Month: February 2015

All the “lone wolves” are muslim terrorists?

by digby

Apparently not. Imagine that:

A new intelligence assessment, circulated by the Department of Homeland Security this month and reviewed by CNN, focuses on the domestic terror threat from right-wing sovereign citizen extremists and comes as the Obama administration holds a White House conference to focus efforts to fight violent extremism.

Some federal and local law enforcement groups view the domestic terror threat from sovereign citizen groups as equal to — and in some cases greater than — the threat from foreign Islamic terror groups, such as ISIS, that garner more public attention.​

The Homeland Security report, produced in coordination with the FBI, counts 24 violent sovereign citizen-related attacks across the U.S. since 2010.

The government says these are extremists who believe that they can ignore laws and that their individual rights are under attack in routine daily instances such as a traffic stop or being required to obey a court order.

They’ve lashed out against authority in incidents such as one in 2012, in which a father and son were accused of engaging in a shootout with police in Louisiana, in a confrontation that began with an officer pulling them over for a traffic violation. Two officers were killed and several others wounded in the confrontation. The men were sovereign citizen extremists who claimed police had no authority over them.

Among the findings from the Homeland Security intelligence assessment: “(Sovereign citizen) violence during 2015 will occur most frequently during routine law enforcement encounters at a suspect’s home, during enforcement stops and at government offices.”

That report was leaked last week. And the right wing is still having a fit over it. Because clearly ISIS “lone wolves” are planning to kill Americans in their beds and we must all run for our lives.

I somehow doubt these alleged ISIS Lone Wolves are going to be crucifying people at the mall of America. If there are ISIS Lone Wolves in America they will probably kill people with guns or try to blow something up. Just like American Lone Wolves do. And American criminals. And American “good guys with guns.” We live with the threat of lone wolves every day — we are, unfortunately, a violent county.

Update: As for the Mall of America threat, this piece at Think Progress makes an important point:

Regarding Al Shabaab’s threat, Secretary Johnson himself admitted to CNN that there is “no credible or specific evidence” to suggest that an attack on an American mall is in the works.

If DHS had a reason to tell mall-goers to steer clear, he would have, but didn’t do so, urging only that they exercise caution – advice so vague that it’s hard to understand what one could do, or why he would bother to issue it unless, of course, it was to remind Americans, and indeed, lawmakers, of the harrowing task DHS has to perform.

If Johnson is publicizing threats he admitted were not credible hopes of renewing funding for his agency, then it wouldn’t be the first time that the Department of Homeland Security has stoked fear to achieve political ends. Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge admitted to playing up fears to win support for fellow Republicans ahead of the 2004 presidential election.

While it’s hard to disprove legitimate threats without the sort of discloser Ridge has made, there are several instances from the presidency of President George W. Bush when terror threats were unveiled and security levels heightened at political opportune times: just before the 2002 midterm elections and just after as the damning scandal at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq.

Given this history, Johnson sounding the alarm on non-specific terrorist threats as his agency’s funding is threatened does raise questions.

“I won’t know about when the next bad actor is going to strike,” Johnson said of the prospect of a DHS shut down – a reality which sounds like a threat in itself.

I’m afraid it does.

Your Weekly Oliver: Tobacco Deaths, “Trade” Courts (and a Stray Obama Thought)

by Gaius Publius

This piece is about corporations as predators, as plunderers, in a literal sense. Please follow closely; I want to get past the sense that “predator” is a metaphor. I want to make the case that the word is a literal description of the way the rich harvest the world.

Indonesia’s “smoking baby“

In a recent piece I wrote about how the world’s rich, controllers of the world’s largest corporations, were plundering the world and noted specifically that “plunder” was indeed the right word:

What does [Hillary] Clinton want [from Elizabeth Warren]? Policy ideas, an endorsement, or some second-hand credibility? Policy ideas are free and obvious — rein in Big Money, take away some of their plunder (yes, that’s the right word for it), and give that recovered loot back to the people they took it from.

