Month: February 2015

“Ordinary folks should listen to the hair on the back of their neck”

by digby

Yesterday I noted that Fox News was hysterically flogging the story of FBI head James Comey was down in Mississippi speaking to law enforcement, ginning up all kinds of paranoia about terrorists lurking around every corner and exhorting citizens to keep an eye on their neighbors and report anything suspicious. Here’s a highlight of his speech:

“Mississippi is a great state, but like all 50 states it has troubled souls that might look to find meaning in this sick, misguided way. The challenge that we face in law enforcement is that they may be getting exposed to that poison and that training in their basement,” Comey said. “They’re sitting there consuming and may emerge from the basement to kill people of any sort, which is the call of ISIL, just kill somebody.”

So he stressed that the threat is very real, not just for military or law enforcement or the media, all of whom have been warned by the FBI that ISIS could be gunning for them, but for ordinary citizens as well.

“If you can video tape it all the better, if it’s law enforcement all the better, if you can cut somebody’s head off and get it on tape, what a wonderful thing in their view of the world,” he continued. “That’s the challenge we face everywhere.”…

“Ordinary folks should listen to the hair on the back of their neck,” he said. “We’ve gone back through every homegrown violent extremist case in the United States and studied it. In every single case, someone saw something online, at a religious institution, in a family setting, at a school, that was weird, that was out of place, this person was acting in a way that didn’t make sense.”

I even made this arch remark:

That guy living across the street from you who has a kind of weird accent? He’s probably one.

Well guess what? In neighboring Alabama the citizens are on the case and so are the police:

Madison police last week roughed up a 57-year-old Indian citizen who was walking on the sidewalk outside his son’s home, leaving the older man temporarily paralyzed and hospitalized with fused vertebrae.

“He was just walking on the sidewalk as he does all the time,” said his son, Chirag Patel, this morning. “They put him to the ground.”

No crime had been committed. Madison Police on Monday issued a statement saying the department had suspended the officer and were investigating the use of force in this case. The police statement wished the man a “speedy recovery.”

Chirag Patel, an engineer for one of the many government contractors in Huntsville, said he had just bought a one-way ticket for his father, bringing him from the small Indian town of Pij to his new home in fast-growing suburbs of Madison.

He said his father, Sureshbhai Patel, was to help his wife care for their new baby, a 17-month-old son, so he could pursue his masters degree in electrical engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

“This is a good neighborhood. I didn’t expect anything to happen,” said Chirag Patel, who recently bought the new house on Hardiman Place Lane.

Madison police issued a statement on Monday saying they received a call early Friday about a man looking in garages among the brick homes just south of the city’s new high school.

“The caller, who lives in the neighborhood did not recognize the subject and thought him to be suspicious,” reads the statement released by police.

Hank Sherrod, attorney for the family, this morning said the man was not walking on other people’s property nor looking in garages.

“This is broad daylight, walking down the street. There is nothing suspicious about Mr. Patel other than he has brown skin,” said Sherrod.

But Sureshbhai Patel does not speak English, this being only his second trip to the United States. He had arrived less than two weeks ago.

The statement by Madison police refers to a “communication barrier.” Chirag Patel said his father speaks only Gujarati, and some Hindi.

Sherrod says the Sureshbhai Patel told the police officers “no English” and repeated his son’s house number.

The police statement says the officer attempted to frisk the man.

“The subject began putting his hands in his pockets,” reads the police statement. “Officers attempted to pat the subject down and he attempted to pull away. The subject was forced to the ground, which resulted in injury.”

Sherrod said he spoke with Sureshbhai Patel at Huntsville Hospital this morning. He said there were two officers present and that Patel was patted down and did not pull away. Sherrod said one officer then pulled Patel’s arm up behind him and slung him face first into the ground. He said Patel could not say what happened after that.

“This is just one of those things that doesn’t need to happen,” said Sherrod, saying the police escalated to violence without cause and left Patel lying bleeding from his face, paralyzed and in need of paramedics.

But hey, you really can’t be too careful, amirite? What with ISIS commonly walking down the streets of small Southern towns and the head of the FBI telling people that they’re coming to kill us all in our beds any day he’s lucky they didn’t waterboard him. I’m sure the hair on the back of the necks of everyone involved was screaming “there’s a terrorist!”  and I don’t think we need to know any more than that.

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Just don’t call it terrorism

by digby

Via Vox, we find a new study indicating that there were many more lynchings of black men in the 12 states where it was most common than previously known. These are the states they looked at:

The study also gives some good context that should be made more explicit if people want to understand how the world works:

Lynchings weren’t typically carried out as a punishment for a crime. The report said, “Racial terror lynching was a tool used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation — a tactic for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire African American community, not merely punishment of an alleged perpetrator for a crime.”

