Month: March 2015

Junior DeMint
by Tom Sullivan

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s letter to the Iranian government, the one 46 of his GOP colleagues signed, has everyone from NPR to the Wall Street Journal to MoveOn.org talking about the Logan Act. This, in spite of the fact that since its passage in 1799, there have been “no prosecutions under the Act in its more than 200 year history.” The law forbids citizens from interfering with U.S. foreign policy “without authority of the United States.” Whatever that means.

But the controversy must look to his T-party cohort like Tom Cotton’s coup. (Or is that Tom Cotton’s kooks?) “Cotton is a conservative hero, and a crackpot,” reads the Washington Post’s landing page teaser. Paul Waldman writes for the Post’s Plum Line:

On paper, Cotton looks like a dream politician with nowhere to go but up — Iraq veteran, Harvard Law School graduate, the youngest senator at 37. It’s only when you listen to him talk and hear what he believes that you come to realize he’s a complete crackpot. During the 2014 campaign he told voters that the Islamic State was working with Mexican drug cartels and would soon be coming to attack Arkansas. When he was still in the Army he wrote a letter to the New York Times saying that its editors should be “behind bars” because the paper published stories on the Bush administration’s program to disrupt terrorist groups’ finances (which George W. Bush himself had bragged about, but that’s another story).

While in the House in 2013, Cotton introduced an amendment to prosecute the relatives of those who violated sanctions on Iran, saying that his proposed penalties of up to 20 years in prison would “include a spouse and any relative to the third degree,” including “parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids.” Forget about the fact that the Constitution expressly prohibits “corruption of blood” penalties — just consider that Cotton wanted to take someone who had violated sanctions and imprison their grandchildren. Needless to say, this deranged piece of legislation was too much even for Republicans to stomach, and it went nowhere.

Waldman suggests Cotton is poised to be the next Jim DeMint.

But forgetting about what the Constitution expressly prohibits is just the point for T-partiers like Cotton. Cloaking themselves in it should be enough. What the law actually says doesn’t matter. What matters is what they believe it should say. (I’ve heard this argued in person.) The fact that “God helps those who help themselves” is not in the Bible, for example, is beside the point. It should be. It feels right. And that truthiness is good enough for them. To borrow again from Stephen Colbert, they want to feel the law at you.

Which States Take Gun Laws Seriously? 

by Spocko

 

The above video is designed to tell people which states are better for criminals who want to get guns.

It is designed to be funny. It’s a Funny or Die video, so you can vote on it.

Part of comedy is timing.  One of the challenges when talking about guns in America is timing.

Right after a major shooting emotions are high. It’s not usually the time to be funny.

Some people think steps should be taken to have fewer gun deaths and they want to do something right NOW!  But they are reminded “NOW is NOT the time! The bodies aren’t even cold! Have some respect, damn it!” I think that respect is important. I also think that anger scares moderate people. So they counsel patience.

Folks say, “Don’t confront the people saying, ‘My 2nd Amendment rights trump your dead child.'” Don’t rub their selfish noses in their comments after a shooting. Be polite. Plus, they might be armed. (Guns everywhere people love knowing you know that.)

The weapons manufacturers’ PR people and lobbyists understand emotions.  They remind people that this time the “gun grabbers” are really going to do something! So now is a great time to buy more guns! “Get ’em before they are taken away!”

And it works.  There’s always a story from a gun dealer after a big shooting, The owner boasting,  “We sold out of our [note to self: Insert correct weapon nomenclature to prove I know guns, or incorrect names because it will piss them off. ] inventory in 2 hours!”

At the end of the day more guns are sold. They win. They used their bases’ emotion to sell product. Our base was tamped down.

But the gun lobbyists aren’t done.

Between major shootings the NRA and weapons’ lobbyists play the long game.

They use hot emotion to sell more guns. Then they use the cool cash from that at the state level to pass Kill at Will Laws (aka Stand your Ground) and keep loopholes open.

If we aren’t supposed to use our hot emotions to change things, what do we do? Use cool logic and reason for education and change.

This is the time to help the people who are working between the hot news events. They can’t fund their work with more weapons sales after each shooting like the gun lobby.

So pick a group to help now. Here are some action links to the Brady Campaign and my friends in others, Everytown, The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and National Gun Victims Action Council

Then, when the next big shooting happens, you won’t be accused of making this specific tragedy political. You have taken the heat of your emotion from the previous tragedy and coolly and logically helped change attitudes, fixed loopholes and worked to reduce violent gun deaths.

