Month: February 2015

Runferyerlives!

by digby

This sounds bad:

The enemy is among us.

That’s the subject of Monday’s “Todd’s American Dispatch,” as Fox News’ Todd Starnes raised questions about radical Islamists living in the U.S.

“FBI director James Comey delivered some alarming words to law enforcement officers last week in Mississippi: There are Islamic radicals living among us – in all 50 states — and there are open FBI cases in every state but Alaska,” Starnes said. “President Obama once told us he had Al Qaeda on the run, and he’s right – they’re running right across our borders and right smack into our neighborhoods.”

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

The sad thing is that he wasn’t really exaggerating about Comey:

As Americans stood horrified at the news of a Jordanian pilot burned alive by the terrorist group known as the Islamic State, one of the top law enforcement officers in the country talked about how Mississippians can fight those kind of extremist ideals within our own borders.

FBI Director James Comey, who was in the state for the second visit of his 10-year term, said there are open cases looking into individuals who may be related to ISIS/ISIL in every state in the Union except Alaska.

“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.”

Comey expressed particular fear that restrictions on information gathering could give terrorists more leeway because they are harder to track.

“I’m very worried about where we’re drifting as a country in respect to law enforcement’s ability to, with lawful process, intercept communications. I’m not talking about sneaky stuff. I’m talking about situations where we have probable cause to believe that somebody is communicating with a terrorist group,” he said. “… We’re drifting into a place where there are going to be large swaths of this country beyond the reach of the law.”

Because of that, Comey said, citizens need to be constantly on the watch. The current climate of the world does not make it acceptable to see something and not report it.

“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.”

Be sure to watch for suspicious crop dusters…

Just to recap, here we have the nation’s top cop telling the American people that despite the fact that absolutely nothing has changed since the Snowden revelations, the government is being hamstrung by four ACLU lawyers and a couple of bloggers from being able to sufficiently investigate terrorism. Apparently,they need even more spying power. Even just being criticized is too much.

We are letting the terrorists win. And so what we really need is to get the people spying on each other and reporting suspicious activity to the federal government. Sounds fabulous. For a police state. Todd Starnes is onboard. He’s seeing terrorists around every corner. I(‘m sure he’ll stand his ground.

.

Headline ‘O the Day

by digby

From The Hill:

“Obama prepares for divisive veto”

There he goes again, being divisive. Most presidential vetoes are polite demonstrations of bipartisan comity. But President Obama just can’t help standing in the way of congresses’ good faith effort to make our government work. This is, after all, his third veto, the first one since 2010:

Obama has rejected just two bills passed by Congress in his nearly six years in office. That’s the fewest of any president since James Garfield, who didn’t veto a single bill, but lasted only six months in the White House before his assassination in 1881. And when you look at presidents who have served as long as Obama has, you’d have to go back to James Monroe, the nation’s fifth president, to find a chief executive who has formally clashed with Congress so rarely. Monroe vetoed just one bill in his two terms, according to records kept by the Senate.

That obstructionist bastard.

.

Same old same old

by digby

Oh please:

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore late Sunday ordered all probate judges and employees in Alabama to follow existing state law and not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples or recognize same-sex marriages.

Couples across the state are preparing to wed Monday morning, when a stay on same-sex marriages is set to be lifted.

On Jan. 23, U.S. District Judge Callie V.S. “Ginny” Granade ruled the state’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and recognition of same-sex marriages entered in other states was unconstitutional. She issued a stay, putting her ruling on hold until Feb. 9.

Since then, Moore has asserted several times probate judges who issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples would be doing so in defiance of state law.

In his order issued Sunday night, Moore wrote that if any probate judge defies the order, Governor Robert Bentley would have the responsibility of ensuring that state law is “faithfully executed.”

He has also said that the judges are not bound by the orders issued in that case, Searcy v. Strange. Instead, he said, probate judges fall under the direct supervision and authority of the chief justice.

This happened too. And it took violence to change it. But it changed:

Update: The Supremes rejected a last minute request for a stay. It looks like some of these judges are defying Roy Moore and these marriages are happening anyway. White racist authority just isn’t what it used to be:

After marrying a gay couple in Birmingham, a judge asked for a picture with them. pic.twitter.com/QESkBxxvyC
— Alan Blinder (@alanblinder) February 9, 2015

More process dodging

by digby

Huffington Post reports that Democrats are between a rock and a hard place with the Netanyahu visit:

Already, the Israeli government has moved to tamp down Democratic unrest. On Wednesday, Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) hosted a meeting with six other Jewish Democratic members and Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. The meeting, according to an aide, came a few days after Dermer — who’s been heavily criticized for his role in organizing the Netanyahu speech — reached out. The group met in Israel’s office over Dunkin’ Donuts muffins and Munchkins, although those observing Jewish dietary laws abstained. They discussed everything from Bibi’s visit to legislation involving Iran sanctions.

