Month: February 2015

Con-Con Macoute

by digby

About that wacky First Amendment…

A majority of Republicans nationally support establishing Christianity as the national religion, according to a new Public Policy Polling survey released Tuesday.

The poll by the Democratic-leaning firm found that 57 percent of Republicans “support establishing Christianity as the national religion” while 30 percent are opposed. Another 13 percent said they were not sure.

It almost goes without saying that the Establishment Clause of the Constitution prohibits establishing of a national religion.

It goes without saying to you maybe. But to “constitutional conservatives” the constitution is a religious document.

Here’s Kilgore:

There’s a revealing passage in a report from Kevin Jenkins of the St. George (Utah) Spectrum on an appearance by Cliven Bundy at a gathering of “constitutional conservative” zealots under the aegis of the Independent American Party:

“If our (U.S.) Constitution is an inspired document by our Lord Jesus Christ, then isn’t it scripture?” he asked.

“Yes,” a chorus of voices replied.

“Isn’t it the same as the Book of Mormon and the Bible?” Bundy asked.

“Absolutely,” the audience answered.

Now most “constitutional conservatives” outside a few western states wouldn’t include the Book of Mormon in this syllogism. But the identification of the Constitution (as crucially modified, of course, by a particular spin on the Declaration of Independence) with the Bible as inerrant (give or take a slavery or genocide endorsement) scripture is pretty common to the Con-Con creed. And it helps explain its strength in areas of the country and of the population prone to what religious critics sometimes call Bibliolatry (worship of books as exclusive repositories of divine wisdom).

To any religiously conservative American Exceptionalist, it can make for a potent combination: divine scripture and a divine Founding Document together calling on the Redeemer Nation to rediscover its divine roots and smite the modern infidels or liberalism and relativism and internationalism—by any means necessary. It’s unsurprising this mix of religious and secular themes might have a special attraction to some LDS folk, for whom America has an intrinsically central place in the unfolding of divine revelation (though the LDS authority structure offers a useful break on too much speculation in this direction). But it’s clearly attractive to all sorts of people with a tendency to deify the day before yesterday, and find eternally fixed ways of living and governing in Holy Words.

To put it another way, more often than not American Exceptionalism + Religious Fundamentalism = Constitutional Conservatism.

Only 57% of Republicans are on board with this.

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So we don’t have to fight them over here …

by digby

Helping or hurting? You be the judge:

Minnesota state Rep. Tony Cornish says the al-Shabaab threat against the Mall of America should be enough to motivate mall owners to drop their “no guns” policy so citizens can protect themselves.

Mr. Cornish, a Republican who also chairs the House Public Safety Committee, said the Mall of America has interpreted state concealed carry laws incorrectly, and he’s intent on challenging them for it, a local CBS affiliate reported.

“This is completely ridiculous. The complete opposite of what they should be doing,” he said. “If we’re threatened with an attack, the last thing you want to do is disarm citizens.”

The Republican’s comments come after a tweet sent from the Mall of America’s Twitter account said, “The mall bans all guns from the premises, you’ll note this clearly at each entrance door.”

That makes perfect sense. Right now, there are no guns allowed but if the Republicans have their way the would-be terrorists would be free to easily bring them in. Of course a bunch of armed yahoos would then shoot back so there would be even more bullets flying in all directions.

These are the people we are supposed to believe are keeping us safe from the “bad guys.”

Coalition building 101

by digby

Ron Paul:

“I was always annoyed with it in Congress because we had an anti-war unofficial group, a few libertarian Republicans and generally the Black Caucus and others did not — they are really against war because they want all of that money to go to food stamps for people here.”

People in issue coalitions don’t have to like each other. They often disagree on everything but the particular cause they’ve joined. But it’s not smart or decent to mischaracterize their support for the issue that brings the coalition together.

The Congressional Black Caucus does support the food stamp program and I’m sure they’d love to have more money for domestic use. But they are sincere in their anti-war position on a moral and practical basis and to claim that it’s only about “food stamps” is really contemptuous. (He could have said they wanted the money for “jobs programs” or “education” but he used the racist dogwhistle.) In fact, one could much more easily make the case that the only reason the handful of libertarians are against foreign adventures is because they believe the money spent on war would be much better left in the pockets of the wealthy “producers” for them to create jobs for dead artists.

