Month: January 2015

A legitimate question
by Tom Sullivan

Thinking about the Keystone XL pipeline. Perhaps you’ve seen a similar scenario before. It could be General Motors or a new real estate development or Goldman Sachs or infrastructure privatization or, really, any other business with political clout. The company insists that the public financially back the venture, or pass legislation to allow it, or amend existing rules (others must abide by) to permit it, or subsidize it with public services, land, or tax breaks, or bail out its failure.

The public – voters – object, citing a multitude of reasons. Good reasons, maybe. Bad reasons, maybe. It’s our community and our right to whatever we damned well please reasons. Maybe We the People simply don’t like your looks or the smell of the deal.

Executives behind the proposal paint objectors as Luddites or communists or NIMBYs or tree huggers or all of the above. How dare citizens stand in the way of unbridled progress, profit, Manifest Destiny? How dare they impede job creators? (“Stand aside, everyone! I take LARGE STEPS!”) Why, if the rabble don’t accede to their wishes and soon, the project will be stillborn. The business model won’t work! Profits and jobs and tax revenues will be lost.

Exaggeration? Of course. And so familiar.

Self-described risk-takers think it impertinent of mortals to question their assumptions, but We the People should anyway, especially when their plans impact our communities. Here is a question rarely asked and less rarely answered:

“How is the success of your business model our problem?”

File away for future use.

This is everything that’s wrong with the world

by digby

Mark Halperin was live tweeting from the Golden Globes red carpet:

I’m not kidding: George Clooney just said to me “I love you.” But I think he’s said that to others before. pic.twitter.com/YlumUDFnxX
— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) January 12, 2015

Who says political journalism has no gravitas?

Your majesty

by digby

A right wing lamentation:

Unfortunately, each passing year brings fresh evidence that fewer people have faith in the ideals of America. The pursuit of individual happiness is giving way to pursuit of an entitlement, a demand that someone else make you happy.

There’s no majesty in that.

Instead of hiring a political class that inspires our better ­angels, we increasingly elect people devoted to stoking resentment and grievance. Too many of our so-called “honorables” talk the country down and convince people they are victims. Some even preach that America is “broken,” a code word that gives them license to sweep away all the good with the bad.

America isn’t broken, but as measured by the quality of public servants, we live in a time of absolute squalor. The fact that the president of the United States disrupted wedding plans by two soldiers so he could play golf is a perfect metaphor for our political rulers. They serve for their own pleasure.

Where’s the majesty in that?

There is none, with the result that our historic prosperity looks and feels perilous. There is a growing sense of impending disorder, a fear that life could spin permanently out of control at any time. Some days, a tragic end feels inevitable.
[…]

[Majesty]is rectitude forged by devotion to duty and honor. It ­expects success and brooks no excuses for failure. There are no trophies for attendance.

Remarkably, I am aware of just two American institutions that still try to live by those standards. One is the United States military, the other is the New York Police Department. Both are widely respected for their professionalism and trusted for their devotion to causes higher than themselves. It is a measure of our warped era that both are under vicious attack.

So far, both institutions are standing their ground. Their strength is not a reflection of ­super-human courage, but rather evidence of the power of mutual commitment.

The military and the NYPD are made up of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, day after day, quietly, without seeking the limelight or acclaim. They do what they do because it is right.

That is absolute majesty.

You know who else was into majesty?

Not that this is anything like that. Of course not.

*I do have to giggle at the idea that the NYPD doesn’t seek acclaim. Or the idea that our culture isn’t patriotic or doesn’t celebrate the military.

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Mass resistance


by digby

	More than 50 world leaders and top envoys joined an estimated 1.5 million people in the French capital in a massive outpouring of solidarity following the recent Paris attacks. Rallies were also held in several other French cities and towns.

The only way Islamic extremism can “win” is if all those people allow themselves to be manipulated by authoritarians. That’s all they’ve got.

