Month: May 2015

Say it ain’t so, in a brogue

A ruling at last on a lawsuit stemming from the 2008 financial collapse. From the Financial Times:

A US judge ruled that Nomura and Royal Bank of Scotland had misled investors in mortgage-backed securities, the first court verdict in a case that has lasted almost four years and seen the world’s biggest banks pay more than $20bn to settle allegations of pre-crisis wrongdoing.

Denise Cote, a senior federal judge on the US district court for the southern district of New York, ruled on Monday that the “offering documents did not correctly describe the mortgage loans”, with the securities constructed from loans to borrowers whose chance of repaying was much lower than advertised. “The magnitude of falsity, conservatively measured, is enormous,” she said.

Nomura, at least, says it will appeal. Good luck with that. From the NY Daily News:

The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which brought the suit, had introduced emails among Nomura executives during a three-week trial that indicated they knew the mortgages were bad.

One email included the line “This one is crap,” referring to mortgages underwriting a bond.

Another warned: “Danger Batman!!”

Factual rulings in Cote’s “incredibly thorough,” 361-page decision may make winning on appeal difficult, according to David Reiss, a professor at Brooklyn Law School quoted by Bloomberg.

Bloomberg offers a little background as well:

Before the trial, FHFA had reached $17.9 billion in settlements with other banks, including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The ruling against Nomura and RBS may encourage other banks to settle mortgage-related suits brought by regulators and private investors rather than face the bad publicity and cost of an adverse judgment, said Robert C. Hockett, a professor at Cornell Law School.

“They look pretty bad,” Hockett said in an interview. “They look like the strategy has blown up in their faces.”

You know, they might have chosen honest dealing in the first place. I guess that would not have been as buzz-inducing, or as profitable. Life in the inner-city, you know. Broken homes. Dysfunctional families. Street culture. Once again, no one on Wall Street will go to jail.

Adelson and the chinese mob. Nobody cares about this?

by digby

I realize that Bill and Hillary Clinton are history’s biggest monsters for taking money from foreigners for charitable work in foreign countries. But can someone explain to me why it’s ok that all the GOP candidates are supplicating themselves and jockeying for favor from this man like they’re 18th century sheik’s concubines?

Sheldon Adelson, the multibillionaire casino magnate and key Republican party donor, spent four combative days in a Las Vegas court this week defending his gambling empire from accusations of bribery and ties to organised crime.

By the time the hearing was over, Adelson had argued with the judge, contradicted the evidence of his own executives and frustrated his lawyers by revealing more information than he was required to in response to simple yes or no questions. But most importantly, far from laying the allegations against his Las Vegas Sands conglomerate to rest, the billionaire’s answers threw up yet more questions which he is likely to have to return to court to answer.

On the court docket, the case is merely a wrongful dismissal suit. The former CEO of Adelson’s highly profitable casinos in the Chinese enclave of Macau, Steven Jacobs, is suing because he claims to have been sacked for trying to break links to organised crime groups, the triads, and for attempting to halt alleged influence peddling with Chinese officials.

But the extent of what is at stake for Adelson was evident in the form of the Nevada gaming board official monitoring the case from the public gallery.

Adelson accused Jacobs of “squealing like a pig to the government” and of blackmail in taking his accusations to the US authorities. They include the allegation that Las Vegas Sands paid what amounted to bribes intended to influence the Macau authorities and the government in Beijing and that the casino did business with a notorious triad leader.

The information Jacobs provided to the authorities prompted continuing investigations by the US Justice Department and federal financial regulators. If these allegations are shown to be true, then Adelson’s gambling licences could be in jeopardy because associations with organised crime could prompt action by Nevada’s gambling authorities, always sensitive to Las Vegas’s history with the mafia. That in turn may threaten the huge sums of money Adelson feeds into the Republican party. He is estimated to have spent $150m to try to secure a Republican victory over Barack Obama in the last presidential election.

