I have a piece up this morning over at Mother Jones as part of what they’re calling “Kevin-fest” — writers filling in for Kevin Drum while he’s laid up. It’s about the GOPs lust for war. An excerpt:
It seems like only yesterday that the conventional wisdom was that the Republican Party was on the cusp of a major shift in philosophy: The libertarians had made huge inroads into the party and the rank and file was very, very taken with their agenda—most especially their isolationist foreign policy. The fact that there are exactly two senators who might be called true libertarians, Rand Paul and Mike Lee, and no more than a handful in the House, did not strike political observers as evidence that Republican voters might not be quite as enthusiastic in this regard as they believed.
For a piece entitled “Has the Libertarian Moment Finally Arrived?” in the New York Times magazine last August, journalist Robert Draper spent some time with a few “libertarian hipsters.” He was apparently smitten with their hot takes on various issues, and how they were changing the face of Republicanism as we know it. Of course, there’s nothing new about libertarians and conservatives walking hand in hand on issues of taxation, regulation, and small government, which orbit the essential organizing principle of both movements. Where libertarians and Republicans disagree most is on social issues like abortion, marriage equality, and drug legalization. (The libertarian-ish GOPers have found a nice rhetorical dodge by falling back on the old confederate line that the “states should decide,” which seems to get them off the hook with the Christian Right, who are happy to wage 50 smaller battles until they simply wear everyone down or the Rapture arrives, whichever comes first.)
This was now a return to “the real” GOP philosophy, as if the last 70 years of American imperialism never happened.
But what Draper and many other beltway wags insisted had changed among the GOP faithful was a new isolationism which was bringing the rank and file into the libertarian fold. They characterized this as a return to “the real” Republican philosophy, as if the last 70 years of American imperialism never happened. Evidently, the ideological north star of the GOP remains Robert Taft, despite the fact that 95 percent of the party faithful have never heard of him. After quoting Texas Gov. Rick Perry saying that we should cut costs by closing prisons, Draper asserted:
The appetite for foreign intervention is at low ebb, with calls by Republicans to rein in federal profligacy now increasingly extending to the once-sacrosanct military budget. And deep concern over government surveillance looms as one of the few bipartisan sentiments in Washington…
The bipartisan “concern” over government surveillance is unfortunately overstated. Polling shows that it ebbs and flows depending on which party is doing it. And regardless of the sentiment, the default solution is to fiddle at the edges, legalize the worst of it, and call it “reform.”
Hydro One is firing a Sunshine List* employee involved in the vulgar incident with CityNews reporter Shauna Hunt at Sunday’s Toronto FC game. – The Hamilton Spectator
Please watch this short video. I want to talk about the people in it and the responses and consequences that followed its release.
In the video a dudebro says “F*** her right in the pussy” while CityNews reporter Shauna Hunt is interviewing some fans following a football match. She stops the interview to address the comment to the crowd of men.
At first I thought the person fired for the vulgar comment was the person who said it. But he’s not. That comment came from the guy with the goatee, pseudo-mohawk, black jacket with red trim with a cigarette in his hand. He says it to the guy being interviewed, then slips away. That guy, circled in black, was not the one fired. (Although he might have been since the story ran last week.)
When the reporter has finally had enough of this, she stops the interview and wades into the crowd. Because pseudo-mohawk guy disappeared she engages the dudebro in the red shirt. He admits that a group of them were waiting to do this, because “Where else are you going to do it?”
When she asks, “You would humiliate me on live television?” Red shirt says, “Not you.” He implies that he wouldn’t have said it to HER (as opposed to other nameless women who might not call him on it.) That’s because he’s face to face and has enough residual brain cells to realize he’s not anonymous and starts backing away from supporting an offensive comment.
After his blurry eyes spot the cameraman he asks, “Are you actually filming this?” He goes from, it’s all a goof to, “Holy crap, this could get me in trouble! What am I supposed to do again!? Oh yeah, condemn the practice, make an exception of the person I’m talking dirt about, try and prove I’m not really a jerk.”
