Month: March 2015

50 years later, it’s always something
by Tom Sullivan

President Obama will speak in Selma, AL today to observe the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday voting rights march that began at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It will be streaming live here at noon EST (9 a.m. PST).

Even as civil rights groups gather at the bridge, a Change.org petition started by Student Unite has gathered 150,000 signatures from people who want the name Edmund Pettus removed from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, now a national landmark and part of the Selma To Montgomery National Historic Trail. It dawned on somebody that the name of a Civil War general and Alabama U.S. senator/Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon is “a symbol of oppression.” Really.

This is happening in Montgomery:

The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday passed a bill that would prevent clergy, officials and faith-based groups with religious objections to certain marriages from being forced to officiate them, or being sued over their refusal.

Although the legislation does not directly address the issue, same-sex marriage supporters said the bill would effectively give state officials and religiously affiliated organizations, such as hospitals, homeless shelters and food banks broad powers to deny services and benefits to same-sex couples.

This is also happening:

The ACLU of Alabama; the Southern Poverty Law Center; the National Center for Lesbian Rights and Americans United for Separation of Church and State asked U.S. District Judge Ginny Granade to add all Alabama couples seeking same-sex marriage licenses as plaintiffs in an ongoing lawsuit in Mobile County, and to add all of the state’s probate judges who may enforce orders barring or resist rulings allowing same-sex marriage as defendants.

The groups also want Granade to issue an injunction that the probate judges “refrain from enforcing all Alabama laws and orders that prohibit same-sex couples from marrying or that deny recognition of the marriages of same-sex couples.”

[snip]

On Tuesday, the Alabama Supreme Court ordered probate judges to stop issuing the licenses, saying its powers to interpret the U.S. Constitution were equal to Granade’s. The seven-justice majority said that the bans did not violate the 14th Amendment, arguing that the laws did not target gay and lesbian couples and that the state had a legitimate interest in promoting traditional marriage.

And you thought it was some kind of article of faith that “government shouldn’t pick winners and losers.”

It’s always something.

QOTD: Rahmbo

by digby

Demanding that people love you never works. Neither does demanding respect.  In fact, if you’re reduced to doing that you’ll almost certainly fail to get it.

They say old Rahm Emanuel came out last night—or maybe it was the real one hiding in plain sight all the time: a sneering, aggressive pol who went “nose-to-nose” with a mental-health advocate demanding, “You’re gonna respect me!”

The alleged exchange took place off-camera between Chicago’s mayor and Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, a member of Mental Health Movement, a group that has been fighting the mayor over the closure of six mental health clinics across the city. Behind a door that separated the mayor from a roomful of constituents at a campaign stop in the Wicker Park neighborhood, Ginsberg-Jaeckle says, he got Rahmbo’d.

“This is the Real Rahm,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle wrote on Facebook. “Calm and collected in public, raging angry and self-defensive behind closed doors.”
[…]
Debbie Delgado, another member of the group, interrupted Emanuel, prompting the behind-closed-doors altercation.

“She told of losing her son to gun violence,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle wrote. “She told [Emanuel] how her other son was holding him as he died. She told about how the city’s Northwest Mental Health Clinic in Logan Square saved their lives, helped her and her son deal with the PTSD and depression. Then she asked why he took that clinic away from her.”

Rahm said he would speak with the pair, and Ginsberg-Jaeckle said they then left the room for a private conversation. That’s when Emanuel allegedly shouted: “You’re gonna respect me!”

Hey it works for Chris Christie. I have relatives who cheer at the sight of a politician bullying his constituents. So perhaps his will work for him. But it’s actually kind of pathetic.

Hey look! Serious, important journalism on a cable news network spotted in the wild!

by digby

If you did not have the chance to watch Chris Hayes’ riveting special on the case of Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed called “The 11th Hour” they have helpfully put it on Youtube so you can watch it:

Part 1:

Chris Hayes investigates the case of Rodney Reed, sentenced to death for the 1996 rape and murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites. But is the state of Texas poised to execute a man for a crime he did not commit?

Part II:

In 1998, prosecutors laid out such a compelling case against Rodney Reed, that it took the jury just 4 hours to sentence him to death for the murder of Stacey Stites.

Part III:

Who killed Stacey Stites? The Innocence Project believes there is enough new information to clear Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed.

This is an amazing story which may end up contributing to the saving of this man’s life. It most assuredly contributes to the evidence that the death penalty is a barbaric tool that has no business being part of anything a civilized nation would call “justice.”

This is really important and interesting journalism. I know it’s not as fun as watching some wild-eyed bloviator turn red in the face screaming about arcane, trivial gossip.  But this actually matters. People need to watch this show. It’s different than the others.