The Las Vegas court hearing that ended on Thursday was called to decide where the full case should be heard – the US or Macau. That restricted the questions that could be asked of Adelson. But if the judge rules that the case belongs in an American court, then the 81-year-old billionaire will face some difficult questions raised by his testimony. Those are likely to be reinforced by internal company documents obtained by the Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) at the University of California, Berkeley, which appear to undermine some of Adelson’s statements in the witness box.

Talk about dirty money. This guy is in bed with the Chinese mob and he’s issuing orders to these GOP candidates like he owns them. And they’re not begging for this money to help anyone but themselves and their highly paid political consultants.

This doesn’t even raise an eyebrow:

According to National Review, Adelson was angry over Bush’s refusal to instruct one of his foreign policy advisers, former secretary of state James Baker, not to deliver a speech to the leftist Jewish lobby J Street during its annual convention in Washington.

Baker, a longtime friend and confidante of the Bush family, is a critic of Israel’s current government and its policies. Adelson, meanwhile, is a backer of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the owner of the pro-Netanyahu daily newspaper Israel Hayom.

Bush’s defiance of Adelson may cost him any chance of procuring campaign donations from the Jewish casino billionaire. Recently, Republican presidential hopefuls took part in part in what is known as “the Sheldon primary,” a four-day event staged by the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas.

GOP candidates were seeking to curry favor with Adelson, competing amongst themselves over which of them offers the strongest support for Israel.

“I think he’s lost the Sheldon primary,” one Republican source told National Review.

Jeb, as you know, has now bent over backwards to mend that rift.

Nobody thinks anything of this sort of influence buying by a crook who has made much of his ill-gotten gains by consorting with criminals. He’s right up front, demanding that these candidates dance to his tune.

I just don’t get it.

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Rats and roaches redux

by digby

Yeah, this figures:

During a focus group led by GOP pollster Frank Luntz at the South Carolina Freedom Summit, the mother-in-law of Citizens United president David Bossie compared immigrants to rats and roaches, to the delight of the audience. Bossie is the organizer of the summit, one in a series of cattle calls for GOP presidential hopefuls.

Asked by Luntz to give advice to the these candidates, she said:

One man, one vote. People are comin’ in this country across the borders like rats and roaches in the wood pile. We’ve got a state like Minnesota that says it’s not our business to check ’em out, we just register ’em. We’ve got to get control. That’s what they need to know.

Her comments drew laughter, whistling, and applause. Afterwards, Luntz asked the audience if they would vote for Bossie’s mother-in-law for president, which drew louder cheers and applause.

I love how she mentions Minnesota like Canadian “rats and roaches” are her real concern.

Congressman Steve King also said that for every immigrant the US lets in, they will deport a leftist. He’s so funny.

You can see the video here.

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Of course it was a conspiracy …

by digby

This is  what happens when you book a lunatic conspiracy theorist to be on your show:

So it was notable when Jones didn’t show up for a scheduled appearance Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” to talk about the military exercise.

“This Week” host Martha Raddatz kicked off a roundtable discussion on “Jade Helm 15” by explaining that Jones had previously agreed to appear on the program but didn’t show up at a satellite studio. But to hear Jones tell it, the network engaged in “dirty tricks” by delaying his car service to the studio.

Jones explained on his InfoWars radio show that when ABC News reached out to him, he’d stipulated that he would only participate in the “This Week” panel if his appearance was filmed live. He said the network then pulled one of its “dirty tricks” and informed his producer on Saturday that they wanted Jones to pre-tape a segment.

“Twelve minutes before airtime — before 9 a.m. when it’s live — they call and go ‘There’s a car downstairs,'” Jones said. “All so they can say I chickened out and didn’t show up. This is the kind of theater these people engage in.”

After a commercial break, Jones suggested he never definitively agreed to appear on the program.

“We were in negotiations with [ABC News] for me to come on but they changed the deal,” he said. “So we told them yesterday that we weren’t sure we were gonna do it until they got back with us. They didn’t get back with us, so I didn’t go on.”

An ABC spokesperson told Mediaite that Jones’ story about delayed car service was “completely false.” The network sent a car to Jones’ apartment an hour before his scheduled appearance and asked building security to knock on the radio host’s door when he didn’t respond to phone calls, the spokesperson said.