Of course when he condemns the practice it’s in a perfunctory, sarcastic tone that conveys, “I am just saying this because I’ve been busted, but I’m not really sorry.”
The third person, the guy in the yellow Fly Emirates shirt, is Shawn Simoes. He defends the phrase as a joke. “it’s f***ing hilarious” and tells Hunt “You’re lucky there’s not a vibrator in your ear like in England.” He is the one who was fired.
Why did Shawn Simoes get fired but not the red shirt guy, who also defended the use of the phrase, or Mr. Black Jacket, faux hawk guy who actually said it? I don’t have all the information on these people, but here is some more behind the scenes details about this clip.
What Good Is a Social Media Related Firing If The Real Culprit Walks?
Social media and video gives us a newer, broader way to interact with the rest of the world. Some people use it hoping to modify others’ behavior and/or to hold people accountable for their words and actions. Other times it’s used as a blunt object to harass or punish people with mob justice.
If you want to use social media to change behavior it helps to know what you actually can change vs. what you hope you can change. It also helps to know who you are appealing too.
I’ve written about how to use social media as a weapon, and taught people how to use it to defund right-wing media. It has resulted in the loss of 100’s of millions of dollars in revenue for some media distribution companies. Because of its use people have been laid off, failed to have their contracts renewed and been outright fired. Lawsuits have been filed, tears shed, people lives and careers have been impacted (both negatively and positively).
Now we are seeing how social media and video are being used to drive accountability for certain actions or remarks in the general public. Politicians and people in power have had to deal with this for decades, and know some of the tricks to evade, retract, “walk back” deny or contextualize their comments or actions. Normal people haven’t learned those skills yet.
Social media can be mis-used and/or used against you. You don’t have to be famous first. It’s important to understand this. This is why I have always tried to give people a chance to clarify what they have said or done before unleashing the the emails of awareness, the birds of twitter or the dogs of war.
Not everyone will do that, but it helps when it comes time to defend your own actions when you are working to leverage some video, audio or text. Plus, you can avoid comparisons to James O’Keefe’s dishonest editing.
Why was Red Shirt given a pass? Maybe because in this video Red Shirt pulls back his support, but Yellow Shirt keeps digging. Here’s the deal, Yellow Shirt is not a trained company representative, but he is an adult. He works for a company making more than 100K a year*. They have a clearly written code of conduct. He has been there for more than 6 months, so he should be aware of it.
Someone knew that when the video when public, all the employers would need to respond. Some comments would have been a “career limiting move” (as they used to say in Silicon Valley) but for some it appears it wasn’t. I don’t know if whomever did the follow up on Yellow Shirt, also found out about Black Jacket’s and Red Shirt’s employment or allegiances. Maybe they were self employed, maybe their employers didn’t care, maybe they weren’t found. But Yellow Shirt’s employers were found and did respond, big time.
Some people worry that an employer having this much power over what someone says outside of a work environment is a problem. I hear that, it is a concern for me too, but if someone wants to start setting expectations for social norms regarding sexist verbal harassment it makes sense to look for who has the authority and power to enforce them.
In other times a code of conduct that someone would listen to, internalize or be concerned about breaking, might come from a church, community or family.
If Yellow Shirt’s family gave him grief for his comment on TV we might never see it. What if the leaders of his church objected? Would they issue a statement? “Today we have excommunicated Mr. Yellow Shirt for failing to abide by our tenets of respect for other genders.”
Businesses and brands today are forces as powerful as religion and culture, in some ways more powerful. If you understand this, you can use this. That is why when I was contacting advertisers about the violent rhetoric on right wing radio I always looked at their code of conduct or vendor relationship agreements before I wrote my letters.
It’s hard for a company to say yes to violent sexist rhetoric when 50 percent of their staff and customers are women. It’s also hard, but not impossible, to ignore what they say to their vendors and employees about their expectations of how they interact with others. You just need to remind them of these facts and place the evidence of the transgressions in their view.
I knew the radio hosts didn’t care what someone outside their target audience said, they only cared what people whose opinion they believed mattered, and those who paid the bills. The people paying the bills had power.
