Month: May 2015

Sunday funnies

by digby

Loved being part of Mitt’s posse tonight. #CVfightnight pic.twitter.com/gBc89JFObV

— Ann Romney (@AnnDRomney) May 16, 2015

If you’re wondering what that’s all about …

Meanwhile back in reality:

It takes a criminal mind
by Tom Sullivan

After signing the credit card draft, the customer asked for his carbons back. (That tells you how long ago this was.) The waiter (moi) must have gotten a puzzled look on his face.

“Nobody ever asked you that before?” the customer asked.

Nope.

The customer explained that dumpster-diving thieves would steal carbons to get credit card numbers.

“Huh? That never would have occurred to me,” I said.

“That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind,” the man said.

Which brings us to this piece in the New York Times. It seems Republican PACs are making a concerted effort to “inhabit the liberal role” on social media and dupe lefties into sharing anti-Hillary Clinton memes. Bill McKibben (350.org), the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and others have fallen prey to the tactic:

For months now, America Rising has sent out a steady stream of posts on social media attacking Mrs. Clinton, some of them specifically designed to be spotted, and shared, by liberals. The posts highlight critiques of her connections to Wall Street and the Clinton Foundation and feature images of Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, interspersed with cartoon characters and pictures of Kevin Spacey, who plays the villain in “House of Cards.” And as they are read and shared, an anti-Clinton narrative is reinforced.

America Rising is not the only conservative group attacking Mrs. Clinton from the left. Another is American Crossroads, the group started by Karl Rove, which has been sending out its own digital content, including one ad using a speech Ms. Warren gave at the New Populism Conference in Washington last May.

The Times continues, “Conservative strategists and operatives say they are simply filling a vacuum on the far left …” Out of the goodness of their hearts.

Ken Goldstein, a professor specializing in political advertising at the University of San Francisco, explains that this effort shows Republican strategists are “thinking a couple steps ahead.” Steven Law, president of American Crossroads, says the goal is to erode support for the Democrats’ presumptive 2016 presidential candidate among base voters:

“It can diminish enthusiasm for Hillary among the base over time,” he said. “And if you diminish enthusiasm, lukewarm support can translate into lackluster fund-raising and perhaps diminished turnout down the road.”

If Hillary Clinton wasn’t their target, it would be someone else. If it wasn’t Karl Rove’s stealing opponents’ campaign letterhead, it would be another scam. Somewhere they must have a handbook for this shit.

It never ceases to amaze me how smart American lefties think they are, and how easily we fall for tactics like these. Not that we’d ever admit to being played for suckers. That would blow our whole “smarter than thou” vibe that already turns off lots of voters — even when opponents are not branding us elitists.

Heads up, people.

First they came for the Sara Lee and I said nothing …

by digby

If you think Iran or immigration pisses off the right, get ready. This is likely to make them completely lose their shit:

The Obama administration is expected to all but ban trans fat in a final ruling that could drop as soon as next week, killing most uses of an ingredient that has been put in everything from frozen pizza to Reese’s Pieces but since deemed harmful to human health.

The agency may create some very limited exemptions, but the ruling could force food companies to cut trans fat use beyond the 85 percent reduction already achieved over the past decade — a key piece of the Obama administration’s broader agenda to nudge Americans toward a healthier diet.
Story Continued Below

The food industry believes low-levels of trans fats are safe. Industry leaders have banded together behind-the-scenes to craft a food additive petition that will ask FDA to allow some uses of partially hydrogenated oils, such as in the sprinkles on cupcakes, cookies and ice cream. The industry hasn’t shared details, but officials maintain the uses will represent “very limited amounts.”

For more than 60 years, partially hydrogenated oils have been used in food products under the status generally recognized as safe, which does not require FDA’s approval. But since the 1990s, reams of studies have linked trans fat consumption to cardiovascular disease, causing somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 premature deaths before the industry started phasing it out.

In late 2013 the Obama administration issued a tentative determination that partially hydrogenated oils are not generally recognized as safe. The move sent shock waves through the food industry, which has already brought down average consumption from more than 4 grams per day to about 1 gram per day — an exodus largely fueled by mandatory labeling imposed a decade ago.

Scores of popular products, including Oreos and Cheetos, have quietly dropped partially hydrogenated oils over the years, but it remains an ingredient in many products, including Pop Secret microwave popcorn, Pillsbury Grands! Cinnamon Rolls and Sara Lee cheesecake, as well as some restaurant fryers and commercial bakery goods.

Hey, they went crazy when New York made people sell sugar water in vessels slightly smaller than a swimming pool. They are in an ongoing hysterical crusade against Michelle Obama’s commie plot to encourage kids eat their vegetables and play outside.

