Month: March 2015

How very Christian of them

by digby

Wasn’t Jesus the guy who said that caring for the poor was a really important thing to do?

KCBS reported that the “no trespassing” signs outside the primary church for Archdiocese of San Francisco, Saint Mary’s Cathedral, did not mention what would happen to the homeless who tried to sleep under the cover of the building’s doorway.

At random times throughout the night, “[w]ater pours from a hole in the ceiling, about 30 feet above, drenching the alcove and anyone in it,” the station noted. “The shower ran for about 75 seconds, every 30 to 60 minutes while we were there, starting before sunset, simultaneously in all four doorways. KCBS witnessed it soak homeless people, and their belongings.”
[…]
A neighbor pointed out to KCBS that the watering system was not only an “inhuman” way to treat people, it also was a waste of water during a serious drought.

Cathedral staff confirmed that the system had been in place for about a year, and that it was intended to discourage homeless people from seeking shelter in the church’s doorway.

“We do the best we can, and supporting the dignity of each person,” Archdiocese spokesperson Chris Lyford said. “But there is only so much you can do.”

Actually, one really simple thing you can do is refrain from dumping water on their heads.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s this guy’s style …

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Domestic spying corporate/government partnership

by digby

I wrote a piece in Salon today about the fact that the government seems to be working with corporations to spy on protesters. Yep, they are:

The Pentagon ended the appropriately dystopian sounding program Talon, although it’s hard to know exactly what any of the agencies charged with keeping the terrorist threat at bay are really doing because they are secret. Edward Snowden’s revelations only involved the most sophisticated of high tech government surveillance activities. It was shocking because of the sweeping nature of the programs and the fact that the NSA said outright that the mission was to ”collect it all.”

But perhaps the more prosaic forms of domestic surveillance activity should concern us as well. For instance, Lee Fang reported this story at The Intercept:

Members of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force tracked the time and location of a Black Lives Matter protest last December at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, email obtained by The Intercept shows.

The email from David S. Langfellow, a St. Paul police officer and member of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, informs a fellow task force member from the Bloomington police that “CHS just confirmed the MOA protest I was taking to you about today, for the 20th of DEC @ 1400 hours.” CHS is a law enforcement acronym for “confidential human source.”

Jeffrey VanNest, an FBI special agent and Joint Terrorism Task Force supervisor at the FBI’s Minneapolis office, was CC’d on the email. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces are based in 104 U.S. cities and are made up of approximately 4,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officials. The FBI characterizes them as “our nation’s front line on terrorism.”

It should be noted that this so-called threat happened months before the al-Shabab video vaguely implying a threat to the Mall was released in late February. In this earlier incident, a confidential informant told the police that someone was preparing to vandalize the mall as part of the Black Lives Matter protest. An FBI spokesman told The Intercept they have absolutely no interest in that campaign and that they make certain not to interfere with people exercising their rights under the First Amendment. They also noted that vandalism is not a “crime” that the Joint Terrorism Task Force is authorized to track and had no idea why it would have been informed of this information. Unfortunately, considering the federal government’s history of illegally spying on Americans for any number of reasons, the burden to explain such activity belongs to them.

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Minimum wage for dummies

by digby

So I hear the right wing is having a full blown hissy fit over the alleged destruction of the Seattle restaurant scene because of their hike in the minimum wage. Apparently some magazine noted that some restaurants were closing (a truly unusual event…) and surmised that it must be because the 15.00 minimum wage hike (which doesn’t fully take effect for years) had passed.

Unfortunately, somebody forget to tell the restaurant owners who were closing some of their restaurants that this was the reason:

The magazine suggested that the minimum wage law might be a contributing factor in the closures of the Boat Street Cafe, Little Uncle, Grub, and Shanik.

“That’s weird,” Boat Street Cafe owner Renee Erickson told the Seattle Times when fact-checkers emailed to confirm the Seattle Magazine story. “No, that’s not why I’m closing Boat Street.” Erickson’s three other restaurants remain open, and two brand new ones are in the works in Seattle. “Opening more businesses would not be smart if I felt it was going to hinder my success,” said Erickson, who described herself as “totally on board with the $15 min.”

Poncharee Koungpunchart and Wiley Frank of Little Uncle “were never interviewed for these articles,” they told the paper. They are closing one of their two locations, “but pre-emptively closing a restaurant seven years before the full effect of the law takes place seems preposterous to us.” Frank reportedly asked one conservative writer who had picked up the wage-menace red herring to “not make assumptions about our business to promote your political values.”

