Month: March 2015

Dispatch from the Great Lakes: which one did it better?

by digby

Steve Benen did a little comparison of two upper midwest states which have everything in common except one is run by Republicans and one is run by Democrats. Guess which one is doing much better economically and which one’s in the dirt?

Wisconsin and Minnesota have long made fascinating bookends. As longtime readers may recall, the two neighboring states have similar sizes, similar populations, similar demographics, and even similar climates. But they don’t necessarily have similar politics, at least not lately.

In the 2010 elections, the Badger State elected Scott Walker (R) governor and gave control of the legislature to Republicans, while the Gopher State made Mark Dayton (D) governor and elected a Democratic legislature. The former got to work targeting collective bargaining and approving tax cuts, while the latter raised taxes on the wealthy and boosted in-state investments.

Nearly five years later, one of these two states is doing quite well. Policy.mic had an interesting report this week.

Since 2011, Minnesota has been doing quite well for itself. The state has created more than 170,000 jobs, according to the Huffington Post. Its unemployment rate stands at 3.6% – the fifth-lowest in the country, and far below the nationwide rate of 5.7% – and the state government boasts a budget surplus of $1 billion. Forbes considers Minnesota one of the top 10 in the country for business.

As Patrick Caldwell recently explained very well, Minnesota’s gains come on the heels of tax increases on Minnesota’s top 2% and higher corporate taxes, both of which state Republicans said would crush Minnesota’s economy. As for their neighbors to the east:

By a number of measures, Wisconsin hasn’t fared as well as Minnesota. As the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal reports, Wisconsin’s job growth has been among the worst in the region, and income growth is one of the worst in the country. It has a higher unemployment rate than Minnesota. And the budget is in bad shape.

Back in January, the editorial board of LaCrosse Tribune wrote, “The governors of Wisconsin and Minnesota each presented their versions of new year’s resolutions in various media interviews last week….Which approach is better? As we enter the new year, Minnesota is clearly winning by a long shot.”

And yet all the smart money in political establishment circles has it that Walker is a real threat. Because even though he was elected in a Republican sweep year and then quickly recalled, he managed to hang on and then barely win in another Republican sweep year. This makes him a brilliant politician. He can’t make a public statement without looking like an out of touch fool. And now we find out that he’s barely doing better than Sam Brownback who has made Kansas into a toxic supply side petrie dish.  A winner for sure.

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Now watch this drive

by digby

… or rather this ad:

And note that Evan Bayh is one of the sociopaths behind it. Just saying.

h/t to Ed Kilgore

Getting the Village band back together

by digby

I wrote a piece for Salon today that made a lot of rightwingers mad. And I’ll bet the Village wasn’t too pleased either:

I got out my old Alanis Morrisette CD this week and listened to “You Oughta Know” for the first time in a decade or more. I had been hit with a strong sense of deja vu and it made me feel nostalgic. A Clinton scandal was burning bright and there was a feeding frenzy on cable news of which I hadn’t seen the likes since Ezra Klein was in grade school. It seems Hillary Clinton did something terrible to do with records she didn’t keep properly and “it doesn’t pass the smell test”. In any case, “where there’s smoke there’s fire”. Or it could have been fog. A light mist perhaps, who knows? But something very serious must be going on or all these people wouldn’t be talking about it, right? So they have to talk about it. Incessantly.

Just like back in the day, no one was prepared to report what was actually supposed to have been wrong about all this, of course, because it was pretty clear after the first NY Times vague report was clarified that Clinton didn’t actually break any laws and there’s no evidence she didn’t adhere to the rules that were in place during her tenure. Sure, something could be wrong with it, but until someone else does some reporting it’s important to discuss ad nauseum what “the problem” really was: this scandal, true or not, important or unimportant, “feeds the narrative” that Clinton is a person of hugely flawed character. None of them were prepared to say this themselves, of course, being unbiased reporters just reporting the facts and all. It’s just that a lot of other people think Hillary Clinton is a devious, Machiavellian control freak and therefore it’s important to report this story. Which will, of course, further feed that narrative.

This is the laziest form of political reporting and commentary imaginable. They are basically sitting around gossiping about what people in DC say about Hillary Clinton and surmising that this story will force them say it even more. Which they will because all these commentators are saying it 24/7 on cable news in a shrill, shrieking feedback loop they mistake for actual public opinion…

read on

They’re getting the village band back together. They sound a lot like that garage band in the Viagra commercial.

What could go wrong?

by digby

Gosh what a great idea. If there’s one thing the Middle East needs it’s some American mercenary yahoos running around:

A U.S. veteran is putting out a call to other veterans to come together to fight the Islamic State on their turf.

