Month: February 2015

Nice try Jebbie

by digby

“I won’t talk about the past,” Bush said on Friday when a reporter asked him about an upcoming foreign policy speech in Chicago, according to Bloomberg Politics. “I’ll talk about the future. If I’m in the process of considering the possibility of running, it’s not about re-litigating anything in the past. It’s about trying to create a set of ideas and principles that will help us move forward.”

Uhm no. You can only get away with saying this is you are a member of the opposing party as part of a bipartisan cover-up, as Obama did when he refused to “look in the rearview mirror” on the question of torture. You don’t get to do it when the predecessor who started a controversial war based on lies is not only of your own party, but is of your own family. No, if your name is Bush, you’re going to have to address Bush wars and policies whether you like it or not. They were backed by virtually every member of the Republican party and people have a right to know whether and how his beliefs differ. (And you can be sure that unless he’s willing to criticize Obama, he won’t get more than three votes in a GOP primary, so he’s putting down a get-out-of-jail-free card only on Bush policies.)

Clinton is going to be forced to address the policies of her husband’s administration and the Obama administration.  She will not be allowed to simply say “I don’t want to look backwards” you can bet on it. No way can Jebbie bank on his famous name and elude any questioning about it. It’s stupid that he’s even trying.

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Underground railroad 6.0

by digby

Things have improved for many millions in the in the 21st century but this old and depressing story is still unhappily all too common:

Like more than 3 million other Syrians, Nawras fled his country in 2012 as the Syrian civil war ramped up in brutality. Along with his mother and six siblings, he escaped Damascus for Istanbul soon after his 13th birthday, where the family has eked out a living for the past two years. (His father died about a year before the war began.) Between classes at a school for young Syrian refugees, Nawras worked at a small restaurant and with an electrician, earning between 5 and 10 Turkish lira ($2.5 to $5) for 12-hour days. When it came, each lira went to his mother, but Nawras, unable to legally work, had little leverage when his bosses simply refused to pay. Still, after two years he and his family had finally saved up enough money. Nawras was bound for Sweden.

“My mother didn’t want me to go because it’s so dangerous,” Nawras says in slow but proficient English, “and my sisters were very worried but it is really the only choice. We have no life and no future in Istanbul.”

Nawras’s journey to Sweden represents one of the last options for his family to be together, but it is one he must make alone. Over the last year, his three older sisters have all made it there. But Nawras’s journey carries extra significance: Unlike them, he is a minor, so if he makes it and receives asylum, he’ll likely be able to bring his mother and two younger siblings to Sweden as well. Without enough money to send anyone with him, the family’s dreams for this future together depend on his success in evading authorities over the course of the next few days.

Read the whole story. When you look at Nawras’ face in accompanying pictorial you see a boy who could be any 15 year old in your neighborhood.

It reminds me of those kids who came over the border last summer from Guatemala and Honduras. And how the nation of immigrants known as America reacted to it. A real low point.

I guess 15 year old kids have been migrating thousands of miles from to try to make a better future for themselves since forever. But you’d think the richest society in the world would have developed a little more compassion. We want to drop bombs from safe distances, but that’s about it.

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Torture threat assessment

by digby

Via Emptywheel I see that Dianne Feinstein got a chance last week to ask an intelligence official whether or not their assessment of dire consequences if the torture report were released has come through:

Feinstein: And I have one other question to ask the Director. Um, Mr. Director, days before the public release of our report on CIA detention and interrogation, we received an intelligence assessment predicting violence throughout the world and significant damage to United States relationships. NCTC participated in that assessment. Do you believe that assessment proved correct?

Rasmussen: I can speak particularly to the threat portion of that rather than the partnership aspect of that because I would say that’s the part NCTC would have the most direct purchase on, and I can’t say that I can disaggregate the level of terrorism and violence we’ve seen in the period since the report was issued, disaggregate that level from what we might have seen otherwise because, as you know, the turmoil roiling in those parts of the world, not that part of the world, those parts of the world, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, there’s a number of factors that go on creating the difficult threat environment we face.

