Month: May 2015

That’s gotta hurt

by digby

From the New Jersey Star-Ledger

For months, we have wondered how Gov. Chris Christie thinks he can win the presidency when New Jersey is in such rotten shape after his six years in office.

Now we may have our answer: The man has lost touch with reality.

In a national TV interview Monday, Christie was asked to explain why 65 percent of New Jersey voters think he’d make a bad president.

His answer: We love him so much that we want him to remain our governor.

“They want me to stay,” he told Megyn Kelly of Fox News. “A lot of those people in that 65 percent want me to stay. And I’ve heard that from lots of people at town hall meetings.”

Maybe he doesn’t believe that himself. That might step on his core pitch about telling the truth, but it would at least tether him to the planet earth.

The worry is that he really believes it. Politicians like him live in a bubble, surrounded by sycophants. Hard truths have a tough time penetrating.

We are here to help. First, the governor needs to hold more town hall meetings in Democratic districts, and at night when working people can attend. He preaches to elderly and overwhelmingly white audiences, over and over.

It’s no wonder that New Jersey is screaming a warning to the rest of the country.
Second, he needs to look beyond this one poll and spot the pattern. Only 1 in 3 approve of his performance. And even fewer believe he’s coming clean about Bridgegate.

Last, he needs to pour himself a drink and ask himself the tough question: Why don’t people love me?

They offer up a bunch of possibilities like taxes, jobs, Bridgegate, crumbling infrastructure etc. But he should know and so should they: if you’re going to be a screaming asshole you’d better deliver. If you don’t, all you have to offer is the fact that you are an ineffectual screaming asshole. There’s nothing worse than that.

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Not a tough one to answer: he’s an asshole who has presided over New Jersey’s

Brat delivers

by digby

My colleague at Salon, Elias Isquith has a piece up today about that Tea Party giant slayer, Dave Brat, whom everyone seemed to think won because of a libertarian revolt against Washington last year. Guess what he’s up to?

Brat’s defeat of Cantor was joyously received by many Tea Party-type Republicans, of course; but some left-leaning self-proclaimed populists — like Ralph Nader, for example — were fired up, too. However, these lefties were more excited by what Brat could be made to represent than by who he actually was or what he actually believed. They tended to ignore his pronouncements on immigration, seeing the libertarian-minded opponent of the 2008 bailouts as a fellow foe of Wall Street instead. But now that he’s been in Congress long enough to get his sea legs (and to start worrying about getting ousted himself) we’re starting to see what really makes this “libertarian populist” tick.

I hope you’re sitting down and are ready for a shock — because it turns out that it’s not fighting Wall Street; it’s fighting immigration. Actually, it’s not even that (though there’s little doubt about what Brat would do if a comprehensive reform bill were brought up for a vote). Because it turns out that Brat isn’t simply worried about comprehensive reform. He’s worried about immigrants, period. And he makes no exception for Dreamers (those who were brought into the country as children), even if they love America so much that they want to serve in its armed forces. These folks, he says, might as well be agents of ISIS.

No, really, that’s what he said. During an appearance on a Virginia right-wing radio show last week, Brat shared the story of how he helped defeat an amendment to allow Dreamers to enlist. “I wanted to stand up and shout,” Brat said, referring to how he felt when the amendment’s supporters talked about the Dreamers’ patriotism. “I mean, ISIS is willing to serve in our military as well,” he added. According to Professor Brat, the proposal was reminiscent of nothing so much as the downfall of the Roman Empire: “[P]art of the reason Rome fell,” he explained, “is because they started hiring the barbarians … to be troops in their own army.”

Elias says he thinks that’s probably not what most libertarians (or anyone else) thought Brat was all about and he’s probably right.