We tend to see language like this as extravagant. Are corporations literally “killers,” as the Coca Cola Corporation or Ford Motor Company are accused of being? Language like that is received as polemical, even by sympathizers with the anti-corporate cause.

John Oliver, Killer Tobacco and International “Trade” Courts

In that light, consider this piece by the best political comedian on the air, John Oliver, from a recent edition of Last Week Tonight. It’s reasonably short and despite the content, fun to watch. As you do watch though, ask yourself — What is your honest moral evaluation of the CEO class that controls tobacco companies like Philip Morris? In other words, if the corporation were a person, what words would you use to describe their behavior?

Just to draw you in, here’s how he starts:

“Tobacco. It used to be a cornerstone of American life. It was how we knew that sex was over before the female orgasm was invented.” 

But that’s not the good part. The good part is helping you clearly see the role of “free trade agreements” as agents of corporate predation. Every example Oliver cites in the clip has a “free trade court” as the corporate weapon of choice. Go back and check. Starting at 5:55 in the clip:

“Countries can try to counteract the influence of that marketing…”

… but they can’t, thanks to “free trade courts.” Examples:

The company  [PMI] complains that Uruguay’s anti-smoking legislation devalues
its cigarette trademarks and investments in the country and is suing
Uruguay for compensation under the bilateral investment treaty between Switzerland and Uruguay.[2] (Philip Morris is headquartered in Lausanne.)[3] The treaty provides that disputes are settled by binding arbitration before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

Alarmed about rising smoking rates among young women, Namibia, in
southern Africa, passed a tobacco control law in 2010 but quickly found
itself bombarded with stern warnings from the tobacco industry that the
new statute violated the country’s obligations under trade treaties.

And in the Solomons:

[T]the industry responded to the Government’s
regulations for the new Tobacco Control law by submitting its own
version and threatening legal action if it was not implemented[.]

Because the Solomon Islands government stands fully behind its new, and implemented, Tobacco Control law, the only lawsuit venue can be “trade” courts.

World trade — because nothing says “corporate control” like a nation-trumping “trade” court. With brings us to …

The Obama Connection

President Barack Obama is pushing hard, very hard, to get the next trade abomination (sorry, “job”-creator) passed through Congress. Trade agreements kill, as should be obvious from the above, all for corporate profit (meaning millionaire and billionaire CEO-class compensation). Tobacco deaths are real deaths, just as Ford Pinto deaths — those condemned to die by (psychopathic?) profit-driven humans who do cost-benefit analyses — are still human deaths. And all for profit.

What used to be a Pinto after a rear-end collision

Is this exaggeration? If not, and in that light, why is Barack Obama pushing so hard for TPP? It’s a corporate wet wish, a must-have, just like tax-forgiveness for trillions held untaxed abroad (which Obama also strongly supports, by the way). I can only think of two answers to the question above:

The second question asks, in short, “Is Obama is cashing out?” (Do most politicians “cash out” these days?) About that Clintonian income and foundational “legacy”:

One of the largest donors to the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton
Foundation is the government of Saudi Arabia. The Clintons’ personal
net worth now probably exceeds $200 million, and while earned legally,
both the money’s sources and the Clintons’ public statements indicate a
strong aversion to rocking boats or making powerful enemies.

That’s not chump change, though it’s pocket lint to the Kochs, the Dimons and the Waltons. Does Obama want some of that? The theme of this piece is language and its accuracy. Is the above language polemical or accurate? Or do you have a third answer to the question?

Because if you don’t, you’re stuck with the two answers above. A challenging thought, I know; real cognitive dissonance territory if you have a Democratic party loyalist bone somewhere inside you. But there it is. Neither you nor I are making him do this stuff.

GP

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What’s that they say about the definition of insanity again?

by digby

Kevin Drum had a great post this week-end. Short and to the point:

So here’s my scorecard for American military interventions since 2000:

Afghanistan: A disaster. It’s arguable that Afghanistan is no worse off than it was in 2001, but after losing thousands of American lives and spending a trillion American dollars, it’s no better off either.