The ABC spokesperson also told Mediaite that the network had always planned for Jones’ appearance to be filmed live.

That is hilarious …

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No, it isn’t only the left that plays “identity politics”

by digby

My piece for Salon today …

My first exposure to the term “identity politics” came from conservative commentators who used it to complain about civil rights. (It usually went hand-in-hand with derisive right-wing phrases like “playing the race card” and “professional poverty pimp.”) Indeed, I assumed for years that it was a catch-all conservative insult for anyone who sought equality and advancement for marginalized constituencies. That’s my bad. As it happens, the term has a serious academic pedigree and is hotly debated in intellectual circles so it’s not just another right wing epithet.

Nonetheless, that is exactly the way the term used today, and there are certain left-leaning types who use it as such as well. Interestingly, both sides lodge a similar complaint in terms of practical politics: “Identity politics” is seen as a scam to dupe racial and ethnic minorities, gays and women into voting for Democrats who pander to their personal concerns, letting their economic interest and the nation’s best interest as a whole be obscured in the process. The right sees this as a matter of ignorance, while the much smaller faction on the left that subscribes to a similar view sees it as a kind of selfish naivete. The left, to be fair, also thinks that right-wingers are being duped into voting against their economic interest by Republicans who pander to their personal concerns about religion and culture. (See: the “What’s the Matter with Kansas” critique.) So, in these lefties’ minds, it’s an equal opportunity duping. Still one cannot help but notice that most of the people on both sides who complain about their fellow citizens being duped by politicians pandering to their narrow concerns have rarely walked in the shoes of those to whom the pols are allegedly pandering. It undoubtedly looks a little different from that perspective.

But let’s not kid ourselves about what the term most commonly means in our current political discourse. When a conservative derides “identity politics” he’s saying that white people are getting the short end of the stick. It’s not an academic critique or even more anodyne call for melting-pot solidarity. It’s racist coding, plain and simple. Even if “identity politics” is open for interpretation, there is no mistaking the meaning of Dog-whistle politics:

Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup. The phrase is used only as a pejorative, because of the inherently deceptive nature of the practice and because the dog-whistle messages are frequently themselves distasteful, for example by empathising with racist or revolutionary attitudes. The analogy is to a dog whistle, whose high-frequency whistle is heard by dogs but inaudible to humans.

That conservatives use “identity politics” as a dogwhistle is not well understood by the mainstream media. Or, if they do understand it, they ignore it.

read on …

Your little piece of good news for the day

by digby

Via The Hill:

Insurers must cover a wide range of contraceptive methods at no cost to patients, the Obama administration said Monday in new guidance to health insurance companies.

The guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) makes clear that insurers are obligated under the Affordable Care Act to cover at least one of each of 18 federally approved birth-control methods.

“Today’s guidance seeks to eliminate any ambiguity,” HHS said. “Insurers must cover without cost-sharing at least one form of contraception in each of the methods (currently 18) that the FDA has identified for women in its current Birth Control Guide, including the ring, the patch and intrauterine devices.”

The announcement comes after a series of reports that indicated insurers had conflicting policies on covering contraceptives, despite ObamaCare’s requirement that contraception be offered at no cost.

The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health research group, reported last month that some insurers were not providing all 18 forms of contraception at no charge. Five of 20 insurance plans it reviewed charged women for a vaginal ring, and one plan did not cover the contraceptive at all.

This will have a direct effect on many women’s lives. Huge actually, since many of them can’t use certain types of contraception. Also too, these more expensive types are also more reliable.

Little things that make a big difference.

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Whither lefty foreign policy

by digby

This is from Hillary Clinton’s big economic speech in the last primary campaign:

Over the 12-month period that just ended in July, the slow growth in wages actually accounted for more than two-thirds of the increase in corporate profits. What does that mean? Well, the profits go up, but unlike every other time in our history, the CEOs and the boards of these companies are not sharing the wealth. So companies are actually profiting off of keeping workers’ wages stagnant … In 2005, the last year I could find the numbers for, all income gains went to the top 10 percent of households, while the bottom 90 percent saw their incomes decline. That is not the America that I grew up in.