The owner of Shanik told the Times that closing has “nothing to do with wages,” and Grub’s owner explained that they’re being bought out and rebranded by new ownership because the breakfast and sandwich bistro has been “a huge success.”

The Seattle Magazine article itself notes that new restaurants are opening at a healthy clip around the city, and that the Capitol Hill neighborhood is in the middle of “an unprecedented dining boom.”

Why ask the restaurant owners why they are closing when you can simply assume they are morons who are closing their restaurant over a bill that has yet to take effect?

Seattle’s restaurant scene is in no danger of imploding. If it does it will be because too many people finally get sick of eating bacon infused foams not because of the minimum wage.

The sad thing is that it doesn’t even matter that the business community and the city hashed all this out together:

Seattle’s business community was heavily involved in crafting graduated wage hike schedules that provide deferential treatment to employers who are already offering workers some non-cash compensation. The law’s complexity and flexibility owes in large part to the business community’s fierce negotiating in months of meetings with labor officials and local politicians. All sides left “a little bit of blood on the floor and some deeply held principles,” the business community’s lead negotiator told ThinkProgress last summer.

Why let a little hard won negotiation with all sides involved stand in the way of a good storyline about workers destroying businesses with their greed and avarice?

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Example #4798 of why believing in “transpartisanship” is BS

by digby

It didn’t take a political genius to know that the Republicans were shall we say … insincere in their belief that Guantanamo should be closed:

[I]n response to a seventh-grader’s question about what advice he’d give his inexperienced self, Obama said he should have taken a more immediate approach, presumably by simply ordering the remaining 242 detainees be moved elsewhere. That stopped being an option after Congress passed restrictions on transferring Gitmo prisoners to the United States.
“I think I would’ve closed Guantanamo on the first day,” Obama said. “I didn’t because at that time we had a bipartisan agreement that it should be closed.”

Defense Secretary Ash Carter, accompanied by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, pauses while testifying on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 18, 2015, before the House Armed Services Committee hearing on President Obama’s use of military force proposal against IS and the Defense Department’s budget.

Indeed, Obama’s Republican opponent John McCain had also run on closing Gitmo in 2008, and George W. Bush said in a memoir he would’ve liked to close the facility. But in March 2009, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) started taking to the floor to warn against shuttering the prison.
“No acceptable alternatives exist,” McConnell wrote in The Washington Post, in just one early instance of the Republican leader frustrating Obama’s ambitions.

After opposition grew, Obama acknowledged Wednesday, “the path of least resistance was to just keep it open even though it’s not who we are as a country.”

There is a lesson here which I doubt anyone will learn. Movement conservatives are not pragmatists. They are revolutionaries. They have proved it over and over again. If a Democrat wants to get something other than their agenda done they are going to have to do it themselves or find a way to blackmail the GOP into cooperating. And anyone who believed that the GOP was really committed to closing Guantanamo rather than just trying to find something, anything, to distance themselves from the debacle of George W. Bush, was naive in the extreme. Republicans are organized around fear. Closing Gitmo expressed a sanguinity about the safety of Americans in the face of a foreign threat that would never in a million years work for them.

Oh well. It’s just a prison camp full of Muslims we have tortured and subjected to a kangaroo court that has the legitimacy of Judge Judy. What harm can it do to keep them there for decades?

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Faking lattes for no good reason

by digby

Wait, what?

Dick Cheney likes lattes. Seated in his favorite brown-leather chair in the sunlit study of his home in McLean, Virginia, the former vice president of the United States can toss back two of the warm java blasts in an hour. They come from a stainless-steel machine in the kitchen and a slender, mustachioed housekeeper named Gus, who serves them in custom-ordered white Starbucks cups outfitted with cardboard Starbucks sleeves.

What the hell? Why would anyone want to pretend they’re drinking Starbucks when they’re drinking a latte made in their own kitchen? Does he want to pretend that he’s some working stiff who picks up a cup on his way to work? Does he want people to think he has a Starbucks in the basement? I don’t get it.

God Dick Cheney is a weirdo …

That quote is from the Playboy Interview with Cheney. It’s the very first paragraph. Should be fun.