Iraq: An even bigger disaster. Saddam Hussein was a uniquely vicious dictator, but even at that there’s not much question that Iraq is worse off than it was in 2003. We got rid of Saddam, but got a dysfunctional sectarian government and ISIS in return.

Libya: Another disaster. We got rid of Muammar Qaddafi, but got a Somalia-level failed state in return.

Yemen: Yet another disaster. After years of drone warfare, Houthi rebels have taken over the government. This appears to be simultaneously a win for Iran, which backs the rebels, and al-Qaeda, which may benefit from the resulting chaos. That’s quite a twofer.

Blame all this on whoever you want. George Bush for starting two wars with no real plan to prosecute either one properly. Or Barack Obama for withdrawing from Iraq too soon and failing to have any kind of postwar plan for Libya. Whatever. The question for hawks at this point is: what makes you think American military force has even the slightest chance of improving things in the Middle East? It’s been nothing but disasters since 9/11, and there’s no reason at all to think we’ve learned how to do things better in the intervening years. Bush started big wars, and Obama has started small ones, but the result has been the same.

And then he asks the big question — what in the world makes you think that military action now will solve the problems in the middle east any better than it’s solved them before?

Read the whole thing. It’s short. But seriously —- what do people think is the plan here besides “ohmygodsendtroops!!!”?

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Thus proving once and for all that Fox News isn’t news

by digby

Guys like Ed Henry and John Roberts must be so proud to have left their former careers to join Fox. I hope the money is worth it.

Another former colleague of Bill O’Reilly has spoken out following allegations that the Fox host embellished his experiences covering the Falklands war for CBS in the 1980s.

Former CBS reporter Charles Krause called O’Reilly’s claims “absurd” in an interview with Media Matters published on Monday.

“I don’t recall him doing any major story that anybody remembers and he was there a very short time,” Krause said, “then he was recalled, I don’t know why.”

Krause said he could not remember any proof of O’Reilly’s claim that he saved a cameraman while being chased by the Argentinian army during a protest in Buenos Aires, nor did he agree with calling the protests “riots.”

He also called O’Reilly’s general characterization of the demonstrations “absurd.”

“That’s absurd because Buenos Aires was Buenos Aires,” Krause told Media Matters. “It was just like it always was, there was very little evidence of the war in Buenos Aires. The war was being fought thousands of miles away.”

“He wasn’t a team player and people thought he was grandstanding, basically,” Krause said.

On Sunday, another former CBS correspondent, Eric Engberg, similarly dismissed O’Reilly’s description of the protests in Buenos Aires to CNN’s Brian Stelter, and took issue with O’Reilly’s attitude.

Engberg became noticeably agitated when CNN showed a clip in which O’Reilly said all his CBS colleagues were hiding in their hotel rooms the night of the protests.

“What he just said is a fabrication, a lie,” Engberg said.

CNN also reported that seven other former CBS colleagues have disputed O’Reilly’s repeated accounts of the protests in Buenos Aires.

Apparently, they’re all lying for some reason.

Sadly, O’Reilly will not suffer much from the unfolding scandal that has CBS news vets all saying he was lying about his “combat” reporting even though he smugly attacked Brian Williams for a much lesser crime. (After all, nobody disputes that Williams was actually in a war zone.) Remember that O’Reilly kept his job after being accused of a level of sexual harrassment so gross that it couldn’t even be accurately reported on regular news. Clearly, the only thing that could possibly dislodge him from Fox is news that he’s secretly been donating money to PETA and Move On.

Fox is not news and has never been news. They aren’t even honest partisans. They are just a scripted “reality” TV show. Fake news, except they don’t admit it. And O’Reilly is their star. I’ll be shocked if he pays even the slightest price for this.

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Jebbie’s baggage

by digby

Over at Salon this morning I have a piece about the new ad by Brent Bozell’s group attacking Jeb because he’s too close to Hillary.  I suspect that’s not the real message.

