Month: January 2015

Jeb’s odd solution

by digby

… to the vexing problem of illegal immigration:

“First and foremost we need to control our border. The 40 percent of the people that have come here illegally came with a legal visa and overstayed their bounds. We ought to be able to figure out where they are and politely ask them to leave.”

A couple of thoughts here. Jeb probably thinks he’s dogwhistling to Latinos by pretending that he’s going after European college students and would-be hijackers instead of them but I don’t think they’re going to hear it. They know very well what the immigration debate is really all about and visas aren’t involved. He also thinks that by saying this the rabid xenophobic base will be appeased, but the last thing they want to hear is “politely ask them to leave”. They like the idea of “self-deportation” a lot. But they only like it in the context of making immigrants so miserable they will voluntarily go back to countries where they will starve or be killed. Let’s just say that would have to be pretty miserable. After all, if they don’t suffer then they won’t learn their lesson and they might come back.

It’s early in the cycle and Jeb’s out of practice. He’s also campaigning pretty much exclusively for rich donors at the moment so maybe this will impress them if no one else. (They have a different set of interests when it comes to immigration.) But he’s going to have to figure out a better way to speak to this issue if he wants Republicans to vote for him. The words “immigrant” and “polite” cannot be in the same sentence.

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Night Will Fall
by Batocchio

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and a new documentary looks at some important old footage. The Los Angeles Times provides a good summary:

Seventy years ago, British, Soviet and American forces were unprepared for the atrocities they encountered when they liberated the Nazi concentration camps. Combat and newsreel cameramen recorded these harrowing discoveries at camps that included Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz.

In April 1945, the footage was to be turned into a film, “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey,” and was supposed to be screened in Germany after the collapse of the Third Reich.

Despite having Alfred Hitchcock as a supervising director, the 1945 film was never completed. In 1952, London’s Imperial War Museum inherited the rough cut of five of the six planned reels of the film, as well as 100 compilation reels of unedited footage, a script for voice-over commentary, and a detailed shot list for the completed film.

“Night Will Fall,” a new HBO documentary airing Monday [1/26/15] on the cable network and then repeating on HBO2 on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday, chronicles the making of “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.” The actual 1945 documentary, which has been restored and assembled by London’s Imperial War Museum, will also screen Tuesday at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Here’s a trailer for Night Will Fall:

(The New York Times also has a good write-up and Metro UK rounds up British viewers’ powerful reactions.)

I haven’t seen either film in entirety yet, but the footage from 1945 has featured in plenty of previous Holocaust pieces, and some completed segments from German Concentration Camps Factual Survey have been shown before, including sections demonstrating Alfred Hitchcock’s approach of using wide shots, panning shots and long takes where possible. (He was sadly prescient about the possibility of Holocaust denial.) Some of the footage is indeed harrowing. An excellent Guardian piece on both documentaries recaps a segment from the 1945 film that’s stuck with me for years:

In one piece of film, from Majdanek concentration camp, we see huge bags containing human hair. Collected from the murdered, it would have been carefully sorted and weighed. “Nothing was wasted,” says the narrator. “Even teeth were taken out of their mouth.” Bernstein’s film then cuts to a large pile of spectacles. “If one man in 10 wears spectacles,” we are asked, “how many does this heap represent?”

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. features something similar – 4000 shoes, which make a lasting impression on visitors:

US Holocaust Memorial Museum

The focus of the day has always been on (horrific) historical events but also on the general idea of human rights. Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl observed that there are limitations to comparing suffering, because it is like a gas filling a room, and “suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.” Meanwhile, Akira Kurosawa once said that “The role of the artist is not to look away,” and that’s certainly true of great documentary filmmakers, good historians, and really anyone who bears witness to injustice. (The documentary The Act of Killing is also well worth a look.) Injustices may vary in scale, but here in the United States, I can’t help but think of indefinite detention without charges in the present, the U.S. torture regime in the recent past (and efforts to keep it unexamined), the oppression of Jim Crow laws and internment camps in living memory, and slavery and the treatment of Native Americans in the more distant past. Of course, not everyone wants to look at those events in our own nation’s history, some vehemently deny them (in part or in whole) and the effects of those events are hardly limited to the past. Personally, I plan to see both Holocaust documentaries, but I suspect they serve as reminders not only of essential historical events but our own sadly enduring capacity for inhumanity. (Where we go from there is the big question.)

