Month: February 2015

A bizarre torture sideshow

by digby

So, it turns out that Dianne Feinstein didn’t violate Intelligence Committee rules by sending out the full classified version of the torture report to the White House. Yes, the Republicans have tried to say she did (for some complicated reasons having to do with their desire to deep-six the report permanently.) Anyway, she didn’t. But it doesn’t make any difference because the White House and everyone else in the Executive Branch have colluded with those who want to keep the report a secret forever by refusing to read it. I’m not kidding.

This story by Ali Watkins spells out the whole bizarre tale. (I wrote a bit about this here at Salon a while back.)

The news marks a victory for Feinstein in a short-lived but heated partisan feud kickstarted by newly minted Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr (R-N.C.) upon taking over the panel’s reins in January. Burr, who has made no secret of his disdain for Feinstein’s massive study on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, sparked outrage from Democratic colleagues when he suggested Feinstein had violated committee protocol by sending out the report in December, just before relinquishing control of the panel to Republicans.

Burr brought in the Parliamentarian to settle the matter in January. He confirmed Tuesday that the office had found no rule violation on behalf of his co-chair.

Additionally, Burr wrote to the White House in January and demanded that all copies of the report disseminated by Feinstein throughout the executive branch — including to the Justice Department, State Department and FBI — be returned to the committee immediately. The White House has declined to comment on whether it intends to do so.

But despite the seeming victory for Feinstein, the panel chairman said he’s not done with the matter yet.

“We’ll proceed to whatever the next step is gonna be,” Burr said Tuesday. “I think there will be a next step, but it probably won’t be a public one.”

It’s unclear what other avenues are available to Burr if he wants to pursue the matter within the committee. There was no violation of law; the classified document was sent to appropriately cleared executive branch agencies with an arguable need-to-know. The Parliamentarian, the keeper of the Senate’s rulebook, has nixed his case that Feinstein committed a sin by committee standards.

And on top of that, most of the executive branch agencies in receipt of Feinstein’s document haven’t even opened their copy, and have not entered the document into any executive branch system of records.

Burr’s intent to continue pushing the issue — despite an independent ruling in Feinstein’s favor — isn’t likely to help heal partisan wounds he inspired with his first moves at the helm of the intelligence panel, something that is worrying his committee colleagues.
[…]
The panel’s two parties have fought for years over the study’s objectivity, with Republicans smearing it as a partisan witch hunt. Feinstein and her investigators have fought bitterly with the agency for years over a contested CIA document, and the spies’ manipulation of the investigation. And tensions have flared when the panel’s Democrats sought help from the Obama White House — which, despite having publicly condemned the CIA’s brutal torture tactics, has aligned itself more with the spies than their overseers.

The executive branch’s apparent failure to examine the full report — the State Department and Justice Department have yet to even open their copy — continues to concern Democrats, though the White House has consistently declined to weigh in.

In a letter sent to outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder Tuesday, intelligence panel member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked that Holder make better use of the full report.

“It will be much more difficult to prevent these mistakes from being repeated if no one at the Justice Department understands how they happened in the first place,” Wyden wrote.

The 500-page executive summary of the torture study was released in December. With Burr’s takeover, few believe the full, 6,000-plus page document will be released, as the longtime intelligence committee member has expressed support for the torture tactics and blasted Feinstein’s study.

Burr has additionally said he intends to return to the agency the fiercely contested internal CIA review of the torture program that supposedly aligns with the harsh conclusions of Feinstein’s torture study — a document that Feinstein and her investigators have fought fiercely to keep in committee hands.

Can you believe it? The Republicans on the committee want to disappear the study and pretty much give the CIA the greenlight to torture at will. And the executive branch is refusing to “open their copy” of it because then it would enter the official executive branch record system and become subject to FOIA laws and potentially to defense attorneys trying to defend their clients who were tortured. (Katherine Hawkins of openthegovernment.org explained the legal theory in this post.)

Everyone is upset that Richard Burr’s opening gambit is to treat Dianne Feinstein disrespectfully and they worry about how such rude behavior will affect the way the committee works in the future. But we should probably remember that this whole thing is happening because they are trying to destroy an official government report about how the CIA tortured prisoners.

It’s mindboggling.