Some of you might not be able to handle this method. You want your emotions to fuel you. If so, then start thinking now how to better channel them, like the gun lobby does.

The “good” news is you won’t have to wait long to start using your hot emotions for change—the next major shooting is only days away.

No perfect deal

by digby

About that “perfect deal” with Iran that the president certainly isn’t pursuing:

This is a fantasy, a unicorn, the futile pursuit of which ends with a half-assed airstrike against Iran, a region in flames, and eventually an Iranian nuclear weapon. And let’s be clear: If negotiations collapse, the United States will take the blame from Europe and the sanctions regime will unravel. And here’s the best-case scenario: Any military action against Iran will set its nuclear program back, at best, a couple of years. But the anger will last generations.Any military action against Iran will set its nuclear program back, at best, a couple of years. But the anger will last generations.

I’m fairly sure Tom Cotton and the boys are willing to occupy the country for a hundred years. But that’s a unicorn too. We really can’t afford it:

In 2000, the Republican candidates for president campaigned against the Clinton administration’s policies toward North Korea and its nuclear weapons program, especially the 1994 Agreed Framework that froze North Korea’s plutonium production infrastructure. In particular, Republicans argued — as they do today with Iran — that North Korea’s nuclear programs had to be completely dismantled, not merely frozen. Sen. John McCain accused the Clinton administration of “appeasement” then, as Sen. Cotton accuses the Obama administration of appeasement today. There were plenty of reasons to be worried about North Korea’s compliance, but the fundamental interest was the same as with Iran: Even an imperfect freeze on plutonium programs put the United States in a stronger, safer position to manage the problem. When intelligence emerged suggesting that North Korea’s enrichment program was more advanced than previously thought, the Bush administration walked away from the Agreed Framework, as well as its own policy of a “bold approach” to transform U.S.-DPRK relations. The deal was dead.

What happened next should temper the enthusiasm of anyone who wants to walk away from talks with Iran now. North Korea stockpiled plutonium and tested a nuclear weapon. In recent years, a nuclear-armed Pyongyang also engaged in a series of conventional provocations, like sinking South Korean ships and shelling islands. After a few years, and to his credit, Bush reversed course and tried to negotiate a new agreement. But the North Koreans had far more leverage at that point, and certainly weren’t about to agree to dismantle any nuclear facilities. Since “freeze” was still a dirty word, the State Department called the process “disablement” — which is a make-believe word for a make-believe world in which a Republican administration had not just negotiated the same deal (well, a little worse, actually) than the one they trashed.

He claims that a GOP president would negotiate the same deal that Obama is negotiating because that’s just the reality of it all.  I’m not quite as sanguine about that simply because we saw them launch a war on the pretext of stopping a nuclear program within the last decade. I guess I just feel they’re capable of anything. And it’s quite clear that war is what a whole bunch of them believe is the only answer to the problem.

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What horrible freedom hating Commie wrote this?

by digby

Anyone can see that a beneficent tyrant could better protect us from foreign aggression. Without the constraints of a Congress, the tyrant could act more swiftly and effectively to prevent, or prosecute, foreign wars.

That would be the new Tea Party hero Tom Cotton (!) when he wrote for the Harvard Crimson.

This is probably taken out of context and I’m not motivated to go through his whole archive to find out. But it’s revealing either way. This was written before he became a politician and had to pretend that he loved freedom. It is what they really think … as long as the beneficent tyrant is George W. Bush or Dick Cheney …

Those middle easterners are so confusing

by digby

Scott Walker has been making a lot of gaffes, some of them about foreign policy, which indicate that he’s not ready for prime time. But what can you say about a Senate presidential candidate who sounds even dumber than he does.  Steve Benen reports on the Senate Foreign Relations  Committee hearing this morning:

At the recent CPAC gathering, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a likely Republican presidential candidate, seemed to stumble on one of the basic facts of the Middle East. “The reason Obama hasn’t put in place a military strategy to defeat ISIS is because he doesn’t want to upset Iran,” the Florida Republican said.

The senator seemed confused. In reality, President Obama has put an anti-ISIS military strategy in place, and that’s fine with Iran, since Iran and ISIS are enemies.