Some examples:

In 1904, a white mob lynched General Lee, a black man, for knocking on the door of a white woman’s house in Reevesville, South Carolina.

In 1916, white men in Cedarbluff, Mississippi, lynched Jeff Brown because he accidentally bumped into a white girl while running to catch a train.

In 1919, a white mob in Blakely, Georgia, lynched William Little for refusing to take off his army uniform after returning from World War I.

These acts had a deep impact on Southern governance and culture. Many blacks left the South out of fear that they could be the next victims of lynchings. Those who remained in the region were oppressed by Jim Crow laws that imposed segregation — and many were afraid to speak out due to concerns for their lives.

That happened right here in the good old US of A. And it’s not ancient history. There are people alive today who witnessed this violence.

Here’s another chart for you:

Published in October 2014, the Feminist Majority Foundation’s 2014 National Clinic Violence survey found that abortion clinic doctors and nurses reported higher instances of intimidation tactics and stalking than in prior years. The research included 242 abortion providers nationwide, with participants such as Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Abortion Care Network and other independent, unaffiliated clinics.

The survey found that nearly 70 percent of abortion providers said they experience frequent harassment.

Abortion clinics also reported a 25.3 percent overall increase in “threats and targeted intimidation tactics” between 2010 and 2014. FMF researchers defined these threats and targeted intimidation acts as distributing pamphlets that personally threaten doctors, releasing personal information of staff, picketing homes of staffers, posting flyers that read “Killer Among Us” with photos of doctors’ faces, and releasing doctors’ personal information on the Internet.

The survey found that physicians reported increased stalking by anti-abortion protesters between 2010 and 2014, as well as many more instances of their personal information being posted on the Internet. Anti-abortion protesters are also creating more “Wanted” and “Killers Among Us”-type pamphlets, featuring doctors’ and nurses’ personal information as a means to threaten and intimidate staff.

I won’t talk about the crusades. But I will agree with the president that we shouldn’t “get up on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place.” Obviously …

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Where at least we know we’re free (for now)

by digby

They deported Sami Al-Arian last week after more than a decade of highly questionable behavior on the part of the US Government. The Intercept reminded us of the details of his story:

Al-Arian, while a Professor at the University of South Florida, was indicted on multiple counts of providing “material support” to the group and fundraising on their behalf in the United States. In the press conference announcing the indictment, Ashcroft claimed that Al-Arian and his co-defendants “financed, extolled and assisted acts of terror,” and praised the recently passed Patriot Act as being instrumental to helping bring about the charges.

The charges were part of a broader post-9/11 campaign to by the U.S. Government to criminalize aid and support to Palestinians, as exemplified by the successful prosecution of five officials of what had been the largest Muslim charity in the U.S., the Holy Land Foundation. Those charity officials are now serving decades in prison for sending money to Palestinians which, it was alleged, made its way to designated terror groups in the Occupied Territories.

For most of the three years after his arrest, Al-Arian was kept in solitary confinement awaiting trial. During this time, he was regularly subjected to strip-searches, denied normal visitation rights with his family, and allegedly abused by prison staff. Amnesty International denounced the circumstances of his detention as “gratuitously punitive” and in violation of international standards on the treatment of prisoners.

When Al-Arian’s case did finally reach trial after years of harsh imprisonment, prosecutors failed to convict Al-Arian on even one charge brought against him. Jurors voted to acquit him on the most serious counts he faced and deadlocked on the remainder of the indictments.
[…]
Al-Arian agreed to a plea bargain on the remaining charges by pleading guilty to one count of providing “contributions, goods or services” to PIJ, a decision he says he undertook out of a desire to end the government’s ongoing persecution of him and win his release from prison.

Despite this plea, Al-Arian was not released from prison.

Instead, in 2007, shortly before he expected to leave jail and begin likely deportation proceedings, the government brought a new set of charges against him for refusing to testify in another trial against a Virginia-based Islamic think tank. Among several reasons he provided for refusing to testify against the group, he stated his belief that the organization was innocent of terrorism charges and, according to his lawyer, Jonathan Turley, “he doesn’t want them to be persecuted the way he was.” His lawyers also worried that any testimony he gave in that other case would allow the DOJ to bring wholly new charges against him for perjury.

For his refusal to testify, Al-Arian was sentenced to an additional 18 months in prison on civil contempt charges, the maximum allowed by law. Al-Arian served this added time only to be charged at the end of his sentence once again with additional criminal contempt charges stemming from the same case.

