Month: April 2015

Seeing the Other as real
by Tom Sullivan

Confronting Hatred: 70 Years after the Holocaust played on the local NPR station recently. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, the program looks at “racism, antisemitism, and the ways in which hatred can grow.” I tuned in late and heard a German woman confronting Klansmen. It led me to this 2014 clip from the BBC:

Mo Asumang is a German filmmaker who confronts racism by speaking directly to those who want her excluded from their world. They don’t talk to or know their “so-called enemy,” Asumang says, “so what they do when they talk to me, they talk to reality, and that’s the first thing they have to survive.”

MORGAN FREEMAN:

Asumang concedes that her tactics for confronting hatred so directly are not for everyone. But she is inspired by the incredible change she witnessed in her own family, when her grandmother—a former Nazi party member, who worked for the SS—came face to face with a black grandchild.

MO ASUMANG:

My mother, she told me when she told my grandmother there’s a baby going to be born and the baby’s going to be black, that my grandmother said she wanted to jump in front of the tram and kill herself. But then when she saw me, even though she was at the SS, when she saw me, there was an emotional moment, and this emotional moment was human. There was a baby, and she was a woman. She felt like a mother. So she took care of me. So I think, through this in my personal history, I am really very, very sure that every person, even if the person has been to the SS, can change, but we have to bring it to a personal level.

It struck me how, as Asumang suggests, keeping the Other at a distance, maintaining the caricature, is essential to “keeping the faith,” as it were. Nazis, Klansman, antisemites, various brands of religious fundamentalists, have nice, neat, black-and-white categories for the world that insulate them from opposing ideas, contradictions, and people unlike themselves. Dealing with real people makes them very uneasy. It is “out of fear,” she suggests to a robed Klansman.

“No, it’s not out of fear,” he insists. Fear is for the weak.

In evangelical circles, mingling to temptation, to corruption. It’s threatening:

2 Corinthians 6:14 (KJV)

14 Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?

Because the devil is gonna steal your faith if you let him get too close. (Remember the God Warrior?)

Professor David Pilgrim of the Jim Crow Museum in Michigan explains his interest:

As corny and trite as it sounds, I think that antisemitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia…I think those things undermine democracy. I think they make of democracy a lie. I mean as long as we have these “us versus thems,” and as long as people are hurt in our society and others think that’s their problem, then we undermine this nation. So the trick is, is to figure out a way to get people that are not themselves directly hurt to believe that they are a part of the same “We.” And that for me has been the thrust of what it is I’ve spent my life trying to do; trying to make the “We” bigger.

The New York Times editorial board this morning examines renewed efforts to keep the wrong people from voting after the Supreme Court struck down the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act — efforts disguised as something loftier and more star-spangled. As sure as Benghazi, in 2016 we are sure to see more allegations of widespread fraud and more efforts to block participation by nameless, faceless “those people.”

Bloodthirsty nation

by digby

This makes me sick:

When you don’t even give a shit that innocent people might be executed or that it’s more likely to affect minorities you are an immoral piece of work who could, under your own value system, logically be executed yourself. After all, if you support executing innocent people you are no better than a murderer yourself.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans are more bloodthirsty than anyone else in the country. They aren’t quite as bad as they used to be, but they’re still bad. Democrats seem to be growing a bit more of a conscience:

I obviously don’t support the death penalty. But I have some sympathy for those who truly believe the system works to only execute the guilty and that it’s color blind. They’re wrong about the facts but it’s a moral question that operates on a pretty complicated level. It’s this blithe acceptance that innocent people might be killed that shows this is about simple-minded blood lust not justice. It’s barbaric.

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A geyser of money worthy of Old Faithful

by digby

It boggles the mind:

Less than a week after announcing his 2016 campaign for president, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida doesn’t need to worry about money.

It’s as good as in the bank.

“Marco Rubio will have the resources necessary to run a first-class campaign, that’s already been determined,” said billionaire Florida auto dealer Norman Braman, a former Jeb Bush supporter who is now one of Rubio’s highest-silhouette donors.

Annandale Capital founder George Seay, who is hosting a Rubio fundraiser with the moneyed Dallas elite at his 7,000-square-foot, seven-bath home on Tuesday, said: “Marco has had zero trouble raising money.”

At least seven other Rubio mega donors say their candidate has already received monetary commitments in excess of the $40 million he will likely need to battle through a presidential primary season that will feature a crowd of seasoned Republican candidates with strong financial backing.