I’d hoped that Rubio just misspoke, or had been briefly poorly but an aide, but apparently not – -at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing this afternoon, the far-right Floridian continued to push this strange theory, pressing Secretary of State John Kerry on the point. “I believe that much of our strategy with regards to ISIS is being driven by a desire not to upset Iran so they don’t walk away from the negotiating table on the deal that you’re working on,” Rubio said. “Tell me why I’m wrong.”
[…]
Honestly, it was like watching a competent teacher trying to explain the basics of current events to a student who failed to do his homework. Andrea Mitchell said the Secretary of State took Rubio “to school.”

Not the sharpest tool in the shed, is he? But then he’s not the only one. Ben Carson said that we need to be worried about “the Shia” and ISIS apparently failing to understand that they are actually enemies. When it comes to ISIS, the Ayatollah and Lindsey Graham are on the same page …

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Yes, we’re revisiting the 90s. The 1890s.

by digby

Cable news integrity doesn’t start from a very high level. But it’s is sinking before our eyes into something nearly comical in its absurdity:

Conservative commentator Bill Kristol said on Wednesday morning that white University of Oklahoma frat members who were recently caught on video singing a racist chant were parroting the language they had learned from rap music.

“When popular culture becomes a cesspool, a lot of corporations profit off it, and then people are surprised that some drunk 19-year-old kids repeat what they’ve been hearing,” the Weekly Standard editor, who is white, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

He made the comments after co-host Mika Brzezinski, who is also white, criticized the rapper Waka Flocka Flame, who is black, for canceling a concert at the university despite using the N-word in his own songs.

“If you look at every single song, I guess you’d call it, that he’s written, it’s a bunch of garbage, full of N-words, full of F-bombs,” Brzezinski said. “It’s wrong. And he shouldn’t be disgusted with them; he should be disgusted with himself.”

Yeah, rappers are always celebrating the idea of “hanging them from the trees.”

But I do love it when self-righteous wingnuts like Scarborough condemn corporations for profiting from violent lyrics sung by black people. (Also a return to the 90s, by the way.) I honestly can[t think of another profit center they object to. Including slave labor and poisoning the public with e.coli.

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The Kingmakers

by digby

Paul Waldman speculates that some GOP Senators might be feeling a little bit queasy about signing that letter. But he notes, correctly in my opinion, that while normal poltiicains might worry about being the instruments of destroying a nuclear agreement that might prevent WWIII, this has catapulted freshman Senator Tom Cotton into the political stratosphere:

All told, it looks like quite the fiasco. But Tom Cotton himself is probably saying, “That worked out great!”

That’s partly because the name “Tom Cotton” is now on so many lips, and he surely has more requests for television interviews than he could ever wish for. More than that, he’s shown what even a Senator who’s been in office just a few months can accomplish with a little initiative and creativity. It may be a black eye for his party, but to the tea party base from which Cotton sprang, he’s now a hero. The more criticism he gets, the more convinced they become of his heroism.

Indeed, a legislator in his home state of Arkansas has just introduced a bill that would allow Cotton to run for both re-election to his Senate seat and for president in 2020.

On paper, Cotton looks like a dream politician with nowhere to go but up — Iraq veteran, Harvard Law School graduate, the youngest senator at 37. It’s only when you listen to him talk and hear what he believes that you come to realize he’s a complete crackpot. During the 2014 campaign he told voters that the Islamic State was working with Mexican drug cartels and would soon be coming to attack Arkansas. When he was still in the Army he wrote a letter to the New York Times saying that its editors should be “behind bars” because the paper published stories on the Bush administration’s program to disrupt terrorist groups’ finances (which George W. Bush himself had bragged about, but that’s another story).

Read on …You won’t believe how nutty he really is.

But one thing Waldman doesn’t mention is the fact that Tom Cotton is a creation of the conservative blogosphere. That letter he wrote to the NY Times when he was still in the service was never published. He sent it to Powerline, Time magazine’s  “Blog of the year”, and it went viral in the wingnut fever swamps. They are surely very proud.

QOTD: Bernie Sanders

by digby

I wonder how long it’s going to take for one of these very excited Village scribes to ask Hillary Clinton (or any of the Republican candidates, for that matter) if they agree that Social Security and Medicare should be cut?

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About that religious war …

by digby

Jay Sekulow:

Is it possible that this decade will see the virtual end of Christianity in the very region it was born?