“There has been strong support and numerous veterans who are interested in going.”

According to Gannett affiliate, WTLV, eight-year military veteran Sean Rowe launched the website, Veterans against ISIS. He’s recruiting veterans to fight the terror group in places like Iraq, and he’s asking for four years of military experience.

“So, I will be talking with them and screening them. I want to keep it small and simple,” said Rowe.

From kidnappings to beheadings, the violence unleashed by ISIL continues, and Rowe says he’s had enough.

“I’m not scared of these guys. They can come for me if they want but I am going to take the fight to them,” said Rowe.

There are no federal laws prohibiting people from flying to other countries and acting as mercenaries, but former FBI special Agent Ron Wirth says there are other laws to keep in mind.

“If you are training with automatic weapons or weapons or explosives or rocket launches you may exposing yourself to criminal prosecution,” said Wirth.

Wirth also says he’s not guaranteed medical treatment if he’s injured, and he’s not protected under the Geneva Convention.

“It’s going to be dangerous but that’s a risk that anyone who signs up for this is going to be taking,” said Wirth.

When Rowe was asked if he had a strategy or where he even plans to go, he said, “We just need to be in an area…just to leave it to us. Don’t worry about it.”

He’s also not concerned about being a terror target.

“Do they care about Jacksonville? I don’t think they care about Jacksonville. They are going to come for me,” said Rowe.

Just leave it to them. Don’t worry about it.

I can only imagine the shrieking right wing outcry if one of these heroes got captured by ISIS. Somehow, I don’t think they’d have the same thing to say about them as they said about ISIS victim Kayla Mueller:

In a piece titled “Kayla Mueller: Dead ISIS Hostage Was Jew-Hating, Anti-Israel Bitch,” conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel wrote, “No tears for the newly-departed Kayla Mueller, the ISIS hostage whose parents confirmed today that she is dead.”

“Mueller was a Jew-hating, anti-Israel piece of crap who worked with HAMAS and helped Palestinians harass Israeli soldiers and block them from doing their job of keeping Islamic terrorists out of Israel,” Schlussel wrote.

“I have no sympathy for any of these ‘American’ (in name only!) hostages of ISIS,” she went on. “And my attitude when I hear they’ve been snuffed out is, so sad, too bad.”

One conservative website urged readers to pause before they mourn Mueller’s death and ask whether her support of Palestine was ultimately what killed her.

“People should be asking is why this young American girl was in Syria in the first place,” said Conservative-Headlines.com. “The fact is that Kayla Mueller was a Cultural Marxist who talked about her ‘privilege.’”

The website Shoebat.com’s Lee Kaplan said, “(T)he press tries to paint Kayla as a selfless volunteer helping poor Arab refugees. She may have even helped some injured Arabs in refugee camps. But don’t be fooled where her sympathies laid; she was working to support the goals of Palestinian irredentist/terrorists and to interfere with the IDF on behalf of terrorist groups. As an ISM activist she was a tool for the worldwide jihad.”

And Jim Hoft, also known as the Gateway Pundit, called Mueller “pro-terrorist” for opposing Israel’s ongoing occupation of Gaza.

That’s just so awful …

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Mainstream mean boys

by digby

Huckleberry Graham got in trouble this week for making a mean,sexist joke about Nancy Pelosi. He begrudgingly apologized clearly unconcerned about what he’d said. He’s not the first Republican to be so rude. Hate radio has made millions with these cheap jokes.

But there is one person we can hold up as responsible for making this particular mean, sexist joke mainstream:

“Outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave a speech and handed the gavel to John Boehner. Very emotional moment for Pelosi, but she managed to keep a stiff upper lip, a tightly stretched forehead, and unnaturally arched eyebrows.” –Jay Leno

“Ohio Republican John Boehner will take over for Nancy Pelosi. Those are some big eyes to fill.” –Jay Leno

“Nancy Pelosi has now been elected the new House minority leader. She was smiling from ear to ear, which is pretty impressive considering how far her ears have been pulled back.” –Jay Leno

“Christine O’Donnell has a new campaign ad where she says she’s not a witch. Nancy Pelosi was furious. She said, ‘Hey, that’s my slogan.'” –Jay Leno

“Nancy Pelosi’s Republican opponent, John Dennis, has an ad where he depicts Pelosi as the Wicked Witch of the West. Pelosi is very angry and the Wicked Witch is even angrier.” –Jay Leno

“Of course, this all couldn’t have been done without the help of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. And today, the president thanked her for her unblinking support.” –Jay Leno, on the passage of health care reform