But some of us saw this coming. As I wrote in Salon last year:

[T]he one area where Brat diverges from a standard libertarian POV is the big flagship issue of his campaign: immigration. Libertarians traditionally believe in a loose, if not open, border policy and tend not to be hardcore immigrant bashers. It’s hard to know if Brat has a visceral objection to immigration as so many of his big-name supporters do or whether he genuinely objects simply because Big Business likes it. But he certainly knows how to talk the Tea Party talk:

Laura Ingraham: Are you a man who would separate a child from her mother or father and isn’t that a hard-hearted approach and a way that you’ll never grow the Republican Party or the conservative base. I mean it’s so mean. [The bigoted wingnut said sarcastically]

Brat: You hit it on the head, that is the crux of the issue and Eric Cantor is acting exactly like Obama and the Democrats basing public policy on emotion rather than reason. Just for starters, “making life work?” I mean the day you think the federal government and Caesar should make your life work, you’ve got a fundamental problem on your hands and you need to go re-read history books. Whenever you trust the federal government, federal governments do not love, they are incapable of love, so this emotional pitch that Caesar is going to take care of children is just completely irrational. Our founders knew much better. They wanted a contest of 50 states. And on the point you make about the passage of this great founding principle that children should not be punished, does that apply to all children across the globe that they somehow receive a right to be US citizens? And if that were true, that would mean all future DREAMers have a right to amnesty as every immigration law is bypassed and permanently void if you follow Eric’s logic.

I think you referred to it in the news, I know Mark Levin did last night, the Washington Times reported 60,000 kids are expected to cross the border at 225.00 a day per child., and big business gets the cheap labor that’s what they want, Eric Cantor’s their guy, but who has to pay the 225.00 a day per kids who are coming over the border in what some are calling a humanitarian crisis because Eric Cantor is sending all the wrong signals? … He wanted to put illegal immigrants into our military, which makes no sense. You’ll have non-citizens in one of the most key positions in our society, serving in the most honored spot.

He dog-whistled the Christian right with all that “Caesar” talk, winked at the anti-corporate populists, complained about costs to the taxpayers, genuflected to the military and blamed Eric Cantor for all of it. No wonder he won. He’s good. In fact, he ran a pretty textbook right-wing populist campaign, featuring an attack on “elites” (whom everyone hates these days) with a thinly veiled nativist appeal to national purity.

I’m not sure why so many people on the left and the right insisted that Brat’s anti-immigrant platform (and the national figures like Ingraham who swept into his district to support him and it) wasn’t the reason he won that seat. It certainly seemed obvious to me at the time that this was what fueled his campaign and that this was what that far right mid-term primary constituency was hearing that they liked. I’m sure they hate taxes and I’m sure they are sick of the current Washington scene like everyone else. But it takes something really visceral to get people to vote against a powerful congressman who is a national figure and a member of the leadership and it’s not something as abstract as “Wall Street.”

Xenophobia motivates the right at times like these and Brat brought it, big time. And he’s delivering. It turns out that’s what he really believes in, which makes him a true right wing believer.

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Rand Paul “orates” the Patriot Act

by digby

Via Roll Call:

At approximately 1:18 p.m. Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul took to the Senate floor for what’s best described as an extended oration about the Fourth Amendment.

Unlike Rand Paul’s filibuster of the choice of John O. Brennan to head up the Central Intelligence Agency in 2013, which was designed to protest the Obama administration’s use of drones, the Kentucky Republican isn’t really holding up Senate business this time since the chamber is sitting through an “intervening day.”

That hasn’t stopped Paul from calling his long talk a “filibuster.”

Paul is speaking against reauthorizing provisions of surveillance law that were established under the Patriot Act, espousing the view that the program of bulk collection of phone records by the National Security Agency is not only ill-advised, but also unconstitutional.

Late Monday, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., filed a pair of cloture motions related to the “fast track” trade legislation that’s been pending on the Senate floor.

Under the rule, McConnell’s action means the Senate will vote to limit debate on a substitute amendment to the trade vehicle offered by Finance Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, one hour after the Senate convenes on the calendar day Thursday. That’s as early as 1 a.m.

But, a precedent applied when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, gave a similar long speech would mean the vote wouldn’t take place until approximately 1 p.m. Under that ruling of the chair, the vote would take place one hour after a new legislative day starts automatically at noon.

Rand Paul’s presidential campaign was quick to send out a fundraising email tied to the speech and threatening to hold senators in town through the Memorial Day recess.