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“Re-homing” children like pets

by digby

Sometimes people get a cat or a dog and it just doesn’t work with the family. And so they find a home for the animal, hopefully one with people who will love and care for it. But apparently some people are doing this with kids too. Reuters did an expose about this a couple of years ago and it’s stuck with me ever since.  So cruel and heartless. And dangerous for these kids, many of whom are basically “sold” to sexual predators who advertise on the internet.

Even knowing all that it’s still jarring to read about these situations like this one featuring a Republican politician by the name of Justin Harris in Arkansas. A Christian schoolteacher in his employ was arrested and convicted of raping a 6 year old girl. Harris was said to be horrified to find this out saying the man’s reputation was “pristine”:

What Harris did not publicly disclose last spring, however, is how Francis came into contact with the 6-year-old victim. In prosecutor documents recently obtained by the Arkansas Times, state police investigators and multiple witnesses concur that the child was in fact the legally adopted daughter of Justin and Marsha Harris.

The Harrises had adopted the girl and her 3-year-old sister through the Arkansas Department of Human Services (DHS). The couple also has three biological sons who are older than the girls. Pictures of the girls appeared on Justin Harris’ social media accounts in early 2013 (the images have since been deleted), and Harris announced on Twitter and Facebook on March 6, 2013, that the couple had officially adopted the girls. Because DHS adoptions require an in-home trial period of at least six months prior to papers being signed, the girls likely entered the home no later than September 2012.

And then, something evidently went amiss in the household. For unknown reasons, about six months after the adoption was finalized, the Harrises sent the two girls to live with Eric Francis and his family in Bella Vista.

According to an Arkansas State Police investigative report prepared by Sgt. Kimberly A. Warren dated April 3, 2014, she contacted Crimes Against Children Division Supervisor Terri Ward who advised that “Mr. and Mrs. Harris placed the girls into the care of Eric Francis and his wife Stacy [sic] Francis in October 2013.” The report further states that “It was later reported to the Department of Human Services that Mr. and Mrs. Harris had left the children with another family and had basically abandoned them. This incident was reported to the child abuse hotline and the children were interviewed.”

After her husband’s arrest, Stacey Francis told a state police investigator that she and Eric “met [the girls] through friends of theirs, Justin and Marsha Harris, who were looking for a new adoption plan for themselves … Stacey Francis reported that she and Eric Francis brought [the girls] into their home with the hopes of being able to adopt them.” The Francises already had three older children — two girls and a boy — who were adopted internationally. Stacey Francis said the Harris girls stayed with her and Eric “until February or March of 2014.” That means the Harrises left the girls with Eric Francis and his wife even after firing him.

The sexual abuse of the 6-year-old girl came to light only because of a call placed to the state’s child maltreatment hotline on Friday, March 28, from an unidentified caller who said the Harrises “gave their adoptive children to a family” and “that family in turn gave the children to another family” and that they had “continued to accept adoption subsidy money even after giving the children away.”

I think this is what’s known in the trade as “family values.”

There’s a lot more at the link. And apparently this man is giving a press conference today so perhaps there will be some more news on this creepy case later.

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Who are the civilized people again?

by digby

These comments come from the NRA’s Facebook page:

A few more:

It’s a good thing we’re so civilized here in the US, not like those barbarians who are coming to kill us all in our beds.

h/t to ts

Waiting on the Supremes

by digby

I have always assumed that it was very likely the conservative majority on the Supreme Court would take the easy way out and rule against the federal exchange subsidies by simply saying that the law is unclear so they are ruling for the plaintiffs but it’s no biggie because the congress will “fix it.” Those of us who don’t live in Bizarroworld know this is ridiculous, but it’s entirely possible that the conservative justices will pretend naivete and just say all the congress has to do it a little tweak and all will be ok, no harm no foul. And except for the dozens of votes to scale back or repeal Obamacare, that might even make sense.  And, as Greg Sargent points out here, the fact that the Republicans have failed to produce their promised alternative for 50 months now can’t possibly mean that they have no flipping idea how to “fix” it without making millions of people lose their health insurance.

On the other hand, many people think that John Roberts has a little more regard for the reputation of the court that to do something so patently absurd, which this interesting video from a few months back would seem to  validate. He seems to be very concerned that the public not see the court as partisan and protests that it’s just plain wrong. (I’m sorry to inform him that that ship sailed with Bush vs Gore — and Roberts was among those GOP lawyers who descended on Florida to ) 

The problem is that he seems to think that the impression the public has of the court being partisan is strictly related to its advancing the political fortunes of the two parties and, even more importantly, that “partisanship” is purely a matter of political identity rather than ideology/philosophy. The fact is that when the justices consistently vote as ideological blocs as they do most of the time, they are reflecting the political reality of the country. Now whether the Supreme Court is supposed to reflect the political reality of the nation is another question, but the fact is that it does. It is, at the moment, as partisan as it gets. Denying that fact is pretty silly.