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Speaking of violence

by digby

…Here’s the latest on the NAACP bombing in Colorado last week.

The FBI on Friday released the composite sketch of a suspect in the bombing of the NAACP Colorado Springs chapter.

The FBI believes a man described as white, about 40 years old, and balding may have been involved in the explosion. The man was seen by a witness carrying something into an alley near the building that houses the NAACP and leaving empty-handed at the time of the explosion.

According to Thomas Ravenelle, FBI the special agent in charge, authorities are also looking a person who was “upset” at the NAACP office a few weeks before the bombing.

I’d post the picture but it could be any Balding middle aged white guy in America with sunglasses.

Anyway, carry on.

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you …”

by digby

I’m getting that strange feeling I had after 9/11 again when I nervously observed people I admired getting hysterical over the fact that religious extremists had launched a terrorist attack and conflated that act with something like World War II. That was an epic attack to be sure, but even so, it did not represent an existential threat to the most powerful nation on earth and the shrieking about the Clash of Civilizations was overwrought and destructive. Still, considering the events of the last few days it’s understandable that people would be afraid. And unfortunately, it’s entirely predictable that liberals who have tried to find a way these last few years to condemn extremism without alienating the vast majority of Muslims are being held up as appeasers who are selling out our Western values. That’s just the way these things work.

But that does not change the fact that this violence does not actually represent an existential threat to our way of life any more than the much more dramatic events of 9/11 did and those who are losing their grip over it are irrational. The threat to our way of life comes in the reaction and I’m sorry to say that it’s these critics who are facilitators in that project. That is, in fact, whole the point of terrorism and why it’s so frustrating to see people who allegedly care about our way of life falling into the trap head first.

After all, we have mass killing in this country all the time and we manage to keep calm and carry on:

Sandy Hook, the Washington Navy Yard and, again, Fort Hood. These place names signify terrible tragedies that continue to prompt deep reflection from policymakers and the public about how to stop acts of mass violence in the United States.

While FBI statistics show that levels of violent crime in the United States, including murder, have steadily declined since 1991, acts of murder and non-negligent manslaughter still claim about 15,000 lives a year. More than half of all such violent crimes in a given year are typically committed with guns. Over the past 30 years, public mass shootings have resulted in the murder of 547 people, with 476 other persons injured, according to a March 2013 Congressional Research Service report. “[W]hile tragic and shocking,” the report notes, “public mass shootings account for few of the murders or non-negligent homicides related to firearms that occur annually in the United States.” For more on these dynamics, see the May 2013 Pew Research Center report titled “Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware.”

Even as the total gun homicide rate has fallen, however, some of the worst acts of violence in U.S. history have taken place within the past decade. Half of the deadliest shootings — incidents at Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Binghamton, Fort Hood (2009) and the Washington Navy Yard — have taken place since 2007. In September 2014 the FBI released a report confirming that U.S. mass shootings had risen sharply since 2007: From 2000 to 2006, there were an average of 6.4 annually; from 2007 to 2013, the average more than doubled, rising to 16.4 such shootings per year.

Our society is soaked in bloody mass violence. And yet each time it happens we go about our daily lives without succumbing to fear. This is not to say that intent doesn’t matter, it does. Some people are crazy, some people are zealots, some people are misguided and some are just cruel and homicidal. But I would guess those designations apply just as well to the Islamic extremists who perpetrated that horrific mass killing in France as they do to our homegrown variety of mass killers. They are not super-villains with extraordinary power. They are weak, marginalized misfits who found a reason to act out their violent impulses. Rationally, the threat they pose is little different than the workplace killer who comes into an office and mows down his co-workers — something that happens with frequency in America.

Again, the point of terrorism is to make us defeat ourselves. If we can deal with the fact that heavily armed lunatics walk America’s streets every day ready to mow down strangers for any reason at all without losing our grip, we should be able to keep our heads about us when a bunch of misfit religious fanatics do the same thing.