The CBC cares about the people overseas who die in the wars. I’m going to guess that Ron Paul hasn’t lost a minute of sleep over that unfortunate consequence. After all, the problems of other people, even those in his own neighborhood much less in countries a world away, are none of his concern.

And by the way, is there anyone out there who still believes that Ron Paul was oblivious about those racist newsletters?

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Goper vs Goper

by digby

As we watch Luke Russert breathlessly report the latest maneuvering from the halls of congress over this DHS spending bill drama, it’s a good idea to remember that this is not really about the DHS. It’s not even about immigration. It’s about the Republican Party.

Stan Collender called it a while back:

The Republican vs. Republican budget war is now wide open for all to see. The House’s intransigence on this particular issue — it insists that the DHS appropriation include language that somehow reverses President Obama’s executive orders on immigration -– is being matched by the Senate’s unwillingness to take the steps needed either to match what the House wants or develop its own alternative.

And, as I also predicted, the unwillingness of Senate Democrats to provide any votes for their GOP colleagues even on issues where there is some agreement has backed Republicans so far into a political corner that it’s not at all clear how they will fight their way out.

This is not an aberration over the very hot button immigration issue: No matter how this showdown ends, it’s virtually certain to be repeated over and over and over again this year on everything budget-related.

The current budget stalemate and those to come were inevitable the day after Election Day. Even though the House and Senate both have Republican majorities and are controlled by the same political party, the GOP representatives and senators have very different constituencies and, therefore, vastly dissimilar political needs.

Because the 2012 redistricting created more reliably one-party congressional districts, House Republicans are more concerned about intra-GOP fights in primaries than general elections and the voters in those races tend to be extremely anti-Democrat, anti-Obama and conservative. They are also far more willing to support militant tactics like shutdowns.

By comparison, reelection for many Senate Republicans depends on them appealing to a much broader and more moderate (even if it’s only just relative) statewide base that is not as comfortable with confrontational politics. Add to that the fact that 24 of the 34 senators up for reelection in 2016 will be Republicans and that many of them are from states that Obama won and you start to understand the substantially different political needs between the two GOP-controlled houses of Congress.

That makes it anything but surprising that on many or even most issues what the GOP House demands won’t be acceptable to the Republican Senate and what the Republican Senate needs will be completely intolerable to the GOP House.

The country will just have to suck it up and suffer because the Republican Party is at war with itself.

I think that most people believe this is the big crucible and that the grown-ups will finally assert themselves and vanquish the radicals forever. Personally, I wouldn’t bet on it.

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Debtor’s prison for profit

by digby

Alabama is an amazing place. It’s quite beautiful and charming in dozens of different ways even as the echoes of its controversial history still reverberate in today’s cultural battles.

But come on, this is too much:

Harpersville and Childersburg are blaming a private probation company for getting them sued by indigent municipal court defendants who claim the two cities operated debtors’ prisons.

The two north Alabama cities say in a lawsuit filed this week that Judicial Correction Services Inc. raised fees without permission, used threats to collect money, and some of its employees wore badges and claimed to be “probation officers” when they were not.

The lawsuit also states that JCS and its insurance company should pay for defending them against the lawsuits by the city court defendants. The lawsuits against Harpersville in state court and against Childersburg in federal court are still pending.
[…]
Both Harpersville and Childersburg face lawsuits from city court defendants who say they were jailed after they could not keep up with payments on court fines and costs. One judge more than two years ago called Harpersville’s situation a “debtor’s prison” and took over that court.

Harpersville claims in the lawsuit that four JCS employees were negligent because they allegedly represented to others that they were probation officers and some carried badges with a seal. That gave the appearance that they were probation officers who spoke for the cities.

“The individual defendants never told anyone with these municipalities that they were going to refer to themselves as ‘probation officers’ and did not get permission from anyone from these municipalities to carry badges,” the lawsuit states. “Had these municipalities known that the individual defendants were making representations that they were ‘probation officers’ and carrying badges, these municipalities would have ordered the individual defendants to immediately stop.”

The two cities claim that as a result of the JCS employees’ negligence Harpersville lost its ability to operate a municipal court and both Childersburg and Harpersville face liability to the court defendants who have sued.