So the assessment we made at the time as a community was that we would increase or add to the threat picture in those places. I don’t know that looking backwards now, I can say it did by X% or it didn’t by X%. We were also, I think, clear in saying that there’s parts of the impact that we will not know until we have the benefit of time to see how it would play out in different locations around the world.

Feinstein: Oh boy do I disagree with you. But that’s what makes this arena I guess. The fact in my mind was that the threat assessment was not correct.

That is some serious bureaucratese there. Let me translate: “No, we were full of shit and we knew it but we hoped to spare ourselves the embarrassment of having to deal with the fact that our government is protecting liars and torturers. We’re not sorry.”

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The more you know

by digby

… about spying on Americans, the more you realize that they can pretty much do it at will — and are.

In this piece, Law professor Margo Schlanger examines Executive Order 12333:

[T]he surveillance I’m about to describe, which proceeds under Executive Order 12333, rather than FISA, is far more worrisome than the programs under Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act that have received so much recent attention. (For example, here and here for Section 215, here and here for Section 702, and here and here for more general info.) This is content surveillance that applies to both wholly and partially domestic communications of US citizens and residents. The access and analysis rules are very, very loose. There is no judicial supervision of any kind, and Congress does almost no 12333 oversight. (See here for more on how FISA and 12333 differ).

Non-selective “vacuum cleaner” SIGINT collection — mass collection of communications unlimited by particular communicants or subjects — is outside FISA’s ambit, so long as the collection is either done abroad (for wire communications like those carried on landlines or cables) or involves at least one foreign communicant (for wireless communications). This kind of collection can and does include wholly and partially domestic communications of US citizens and residents.
Once collected, analysis of these communications is also outside FISA’s ambit. Instead, the use of SIGINT that was collected vacuum-cleaner-style is limited by PPD-28 to six topics: detecting and countering espionage, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, cybersecurity threats, threats to the armed services, and transnational crime.

This kind of entirely unlimited SIGINT collection is not favored, however: According to its new policies implementing PPD-28, when “practicable,” the NSA searches for communications containing specific terms that narrow its collection to topics like “nuclear proliferation, oil sales, [and] economics.” Economics!

Again, so long as the collection is either done abroad (for wire communications) or involves at least one foreign communicant (for wireless communications), FISA does not regulate term searching based on subject matter, rather than the identity of a communicant. And because this approach uses a “discriminant,” it is not deemed “bulk” collection for purposes of PPD-28. It may thereafter be searched by the NSA for any and all foreign intelligence purposes, not just the six topics identified in (2), above.

When the NSA uses subject matter searching — whether to acquire data or to search raw SIGINT acquired in bulk or otherwise — there is a mild tailoring requirement. Specifically, policy requires use of only selection terms that are reasonably likely to flag communications that include foreign intelligence topics (like oil sales). Policy also requires the NSA to try to develop selection techniques that “defeat, to the greatest extent practicable under the circumstances” interception of non-foreign intelligence communications. While we don’t know what “practicable” means in this context, term searching is very familiar; just think of using Google or Westlaw. It seems inevitable that this approach exposes an extraordinary amount of innocent Americans’ communications to the eyes of intelligence analysts.

So, when the President says that foreigners will get the same protections against surveillance as US citizens and residents, keep in mind that those protections leave a lot out.

Marcy Wheeler has written tons about this. You can read her stuff here. In fact, EO 12333 is one of the issues about which Edward Snowden insists he queried the NSA’s legal department.

Everyone wants to believe that the legal basis for all this collection of data is FISA, with its “oversight” and kangaroo court. But the NSA doesn’t just rely on FISA — executive orders govern a lot of what they do and the powers are sweeping and not subject to oversight.

Just remember. If you aren’t writing about economics, you have nothing to worry about …

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Election integrity but not elected integrity
by Tom Sullivan

It’s a cliche anymore to say that people who get distraught when women they don’t know want an abortion show much less concern for other people’s children once they’re born. But a headline from the inbox yesterday reminds me this is not the only area of public policy where such behavior holds.

One of the state’s GOP websites regularly reproduces in whole press releases from the Voter Integrity Project, North Carolina’s spinoff of True the Vote. This week’s 10-alarm headline? Curbside voting. Did you know that “there is no actual ‘proof’ of disability required” for the disabled or aged to use curbside voting? That you don’t have to show a photo ID at curbside voting? And that George Soros-backed groups will use this “curbside loophole” to help “drive-by voters” circumvent the state’s new voter ID law?

