Month: March 2015

Mob mentality

by digby

Evidently, the denizens of the right wing fever swamps have convinced themselves that Harry Reid’s accident was actually a beat-down by the mafia. I’m not kidding. It seems to have started at Powerline:

A friend of mine was in Las Vegas a week or two ago. He talked to a number of people there about Reid’s accident, and didn’t find anyone who believed the elastic exercise band story. The common assumption was that the incident resulted, in some fashion, from Reid’s relationship with organized crime. The principal rumor my friend heard was that Reid had promised to obtain some benefit for a group of mobsters. He met with them on New Year’s Day, and broke the bad news that he hadn’t been able to deliver what he promised. When the mobsters complained, Reid (according to the rumor) made a comment that they considered disrespectful, and one of them beat him up.

Everyone knows that the Reid family has gotten rich, even though Reid has spent his entire career as a public employee. It is known that a considerable part of his fortune came from being cut in on sweetheart Las Vegas land deals that included at least one person associated with organized crime as a principal. Was the Senate Majority Leader in the pocket of the Mafia? That seems like a question worth exploring, and yet, to my knowledge, not a single investigative reporter has chosen to look into the matter, even with the obvious clue of Reid’s face in front of them.

Somebody needs to cancel his Netflix subscription and take a breather. Life isn’t a movie.

Yglesias at Vox breaks all this down, explaining that Reid’s fortune is easily explained and has been thoroughly investigated by numerous newspapers. (He’s worth something like 6.8 million which is what the million dollars he had when he started his political career would have likely returned over three decades.) He also explains that “the mob” has not really been a factor in Las Vegas for a very long time.

And most importantly he explains how these exercise band accidents happen:

According to the Schmidt Firm PLLC, a personal injury litigation firm, “Resistance bands (or ‘exercise bands’) have become one of the most popular types of exercise equipment in the United States. Unfortunately, dozens of people have been severely injured when the bands unexpectedly broke or released, snapped backward at the user, and caused eye injuries, vision loss, hand injuries, and more.”

A November 2014 New York Post article reported on a lawsuit filed by a woman who claims to have been partially blinded in a band-snapping incident at her gym.

Carolyn Williams at LiveStrong wrote in 2013 that “with proper care and attention, [resistance bands] are useful for a variety of upper and lower body exercises and can last for several months. However, if you don’t care for or tether them properly, they can snap.”

No kidding.

Now factor in the fact that Harry Reid is 75 years old. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill himself with one of those things.

It’s typically stupid and sick for the right wing fever swamps to engage in something this absurd. But I thought this guy was a little bit less of a nut than this:

I guess not.

Jesus wasn’t a bigot

by digby

This is a great piece in The Atlantic explaining why Indiana’s new discrimination law is so egregious. It starts like this:

No one, I think, would ever have denied that Maurice Bessinger was a man of faith.

And he wasn’t particularly a “still, small voice” man either; he wanted everybody in earshot to know that slavery had been God’s will, that desegregation was Satan’s work, and the federal government was the Antichrist. God wanted only whites to eat at Bessinger’s six Piggie Park barbecue joints; so His servant Maurice took that fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1968 decided that his religious freedom argument was “patently frivolous.”

Until the day he died, however, Bessinger insisted that he and God were right. His last fight was to preserve the Confederate flag as a symbol of South Carolina. “I want to be known as a hard-working, Christian man that loves God and wants to further (God’s) work throughout the world as I have been doing throughout the last 25 years,” he told his hometown newspaper in 2000.

Growing up in the pre-civil-rights South, I knew a lot of folks like Maurice Bessinger. I didn’t like them much, but I didn’t doubt their sincerity. Why wouldn’t they believe racism was God’s will? We white Southerners heard that message on weekends from the pulpit, on school days from our segregated schools, and every day from our governments. When Richard and Mildred Loving left Virginia to be married, a state trial judge convicted them of violating the Racial Integrity Act. That judge wrote that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents … The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

This law is particularly egregious not just because of it’s timing. Despite the media’s bizarre inability to explain why this law is different from earlier ones,  it’s egregious because it contains some highly unusual features:

[T]he Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not. First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.