I caught that quote from an astute piece by Ezra Klein discussing the Clinton-Warren dynamic, which he sees as a mutually beneficial one that allows each to take a role in pulling the debate to the left on economics. As he puts it, Clinton has always been more like Warren on those issues than different but I guess she’s held liable for her husband’s decisions as president — decisions taken 20 years ago in a different political environment, which is only partly fair. But nonetheless, her history is more populist than she’s given credit for even if less so than the left might prefer.

He goes on to say that this is a clever tactic to keep the focus on economics and allow Clinton to escape scrutiny on foreign policy in a way she was unable to do back in 2008.  I’m not so sure about that.  Maybe that’s the effect, but I’d be surprised if that was a plan. He also characterizes Clinton as a foreign policy hawk to the right of most liberals and I’m not sure that’s exactly correct. Her record puts her pretty much right in the center of the Democratic Party on those issues (which are too hawkish in my view but then I’m on the left side of the dial on those things.) He claims she cast more hawkish national security votes than most people in the party and that’s just not correct. Obviously, she got the iraq war wrong, along with all the presidential aspirants at the time, Kerry, Edwards etc. No pass on that. But she was not among the biggest hawks among Senate Democrats:

Clinton voted against H.R. 2206 in 2007, a $120 billion funding bill mostly for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that did not include a provision for troop withdrawal from Iraq [source: Washington Post]. 

­
She did not vote on Senate Amendment (S. Amdt.) 3875 in 2007, which called for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq [source: U.S. Senate].

Clinton did not vote on a successful motion to kill a bill (S. Amdt. 3313) in 2007 to provide $75 million for local and state law enforcement agencies [source: U.S. Senate].
She voted in favor of S. Amdt. 3164 in 2007, which called for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq [source: U.S. Senate].

Clinton voted against the successful Protect America Act of 2007, which allowed electronic surveillance between people outside the U.S. without a court order [source: Washington Post].

She voted for a failed amendment (S. Amdt. 2087) in 2007, a bill that called for the reduction and transition of troops in Iraq [source: U.S. Senate].

Clinton voted against S. 3930, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which, among other things, provided immunity for CIA officials who may have been involved in acts of torture since Sept. 11, 2001 [source: U.S. Senate].

Clinton voted against an increase in funding of $360.8 million for purchase of armored tactical vehicles deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan (S. Amdt. 1933) in 2005 [source: U.S. Senate].

She voted in favor of S. Amdt. 1689 in 2003, which provided $87 billion in emergency funds for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq [source: U.S. Senate].

Recall also that while then Senator Obama famously flip-flopped on warrantless wiretapping during the 2008 primary campaign, Clinton voted against it. So her record is pretty mixed.

I’m not trying to defend Clinton’s foreign policy here. In fact, I’m not sure what it is today and I’m afraid I’m not going to like it when she makes it clear. There is good reason to believe that she will be as lot more hawkish than I would want. They almost always are. But although her tenure at State does show some worrisome interventionist tendencies her record is not one of a hardcore hawk far to the right of the Democratic Party. She’s right in the middle.

The good news about Clinton is that she’s already been exposed to the national security establishment at the highest level so they won’t have the ability to get her in a room after she’s been elected and scare the hell out of her with a bunch of top secret threat assessments. But that won’t help if she’s got a hawkish worldview already. I’ll be anxious to hear what she has to say on all this.

But I won’t be waiting for the left to ask. It seems as though this topic is completely irrelevant on the progressive left all of a sudden. Nobody seems concerned about Clinton, Sanders or Warren’s foreign policy and national security views as far as I can tell. Someone I know was in a small gathering with Warren a while back, begging for her to run, and when I asked about foreign policy, he said it never came up! And that’s a mistake. The Republicans are going to be running on these issues whether we like it or not. And it would be nice if the left made itself as relevant on these issues as it has on issues around economics.

Bernie Sanders has a long congressional record on foreign policy and he is always among the doves. Maybe he’ll be able to confront this on the campaign trail. I hope so or we’re going to get to a general election where we’ll have Republicans baiting the first woman presidential nominee as being too old and soft on national security and a bunch of nervous Nellie Democratic consultants (is there any other kind?) telling her she has to turn into Atilla the Hun in order to win. This is not a good thing.