After watching the video and reading the article I, gasp, read the comments. It was a mix of replies I’ve seen before. Some identified with the guy who was fired, others focused on free speech, saw the the phrase as humor, or wondered if the punishment fit the crime.
At the time I didn’t see too many women dropping in to engage the defending commenters.
I often read and hear about the desire to hold people accountability for their words and actions. This need for justice (or fairness) runs deep for many people. Telling people, “Life ain’t fair.” is a nice STFU to people, but it fails to address the question, “Okay, Mr. Cynical Pants, what can we do to make life less unfair?”
It is tremendously frustrating, and sometimes rage inducing, when people aren’t held responsible for their illegal, destructive, harmful or morally repugnant actions. So when we see someone actually paying the price for something repugnant like this many cheer. Others ask, “Is this response fair? What about the others who participated or did worse and weren’t punished?”
Of the three men in this video, who do you think will change their behavior in the future? Will it also change their attitude? What about the men watching in person at the event? What about the dudebros, waiting at future live events to interrupt a newscaster? Dudebros at home watching on YouTube? What will they learn? Will they go back to “Ba Ba Booey, Howard Stern Rules!” or some new catch phrase?
“But Spocko,” you say, “You can’t change drunk dudebro’s sexist, obnoxious attitudes! I don’t like what they say but, Free Speech! Don’t waste your time mud wrestling with a pig, they won’t change and they like it. You are overreacting, it’s comedy. Stop being uptight and politically correct, remember Lenny Bruce!”
My reply is, “Thank you for your comments. Now I’d like you to stop and ask yourself, ‘If you put yourself in the position of the female reporter–who is also aware of all the issues that you brought up–what would you do?’
To do this requires full-senses empathy. It also requires you to think of solutions. And I don’t mean straw-women answers. Too often I see people throw up their hands when it’s solution time, “That’s censorship!” Or, “Just ignore them and they will go away.”
Something can be and should be done. The actions that came out of this video are a start. If that answer makes you nervous, explore why. Maybe you are justified or maybe you are going down a slope that is not really a slippery slope. Maybe you are buying into a straw-woman path, I know that I’ve gotten into that mode in the past, and I needed to educate myself and people on my side that the Spocko Method was NOT censorship.
Send Your Message to the Right People
In the above video there are multiple people who say, agree with and defend the vulgar, sexist comment. But, as of now, it appears that only one will feel the consequences for his comment. But it’s more than just that one.
Think aboutthe impact Yellow Shirt’s firing will have on the employees and management at Hydro One.
Top executives sent a message to the rest of the company, “We are serious about this, it’s important.” I can imagine both relief and fear for employees (and managers.) “Finally! Now my male manger will get what’s not okay and I’ll be heard when I point out obnoxious sexism.” Or, “Oh, crap, I can get fired over this? Am I doing it? I better change my behavior or hide it.”
Now think about the impact Shauna Hunt’s actions, management support and the subsequent stories will have on the other employees at her company.
The broadcasters know you can’t stop jerks from being jerks so they develop coping mechanisms like delays, fewer live events, and even limiting female broadcasters from live reporting where a crowd might gather. But promoting this story and running it shows they at least understand there is a problem.
Some believe that violent sexist rhetoric is not that big of a deal, especially compared to other problems. Others think that there really isn’t anything that will make any difference. Others fear it will get out of control and lead to censorship and backlash. I get that, I really do.
But one attitude about accountability for sexist, violent rhetoric that we can change is ours. There are things we can do, and we can make a difference. It starts with not ignoring it when we see or hear it.
But as the article makes clear, “Schumer is at the center of Dem trade drama” is easy code for “Schumer is lead perp for Dem trade collapse.” Sen. Chuck Schumer, soon-to-be Minority Leader, got his wish, a Fast Track bill that would pass the Senate, plus a separate currency bill that “pro–billionaire-controlled trade” senators can use for ground cover.