Rubio’s whirlwind money-raising comes after a network of Senator Ted Cruz super PACs raked in $31 million following Cruz’s announcement in March that he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

The breakneck pace of the 2016 fundraising, most notably characterized by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s reputed aim to raise $100 million, is emblematic of how much the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision unleashed an era of unfettered political spending by for-profit corporations and the rich, altering the financial calculus of campaigns.

At a time when a band of billionaires can single-handedly bankroll the politician of their choice through a super PAC, in some ways it’s never been easier to raise money, signaling a phase that campaign-finance reformers fear will further concentrate political power in the hands of the deep-pocketed few.

The commitments to Rubio, Cruz and Bush ensure this Republican primary season will be long and bruising given that raising money is no longer the issue it once was.

Even more mind-boggling is the fact that the money doesn’t make even the tiniest dent in the wealth of these billionaires’ fortunes.

It’s going to be a truly dizzyingly profitable season for the media and the professional political world to have this huge influx of cash into the process. But we still get to vote. And the right wing base is well enough organized to make their own decision if they can see through this miasma of plutocratic smoke so they could surprise everyone. I’d guess that most people will be sick of this stuff long before the election and will tune it out. But hey, maybe that’s the Big Money Boyz’s nefarious plan.

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Friends and allies

by digby

Maybe Bob Graham is a nut. But he seems to really believe this is true:

The episode could have been a chapter from the thriller written by former Senator Bob Graham of Florida about a shadowy Saudi role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

A top F.B.I. official unexpectedly arranges a meeting at Dulles International Airport outside Washington with Mr. Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after he has pressed for information on a bureau terrorism inquiry. Mr. Graham, a Democrat, is then hustled off to a clandestine location, where he hopes for a breakthrough in his long pursuit of ties between leading Saudis and the Sept. 11 hijackers.

This real-life encounter happened in 2011, Mr. Graham said, and it took a startling twist.

“He basically said, ‘Get a life,’ ” Mr. Graham said of the F.B.I. official, who suggested that the former senator was chasing a dead-end investigation.

Mr. Graham, 78, a two-term governor of Florida and three-term senator who left Capitol Hill in 2005, says he will not relent in his efforts to force the government to make public a secret section of a congressional review he helped write – one that, by many accounts, implicates Saudi citizens in helping the hijackers.

“No. 1, I think the American people deserve to know the truth of what has happened in their name,” said Mr. Graham, who was a co-chairman of the 2002 joint congressional inquiry into the terrorist attacks. “No. 2 is justice for these family members who have suffered such loss and thus far have been frustrated largely by the U.S. government in their efforts to get some compensation.”

He also says national security implications are at stake, suggesting that since Saudi officials were not held accountable for Sept. 11 they have not been restrained in backing a spread of Islamic extremism that threatens United States interests. Saudi leaders have long denied any connection to Sept. 11.

Mr. Graham’s focus on a possible Saudi connection has received renewed attention because of claims made by victims’ families in a federal court in New York that Saudi Arabia was responsible for aiding the Sept. 11 hijackers and because of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the F.B.I. in Florida.

In sworn statements in the two cases, Mr. Graham has said there was evidence of support from the Saudi government for the terrorists. He also says the F.B.I. withheld from his inquiry, as well as a subsequent one, the fact that the bureau had investigated a Saudi family in Sarasota, Fla., and had found multiple contacts between it and the hijackers training nearby until the family fled just before the attacks.

Despite the F.B.I.’s insistence to the contrary, Mr. Graham said there was no evidence that the bureau had ever disclosed that line of investigation to his panel or the national commission that reviewed the attacks and delivered a report in 2004.

“One thing that irritates me is that the F.B.I. has gone beyond just covering up, trying to avoid disclosure, into what I call aggressive deception,” Mr. Graham said during an interview in a family office in this Miami suburb, which rose on what was a dairy farm operated by Mr. Graham’s father, also a political leader in Florida.

If what he says is correct we have to assume that the US Government covered this up for fear of upsetting a very close ally in the middle east — even at the expense of the truth about al Qaeda and 9/11. We should keep that in mind as we listen to our political leaders of both parties wax on about principles and values and keeping the babies safe. They often have a very different definition of what that means than the average American does.

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Real men don’t drink Chai

by digby

What an elitist …

Sorry, that’s just unAmerican…

Sophisticated Republican national security policy

by digby

This is what passes for Republican national security policy these days:

I’ll just let Olivia Nuzzi explain:

The biggest threat that he can wrap his head around is a reptile—native to America!—that mostly feeds on small rodents and birds.