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Sanders Raises $3 Million in Four Days; Will He Split the Party?

by Gaius Publius

My headline has two parts (you can see it above) but the second is, for me, the most important and the most interesting. I’ve been writing about the split — the chasm, really — between progressives and “progressives” in the Democratic Party for at least a year, and Howie Klein has been documenting the sins of money-bought “Democrats” like those running the DCCC since forever.

Some want that split to heal, and some want it to widen. Democrats who want it to heal are motivated by two main interests, it seems. One is the desire, understandable enough, to keep government out of the hands of Republicans, who really are the greater evil, if only by a little.

The other interest, though, is more insidious and far less defensible. If the party pulls together, those whose careers are tied to the success of its money-soaked DLC wing will see those careers advanced — in some cases, spectacularly.

The losers in all this? Unbailed-out mortgagees; students with crushing personal debt; 401k-holders doomed to end their lives in poverty — the jobless; the poor; the barely-making-it in an Apple & Nike “made in Asia” economy. The bottom 80% who are going nowhere or going down. The traditional constituents, in other words, of the real Democratic Party as constituted in the pre–Bill Clinton years.

Who wants the split in the Democratic Party to widen? Anyone who wants progressive change in America at a non-incremental pace. And everyone, voter or activist, who no longer wants to reward “professional Democrats” — self-serving, money-serving women and men — for their constant and regular betrayals.

An Uneasy Truce

So far, we’ve seen something of a truce between the two groups, with skirmishes. The DCCC-minded crowd has been losing elections for progressives as fast as it can while still advancing some progressive causes, even if forced and grudgingly. And pro-progressive activists have been taking them on via incremental assaults on their numbers. In the meantime, the Democratic Party as a whole has been losing its brand, and arguably losing elections as a result (most recently, 2014).

There’s absolutely no question that progressive and populist economic policies are wildly popular with voters, even Republican ones. 87% of Republicans want TPP to fail, along with large numbers of Democrats. Yet party leaders — Democratic party leaders — are hell-bent to pass it, and don’t mind being seen by voters as hell-bent to pass it.

Even Hillary Clinton, I’m almost certain, wants TPP to pass, but doesn’t want to say so. Consider this:

Clinton Campaign Chairman On Trade Deal: ‘Can You Make It Go Away?’

… At a closed-door gathering of wealthy progressive donors in April, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was asked how the campaign would deal with the [TPP] issue.

“Can you make it go away?” Podesta replied jokingly, according to sources in the room at the time.

This isn’t how a TPP opponent talks. This is how a friend-of-money talks when her campaign needs to hide her views. How else can you read this?

Now Comes Bernie Sanders, Making Progressives Choose

But this is not about Hillary Clinton, Robert Rubin or Barack Obama. It’s about Democratic voters and the infrastructure of the Democratic Party, its official organs and its allied support groups.

Bernie Sanders is calling them all out — “You say you believe in fixing the economy; prove it.” And he’s doing it as a candidate for the presidency, in direct opposition to the “inevitable” Hillary Clinton. This is not about polls that can be ignored. Sanders is asking for votes. Now look at the first part of my headline: “Sanders Raises $3 Million in Four Days.” He’s apparently got the popular wind at his back, at least for now:

Bernie Sanders Raised $3 Million From Small Donors in the First Four Days of His Campaign

Your 2016 Democratic presidential primary in a nutshell: At about the same time Hillary Clinton revealed Wednesday she would begin raising unlimited money for a super PAC supporting her bid, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders told the Huffington Post the
Vermont independent’s campaign had taken in $3 million over four days —
at an average of $43 per donation, from an estimated 75,000
supporters.