The telling quote:
Of course, the likely outcome is the separate measures will pass out
of the Senate, but the currency-related measure faces a rough road in
the House and at the White House.
Pro-trade Democrats, though, will be able to say they voted to get
tough on trade even as they voted for a six-year fast-track trade bill.
Nice job, Mr. Schumer. Notice both pieces. First, as a separate bill the currency restrictions will pass, but they can be vetoed separately from Fast Track. So that’s a win for Fast Track — no enforceable currency restrictions. Second, passing the separate currency bill allows pro-TPP Democrats to brag about how they “tried” anyway, useful fog for the campaign trail. Again, nice job, Mr. Schumer.
Now for the rest of the Wash Post piece, which contains a fascinating look at the back-and-forth, and the lead architect of that back-and-forth, which led to the defeat of the second filibuster and will lead to Fast Track passing in the Senate.
That lead architect, again, is Chuck Schumer:
Senate Democrats’ epic trade revolt against President Barack Obama’s
fast-track bill — and the furious efforts to salvage it — had one
senator at the center of it all: Charles E. Schumer.
The New York Democrat, who has become the heir apparent to Minority Leader Harry Reid
of Nevada, found himself in an awkward position, to say the least. A
provision he authored to get tough on countries that manipulate their
currencies was threatening to bring down the White House’s entire trade
agenda; its absence on the Senate floor was why Democrats filibustered
Obama’s fast-track trade package Tuesday.
By the end of the day Wednesday, the crisis — what White House Press
Secretary Josh Earnest kept calling a “procedural snafu” — had been
averted, with Schumer helping to seal the deal.
Although the New Yorker has opposed the trade bills — he voted
against fast track in committee — as the caucus’ future leader, he has
to balance the anti-trade sentiment among the vast majority of
Democratic senators with his loyalty to the White House and the desires
of a sizable number of pro-trade Democrats, such as Sen. Patty Murray of Washington.
In short, it’s a sign of the kind of leader Schumer will be.
Don’t forget to notice “progressive” Patty Murray’s role in this. As a member of Democratic leadership, she seems to have had to choose between “following the neo-liberal leader” — in this case, Barack Obama on TPP — and standing with all other progressives in the “Democratic coalition,” including every labor union. Murray is choosing to play ball with Senate leadership against progressives. Watch her carefully going forward. This looks a lot like the victory of careerism over principle.
Confirmation that Schumer is playing both sides — pro-billionaire, pretend-progressive — comes later in the article:
Schumer all along — both in committee and at the microphones Tuesday —
said his goal was not to use his currency proposal as a poison pill to
kill fast track, which is why he offered it as an amendment to the
separate customs bill last month.
The main reason for the explosion of popular joy after the first filibuster vote was that poison pill. Schumer and the White House (via its late-night meeting with 10 named Democratic senators) re-energized the pro-TPP senators, re-stiffened their pro-TPP spines. In the end, those ten plus four others (see below) were more than enough to defeat the second Democratic filibuster.
Who Are the Pro-TPP Democratic Senators?
Ahead of the vote, Wyden claimed he had 14 senators on his side (Politico Pro; subscription required):
Sen. Ron Wyden, ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said earlier today that 14 Democrats were prepared
to vote for cloture if there was a clear path for approval of the customs bill.
Ten Democratic senators were named in the White House’s press announcement of its Tuesday post-filibuster meeting with Democrats. (Politico wrote up the importance of that action here. Note that Politico’s write-up also served to turn up the heat on those Democrats.)
Who were the other four? The Hill had previously named two, Feinstein and McCaskill, who were siding with Wyden on “trade,” and they indeed voted to defeat the second filibuster. Plus there were two surprises. We now have the result of the second vote on Fast Track. The filibuster was defeated 65–33 with two Republicans not voting. In addition to the original 10 names from the White House meeting, four additional senators indeed voted with Wyden and Republicans.
The entire list of pro-TPP Senate Democrats is below, with phone numbers. Enjoy.