“When you’re dealing with Islamic Jihad … you’re dealing with a rattlesnake.” — former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee
But this is not necessarily Huckabee’s fault—and he’s not alone.

Running a state does not require one to regularly contemplate war or diplomacy in the way that serving in Congress does.

Governors do not, obviously, get to vote on war resolutions or defense spending and because of that, their opinions about foreign policy are infrequently sought, because they are not relevant to their position.

In fact, were a governor to be completely devoid of presidential ambitions, they could feasibly serve two terms at the helm of any of the 50 states without once speaking publicly about the Middle East or Russia—and it wouldn’t actually matter.

And that’s how you end up with moments like the one two weeks ago on This Week, when former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, looking like a deer-in-headlights, haltingly answered a question about the biggest threat to national security.

“The greatest danger that we face right now on a consistent basis in terms of manmade threats is—um—is—nuclear Iran and related to that, extremist violence,” he said. “I don’t think you can separate the two. I think they go together in terms of natural threats, clearly, it’s climate change.”

His Republican counterparts who would like to be president have been equally unlucky navigating matters of homeland security.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, was asked about terrorism.

He responded confidently: “I want a commander-in-chief who will do everything in their power to ensure that the threat from radical Islamic terrorists does not wash up on American soil.”

Then, Walker made reference to his battles with unions—battles in which no one, to my recollection, was beheaded or hit by drones. “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”

After Crimea was invaded by Russian military forces, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie attended what The New York Times reported was “a confidential meeting of Republican activists.”

At the meeting, he was asked how he would deal with Putin differently than President Obama has, to which he replied by saying Obama’s behavior had let him be pushed around by Putin. “I don’t believe, given who I am, that he would make the same judgement,” he claimed. “Let’s leave it at that.” Christie reportedly did not offer any further insights into his own understanding of the issue.

In August, now-former Texas governor Rick Perry addressed the Heritage Foundation in Washington. He told them he believed it’s a “very real possibility” that ISIS could cross into the United States through Mexico because the border is not secure. “We have no clear evidence of that,” he acknowledged, but “individuals from ISIS or other terrorist states could be” planning to do that or, “they may have already used that.” Perry used this theory to advocate for a border fence.

These are the grown-ups.

By the way, Iranians are actually human beings not snakes  I know that comes as a surprise to many people.  There are even a whole lot of them right here in the good old US of A.

Cool vs Cold

by digby

Who knew Lincoln Chafee was such a putz?

COLMES: Do you have any relationship with Hillary Clinton? Do you know her at all?

CHAFEE: We served together in the Senate and we served on the Environment and Public Works
Committee together. I worked on a couple of bills with her.

COLMES: What’s your impression?

CHAFEE: She’s as everyone said a policy wonk, she can be cold.

COLMES: Cold personally? Not a warm fuzzy human being?

CHAFEE: Yeah, when we worked on some of these issues, she likes to be the center of attention.

Here’s a little game: substitute the word “serious” for cold and see how it sounds. And then ask yourself whether it’s laughable that a virtually unknown man who’s quixotically running for president is criticizing a rival for wanting to be the center of attention.

I won’t belabor the point but it’s worth noting that people rarely call a man “cold.” In fact, they call men “cool” a which has a whole other connotation. Saying a woman is “cold” is a put down that calls to mind some sort of sexual repression and I’m fairly sure that most smart, serious women have been called that in their professional lives, especially if they were not inclined to play the flirty game to sooth all the egos in the room.

More importantly, who gives a shit? It’s not as if Jeb Bush or Scott Walker — or Lincoln Chaffee, for that matter come across as cuddly comedians. Or, for that matter, Barack Obama who is so known for his cool demeanor that they call him “no drama Obama.” He’s so unemotional that if he was a woman he’d be called a frigid ice queen.

The truth is that we should want leaders who work hard and can keep their heads and stay focused. We don’t need them to come up with cute nicknames for everyone or seem like the kid of person you’d want to have a beer with. Being “cool” (or “cold” if you insist) is an asset not a liability in a leader.

There are plenty of legitimate things over which to criticize Clinton and it’s kind of sad (and idiotic) that the completely predictable sexist trope of “cold bitch” is still the go-to insult among so many people.

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We have met the enemy and he is You
by Tom Sullivan

“How many isolated incidents equal a pattern?” radio host Tavis Smiley asked Bill O’Reilly this week as the two debated police misconduct and mass incarceration.