“It was an opportunity for them to air their grievances to the ambassador, the fact that it is unfortunate that the style has overtaken the substance,” said the aide. “The grievances are not about Bibi coming to speak at all. It is about the way it transpired.”

(Love the donuts and Munchkins detail …)

But here’s the problem. Yes, the way it was done was wrong. The Speaker of the House should not be inviting foreign leaders to speak without clearing it with the White House. This is the kind of thing they should agree upon before it happens.

But the real issue here is that Netanyahu and the Republicans are trying to tank the nuclear negotiations with Iran. Even if they had crossed all their Is and dotted their Ts they’d still be trying to stand in the way of a more peaceful world. That’s the problem, not the lack of protocol. And it’s a big one.

.

Wait. I got this.

by Tom Sullivan

McClatchy asks an adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry how the Islamic State justifies its blood lust:

They cherry-pick Quranic verses out of context, apply the most rigid interpretations of jurisprudence and excuse just about any brutality by saying they’re waging a defensive jihad on behalf of aggrieved Muslims worldwide, according to Jocelyne Cesari, a renowned scholar of Islam who’s part of Secretary of State John Kerry’s working group on faith and foreign policy.

Swap out “Quranic” with “Bible,” “jihad” with “preemptive war,” and “Muslims” with “Christians” and this could describe death penalty proponents in Texas or torture apologists across America.

See if this doesn’t sound familiar:

Q: What religious grounding does the Islamic State give for its atrocities?

A: They say they’re in survival mode. They believe that conditions for Muslims today are a danger to your soul as a Muslim. They don’t see their jihad as an attack; they see it as defensive jihad.

Wait. I got this. “We fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” Preemptive jihad. Who’da thunk that strategery would have become so popular?

What the hell is it then?

by digby

This story from last week will make you feel young. Why? It will remind you of all those times you were stoned in college and started thinking that there might actually be a totally different universe living under your thumbnail and that we might be a universe living under the thumbnail of something else and they might be …. you get the picture. At that point you probably decided it was time for another Oreo. But this is for real:

Have you ever been on the subway and seen something that you did not quite recognize, something mysteriously unidentifiable?

Well, there is a good chance scientists do not know what it is either.

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College released a study on Thursday that mapped DNA found in New York’s subway system — a crowded, largely subterranean behemoth that carries 5.5 million riders on an average weekday, and is filled with hundreds of species of bacteria (mostly harmless), the occasional spot of bubonic plague, and a universe of enigmas. Almost half of the DNA found on the system’s surfaces did not match any known organism and just 0.2 percent matched the human genome.

It’s actually not a surprise since only a few thousand of the world’s genomes have been mapped.

Still, what the hell are they? 😉

.

Katha Pollitt FTW

by digby

I wrote a post a while back about the General Dempsey, the Chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, holding an essay contest for the best tribute to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah. Katha Pollitt entered the contest, calling her essay “Why I Heart King Abdullah.”

She gives four reasons for her adulation. Here are the first two:

1. King Abdullah was old school, and old school is good. We haven’t had a monarch like him in the West in hundreds of years, and look what a mess we’re in. Some people compare him to Louis XIV, absolute monarch extraordinaire, but I plan to argue that he was more like Henry VIII, because they both enjoyed beheading people and getting married a lot. Actually, most kings back then did the kinds of things Abdullah was famous for: throwing their enemies into dungeons, banning all religions but their own, public executions, torture, tossing ridiculous amounts of money about. The queens were much the same—look at Isabella I, who banished the Jews and Muslims from Spain and let the Inquisition set up shop in her country. In some ways, Abdullah was a lot like her. Not entirely—there was that business with expelling the Muslims (expelling the Jews, good!), plus Isabella had an egalitarian marriage with King Ferdinand, and she thought the world was round, as Columbus said—I wouldn’t want to suggest that Abdullah shared her progressive views on that! But they both ruled medieval, cleric-ridden kingdoms and did their best to keep them that way in a changing world. Do you think it would be an insult to compare Abdullah to a woman?

2. He made America feel good about itself again. In the years before 9/11, he turned a blind eye to Al Qaeda, which became our Enemy No. 1. It’s no accident that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, to say nothing of Osama bin Laden himself, were Saudi. Without the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to concentrate their patriotic feelings, Americans might have spent the last twelve years getting really upset about inequality or global warming. War lets people feel virtuous and stout-hearted—especially now that only a small handful of volunteers actually fight in them. So, patriotic Americans, next time you thank a service member for his or her service, give King Abdullah a mental tip of the hat for making those warm feelings possible.

I’ll say it because she’s too polite: America, Fuck Yeah!!!