And here I thought privatizing public services was much more financially prudent and efficient.

So, the private debtor’s prison employees failed to tell the cities that contracted with them that they were fraudulently performing their jobs so the city isn’t responsible.

Every part of that sentence is ridiculous.

But hey, at least we know we’re free, amirite?

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Tweet ‘O the Week, patriotic American edition

by digby

You can’t make this stuff up:

Via TBOGG, who has more.

He was “jostled” at a street protest once.

by digby

According to CBS reports that day, O’Reilly’s claim that he was in “combat” in Argentina was reported by the network as a protest in which some reporters were “jostled.” There’s even footage featuring some Argentine businessmen in suits peering menacingly in the car of Canadian journalists as they sped off.

Bill O’Reilly covered a street demonstration which he has repeatedly and luridly recounted as combat experience.  And he’s repeated it as a way of showing his wartime bonafides in contrast to other journalists (and even soldiers like John Kerry.) He is a liar.

You can see the CBS reports here at Mother Jones. 

And even when O’Reilly wasn’t characterizing this incident as “combat” he was embellishing the story an pimping his own alleged heroism:

That’s not true. The riot police used rubber bullets and tear gas. There was trampling, at least one car et on fire and the usual chaos as the police fired tear gas and the crowd dispersed.  Nobody was killed.  If this was combat , then New York was an official battlefield during the Occupy protests.

As I’ve said before, the idea that this liar took Brian Williams to task for his exaggerations shows just proves what a pathologically dishonest hack he is.  Williams was actually in the war zone. O’Reilly was covering (very briefly, I might add, since they sent him home almost immediately because he was such a jerk) some street demonstrations and has been passing himself off as Ernie Pyle ever since.
It’s intensely frustrating to see this bombastic jackass get away with this but he will.  He’s the highest rated personality on Fox.  Short of getting arrested for public lewdness (and even then …) there is nothing that will end his career.  And even worse, all evidence of his deceit will be seen as further confirmation  of his righteousness. It’s an awesome racket.

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Relentless
by Tom Sullivan

I used to describe George W. Bush as a Jack Russell terrier playing tug of war with a knotted rope. Once he sank his teeth into something, he simply would not let go. You could lift him bodily off the ground and watch his butt cut circles in the air as he wrestled with his end of it. But in the end you would tire of the game first, let go, and he’d retire triumphantly to his doggy bed with his prize. I was never sure myself whether I meant that as a cut or a compliment.

This how the right wins and we lose. The thing is, conservatives often beat the left, not simply with money, but with sheer relentlessness. They play tortoise. Liberals choose hare.

At “The Fix” yesterday, Chris Cillizza looked at the national Democrats’ draft “party autopsy” written in the wake of the thumping its candidates suffered in the 2014 mid-term elections. He wasn’t too impressed, except with this:

The Task Force recommends that the DNC – along with the Democratic family of organizations, state parties and allied organizations – create and resource a three-cycle plan that targets and wins back legislative chambers in order to prepare for redistricting efforts. This long-term effort must be aggressive and focused on winning elections at the state and local level. It must also support efforts to take back the House of Representatives.

But even this “long-term effort” – six years – is Short Attention Span Theater compared to the decades that movement conservatives put into getting George W. Bush, their movement’s apotheosis, into the White House, gaining control of Congress, and mounting a final, all-out, Koch- and ALEC-backed, legislative assault in the states on any who might oppose them. Working with those long time horizons is not the left’s strong suit. We’re too flighty and easily discouraged.

Cillizza writes:

Traditionally, Democrats — and, in particular, the party’s major donors — have not been terribly good at either a) seeing the big/long-term political picture or b) getting excited about downballot races. (Republicans, on the other hand, have been brilliant at both.)

Republicans have been kicking Democrats’ butts at the state and local levels (and in judges races), unanswered, for a decade.

There is an ADHD component to lefty politics. We’re attracted ever so briefly to bright, shiny, national races, to candidates with fleeting star-power, and to Beltway theater. Building a state and national bench from the local level doesn’t provide the buzz we crave. For political junkies on the left, how many moods rise and fall based on what did or didn’t happen this week in Washington? They’re up, they’re down, they’re in, they’re out, they’re thrilled, they’re through. I’m not talking about dedicated, hard-core organizers, but the battalions of armchair activists who stay home in off-year elections, who consume politics like pints of Ben and Jerry’s and yell at the TV, but won’t get their hands dirty with the real grunt work. I’ve met many. (And it’s mostly grunt work.) They’ll never win if they won’t get into the game.