From mass surveillance to mass incarceration, it appears that government of the people, etc. is increasingly prone to viewing itself as government against the people. The Guardian reported Friday that the Missouri National Guard had to caution its people against referring to Ferguson protesters as “enemy forces“:

A briefing for commanders included details of the troops’ intelligence capabilities so that they could “deny adversaries the ability to identify Missouri national guard vulnerabilities”, which the “adversaries” might exploit, “causing embarrassment or harm” to the military force, according to documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request by CNN.

And in an ominous-sounding operations security briefing, the national guard warned: “Adversaries are most likely to possess human intelligence (HUMINT), open source intelligence (OSINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), technical intelligence (TECHINT), and counterintelligence capabilities.”

National Guard spokesman Capt. Quinn told CNN later drafts of mission plans dialed back the language. Quinnn said, “‘enemy forces’ would be better understood as ‘potential threats.'” So that’s comforting.

In France, lawmakers debated an anti-terrorism bill that would expand the breadth of government surveillance:

The proposed law, introduced in Parliament on Monday, would allow the government to monitor emails and phone calls of suspected terrorists and their contacts, without seeking authorization from a judge. Telecommunications and internet companies would be forced to automatically filter vast amounts of metadata to flag suspicious patterns, and would have to make that data freely available to intelligence services. Agents would also be able to plant cameras and bugs in the homes of suspected terrorists, as well as keyloggers to track their online behavior.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls insisted, “… this is not a French Patriot Act.” We’re just going to Hoover your Internet and phone calls. (Pun intended.) Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., Congress is getting ready to extend the Patriot Act, including Section 215 that the NSA uses justify bulk data collection of personal data. But even without Section 215, there remain “a host of far-reaching surveillance authorities, including those of the Drug Enforcement Agency that are aimed at US citizens.”

Writing for Washington Monthly, Seth Stoughton a former police officer, now a law professor at the University of South Carolina, looks at the warrior mindset being inculcated by law enforcement training:

In this worldview, officers are warriors combatting unknown and unpredictable—but highly lethal—enemies. They learn to be afraid. Officers don’t use that word, of course. Vigilant, attentive, cautious, alert, or observant are the terms that appear most often in police publications. But officers learn to be vigilant, attentive, cautious, alert, and observant because they are afraid, and they afraid because they’re taught to be.

As a result, officers learn to treat every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter in the making. Every individual, every situation — no exceptions. A popular police training text offers this advice: “As you approach any situation, you want to be in the habit of looking for cover[] so you can react automatically to reach it should trouble erupt.” A more recent article puts it even more bluntly: “Remain humble and compassionate; be professional and courteous — and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”

Gosh, what about that would make young, black males apprehensive when encountering police officers?

Stoughton thinks this is exactly the wrong approach:

Counterintuitively, the warrior mentality also makes policing less safe for both officers and civilians. Officers learn to both verbally and physically control the space they operate in. They learn that it is essential to set the proper tone for an encounter, and the tone that best preserves officer safety is widely thought to be one of “unquestioned command.” Even acting friendly, officers are told, can make them a target. But like the use of physical force, the assertive manner in which officers set the tone of encounter can also set the stage for a negative response or a violent interaction—one that was, from the start, avoidable. From the warrior perspective, the solution is simple: the people with whom officers interact must accede, respecting officers’ authority by doing what they are told. The failure to comply is confirmation that the individual is an enemy for the warrior to vanquish, physically if necessary. And remember that officers are trained to expect threats. Our brains are wired so that we see what we expect to see; given their training, it’s no surprise that officers react to threats that don’t actually exist. The result is avoidable violence.

We are expected to treat police officers as public servants and heroes willing to lay down their lives to protect us. So it baffles me how, as Stoughton writes, “would-be officers are told that their primary objective is to go home at the end of every shift.” What is heroic about that? About sacrificing others before you would sacrifice yourself? What is heroic about shooting unarmed suspects in the back or choking them to death for selling loose cigarettes? Stoughton rightly blames the training, and offers suggestions on training Guardian Officers rather than Police Warriors. But beyond that, there is a culture growing within law enforcement, the military, and the intelligence community that, post-September 11, increasingly views the public they are meant to serve as “enemy forces” to be dealt with. Somewhere, Osama bin Laden must be smiling.