Furthermore, for all of his handwringing in that exchange about the confirmation process being teddibly teddibly partisan, he participated in it before he was a justice and for his own confirmation process. He knew very well what was happening and went right along with it.

Anyway, all that’s beside the point. Jonathan Cohn at Huffington Post says this is the lay of the land judging by the oral arguments:

Justice Anthony Kennedy joined his liberal colleagues in asking pointed questions about federalism that could lead him to reject the lawsuit. Justice Samuel Alito floated the idea of a “stay” to delay the ruling’s impact, suggesting that he might be trying to assuage the anxieties of conservative justices wary of upending so many people’s health insurance. And Chief Justice Roberts said almost nothing — which suggests, at the very least, that he was not so openly hostile to the government’s case as he was three years ago, when the court famously heard a challenge to the law’s individual mandate.

But there were also some bad omens for the law. Kennedy seemed to embrace a key argument that Obamacare critics had made about the amount of deference the court should give to federal agencies when so much money is in play. Alito’s proposal for a stay seemed like precisely the sort of political cover that Roberts might need to rule against the government. And Justice Antonin Scalia, whose past opinions made clear that justices should not read passages of laws in isolation, seemed fully prepared to do just that in order to rule against Obamacare.

The justices are meeting today to decide the case. We’ll be able to read the opinions in June.

Stat ‘o the Day

by digby

from 1960 to ’64, after Dem president signed Civil Rights Act, GOP nominee’s share of black vote fell from 32% to 6%: http://t.co/Wla3W1B1bI
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) March 6, 2015

Then there’s the other side of that coin:

Since President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, signed it into law, there have been 12 presidential elections. Republicans have won seven of them – and carried the white vote in all 12. Democrats have won five, including Mr. Obama’s 2008 breakthrough fueled by overwhelming support from African-Americans as well as Latinos.

But Mr. Obama hasn’t come close to breaking through in the state where law enforcement officers attacked protesters at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

While blacks have grown as a share of the Alabama electorate, support for Democratic presidential candidates among the state’s white majority has collapsed. The 27 percent Michael Dukakis received from Alabama whites in 1988, exit polls showed, fell to 19 percent for John Kerry in 2004. Mr. Obama drew just 15 percent of Alabama whites.

That tiny share, like the 10 percent Mr. Obama received from whites in neighboring Mississippi, places some Deep South states out of reach. Outside the Old Confederacy, Mr. Obama did vastly better among whites while carrying such battlegrounds as Wisconsin (48 percent), Colorado (44 percent) and Pennsylvania (42 percent).

He goes on to reference the new report from CAP showing that the Republicans have to do better with minorities than George W. Bush did if they want to win the presidency. Let’s just say that’s unlikely unless the Democratic Party decides to revert back to its old strategy trying to get some of those Southern white folk at the expense of their own base. Obama’s coalition of white liberals, women, African Americans, Hispanics and other ethnic and racial minorities is the future.

Look who’s making fun of ISIS

by digby

When I read about the handwringing over the ISIS video I had a vague recollection that there was a very popular comedy show in Iraq which made ruthless mockery of ISIS. Mother Jones has a story about it:

Yet throughout the Middle East, ISIS is routinely ridiculed on television shows, within plays, and by cartoons. For many entertainers and satirists in the region, comedy is a way to fight ISIS’s often effective propaganda and to counter the murderous group’s narrative. “These people are not a true representation of Islam and so by mocking them, it is a way to show that we are against them,” Nabil Assaf, a producer of a satirical show now airing in Lebanon, told the Associated Press.

In Iraq, a state-funded television channel, Al Iraqiya, funneled an unprecedented $600,000 into producing Dawlat al-Khurafa, a satirical Iraqi show that features comical songs and skits acted out by a cast who satirize ISIS members living in a mythical Iraqi town. One recent song was about ISIS’s ban on adultery; it noted the ban is ignored when it comes to ISIS fighters and the women they enslave. Al Iraqiya also hosts an animated show called Dashawi, which chronicles the pratfalls and failures of a group of bumbling and hypocritical ISIS fighters who have set up base in Iraq. In the cartoon series, one young militant attempts to fire a rocket launcher and drops it on his commander’s foot, while ISIS’s go-to drunkard is tasked with enforcing an alcohol ban. The show is a mix of Looney Tunes and South Park. Al Iraqiya is the most successful and most accessible of domestic and foreign news networks in Iraq; it reaches 93 percent of Iraqis. Dawlat al-Khurafa’s theme song even went viral in Iraq, racking up more than 200,000 times on YouTube. Many viewers find the show funny, and share and comment on the videos online.

