Month: May 2015

Let ’em rot

by digby

Oh this is clever. Rand Paul isn’t trusted by the GOP base because of his alleged (and I do mean alleged) isolationism. But he’s one of them. And he can prove it:

While speaking with Iowa-based radio host Jan Mickelson yesterday, Paul criticized efforts by the U.S. and the United Nations to settle Iraqi refugees in the country. Mickelson was even more sweeping, attacking efforts to settle Muslim refugees in general.

“We won the war in Iraq, why would we be giving political asylum to people to come from a country where we won the war?” Paul asked. “It’s one thing if you’re trying to escape Castro or trying to escape communism in Russia or Vietnam or somewhere else or China, I can understand asylum, but when you win the war, why would you give people asylum? And if the 60,000 coming here are friends of the West, wouldn’t you want that 60,000 to be in Iraq helping to form a better country over there?”

He continued: “If you let the better people, the people who like the United States leave and come here, then aren’t you diminishing the numbers of folks that would make that country a better place to live? So I think the whole idea of resettling 60,000 people from Iraq over here was a mistake. But I also think that the refugee program as well as the student visa program are some of the highest risks for us to be attacked.”

Following a rant by Mickelson about the Somali-American community in Minnesota, which he deemed a national security risk, Paul agreed that the U.S. needs to reexamine its refugee program.

Mickelson recently promised to ask every 2016 candidate about Muslim refugees in the U.S.

That goes straight to the diseased moral center of the right wing. Sure, these Iraqis may have helped the US when it illegally invaded their country and turned themselves into pariahs among their own people but fuck ’em. They’re Mooslims, amirite?  And anyway, we always knew all that stuff about Saddam and the rape rooms and “let freedom reign” was a pile of crapola, right? We never gave a damn about any of those people. Let ’em rot over there.

If you didn’t know that Rand Paul was a disgusting piece of work before, it’s surely clear by now.

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If the Dems are in disarray, the Republican Party must be utter pandemonium

by digby

I wrote about the New York Times’ first entry into the “Democrats in disarray” narrative for 2016 in Salon today.  The author takes a look at the Maryland Senate primary which (so far) features two candidates, Chris Van Hollan and Donna Edwards, and betrays almost no understanding of the dynamics at play among the liberals in that race. (Read my piece to see why that is.)

Anyway:

After allegedly establishing Maryland as the perfect illustration of the Democratic crackup, Draper goes on to make this larger case:

The problem is that neither wing [of the Democratic Party] can muster an entirely airtight case that theirs is the road map to electoral success. Sroka, of Democracy for America, says that last November’s election “was a good night for progressives,” pointing to the successful re-election campaigns waged by Senator Al Franken of Minnesota and Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who each employed anti-Wall Street rhetoric. But in purple states, House Democrats like Alan Grayson of Florida, Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire and Tom Perriello of Virginia all ran on Obama’s progressive achievements in 2010 and lost, as did Shea-Porter again in 2014.

Moderate Democrats cite the Senate victories of Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Joe Donnelly in Indiana in 2012 as models for how Democrats can expand the map in their favor by proffering candidates who are not to the left of their electorate. On the other hand, Mark Warner, the Virginia senator and popular centrist, was nearly defeated in 2014 by failing to motivate the Democratic base. And the moderate Senate Democrats Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana did all they could to distance themselves from Obama’s Affordable Care Act and were still routed. The election results are a jumble of counterindicators, from which anything and nothing can be concluded, allowing each side to blame the other after a loss.

I hate to point out the obvious but, first of all, Alan Grayson won back his seat in 2012 and is still in Congress after the bloodbath of 2014. Just saying. And mixing up the races of 2010, 2012 and 2014 like that is a very big mistake. Why? Because in presidential years the Democrats do a lot better and in midterms the Republicans do a lot better. Who survives in those circumstances has a lot less to do with ideology and a lot more to do with the makeup of the electorate.

Ed Kilgore, who literally wrote the book about why Republicans swept the 2014 midterms (“without once considering the argument that Democrats lost because they were in the grip of mad lefty hippies, or because they had sold their souls to Wall Street,” as he himself describes it), actually consulted the experts and looked at the numbers and discovered that such things as “turnout patterns, the economy, the electoral landscape, and the long history of second-term midterm disasters for the party controlling the White House” were more salient than this stale narrative about Democrats searching aimlessly for their misbegotten souls.