This calls for a big helping of Alaska word salad

by digby

Jeb, Jeb, Jeb. Remember, you’re supposed to be the smart one in the family:

“Jeb Bush, defending his efforts to keep alive Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman, when he was governor of Florida, suggested on Friday that patients on Medicare should be required to sign advance directives dictating their care if they become incapacitated. A similar proposal by President Obama — that doctors should be paid to advise patients on end-of-life decisions — became a political firestorm in 2009, when Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate, claimed that the legislation would give bureaucrats the power to decide if some frail or disabled people were deserving of medical care. The assertion was shown to be false.”

Sheesh. All Obamacare proposed was to let doctor’s charge for talking to their patients about living wills. This guy wants to require them to have one on file … or else, what? Thet’ll withhold their SS check? Send in the jackbooted thugs? What?

He’s so out of practice. (Either that or he’s always been so overrated.)

The outrageous cost of our love for guns

by digby

I wrote a little post over at Salon about the gun lobby making it impossible to gather date on gun deaths a couple of weeks ago.  I wish I’d had this latest deep dive into the cost of gun violence from Mother Jones to draw on.  It’s epic and it’s shocking:

Jennifer Longdon was one of at least 750,000 Americans injured by gunshots over the last decade, and she was lucky not to be one of the more than 320,000 killed. Each year more than 11,000 people are murdered with a firearm, and more than 20,000 others commit suicide using one. Hundreds of children die annually in gun homicides, and each week seems to bring news of another toddler accidentally shooting himself or a sibling with an unsecured gun. And perhaps most disturbingly, even as violent crime overall has declined steadily in recent years, rates of gun injury and death are climbing (up 11 and 4 percent since 2011) and mass shootings have been on the rise.

Yet, there is no definitive assessment of the costs for victims, their families, their employers, and the rest of us—including the major sums associated with criminal justice, long-term health care, and security and prevention. Our media is saturated with gun carnage practically 24/7. So why is the question of what we all pay for it barely part of the conversation?

A top public health expert describes the chill this way: “Do you want to do gun research? Because you’re going to get attacked. No one is attacking us when we do heart disease.”
Nobody, save perhaps for the hardcore gun lobby, doubts that gun violence is a serious problem. In an editorial in the April 7 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, a team of doctors wrote: “It does not matter whether we believe that guns kill people or that people kill people with guns—the result is the same: a public health crisis.”

And solving a crisis, as any expert will tell you, begins with data. That’s why the US government over the years has assessed the broad economic toll of a variety of major problems. Take motor vehicle crashes: Using statistical models to estimate a range of costs both tangible and more abstract—from property damage and traffic congestion to physical pain and lost quality of life—the Department of Transportation (DOT) published a 300-page study estimating the “total value of societal harm” from this problem in 2010 at $871 billion. Similar research has been produced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the impact of air pollution, by the Department of Health and Human Services on the costs of domestic violence, and so on. But the government has mostly been mute on the economic toll of gun violence. HHS has assessed firearm-related hospitalizations, but its data is incomplete because some states don’t require hospitals to track gunshot injuries among the larger pool of patients treated for open wounds. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also periodically made estimates using hospital data, but based on narrow sample sizes and covering only the medical and lost-work costs of gun victims.

Why the lack of solid data? A prime reason is that the National Rifle Association and other influential gun rights advocates have long pressured political leaders to shut down research related to firearms. The Annals of Internal Medicine editorial detailed this “suppression of science”:

Two years ago, we called on physicians to focus on the public health threat of guns. The profession’s relative silence was disturbing but in part explicable by our inability to study the problem. Political forces had effectively banned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies from funding research on gun-related injury and death. The ban worked: A recent systematic review of studies evaluating access to guns and its association with suicide and homicide identified no relevant studies published since 2005.

An executive order in 2013 from President Obama sought to free up the CDC via a new budget, but the purse strings remain in the grip of Congress, many of whose members have seen their campaigns backed by six- and even seven-figure sums from the NRA. “Compounding the lack of research funding,” the doctors added, “is the fear among some researchers that studying guns will make them political targets and threaten their future funding even for unrelated topics.”

750,000 Americans injured by gunshots in 10 years. 320,000 dead. For freedom? We only lost about 5,000 in the Iraq war.

We are supposed to be the most advanced nation in the world. Contrary to Ted Cruz’a fatuous insistence that climate deniers are the Galileos of our time, it’s actually scientific researchers in any area conservatives don’t want researched. Same as it ever was.

Read the whole piece this week-end if you have the chance it’s really eye-opening.

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