“Actually, Nancy Pelosi used the Internet to help gain support for this. She reached out to people on her favorite social networking site, Icantmovemyfacebook.com.” –Jay Leno

“Before the health care vote, protesters on Capitol Hill heckled Nancy Pelosi. But she managed to keep a stiff upper lip, as well as a tightly stretched forehead, and an unnaturally arched eyebrow.” –Jay Leno

“Before she left for China, reporters repeatedly questioned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about her claim the CIA lied to her. But Pelosi remained tight-lipped. She also remained tight-foreheaded and tight-eyelided.” –Jay Leno

“It was so cold in Washington, it felt like Hillary’s inauguration. It was so cold, Al Gore led a prayer for global warming. In fact, by the end of the inauguration, everybody’s face looked like Nancy Pelosi.” –Jay Leno

“Nancy Pelosi said today we’ve waited 200 years for this. 200 years? How many face lifts has this woman had?” –Jay Leno

There are a bunch of Bill Maher jokes in the same vein. You can understand why someone like Graham might assume that such jokes are considered perfectly acceptable. Many millions of people heard them night after night and laughed and laughed and laughed.

It’s not the biggest problem in the world. But Pelosi is the most powerful elected official in the US Government. This stuff is demeaning and very much designed to portray her as an unserious old bag. Why not poke fun at her politics straight up instead of doing it with cheap sexist and ageist tropes? There’s a ton of material there. Comedians don’t really have to do it like this.

Certainly Huckleberry Graham can figure out how to deploy his dull, mean boy wit in less obvious ways.

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Supreme hackery

by digby

I think Scott Lemieux’s example of conservative movement hackery and scamming is right on point:

Let’s consider another of Scalia’s talk radio soundbites: “This is not the most elegantly drafted statute. It was ­­ it was pushed through on expedited procedures and didn’t have the kind of consideration by a conference committee, for example, that ­­ that statutes usually do.”

The “expedited procedures” claim is just erroneous; both the Senate and then the House passed the ACA using ordinary procedures, and then there was a set of amendments passed through reconciliation. The implicit claim that the ACA was passed in unseemly haste is a joke to anyone who actually remembers the interminable process. It is true that the bill did not have the usual benefit of being harmonized through a conference committee. But the reason that this didn’t happen is that the Republican minority in the Senate would not have permitted a vote on a new bill.

It’s a neat scam: A Republican minority prevents Congress from functioning properly, and then their political allies on the Supreme Court use this as an excuse to willfully misread the resulting statute, with disastrous consequences for many people. When the same Supreme Court justice to then assert that congressional Republicans would never, ever dream of seeing large numbers of people go without health insurance it just completes the shameless hack cycle.

And let’s not forget the fact that the House Republicans have voted 56 times to kill or scale back Obamacare.

This is how the Republicans deal with being a congressional party. They use every lever of power they hold to obstruct absolutely everything and then blame the President for being unable to get anything done. Their only negotiating stance is to pass their agenda or nothing. And even then they’ll find reasons not to do it. If the Democrats manage to pass anything they then do whatever it takes to disrupt the implementation including running around to the states to persuade them to sign on to something (the federal exchanges) they have every intention of destroying. After which they will blame the resulting carnage and pain on the president and his party for failing to stop them.

As Lemieux says, it’s a neat scam. And it fits right in with the conservative mind. This what they love to do more than anything: screw with other people. It’s enjoyable in a way that tax cuts for the rich never will be.

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There surely are officials more corrupt than Christie 

by tristero

But there are very few who are so cynically blatant about it. 

For more than a decade, the New Jersey attorney general’s office conducted a hard-fought legal battle to hold Exxon Mobil Corporation responsible for decades of environmental contamination in northern New Jersey.

But when the news came that the state had reached a deal to settle its $8.9 billion claim for about $250 million, the driving force behind the settlement was not the attorney general’s office — it was Gov. Chris Christie’s chief counsel, Christopher S. Porrino, two people familiar with the negotiations said.

One of those people, Bradley M. Campbell, was the commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection in 2004 when the lawsuits against Exxon were filed. Mr. Campbell, in an Op-Ed article appearing in The New York Times on Thursday, wrote that “even more troubling” than the decision to settle the lawsuit were “the circumstances surrounding the decision.”

He goes on to say that former colleagues of his in the state government told him that Mr. Porrino “inserted himself into the case, elbowed aside the attorney general and career employees who had developed and prosecuted the litigation, and cut the deal favorable to Exxon.”