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The Nones

by digby

I came across this Pew study about “the nones” the fastest growing religious designation in America:

Registered voters in the general public tend to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party over the Republican Party by a margin of 48% to 43%. Religiously unaffiliated voters tilt strongly toward the Democrats over the Republicans, however. About six-in-ten unaffiliated voters (63%) say they are Democrats or lean toward the Democrats, while a quarter (26%) identify with or lean toward the GOP. This pattern is especially pronounced among atheists and agnostics.

In contrast with the unaffiliated, voters who are affiliated with a religious group are more likely to identify with or lean toward the Republicans (48%) than the Democrats (45%).

Voters who are unaffiliated with a religion also are more likely than the general public to describe themselves as liberal (38% to 21%), and less likely to identify as conservative (20% to 39%).

Within the unaffiliated, about half of those who call themselves atheist or agnostic identify as liberal (51%), compared with 13% who identify as conservative. The margin is narrower among those who identify their religion as ”nothing in particular,” with 31% of that group calling themselves liberal and 23% conservative.

Compared with the unaffiliated, voters who are affiliated with a particular religion are more than 20 points more likely to be conservative (44% vs. 20% among the unaffiliated) and about half as likely to identify as liberal (17% vs. 38% among the unaffiliated). In fact, each affiliated religious group is significantly more conservative than they are liberal – a direct contrast with the unaffiliated.

Meanwhile:

Even though the percentage of U.S. adults identifying as religious “nones” has grown in recent decades, the congressional representation of the unaffiliated continues to lag behind. As noted earlier, only one member of the new Congress identifies as religiously unaffiliated. And over the past five decades, only one member has publicly declared that he does not believe in God or a Supreme Being: Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., who served in Congress from 1973-2012.

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There were a bunch of founders who would have fit that description though.

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Apologies excepted
by Tom Sullivan

News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch tweeted this on Friday about the Charlie Hebdo attacks:

Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 10, 2015

Murdoch’s sweeping indictment of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims drew its own round of apologies for Murdoch from other Australian men, conveniently aggregated by the Independent, including this none-too-subtle rebuke:

As a human being living on planet earth, I must apologise to the Universe for not throwing @rupertmurdoch into the mouth of a Volcano.— Christopher McBean (@MrMcBean) January 11, 2015

As Vox observed, a ritual apology is expected of the Muslim world after every incident resembling the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris:

Here is what Muslims and Muslim organizations are expected to say: “As a Muslim, I condemn this attack and terrorism in any form.”

The demand, writes Max Fisher, is “Islamophobic and bigoted,” making every Muslim a monster in the closet unless he/she says otherwise, and not even then.

Katie Halper explains at Raw Story how this works:

Every time an extremist who is Muslim commits an act of terrorism, people ask where the moderate Muslim voices condemning violence are. (Interestingly, as a Jew, I don’t usually get asked to condemn extremism when it is perpetuated by Jewish fundamentalists like Baruch Goldstein, who shot 29 praying Muslims do death, and injured 125, at the Cave of the Patriarchs, or Yigal Amir, who killed Israeli Prime MinisterYitzhak Rabin.) And the same thing is happening following this week’s deplorable, pathetic, and tragic killing of 12 people at the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

Not surprisingly, much of the “where is the Muslim outrage” outrage is coming from… Fox News, as Media Matters notes. Fox’s own Monica Crowley, for example, said that Muslims “should be condemning” the attack and that she hadn’t “heard any condemnation… from any groups.” Fox News’ America’s Newsroom guest Steve Emerson complained, “you don’t see denunciations of radical Islam, by name, by mainstream Islamic groups.” Bob Beckel, a host of Fox News’ The Five host said Muslims were “being quiet” about the shooting and accused the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) of keeping “their mouth shut when things happen.”