Peek-a-boo, we spy you … again
by Tom Sullivan

Via a 2011 slide presentation leaked by Edward Snowden, The Intercept provides more details on how spy agencies are “building haystacks to search for needles.” By intercepting unencrypted data relayed from smartphone ads and apps to analytics firms and advertisers, British and Canadian spy agencies can compile detailed profiles of individual smart phone users. Advertisers typically collect this information to answer usage questions:

How often does a particular user open the app, and at what time of day? Where does the user live? Where does the user work? Where is the user right now? What’s the phone’s unique identifier? What version of Android or iOS is the device running? What’s the user’s IP address?

But since the data sent from apps is often unencrypted, it represents “a major privacy threat” exploitable by spy agencies. This particular spy program was/is code-named BADASS:

Analysts are able to write BADASS “rules” that look for specific types of tracking information as it travels across the internet.

For example, when someone opens an app that loads an ad, their phone normally sends an unencrypted web request (called an HTTP request) to the ad network’s servers. If this request gets intercepted by spy agencies and fed into the BADASS program, it then gets filtered through each rule to see if one applies to the request. If it finds a match, BADASS can then automatically pull out the juicy information.

And those privacy policies?

Companies that collect usage statistics about software often insist that the data is anonymous because they don’t include identifying information such as names, phone numbers, and email addresses of the users that they’re tracking. But in reality, sending unique device identifiers, IP addresses, IMEI numbers [a unique device identifier], and GPS coordinates of devices is far from anonymous.

In one slide, the phrase “anonymous usage statistics” appears in conspicuous quotation marks. The spies are well aware that despite not including specific types of information, the data they collect from leaky smartphone apps is enough for them to uniquely identify their targets.

It’s going to be tough on screenwriters for Hollywood spy thrillers. How are we suspend our disbelief when what used to be the stuff of fiction no longer is? At the end of the spy comedy, The President’s Analyst, androids from the shadowy TPC have the entire world under surveillance. In 1967, that knock on The Phone Company was a joke.

How Torture Wins In the US Marketplace of Ideas 
by Spocko

Over two thirds of Christians support the torture of terrorist suspects.—Washtington Post Poll, January 3, 2015

How did this happen? How did actions considered morally repugnant and war crimes in World War II, become acceptable now? And by Christians, goddamnit! Who made this happen, who let this happen, who helped it happen? And finally, is there a way to change this opinion?

My friend Dr. Rebecca Gordon, goes into detail on some of these questions in her book Mainstreaming Torture, but recently I saw a TV show and heard a radio program that illustrated how some of it happened. It took a mix of secrecy, rhetorical tricks and proactive marketing to make torture become acceptable in the US.

First I watched a tv series set in 1962 in a slightly different America. Here’s the opening scene:

Fade in: Two men are watching a color newsreel in an elegant theatre. The title reads, “A New Day in America.” We see images of smiling workers in factories, farms and office settings. The announcer says, “Everyone has a job, everyone knows the part they play keeping our country strong.” he adds, “but our greatest days lie ahead.”

In the seats a note is handed off. As one of the men leaves he is silhouetted by the American flag flying on the screen. As the flag unfurls you see the stars have been replaced by a white swastika on a blue background. The announcer ends with, “Sieg Heil.” 

This is the opening scene from the new Amazon TV series “The Man in the High Castle.” (The first episode is free.)

In this alternative history, based on the Phillip K. Dick book, the Nazi’s won World War II, the US is split between the Japanese in the west and the Nazi’s in the east.

In this timeline Hitler wasn’t defeated. The Nuremberg Trials never happened. The atrocities committed by one group of humans on another were never revealed, condemned or punished.

 

Christian religious leaders go back to their churches to give Sunday sermons about the Bible and the New Testament. 