“Fellow Conservative, liberty cannot long last without privacy from government intrusion. Yet, it seems many of my colleagues here in the Senate care more about getting out of town for the Memorial Day break than protecting the Constitution so many American patriots have fought and died for. I have news for them. They are going NOWHERE,” Paul wrote. “I will not simply stand down and allow them to ram through another “last-minute” deal to shred our Constitution — all while they think the American people aren’t looking.”

Paul could be delaying the start of other Senate business, such as the filing of a motion to limit debate to just take up a surveillance bill, but given the amount of debate time in order on trade, that might be a moot point.

He’s was joined by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, but no Republicans have signed on. I’m fairly sure that NSA reform is no longer fashionable on the right now that they’ve gotten back in touch with their inner authoritarian.

Paul’s claim that he will not “allow” them to do this is a bit of an exaggeration. He’s not actually filibustering and there undoubtedly are not enough votes to sustain one if he did, so this is mostly theater. But it’s good he’s doing it, if only to get this stuff in the record. I’m pessimistic about the “reforms” in the USA Patriot Act ending up being improvements (it would be a first) but it’s certainly good to try.

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Secrets, Politics and Torture

by digby

I wrote about last night’s Frontline documentary called “Secrets, Politics and Torture” for Salon this morning. It’s well worth watching online if you missed it. Here’s an excerpt:

The Frontline film takes a detailed look at the torture program and the saga of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Torture Report, the summary of which was finally released last December. (The 6,000 page report remains classified.) We know about the waterboarding and confining of prisoners in a tiny box for days, the sleep deprivation, the beatings and the grotesque depravities like “rectal feeding” from the Senate report. It reads like a bureaucratic version of the Marquis de Sade’s “20 days of Sodom.” Seeing all that put in context with the lies and the coverup lends it a new layer of horror.

Of particular interest in this film are the interviews with top CIA officials John Rizzo, the agency’s legal counsel, and John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director at the time, both of whom excuse any alleged shortcomings in the torture regime as a result of the agency being tasked with something it wasn’t trained to do. The film does make it clear that the members of the interrogation team, in the beginning at least, were sickened by what they were doing, but were told to continue by the people in Washington who insisted they keep doing it.

Rizzo is a complicated character who explains that he didn’t see his duty as one requiring him to question the morality of the program, but simply to find ways to protect the agency from legal exposure. And he cleverly did that by getting buy-in from the Department of Justice, members of Congress and the White House. He is a creature of the CIA, and is loyal to the agency. But he admits to being shaken when he went to John McCain, after the program had been revealed, to try to convince him that it was highly controlled and effective — and Mccain simply said, “it all sounds like torture to me.” Rizzo was also obviously upset that CIA Director of Operations Jose Rodriguez took it upon himself to destroy tapes of the first horrific interrogation, the revelation of which served as the catalyst for the Senate Torture Investigation.

But if Rizzo comes off as at least somewhat ambiguous about the whole thing, John McLaughlin reveals himself as one of the most chilling characters in recent American history. You wouldn’t assume that this rather bland looking fellow would look menacingly into the camera and hiss, “We were at war. Bad things happen in war,” as if he were in a Clint Eastwood movie. But he does just that.

He also specializes in fatuous nonsense like this:

The CIA faced a real dilemma here: On the one hand, we knew this program would be contentious. On the other hand, we asked ourselves: Wouldn’t it be equally immoral if we failed to get this information and thousands of Americans died? If there was another 9/11? How immoral would that be? That’s the dilemma we were up against. And we felt a moral commitment to protect the United States.

That’s very stirringly heroic, but it ignores the fact that despite his insistence otherwise, there’s simply no evidence that their program was effective at all, much less any more effective than other means that didn’t require the United States of America to twist itself into a pretzel to try to justify its immoral behavior. And you have to wonder: with that kind of logic are there any limits to what we can do? It doesn’t sound like there are.

One thing I failed to mention in that piece, was a revelation in the film that I had never heard before. Ryan Cooper in The Week describes it like this:

The Abu Ghraib torture scandal was a colossal stain on Bush’s legacy, and by late 2005 much of the administration had turned against the CIA program. Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice led a push inside the administration to announce an official stop to the program. At a high-level meeting in the White House, everyone but Cheney agreed with Rice, and she seemed to have won. A speech was arranged.