For the edification of Fox News’ talking heads, Halper compiled 46 examples of Muslim outrage at the attacks that Murdoch’s crack news team had trouble finding.

Lest we think Halper’s view is slanted by her religious views, Mark Steel observes how Norway’s Christians were not asked to apologize after Anders Breivik slaughtered over 70 people in 2011. Nor America’s Christians after Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people and injured over 600, Fisher adds.

Arifa Akbar, literary editor at the Independent, after recounting a string of condemnations by Muslim faith leaders, responded to the Murdoch tweet this way:

For Muslims to apologise is for them to admit that they – we – harboured these men, we invited them to our mosques and listened to their bile and hatred, and perhaps even their planning. How many of us were and are complicit in this? I’m not, and the majority of Britain’s 2.8 million Muslims aren’t either. After 9/11, I spoke to the brother of a Muslim victim. Who should apologise to him? The policeman shot dead in the line of duty was a Muslim. Who should apologise for Ahmed Merabet’s death? Me?

How far do ripples of responsibility extend? Should an imam in Southall apologise for the actions of these men in Paris? France has a significant Muslim minority with its own tensions – the ban on the veil and high levels of disenchantment among this largely banlieue-dwelling minority. It is all rather more complex than can be smoothed over with an apology.

As noted, Christians are exempt from calls for these ritual apologies expected from the Muslim community. No quantity or quality of them would be accepted or even acknowledged by the Murdochs of the world anyway. Because what they really want from the world’s uppity, second-largest religion is the kind of supplication Muslims perform in the Salat each day, only in acknowledgment that Christianity is Number One. Because this is not about terrorists or any brand of religious extremism. As with minorities of every other type, Muslims are expected to know their place.

Big surprise on 4/15/15

by digby

I’ve been writing about this for a while. I think it’s going to be a big story because people simply weren’t adequately warned about it:

Uncle Sam could take a bigger bite at tax time for consumers who received too much government help last year with their Obamacare premiums.

That may be just one of several surprises for millions of Americans in advance of the first tax deadline involving the Affordable Care Act.

The majority of Americans who get their health insurance at work should see few changes when filing their taxes. Most will just need to check a box on their tax return indicating they had coverage in 2014.

It stands to be more complicated for those individuals who purchased a private health plan in government-run exchanges or went without insurance at some point last year.

Obamacare launched a year ago, but it’s only now that people will incur tax penalties for being uninsured. Others will realize their federal premium subsidy was incorrect.

Experts project that 40% to 50% of families that qualified for financial assistance might have to repay some portion because their actual household income for 2014 was higher than what they estimated during enrollment.

Those repayments could range from a relatively small amount to thousands of dollars in some cases. In California, some of the first clues may emerge later this month when the state issues tax notices to 1 million consumers.

About 85% of the roughly 7 million Americans who signed up last year through government-run exchanges paid discounted premiums thanks to subsidies.

“This could flip people from having a refund to not,” said John Graves, an assistant professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “Nobody can project their income down to the last dollar. It could be a huge deal.”
[…]
About two-thirds of consumers didn’t know that their 2014 tax return would be used to reconcile their subsidy amount, according to a survey by the H&R Block Tax Institute.

The lowest income people in the exchanges have their potential payback capped. But it could add up to some real money for middle class folks who made more than they expected. And it will feel as if they’re being punished for doing better. It’s unusual to have your bills increase just because you get a raise.

I suspect that in the long run people will begin to overestimate their incomes and look more closely at the actual cost of premiums not just what you pay after the subsidies. (Here in California they are huge — twice what I paid for a similar plan two years ago.) They’ll end up buying cheaper plans knowing that they might have to pony up a big payment if they make a mistake or unexpectedly come into some money. People will adjust. But this is another one of those surprises that most people didn’t see coming that will cause a whole lot of bad press.