The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: “A person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.” (My italics.) Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this; only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, contains similar language.

What these words mean is, first, that the Indiana statute explicitly recognizes that a for-profit corporation has “free exercise” rights matching those of individuals or churches. A lot of legal thinkers thought that idea was outlandish until last year’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in which the Court’s five conservatives interpreted the federal RFRA to give some corporate employers a religious veto over their employees’ statutory right to contraceptive coverage.

Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a business’s “free exercise” right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government. Why does this matter? Well, there’s a lot of evidence that the new wave of “religious freedom” legislation was impelled, at least in part, by a panic over a New Mexico state-court decision, Elane Photography v. Willock. In that case, a same-sex couple sued a professional photography studio that refused to photograph the couple’s wedding. New Mexico law bars discrimination in “public accommodations” on the basis of sexual orientation. The studio said that New Mexico’s RFRA nonetheless barred the suit; but the state’s Supreme Court held that the RFRA did not apply “because the government is not a party.”

Remarkably enough, soon after, language found its way into the Indiana statute to make sure that no Indiana court could ever make a similar decision. Democrats also offered the Republican legislative majority a chance to amend the new act to say that it did not permit businesses to discriminate; they voted that amendment down.

Mike Pence’s embarrassing performance on This Week notwithstanding, I’m sure the wingnuts in Indiana knew exactly what they were doing. I’d go even further and speculate they had some help from some of the heavy hitters in the conservative legal circles who developed this “religious liberty” concept. This is how they do it.

The furious backlash may just work to roll this one back.

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Another norm bites the dust #POWs

by digby

I wrote about the right’s conditional love for American troops this morning at Salon. I recounted the history of Limbaugh and the like and his loathing for “phony soldiers” — you know, soldiers who criticize war. And then:

It shouldn’t, therefore, be surprising that while these right-wingers are reverent toward the uniform and the flag (to the point where they are even willing to defend them torturing prisoners in order to ”blow off steam”) they are equally quick to announce that the prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl should have been left in the hands of the Taliban. One would think that the idea of leaving an American who had been tortured for five years by a ruthless enemy to rot would strike them as at least slightly unpatriotic, but apparently his alleged desertion and political thought crimes are so abhorrent that the U.S. government should abandon its tradition (as well as its legal and moral obligation) to exchange prisoners of war going all the way back to George Washington.

It’s not hard to imagine that if the president had been named Bush and the prisoner had left behind a diary proclaiming his love for Rush Limbaugh the right wing that today insists that Bergdahl is a traitor would be throwing parades in his honor, deserter or not. He was, after all, held for nearly five years by the enemy, something that would probably be seen as heroic if it weren’t for his hippie-dippy beliefs. If we have learned anything by now it’s that for all their pompous flag-waving, the right only supports some of the troops. The government should probably take a poll among them before deciding which soldiers are worthy of the nation’s concern.

Mainly I’m concerned about the idea that yet another norm is being discarded in the name of the GWOT, in this case the norm going all the way back to George Washington that says we will exchange prisoners of war. Also too this ridiculous idea idea that these specific middle aged men who’ve been held prisoner for a decade for the last decade are uniquely dangerous. Unless Guantanamo has been teaching its prisoners advanced military strategy it’s highly doubtful those guys present more of a danger than the thousands of battle-hardened Taliban soldiers who have been receiving training day in and day out on the battlefield. How silly.

There more here…

Treachery with a smile on its face
by Tom Sullivan

The Bush administration’s infamous torture memos were not the first legal documents to use the color of law to whitewash moral obscenities. Jim Crow had etched that tradition deep into the national culture over a century earlier.

Jim Crow may be gone, but the tradition persists in the branding of legal initiatives that purport to do one thing but in fact do the opposite. And in laws advertised as defending one American principle while violating others. And in using the color of law, as Bush and Cheney did, to justify the illegal and the immoral. Whether it is “election integrity” measures meant to limit ballot access or “religious freedom” as justification for discrimination, treachery with a smile on its face has become standard operating procedure where many of this country’s laws are made.