But as happened so often in the Bush administration, Cheney went to Bush personally afterward, and convinced him that Rice was wrong. Rice went to the speech expecting Bush to disavow “enhanced interrogation,” but instead he embraced it, and claimed it had produced valuable intelligence (it hadn’t).

He didn’t just embrace it. He came out swinging in defense of it and demanded that the congress legalize the practice. It’s impossible to know what Cheney told him, but it seemed to galvanise his support. The film shows the incredulous look on Condi Rice’s face as she listened to the speech — and the grimace grin of Cheney sitting a few seats down. Bush and Cheney walked away from the podium together, back into the White House. It’s quite stunning.

And I can’t help but wonder what in God’s name it would have taken for any of these people to resign? Powell says he was misled by Cheney and the CIA but he stayed on through the first term nonetheless. Condi Rice and the entire National Security team in the White House was lied to by the president who went out and publicly did exactly the opposite of what he told them he was going to do. And yet they stayed on.

Lies to justify war. Lies to justify torture. They knew. They did nothing.

This episode continues to haunt me and I think it will haunt the nation for a very long time. And I have little doubt that if there were another terrorist attack on American soil or any other major threat, the government would do it again without question.

The previous consensus, agreed upon after two epic global conflagrations in the last century, on preventive war, war crimes and human rights is dead and buried. And America is the country that killed it.

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They knew something was wrong with Freddie Gray

by digby

The Baltimore Sun published new video of the Freddie Gray incident. It’s pretty chilling:

As officers restrain Gray, the video shows another officer pull up in a patrol car, get out and walk toward the van. (The neighbor did not allow his name to be published because he feared retaliation by police, but Gross allowed The Sun to copy the video from her phone.)
At this point on the cell phone video, Gross yells to Gray, “You all right?” No response is detectable from the recording and Gross said she didn’t hear Gray respond. Her neighbor yells, “Porter, can we get a supervisor up here please?” He said he was yelling at officer William Porter, who would be one of the six charged in the case.

The neighbor said Porter motioned to Rice, identifying him as the supervisor. On the video, the neighbor says, “Can we get someone else out here? This is not cool. This is not cool. Do you hear me?” The man’s shouts are heard on the phone, but not the officers’ responses.

The man said that Rice and other officers moved toward him, blocking his view of the van. They didn’t ask him to stop recording, but Rice took out his Taser and threatened to use it if he didn’t leave, the man said.

Desi at Daily Kos writes:

According to Baltimore police, Freddie Gray was “irate” in a transport van after his arrest and they had to restrain him. However, that account is being challenged with the release by The Baltimore Sun today of a new video taken by a witness at the van’s Baker and Mount Street stop.

In the video Gray is seen “halfway out of the van, his stomach flat on the floor, and his legs hanging off the back. He does not move as four officers stand over him and place shackles around his ankles.”

A police news release on April 16 stated that when the van departed from Mount and Baker streets, video evidence indicated that Gray was “conscious and speaking,” yet it’s not known what video the police are talking about. The account of the eyewitness who recorded the video reveals otherwise

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People keep implying that the indictments were based on some sort of over-emotional reaction by the state’s attorney. Maybe there’s more evidence than we know about.

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Fast Track news, House and Senate (plus a nice infographic)

by Gaius Publius

Paul Ryan now thinks he can get Fast Track passed in the House:

Republicans claim enough votes to pass fast-track trade bill 

Top Republicans predicted on Sunday that both chambers of Congress would muster the votes to pass the “fast-track” authority sought by President Barack Obama to negotiate major trade deals, despite opposition from Obama’s fellow Democrats.

“Yes, we’ll pass it. We’ll pass it later this week,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said in an interview with ABC.

Republican U.S. Representative Paul Ryan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he was confident the measure would also pass the House of Representatives.

“We will have the votes,” said Ryan, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. “We’re doing very well. We’re gaining a lot of steam and momentum.”

