Month: February 2015

Wait, are there other kinds of extremists?

by digby

Man this is really getting confusing. Here I thought Islamic extremists were the worst. It turns out there’s a homegrown group that just as bad. And they are anything but Lone Wolves:

Gay rights activists… have not turned physically violent. But they are intent on destroying any who disagree with them. They will take the homes, businesses, and life savings of any who defy them. They will use the tools of the state and mob action through boycotts, fear, and intimidation to make it happen. They will not kill but they will threaten and scare.

The divide between Islamic extremists and gay rights extremists is at death. They meet on the line at destruction.

[…]

The gay rights activists who yell “bigot” at those who disagree with them are the Imams of America’s cultural ghetto.

I’m scared.

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Big Pharma double dealing? Say it ain’t so.

by digby

This piece at Mother Jones details the strange relationship with one of Obamacare’s allegedly enthusiastic health industry supporters and a right wing think tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute dedicated to destroying Obamacare:

This was the deal Big Pharma cut during the legislative battle over Obamacare: The pharmaceutical companies agreed to support the law and accept about $80 billion in cost-cutting measures over the next decade, and the White House granted the industry lucrative concessions to protect its profit margins. These industry-favoring measures include provisions preventing the government from negotiating lower drug prices for Medicare and Medicaid and blocking Americans from importing cheaper prescription drugs from abroad. Those concessions were costly to taxpayers and consumers, but they were part of the grand bargain hammered out between the White House and Big Pharma. This accord ensured the industry would use its formidable lobbying clout to pass Obamacare—not destroy it.

At the time, Ron Pollack, the executive director of the health care reform advocacy group Families USA, worked closely with PhRMA on jointly-sponsored ads supporting Obamacare. He finds it odd that PhRMA would subsequently contribute to a conservative think tank that’s trying to undo the law. “The bottom line is that PhRMA was a strong supporter for the Affordable Care Act, and put a lot of money on the line for advertising for the Affordable Care Act,” he says.

“The Competitive Enterprise Institute accepts donations from a diverse group of individuals, businesses, and foundations who support our research and educational activities,” says a spokeswoman. “CEI’s research programs and positions are developed independently and are not influenced by the views of donors.”

PhRMA declined to say whether will continue to fund CEI. “As part of our mission,” says the trade group’s spokesman Robert Zirkelbach, “PhRMA often makes grants or charitable contributions to organizations that share PhRMA’s goals of improving the quality of patients’ lives, increasing the availability of life-saving and life-enhancing medical treatments, and supporting the discovery of new treatments and cures by pharmaceutical and biotechnology research companies.”

PhRMA couldn’t possibly be playing both sides, could it? No, they wouldn’t do that. I recall a White House spokesperson assuring the press on a conference call that the hospitals wanted to help because they were good Americans. I’m sure the drug companies are too. So never mind.

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Bobby Jindal has changed his mind

by digby

Remember this?

Obviously, he’s had second thoughts:

“The gist of what Mayor Giuliani said – that the President has shown himself to be completely unable to speak the truth about the nature of the threats from these ISIS terrorists — is true,” Jindal, a likely GOP presidential candidate, said in a statement to TIME. “If you are looking for someone to condemn the Mayor, look elsewhere.”

Of course, this is the guy who scientific monitoring of volcanoes is a stupid waste of money so it’s not as if he ever demonstrated any real commitment to not being a card-carrying member of the stupid party. But there was moment when he thought to rejoin the normal people. That moment has obviously passed.

The frenzy builds

by digby

This was just a mistake according to Tucker Carlson:

WTF Daily Caller pic.twitter.com/CxrA4TI6rC
— Timothy Johnson (@timothywjohnson) February 18, 2015

I know it’s lame to point out “imagine if the other side did this” stuff. But this one struck me as worth mentioning because we are currently obsessing over religion and the middle east and European anti-semitism and the like and I have to assume that if it had been TPM making this mistake the right would not be dismissive. And not just because it’s a cheap gotcha (which it normally would be.) Many people on the right have come to genuinely believe that anyone who isn’t a conservative is hostile to Jews and Christians because they secretly favor the terrorists.

But none of that is the real point. Take a look at the mistaken headline’s article:

The Nazis forced all Jews living in Germany to wear a yellow Star of David as a cloth armband. The message this was meant to send was, “Take care, the wearer of this patch is a filthy, sub-human scum unfit to live among decent people like us Germans.”