The difference between libs and cons

by digby

In a nutshell. Here’s Scott Walker’s argument for why he’s uniquely qualified to be president:

Walker talked about some of the death threats made against him by those who opposed his conservative reforms. One threatened to “gut my wife like a deer,” and another note said that if his wife didn’t stop him, he’d be “the first Wisconsin governor ever assassinated,” he said. The threats are part of the reason he’s “exploring that very real possibility of stepping up and providing a new level of leadership,” he said during the 30-minute call.

“Part of me looks back and thinks that maybe God put me and my family through all this for a purpose – and it wasn’t just to get things done in Wisconsin, and it wasn’t just to win all those elections in a state that normally doesn’t go Republican. Maybe it was to set us to … help get our country on the right track.”…

A Fort Dodge man asked Walker if he could use the same approach he used in “defeating unions” to take on liberals in Washington “and get some spending control bills and repeal Obamacare.”
“Absolutely,” Walker answered.

And to think that all these violent liberal psychopaths are against guns and want to surrender to our enemies.

As Ed Kilgore points out:

Walker’s getting into a real groove in using the “death threats” he and his family supposedly received as a sign of the martyrdom—a sort of stigmata—Christian conservatives are expected to confess these days. Sarah Palin couldn’t do it better. Beyond that, though, he’s advertising his union-bashing not simply as an end in itself, but as an opening bid for the nastiness he will inflict on liberals in Washington as a sort of divine hammer. That, in addition to his electability argument, is pretty powerful to the “base.”

It is. They eat that stuff up.

Now think back to Barack Obama’s argument in 2008:

“You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and anger and pettiness that’s consumed Washington; to end the political strategy that’s been all about division. And instead make it about addition; to build a coalition for change that stretches through red states and blue states.”

I think it’s fair to say that his message made liberals ecstatic.

We are different, that’s for sure.

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Fix the Debt: “Blah, blah, blah, debt, blah blah, entitlements…”

by digby

The following is a statement by Fix the Debt co-Chairs Gov. Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, and Sen. Judd Gregg, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire.

Senator Judd Gregg: “The President’s budget has too much debt and little
reform of our tax and entitlement programs. Outside of some modest Medicare
savings, the budget doesn’t do much at all to prepare for an aging population
and growing health care costs, nor to move toward a more competitive and
pro-growth tax system.”

Governor Ed Rendell: “The President’s emphasis on promoting investment and
middle-class growth is an important one, but one that will succeed if we can
bring our debt under control and make our entitlement programs solvent. The
budget takes some first steps in these areas, but President Obama needs to
reach out to Republicans on the Hill to work together and go further.”

Oh shut up …

Here come the wimmin! Runferyerlives!

by digby

I saw this article in USA Today and gasped for the same reasons Marcotte does below:

Democrats are quite likely to nominate a woman for president in 2016, which would be the very first time in American history that a major political party has done such a thing. Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers, explains in USA Today that this possibility should alarm us all. Baker argues that by allowing women to have power, the Democrats “have scared off serious male challengers” and created a “gender problem” in the party.

Baker pays lip service to the idea that it’s good to let women have some power by allowing that the “advancement and championing of women has been a source of justifiable pride for Democrats.” Then he lets loose with his real argument, which is that allowing women into positions of power is inherently anti-male, because we all know how afraid men are to challenge women. “Take Hillary Clinton and Rep. Nancy Pelosi,” he writes. “Both are towering and intimidating figures, who have sucked the oxygen out of the spheres they dominate.”

Baker argues that these women have amassed power not because of merit, but because they are using the immense terror of ever challenging female power to intimidate their worthier male opponents. “But the very elevation of these extraordinary women has placed male Democrats in the position of being unwilling to challenge them,” he writes. “The mantra ‘it’s her turn’ has broad appeal among Democrats.”

The list of Clinton victims is long, according to Baker:

While the Democratic bench isn’t as full as it has been, there is still no shortage of qualified male candidates who will probably not step forward in 2016. In the Senate there are potential hopefuls who could win the hearts of the very people who consider Clinton too middle-of-the-road: Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. There are well-regarded governors such as Jack Markell of Delaware and Andrew Cuomo of New York or former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. None of them has given the slightest hint that they might consider a run.