Like a wicked, little boy who stomps a cat’s tail then smiles sweetly — Who, me? — lawmakers figure you can fool some of the people some of the time with such legislation. Then they dare us to stop them.

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act isn’t the first of the new, flag-draped attempts at putting “those people,” however defined, back in their places. But it is egregious enough that prominent people are calling bullshit.

“There’s something very dangerous happening in states across the country,” writes Apple CEO Tim Cook in today’s Washington Post. Cook condemns “a wave of legislation” designed to sanction discrimination under color of law:

These bills rationalize injustice by pretending to defend something many of us hold dear. They go against the very principles our nation was founded on, and they have the potential to undo decades of progress toward greater equality.

America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business. At Apple, we are in business to empower and enrich our customers’ lives. We strive to do business in a way that is just and fair. That’s why, on behalf of Apple, I’m standing up to oppose this new wave of legislation — wherever it emerges. I’m writing in the hopes that many more will join this movement. From North Carolina to Nevada, these bills under consideration truly will hurt jobs, growth and the economic vibrancy of parts of the country where a 21st-century economy was once welcomed with open arms.

Cook concludes, “This isn’t a political issue. It isn’t a religious issue.” That’s putting it mildly. And far too politely. It is a moral issue.

My only real complaint with Cook’s op-ed is that he argues discrimination is bad for business. That may be. But completely beside the point. These efforts to resurrect and slap a smiley face on Jim Crow are evil.

Chatting with McJoan

by digby

That is I will be chatting with Joan McCarter on Blogtalk radio Virtually Speaking tonight at 6PDT:

They like him they really like him

by digby

Oh heck, since I’ve been surveying the GOP presidential candidates today, why not take a look at old Ted, too:

Glenn Beck wants listeners to pray for him. Mark Levin says Fox News is out to get him. Hugh Hewitt calls him an “intellectual leader.” Rush Limbaugh thinks his campaign launch was “masterful.” Laura Ingraham hails him as “Reaganesque.” Erick Erickson considers him a “good friend.”

Ted Cruz may be trailing in the polls and strapped for cash, but the first declared candidate of the 2016 race is winning in at least one key contest — the conservative talk-show primary.
Story Continued Below

Tens of millions of listeners — and potential GOP primary voters — tune in each week to the biggest right-wing radio hosts, who hold forth on the merits and demerits of the various 2016 Republican hopefuls as keenly as they spit invective about Barack Obama and the Democrats. Many of them are big fans of the Texas senator, if not outright supporters. Most are holding their cards close, refusing to hug any candidate too tightly, be it in the spirit of equanimity or out of fear of alienating some listeners.

But nearly all the kings and queens of the conservative airwaves express admiration for a man almost universally despised by his Senate colleagues and dismissed by the mainstream media: Cruz. And they are equally clear about who they do not like: Mushy “progressives” like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie.

They represent the id of the GOP. It’s hard to know just how much influence they’ll have but it’s fairly sure that it’s one constituency the presidential aspirants would rather have on their side in a primary than against them …

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Libertarian integrity

by digby

This is just getting pathetic. Pence acting like a rank amateur worthy of Sharron Angle on This Week, Scott Walker flip-flopping like a dying fish and now Rand Paul letting his libertarian facade drop and acting like he’s Pat Robertson:

At a prayer breakfast in Washington, D.C. on Thursday morning, Rand Paul practiced pandering. The senator from Kentucky will announce that he is running for president in less than two weeks, and it seems the pressure to be all things to all people is resulting in the breakdown of his political brand, with the latest example being his newly articulated position on marriage.

He conceded to the evangelical crowd, which included Dr. Jerry Johnson, CEO of the National Religious Broadcasters, that there is a “moral crisis in our country” and more specifically, “a moral crisis that allows people to think that there would be some sort of other marriage” in addition to heterosexual, or “traditional,” marriage.

