Month: April 2015

“A political stunt, a bow to Hollywood jingoism, and pillow talk”

by digby

Via:

Obama’s Department of Justice has led the most targeted campaign against whistleblowers of any president ever, charging more government employees under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined—almost all of whom sit in prison serving sentences up to 30 years.

As the relative slap on the wrist Gen. David Petraeus received this week revealing classified military information to his mistress and biographer proves, this aggressive pursuit of leaks does not, however, extend to the leadership of his intelligence agencies, revealing a deep seated double standard.

Petraeus is not the exception here. Current CIA director John Brennan once leaked classified details of a busted terror plot to the Associated Press yet saw no charges. Former CIA Director Leon Panetta once revealed classified details about the raid that captured Osama bin Laden to Hollywood filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow for the purposes of her film about the raid, Zero Dark Thirty, but he also saw no charges.

All three leaks were not done in the interest of the public but respectively as a political stunt, a bow to Hollywood jingoism, and pillow talk. The disregard for the criminal activity of these men, all former or current top administration officials, reveals a systemic hypocrisy within an administration failing to live up to its own standards. In order to highlight their hypocrisy, it’s worthwhile to look at seven lower government employees who shared classified information and paid a heavy price for it.

The article goes on to note the charges and convictions against a number of whistleblowers.

This disparity is certainly not surprising. Friends of elites usually get away with things that average people don’t get away with. What is surprising is how little they care about the optics of this particular type of double standard. If they want to have these harsh penalties for whistleblowing in order to deter future whistleblowers, this is one situation in which allowing their buddies to get away with doing the same thing for their own purposes shows utter contempt for democracy and the public interest. It really gives away the game.

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The earth is angry my friend

by digby

Chile volcano:

Nepal earthquake:

Planet Earth is still alive and kicking.  If we humans manage to kill ourselves and all other life it will still be here.

Update: Oh God …
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TOTD: Noah Smith

by digby

I’ll support drone warfare when the enemy has drones too, and it’s just robots blasting robots and us watching on TV. http://t.co/AD28AkJOkw
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) April 25, 2015

It probably won’t be long before they do. Unfortunately, they won’t be fighting other drones, they’ll just be killing more humans.

In fact, the real future of drones, in my view, is the end of the soldier fighting soldier portion of our evolutionary program. We will all be using robots to target civilians. It’s quite an advancement. Proud to be a part of it.

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Proving the stereotype year after year

by digby

It should be free, but other than that …

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Bruce Jenner comes out

by digby

… and I, for one, am shocked and appalled. Last night — on national television — he admitted a great, dark secret. He admitted that the rumors are true.  He is a … Republican.

When asked about Barack Obama addressing LGBT rights in his State of the Union, the 65-year-old former Olympic athlete said that didn’t affect him much.

“I’ve always been more on the conservative side,” Jenner said.

Sawyer, looking shocked, asked if he identifies as a Republican, to which Jenner answered, “Yes.”

What is this world coming to when a sports hero and Hollywood icon pulls a face at the mention of President Obama?

Oh, and Jenner also mentioned that he’s transgender.(He told Diane Sawyer that he has not transitioned to be called she as yet.) His family is fine with it and just wants him to be happy. He’s probably lucky they aren’t conservative Republicans too.

*Seriously, it was a pretty amazing interview.  I don’t happen to like Jenner much as a person but you have to admire his courage.  I sincerely hope this will have a positive influence on our society.

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Silenced for speaking her mind
by Tom Sullivan

We have become disturbingly accustomed in this country to police shootings of unarmed, black men. This is not another one of those:

Pakistan civil liberties activist and social worker Sabeen Mahmud was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Karachi Friday night as she headed home from a talk on the troubled Balochistan province. She was 40.

According to the Dawn website, Sabeen left The Second Floor — she was the director of T2F which she called a community space for open dialogue — with her mother shortly after 9 pm and was on her way home when she was shot. She died on the way to hospital. Doctors said they retrieved five bullets from her body. Her mother was said to be in a critical condition.