Finally, these two, while voting to uphold the second filibuster, are not in the clear:
Cory Booker (D-NJ) — who declined to vote on the first filibuster
Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — who helped collapse the resistance
Schumer’s DC phone number is — 202-224-6542. Booker’s is — 202-224-3224. Schumer probably won’t care that you called to complain, but why not call anyway? If you do, tell him his No vote doesn’t hide his hand in Fast Track passing. TPP is still his fault.
Since elections that gave the GOP control of North Carolina’s legislature (2010) and governor’s mansion (2012), creating jobs hasn’t exactly been Job One. But keeping theirs has. That has meant election changes from soup to nuts, or rather, from gerrymandering to photo identity cards. The cherry on top? Voter registrations state agencies must offer clients by the National Voter Registration Act dropping by 50 percent since Gov. Pat McCrory took office. Plus regular voter fraudsnipe hunts designed to generate public support for even more election “reforms.”
For all their amateur data-sleuthing, what the state’s voter fraud vigilantes lack in quality, they make up for in quantity. Yet documenting non-anecdotal cases of fraud has proven difficult. Finding real victims of the voting restrictions they advocate, less so, as the Institute for Southern Studies found:
Jerome Roberts and his daughter Diana battled nearly unbelievable odds to become U.S. citizens. And one of the first things they wanted to do after becoming naturalized was to cast votes in North Carolina’s 2014 elections.
In the 1990s, they had fled their native Liberia during the West African country’s deadly civil wars, which claimed the lives of both of Jerome’s parents. After living in a U.N. refugee camp in Ghana for several years, the family was moved in 2000 by the U.S. government to a resettlement in Charlotte, where Jerome has worked as a service technician for the city for eight years.
They were excited about voting as full citizens in their first general election in November 2014. And then?
On the morning of the elections, Jerome picked Diana up from high school, where she was an 18-year-old in her last semester, and they headed to their precinct at Druid Hills Academy. When they arrived, however, they discovered that Diana — despite being a naturalized citizen, and a registered voter since September — had been flagged as a potential non-citizen by state election officials. According to state law, only naturalized citizens can vote.
Diana was apparently on a list of 1,454 names the N.C. State Board of Elections gave to local election officials shortly before the 2014 elections, identifying registered voters whose “citizenship status was in question.” More than 300 names had been sent to Mecklenburg County.
According to Jerome and Diana, their voting experience went downhill from there. A poll worker told them to wait while precinct officials “called downtown” to address Diana’s citizenship status. They waited more than two hours, to no avail. In the meantime, Jerome — unfamiliar with the voting process — asked the same poll worker for help understanding his ballot; according to Jerome, she became impatient and dismissive, saying, “We can’t help you.”
In the end, Jerome cast a ballot, but Diana, frustrated and tired, did not. Asked if she planned to try again next election, she said no. Jerome added, “Is this how people vote in this country? Because these are the things that make people not want to vote.”
As President George W. Bush once said of his administration’s custom-designed fiasco, “Mission accomplished.”
Here’s Marco Rubio on Fox News with Chris Wallace this morning:
On Sunday’s edition of Fox and Friends, host Chris Wallace noted that likely GOP candidate Jeb Bush had spent much of the week trying to recover after he told Fox News host Megyn Kelly that that he “would have” invaded Iraq knowing that the country did not have weapons of mass destruction. He later insisted that he misheard the question. After evolving his answer over several days, the possible candidate eventually relented, saying, “I would not have gone into Iraq.”
But Rubio seemingly missed the lesson Jeb had learned after a week of damage control.
“It was not a mistake,” Rubio told Wallace.
Wallace reminded the candidate, however, that the question was “based on what we know now.”
“Well, based on what we know now, I would not have thought Manny Pacquiao was going to beat [Floyd Mayweather] in that fight a few weeks ago,” Rubio snarked. “The question was whether it was a mistake, and my answer is, it’s not a mistake. I still say it was not a mistake because the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it was governed by a man who had committed atrocities in the past with weapons of mass destruction.”
“But what [Megyn Kelly] asked was, ‘Was it a mistake to go to war with Iraq?'” Wallace pressed.