To solve the crisis, Paul called for a religious revival and lost himself.

“We need another Great Awakening with tent revivals of thousands of people saying ‘reform or see what’s going to happen if we don’t reform,'” Paul said, adding that Washington has a responsibility to help, too. “There is a role for us trying to figure out a thing like marriage.” After all, he said, “The First Amendment says keep government out of religion, not religion out of government.”

Paul’s position on gay marriage has long been to leave it up to the states and keep the federal government out of it.

In an interview with The Daily Beast’s Editor-in-Chief John Avlon at SXSW earlier this month, Paul admitted he was a “traditionalist, born in 1963, okay. You know, marriage was between a man and a woman and still sort of a conservative position that I hold, personally.”

As a lawmaker, however, he felt that “the law does have to treat people equally, though, and so the idea that the law can or should be neutral is something that I do find important.”

When Paul acts or speaks inconsistently, his campaign responds by pretending like it did not happen.

“Senator Paul believes marriage is an issue that should be dealt with at the state level,” political adviser Doug Stafford told The Daily Beast. “Nothing about his position has changed.” Stafford later added: “Senator Paul does not want his guns or his marriage registered in Washington. He has said this repeatedly and consistently. Marriage is not a federal issue. It is an issue for state and local governments to deal with.”

Thursday’s statement, then, would seem to suggest to anyone with eyes and ears and basic critical thinking skills that the Senator has had a change of heart.

Stafford did not respond to a request to clarify what Paul meant by “moral crisis” or who the “us” he was referring to when he said “there is a role for us trying to figure out a thing like marriage.” But in the video of Paul’s comment, obtained by CBN News’ David Brody, it seems clear Paul is implying that the crisis can be averted with the help of both the federal government and the evangelical activist community. He says “The one thing i would say is – and this is given as free advice – don’t always look to Washington. The moral crisis we have in our country, there is a role for us trying to figure out things like marriage, but theres also a moral crisis that allows people to think that there would be some sort of other marriage. and so um really there’s a role outside and inside government…”

This is the guy everyone says is in the race to move the Party away from its traditional base of social conservatives and military hawks by educating a new generation about libertarian principles. How’s that going?

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Sunday funnies

by digby

Also too, this:

Fiorina said that she had two prong plan for boosting the economy by reforming the federal government.

“One, zero-based budgeting so we actually know where money is being spent, and we’re talking about the whole budget and not just the rate of increase,” she remarked. “And two, pay for performance in our civil service.”

“We have — how many Inspector General reports do we need to read that say, you know, you can watch porn all day long and get paid exactly the same way as somebody who’s trying to do their job?”

H/t to Bradblog

More Scott Walker brilliance

by digby

How many gaffes and clumsy errors before he becomes Rick Perry? He was in New Hampshire this week telling everyone who will listen that he’s against amnesty for undocumented workers.  Except when he was saying he wasn’t.  It’s got the right wing a little perturbed.  Here’s Allahpundit at Hot Air:

So, to recap: The Wall Street Journal claimed yesterday that Walker told an audience of New Hampshire Republicans that he supported a path to citizenship, which was — supposedly — a flip-flop from what Walker’s been telling reporters lately about opposing “amnesty.” Except that it’s not a flip-flop, as I tried to explain. Walker’s supported a path to citizenship for nearly 15 years. As recently as this month, when asked by Chris Wallace if he can imagine a path to citizenship if illegals paid a penalty first, he replied, “I believe there’s a way you can do that.” No flip-flop!

This, however, is a flip-flop:

“Gov. Walker has been very clear that he does not support amnesty and believes that border security must be established and the rule of law must be followed,” [Walker spokesman Kirsten] Kukowski said. “His position has not changed, he does not support citizenship for illegal immigrants, and this story line is false.”

That’s the statement Walker’s team put out yesterday afternoon as buzz built among righties over the WSJ story. Walker told Wallace a few weeks ago that he’d changed his mind on the need for border security; now, under fire over immigration again, he’s changed his mind on the rest of the issue and abandoned a path to citizenship too. No amnesty of any sort for illegals!