“No one has claimed responsibility for her shooting, and police have not named any motive,” reports CNN, plus this background on Mahmud:

Her second floor cafe on a dusty industrial road was painted with dashes of psychedelic colors. And Sabeen Mahmud surrounded herself there with books, people, and discussions on technology, human rights and women’s entrepreneurship.

Introducing others to Jimi Hendrix, street art, and talking politics was not supposed to get her killed. But in Pakistan, free speech is dangerous, and Mahmud’s exuberant exercise of it made her stick out nationwide.

[snip]

In the province of Baluchistan, where separatists have fought a virulent insurgency for years, people have been disappearing regularly. There have been steady allegations of mass abduction. The Lahore University of Management Sciences planned to host the discussion on the topic, with human rights activist Mama Qadeer Baloch, but authorities shut it down.

Mahmud would not hear of it not going on.

“Despite the plurality of opinion, very little space seems to be given to the discussion in Pakistani mainstream media or academia; the debate seems to be shut down before it can even begin,” she posted on Facebook. “What is the reality? Has the media been silenced on Balochistan? What makes it dangerous for us to talk about Pakistan’s largest province at one of our most celebrated universities?”

So she hosted the talk herself. At Aljazeera, friends remember her:

“Sabeen was a voice of reason, pluralism and secularism: the kind of creed that endangers the insidious side of constructed Pakistani nationalism,” Raza Rumi, a rights activist who escaped an assassination attempt in March 2014 and now lives in the United States out of fear for his life, told Al Jazeera.

“In her work, she was neither a political partisan nor a power seeker but Pakistan’s state and non-state actors are averse to any form of dissent. This is why she had to be killed,” Rumi said.

“Her death has simply reopened my wounds. She gave me support when I escaped death and now I feel even more scared to return to Pakistan. Her death is a huge blow to Pakistan’s civil society and social change movements.”

Outside this morning, it’s raining.

I’ll bet you need this too…


by digby

It’s been a long week, and I am in serious need of a cocktail or two.

And this:

Those are baby otters.  I’ve named them Bernie and Liz.

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Rubiomania may last a while

by digby

538 splashes cold water on Rubio’s “surge” but offers some hopeful news for the hot Cuban-American hopeful’s long term prospects:

What makes Rubio strong isn’t his polling surge, but that he is well-liked across the party apparatus. He pulls in conservatives with his voting record and moderates with his impressive 2010 Senate victory in Florida, a crucial battleground state.

This is all evident in non-horse-race polling. Rubio’s net favorability rating among Republicans is near the top of the field. The gap between Republicans who could see themselves voting for Rubio and those who couldn’t is among the field’s best, according to an average of CBS News surveys conducted this year

I have been saying for months that Rubio is the guy who makes the most sense for the GOP. Of course,   I could be wrong. It’s based entirely on seat-of-the-pants intuition and very general observation of the political field. But I haven’t changed my mind yet.

I don’t know that he can win — it’s early days. But if I were a Republican strategist I’d tell the big money boys that he’s the guy who looks like the best bet to beat Clinton. On paper at least. (I’d also tell Rubio to lose the smirk — it worked for W but it’s probably not a good idea to remind people of him.)

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Submission to the Panopticon

by digby

We’ve been writing here about the “stingray” technology and the local cops’ use of it for a while.  But I was happily surprised to see the mainstream Vox take up the subject and with such a strong editorial viewpoint:

Did you know that law enforcement can track your cellphone with a fake cell tower? It’s true — and devices that do this, known as stingrays, are at the center of a growing scandal.

The FBI has done everything it could to keep the existence and use of stingrays a secret. Local law enforcement agencies are forced to sign nondisclosure agreements before they can use the devices. The FBI claims that revealing details about how the gadgets work would tip off criminals and terrorists, rendering them less effective.

But in recent months, civil liberties groups have steadily chipped away at the secrecy of these devices. We’ve learned that they’re used by dozens — and probably hundreds — of law enforcement agencies across the country, and that at least one agency has used them thousands of times.

Critics say the way these devices have been used violates the US Constitution, by tracking people’s locations without judicial oversight. And the secrecy surrounding the devices also appears to be hampering efforts to prosecute violent criminals, as prosecutors have dropped key evidence rather than discuss how it was obtained.