Someone should have mentioned this earlier:

“We are still in the first steps of a historic change, and the challenge we all have is educating Californians and all Americans on how this works,” said Peter Lee, executive director of the Covered California exchange. “The individual mandate is really kicking in and some people will find out, ‘Oh I actually received more of a tax credit than I should have.'”

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TMCP on the hot seat

by digby

I am not the biggest fan of The Man Called Petraeus, but I think this another case of government overreach. If he is prosecuted it should be for something serious not this affair nonsense:

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against retired Gen. David H. Petraeus for providing classified information to his former mistress while he was director of the C.I.A., officials said, leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison.

The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Mr. Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell, an Army Reserve officer who was writing his biography, and focuses on whether he gave her access to his C.I.A. email account and other highly classified information.

F.B.I. agents discovered classified documents on her computer after Mr. Petraeus resigned from the C.I.A. in 2012 when the affair became public.
[…]
But investigators concluded that, whether or not the disclosure harmed national security, it amounted to a significant security breach in the office of one of the nation’s most trusted intelligence leaders. They recommended that Mr. Petraeus face charges, saying lower-ranking officials had been prosecuted for far less.

I wonder when we’ll see an indictment of Leon Panetta? Or John Brennan, for that matter?  Or any number of administration members who leak classified information all the time when they are trying to build public support or justify controversial actions?

As Trevor Timm says in this piece:

[A]ll of Petreaus’s powerful D.C. friends and allies are about to be shocked to find out how seriously unjust the Espionage Act is—a fact that has been all too real for many low-level whistleblowers for years.

By all accounts, Petraeus’s leak caused no damage to US national security. “So why is he being charged,” his powerful friends will surely ask. Well, that does not matter under the Espionage Act. Even if your leak caused no national security damage at all, you can still be charged, and you can’t argue otherwise as a defense at trial. If that sounds like it can’t be true, ask former State Department official Stephen Kim, who is now serving a prison sentence for leaking to Fox News reporter James Rosen. The judge in his case ruled that prosecutors did not have to prove his leak harmed national security in order to be found guilty.

It doesn’t matter what Petraeus’s motive for leaking was either. While most felonies require mens rea (an intentional state of mind) for a crime to have occurred, under the Espionage Act this is not required. It doesn’t matter that Petraeus is not an actual spy. It also doesn’t matter if Petraeus leaked the information by accident, or whether he leaked it to better inform the public, or even whether he leaked it to stop a terrorist attack. It’s still technically a crime, and his motive for leaking cannot be brought up at trial as a defense.

This may seem grossly unfair (and it is!), but remember, as prosecutors themselves apparently have been arguing in private about Petraeus’s case: “lower-ranking officials had been prosecuted for far less.” Under the Obama administration, more sources of reporters have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act than all other administrations combined, and many have been sentenced to jail for leaks that should have never risen to the level of a criminal indictment.

It’s certainly only right that Petraeus be charged if lower level “leakers” have been. But nobody should be prosecuted under this authoritarian piece of garbage known as the Espionage Act. They classify everything in Washington, including their dinner menus and laundry lists.

They use the laws against leaking very capriciously and if Petraeus is charged it will be simply to prove that they don’t just chase low level people with it, even though that’s clearly the case 99.9% of the time and will continue to be so. After all, if Petraeus had consciously leaked classified information to the New York Times to valorize members of the administration you can bet he wouldn’t be prosecuted for it. In fact, he probably did, many times. This sexy story is an easy one that only reflects on his personal peccadilloes.  And it will be catnip for the adolescent Villager busybodies to obscure the serious issues at stake while marching around self-righteously proclaiming it proves something about equality under the law. And the most sickening thing about it is that Petraeus will be the sin-eater that proves official Washington doesn’t protect the powerful — except, of course, it does. And will.  Unless sexytime.

I won’t cry if Petraeus is charged and has to go through all that.  He’s part of the power structure that supports this nonsense. But I won’t be cheering it either.  It’s a sad and sordid little personal story about which I really could not care less.

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