I preface the piece with a look at Bozell who is a movement conservative’s conservative to whom heed should be paid if you want to know what the far right is up to.  And then I talk about his new ad:

… Jeb is “unelectable” because he was nice to Hillary but Hillary was responsible for Benghazi and therefore Jeb is tainted by his friendly association with her at this event. It’s hard to believe that anyone thinks this very thin association of Bush with Benghazi could possibly be used by, well … anyone.

But Bozell is much cleverer than that. He’s making the case that Jeb is unelectable for an entirely different reason. He has taken the exact case against George W. Bush and 9/11 — “ignored evidence,” “refused to act,” “happened on his watch” — and applied it to Hillary and Benghazi. I’m sure many right-wingers have internalized the idea that this event is an act of terrorist aggression that Hillary failed to stop, but when you put it in the context of Jeb Bush it takes on another dimension, doesn’t it?

What are they really saying with this ad that immediately evokes the comparison of Benghazi with 9/11? They are really saying that Jeb Bush is unelectable because of his brother, not because of any award he gave to Hillary. Bozell isn’t aiming this ad at the rank and file. He’s aiming it at the Big Money Boys whom he obviously feels need to be reminded of the serious baggage Jeb brings with him.

The movement conservatives don’t want Jeb and not because he’s a moderate but because he’s an establishment conservative over whom they have little leverage.

And, by the way, they are right about why Jeb is unelectable. It’s only been six years since his own brother left office with a 28% approval rating. We’re still dealing with the mess that he left both economically and in the Middle East. It’s possible that a different Republican win but it hasn’t been long enough to forget about all that and elect another Bush.

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Super-villains on the run?

by digby

It’s fashionable to think that ISIS is an invading army of super-villains who have their eyes set on taking over the world, especially America, and will probably succeed unless we declare a world war immediately.  But shockingly, that may actually be  a misconception. In fact, it may be that ISIS is better at making snuff videos than warmaking. (Sorry, Huckleberry.)

This piece from Zach Beauchamp at Vox spells it out:

It’s certainly true that ISIS remains a terrible and urgent threat to the Middle East. The group is not on the verge of defeat, nor is its total destruction guaranteed. But, after months of ISIS expansion and victories, the group is now being beaten back. It is losing territory in the places that matter. Coalition airstrikes have hamstrung its ability to wage offensive war, and it has no friends to turn to for help. Its governance model is unsustainable and risks collapse in the long run.

Unless ISIS starts adapting, there’s a very good chance its so-called caliphate is going to fall apart.

Now, that is not going to be what the hawks want to hear. Neither are the timorous Dems who will try to deflect the inevitable attacks on their patriotism by getting out front on the warmongers likely to listen. The media will put their fingers in their ears and sing la-la-la-la-la rather than do anything to interfere with their pumped up war ratings. (Right now I’m watching MSNBC breathless flog a story called “Threatened in America” … oy.)

So who knows if the war drums can be muffled by the bad news that ISIS may be losing their war? But the rest of us should at least be alert to the possibility that these monsters might not be quite as formidable as certain people want them to be. Reality based community and all that …

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On the origin of “lynching”
by Tom Sullivan

Two postings this weekend involving lynch mobs led me to an interesting bit of history from the Revolutionary War. Reading the L.A. Times op-ed title, “Southern ‘Hanging Bridge: A monument to Judge Lynch,” made me gasp. It had never occurred to me that lynching derived from someone’s name.

Jason Morgan Ward, associate professor of history at Mississippi State University, begins:

On Feb. 10, the Montgomery, Ala.-based organization Equal Justice Initiative released “Lynching in America,” a searing report that documents 3,959 lynchings in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950. The researchers note that their count exceeds that of previous studies by at least 700 victims. The news media seized on the numbers and paid less attention to what the group characterized as an “astonishing absence” of lynching memorials in communities that boast monuments to Confederate soldiers and architects of the South’s Jim Crow regime.