Yes, there are tensions within the party. It’s a very big party. But there have always been tensions within both of the parties. Why would anyone expect something different when there are only two of them in a country of more than 300 million people? And as polling has shown, that big country has become more polarized between the two main parties, which makes these internecine battles even more energized as the most active members of both seek to push their parties to represent their interests. The political establishment calls this “disarray” and characterizes it as some kind of tearing at the fabric of our civic life. In reality, it’s just democracy.

And I point out that so far the Democratic race is unfolding as a rather stately campaign of ideas while the Republicans are staging a chaotic three ring circus. Believe me, if there was serious disarray in the Democratic party they’d be giving the GOP a run for its money — they have plenty of practice. As it happens the Democrats are more progressive, more populist and more cohesive than they’ve been in many years. That doesn’t mean everyone’s singing kumbaaya. It means that everyone sees a role in the Party and are taking those roles seriously trying to effect positive change. It’s not that they’re satisfied by any means. It’s just that they’re organized. That’s the opposite of “disarray.”

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So the GOP candidates are all apostates now?

by digby

Following up on my post below, I see that Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller awakened from a long winter’s nap:

This whole Jeb Bush/Iraq thing is remarkable. First, you’ve got the fact that this debacle has come from interviews with ostensibly friendly interlocutors — Megyn Kelly and Sean Hannity. That’s an interesting aspect, to be sure. But what is even more remarkable to me, at least, is that you now have mainstream Republican candidates like Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Ted Cruz (who worked for Dubya) — not to mention Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Ben Carson — publicly criticizing the invasion.

A few years ago, this would have branded them apostates. Now, it appears to be the consensus opinion (or, at least, not a minority one).

This reversal seems to have happened at roughly the same speed attitudes about gay marriage have shifted. Maybe Ron Paul really did win the r3volution?

Some of this could simply be that elections are about contrast, and if you’re a conservative looking to carve out a niche, disagreeing with Jeb is a pretty good idea. In this regard, Jeb’s inability to effectively answer this question might have actually impacted the stated policy positions of the GOP field — or, at least, sped up the process whereby Republicans were “coming out” as opposing the Iraq war (or, at least, with the caveat of knowing what we know now).

I don’t know what to say. Clearly he’s been out of touch for quite some time.

A September 2014 AP-GfK poll found that 71 percent of Americans said they think history will judge the war as a failure. Among Republicans, that assessment was even more prevalent, with 76 percent saying the war would be seen a failure.

And according to the Gallup poll, a rather substantial majority of Americans have thought the war was a mistake since at least 2005.

Does he think these candidates should associated themselves with an epic failure of this magnitude?

Also too, this vacuous argument that “knowing what we knew then” it was the right decision is extremely lame. Sure, they can say that Clinton made the same mistake but she, at least, has admitted she made the wrong call. These guys would have to continue to defend the invasion that despite the fact that half the world didn’t see the same evidence and we all know it was based on lies, they would still make the same decision. Recall that the only nations that were truly on board were the UK and Spain at the end. (Oh, and don’t forget Poland!)

And let’s not forget that the US withdrew the inspectors before they had finished their jobs when it looked like they wouldn’t find any WMD! How do you defend that? I could go on. It wasn’t just that the evidence was wrong. It’s that a lot of people didn’t believe it at the time because it obviously sounded like a bunch of hooey!

No candidate wants that hideous mistake to weigh them down. Clinton already paid a big price for her vote back in 2008 and has wisely admitted her error. It’s unlikely she would be eager to make that same mistake again. The Republican candidates are also trying to put some daylight between themselves and Bush and Cheney and for good reason. But Jeb can’t do that. To do it would be to repudiate his own family, both of whom have left legacies of hell in Iraq. Indeed, one might even suspect that he’d be the one president to attempt to go in again to try to rescue the family name since it’s been irretrievably degraded by the ongoing toxic mess they created in Iraq. So he’s stuck. And he can’t get unstuck. And every time he sputters about this he looks less and less like the “strong leader” GOP voters always want and more and more like the embarrassing failures they’ve been getting the past 25 years.

He can still win the nomination, of course. I have no crystal ball and anything can happen. But I don’t see the juggernaut that everyone else sees. He’s collecting a lot of money but so what? There will be enough money for everyone. The billionaires have plenty to spare. From where I sit he’s a guy whose brother tied a very big dead Pterodactyl around his neck from which he will never be able to extricate himself. It’s right there in the name.

Update:

Jeb answers the hypothetical: “knowing what we know now, I would have not engaged. I would have not gone into Iraq.”