There were few images more sickening than the images of ISIS terrorists beheading 21 Egyptian Christians on a beach in Libya. It was sickening because the crime itself was beyond the pale. It was sickening because months after the United States launched its war against ISIS – the Islamic State – the atrocities continue, unabated. And it was sickening because the video was visual evidence that ISIS continues to expand, even into Libya – a nation we helped “liberate” less than four years ago.

On Wednesday, I am testifying before the Senate’s State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Subcommittee. The topic: “Protecting Religious Freedom Abroad.” There has never been greater need for public awareness of the plight of Christians in the Muslim world.

The Bridegroom is a comin’.

Whistling past the atomic graveyard
by Tom Sullivan

In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985), physicist Richard Feynman explains that one of the early problems at Oak Ridge, TN during the Manhattan Project was that nobody processing the uranium really knew much about it or what it was for. As far as the Army brass was concerned, they didn’t need to know. Except Feynman noticed plant workers storing large lots of processed uranium unsettlingly close together. Feynman observed, “Now, if you have too much stuff together, it goes up, you see.” And that would be, shall we say, bad. The staff could properly follow the handling rules only if they knew a modicum about what they were handling and how it works, Feynman knew. So J. Robert Oppenheimer had sent him to Oak Ridge to advise the plant how to handle and store the “stuff” safely. If he got any pushback, he was to say, Los Alamos cannot accept the responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless ….” He did. It worked like a charm.

Safety and security at America’s nuclear facilities have always been concerns. Writing for New Yorker, Eric Schlosser provides more background on the 2012 break-in by Plowshares peace activists at the Y-12 uranium processing facility at Oak Ridge. It’s a lengthy piece detailing the group’s motives, and it’s less than reassuring about the security at American nuclear facilities:

On the night of the Y-12 break-in, a camera that would have enabled security personnel to spot the intruders was out of commission. According to a document obtained by Frank Munger, a reporter at the Knoxville News-Sentinel, about a fifth of the cameras on the fences surrounding the Protected Area were not working that night. One camera did capture someone climbing through a fence. But the security officer who might have seen the image was talking to another officer, not looking at his screen. Cameras and motion detectors at the site had been broken for months. The security equipment was maintained by Babcock & Wilcox, a private contractor that managed Y-12, while the officers who relied on the equipment worked for Wackenhut. Poor communication between the two companies contributed to long delays whenever something needed to be fixed. And it wasn’t always clear who was responsible for getting it fixed. The Plowshares activists did set off an alarm. But security officers ignored it, because hundreds of false alarms occurred at Y-12 every month. Officers stationed inside the uranium-storage facility heard the hammering on the wall. But they assumed that the sounds were being made by workmen doing maintenance.

There’s much more, of course. But my mind immediately went to John McPhee’s conversations with Los Alamos weapons designer, Ted Taylor, in The Curve of Binding Energy (1973). Taylor was worried then about terrorists clandestinely getting hold of poorly secured weapons material and fashioning a crude bomb. Carson Mark admitted blithely at the time, “So far as we know, everybody in the world who has tried to make a nuclear explosion since 1945 has succeeded on the first try.” So, that’s reassuring.

One of my own experiences informs my concern over how the “stuff” is handled.

One Thanksgiving weekend in the late 1990s, my wife and I were returning from seeing friends in Mount Pleasant, SC. It was late Sunday afternoon and traffic on I-26 would be bumper-to-bumper all the way to Columbia.

In North Charleston we overtook a tractor-trailer hauling four-foot diameter stainless steel casks. Lying on their sides and the width of the flatbed, it was unusual cargo. Pulling closer, we were able to read the printing on the rear cylinder: UNITED STATES ENRICHMENT CORPORATION – URANIUM HEXAFLUORIDE.

Brilliant. Some mastermind decided to move reactor fuel – reprocessed from Soviet nuclear warheads – out of Charleston to Paducah, KY on the busiest travel weekend of the year. Sunday, yeah. Traffic is light on Sundays.

My wife was unnerved tailgating nuclear materials and insisted we drive on ahead. Ahead were three more trucks like the first. In front, an unmarked, white conversion van had curtains drawn and interior lights on in the back. “Check out the driver,” I said as we pulled alongside. Black tee shirt and military crew cut. An armed detail with automatic weapons, probably. My wife had spotted an identical van at the rear of the convoy.