The fact that there are so many male Senators and governors to begin with is lost on Baker. And to those who would point out that the all-powerful Clinton lost to a male opponent last time she tried to secure the Democratic nomination, Baker says this: “Yes, but he also represented a core Democratic constituency that also enjoys favored status in the party and rewards it in return with overwhelming support.” Which is a euphemistic way of saying that it’s only because Obama is black.

And that constituency of humans who failed to be properly born with penises? They don’t exist apparently.

The fact that this kind of article can appear so boldly in a mainstream national newspaper makes me wonder if the nation really can elect a woman president. Can you imagine, for instance, Ross Baker writing this is USA Today six years ago:

Take Senator Barack Obama and Rep. John Lewis. Both are towering and intimidating figures, who have sucked the oxygen out of the spheres they dominate…. But the very elevation of these extraordinary African Americans has placed white Democrats in the position of being unwilling to challenge them… the mantra ‘it’s their turn’ has broad appeal among Democrats….While the Democratic bench isn’t as full as it has been, there is still no shortage of qualified white candidates who iwll probably not step forward in 2008.

White I’m sure there was plenty of this sort of thing being written in the fever swamps six years ago I don’t think USA Today was running it. They surely wouldn’t run it now. It’s openly racist, suggesting that white people are afraid to run for office because they’re being “mau-maued” by some uppity blacks. Here, it’s white men being “mau-maued” by some uppity females and they run it like it’s perfectly reasonable to assert such a thing. The fact that they do still makes me a little bit skeptical that a woman can win the presidency. I suppose if she’s lucky in her opposition she can pull it off but it’s not going to be as obviously easy as some people think it is.

Clinton is a powerful figure because she was politically active in the Arkansas Governor’s mansion for a decade, same with the White House for eight years as the president’s closest advisor, then a Senator, a Secretary of State and a presidential candidate who came very close to winning the nomination in 2008. I’d guess that’s a 30 year resume that might scare off some white men even if she were a white man herself.

As Marcotte points out, all the white men can relax a little bit. The power in this country remains safely in their hands. Here’s the gender breakdown of the current congress:

Scary.

Also too, this:

The threat of matriarchy is very far off indeed. But in the meantime if some of these timorous white men feel threatened by us old broads, fine. Welcome to our world.

Boo!

Update: Oh, and by the way, the white men foolishly gave women the right to vote some time ago and they make up over half the population. If appealing to them is a “problem” for Democrats it’s a good problem to have.

The most dangerous doctors in America 


by digby

Some of the most dangerous people in America are right wing doctors. In fact, I think I’m going to have to ask for political affiliation before I allow one to treat me since any doctor who believes crapola of the kind we’ve been hearing from Rand Paul about vaccines is likely to kill you. And surely you’ll recall the famous case of Senate majority leader Dr. Bill Frist committing medical malpractice on the floor of the Senate by misdiagnosing a woman in a coma via videotape for political reasons.

I wrote about yet another one for Salon this morning:

It was startling to see physician and Senator Rand Paul claim the other day that people on disability were faking bad backs and anxiety to get on the dole and cheat the taxpayers. These are real ailments, sometimes totally debilitating, as anyone who has suffered from either can tell you. Severe back pain can make it impossible to work at any job, even those which only require sitting. Anxiety disorder is a terrible condition that can even make some people unable to even leave their house. What kind of medical doctor would deny such a thing? (If you answered, “one who will willingly trade his professional integrity for political points” you’d be right.)

But this is actually part of the GOP’s ongoing quest to degrade “entitlements” and make America’s health care system the worst in the world for anyone who isn’t wealthy. Their ongoing attack on Obamacare opened up a window to their underlying philosophy about affordable health care. (They’re not for it.) And now they are taking legislative aim at the Supplemental Security Income portion of the Social Security System. This is the program that makes it possible for people with disabilities to live without begging on the streets. Despite the fact that the congress has always routinely pushed money back and forth between the retirement and disability portions of the program as the need occurred, the Republicans in congress have decided that they no longer support doing such a thing. The result, if they have their way, would be to cut the meager stipends of millions of disable Americans within the next year.