People write books, become pundits and experts in their field. They talk to the media, go on talk shows to plug their latest books and go on the speaking circuit to explain how they won the war.

In this alt-US, do they allow some dissension, or do they attack, smear and jail people who try to reveal the whole story? 

We often hear this question, “How could Germans gone along with the atrocities that were happening?” Lots of answers.

• They didn’t know. 
• They knew but were afraid to speak up because of the fear of their own safety. 
• They knew, but were told these actions were necessary for safety and success. 
• They agreed with the actions. 
• They were angry at the people whom they believed hurt them and their country and wanted to hurt them back. 
• They rejected previously agreed upon legal, practical, moral and religious views about torture and accepted new definitions, rationals and priorities that were provided to them for justification of torture and other war crimes.

Who’s Selling Torture In the Marketplace Of Ideas?

Which leads me to the radio program I heard,  Does Mass Phone Data Collection Violate The 4th Amendment? It was a debate hosted by Intelligence Squared with John Yoo arguing that mass phone data colletion does NOT violate the 4th Amendment.

Yoo is introduced  as “controversial” by ABC correspondent John Donvan. Yoo makes a few jokes about Berkeley liberals, the audience laughs and claps and it’s off to the races.

The intro reminded me of a guest on the Tonight Show offering up a funny story before he sets up the clip from his latest fish-out-of water buddy film. 

Here’s the video link to the intro. Here’s the transcription link to the debate.

Spoiler Alert! Yoo’s side lost. The audience’s minds were changed.

PRE-DEBATE POLL RESULTS

46% FOR | 17% AGAINST | 37% UNDECIDED

POST-DEBATE POLL RESULTS

66% FOR | 28% AGAINST | 6% UNDECIDED

After watching the debate I thought about all the people who promoted and are still promoting Yoo and his ideas vs those who challenged them. Conservatives love to talk about winning in the “Marketplace of Ideas.” I laugh when I hear this. It reminds me of the sales people I knew who would half jokingly say, “All I want is an unfair advantage.”

The pro-torture forces look for venues where they have an unfair advantage like one sided “debates” where they control the microphone or use strawmen instead of guests.

They want to talk to people and venues they can control via fear and rhetoric. For example, Dick Cheney on Meet the Press talking to Chuck Todd about torture.  Todd wasn’t going to really push Cheney, he might be seen to have an option, or worse, risk Cheney not coming on the show again.

 (BTW, listen to this great clip from the Jimmy Dore Show where Todd admits if he “barks” at guests they won’t come back on the show. Audio clip, starts at 24:45 )

If Todd and the rest of the corporate media aren’t going to challenge these ideas can we get them to book an anti-Dick Cheney to go on shows and challenge him?

When only the sellers of torture are being bought by the media as public the best guests and leading experts, we get an United States like in The Man in the High Castle. We have won the war but lost the values that we believed made us special.

Is this our flag?

Or is it really this? What are our current values?

Next, what will it take to change this opinion? Who will do it? Will anyone pay for doing it in the marketplace of ideas? Or should we just accept Dick Cheney’s reality has won and move on?

*American Flag, by Eric Lynch via Creative Commons license

*Flag from screen grab of Amazon Production’s The Man in The High Castle 

“Sarah, Sarah, so easy to look at, so hard to define”

by digby

Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review writes an essay declaring that Sarah Palin is a joke and has been one for a very long time. Seems she doesn’t make much sense and is in it for herself and not the conservative movement. Imagine that.

And then I looked at the comments to find that, lo and behold, a lot of people at NR agree with him. People like this:

I admired her for about a year, then asked myself, “Why do these ‘strong women’ have such p-whipped husbands?” I’d hate to come home at night to one of them and find out.

There’s your problem. The gibberish isn’t an issue, never has been. But then they all love Rick Perry and Ben Carson too so that’s obvious. The problem is that once you get to know her she’s just another ballbuster, amirite?