“That’s not the same question,” Rubio replied. “The question I was asked was what you know now.”
“But that’s the question I’m asking you,” Wallace explained. “Was it a mistake to go into Iraq?”
“It was not a mistake for the president to decide to go into Iraq because at the time he was told…” Rubio said before being interrupted.
“I’m not asking you that,” Wallace reminded him.
“The world is a better place because Saddam Hussein is not there,” the Florida Republican argued. “But I don’t understand the question you’re asking… A president cannot make a decision knowing what someone might know in the future.”
“That’s what I’m asking you,” Wallace tried again. “Was it a mistake.”
According to Rubio, President George W. Bush “wasn’t dealing with a Nobel Peace Prize winner, he was dealing with Saddam Hussein. And he made the right decision based on the information he had at that time.”
“We’ve learned subsequently that information was wrong,” Rubio added. “My answer was, well, at the time, if it had been apparent that the intelligence was wrong, I don’t think George Bush would have moved forward on the invasion.”
Except, you know, lots of people knew the decision was bullshit at the time:
The deliberately cherry- picked intelligence was concocted in order to influence the decision that led to the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of Americans, countless hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the quagmire in the Middle East in which we have been enmeshed for the past decade. As the head of British intelligence reported back to his government after meetings in Washington in June, 2002: “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Alan Foley, the Director of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) told his people in late 2002 or early 2003: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.”
That’s from Joe Wilson in TPM, who famously wrote about this phony intelligence at the time in the pages of the New York Times.
Here’s that doddering old fool Seymour Hersh in October 2003:
Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.
The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq’s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. “Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,” the official said. “If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.”
There were, of course, good reasons to worry about Saddam Hussein’s possession of W.M.D.s. He had manufactured and used chemical weapons in the past, and had experimented with biological weapons; before the first Gulf War, he maintained a multibillion-dollar nuclear-weapons program. In addition, there were widespread doubts about the efficacy of the U.N. inspection teams, whose operations in Iraq were repeatedly challenged and disrupted by Saddam Hussein. Iraq was thought to have manufactured at least six thousand more chemical weapons than the U.N. could account for. And yet, as some former U.N. inspectors often predicted, the tons of chemical and biological weapons that the American public was led to expect have thus far proved illusory. As long as that remains the case, one question will be asked more and more insistently: How did the American intelligence community get it so wrong?
Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.
A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: “Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?” The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as “stovepiping”—without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.
The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”
A few months after George Bush took office, Greg Thielmann, an expert on disarmament with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, was assigned to be the daily intelligence liaison to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, who is a prominent conservative. Thielmann understood that his posting had been mandated by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who thought that every important State Department bureau should be assigned a daily intelligence officer. “Bolton was the guy with whom I had to do business,” Thielmann said. “We were going to provide him with all the information he was entitled to see. That’s what being a professional intelligence officer is all about.”
But, Thielmann told me, “Bolton seemed to be troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear.” Thielmann soon found himself shut out of Bolton’s early-morning staff meetings. “I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, ‘The Under-Secretary doesn’t need you to attend this meeting anymore.’ ” When Thielmann protested that he was there to provide intelligence input, the aide said, “The Under-Secretary wants to keep this in the family.”
Eventually, Thielmann said, Bolton demanded that he and his staff have direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign-agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous Administrations, such data had been made available to under-secretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specially secured offices of INR. The whole point of the intelligence system in place, according to Thielmann, was “to prevent raw intelligence from getting to people who would be misled.” Bolton, however, wanted his aides to receive and assign intelligence analyses and assessments using the raw data. In essence, the under-secretary would be running his own intelligence operation, without any guidance or support. “He surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get C.I.A. information directly,” Thielmann said.