[…]

In 2014, the federal government quietly and unceremoniously dropped all of their charges against Al-Arian. After 11 years of persecution which left his once-promising career in academia and public advocacy in shambles, Al-Arian was “free” to be deported from the country where he had spent 40 years of his life and raised his family.

The man spent years in jail despite never having been convicted of a single crime.

Read the whole thing. I don’t know why everyone is so sure this kind of thing could never happen to them. Really, why couldn’t it?

The isolationists are missing


by digby

This should be illuminating. I’m going to guess the answer is “whenever we damned well want to!”

How odd. The alleged “isolationist” wing of the conservative movement seems to be missing.

The closes you will get to anyone even thinking Iraq was a mistake is the moderator KT McFarland, who believes that the mistake was in thinking we were fighting members of the human species instead of the strange, other-worldly creatures they really are:

After one of the longest wars in American history we have little to show for the thousands of American deaths, tens of thousands of American casualties and trillions in spent American treasure.

Why? Because we failed to realize one essential truth of the Middle East — that the nations in that part of the world aren’t just like us.

We in the West think of peace as society’s default position. War is a temporary state of affairs that that happens when peace fails. For us, war is something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When it is over, win or lose, the warring factions lay down their arms, and resume their normal lives.

We realize, too late, that President Bush shouldn’t have taken us into Iraq, and President Obama shouldn’t have taken us out.

In the modern Middle East, war and peace are seen through a different lens. War is the default position, the normal state of affairs. Peace is what happens between wars; it is the temporary pause where defeated factions fade into the woodwork to lie low, regroup, and plan their next assault.

Sends shivers down your spine, doesn’t it?

The Heritage Foundation’s Carafano, Senator Cotton and presidential candidate (!) John Bolton are all unreconstructed hawks who believe that George W. Bush won the war and Obama came along and ruined everything.

I’m sure the Paulites will be in attendance as they usually are and the Village press corps will dutifully report that they are taking over the GOP.  But this panel is much more indicative of the Republican party than the libertarian party animals that descend on CPAC every year.  Mainstream GOP national security ideology runs the gamut of hawks, super hawks and dystopian annihilationists..

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My “come to Obama” story

by digby

I never felt the emotional pull back in 2008, although I admired him as a politician. But then I don’t feel an emotional pull to any politicians anymore. I’ve seen too much, I guess.

But I want to announce that I have finally “come to Obama.” Today I am officially declaring myself an Obamabot. Because of this, as related by David Axelrod in his new book:

When we brought her to the front of the plane,” Axelrod writes, “Obama proceeded to blister her for a previous column she had written. No one got under Barack’s skin more than Maureen… He was patronizing and disrespectful…After that awkward encounter, she seemed to take particular delight in psychoanalyzing Barack and belittling him in print, which only deepened his contempt… Why are you friends with her?’

The “her” in question was Maureen Dowd who called him “Obambi” throughout the campaign.

That guy is the one I was waiting for.

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Oh what do they know?

by digby

The New York Times reports:

Over the past couple years, much ink has been spilled on how women need to speak up and “lean in.” Much of the conversation has focused on media representation — a still volatile battleground for gender parity. According to the Op-Ed Project, in 2011, women authored only 19 percent of op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, 22 percent in the New York Times and 24 percent in the Los Angeles Times. Another way to look at the status quo: a woman over 65 is less likely to be cited as an expert in the media as a boy in the 13 to 18 age group. A report by the Women’s Media Center found that on the front page of The New York Times, men were quoted three times more often than women.

In collaboration with Media Matters for America, we conducted an analysis of foreign policy guests on major news programs. The results read like a time capsule from the 1950s: In 2014, women made up just 22 percent of guests. Of trained experts networks call upon, they are even less than that. If you see a woman on cable news talking about foreign affairs or national security, she’s likely a reporter or news personality, not a trained expert or a diplomat.

There are plenty of women in foreign policy think tanks. But hey, as long as there is even one available Very Serious Male Person who always been wrong about everything, why ask one of them for their opinion?

I confess I’m still shocked to see numbers like this in this day and age. And it makes me wonder if voting for a woman president might still be a bridge too far for most Americans. Sure, other countries have done it. England had Thatcher 30 years ago. But England also had Queen Elizabeth 450 years ago, so it wasn’t unprecedented. America is not among the most advanced in this way and never has been. Since national security and foreign policy are coming back into fashion (and with Republicans pimping it for all its worth for obvious reasons) it’s going to be a real test of our maturity as a nation.