You’ll pry their Pillsbury Grands Cinnamon Rolls from their cold dead hands …

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The grossest tweet you’ll see all week-end

by digby

From the Great Whitebread Hope:

Eating some chicken at the state convention in La Crosse! – SKW pic.twitter.com/7ALTdAEgVo

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) May 16, 2015

Thanks for sharing, Scott.

The good news is that it probably tastes better than it looks. If he’s going to tweet what he eats someone needs to get him a better camera …

“Farcical” democracy

by digby

Good lord:

An Egyptian court has pronounced death sentences on ousted president Mohammed Morsi and more than 100 other people over a mass prison break in 2011.

Morsi is already serving a 20-year prison term for ordering the arrest and torture of protesters while in power.

Egypt’s religious authorities will now have to give their opinion before the sentence can be carried out.

Morsi’s supporters from his Muslim Brotherhood movement have described the charges against him as “farcical”.

He was deposed by the military in July 2013 following mass street protests against his rule.
Since then, the authorities have banned the Muslim Brotherhood and arrested thousands of his supporters.

I’m sure there are people in this country who envy the Egyptian system today. (Google Muslim Brotherhood if you don’t believe me.) But it should be recalled that Morsi was democratically elected. Not that we care about that.

And you thought “realism” was dead …

Now we know the REAL reason Howie likes Sanders so much

by digby

Heh:

In Burlington, Vermont, 242 Main Street was originally the location of the city’s water department. A nondescript building situated near the campus of the University of Vermont and across from a jewelry store, it would look more like an old middle school if not for the graffiti covering the front door and the sign next to it that reads, “Celebrating 25 Years of Art & Music.”

It isn’t a household name like the now-defunct CBGB in New York City, and it doesn’t get the same recognition in the punk rock history books as a spot like 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley. But 242 Main Street is special in its own way: Nearly 30 years after opening its doors, it is now one of the longest running all-ages music venue in the country, beginning as an offbeat government-funded effort to overturn a draconian city ban on live music that resulted in the transformation of an old administrative building into the municipal youth center that exists to this day.

The leader of that effort, and the person perhaps most responsible for the founding of 242 Main, was Jane O’Meara Sanders, the director of the Mayor’s Youth Office who later became the president of Burlington College and now serves as a commissioner for the Vermont Economic Development Authority. As for the mayor who was partly responsible for this DIY, youth-run venue that played host to bands like Fugazi and opened the same month that Husker Du released Candy Apple Grey: It was her husband, Bernie Sanders, now a Vermont Senator and Democratic candidate for president in 2016.

Lot’s more at the link. It’s fascinating. It just occurred to me that Sanders is the guy everyone thought the (more conservative) Vermont pol Howard Dean was back in 2004.

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The media’s “adrenal instincts”

by digby

This piece at Pando is a useful reminder that the political establishment always tends to react to certain unpleasant realities in the exactly the same way. It’s about their reaction to an earlier CIA expose by Seymour Hersh:

He got the same hostile reaction from his media colleagues when he broke his biggest story of his career: The 1974 exposé of the CIA’s massive, illegal domestic spying program, MH-CHAOS, which targeted tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly antiwar and leftwing dissidents.

Hersh is better known today for his My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib exposés, but it was his MH-CHAOS scoop, which the New York Times called “the son of Watergate,” that was his most consequential and controversial—from this one sensational exposé the entire intelligence apparatus was nearly taken down. Hersh’s exposés directly led to the famous Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses, the Rockefeller Commission, and the less famous but more radical Pike Committee hearings in the House, which I wrote about in Pando last year. These hearings not only blew open all sorts of CIA abuses, assassination programs, drug programs and coups, but also massive intelligence failures and boondoggles.

They also revealed to the public for the first time the NSA’s secret programs targeting Americans, including co-opting all the major US telecoms and cable telex companies— AT&T, ITT, Western Union and RCA—in a program “vacuuming” all electronic communications, as well as “Project Minaret,” in which the NSA wiretapped hundreds or perhaps tens of thousands (depending on the source) of antiwar and leftwing American dissidents. Those hearings led briefly to some real reforms and some half-assed reforms in the intelligence community during the Carter years, all of which were undone as soon as Reagan came to power. (I wrote about the history of Hersh’s MH-CHAOS exposé for NSFWCorp here and here.)

That is what effective journalism looks like. But if Hersh’s media peers at the time had their way, none of that would’ve happened. Rather than supporting Hersh, journalists across the spectrum, led by the Washington Post, did everything to discredit and undermine his reporting. “I was reviled,” is how Hersh later put it to UC Davis professor Kathryn Olmsted, author of the excellent “Challenging the Secret Government.”

It was mostly thanks to the CIA director’s own admission in January 1975 that Hersh’s reporting was correct that other journalists backed off, and joined in the adversarial feeding frenzy. Yes: the CIA saved Hersh’s biggest scoop from the lapdog press. Times were strange.