The settlement, first reported by The Times on Friday, came two months after the attorney general’s office, in a court brief, argued vigorously for $8.9 billion in damages, saying, “The scope of the environmental damage resulting from the discharges is as obvious as it is staggering and unprecedented in New Jersey.”

The pigment tax
by Tom Sullivan

Reading Charles Blow’s New York Times column this morning, one phrase stopped me cold: a pigment tax. That, essentially, is what the Justice Department’s report charges the Ferguson Police Department was extracting from African American citizens:

The view that emerges from the Justice Department report is that citizens were not only paying a poverty tax, but a pigment tax as the local authorities sought to balance their budgets and pad their coffers on the backs of poor black people.

Perhaps most disturbing — and damning — is actual correspondence in the report where the authorities don’t even attempt to disguise their intent.

Take this passage from the report:

“In March 2010, for instance, the City Finance Director wrote to Chief [Thomas] Jackson that ‘unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year. . . . Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it’s not an insignificant issue.’ Similarly, in March 2013, the Finance Director wrote to the City Manager: ‘Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5%. I did ask the Chief if he thought the PD could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try.’”

The report, writes Blow, reads like an account of “a shakedown gang.”

There were many insane accounts from Ferguson, MO of police oppression — what else can you call it? — but this one (via CNN) made my blood boil:

1. Unlawful arrest has long-term consequences

Summer of 2012. A 32-year-old African-American was cooling off in his car after a basketball game in a public park.

What comes next is a series of civil rights violations described in the Justice Department report that resulted in the man losing his job as a federal contractor.

A Ferguson police officer demands the man’s Social Security number and identification before accusing him of being a pedophile and ordering the man out of his car.

When the officer asked to search the man’s car, the 32-year-old refused, invoking his constitutional right.

The response? The officer arrested the man at gunpoint, slapped him with eight charges, including for not wearing a seat belt, despite the fact that he was sitting in a parked car. The officer also cited him for “making a false declaration” because he gave his name as ‘Mike’ instead of ‘Michael.’

“The man told us that, because of these charges, he lost his job as a contractor with the federal government that he had held for years,” the report says.

The Washington Post sums it up as a racket (emphasis mine):

This, as the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out in a tweet, is “plunder made legal. … Municipal employees in Ferguson report sound more like shareholders. Gangsters.” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. called it a system “primed for maximizing revenue” — one that now basically serves as a “collection agency” instead of “a law enforcement entity focused primarily on maintaining public safety.”

“The new Department of Justice report depicts a system in Ferguson that is much closer to a racket aimed at squeezing revenue out of its population than a properly working democracy,” wrote George Washington University political scientist Henry Farrell in the Monkey Cage blog, which runs in The Washington Post. Ferguson city employees, from the police chief to the finance director, collaborated to generate revenue through tickets and fees, according to the Justice Department. As described in the report, Farrell and others pointed out, Ferguson is reminiscent of medieval Europe, when gangster governments collected “tribute” and bamboozled the subject population at every turn.

This is a department that might properly be prosecuted under RICO and likely won’t be. And for the same reason Dick Cheney, the torture master, is still fly fishing instead of swatting flies in a jail cell; for the same reason banksters walk free after defrauding courts, plundering people’s homes and throwing families into the street; for the same reason HSBC pays a fine for laundering drug money, and those too poor to pay parking fines face debtor’s prison.

Justice, which was never equal in this country, has utterly broken down along class lines, rigged like the economy. The scales of justice aren’t just out of balance. They’ve been thrown out. Medieval is right.

A crucial insight on King vs Burwell

by digby

…from Jack Balkin. He makes the important point that conservatives and liberals don’t always agree on what “reality” is. But he also points out that the Supreme Court Justices all seemed to accept that dire consequences would flow from the denial of subsidies in the federal exchange, so in this case they might have at least some common ground on that point.

However:

Here’s a key exchange between Justice Scalia and Solicitor General Don Verrilli:

JUSTICE SCALIA: What about what about Congress? You really think Congress is just going to sit there while while all of these disastrous consequences ensue. I mean, how often have we come out with a decision such as the you know, the bankruptcy court decision? Congress adjusts, enacts a statute that
that takes care of the problem. It happens all the time. Why is that not going to happen here?

GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, this Congress, Your Honor, I- I-
(Laughter.)

GENERAL VERRILLI: You know, I mean, of course, theoretically of course, theoretically they could.

JUSTICE SCALIA: I– I don’t care what Congress you’re talking about. If the consequences are as disastrous as you say, so many million people without without insurance and whatnot, yes, I think this Congress would act.