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“Enhanced interrogation” comes to the schoolroom

by digby

It’s hard to believe that anyone would think this is ok, but apparently they do:

John E. Reid & Associates is the largest interrogation trainer in the world and teaches such methods to hundreds of school administrators each year . Last month, members of the Illinois Principals Association, for instance, could register for a “professional development” event on “Investigative Interviewing and Active Persuasion”. The School Administrators Association of New York State recently offered a workshop for administrators on this same topic, titled “Are you Sure They Are Telling the Truth”?

These administrators are learning the “ Reid Technique ”, which relies on “maximization” and “minimization” tactics in order to induce suspects to confess. Minimization focuses on reducing a suspect’s feelings of guilt, while maximization is designed to heighten suspect anxiety using confrontation. Both techniques are legal and both are incredibly coercive.

Controlled studies of Reid interrogation have documented that while such techniques may increase the likelihood that a guilty person will confess, they also increase the likelihood that an innocent person will as well. New research released in February found that the Reid technique causes witnesses to falsely implicate others.
[…]
Juvenile coerced confessions share certain hallmarks : use of intimidation, threats, promises of leniency, and outright lies, so that the youth feel their only way out is by confessing. Adult interrogators take advantage of the fact that children are less mature and more susceptible to pressure, and that they lack the experience to make decisions in their best interest. Youth in the criminal justice system are more likely to have diagnosable psychological disorders , and they often fall victim to the “status differential” – youth feel compelled to answer police questions because of the officers’ elevated position of power. All of this is why the young are much more likely than adults to give false confessions.

What an excellent idea. It’s not as if there’s ever been any experience with adults extracting false stories from kids that ended up in a Kafkaesque horror of epic proportions. This should work out great.

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Rigging the rigging
by Tom Sullivan

It is one of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s signature lines: “The game is rigged.” Lina Khan at Washington Monthly fleshes out just how much. Forget the social safety net. Khan looks at how binding arbitration clauses in consumer contracts snip away what’s left of the legal safety net protecting consumers. Warren may have birthed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to give Average Joe a fighting chance, but binding arbitration still leaves the Man with all the power:

Last week the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a report documenting the prevalence and effects of arbitration clauses in consumer financial products. CFPB’s report captures the effects of arbitration clauses in financial products and services, based on data from the American Arbitration Association, which handles the vast majority of consumer financial arbitration cases. A few main takeaways from the study [edited for length – TS]:

•Arbitration tends to work out better for companies than it does for individual consumers: in cases initiated by consumers, arbitrators awarded them some relief in around 20 percent of cases. By contrast, arbitrators provided companies some type of relief in 93 percent of cases that they filed.

•Even the degree of relief varies notably: within the slice of arbitration outcomes that CFPB could assess, consumers won an average of 12 cents for every dollar they claimed. By contrast, companies on average won 91 cents for every dollar they claimed. In total, consumers received less than $400,000 from arbitrators in 2010 and 2011. Companies won $2 million over that same period
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•Notably, CFPB found evidence undercutting a favorite pro-mandatory arbitration trope: that nixing arbitration clauses would burden companies with greater litigation costs, which they would be forced to pass on to consumers in the form of higher prices for their goods. CFPB found that the banks that had to drop arbitration clauses from their contracts as part of an antitrust settlement in 2009 did not subsequently raise prices for consumers.

The CFPB is expected to propose rules “limiting mandatory arbitration clauses in these take-it-or-leave-it contracts,” Khan reports. Over 90 percent of consumers in contracts with a binding arbitration clause were unaware they could not sue “or had no idea.” On average, $27,000 of consumer money is at stake in these disputes. But paired with class action bans, these contracts leave financial organizations holding all the high cards in the game and “de facto privatizes” a legal process funded with tax dollars that, at least in theory, leveled the playing field.

The sharks are running the fish hatchery. Reason #17 for changing the motto on the money from e pluribus unum to caveat emptor.

Game On! Santorum’s back

by digby

Rick Santorum appeared at some national security “summit” and took questions. Here’s how it went:

One attendee asked Santorum why Republicans in Congress did nothing to stop “communist dictator” Obama from “destroying my country,” mentioning the president’s executive actions on immigration and the time when “Obama tried to blow up a nuke in Charleston a few months ago.” (In case you aren’t familiar, several far-right outlets and pundits have embraced a bizarre claim that Obama tried to nuke Charleston as part of a potential false flag operation). “I want him out of the White House, he’s not a citizen and he could’ve been removed a long time ago,” she added.