Or, as happened the other day, we take ourselves so seriously that we attack allies over minor foibles. Patricia Arquette backstage at the Oscars, for instance. Instead of bashing her on Twitter, Oliver Willis went glass-half-full on Arquette’s pay equity comments. She used “a national stage with an extraordinarily high viewership to elevate an issue of key importance for the progressive coalition.” Thst’s a good thing. Some activists complained that she wasn’t perfection. Yeah? And? Willis writes:

The left has a long long history of shoving its head way up its own butt and ignoring the long fight for progress. It [is] often thanks to visionary leaders, both outside the official halls of power and within it, that the movement has had its discordant energy pointed in the right direction towards great national goals.

Along that way, it seems so often as if the left is not happy because while they got 70-80% of the cake, they didn’t get that 20% so nobody should have cake forever — until the mythical day we can get 100% cake (which is never coming and has never happened, ever in history).

At Huffington Post, Brooke Sopelsa asked the LGBT community yesterday to stop “launching attacks on well-meaning straight people” for not being hip to “the latest LGBTQIA lingo” that she can’t even keep up with herself.

We have enough adversaries working a divide-and-conquer strategy against us to do their work for them. NC Sen. Thom Tillis and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, to give just two examples – not to mention their Kochtopus masters.

If Democrats and the left expect to carry the day, save democracy, or whatever, we need to start training for marathons instead of sprints. It’s not just a different way of doing. It’s a different way of thinking.

Once, as runners milled around before the start of a 10k race, as people compared past times and personal bests, I overheard one conversation that stuck with me. This guy I knew (barely) was telling the runner beside him how a recent race had gone. He said at such-and-such weekend event he had run two-twenty-five (or something). I laughed to myself. Anybody else overhearing him would think that was a pretty good marathon time. Except he wasn’t a marathoner. He was an ultra distance runner. He meant miles.

Oh bother

by digby

Huckleberry felt the need to tweet this clip out for some reason:

As to @VP Biden not showing up for PM Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, that bothers me greatly. WATCH: http://t.co/ug211Ftb2H #Israel
— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) February 23, 2015

It bothers him greatly because nothing could be “more important than hearing from our best friend.” His one boy cuddly toy, it up his down his pride and joy…

But that’s not all.  We must send at least 10,000 ground troops and give an open ended authorization to “beat ISIL”

On @foxandfriends @GrahamBlog explained why we cannot defeat ISIS w/o US boots on the ground: http://t.co/FYCAC6x8M3 pic.twitter.com/kfiFUgClOF
— Brian Kilmeade (@kilmeade) February 23, 2015

“ISIL our war… The mall of America! … They have us in their crosshairs… whatever it takes…”

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Why this Oscar mattered


by digby

Amy Davidson at the New Yorker wrote the best story about the Citizen Four win today:

“Thank you to Edward Snowden for his courage,” Laura Poitras, the director of “Citizenfour,” said as she accepted the Oscar for best documentary. Neil Patrick Harris, the award show’s host, noted that Snowden couldn’t be there “for some treason.” Treason isn’t one of the crimes Snowden has been charged with—the government wants to prosecute him under the Espionage Act—but both the praise and the joke point to why this Snowden Oscar mattered. What he did was useful, and dangerous.

That wouldn’t have been enough if the movie were bad. But “Citizenfour” is worth watching, as well as celebrating. One still has to ask where the cinematic romance is. At the Oscars, an answer was provided by the young woman onstage with Poitras: Lindsay Mills, the woman whom Snowden at first left behind when he left his job and everything else for a hotel room in Hong Kong. One of the minor revelations of “Citizenfour” was that Mills had joined him in Moscow.

“Just walk me through it,” Glenn Greenwald tells Edward Snowden, in that Hong Kong hotel room. The guidance Greenwald and his colleagues look for is of three distinct kinds: How do you keep secrets? Why would Snowden tell secrets? And what has the government been hiding?

Read on ..  It’s good.

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