Verrilli offers the conventional wisdom– that the current Republican-controlled Congress is hopelessly dysfunctional and that Republicans have been unable to agree on a fix for Obamacare–in part because there is no consensus on a substitute for Obamacare, and in part because their more radical elements will punish politicians who attempt to fix the program. Moreover, he assumes that it is vain to hope that there will be a bipartisan solution because Republicans and Democrats disagree so pointedly about Obamacare.

Scalia, however, sees things differently. He believes that when push comes to shove, Republicans will overcome their internal divisions and come up with a sensible solution that will preserve insurance coverage for millions while getting rid of the hated Obamacare. If you read the media that Scalia reads, you might well believe that this is the case.

But even if you don’t agree with that view, and you don’t regularly get your news from conservative media, you might well believe (or at least hope!) that Congress will respond in the face of a genuine disaster. Republicans will back down from their complete rejection of Obamacare and pass a technical fix.

But that assumes that the Republicans in Congress see the world the way that you do. Some of them may, but some of them may not. Your judgment of the likely consequences depends on other people’s vision of reality.

Scalia’s optimism about the consequences of holding for the petitioners is premised on the view that Congress is not really dysfunctional, and that this is an unfair portrait painted by a liberal media. People with a different view of the world will probably disagree– Congress is broken. Or, at the very least, they have insufficient faith in the current political system to want to gamble that Congress will be able to avoid a disaster.

Competing visions of the world matter greatly in making arguments about consequences. And there many many ways that liberal and conservative elites can find ways to disagree about what is actually happening. Even if the Justices all agree on the consequences of denying subsidies in federal exchanges, they may still have very different views of the world when it comes to how the current political system works and whether Congress can be trusted to work things out. And that difference in their views of reality may be crucial to how the case comes out.

I think that’s right. They may very well believe that when push comes to shove the congress will “fix the problem” and they may even hope they do it in a way that cynically forces the president and the Democrats to sign on to something truly toxic in the bargain. They love to hold hostages after all. But it’s also entirely possible that they simply do not think that this congress will just let the federal exchange die and make 10 million people drop health insurance because it’s become too expensive overnight. It’s possible. They have voted to repeal Obamacare almost 50 times. It’s very difficult to see how they suddenly move to reinstate subsidies on the federal exchanges.

But whether they fix it or not the price will be very, very high.

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Murder confidential

by digby

Another summary electrocution:

Nearly a week after a man died in police custody, the Coconut Creek Police Department still refuses to provide any information, declaring his death “confidential.”

Calvon Reid, 39, died in police custody after apparently being Tasered by several Coconut Creek Police Officers. Police Chief Michael Mann refused to even acknowledge or confirm the name of the person who died, citing the federal healthcare privacy law known as HIPPA.

“The information sought is confidential and exempt, therefore, as an agency, we have no comment at this time,” Mann wrote in a statement.

However, Barbara Peteresen, president of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, said the city of Coconut Creek was wrong in their interpretation of state and federal law.

“They are misinterpreting and misapplying an exemption for complaints of misconduct to cover up what led to the Tasering and ultimate death of a human being,” she told CBS4’s Jim DeFede.
Even more disturbing, she said, is the city attempting to use HIPPA to try and hide the fact Reid died.

“HIPPA does not apply to the Coconut Creek Police Department. It applies to healthcare providers. It does not exempt the name of a man who died in police custody.”
Mann refused to meet with reporters who showed up at the police station Monday.
Sgt. Henry Cabrera, the department’s public information officer, also refused to answer any questions: “I’m not going to answer any of your questions. No comment.”

City leaders in Coconut Creek are supporting the police chief and his refusal to release public records.

“You’ve already been given a statement,” said Mayor Becky Tooley, referring to the chief’s statement declaring the death confidential. “I’m not going to answer any more questions from you sir.”

Commissioners Sandra Welch, Mikkie Belvedere, and Lou Sarbone also refused to make any comment or criticize the police department for withholding public information.

And unfortunately we still don’t have some very basic information: What day did this occur? What time did it occur? What was the initial call that brought officers into contact with Reid? How many officers responded? What happened once they got there? Are the officers still working or have they been relieved of duty pending the results of the investigation?

Reid’s father told the Sun Sentinel the police claimed his son had was Tasered after his son became belligerent with paramedics who had been called to treat him after he was found beaten inside the gated retirement community of Wynmoor Village.

I’ve seen some cynical cover-ups in my day but I’ve never seen anything quite that bad. To use the medical privacy law to hide the facts in a police killing by taser takes some real chutzpah.

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