Did brother make a mistake? Let’s hear it …

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Harsh, but true

by digby

This is the kind of stuff the Republicans don’t want to relive:

A college student told likely GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Wednesday that his brother, former President George W. Bush, was to blame for the rise of the Islamic State.

The heated confrontation took place at a town hall meeting in Reno, Nevada, according to The New York Times. Ivy Ziedrich, 19, a student at the University of Nevada, approached the former Florida governor to question him about comments he had made during the event. Bush had argued that the Obama administration’s weak foreign policy was responsible for the rise of the terrorist group, also known as ISIS, in the Middle East.

Ziedrich countered that Obama wasn’t to blame — and that it was his predecessor’s decision to disband the Iraqi army that made the group’s formation possible.

“Your brother created ISIS,” she told Bush.

What followed was a contentious exchange, according to the Times. Ziedrich accused Bush of “spouting nationalist rhetoric to get us involved in more wars,” pointing out that under his brother, the U.S. had spent years in the Middle East, waging “pointless wars where we send young American men to die for the idea of American exceptionalism.”

Bush responded by defending the war in Iraq. “When we left Iraq, security had been arranged, al Qaeda had been taken out,” he said. “There was a fragile system that could have been brought up to eliminate the sectarian violence.”

Ziedrich’s case is stronger than it may seem. To be sure, had the U.S. not invaded Iraq, the region’s history would have unfolded differently. But more to her point, specific decisions made by the Bush administration also led to the rise of ISIS. Most notably, the administration engaged in a widespread and controversial policy known as debaathification, which made most people, even low-level bureaucrats, who had been associated with the former regime, ineligible for government employment in the new era. The German magazine Der Spiegel in April published a trove of documents that once belonged to the mastermind of ISIS, Haji Bakr, who created the infrastructure of the Islamic State.

Der Spiegel describes the route Bakr took to found ISIS:

In 2010, Bakr and a small group of former Iraqi intelligence officers made Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir and later “caliph,” the official leader of the Islamic State. They reasoned that Baghdadi, an educated cleric, would give the group a religious face.

Bakr was “a nationalist, not an Islamist,” says Iraqi journalist Hisham al-Hashimi, as he recalls the former career officer, who was stationed with Hashimi’s cousin at the Habbaniya Air Base. “Colonel Samir,” as Hashimi calls him, “was highly intelligent, firm and an excellent logistician.” But when Paul Bremer, then head of the US occupational authority in Baghdad, “dissolved the army by decree in May 2003, he was bitter and unemployed.”

Thousands of well-trained Sunni officers were robbed of their livelihood with the stroke of a pen. In doing so, America created its most bitter and intelligent enemies. Bakr went underground and met Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Anbar Province in western Iraq. Zarqawi, a Jordanian by birth, had previously run a training camp for international terrorist pilgrims in Afghanistan. Starting in 2003, he gained global notoriety as the mastermind of attacks against the United Nations, US troops and Shiite Muslims. He was even too radical for former Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. Zarqawi died in a US air strike in 2006.

Bush has had difficulty distancing himself from his brother’s controversial foreign policy legacy, chiefly the Iraq war. On Monday, he fumbled a question about whether he would have authorized the war if he had today’s intelligence, responding that he would have. He later claimed to have misheard the question, and then backtracked and refused to give a definitive answer, saying instead that “mistakes were made.” At the town hall on Wednesday, he shrugged off further questions about the war by claiming they were “hypotheticals” and “a disservice for a lot of people that sacrificed a lot.”

Difficulty distancing himself from his brother’s failed presidency is a very mild way to put it. He’s going to be dogged by it every step of the way. And this is, by GOP necessity, going to be a national security election as much as they can make it one.

He’s got problems.

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And of course his brother is instrumental in creating ISIS. It was created out of the chaos that we turned that country into. In fact, we could call him the Father of ISIS if we were inclined to do it. And since Jeb finds it impossible to admit that doing that was a mistake he gets to take the mantle from his brother and wear it wherever he goes.

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Fact checking gets weaponized
by Tom Sullivan

Move over oppo researcher. Now that fact checking has been “weaponized” (according to Mark Stencel), you may be out of a job:

Weaponizing fact-checks is just one of many ways politicians use and abuse fact-checking. One positive response is that candidates now vet their own messages, prepare background materials, dedicate staff to answering fact-checkers’ questions—and when called out on a particular comment or line of attack, they often adjust what they say going forward. But politicians also often “stand their ground,” after being told their pants are on fire—particularly when it comes to key strategic messages. Mitt Romney’s repeated attacks on President Obama’s international “apology tour” and the Obama campaign’s relentless focus on Romney’s time at Bain Capital were just two examples from the 2012 election where politicians refused to cower to fact-checkers.