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren is leading the charge in the Senate. In addition to releasing her own report — Broken Promises: Decades of Failure to Enforce Labor Standards in Free Trade Agreements (pdf and a good read) — she’s unleashing a barrage of amendments in the Senate:

Elizabeth Warren fires new shot in trade battle with President Obama
… Warren is also highlighting labor concerns with the more than half-dozen
amendments she submitted to the trade legislation. For example, she
proposed a measure that would end TPA if the Labor Department does not
investigate accusations of labor violations by a country in a trade
agreement.

She also filed a proposal that would terminate TPA depending on the
level of the U.S. trade deficit with partnering countries, as well as
another amendment aimed at ending TPA in January 2017 — cutting the
current length of the “fast-track” powers from six years to about two.

Backed
by about more than a dozen Senate Democrats, Warren and Sen. Heidi
Heitkamp (D-N.D.) are also pushing an amendment that bars “fast-track”
powers to be used on trade deals that include the so-called
investor-state dispute settlement provision. That obscure language
allows companies to sue governments over decisions that harm their
foreign investments — which Warren argues could force U.S. taxpayers to
pick up the tab for those settlements.

Heidi Heitkamp made the list of TPP proponents, so getting her name on the anti-ISDS amendment is a bit of a coup for Warren and a testament to her coalition-building skills.

Whether McConnell will allow amendments, something he promised Reid he would do, is your guess. The article above closes with this: “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told ABC on Sunday that the chamber will finish the trade legislation this week.” How he does that with these and other amendments queued up is beyond me.

Why Fast Track should fail

In addition to the reason expressed here, the need to defeat Fast Track for any trade legislation is neatly encapsulated in this infographic:

Suitable for sharing, should you care to.

GP

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There’s something happening, eh?
by Tom Sullivan

While Texas Sen. Ted Cruz went “full Ted Cruz” and Texas bikers went to guns, I missed the tremors coming out of Canada’s version of Cruz’s petrostate. Canada’s Globe and Mail once called it Saudi Alberta, where, Russell Cobb writes for the New York Times, the Progressive Conservative Party had been in power longer than he’d been alive [emphasis mine]:

Then came the “Alberta Spring,” the May elections in which the Progressive Conservatives were swept from power by the left-leaning New Democrats. In the run-up to the vote Rachel Notley, the New Democrats’ leader, argued that Alberta’s oil belonged to the people, not to the foreign corporations that do most of the exploration and extraction in the oil sands. She called for a review of the province’s current royalty regime, as well as a 2 percent increase in corporate taxes. It’s hard to imagine mainstream Texas Democrats making that case, let alone sweeping the state elections, and yet that’s precisely what happened in Alberta.

But campaign rhetoric is one thing. It’s another for the new premier to fundamentally challenge the backbone of the provincial economy. Especially when one poll suggests that voters threw out the old bums more than voted in new ones.

Notley is already negotiating with oil industry over just what the royalty review will mean, and what the NDP platform meant when it criticized conservatives for “neglecting our opportunity to invest in value-added processing and refining – investment that would create more jobs in Alberta instead of exporting them to Texas.” Hmmm.

Still, Cobb writes, “To my ears, attuned as they are to the sacred American concept of private property, the idea that ordinary people own natural resources sounds, well, kind of socialist.” As Sen. Bernie Sanders might say, what’s wrong with that? As oil interests here in the States lobby for oil and gas drilling off the East Coast (with the Obama administration’s support), just who owns the Commons, makes the decisions about and profits from the Commons is something that here in the States we are overdue to review.

I just don’t even want to know

by digby

Ok, if you must know

The way we treat the mentally ill in this country is a crime

by digby

The Supreme Court ruled this week that police shooting an agitated schizophrenic woman is justified even if they could have stood outside in a hallway and left her alone in a room until more help arrived. The Justices felt that it was reasonable for them go bursting into the room and shoot her even though they had already been in there, had retreated and knew that she couldn’t harm anyone but herself.

The incident involving Sheehan started when social worker Heath Hodge believed Sheehan’s schizophrenia had deteriorated to “gravely disabled” after Sheehan stopped taking her medication, and called police for help transporting her to a mental health facility for involuntary commitment and treatment.

