent of being shunned by the Mean Girls table in the cafeteria — a kind of social death. The article characterizes this as an ideological battle between the center and the right, but it’s really a little family spat among conservatives. There is no center. And the idea that they’ve suddenly noticed that voters expect a policy agenda “even though Heritage Action’s favored prescriptions are more conservative than what many party officials support” is basically saying that the 2016 presidential candidates need something to run on besides hating Barack Obama. Heritage is hoping to get a little piece of that action.

But you have to give them credit for sheer audacity. The party that elevates the health of business above every other concern, that worships “market solutions” to every problem, that calls the nearly 50 percent of Americans who make too little money to owe federal income taxes “moochers” and “parasites” is now saying, “What a lot of Americans are looking for is a genuine agenda that speaks to the anxieties they have, and that’s a tough thing for Washington to deliver because it’s not what K Street’s asking for.”

That’s the party that initiated a program called “The K-Street Project”:

The K Street Project is an effort by the Republican Party (GOP) to pressure Washington lobbying firms to hire Republicans in top positions, and to reward loyal GOP lobbyists with access to influential officials, an arrangement known as crony capitalism. It was launched in 1995 by Republican strategist Grover Norquist and then-House majority whip Tom DeLay. It has been criticized as being part of a “coziness” between the GOP and large corporations which has allegedly allowed business to rewrite government regulations affecting their own industries in some cases.

How likely is it that this “cozy” relationship is no longer desirable by the Republican Party?

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a “rebranding” going on at the Heritage Foundation. Under the mature and reasonable leadership of Jim DeMint, the Christian right ex-senator who said Obamacare would be the president’s “Waterloo,” the foundation is undergoing a bit of a face-lift. They are touting the sexy new Beltway brand called the “Reform Conservative Movement” (which strikes me as something of an oxymoron. Why would conservatism want reform?). DeMint characterizes this revolutionary change as showing Americans “how our ideas and policies will make their life better and country stronger,” which does seem like a challenge.

Read on … This has to be the most absurd “re-brand” in history. And yet some members of the beltway press are eating it up.

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Serpico Redux

by digby

I recently linked to a post by Frank Serpico recalling once what happened to him when he exposed corruption in the NYPD. The wall of silence that keeps cops from policing themselves is isn’t so thin. Here’s a recent example of it:

Before he became public enemy No. 1 inside the Baltimore Police Department, Det. Joseph Crystal was considered one of its rising stars.

The son of two NYPD cops, Crystal was put in charge of his police academy cadet class on day one.

He was promoted to detective before he reached his second year on the force.

And he went on to lead his violent crime unit in gun arrests, racking up high-profile collars that made the evening news.

For Crystal, rooting out crime in one of the most violent cities in the nation didn’t even feel like work.

“Being a cop was all I ever wanted to do,” he says. “A dream come true.”

But that dream turned into a nightmare four years ago when his brothers in blue turned on him – bombarding him with taunts and threats, refusing to come to his aid during drug busts and even leaving a dead rat on his windshield.

His crime? He reported a case of police brutality.

Crystal drew the ire of his department after coming forward to report the 2011 beating of a drug suspect by a fellow officer. Crystal’s subsequent trial testimony helped secure convictions against the cop who carried out the beating and the sergeant who helped facilitate it.

Crystal says the pattern of abuse that followed led him to resign from the job he loved.

“I never imagined that doing the right thing as a cop could cost me so much,” Crystal, 31, told the Daily News this week in his most extensive interview to date.

You should read the whole article with all the details of what happened to him. It’s chilling. He’ could have been killed as a result of some of the behavior of his fellow cops. In fact, it seems as though that was the idea.

There have been boatloads of words spilled about this problem over the years. But it never changes.

Crystal and his wife now live in Florida where he’s working as an officer with the Walton County Sheriff’s Office.

Crystal understands that some might draw parallels between his case and the coordinated displays of disrespect shown to Mayor de Blasio by NYPD officers at the funerals of slain cops Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.

But Crystal doesn’t see a connection.

“I see people here as they’re hurting and upset right now at the loss of two of their own,” Crystal said. “I saw what happened to me as somewhere along the line we lost our way.

“What I saw was criminal. What I see here is an emotion,” Crystal added. “And those are two very different things.”

He tried for months to get a law enforcement job near Maryland but found no takers.

“Looking back, I still can’t fathom what happened,” Crystal said. “How do you honestly expect people to have faith, to trust the cops, when they let this happen?”

This youtube called “watching Serpico with Serpico” from the New York Times is a fascinating little look at the problem:

Did we mention the stonings?
by Tom Sullivan

On a local Facebook political page the other day, a resident conservative was fear mongering about Islam and posted the address of the local Islamic Center as evidence of something somehow threatening. It’s next door to an office where I spend a lot of time. Nice people, I replied, you should drop by sometime. And they are.