“You just decide the fact-checker is wrong,” one Obama adviser I spoke to said.

But most of the time, people in politics do the opposite: They use fact-checks to validate or reinforce their position—and bloody their opponents. That was the case in nearly every reference to fact-checking I found in House and Senate debates and congressional floor speeches from 2013 and 2014. Of 83 statements (57 from Republicans and 26 from Democrats), only three challenged the fact-checkers’ findings. The rest used the fact-checks to label themselves as truth-tellers or their opponents as liars. But, even when using fact checks to attack a political rival, politicians frequently take a swipe at fact checking itself.

If only the facts counted in politics as something more than confirmation bias. I used to call Iraq Whose War Is It Anyway? – Where Everything’s Made Up and the Facts Don’t Matter.

Stencel prepared a report for the American Press Institute on how fact checking has changed politics. But even as they check ads’ political claims, who fact-checks closing zingers such as “A lying politician, just like Obama”? For an audience that largely doesn’t seem to know the difference between fact and opinion, that’s as much of an issue as how many Pinocchios an ad receives.

“When did fact checking and journalism separate?” the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart once asked NBC News’ Tom Brokaw. No journalist deploys fact-checking to greater effect than Stewart, a comedian.

Stewart just did marvelous take-down of Fox News’ pompous, stuffed shirt, Stuart Varney. Nothing like an arsenal of TiVos for fact checking propagandists:

Never did like that Varney guy. Know what I mean, Vern?

The Daddy State strikes again

by digby

Yeah, sure those culture wars are definitely over:

The House on Wednesday voted to ban most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, approving a revised version of a bill that Republican leaders abruptly pulled in January amid objections from some of their own members.

The measure passed in a 242-to-184 vote, with one member voting present. The bill dropped a provision in the original version that would have required women who became pregnant through rape to report their assault to law enforcement authorities to be eligible for an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Under the new bill, such women would have to receive counseling or medical treatment at least 48 hours before having an abortion. In cases involving minors, abortion providers would have to alert the authorities for the girls’ protection. The bill, known as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, would also make it easier to sue a noncompliant abortion provider.

“No matter how it is shouted down, or what distortions, deceptive what-ifs, distractions, diversions, gotchas, twisting of words, changing the subject or blatant falsehoods the abortion industry hurls at this bill and its supporters,” said Representative Trent Franks, the Arizona Republican who introduced the measure, “this bill is a deeply sincere effort, beginning at their sixth month of pregnancy, to protect both mothers and their pain-capable unborn babies from the atrocity of late-term abortion on demand.”

Thank you daddy for protecting women from themselves.

Meanwhile, with their hands firmly implanted in women’s vaginas, they went on to denounce big government and federal interference in their wallets.

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I’m pretty sure this means the Rapture is upon us

by digby

Say your prayers, people:

Every date in this week-and-a-half is a palindrome, which means that every date is symmetrical and it’ll read the same forward and backwards in the U.S. style of month/date/year.

Palindromes are words, phrases and number sequences that have the same spelling backwards. Words such as “kayak” and phrases like “Was it a car or cat I saw?” are all palindromes.

These are all the dates that will be palindrome in May:

5/10/15
5/11/15
5/12/15
5/13/15
5/14/15
5/15/15
5/16/15
5/17/15
5/18/15
5/19/15

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The Great Whitebread Hope is no Great Communicator

by digby

Can you make heads or tails of this?

We’re not about to give up the fight for freedom. RT if you want the next generation to have it BETTER than us. -TW pic.twitter.com/Wqk4Lh7pUG

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) May 13, 2015

Ok, so we’re the “last stand on earth” because if we lose it there’s no place else to go. (That’s not exactly true, but whatever.) So Scott Walker says we need to keep fighting for that freedom. Ok. So the next generation will have more freedom than us.  But I thought we were the freedom-est place on the earth! How much freer can we be?

I think what happened here is that they got “freedom” confused with “rich”, which is common among right wingers. Money is what you want the next generation to have more of.  But to suggest that we aren’t free here in the US of A is kind of, dare I say it, unAmerican. We are as free as can be. Aren’t we?