The same adviser reported that 99.4% of the contributions were for $250 or less. Furthermore, the Huffington Post reported, Sanders’ campaign website has collected 185,000 email addresses, an indication his grassroots donor base could grow throughout the primary season

Getting the band back together: If the interest is
there — and these early numbers suggest Sanders is rooted in fertile
political ground — the campaign will be in a good place to capitalize on
it. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Sanders had signed up veterans of President Barack Obama’s groundbreaking 2008 digital operation. Revolution Messaging, headed up by Obama alumnus Scott Goodstein, will manage the campaign’s online networking and fundraising work.

Sanders will need his initial wave of small donors to keep
their pocketbooks open and credit cards out, because there is no cavalry
of billionaire boosters ready to ride in behind them. Asked last week
if he would accept and promote a friendly super PAC — like the rest of
the candidates in the 2016 field, Republican and Democrat — Sanders told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer he would not, describing the practice as “vulgar.”

That wind at his back is not a gentle breeze:

It’s a long shot, but Sanders has reason to believe. A poll Wednesday
out of New Hampshire showed Clinton with a narrowing majority — just
51% — with Sanders’ support among Democrats rising to 13%, up from 6% in
February. One in 5 surveyed said they backed Sen. Elizabeth Warren
(Mass.), who has said repeatedly she will not run in 2016. If those
potential voters were to shift their allegiance to Sanders, the
candidate most closely aligned with Warren’s politics, he would be up to
33% in the Granite State.

If this keeps up — and if he doesn’t take himself out of the race (which I don’t see, but I’m watching) — everyone who calls herself a “Democrat” will have to choose sides. If he unites the voters, he could split the party. It’s going to be interesting times if the Sanders campaign gains any kind of strength. (You can help, if you like, here.)

Shining Clinton’s Progressive Apple

At the moment, two large groups of progressives in the Democratic Party are in agreement about Bernie Sanders — they like that he’s entered the race. The first group, however, wants Sanders to win. Actually win. The second group are Hillary supporters; they want Clinton to win, but want Sanders to shine her apple — to “pull her to the left” so that she’s (a) more acceptable to voters; or (b) forced to make promises she might, maybe possibly, feel forced to keep. Or both.

Hillary supporters in the (b) group above — those who think or hope that Clinton can be “pulled to the left” — are mainly genuine in their principles, whether mistaken in their hope or not. These progressives, I think, would re-elect Barack Obama, even if he manages to sign TPP, and be glad he’s not a Republican.

Hillary supporters in the (a) group — who only want Sanders around to polish her progressive apple so voters will like her better — are a different story. They know, no matter what Clinton does while in office, their next bread and butter will come from her administration and the infrastructure that supports it. That has to be a compromising thought. It would certainly compromise me if I needed her favor to eat, or at least eat well in DC.

From the sidelines, this is just fascinating to watch. I don’t for a second envy the players, however. DC is a very expensive town if you want to eat well.

An Uneasy Truce … For Now

This truce will last, I think, until Sanders is out of the race, so long as it never looks like he could win. But if it starts to look like he can actually beat her — if he lasts through next April, say, with the same wind or stronger at his back — look out. The more he thrills the voters, the more he splits the party.

Consider that again — If Sanders and his message prove wildly popular with voters, the party will split along a continent-long fault line, one it has lived with, uneasily, for more than two decades. Yet, in all this there’s very good news.

If Sanders Wins, All Progressives Will Win

The good news here is very good. If this works out, if Sanders wins the Democratic primary, it will prove how popular his message of economic recovery actually is. That opens all kinds of possibilities on the Democratic side. And given the hatred of Wall Street among Tea Party voters — which just scratches the surface of their economic anger — he’s likely to pick up many of the Republican votes in the general election that a Warren candidacy would have gotten.

I think if Republicans could nominate a competent non-whacko, it might be a contest. But frankly, without the racism angle, I see a Sanders win, or at least a strong shot at one. That would put progressives, real ones, in the White House for the first time, in fact, since Johnson. How is that bad, if you’re a real progressive?

And just in time, in the hour of greatest need. I’ll have more on that “greatest need” later, but as you might guess, it includes climate, billionaire-owned methane, and the inexorable march of the lemmings to 500 ppm CO2 and beyond.