In Lebanon, the Ktir Salbe Show, a comedy series that airs on a local station north of Beirut, produces short skits that depict extremist Islamists not living by their own premodern rules as they talk on cellphones and ride in cabs. ISIS’s regional terrorism and hypocrisy are recurring themes on the Palestinian satirical TV show Watan ala Wata. A Jordanian play lampooning ISIS is touring theaters. In October, a group of Iraqi Kurds made their own SNL-style musical parody video of ISIS, in which a group of militants play air guitar with rifles and juggle with human skulls. Most of these videos are available on YouTube. One Palestinian ISIS parody video has almost 800,000 views.

You can see all the links at the piece. This is apparently a centuries long tradition.

If Iraqis are smart and brave enough to make fun of ISIS, use satire and comedy to peel away their mystique, you’d think the US would be able to put its entertainment institutions to the same task. This is a propaganda war as much as anything. (And these Middle Eastern satirists prove you don’t actually have to depict the Prophet Mohammed to make a pointed statement about ISIS.)

Middle Eastern television representatives insist that satire is an important weapon against ISIS, whose team of graphic designers, media spokespeople, and artists craft the sophisticated videos and messaging that lure in foreign recruits. As Ala’a Al Majedi, who works on Al Iraqiya’s satirical shows, said in an interview with the Middle Eastern news site Al Arabiya, “Comedy is one way to raise awareness” about the opposition to ISIS and other terrorist organizations

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No joy in joystick
by Tom Sullivan

The Air Force seems to have a problem retaining drone pilots. They are quitting faster than new ones can be trained, writes Pratap Chatterjee at Alternet:

The Air Force explains the departure of these drone pilots in the simplest of terms. They are leaving because they are overworked. The pilots themselves say that it’s humiliating to be scorned by their Air Force colleagues as second-class citizens. Some have also come forward to claim that the horrors of war, seen up close on video screens, day in, day out, are inducing an unprecedented, long-distance version of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).

But is it possible that a brand-new form of war — by remote control — is also spawning a brand-new, as yet unlabeled, form of psychological strain? Some have called drone war a “coward’s war” (an opinion that, according to reports from among the drone-traumatized in places like Yemen and Pakistan, is seconded by its victims). Could it be that the feeling is even shared by drone pilots themselves, that a sense of dishonor in fighting from behind a screen thousands of miles from harm’s way is having an unexpected impact of a kind psychologists have never before witnessed?

Burnout may be a factor. Whereas pilots for manned Air Force aircraft log 300 hours per year, the drone warriors can spend 900-1,800 flying drones in circles, working “either six or seven days a week, twelve hours a day,” according to Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh.

Some say that the drone war has driven them over the edge. “How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile? How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?” Heather Linebaugh, a former drone imagery analyst, wrote in the Guardian. “When you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience.”

“It was horrifying to know how easy it was. I felt like a coward because I was halfway across the world and the guy never even knew I was there,” Bryant told KNPR Radio in Nevada. “I felt like I was haunted by a legion of the dead. My physical health was gone, my mental health was crumbled. I was in so much pain I was ready to eat a bullet myself.”

Then again, they could just stop doing it, haunted as they are by the images and scorned by colleagues. And perhaps by a few fellow Americans who want them to stop:

LAS VEGAS — Protesters outside an air base in southern Nevada are calling for an end to U.S. drone missions that they say kill many more civilians than terrorists halfway around the world.

Organizer Toby Blome and base officials said Thursday that no violence and no arrests resulted from the first day of a demonstration outside Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, northwest of Las Vegas.

How effective are the drone attacks? Chatterjee cites a report by Jennifer Gibson of the British-based human rights organization, Reprieve, that claims some targets on the White House “kill list” have allegedly “’died’ as many as seven times.”

Gibson adds, “We found 41 names of men who seemed to have achieved the impossible. This raises a stark question. With each failed attempt to assassinate a man on the kill list, who filled the body bag in his place?” In fact, Reprieve discovered that, in going after those 41 “targets” numerous times, an estimated 1,147 people were killed in Pakistan by drones. Typical was the present leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In two strikes against “him” over the years, according to Reprieve, 76 children and 29 adults have died, but not al-Zawahiri.

That would keep me awake at night.

Digby Discusses the Movie Citizen Four, Journalism and Snowden