And it was the Washington Post that led the attacks on Hersh’s reporting. In early January 1975, the WaPo ran an editorial, “The CIA’s ‘Illegal Domestic Spying,’” attacking Hersh for relying on anonymous sources—this from the same paper that relied on the most famous anonymous source in history, Deep Throat. The WaPo editorial went on:

“While almost any CIA activity can be fitted under the heading of ‘spying,’ and while CIA activities undertaken on American soil can be called ‘domestic spying,’ it remains to be determined which of these activities has been conducted in ‘violation’ of the agency’s congressional charter or are ‘illegal.’”

The WaPo’s top intelligence reporter, Laurence Stern, took to the Columbia Journalism Review to attack Hersh in an article titled “Exposing the CIA (Again)”—alleging a “dearth of hard facts” in Hersh’s reporting, and a “remarkably febrile succession of follow-ups.” While in the Post, Stern alleged that it wasn’t the CIA that was keeping files on the 9,000 Americans that Hersh orginally reported, but rather the Justice Department—making it therefore legal. Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Anderson followed up in the WaPo confirming Stern’s false allegation, in a piece titled, “CIA’s Files Said to Support Denials”.

The two major news weeklies, Time and Newsweek, piled on Hersh’s reporting too. Newsweek, in a piece headlined “A New CIA furor,” quoted a number of anonymous intelligence sources to discredit and downplay the significance of Hersh’s MH-CHAOS scoop: “There’s something to Hersh’s charges, but a hell of a lot less than he makes of it.” Time’s article, “Supersnoop,” snarked:

“[T]here is a strong likelihood that Hersh’s CIA story is considerably exaggerated and that the Times overplayed it.”

A common line of attack was to call Hersh’s series “overwritten and under-researched.” Gossip in the Washington press corps at the time claimed that WaPo’s famous editor Ben Bradlee denounced Hersh’s stories as “overwritten and under-researched”; and when Hersh was passed over for the Pulitzer that year, to everyone’s surprise, one columnist wrote Hersh didn’t deserve it anyway, calling his MH-CHAOS exposes “overwritten, overplayed, under-researched and under-proven.”

Hersh might’ve been buried by his own press colleagues, who were only interested in discrediting his reporting, if not for CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Senate in mid-January, 1975. Hersh himself reported it for the Times, which led:

“William E. Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, acknowledged at a Senate hearing today that his agency had infiltrated undercover agents into antiwar and dissident political groups inside the United States as part of a counterintelligence program that led to the accumulation of files on 10,000 American citizens.”

After the CIA chief’s confirmation of Hersh’s story, his media detractors had no choice but to grudgingly walk back their criticism. Quoting again from Kathryn Olmsted’s book, after Colby’s admission,

“The Washington Post reported that Colby’s disclosure had ‘confirmed major elements’ of Hersh’s stories, and Newsweek agreed that Colby’s testimony had substantiated ‘many basic elements of the original story if not all the adjectives.’”

Today we’re seeing some of the same grudging, qualified acceptance of Hersh’s Bin Laden bombshell from the establishment press.

Later in 1975, the great Bill Greider—who was then an editor at the WaPo—summed up the attitude of the press to Hersh’s revelations:

“the press especially tugs back and forth at itself, alternately pursuing the adrenal instincts unleashed by Watergate, the rabid distrust bred by a decade of out-front official lies, then abruptly playing the cozy lapdog.”

I copied way too much of this, but there’s even more at the link and I urge you to click over and read it.

I tend to get depressed by the reflexively antagonistic reaction of the establishment press to anything that disturbs the official record. (I don’t pretend to understand why people who think that way would want to be journalists instead of say, working for the government…) Their reactions are sometimes so embarrassingly servile toward government and disdainful of their own profession I cringe on their behalf.

But Greider’s observation is correct. It goes back and forth. However, in recent years, that rabid distrust seems to be focused almost entirely on the private affairs of politicians rather the private abuses of government. I think the media finally found a way to pursue their “adrenal instincts” without disturbing the status quo.

And even more depressing is the fact that even when the stuff is exposed and everyone finally accepts that it’s true, the only “reform” happens around the edges and the next round of secret government abuses has a new starting point. Our technological advances are taking this to new a new level.

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Sometimes a taser is the right choice

by digby

A man died after being tasered:

A 40-year-old Burtonsville man died this week at a local hospital two days after being Tasered by a Montgomery County police officer.

The officer’s conduct appears to have followed police protocol, but the department will continue its investigation into the death, said Capt. Paul Starks, a police spokesman. Autopsy results are pending.

The man, Dajuan Graham, had been acting erratically before the altercation with police officers, Starks said. At various points that night, he assaulted a bystander, a police officer and a hospital security guard, according to police.