In a subsequent interview, Bolton acknowledged that he had changed the procedures for handling intelligence, in an effort to extend the scope of the classified materials available to his office. “I found that there was lots of stuff that I wasn’t getting and that the INR analysts weren’t including,” he told me. “I didn’t want it filtered. I wanted to see everything—to be fully informed. If that puts someone’s nose out of joint, sorry about that.” Bolton told me that he wanted to reach out to the intelligence community but that Thielmann had “invited himself” to his daily staff meetings. “This was my meeting with the four assistant secretaries who report to me, in preparation for the Secretary’s 8:30 a.m. staff meeting,” Bolton said. “This was within my family of bureaus. There was no place for INR or anyone else—the Human Resources Bureau or the Office of Foreign Buildings.”
There was also a change in procedure at the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy. In the early summer of 2001, a career official assigned to a Pentagon planning office undertook a routine evaluation of the assumption, adopted by Wolfowitz and Feith, that the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, could play a major role in a coup d’état to oust Saddam Hussein. They also assumed that Chalabi, after the coup, would be welcomed by Iraqis as a hero.
An official familiar with the evaluation described how it subjected that scenario to the principle of what planners call “branches and sequels”—that is, “plan for what you expect not to happen.” The official said, “It was a ‘what could go wrong’ study. What if it turns out that Ahmad Chalabi is not so popular? What’s Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys don’t have it in them to accomplish the overthrow?”
The people in the policy offices didn’t seem to care. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study’s exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. “Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads,” the official told me. “You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails.” read on….
Like I said, that’s just Sy Hersh an idiot who nobody should listen to. So never mind.
Still, it seems like a bad idea to let these GOP bozos push the idea that poor old Bush and Cheney didn’t know nothing ’bout fixing the intelligence. They’re the ones who did it!
After 2000, many folks learned the obvious, that a country headed by Gore would be vastly preferable than one led by Bush, i.e., that maybe the perfect really is the enemy of the good. But even today, liberals and the left are still quite adept at the circular firing squad (see Hebdo, Charlie, and PEN). So it makes sense for the Kochians to bait us with anti-Clinton stuff.
Here’s one liberal’s attitude towards 2016, in three easy steps:
1. I took a solemn vow not to vote for anyone who voted for Bush’s Iraq war resolution. I have every intention of keeping that vow.
2. Therefore, if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination and it looks very, very likely she will win the presidency, I will not vote for her.
3. BUT, if it looks like the election’s going to be close and a member of the clown club stands a good chance of winning, then I will enthusiastically vote for Hillary Clinton and actively encourage everyone I know to do so.
After all, I’m not crazy. This world simply can’t afford a Bush, or Rubio, or Santorum, or Huckabee, or Paul, or, or, or…
John Kennedy Fenwick, 25, is expected to survive after police in Bardstown, Kentucky, shot him Sunday, following a long and destructive car chase, The Huffington Post reported.
In a press conference Monday, Nelson County Sheriff Ed Mattingly said he was relieved to know Mr. Fenwick is white.
“We are glad that he is white, and we shouldn’t have to be worried about that,” said Sheriff Mattingly, who is also white. “And we do not want any backlash or violence in this community because people have been misinformed. I think that the public needs to know how the criminal justice system works and … what officers are able to do.”
The sheriff acknowledged heightened racial tensions across the country following the deaths of unarmed black men in New York City, Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri.
“We must take notice of previous cases and how the media has handled those situations. We want the public to be informed and accurately informed. We do not want trouble,” Sheriff Mattingly said, the Post reported. “The media has not done a very good job of informing the public, and the public is not educated on how the system actually works.”
This whining is unprofessional. Police are representatives of the state and the community and they are given a tremendous amount of power. They need to get a hold of themselves. This is embarrassing.
Here’s our macho, manly Lindsay Graham not only out-machoing Marco Rubio but giving Liam Neeson himself a run for his money:
“If I’m president of the United States and you’re thinking about joining Al Qaeda … I’m not going to call a judge” to get a warrant. I’m going to call a drone and we will kill you.”
And then he said, “make my day motherfuckers!” and pulled out a 44 magnum and shot it into the air, just for effect. Cuz he’s a badasses badass.
Fox News contributor and former actress Stacey Dash said on Friday’s “Outnumbered” that female actresses should stop complaining about gender bias and be “grateful” for being cast alongside famous male actors.