They claim that the program is rife with fraud and that far too many people are able bodied and just refuse to work. (They haven’t used the term “disability queen” queen in public yet, but you can be sure they’ve thought it.) Representative Tom Price, another erstwhile medical professional committed to proving that trusting a Republican doctor to treat you is like asking a convicted robber to house sit, said:

“There are a number of studies that demonstrate that a lot of people who are on the program are no longer eligible. People get well, people do other things and other opportunities become available from a medical standpoint to treating whatever disability they have to make it so that they can contribute to a greater degree.”

That’s a convenient story but it’s just not true

Read on for more… In fact, most people on disability are mired in poverty barely able to survive and would go to work in a minute if they could. This is just more “welfare queen” calumny.  It never ends with these people.

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Your freedom to get sick is being well protected by right wing zealots

by digby

This man is now a US Senator:

“I was having a discussion with someone, and we were at a Starbucks in my district, and we were talking about certain regulations where I felt like ‘maybe you should allow businesses to opt out,’” he said, “as long as they indicate through proper disclosure, through advertising, through employment literature, or whatever else.”

Tillis was, at the time, the minority whip of the North Carolina House of Representatives.

“She said, ‘I can’t believe that,’” he continued in retelling the story. “And at that time we were sitting back at a table that was near the restrooms and one of the employees just came out. She said: ‘For example, don’t you believe that this regulation that requires this gentleman to wash his hands before he serves your food is important and should be on the books?’”

“I said: ‘As a matter of fact, I think it’s one that I can [use to] illustrate the point,’” he remarked. “I said: ‘I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says “We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom,”’” he recalled, as the audience chuckled. “The market will take care of that.’”

Sure will. But isn’t that requirement to post a sign a rather tyrannical requirement designed to infringe on the freedom of business owners? I think it is. Better to just let the buyer beware — if a few customers start barfing into their cappucinos word will eventually get around. Let the market really decide.

I know it’s totalitarian to require employees who handle food to wash their hands after going to the bathroom. They might as well be sending people to the gulag. But I suspect that until they install an attendant in the washroom to force the employees to do it, it’s actually just a recommendation. This fine fellow can relax in the knowledge that if a food server decides to exercise his god-given right as an American not to wash his hands, he can.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the feces of patriots and tyrants.

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We just disagree

by digby

Chris Mooney explains why we have such divergent views on climate change in this country:

For a long time, people have been using words like “polarizing” and “partisan” to describe the debate over climate change. Last week, I added “brutal and dysfunctional” to the descriptive pile.

But according to new research just out in Nature Climate Change, it may be even worse than that. The new study, by a group of Australian psychologists and social scientists, examines the clash between climate adherents and so-called “skeptics” as an “intergroup conflict” (a psychological buzzword) driven, in significant part, by anger at those on the other side.

Or to put it another way, the debate is a cultural clash between two groups with divergent social identities who define those identities, in part, by criticizing those on the other side.

“Believers and sceptics [sic] are united, but only insofar as they are united in opposition to each other,” notes the paper, whose lead author is Ana-Maria Bliuc of Monash University in Victoria.

What do social psychologists mean when they talk about “intergroup conflict”? Tom Postmes, a psychologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who wrote an accompanying essay about the new study, more or less defines the climate situation as tribal. He notes that on both sides of the climate debate, “believers” and “skeptics” are united by an in-group consciousness and identification as well as an out-group dislike or distrust. Or in other words, both see the issue in “us and them” terms. Such perceptions “revolve around the awareness of ‘us’ in opposition to ‘them’ with very clear boundaries between groups,” he writes.

Indeed, write Bliuc and her colleagues, the climate conflict “can be understood in similar terms to other social conflicts, such as that over abortion, the campaign for equality of the sexes, the US civil rights movement, and campaigns for marriage equality.”

One key aspect of in-group/out-group behavior is called “outgroup derogation” — negativity towards those who are members of the opposing group — and Postmes sees it here. “People tend to talk badly about the outgroup as a way of expressing solidarity with their own side,” writes Postmes.

This actually explains why we have such divergent views on everything despite the fact that our culture has actually become much more homogenous than it used to be. It’s almost as if we go out of our way to find reasons to disagree with each other. But then that would be America from the very beginning. We’ve always been two countries. Unlike most other countries which reached consensus in a reasonable way, we fought a war over the fundamental moral question of slavery.