She also gives him high praise for being good for secularists and feminists, points which have been made, but not so convincingly, by American politicians of all political stripes these last couple of weeks. (Who knew?) I urge you to read it.

This was just a first draft — she wants General Dempsey to take a look and tell her if she’s on the right track. But I’m convinced. King Abdullah was our bestest friend ever and I just hope we have more friends like him to join in our fight for Western Enlightenment values.

And Katha Pollitt gets this week’s Gold Star!

.

Talk about missing the point

by digby

I have never been to Burning Man and I’m sure I’ll never go.  I’m not a fan of big crowds or desert heat. But I can certainly appreciate the spirit of it.  Unfortunately, money (as usual) seems to have corrupted the thing as it always does:

For his 50th birthday, Jim Tananbaum, chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, threw himself an extravagant party at Burning Man, the annual sybaritic arts festival and all-hours rave that attracts 60,000-plus to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada over the week before Labor Day. Tananbaum’s bash went so well, he decided to host an even more elaborate one the following year. In 2014 he’d invite up to 120 people to join him at a camp that would make the Burning Man experience feel something like staying at a pop-up W Hotel. To fund his grand venture, he’d charge $16,500 per head.

Tananbaum, a contemporary art collector who resembles the actor Bob Saget, grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and graduated from Yale and Harvard, where he earned both an M.D. and an MBA. After years of starting, selling, and investing in health-care companies, he founded Foresite in 2011. A private venture capital firm with $650 million under management, San Francisco-based Foresite specializes in the health-care and pharmaceutical industries.

Busy building his portfolios, Tananbaum only made it to Burning Man in 2009, the festival’s 24th year, but instantly fell under its spell. While his peers in San Francisco’s high finance circles took up kitesurfing or winemaking, he devoted his spare time to preparations for the next burn. “Jim put a tremendous effort into trying to create something very special for the Burning Man community,” says his friend Matt Nordgren, a former quarterback at the University of Texas, who went on to star in the Bravo reality show Most Eligible Dallas.

For 2014, Tananbaum wanted a camp that was aesthetically novel, ecologically conscious, and exceedingly comfortable. In the spring he and his team sent out a detailed invitation, enticing potential guests with an early vision of the camp, named Caravancicle. Anyone concerned about living in a hot, unforgiving wilderness could rest assured. There would be no roughing it at Caravancicle. Accommodations would consist of a series of cubical tents with carbon fiber skeletons. Each cube would have 9-foot ceilings, comfortable bedding, and air conditioning. The surrounding camp, enclosed by high walls, would be safe and private. Amenities would include a central lounge housed in a geodesic dome, private showers and toilets, solar panels, wireless Internet, and a 24-hour bar. Guests could count on a “full-service” staff, who would among other things help create “handcrafted, artisanal popsicles” to offer passers-by. To help blend in with the Burning Man regulars, who tend to parade around the commons in wild, racy outfits (if anything at all), the camp would include an entire shipping container full of costumes.

You have to read the whole article to appreciate just how fully they screwed it up. And it wasn’t just them, it was the board of Burning Man too which went out to find rich patrons and you know what happened next. This is the world in which we now live: everything is a toy for rich people and the rest of us are just supporting players, servants and slaves to their needs and wants. If you’re lucky they’ll trickle enough down on your head so that you can carve out a fairly decent life.  But there are no guarantees. Don’t ever forget, it’s all about them.

And as this article shows, these rich guys aren’t good at everything. In fact, they might not really be good at anything. But, like the aristocrats of yore they believe they were ordained by God (in their case Mammon, the God of Markets and Meritocracy) and they are, therefore, infallible.

.

The vessel is nothing

by digby

“It’s beautiful beyotch”, whether you like it or not:

West Virginia Del. Brian Kurcaba (R) made the comments — which were first reported by Charleston Gazette staffer David Gutman — during a public hearing on Thursday. A health committee in the legislature was debating a proposed 20-week abortion ban. Kurcaba was explaining why he opposed a Democratic-sponsored amendment to add an exception for rape victims.

“Obviously rape is awful,” Kurcaba said. “What is beautiful is the child that could come from this.”

Kurbaca’s statement echoes other controversial comments from GOP politicians along the same lines. In 2012, Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said that abortion bills should not include rape exceptions because pregnancies resulting from rape are a “gift from God.” Mourdock lost his election, as did several other Republicans who waded into the issue of sexual assault and abortion access during their campaigns that year.

Since then, political consultants have attempted to train GOP lawmakers about how to more sensitively talk about rape. In 2013, the National Republican Congressional Committee sat down with candidates to coach them about what to avoid, especially in races against female opponents.

They believe this so it doesn’t matter if the Party “trains” them to talk about it more sensitively, their underlying attitudes will be the same.  So I don’t really give a damn about their training.