This atrocity was happening in the 1930s and no nation, including the United States, took up the Jewish cause even though this was far more than just an anti-Jewish event. At stake was worldwide life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Today the free nations of the world have a golden opportunity to make amends for their failure in the 1930s to protect decency, fairness, brotherhood and honor. But back then no nation faced down Hitler at the League of Nations and called him to task. Instead, it was almost as if the Jews were expected to apologize for surviving Hitler’s murderous attacks.

Now in the Middle East Muslim nations like Iran are publicly saying they want to kill every Jew on the face of the earth. So why shouldn’t the Jews want to sit down and negotiate they ask. Hitler and the Nazis, with the quiescence of the League of Nations, were leading a word wide assault not just on the Jews but also on the world’s Christians, like cleric Niemoeller. Today Muslims, with the quiescence of the United Nations, are leading an assault on the world’s liberty and freedom just as the Nazis did, and again no one is protesting.

Now it is obviously true that there is carnage and mayhem happening in the middle east. This has been happening for some time as anyone who has followed the news for the past few decades. It’s horrifying. It always has been. But here you have a fool conflating the horrors of Nazi germany with both Iran and ISIS which are actually at odds with one another. It doesn’t matter.  “Muslims” are the enemy and that enemy is just like Hitler’s Germany.

I don’t think anyone is underplaying the barbarity of ISIS. They are acting like a medieval army using the same terror tactics that were used a thousand years ago. It’s very frightening to us in the 21st century to see these horrible acts carried out. That’s the point. But it’s that medieval nature of this threat that makes it totally absurd to conflate them with the threat of Naziism. The Germans were a thoroughly modern state with highly developed technical capability and a professional military. They were a major European power that sought, as many European nations and kingdoms had done for centuries before them, to conquer other nations, seize their land and expand their empire. But their particular evil was unprecedented and sui generis because of the industrial, mechanized nature of it, the way it coldly used modern manufacturing methods to create factories of death. It was exactly the opposite of ISIS, which is pre-modern and primitive in its methods.

The only way in which they are modern is in their use of these methods as propaganda tools to make the West overreact so they might recruit others to their cause. They do not have the military capability or the know-how to present an existential threat to the west as Germany did. It’s estimated they have 20-30,000 members. At the moment the entire middle east is in turmoil, many of its member states horrified at the rise of ISIS.  The extremists need a common enemy to recruit their army and they are obviously trying to provoke the West into action so it will overreact and provide one.

ISIS is finishing the destabilization of the region that began a long time ago (with our help, by the way.) But it is not an existential threat to the US or to Europe. And if they made even the slightest move against Israel they surely know the wrath of the entire west would rain down upon them and they could not win that fight. They do not seem to be that stupid. So prematurely ginning this up into a world-wide threat on the level of WWII would seem to be counter-productive to say the least.

Even though they are a bunch of hideous monsters, they are different monsters than the Nazis, very different. Failing to recognize that is the first step to making serious mistakes in a way that could be catastrophic. The man who wrote the piece is a retired General named Jerry Curry, a full-blown right wingnut, easy to dismiss. But he’s not alone, unfortunately. This came from the US Department of state:

Once you start with that kind of comparison, you’re laying out a moral obligation for full-fledged war. Maybe there is one. But unless we are prepared to engage in yet another war based on lies and false premises, they need to stop lazily shouting “Nazis!” and pruriently obsessing over these hideous snuff videos and explain  what they are talking about when they insist we must “act”.  And more importantly, they need to explain how this is all supposed to end.   ISIS isn’t Germany and the war won’t be WWII with celebrations of V-I day in Times Square. So what will it be?

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Little Tyrant

by digby

This man has become a parody of a right winger:

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said during the dinner at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

“I thought the Crown Heights riots were a pogrom because you’re going out trying to kill Jews,” Giuliani said. “Why is this man incapable of saying that? You’ve got to be able to criticize Islam for the parts of Islam that are wrong. You criticize Christianity for the part of Christianity that is wrong. I’m not sure how wrong the Crusades are. The Crusades were kind of an equal battle between two groups of barbarians. The Muslims and the crusading barbarians.

What the hell? What’s wrong with this man that he can’t stand up and say there’s a part of Islam that’s sick?”

I don’t know. I guess for the same reason he doesn’t stand up and say that there’s part of Catholicism that’s sick. After all, the Catholic priesthood has been crawling with child molesters for decades. For all we know, centuries. I’m going to take a guess that as a Catholic he doesn’t think it would be right to tar the vast majority of non-pedophile Catholics with the actions of those priests or define the religion itself as a pedophiliac belief system.