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Protecting the Big Money Boyz

by digby

This is why civil libertarians worry about domestic spying. This one didn’t happen 40 years ago:

The FBI breached its own internal rules when it spied on campaigners against the Keystone XL pipeline, failing to get approval before it cultivated informants and opened files on individuals protesting against the construction of the pipeline in Texas, documents reveal. 

Internal agency documents show for the first time how FBI agents have been closely monitoring anti-Keystone activists, in violation of guidelines designed to prevent the agency from becoming unduly involved in sensitive political issues. […]

One FBI memo, which set out the rationale for investigating campaigners in the Houston area, touted the economic advantages of the pipeline while labelling its opponents “environmental extremists”.

Keystone activists don’t run around in the woods in camo gear with guns pretending to play revolutionary. They are not violent. And yet the government spied on them.

It’s not the first time they’ve investigated climate activists.

As Meteor Blades at Daily Kos notes:

The documents, The Guardian reporters write, indicate that the Houston operation was just one branch of investigations of anti-Keystone groups and individuals across the country.

A former FBI agent, Mike German, helped the newspaper understand the documents. He said that they indicate the bureau opened an “assessment” under expanded authority introduced after the 9/11 attacks to allow it to investigate people and groups even if they have no reason to believe they are breaking the law or planning to.

German, now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, said the documents also raised questions over collusion between law enforcement and TransCanada.

“It is clearly troubling that these documents suggest the FBI interprets its national security mandate as protecting private industry from political criticism,” he said.

Is this really ok? We think it’s just fine for the government to be investigating non-violent protesters on behalf of commercial interests? Good to know.

But should we be surprised? After all, the NSA spies for “American” companies. Well, they aren’t actually American, are they? Most of them are multi-national and their loyalties are to their shareholders, wherever they may come from. For some reason Americans always assume that will end up benefitting them. Silly Americans.

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Don’t count your atheists before they’re hatched

by digby

I wrote about the new Pew Poll on religion for Salon today which shows that the number of religious people is declining while the number of “unaffiliated” has grown. But I caution the left not to get too excited about this and start prematurely celebrating the end of the Christian Right as they inevitably do. The devil (so to speak) is in the details:

So this is good news, right? The secular faction is growing and the Christian right faction is shrinking. It’s all downhill from here.

Unfortunately, as Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches ably demonstrates, that’s probably not correct. While it’s true that many Catholics and mainline Protestants have apparently switched to “unaffiliated” (which could mean many things) the evangelicals haven’t missed a beat:

Evangelicals…have seen their share of the adult population drop very slightly (less than a one percent drop, but still around a quarter of the U.S. adult population). But their overall numbers are up because they have experienced net gains from religious switching. Here “evangelical” includes the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, Churches of Christ, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Presbyterian Church in America, and “0ther evangelical denominations and many nondenominational congregations.” Sixty-two million Americans fall into this demographic, two million more than in 2007, according to the Pew Survey.

That’s two million more people, the large majority of whom are presumably social conservatives than in 2007.

Posner points out that we don’t know what all this means in terms of political orthodoxy, because that part of the Pew Poll won’t be released until later in the year. It’s always possible that the evangelical community has had a revelation and are no longer socially conservative, but I wouldn’t count on it. And they may have adopted some more populist economic stances which would be a good thing. But we just don’t know at this point.

Posner also draws our attention to a little noticed Pew Poll from last year which shows a “growing appetite” for combining religion and politics:

As I wrote at the time, the poll found “those affiliated with a religion, particularly evangelicals, Protestants, and Catholics, ‘have become significantly more supportive of churches and other houses of worship speaking out about political issues and political leaders talking more often about religion.’”

Again, if the idea is that they are following Pope Francis’ teachings on poverty, great news. But let’s just say I haven’t seen much evidence of that, and a lot of evidence that they are very excited by the prospect of “religious liberty” political crusades. Posner points to studies showing that they have actually evolved over many decades of political involvement into a movement based on a “narrative of Christian nationalism.” She also notes that this might be what has driven some people out of their traditional religious homes. Unfortunately, the unaffiliated don’t have a shared identity or common institutions the way the Christian conservatives do, so they may not be much of a political counterweight.

Read on. There’s more. The upshot is that the Christian Right is as organized and disciplined as ever. And the “unaffiliated” are … not. How could they be? These people need to “affiliate” as political players, hopefully on the left side of the dial, because unfortunately, the religiously unaffiliated don’t vote in any greater numbers than anyone else. The Religious Right, on the other hand, does. Still.

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