Clearly, these people cannot imagine some people’s horror and pain at having to go through 9 months of pregnancy, childbirth and raise (or give up) a child that was conceived by violence and rape. They don’t have to imagine it because the human being that has to go through this is irrelevant in their thinking. A pregnant woman is not a person to these people, she is a vessel in which a person is gestating.

Obviously, some women will bear their rapists child and be fine with the decision. But I daresay that there are more than a few for whom it is a nightmare of epic proportions. Forcing them to do it is one of the cruelest acts I can imagine. They are virtually daring her not to be a madonna and love the child she’s bearing. If she fails it’s on her for not knowing what’s “beautiful” and what isn’t. One thing she’ll know for sure: it doesn’t matter what she wants or needs. She’s nothing.

.

Bringing barbarity back

by digby

Whenever Bill Maher makes does his tiresome commentary in which he rolls his eyes and declares “Yes, Christians used to be violent — but it’s the Muslims doing the violence today and they must be defeated” I always say to myself: “give the Christians a chance and they’ll do it too, and for the same reasons.” Not your regular everyday mainline Christians, obviously, but the fundamentalists, fanatics and other right wingers who would jump on the same bandwagon if that was the one that would carry them to the blood-letting and killing fields. Let’s just say that it doesn’t take a historian to see that all this talk of preserving our “Judeo-Christian” heritage might lead some to think in these terms.

But I had no idea just how explicit this has become.

Right-wing radio and TV talking heads aired long rants about Obama’s “attacks on Christianity”. Jonah Goldberg claimed the Crusades were a justified action against Muslim aggression and the Inquisition was a well-intentioned anti-lynching measure. Ross Douhat spent his morning on Twitter defending conservative Catholicism more generally. Redstate.com’s Erick Erickson declared that Barack Obama was not a Christian in “any meaningful way”. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal argued that since the medieval Christian threat was over a long time ago, we should just focus on combating radical Islam.

Jindal is wrong. While relatively few contemporary Christians are calling for the crusades these days (although crusader iconography is not uncommon in the US military), it’s a mistake to believe in Christian exceptionalism – the idea that Christianity alone has solved its problems – while other religions are still “medieval”. One of history’s lessons is that any ideology, sacred or secular, that divides the world into ‘us versus them’ can and will be used to justify violence.

But when we talk about the past, we’re often really talking about ourselves. In my scholarship, for instance, I look at the ways in which medieval people developed stories about holy war as a response to contemporary problems – which often had little to do with the Crusades.

This kind of tale-telling happens today as well. Matthew Gabriele, a history professor at Virginia Tech, has written about the dangerous nostalgia for the Crusades by right-wing commentators and politicians. In an email, Gabriele told me, “It stems from an understanding of the past as unchanging, one where Christians have always been at war with Muslims and always will be at war with Muslims. It’s an argument that doesn’t care for historical context and one that relies on a false equivalence — either “they” (Muslims) were worse than “us” (Christians) or “they” (Christians of the past) are not “us” (Christians of the present).”

In other words, either the bad stuff done by long-dead Christians has nothing to do with modern Christianity; or maybe the Crusades weren’t so bad for Muslims and Jews after all.

Read on for a short re-cap of the allegedly “defensive” Crusades.

(And if there is a more vacuous right wing “intellectual” than Jonah Goldberg, I’d love to know who it might be. Debra Schussell is less idiotic. You have to read his completely ridiculous column (linked above) to truly appreciate it.)

Guess which Presidential candidate said this?

“The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom. They hate Christendom. They hate Western civilization at the core. That’s the problem.”

That was Santorum, back in the 2012 campaign.

So this desire to whitewash the Christian Crusades and Catholic Inquisition as righteous causes (when they aren’t shrieking that even mentioning the Crusades in the same breath as terrorism is a slap in the face to Christianity) is fairly common on the right. In fact, it’s been building into the mainstream for quite some time. I don’t know why this surprises me, knowing what I know about the right, but it does.

This is unbelievable, however, even for them.

Yet another for the collection. https://t.co/MgTZNCBwQ6 pic.twitter.com/CRjwnIZyYt
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) February 8, 2015

When reminded of this horrific story of Americans burning a young black man alive as he was tied to a tree, a commenter replied that he wasn’t in a cage. Apparently, that makes it completely different.

All my caterwauling about torture being a taboo over the past few years sounds hollow to my ears now. We are always just a moment away from total regression to the kind of barbarity we see from ISIS today. This kind of violence is not really a taboo at all. It’s just been out of fashion. The Taliban brought back medievalism and we followed with Inquisition style torture and now we’re back to summary execution by beheading and immolation. I fully expect to see drawing and quartering come back any day. And I wouldn’t place a bet on who will be the first to do it.

.