As for whether the president doesn’t love America because he “wasn’t brought up through love of this country” …. oh whatever.

He was at an event for Scott Walker talking about endorsements. If Walker wants to be president, he should probably steer clear of this one. Giuliani used to be a respected figure in this country and now he’s just another embarrassing right wing freakshow like Ted Nugent or one of those Duck Dynasty guys.

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Dominating the battle space
by Tom Sullivan

Citizens United … yadda, yadda, yadda … we’re a plutocracy.

It seems our plutocrats want to buy America’s elections and, increasingly, we’re willing to let them. Their efforts — like Jeb Bush’s — to dominate the political donations battle space may be succeeding. Analyzing the results of “the most expensive midterm election in history,” costing a whopping $3.77 billion, the Center for Responsive Politics’s Russ Choma finds that fewer donors are choosing to participate. That is, fewer donors are giving more:

Every area of traditional campaign finance saw a decline in the number of donors. Despite the increased cost of this election, the records that a number of races set in terms of overall cost and a huge focus on fundraising, there were just 434,256 identifiable individual donors to candidates in the 2014 election. That’s 107,000 fewer than there were in the 2010 election.

The number of individuals giving money to national party committees also declined — although this was not the first time that happened.

Even when it came to outside spending groups, there were fewer donors. In 2010, there were 57,405 individual donors to outside spending groups (including 527s) who gave a total of $104.6 million, or roughly $1,800 apiece. In 2014, there were 53,725 donors to outside groups, whose average donation was $8,011. That’s an increase in the size of the average donation of almost 445 percent.

Aaron Blake sums up at “The Fix”:

-A nearly 20 percent decline in total donors to candidates in just four years

-A more than 6 percent decline in donors to outside groups, even as these outside groups are multiplying thanks to the court rulings

Perhaps America’s common folk are beginning to cry uncle (Pennybags).

The Koch brothers. Of course, the Koch brothers. But they’re ideologues, zealots, holy warriors armed with golden pens, and not your typical greedheads. There are plenty more of the latter in the Midas cult, drunk on their own wealth and, not content to enjoy it privately or to give it away in service to mankind. They need to dominate the rest of us the way they dominate business rivals. Their watches could buy “a six-pack of Rolexes,” etc.

At what point do plutocrats calculate that they’ve reached a point of diminishing returns in spending money to avoid the costs of maintaining a decent society, and/or to suck dry the national treasury to increase their own? Might they then retire from politics and focus on more traditional, sybaritic pleasures?

Maybe not. Power is quite the aphrodisiac.

If it continues, it is a trend that seems destined to break democracy itself. Well, you break it, you bought it, Pennybags. How much will that cost you?

Same old same old

by digby

From Larry Mishel in The American Prospect:

There was a time where it was plausible to argue that more education and innovation were the primary solutions to our economic problems. But that time has passed. You cannot tell that, however, to the Wall Street Democrats and their Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

They’re not ready to change just yet, even though most of the Democratic Party has. This shift was signaled by a recent report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, which is co-chaired by Lawrence H. Summers, who served as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, and as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in President Barack Obama’s first term. The report calls for full employment (a “high pressure economy,” as Summers calls it), a more welcoming environment for collective bargaining, higher labor standards (overtime, minimum wage, earned sick and paid family leave), changes in corporate governance, and large scale public investment to address middle-class wage stagnation.

This puts Hillary Clinton in a bind, you might say. The Hamilton Project is the brainchild of her longtime adviser, Robert Rubin, who preceded Summers as President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, while CAP is closely associated with two other Hillary confidants, John Podesta and Neera Tanden.

This is pretty much the same analysis we heard from the Clinton administration 20 years ago
The new framing paper released by the Hamilton Project details how “advancing computer power and automation technology” creates a challenge for “how to educate more people for the jobs of the future, how to foster creation of high-paying jobs, and how to support those who struggle economically during the transition.” This is pretty much the same analysis we heard from the Clinton administration 20 years ago, when the discussion was of a “transition to the new information economy.” Let them eat education.

The education-only solution wasn’t appropriate when it was first put forward, and it is not even remotely plausible now given developments since the mid-1990s—and especially since 2000. Wages for the college-educated have been stagnant for the dozen years since 2000 (when the wage boom of the late 1990s receded). That stagnation has affected the bottom 70 percent of all college graduates both in the last recovery and throughout the Great Recession and the recovery from 2009 through 2014. Moreover, the college wage advantage has grown very little since the mid-1990s: This means that the continuously growing wage gap between high-wage and middle-wage workers since then has had very little to do with education wage gaps.