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Statistic ‘O the Day

by digby

Some things you probably didn’t know:

During the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2014, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) deployed to 133 countries — roughly 70% of the nations on the planet — according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt, a public affairs officer with U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). This capped a three-year span in which the country’s most elite forces were active in more than 150 different countries around the world, conducting missions ranging from kill/capture night raids to training exercises. And this year could be a record-breaker … just 66 days into fiscal 2015 — America’s most elite troops had already set foot in 105 nations, approximately 80% of 2014’s total.

Despite its massive scale and scope, this secret global war across much of the planet is unknown to most Americans.

I would imagine that most Americans don’t care much either. This is a very efficient form of warfare which doesn’t require any participation from the public. What could be better?

I’m just glad the US Government is omnipotent and knows exactly what it’s doing at all times or I might worry that running military actions in 70% of countries in the world might create some problems down the road.

Bond villains in every sense of the word

by digby

So everyone’s all agog at this number. And it’s big, especially since it will apparently come from only a few hundred donors, the largest of which will be the Kochs themselves.

The Koch brothers’ political operation intends to spend $889 million in the run-up to the 2016 elections, according to an attendee at the operation’s annual winter donor gathering in the California dessert.

The spending goal, shared with donors at a Monday morning session at the Rancho Mirage Ritz Carlton, reflects the sweeping ambition of a private conservative political network that in many ways has eclipsed the power of the official Republican Party.

The $889 million spending goal dwarfs the $404 million the Republican National Committee spent during the 2012 election and the $188 million it dropped during last year’s midterm campaign.
While the RNC’s spending was supplemented by congressional campaign arms, part of the potency of the Koch operation is that it doesn’t have to spread its cash across the entire GOP political landscape.

Rather, it’s able to pick its spots, funding initiatives targeting specific slices of the electorate – such as Hispanic voters, veterans or millennials – or specific issues that jibe with the libertarian-inflected conservatism of the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch

The $889 million will be raised from a network of a few hundred donors who attend twice-a-year gatherings like the one at the Ritz. The gatherings, which are known as “seminars” in Koch world, typically run for three days – from Saturday night through Tuesday morning – and conclude with pledge sessions during which donors contribute six- and seven-figure sums to help fund the advocacy efforts detailed at the seminars.

Yes, I’m going to remind you all that this is not a Big number when you have the kind of money the Kochs have at their disposal. Combined they are worth over 100 billion dollars. Just the two brothers.

They could literally spend 50 times the amount they plan to spend and still have more than 50 billion between them and be among the top richest men on the planet.

And, by the way, this isn’t about making more money for themselves. Their money is making plenty of money for them. They are true believers:

During a Saturday night welcome speech in Rancho Mirage, Charles Koch took the slightest of victory laps – calling the midterms “an important step in slowing down the march toward collectivism” – but he implored the assembled donors to dig deep headed into 2016.

Espousing a political worldview that protects free speech and “individual and property rights with equal protection for everyone under the law,” Koch said: “It is up to us. Making this vision a reality will require more than a financial commitment. It requires making it a central part of our lives.”

They are willing to spend whatever it takes to fulfill their vision. Yes, that will undoubtedly end up making them more money. But that’s no longer their prime motivation. They are so rich that they’ve become Bond villains. They want to run the world.

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Don’t worry, nobody will notice the hypocrisy


by digby

Ok, this is just getting weird:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has established a research and essay competition in honor of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz hosted by the National Defense University.

The king, who died Jan. 23 at age 90, oversaw the modernization of his country’s military during the time he spent as commander of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, a position he held from 1963 until he became king in 2005.

Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey said the essay competition is a fitting tribute to the life and leadership of the Saudi Arabian monarch.

Lifetime Supporter of U.S.-Saudi Alliance]

The king was a lifetime supporter of his country’s alliance with the United States. Abdullah ruled Saudi Arabia from 2005 to his death, and served as regent of the country from 1995. He is succeeded by King Salman Bin Abdul-Aziz.

“This is an important opportunity to honor the memory of the king, while also fostering scholarly research on the Arab-Muslim world, and I can think of no better home for such an initiative than NDU,” Dempsey said in a statement announcing the competition.

The competition will focus on issues related to the Arab-Muslim world and is designed to encourage strategic thinking and meaningful research on a crucial part of the world. The program will be in place at NDU for the next academic year, officials said.