Dash’s comments were made during a discussion about gender bias within Hollywood, which women such as actress Elizabeth Banks and director Kathryn Bigelow have taken issue with.
“I think that if you are directing a film, man or woman, there is pressure and if you don’t do a good job, the results are the same — you’re not gonna get to do it again, or maybe you will,” Dash said. “But it doesn’t matter on your gender. That’s not what’s gonna, you know, affect the outcome.”
“If you want something, you have to fight for it, you know,” Dash said. “And the other side of this is that I know hundreds of thousands of actresses who would love to play the leading lady to a Leonardo DiCaprio, a Matt Damon, you know, a George Clooney. So, you’ve gotta be grateful for what you got and if you want more, then get it. Work for it.”
Co-host Harris Faulkner agreed with Dash, noting that there were plenty of female executives.
“How many female exec— I mean you’ve got Oprah Winfrey,” Faulkner said, “you know I mentioned Ava with ‘Selma’ who directed that, you’ve got Oprah Winfrey. You’ve got a lot of people who are opening doors for other women in the business, too. You know, Tyler Perry is another. I mean you do have lots of opportunity.”
At this point, co-host Melissa Francis pointed out that the numbers actually show that over the past 17 years there has been a decline in the number of women directing films.
“The reason why this matters is because if there is a woman executive producer, writer, or director, then 39% of the time the lead in the movie is also a female,” Francis said. “If it’s a male writer, director, producer, only 4% of the time is the opportunity there for the actress.”
Co-host Sandra Smith then chimed in with her take on the issue.
“But, that makes so much sense to me,” Smith said. “Yes, sometimes you need a female perspective from a directional (sic) standpoint — correct me if I’m wrong, you guys are the experts in this industry — but sometimes you need a male direction.”
Dash added that Kathryn Bigelow got an Oscar for the movie “The Hurt Locker.”
“Like it’s relative. It’s all relative,” Dash said. “Like I said you have to fight for what you want and be good at it. Be extraordinary at it.”
Well, it goes without saying that “you need a male direction” amirite? Good thing Hollywood knows what it’s doing on that count:
Views of the president among members of the opposing party have become steadily more negative over time. Our 2014 report on political polarization documented this dramatic growth in partisan divisions over views of presidential job performance. Over the course of Obama’s presidency, his average approval rating among Democrats has been 81%, compared with just 14% among Republicans.
During Eisenhower’s two terms, from 1953-1960, an average of 49% of Democrats said they approved of the job the Republican president was doing in office. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, an average of 31% of Democrats approved of his job performance. And just over a quarter (27%) of Republicans offered a positive assessment of Clinton between 1993 and 2000. But the two most recent presidents – George W. Bush and Obama – have not received even this minimal level of support.
I would have thought the polarization over Bush was mostly about the fact that he used the levers of power in his brother Jeb’s state and his father’s Supreme Court appointees to steal the election from the man who won the popular vote in the country. And the polarization of Obama would likely be because he’s well … black. But apparently this is a long term trend.
Interestingly, in my experience, people on the leftmost end of the dial are more convinced than ever that there’s literally no difference between presidents at all regardless of party. I don’t think that’s true on the right.
Also too and apropos of nothing, I wonder if most people are aware of this?
High-profile presidential scandals don’t always cause huge or lasting drops in public approval. Clinton first reached his all-time high job approval of 71% in our February 1998 poll, amid the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Clinton again reached the 71% mark in our late December 1998 poll, after his impeachment by the House of Representatives. Reagan’s approval rating dropped to 49% in January 1987 during the Iran-Contra scandal, but he left office two years later with a 63% rating.
But Richard Nixon’s approval declined steadily throughout the Watergate scandal. His rating reached a high of 68% in January 1973, following his re-election, but plummeted to a low of 24% by the time he left office in August 1974.
But that will not stop the right from trying again. Clinton is their great white whale and if they can’t get him they’ll happily take her down as a proxy. The fact that she’s a woman makes it all the sweeter.