Read on for why this is such a daft irrelevant set of policies for today’s problems.

It’s as if these people are suspended in amber. It’s going to be a huge problem if Clinton and company come out with a bunch of stale 90s jargon about the “information economy.” Yikes.
The Democrats should be able to beat the GOP clown show in 2016 without too much trouble … unless they continue with this same moldy DLC dogma circa 1992. People could easily decide to vote for Republicans for the same reason they watch some stupid reality show about storage lockers rather than reruns of Friends. They’ve seen “the one about the information economy” one too many times. They’ll watch anything else. Even the GOP circus.

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Police overkill

by digby

Why in the hell do police agencies continue to use these brutal tactics like “no-knock” entry with guns drawn when things like this commonly result from them?

The King County Prosecutor’s Office has determined there is no new information to support criminal charges against a sheriff’s deputy and a state community corrections officer whose account of an incident in which they shot an unarmed man 16 times was called into question in a civil lawsuit.

Reacting to a judge’s recent ruling that raised questions about the deputy’s and officer’s version of events, prosecutors said in statement that insufficient evidence remains that the two acted with malice or bad faith in violation of state law.

Dustin Theoharis, who survived the wounds, was shot in his bed by Deputy Aaron Thompson and corrections Officer Kristopher Rongen on Feb. 11, 2012, after law-enforcement officers went to an Auburn-area home and took into custody another man sought for violating his community supervision.

King County reached a settlement with Theoharis in 2013, agreeing to pay him $3 million.

Theoharis then brought a federal lawsuit against Rongen.

In their search of the home, Rongen and Thompson fired in a darkened bedroom after Theoharis, according to Rongen, claimed that he had three guns and reached under a mattress

Theoharis disputes that account in his federal suit, alleging Rongen and Thompson fired at him after asking for identification. Theoharis contends he reached to the floor for his wallet and was turning back with it when he was struck with about 16 shots in the face, arm, legs and abdomen.

On Feb. 6, U.S. District Judge Richard Jones ruled Theoharis’ excessive-force claim in his suit should be heard by a jury in a trial scheduled for June 1.

In denying the state’s request to dismiss the claim, Jones cited conflicting testimony and evidence that raises questions about whether a multipart verbal exchange described by Rongen and Thompson could have occurred in the seconds between when they went to the bedroom and the beginning of the shooting.

Jones’ order also noted that some witnesses heard nothing preceding the shooting, contradicting Rongen’s and Thompson’s assertions that they were often shouting at Theoharis.

The Prosecutor’s Office declined in 2012 to bring criminal charges against Rongen and Thompson, citing in part the refusals of the officers and Theoharis to provide statements at the time. But prosecutors said they would review any new evidence that emerged in a civil action.

On Friday, the Prosecutor’s Office released this statement:

“We have reviewed the depositions and other documents from the civil case, including the recent ruling from the Federal court presiding over the civil lawsuit. We did not find any new information that would change our legal analysis.

The victim is disabled from his wounds.

If the prosecutor feels that in this he said/she said with no evidence of malice that he cannot make a case against the officers it’s hard to argue that they should. I suspect they’d try harder if it wasn’t police officers kicking in someone’s door and gunning down an unarmed man, but thats seems to be the way these things work. The federal case is ongoing so we’ll see if something comes of that.

But why do the police continue to believe that this is an acceptable way to serve warrants for anything but the most dire circumstances? Far too often they don’t even have the right address and when they do too many innocent people get hurt or killed. The price is just too high.

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The Bush family credo: “take ’em out!”

by digby

Jeb:

He flubbed the number of ISIS fighters, saying in his speech that it was more than 200,000. (A Bush spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that he “misspoke” and “meant more than 20,000”). The CIA estimated in September that the real number of ISIS fighters is between 20,000 and 31,500. On ISIS in general, Bush had no real policy proposals, saying simply that the U.S. needs to “take them out.”

“It’s violent extreme Islamic terrorism,” Bush said “The more we try to ignore that reality the less likely it is that we’ll develop appropriate strategy to garner the support of the Muslim world, to like I said, tighten the noose and take them out.”

Say, does everyone remember W’s famous quote from the 2000 primary debates? Sure you do:

It’s the family credo.

The scariest chart you will see this week. Maybe this decade, if things go sideways …

by digby

Jebbie’s little secret explains that chart very well.