When police showed up at the San Francisco group home where Sheehan lived without a warrant, Sheehan “reacted violently,” wielding a knife and telling the officers she would kill them. In response, officers safely retreated to a hallway. “The officers called for backup,” the Ninth Circuit decision explained, “but rather than waiting for backup or taking other actions to maintain the status quo or de-escalate the situation, the officers drew their weapons and forced their way back into Sheehan’s room, presumably to disarm, subdue and arrest her, and to prevent her escape (although there do not appear to have been any means of escape available). Sheehan once again threatened the officers with a knife, causing the officers to shoot Sheehan five or six times.”

Sheehan argued that officers failed to reasonably accommodate her disability by “forcing their way back into her room without taking her mental illness into account and without employing tactics that would have been likely to resolve the situation without injury to herself or others.”

And expert witness Lou Reiter provided testimony that officers, in fact, did not follow that protocol at all. He said officers are trained not to agitate or excite individuals who are mentally ill, to “respect the person’s comfort zone, use nonthreatening communications and to employ the passage of time to their advantage.” He also cited materials used by the San Francisco Police Department that advise officers to request backup, to calm the situation, to communicate, to move slowly, to assume a quiet, nonthreatening manner, to take time to assess the situation and to “give the person time to calm down.”

“Reiter deemed the officers’ second entry into Sheehan’s home tactically unreasonable under those policies,” the lower court noted, finding that the officers should have awaited back-up and considered seeking a warrant.

In Monday’s opinion, the justices noted that whether the officers followed training protocol is not a factor in granting police officers what is known as “qualified immunity,” the broad federal protection that shields the police and other government entities from civil rights lawsuits.

“Considering the specific situation confronting Reynolds and Holder, they had sufficient reason to believe that their conduct was justified,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court.

This should be mandated in all police departments:

Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Training is a training program developed in a number of U.S. states to help police officers react appropriately to situations involving mental illness or developmental disability.

Communities large and small are seeking answers to managing crisis issues and crisis services. When changes are mandated, community collaborations and partnerships are the key. Advocates have long asserted that law enforcement personnel do not receive adequate mental health training, resulting in ineffective and sometimes fatal encounters or outcomes. In 1988, Memphis introduced the first crisis intervention team as a component to the community’s demand for safer, first responder crisis services.

CIT partnerships led to changes in existing systems and stimulated the development of new infrastructures for services. Suicide attempts and mental health crisis concerns are recognized as a priority. Crises are about people, about our community, our families, our friends, and our loved ones. CIT is founded on principles of dignity, understanding, kindness, hope and dedication.

More:

Calls involving persons experiencing mental health crises can be particularly problematic for police officers. Surveys of officers suggest that they do not feel adequately trained to effectively respond to mental health crises, that mental health calls are very time-consuming and divert officers from other crime fighting activities, and that mental health providers are not very responsive. Officers perceive mental health related calls as very unpredictable and dangerous, which without adequate training in de-escalation, could inadvertently cause them to approach in a manner which escalates the situation. As media reports confirm, on rare occasions, mental health related calls do end in horrible tragedies, with officers or persons with mental illness being seriously or fatally wounded.

THE CIT MODEL
It was a tragedy that spurred the coming together of stakeholders to develop the original CIT program in Memphis, TN. In 1988, following the fatal shooting of a man with a history of mental illness and substance abuse by a Memphis police officer, a community task force comprised of law enforcement, mental health and addiction professionals, and mental health advocates collaborated to develop what is now internationally known as the Memphis CIT model. The primary goals of the model are to increase safety in encounters and when appropriate, divert persons with mental illnesses from the criminal justice system to mental health treatment.

While the centerpiece of the model is 40 hours of specialized training for a select group of officers that volunteer to become CIT officers, proponents stress that CIT is more than just training (CIT International, 2012). CIT is an organizational and community intervention that involves changes in police department procedures as well as collaboration with mental health providers and other community stakeholders. According to the model, officers volunteer to receive 40 hours of training provided by mental health clinicians, consumer and family advocates, and police trainers. Training includes information on signs and symptoms of mental illnesses; mental health treatment; co-occurring disorders; legal issues and de-escalation techniques. CIT curriculums may also include content on developmental disabilities, older adult issues, trauma and excited delirium. Information is presented in didactic, experiential and practical skills/scenario based training formats. The training week may include panels of providers, family members and persons with mental illnesses as well as site visits to agencies in the community (Compton et al., 2011).