The extreme secrecy surrounding these devices is out of step with the American tradition of open and accountable government. Americans have a right to know that law enforcement spying has proper judicial oversight. And this kind of oversight is impossible if even basic information about the technology is kept under wraps.

There is more info at the link. It would be really nice if the rest of the mainstream press showed similar concern. This is all of a piece in which new technology is created and then secretly deployed by the government where it inevitably leads to civil liberties abuses. After all, civil liberties exist for the express purpose of impeding the government’s natural inclination to abuse the rights of its citizens, whether to further its own power or whether they believe it will “protect” innocents. Neither rationale is acceptable in a free society. After all, the government could “protect us” by using their powers to burst into every home at will to ensure that nobody is hiding anything but we would find that to be an odd way of defining “protection”. Making things as easy as possible for police is not how we’ve arranged our society.

I suppose it’s easy for people to believe that the NSA or the FBI are above such pettiness although it’s very hard to see why considering their history. But for the sake of this argument we’ll grant that. Can anyone in their right minds truly believe that local police are above corruption or error and should therefore be allowed to spy on citizens in secret with no safeguards? If you’re willing to believe such fatuous nonsense then you probably deserve the police state in which you’ll soon be living.

While many Americans may give the benefit of the doubt to police in a violent altercation they are unlikely to want to trust them with their own personal information. If they think it’s fine then they ought to just give all their passwords out to law enforcement and willingly submit themselves to The Panopticon. I’m not up for that myself. I like being able to keep my private thoughts to myself. In fact, I can’t imagine what life will be like when that’s lost. It strikes me as a nightmare.

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Good for the daughter but not for the wife

by digby

I think we can all see the problem with this:

And other problems linger:

By more than two to one, men say that it is harder to be a man today compared with their father’s generation–and a number of the reasons focused on changes in their relationships with women.

This is just one of the insights from a recent Hart Research Associates poll for the Shriver Report Snapshot: An Insight Into the 21st Century Man. The online survey was conducted among 818 men 18 and older.

Eighty-five percent of men say they are clear in their role in society today, but 45% say it is harder to be a man today compared to their father’s generation, while just 20% say it is easier to be a man today (35% say it is no easier or harder). For those who say it is harder to be a man, a number of the most common reasons stem from changes in relationships with women, including that women are in a stronger position in the workplace and financially; men are taking on a greater share of household responsibilities; and more demands are being placed on men.

While the old mold in male-female relationships has been broken, it’s clear that the new shape has yet to set. Sixty-three percent of men say they are very comfortable living with or being married to a woman who works outside the home, and 51% are very comfortable with a female partner earning more money than they do. But 56% of men agree, generally speaking, that men are more concerned about making good impressions and earning the respect of other men than earning the respect of women. And while a majority are very comfortable with their female partner working outside the home, just 24% of men said they would be very comfortable being a stay-at-home dad and not working outside the home.

These blurred lines and conflicted feelings about relationships with women are present in another way. Men were asked to select from a list of 10 terms the two or three qualities they deem most important in a wife or female partner. From the same list, they were asked to identify the most important qualities in their daughter when she grows up. Intelligence topped the list for a wife or female partner at 72% and for a daughter at 81%. But the ranking of qualities on both lists diverge after this, sometimes with wide gaps. While 45% of men consider being attractive one of the most important qualities for their wife or female partner, just 11% said so for their daughter. Similarly, 34% specified being sweet as a key quality for a female partner, but just 19% said the same for a daughter. Conversely, men are much more likely to cite being independent (66% for daughter; 34% for wife/female partner) and strong (48% daughter, 28% wife/female partner) as most important qualities for a daughter…

It is clear to me that these blurred lines and conflicted feelings are not easily divided by demographics or ideological leanings either.

I just post this as a little FYI to illustrate that the issues around gender are very complicated and in the most intimate ways. As a good friend of mine pointed out the other day, women bear the additional burden of seeking equality not only in the public sphere but must often deal with oppressors who have no idea they are oppressors and with whom they share their private life as well. Let’s just say that it’s complicated for everyone and pretending that it isn’t merely serves the status quo.