Sadly, given the Charlie Hebdo attacks and other recent events, Islam’s fundamentalists are much higher profile. I feel for myth neighbors. It’s like mentioning America and every time having someone bring up Timothy McVeigh or the Westboro Baptist Church. Having lived and worked within a few miles of Bob Jones University in South Carolina, religious fundamentalism is a topic of some interest to explore in detail when there is more time. But right now, Christian fundamentalists are not what’s news. This is:

Al-Qaeda-linked militants have publicly executed a woman accused of adultery in northwestern Syria, a monitoring group said Wednesday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that in total 14 people had been executed for alleged adultery or homosexuality in the war-torn country since July, half of them women.

It released a video showing fighters from Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, tying up a woman and shooting her in a square in the town of Maaret Masirin in the province of Idlib.

Stonings. Did we mention the stonings? And it’s not just Syria:

Raif Badawi, the Saudi liberal convicted of publishing a blog, has been told he will again be flogged 50 times on Friday – the second part of his 1,000-lash sentence which also includes a 10-year jail term.

The US, Britain and other western governments had all called for the punishment to be dropped but there has been no sign of any diplomatic action against Riyadh. Amnesty International on Wednesday urged the UK government to challenge Saudi Arabia, which has ignored all protests over the case.

Badawi will be given 50 more lashes outside a mosque in his home city of Jeddah unless a Saudi prison doctor determines he is not yet fit to face the punishment owing to injuries sustained last Friday. If nothing changes, he will be flogged every Friday for the next 19 weeks.

Kate Allen, Amnesty International’s UK director, wonders why British authorities are so vocal about the Charlie Hebdo attacks, yet “tone everything down” when it comes to the Saudis. U.S. authorities, too, we might add.

Why is it that people who talk about faith the most seem to understand it the least?

QOTD: “I obviously did not mean what I clearly said”

by digby

Oh wait, he didn’t mean that either:

Charles Krauthammer had a near meltdown today on Fox News complaining that “everybody” knows that there’s a difference between Islam and radical Islam and there’s absolutely no reason for anyone to insist on making such rhetorical distinctions.

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Playing the terrorist game


by digby

Fergawdsakes:

A group called The Truth About Guns organized a simulation of last week’s terrorist attack in Paris. They hoped to learn how things may have played out differently at Charlie Hebdo, or any other mass shooting.

“It’s the one people are Monday morning quarterbacking at the moment,” said group member Nick Leghorn. “It’s interesting to see how people react under stress. It’s not what you’d expect people do.”

Volunteers took turns on a set designed to look like the offices of the French satirical weekly magazine. But unlike the terrorist attack that killed 12 people, volunteers played the role of armed civilian.

“He started shooting – and I started shooting,” said volunteer Linda Cruz.

And here’s the kicker:

Time and time again, the armed civilian “dies” – shot by a round that marks him or her with paint.

In only two cases volunteers were able to take out one of two gunmen in the process.
“Still got killed but did better than I thought I would,” said father of four, Parks Matthew.

That made me emit a strangled mordant chuckle. They also forgot to mention how many fellow civilians these armed civilians took out in the process.

This is absurd. We have mass workplace shootings by the dozens in the United States. If they felt the need to “practice” at any point they could have run a simulation on one of them. But it’s not as sexy as pretending to fight off crazed jihadis which I’m fairly sure were played by guys dressed up in Ninja costumes shouting something incomprehensible in pidgen Arabic which makes it so much more exciting.

A long way to go

by digby

There are a lot of interesting tid-bits of polling data in this Pew poll inquiring about the public’s attitudes about women in leadership positions. This one stuck out for me:

That’s a big difference between what men think and what women think. Women see women in leadership as something that will improve their lives and far fewer men see the same thing. I don’t know if that’s because more men just think that nobody can improve anyone’s lives or that women just suck at doing it but the difference is real.

One thing we know is that many more men think women don’t really face a lot of problems getting to the top:

This is also revealing:

This seems like something that far more men would say “I don’t know”. But apparently, most assume this is not the case. Interesting.

And yeah, there’s been progress but damn it’s slow:

Whoopee. A glacial pace of progress:

And waddaya know — everybody’s saying we’re going to have a nation security election in 2016 and lookee here:

If nothing else, this is designed to push any woman candidates to the right on these issues. Funny how that works out.

The report shows that the partisan divide is strong but I’d guess that has more to do with the fact that the Democrats are likely to nominate the first woman while the Republicans’ last best hope was Sarah Palin.

And the generational divide is fairly strong too. Older folks like me are more pessimistic about the prospects for full equality but I’d guess that just stems from our life experience. (See: glacially slow, above.)

Overall, it’s a pretty depressing result. Most figure women are as good as men at most things but they’re less decisive and aren’t as good at keeping the country safe, two characteristics that are considered important for business and political leadership. (Women are good at caring and being honest, apparently.) There’s hope among the young who are far less likely to fall for gender stereotypes. We’ve come a long way, baby, but we’ve still got a long way to go. But then, this is hugely substantial and fundamental shift in how humans organize themselves, so it’s a heavy lift. But it would be nice if we could speed up the process just a little here in the land of the free at least. Sheesh.

I’ll defend his right to say (but I’ll condemn him as an embarrassment to the human species)

by digby

I hope that’s ok.

Considering the fact that ISIS has been beheading Western journalists, this seems remarkably obtuse, even for former congressman Joe Walsh:

But hey, maybe Chris Matthews can have him back on the show again today to explain himself.

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