Call dispatchers are trained to identify mental disturbance calls and assign these calls to CIT trained officers. CIT officers are trained to uses de-escalation techniques if necessary and assess if referral to services or transport for mental health evaluation is appropriate. An important component of the model is a central designated psychiatric emergency drop-off site with a no refusal policy. This allows the officer to transport an individual for emergency evaluation and treatment and get back out on the street to his or her other duties in a timely manner. Additionally, during training and after, CIT officers familiarize themselves with a variety of mental health services in the community that they can utilize to resolve mental health related calls.

Enthusiasm about the CIT model has spread quickly as police agencies struggle to demonstrate greater responsiveness to the significant numbers of persons with mental illness they encounter. Current estimates suggest that worldwide, there are over 1,000 CIT programs being implemented.

Intractable Iraq

by digby

If you’re confused about what’s happening in Iraq right now, don’t feel alone. But this piece by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker outlines the fundamental issues — and they’re frighteningly huge:

[M]ost of Anbar’s populated areas are now in ISIS’s hands. (Fallujah has been under ISIS control since last year.) The big airbase at Al Assad, which was the center for much of the Iraqi Army’s (and American) operations, is now cut off in the desert. “The fall of Ramadi is a game-changer,” Jessica Lewis McFate, the head of research at the Institute for the Study of War, which released a detailed report on the war just before Ramadi’s fall, said. “Whatever confidence remained the Iraqi security forces is likely to collapse.”

In Baghdad, Prime Minister Abadi faces a stark choice: losing Anbar Province to ISIS or unleashing Shiite militias to reconquer the place, only to permanently alienate an occupied Sunni population. The militias, some of which were responsible for widespread atrocities during the Iraqi civil war between 2005 and 2008, are generally much more effective than the Iraqi Army. Despite their success, American officials are deeply worried about the prospect of the Iraqi security forces being completely taken over by gangs of Shiite gunmen, and they have leaned on Prime Minister Abadi to keep the militias out of Ramadi. For one thing, the militias are trained and backed by Iran, whose influence, despite the country’s desire to crush ISIS, often runs directly against that of the United States. During the American war in Iraq, those same Shiite militias, under Iranian direction, killed hundreds of Americans soldiers.

But the most important reason the Americans are opposing the use of Shiite militias to help regain control of Anbar Province is that they don’t want the campaign against ISIS to become an entirely sectarian war.

And that’s the central conundrum of the campaign against ISIS. The two countries whose territory ISIS has captured, Iraq and Syria, are embroiled in conflicts that are almost entirely demarcated by religion. In Iraq, it’s Sunni vs. Shiite vs. Kurd (most Kurds are Sunnis, so there’s an ethnic element to the struggle there). In Syria, the Sunni opposition, dominated by ISIS and the Al Qaeda franchise Jabhat al-Nusra, is facing off against a government dominated by an Alawite minority. In Iraq and in Syria, the only effective fighting forces—on either side—are based in sect or ethnicity.

What happens now? Under intense pressure from Iraq’s Shiite politicians (he is one himself), as well as from the Iranians, Abadi appears to be preparing to send in the militias. The results will not be pretty.

Since the end of the First World War, both Iraq and Syria have been artificial states, drawn from the ruins of a fallen empire with little regard for sect, tribe, or ethnicity. At best, those artificial states could hope for a day when their people would set aside their more primal loyalties in favor of a broader sense of nationhood. Today, as both Iraq and Syria writhe in sectarian conflicts, the sense of nationhood that could bind those states together seems as elusive as it’s ever been.

Yes, we’re still fighting World War I. That’s how screwed up everything is. And while people like Lindsay Graham and Bob Gates are caterwauling about the lack of a “middle east strategy” their idea of one is to do more of the same stuff that led us to the place we are today. (You know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again in the hopes it will get a different result …)

And this whole epic disaster also shows that as much as some might want to belittle “identity politics” and insult people’s entire religion because of the acts of a few, it may not be such a grand idea. It turns out people take their identities and religion quite seriously. They’ll die for that stuff.

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