No code-speak there, huh?

But it strikes me that all the alarmism over the integrity of elections by people who devote themselves to undermining public confidence in them dissipates like morning fog once candidates take office. Ensuring only their preferred candidates come to term is what’s important. The integrity of those electeds and the actual legislative process afterwards? Not so much.

People whose only power is at the polls are a threat to democracy. Money wielding unprecedented influence in the halls of government at both the state and national level is much less of a concern.

Human sacrifice FTW


by digby

If anyone was under the mistaken impression that the Republicans planned to “fix” the Affordable Care Act if the Supremes decide that a typo invalidates the subsidies in the federal exchange, Paul Ryan just set them straight:

Ryan: If King wins “the idea is not to make Obamacare work better” — it’s to give states more freedom “to get out of Obamacare.”
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) February 13, 2015

I don’t know if he helped his cause with that comment. The Supreme watchers all think the conservative majority will be less likely to strike down the federal exchange subsidies if it’s clear that the congress has no intention of doing something for all the people who would suddenly be hit with massive insurance premiums. Most people thought the idea was for the congress to at least pretend they might fix it in order to give the Court enough cover to say that they didn’t intend to throw millions of people’s lives into chaos because they assumed the congress would do its job.

It does not appear that congress is going to play along with that which either means they secretly want the court to uphold the law or they really want to throw millions of people’s lives into chaos. I think they might believe they win either way — they can blame the court and run on repeal for decades into the future or they can blame all the suffering on the inept Democrats who created a bad system. I’m not sure either will work for them politically but I’m fairly sure they’ll commit themselves to either one without giving a second thought to the actual suffering of millions of people. They think it will be worth the sacrifice. Someone else’s sacrifice, of course.

Save Aunt Millie’s internet

by digby

So Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz made this clever video that he’s tweeting around:

This is the meme. Public utilities are bad.

I don’t suppose it matters because we have no memory of anything in this country but it wasn’t long ago that we had a wonderful experiment in a deregulated the electricity market here in California. And guess what happened?

When a forest fire shut down a major transmission line into California, cutting power supplies and raising prices, Enron energy traders celebrated, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports.

“Burn, baby, burn. That’s a beautiful thing,” a trader sang about the massive fire.

Four years after California’s disastrous experiment with energy deregulation, Enron energy traders can be heard – on audiotapes obtained by CBS News – gloating and praising each other as they helped bring on, and cash-in on, the Western power crisis.

“He just f—s California,” says one Enron employee. “He steals money from California to the tune of about a million.”

“Will you rephrase that?” asks a second employee.

“OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day,” replies the first.

The tapes, from Enron’s West Coast trading desk, also confirm what CBS reported years ago: that in secret deals with power producers, traders deliberately drove up prices by ordering power plants shut down.

“If you took down the steamer, how long would it take to get it back up?” an Enron worker is heard saying.

“Oh, it’s not something you want to just be turning on and off every hour. Let’s put it that way,” another says.

“Well, why don’t you just go ahead and shut her down.”

Officials with the Snohomish Public Utility District near Seattle received the tapes from the Justice Department.

“This is the evidence we’ve all been waiting for. This proves they manipulated the market,” said Eric Christensen, a spokesman for the utility.

That utility, like many others, is trying to get its money back from Enron.

“They’re f——g taking all the money back from you guys?” complains an Enron employee on the tapes. “All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?”

“Yeah, grandma Millie, man”

“Yeah, now she wants her f——g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a megawatt hour.”

And the tapes appear to link top Enron officials Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling to schemes that fueled the crisis.

“Government Affairs has to prove how valuable it is to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling,” says one trader.

“Ok.”

“Do you know when you started over-scheduling load and making buckets of money on that?

It’s not the same exactly situation, of course. But the reason you treat these public necessities like utilities is so that assholes like that don’t have control of people’s lives. The internet should not be subject to the kind of incentives that make greedheads like those guys profit from keeping a necessary service at an affordable price from the public.