Our differences are not quite as regionally defined as they used to be (although they still are to a surprisingly large degree) but the basic outlines of our differences have always been there. In simplistic terms, one America believes they are guardians of a tradition that must be preserved and protected and the other believes that change and progress are what define us. (I said it was simplistic.) The traditionalists have always felt perpetually under attack from the modernists and have developed a sense of resentment that pervades their entire worldview. And it’s not entirely unjustified. The modernists don’t care about their “traditions”, many of which perpetuate inequality and bigotry. I suppose all societies have this divide to some degree but America was organized around it from the beginning.

Not that we have nothing in common. We have tons in common, but this bitterness between the two factions bubbles up over and over again. Right now, we’re in the midst of one of those ugly periods when it boils over. Let’s hope it doesn’t do us in for good this time.

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Freedom to be jerks
by Tom Sullivan

The Kochs, the NRA, and Randians of the right treat the word freedom as a conversation stopper. (What, are you against freedom, commie? Game Over. We win.) But just as creating the T-party pushed the GOP so far right that party regulars now are stuck with trying to reign in the monster they created, turning freedom into a worship word may be backfiring too:

A Florida man set up a gun range in his front yard, but police said there’s not much they can do but keep an eye on him.

Other residents are livid that 21-year-old Joseph Carannate set up targets and plans to fire his 9mm handgun in his residential Saint Petersburg neighborhood, reported WFLA-TV.

“I don’t know if this idiot is going to start popping off rounds,” said resident Patrick Leary. “I’m furious.”

Yeah? Furious commie.

But since by law the Gunshine State prohibits local governments from restricting gun rights, freedom means fire at will. Freedom means telling the neighbors, hide in the basement with your young-uns if you don’t like it.

The recent fight over vaccines travels that same road, doesn’t it? The teaser headline on the front page of the Washington Post online grabbed me this morning. Gerson: Vaccines and our duty to our neighbors. Whaddya mean “duty to our neighbors,” commie? Free-DOM:

Resistance to vaccination on the left often reflects an obsession with purity. Vaccines are placed in the same mental category as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), DDT and gluten. But the problem with organic health care is that the “natural” rate of child mortality is unacceptably high. Organically raised children can get some very nasty ­diseases.

Opposition to vaccination on the right often reflects an obsession with liberty — in this case, freedom from intrusive state mandates. It has always struck me as odd that a parent would defend his or her children with a gun but leave them vulnerable to a microbe. Some conservatives get especially exercised when vaccination has anything to do with sex — as with the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine — on the questionable theory that teenagers are more likely to fornicate if they have a medical permission slip (or less likely to without it).

Whether you are blazing away in a suburban front yard, or putting neighbors’ children at risk by refusing to immunize yours, or publishing cartoons of Mohammed with intent to offend (France, I know), or strolling into the Burger King with your AR-15, or doing anything else arrogantly prick-ish, because freedom, maybe the radical individual thing has gotten out of hand. Doesn’t it seem, at long last, that our freedom fetish is turning us into a nation of jerks?

Michael Gerson dares use the phrase “common good”:

In all these matters, there is a balance between individual rights and the common good. This may sound commonplace. But some Americans seem to believe that the mere assertion of a right is sufficient to end a public argument. It is not, when the exercise of that right has unacceptable public consequences, or when the sum of likely choices is dangerous to a community.

Commie.

Property values are family values

by digby

Dr Paul on vaccines:

I think they’re a good thing but I think the parent should have some input. The state doesn’t own your children; parents own the children and it is an issue of freedom.

Huh. So parents own their children and not only have the “freedom” to expose their property to deadly illnesses, they have the freedom to expose your kids to deadly illnesses. And unless their property is in the form of a zygote inside a woman’s uterus, in which case they are full human beings which the state must step in to protect. Interesting.

Also too, he shushed his interviewer like a little girl:

Let’s all be quiet now when talking about the budget @SenRandPaul @cnbc pic.twitter.com/iC4BAClr80— Ashley Codianni (@AshleyCodianni) February 2, 2015

Guessing Rand thinks he owns women too…

You can see the whole mess of an interview here. He’s just an ass.

About that tide lifting all boats …

by digby

Well, heck. It’s not as if they don’t deserve all that right?

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