I understand that the US believes Realpolitik requires that we pretend not to notice that Saudi Arabia is the state from which ISIS learns its behavior. And we all have to accept the fact that while we rend our garments over barbarity and “radical Islam” we simultaneously support the most barbarous, radical Islamic state. The state which spawned the notorious terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. This is the real world we live in here and as our great philosopher queen Ann Coulter pointed out, “we need oil.”

But this ongoing lauding of the Saudi prince who just went to meet his harem of celestial virgins is a  farce. Just two weeks after virtually everyone in the nation proclaimed fundamentalist Islam the greatest danger the world faces today, after commentators scolded anyone who even mildly suggested that being sensitive to people’s religious beliefs didn’t translate into appeasement of evil, we have the highest reaches of the US Government extolling the home of Wahhabi Islam and our military is using it as an example of modernity in the middle east. It’s completely absurd.

Nobody in this country or Europe sees this as anything unusual.  We’re all used to hypocrisy about the superiority of our “values” and our morals. But one can only imagine what a crock our lectures sound like to Muslims around the world, particularly the majority moderates whom we are constantly exhorting to denounce the extremists. Americans may be too uninformed to understand how ludicrous this is but you can be sure that Muslims in the Middle East have no problem seeing just how inconsistent we are.  Somehow I don’t think that’s helping the cause.

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The far right’s hands across the water

by digby

I have a piece up at Salon today about some lines of convergence between the far right in Europe and the far right in America:

Europe’s far right has been vocal about all this for some time. And yes, their problems are different than ours. But we are now starting to see a similar impulse emerge in the U.S. as well, despite the fact that we managed to keep it somewhat at bay for nearly 15 years — at least as a matter of acceptable mainstream discourse, if not reality, for many individual Muslims caught in the government maw. We are certainly no strangers to xenophobia and nativism and this fits nicely into that niche for a lot of rank and file right-wingers. But this also fits into another niche that fueled the conservative movement for many decades — the original Threat From Within known as Communism. That paranoia, conflated with a free-floating fear of “the other” was one of the far right’s most successful organizing principles. And it’s that extremism that holds the real danger to our way of life if it once again finds its way into the conservative mainstream.

Islamic extremism and terrorism is a grave danger, no doubt about it. That it’s mostly a danger to fellow Muslims doesn’t seem to mitigate the West’s increasing hysteria about it. But America isn’t going to be instituting Shariah law or forcing women to wear veils any time soon. It might do some other things in reaction to that paranoia that are threatening to our way of life, however. We shouldn’t forget that when it comes to extremism, these are the people who openly celebrate it as a virtue.

Read on …

Society’s “trade-offs” in action

by digby

A libertarian explains America, the city on a hill:

End Obamacare, and people could die. That’s okay. We make such trade-offs all the time.

That’s the actual headline. You see, the government doesn’t force people to live in padded rooms to protect them from any danger, it allows people to go to work and drive cars and otherwise take risks. Therefore,  continuing a system in which vast numbers of people must go without health insurance because the for-profit insurance industry has no incentive to cover people who cost them money is no different. It’s just another trade-off for freedom:

In a world of scarce resources, a slightly higher mortality rate is an acceptable price to pay for certain goals — including more cash for other programs, such as those that help the poor; less government coercion and more individual liberty; more health-care choice for consumers, allowing them to find plans that better fit their needs; more money for taxpayers to spend themselves; and less federal health-care spending. This opinion is not immoral. Such choices are inevitable. They are made all the time.

The government coercion involved in making people buy affordable insurance or pay a very tiny penalty is so burdensome that we must be willing to make the “trade-off” of people dying for lack of health care. It’s a small price to pay for “individual liberty”. Unless you’re one of the dead people, in which case “society’s trade-off” for more “choice” might not seem like such a good deal.

But we can always count on conservatives and libertarians to be eager to liberate us from our lives. It’s what they do.

Anyway, this fine fellow is getting credit for an original idea. But we’ve heard this before haven’t we?

That’s society’s “trade-off” in action. Makes you feel so free doesn’t it?

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