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Village Media

by digby

Lulz …

A simple matter of law, justice and dignity
by Tom Sullivan

“This is a simple matter of law, justice and dignity,” says Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive director of North Carolina-based Campaign for Southern Equality in a web statement. “Our fundamental hope is that LGBT people and families would be treated equal under the law and in the social fabric of the South,” she told the International Business Times.

Beach-Ferrara reacted to the refusal of some probate judges in Alabama to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday to deny Alabama’s request to delay a federal judge’s ruling that green-lighted the marriages in Alabama. The court is set to rule later this year on whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage:

Many of the state’s 68 probate judges mounted their resistance to the federal decision at the urging of the firebrand chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Roy Moore. He is best known for refusing more than a decade ago to comply with a court order to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments from the state Supreme Court’s offices.

In Mobile, about 10 gay couples who had expected to be granted licenses first thing in the morning found the marriage-license window closed indefinitely.

Several legal scholars observed that Moore may be within his authority, technically, saying the injunction only prevents the state’s executive branch from enforcing Alabama’s same-sex marriage amendment:

In two memos, one on February 3 and the second on February 8, Moore wrote that probate judges aren’t bound by the injunctions. In the first memo, he said that probate judges aren’t required to defer to the district court’s reasoning—essentially leaving it up to them to decide. In the second, he changed his mind, and ordered probate judges to disobey it “to ensure the orderly administration of justice.”

“Roy Moore got it right,” wrote Florida law professor Howard Wasserman on the Prawfsblawg legal blog last week. “And without bigoted or anti-federal rhetoric.” Probate judges are not covered by the injunction, and Moore is within his rights as head of the judicial branch.

At the U.S. Supreme Court, justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented. Thomas wrote, “I would have shown the people of Alabama the respect they deserve and preserved the status quo while the Court resolves this important constitutional question.”

I wonder if Thomas would have felt the same in 1963?

QOTD: The Nuge

by digby

Sarah Palin “is the perfect example of what our Founding Fathers envisioned for an experiment in self-government.”

… when they were high on peyote.

Crusader Babbits

by digby

In 72 hours the left has begun rewriting the history of the crusades all to protect their precious.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) February 9, 2015

Oh boy.

I thought we at least could agree that the Inquisition was bad and burning witches was no darned good. 500 years of violent European history was a lesson learned. Defending slavery as a Christian institution was not something to be proud of. But apparently not. These things never happened. Christianity has never been used as an excuse for violence and war.

Ed Kilgore took this on, as well as a lot of others (including me) over the week-end. Kilgore highlighted a brilliant post by Ta-Nehisi Coates on one aspect of our allegedly non-violent Christian history that wasn’t all that long ago:

If anything, Coates says, Obama understated the extent to which Christianity served as a rationale for racist policies and all their brutal corollaries. After quoting Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’ explicit claim of divine sanction for slavery, Coates notes how common this sacralization of racism was and continued to be right up to the 1960s:

Stephens went on to argue that the “Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa” could only be accomplished through enslavement. And enslavement was not made possible through Robert’s Rules of Order, but through a 250-year reign of mass torture, industrialized murder, and normalized rape—tactics which ISIS would find familiar. Its moral justification was not “because I said so,” it was “Providence,” “the curse against Canaan,” “the Creator,” “and Christianization.” In just five years, 750,000 Americans died because of this peculiar mission of “Christianization.” Many more died before, and many more died after. In his “Segregation Now” speech, George Wallace invokes God 27 times and calls the federal government opposing him “a system that is the very opposite of Christ.”

This reminder is especially powerful to me because I recall a sweet church-going elderly aunt of mine in 1968 asserting that “George Wallace is the best Christian running for president,” not long after I heard her say she wished she could give sanctuary to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassin.

As it happens I already posted the “Segregation Now” speech this morning.

But it shouldn’t take a brilliant historical essay to make this point. This image says everything you need to know doesn’t it?

The crosses are by accident, I guess.

Now, I think it’s fine to say that the KKK (and the Inquisition) were Christian institutions that were at odds with the true teachings of their faith. It’s a big faith with a lot of different permutations. Just like Islam. But I don’t think people commonly attributed the atrocities committed by the KKK to the Christian faith in general. Certainly African Americans didn’t. They are among the most fervent followers of the religion themselves. Their most revered leader was a preacher. One might even compare them to the thousands of Muslims in Iraq and Syria who are being slaughtered by ISIS. (Guess who the American “ISIS” was in this scenario?)

It is just categorically false that this is an “Islam” problem. It’s a species problem.

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