As it happens, an abandoned, rusted bridge on a dirt road near Shubuta, Mississippi stands as a makeshift monument to the lynchings that occurred there between 1918 and 1942. When Ward asked locals if the new road bypassing the “hanging bridge” had anything to do with its history, a local told him, “People don’t need to see that.”

But Ward’s op-ed did not explain who Judge Lynch was.

It was news last week when Oklahoma legislators voted to cease funding an Advance Placement history course, echoing a key critic of the curriculum who believes “the concept of American exceptionalism has been deliberately scrubbed out of this document.”

At Crooks and Liars, Dave Neiwert suggests that one motivation for the legislation may be that Oklahomans do not want to see their own unflattering history revisited: the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and the Osage Reign of Terror, also from the 1920s. In the first, white lynch mobs obliterated a prosperous black neighborhood – even dropping fire bombs from airplanes (one might consider that exceptional) – and in the second, white fortune hunters exploited and murdered Osage tribal members to gain control over oil rights. Combined, hundreds died. Neiwert explains:

An understanding of Oklahoma history would not be complete without at least some knowledge of these incidents, particularly because they loom so large in the history of race relations in America as a nation.

It also would give young people a clearer and fuller picture of the scope and nature of how history has shaped modern race relations in America. At a bare minimum, it will prevent privileged and sheltered whites from asking ignorantly: “Why haven’t blacks done any better since we ended slavery?” or asking: “Why do Native Americans insist on clinging to their reservations?”

But who was Judge Lynch, and how did his name get attached to extrajudicial killings?

While the Oxford English Dictionary offers no summary judgement, the most likely source seems to be Col. Charles Lynch, a Quaker justice of the peace from Bedford County in the Virginia piedmont, and an officer in the county militia during the Revolutionary War. (His older brother founded the city of Lynchburg.) Threatened in 1780 with the approach of Lord Cornwallis’ troops invading from the south, and facing insurrection from local Loyalists, Colonel Lynch and the county court overstepped their legal authority in jailing Tory conspirators for treason, for which they later threatened to sue Lynch and his associates. Wikipedia explains, “Lynch’s extralegal actions were retroactively legitimized by the Virginia General Assembly in 1782.”

The incidents were notorious enough in colonial Virginia that Judge Lynch, the Quaker, became synonymous with extralegal punishments. Hence, Lynch’s Law.

That’s it. No Stallone movie. Just a footnote to history. Except for the fact that the terrorism “used to enforce racial subordination and segregation” across the South following Reconstruction, homegrown terrorism the Equal Justice Initiative’s new report details, bears Lynch’s name.

Pending the outcome of the FBI’s investigation of the 2014 hanging death of Lennon Lacy in Bladenboro, NC, EJI may have one more lynching to add to its historical(?) report.

Oscar’s troubled brother

by digby

Street artist Plastic Jesus placed a life-size Oscar statuette on Hollywood Boulevard at La Brea Avenue on Thursday morning, at the edge of where the street will be closed ahead of Sunday’s awards.

In addition to being big, this Oscar is far from the reserved gentleman movie buffs might expect: He’s on all fours and snorting two lines of cocaine.

A joke. I think.

Anyway — FWIW, “Birdman” was the best film I saw this year. A real cinematic achievement IMO.

Again, hoping for “Citizen Four” to take home the Oscar. And not just because it’s an artistic achievement, which it is. (It’s very gripping, and much of that is because of Poitras’ highly personal portraiture style.) It’s also important for Hollywood to stand up for civil liberties. They are, after all,  among those who have the most at stake:

FYI: This is the most recent comment at the Youtube page:

When our Government had it right! Proves the gov can step in when it wants to, we now have Hollywood full of Un-Americans making their trash and littering our culture.

sigh…

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Extremism R Us

 by digby

Brian McFadden in the New York Times:

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Coates vs Steele smackdown

by digby

I don’t think there’s any question who was more convincing …

Steele is just a sad, sad person.

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