But wait. Here’s New Hampshire Republican Party chair Jennifer Horn, who was at the event described by the Journal:

“I specifically asked a follow-up question on the immigration reform issue, where he very clearly identified he was advocating a path for legal status but not citizenship,” Horn said in an interview with The Associated Press…

In the half-hour discussion, Walker called for securing the border and allowing for more visas for high-skilled workers. He also said it was unreasonable to deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally, preferring a system that allowed them to pay back taxes and achieve legal status over time, according to Horn.

“The governor was very specific that he was not advocating for citizenship for illegal immigrants,” Horn said.

Aha! So the Journal was wrong — Walker supports giving illegals a path to legal status not not full-fledged citizenship. Or is Horn lying to cover for him? The WSJ says three different people at the event confirmed that Walker talked about citizenship, not just legalization. How did all three of them get it wrong? And if Horn’s telling the truth, where does that leave us in terms of Walker’s “evolution” on this issue?

Confused, obviously.

He concludes:

If you’re going to pander to a key voting bloc, choose one and pander your ass off. Don’t try this ridiculous straddle where you try to make amnesty fans and border hawks happy by splitting the baby and supporting legalization but not citizenship. Trying to please everyone usually means pleasing no one.

Actually, there’s another punchline here. Assuming Horn is right and that Walker’s new position is legalization without citizenship, that means he’s engaging in the same sort of amnesty pander as — ta da — his chief rival, Jeb Bush. Remember, Jeb also claims that he opposes citizenship for adult illegals (although not for DREAMers), which is his own crude attempt to blunt attacks on his immigration position from the right. No one believes that Bush 45 would hold the line on that once in office, though; Jeb saying he opposes citizenship is exactly as credible as Obama saying in 2008 that he opposes gay marriage. If in fact Scott Walker’s new position is what Horn says, i.e. pro-legalization but anti-citizenship, then I suspect he came to that position for no better reason than that it’s also Jeb’s position, which means the issue will be more or less neutralized if the race eventually turns into a “Bush versus Walker” one-on-one.

And if instead Jeb flames out and Marco Rubio supplants him as the great establishment hope, Walker can then argue that Rubio’s more of an amnesty fan than he himself is. After all, Rubio’s Gang of Eight bill endorsed a path to citizenship. And Scott Walker very deeply opposes such things, don’tcha know.

Exit question I’d never thought I’d ask: Among Bush, Christie, Walker, and Rubio, the establishment’s fab four, is Rubio actually the most trustworthy on immigration? Good lord

I’m on record believing that Rubio makes the most sense for the GOP, so I’d say this is probably a good sign for him. The Kochs already love him. The prospect of the youthful Hispanic male against the senior white lady could make make grassroots conservatives overlook a whole bunch of unpleasant little details like his earlier immigration stance if Walker and Bush turn out not to have the charisma everyone in the beltway inexplicably believes they have.

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Pensive Pence

by digby

If there has ever been a more unctuously sanctimonious politician than the hard-core right winger Mike Pence, I’d love to know who it might be.  The man’s perpetually furrowed brow and insistence on his own purity and righteousness seems to have convinced many Villagers that he’s a mainstream politician, a moderate even.   He’s been mentioned many times as one of the most promising of the dark horse candidates for president, largely because of his undeserved reputation for compassion. (He decided to take free money for Medicaid once so …) Today he may have smudged that image a bit with his truly terrible performance on This Week trying to defend his state’s decision to explicitly legalize discrimination against gay people.

The thing is that he’s not unusual. If they were to ask any of the GOP presidential candidates about this issue it’s hard to imagine any of them taking a different stand than Pence. Considering just how vehement the opposition to Indiana’s new law (shared by numerous other states…) at this point in time, and the media’s shocked reaction it seems to me this would be an excellent thing for Democratic activists to take up if the press fails.

Ask your favorite Republican candidate if they support Indiana’s new law. And then watch them try to dance on the head of a pin.

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