The encounter began just after 10:30 p.m. Sunday, when an officer conducting a traffic stop in the Briggs Chaney Shopping Center was approached by four people who said there was a man at least partially unclothed walking on Castle Boulevard and acting erratically, according to police. A second officer was summoned, they drove toward the man, and they saw a woman waving her arms. She told the officers the man had just punched her, cutting her lip.

“The woman also advised the officers that she believed that Graham was under the influence of PCP,” police said in a statement.

The two officers approached Graham, who was standing in the southbound lanes of Castle Boulevard with his hands inside his shorts pockets. They asked him four times to remove his hands, officials said.

“He refused to comply and continued to grunt, raise and lower his shoulders, and assumed a threatening stance,” police said in a statement.

They warned him they would use their Taser, and one of them eventually did — deploying the device one time, and striking Graham with probes in the abdomen and the right upper thigh. “Graham went to the ground, and the officers placed him in custody. They immediately placed him in the recovery position on his side,” officials said.

Considering how hostile I am to tasers, one would assume that I would once again excoriate the cops in this case. But I don’t. Tasers are supposed to be used when someone is being violent and non-compliant but they are not life-threatening. (Violence being the key detail here —he had punched a woman bystander in the face.) In some police departments they would have shot this guy, no questions asked, because he was acting in a menacing fashion and refused to take his hands from his pockets. Assuming the details in this account are true, the taser was the right choice.

If police confined themselves to using them only in circumstances like this it would be a useful addition to the toolbox. Unfortunately, they tend to use them far more often when they are simply impatient or angry with citizens who aren’t violent or dangerous but simply are not instantly compliant. And there are way too many cases where they use them punitively on people who are already in custody. They use them as if they are harmless and they’re not.

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“We stand between the power of the state and the individual”
by Tom Sullivan

A lot will be written about Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev’s death sentence this weekend. But not by me. Whenever these cases go to trial, I think about the go-to public defender for mass murderers and perpetrators of other high-profile killings. I think about Judy Clarke:

Clarke is one of America’s fiercest anti-death penalty champions. Besides Tsarnaev, she has represented the likes of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and “Olympic Park Bomber” Eric Rudolph. And despite their high-profile crimes and the public outrage they garnered, Clarke managed to convince the authorities in their respective cases to spare her clients’ lives. Kaczynski was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and Rudolph received four consecutive life terms. Both are living out their days at a federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

In fact, thus far, none of Clarke’s clients has been executed. Not Susan Smith, who in 1994 murdered her two young sons. Not even Jared Lee Loughner, who in 2011 shot and severely injured former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

But Friday’s announcement that a federal jury sentenced Tsarnaev to death signaled that Clarke’s winning streak may be over.

Don’t bet on it.

Vanity Fair  profiled the “deliberately understated” and publicity-shy Clarke in March. She almost never gives interviews, answers questions, or returns reporters’ phone calls. Clarke stands out “even among the exceptionally talented and dedicated community of public defenders across the country who regard Clarke as a hero.” She considers the death penalty “legalized homicide,” and brings fierce intensity to the task of defending the worst, explaining, “The idea is that we stand between the power of the state and the individual.” The word compassion keeps coming up in Mark Bowden’s profile. He writes:

She seeks not forgiveness but understanding. It takes only a small spark of it to decide against sentencing someone to death.

No one should be defined “by the worst moment, or worst day” of his life,” the death penalty opponent has said. But besides that, she has a cause. What’s more,

“I like to fight,” Clarke told the Los Angeles Times in 1990, when, as the federal public defender for San Diego, she took a $50 fine for two misdemeanors related to smuggling aliens across the border all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court—United States v. German Munoz-Flores. In the end she lost the case, but she enjoyed the scrap. “I love the action,” she said. “I like the antagonism. I like the adversarial nature of the business. I love all of that. I think that’s the fun stuff. Especially when it’s over an issue that I think is of significance to all of us, and that’s our freedoms, our individual liberties.”

To her, this devotion to civil liberties is deeply rooted in her conservative upbringing. Clarke bristled in that 1990 interview at being characterized as a liberal. “I don’t know but what my opinions have been the most conservative in the world,” she said. “What does it take to be an absolute supporter of what the Constitution says? That’s hardly liberal. I don’t smoke dope. I don’t snort cocaine. I’m not into drugs. I don’t like drugs. You associate that with a liberal view of a lawyer. I’m not into that. . . . Yes, I’m a defense lawyer, but I think I have very conservative values.”

“I like to fight.” Those of us who work political campaigns can relate. It’s why we do what we do. Our stakes are just not as high.

Clarke and Speedy Rice, her future husband, were the first students I met when I arrived as an undergrad at Furman University. I only knew Judy briefly. But she stood out. When her name popped up during the Unabomber trial, I knew it had to be that Judy Clarke.