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Oh, how the filibuster worm has turned

by digby

Without any sense of of irony or self-awareness, members of the GOP are very upset right now that the Senate needs 60 votes to pass a bill. In fact, it’s downright un-American:

House conservatives on Thursday pointedly criticized Senate Republicans for saying a House-approved bill funding the agency and reversing President Obama’s executive actions on immigration was dead in the Senate.

“If we’re going to allow seven Democratic senators to decide what the agenda is of the House Republican conference, of the Senate Republican majority, then we might as well just give them the chairmanships, give them the leadership of the Senate,” Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) said at an event held with the Heritage Foundation.

He and other conservatives called for Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) to gut the Senate’s filibuster if necessary to move the House bill to President Obama. With Democrats objecting to the immigration language, Republicans in the Senate are far short of the 60 votes needed to overcome procedural hurdles.

Ya think? After the unprecedented numbers of GOP filibusters these last few years, you just have to love it.

This is about the Homeland Security funding which, according to Hugh Hewitt anyway, is likely to be shut down for a long time because there’s no way the Republicans will budge. (!) The wingnuts in the House are perfectly willing to shut down the DHS — they haven’t really paid a price for these tactics yet. Why should they start worrying about it now? Mitch McConnell’s got his hands full. Here’s what Hewitt says:

Republicans have to chose to go big or go home. They can go big in one of two ways: Smashing the remnants of the filibuster, or going into the no-huddle legislative offense and passing a budget and then bill after bill after bill in very rapid fashion while allowing DHS to shut down and stay shut down. They need to tell their story through action, not speeches, and they need to start now.

Wow. That’s quite a “story”.

But there are a couple of underlying dynamics that are also interesting about this. We aren’t talking about “the government” with this one. We’re specifically talking about one department and it’s not one of those associated with the sick and poor like the food stamp program or Unemployment Insurance which the Republicans have no compunction about shutting down. These are police and national security agencies. It’s one of the few Republican government constituencies and a rare department that is considered sacred by GOP voters. So using their shutdown stunt in this case is risky for them in new ways.

Of course, they are hoping to flip the script on Democrats and accuse them of shutting down the government, ho-ho-ho. And they think this will work because Democrats have reputations for being wimpy, wussy wimmin about Nat Sec while they are heroic manly defenders of all we hold dear. So there is some underlying method to their madness beyond the hypocritical “constitution vs the filibuster” thing the House babies are caterwauling about.  But this is risky too.  The Democrats might still suffer from the old anti-military image but the Republicans are the ones known for having government shutdown tantrums. I suspect it’s not going to be as easy as they might hope.

It certainly doesn’t look as though the Republicans in the Senate think destroying the filibuster is such a hot idea. (They see the 2016 writing on the wall.) They are hoping to convince the baby caucus to fix the bill so they can avoid a shutdown and move along to better terrain. But for the moment it’s anybody’s guess what they’ll do. It’s hard to believe they’d put DHS, of all departments, on the chopping block but they showed themselves capable of doing that when they refused to lift the defense sequestestration. It’s a new game with very high stakes for them politically.

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Climate change politics

by digby

… is immigration politics:

California is in its fourth year of drought, which has left its water reserves dry and cost its economy billions of dollars. Imagine these conditions across southern and central U.S. for another 30 years. There’s an 80 percent chance that 30-year droughts will be the new normal for the region after 2050, if we continue to burn through fossil fuels at the current rate, according to a NASA study published Thursday in the journal Science Advances. They expect higher temperatures will dry out the soil, increasing droughts.

A megadrought of that length is like nothing the U.S. has experienced before. But there’s still something we can do about it. NASA scientists note that the sooner we take action on greenhouse gas emissions, the better the chances are to avert a megadrought: NASA looked at what happens if greenhouse gas emissions start to come down worldwide by mid-century, and the risk of a megadrought drops to 60 percent.

So what do you suppose will happen when all that dark brown land no longer can produce the food needed to feed all the people who live there? And when water becomes scarce?

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QOTD: Another Real American

by digby

Well, you know God created man first. Then he took the rib out of man to make woman. And you know, a rib is a lesser cut of meat.

That’s from an elected Republican official.

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