Santorum told the questioner that congressional Republicans are showing a “complete lack of leadership” in failing to stop Obama’s “dangerous” immigration actions: “As you’ve mentioned, the word tyrant comes to mind.”

He said that just as the courts have embraced “judicial supremacy,” Obama is now seizing powers from Congress, whose members don’t realize that “there is a fire ranging that’s going to burn the whole forest down as you worry about the tree in front of you.”

“This is the unraveling,” Santorum said, explaining that Republicans should have “shut down the government,” refused to confirm any nominee or “pass any bills” in order to have “hearing after hearing after hearing on the unconstitutionality of what this president has done.”

Later in the summit, an attendee told Santorum that Obama is an “Iranian plant” who is working with Valerie Jarrett to secretly help the Iranian regime.

He’s not considered one of the nutty ones …

Whatever it takes to keep us safe

by digby

Another terrorist attack today, this time in Tunisia.

Nineteen people, including 17 foreign tourists, have been killed in a gun attack on the Bardo museum in the Tunisian capital, the PM has said.

Italian, Spanish, Polish and German citizens were among those killed, as well as a Tunisian and a police officer, PM Habib Essid said.

Some media reports suggest the death toll could be as high as 22.

Security forces killed two gunmen and were searching the surrounding area for accomplices, Mr Essid said.

At the time of the attack, deputies in the neighbouring parliamentary building were discussing anti-terrorism legislation.

PUndits are already calling for heightened security to keep this terrorism from our shores. Fox says “whatever it takes” to keep Americans safe.

Meanwhile, in other news:

One person was fatally shot and five were wounded when a gunman opened fire on Wednesday at multiple locations across the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, local media reported.

The shooter, a man in his 40s with a large tattoo on his neck, was still at large, Mesa police spokesman Esteban Flores said. Police fanned out across the city in a manhunt for the gunman.

Authorities confirmed that multiple people had been wounded in a shooting but could not immediately say how many people had been shot or if anyone had died. But the Arizona Republic newspaper, citing an unnamed police source, said one person was killed and five wounded.

The shooter began his attack across the street from a trade school and then moved on to open fire at a restaurant and other locations in the city, which is less than 15 miles east of Phoenix, Flores told reporters.

Dozens of police officers stood at the site of one shooting – Tri-City Inn motel and an adjacent tattoo parlor.

There were five or six shooting locations, local television station 12News, an NBC affiliate, reported.

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They killed him

by digby

Because we are a civilized nation:

The state of Missouri executed its oldest death row inmate on Tuesday – a man who was mentally impaired from a work accident that removed a large portion of his brain – after his final appeals failed at the US supreme court.

The execution of Cecil Clayton, 74, was delayed for several hours, while the supreme court weighed appeals from Clayton’s defense attorneys.

Lawyers acting for Clayton had called on the nation’s highest court to intervene and stay the execution. In a petition to the nine justices, they argued that it would be unconstitutional to execute the prisoner because under a series of rulings in recent years the supreme court has banned judicial killings of insane and intellectually disabled people.

Clayton lost about a fifth of his frontal lobe in 1972 when a splinter from a log he was working on in a sawmill in Purdy, Missouri, dislodged and slammed into his skull. The damage has had a long-term impact on his character and behavior, with a succession of medical experts chronicling problems ranging from uncontrolled rage to hallucinations and depression.

The frontal lobe has an important function in controlling impulse and emotion.

In 1996 Clayton murdered a police officer, Christopher Castetter, who was called to a house where Clayton had broken in. There was no dispute about his guilt, though there was intense debate about whether he should have been protected from the gurney.

Elizabeth Unger Carlyle, attorney for Cecil Clayton, said of the supreme court decision:

Cecil Clayton had – literally – a hole in his head. Executing him without a hearing to determine his competency violated the constitution, Missouri law and basic human dignity.

Mr Clayton was not a ‘criminal’ before the sawmill accident that lodged part of his skull into his brain and required 20% of his frontal lobe to be removed. He was happily married, raising a family and working hard at his logging business.

Medical experts who examined 74-year-old Mr. Clayton said he couldn’t care for himself, tried but couldn’t follow simple instructions, and was intellectually disabled with an IQ of 71. He suffered from severe mental illness and dementia related to his age and multiple brain injuries. The world will not be a safer place because Mr Clayton has been executed.

If there is a God one hopes she will have more mercy on people who think killing a brain-damaged 74 year old man is justice than they showed that brain damaged 74 year old man…

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