You Have to Play to Win

Whatever the outcome, this may be the most interesting political year for Democrats since 1968, when Eugene McCarthy forced President Lyndon Johnson out of the race, paving the way for Kennedy to enter it. (I know, Nixon won that year, but only because we lost Kennedy, who I’m certain would have beaten him.)

Be nervous, but be hopeful. Though the stakes are high — Clinton, though a Democrat, is a carbon candidate as well — the rewards are higher. Let’s put this in the hands of the people, and let the game begin. Again, if you’d like to help, click here.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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At war with ourselves
by Tom Sullivan

It really is Orwellian. Or else deeply funny. A people taught to fear the totalitarian world Orwell warned them about have adopted the same permanent war footing of Orwell’s Oceania. Wikipedia describes Oceania as “a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation.” Except whereas for Oceania the shape-shifting, intractable foe was always out there somewhere on foreign battlefields, here in America he is — like the Devil — lurking around every corner. We are at war with ourselves.

Police shoot unarmed citizens over perceived threats. And why not? They’re “on the front lines.” Everybody says so. The job is described as a war and the police are dressed for it. Citizens shoot each other over perceived threats because they’ve been empowered by law both to carry sidearms and to “stand their ground,” as though from an enemy frontal assault. War on drugs, war on terror, front lines, stand your ground, talk of tyranny and cattle cars? And pundits, politicians, and experts claim our inner-cities suffer from a “culture of violence“?

In the New Yorker, Amy Davidson looks at paranoia in Texas over Jade Helm 15 exercises bringing martial law, rumors of ISIS camps on the border, and a real-life attack on a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest:

What these bewildering scenarios have in common is a perception of Texas as a battlefield in a constant war waged on all fronts. That presumption of a state of siege, fostered by politicians willing to pander to fears of mystery maps and foreign infiltration—perhaps in the White House itself—makes it harder to respond rationally, and with respect for civil liberties, when danger truly is clear and present. There are real threats, and that is what makes scaremongering so destructive. If ISIS is the answer to everything, what is the answer to ISIS?

A wild guess: 42?

The battlefield everywhere is bigger even than Texas.

I hope civil libertarians aren’t counting on the gun activists…

by digby

GOP ex-congressman and right wing talk show host Joe Walsh has been conducting an ongoing dialog about the alleged war on cops:

But this is where it gets interesting. Liberals and libertarians keep deluding themselves that the right’s “anti-government” fervor translates to police tactics. It does not. They are against the federal government making people pay federal taxes and fees, sure. They don’t like that. But they have no problem with authorities using repressive tactics against people they don’t like. In fact, they would like to help them do it.

Molon labe (Greek: μολὼν λαβέ), meaning “come and take them”, is a classical expression of defiance. When the Persian armies demanded that the Greeks surrender their weapons at the Battle of Thermopylae, King Leonidas I responded with this phrase. 

They all saw that stupid 300 movie and think they’re ancient Greek warriors now …

Any civil libertarian who counts on gun nuts to stand with them against government authority is a fool.

Needless to say, shooting anyone is a terrible thing and shooting police officers is no exception.  That should be obvious. Maybe if we didn’t have so many guns all over the place there would be fewer shootings of innocent citizens and police officers.

In case you were wondering:

In urging law enforcement leaders to back new gun control efforts, President Barack Obama is asking police chiefs and county sheriffs to unite behind a cause they don’t even agree about among themselves.

Obama said Monday that he was seeking a “basic consensus” among law enforcement executives to pressure Congress for legislation to ban assault-style weapons and restrict high-capacity ammunition magazines, among a score of other measures.

But it turns out the two national groups representing police and sheriffs at a meeting of law enforcement officials Monday at the White House — the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the Major County Sheriffs Association — disagree on the initiative. The chiefs back it, while the sheriffs oppose it.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, president of the police chiefs group, said the deaths of 20 students and six teachers and staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last month had settled the issue.

“If the slaughter of 20 babies does not capture and hold your attention, then I give up, because I don’t know what else will,” Ramsey said last week. “We have to pass legislation.”

But in a letter to Vice President Joe Biden (.pdf), who is leading the White House lobbying effort, the sheriffs group argued that “a ban on assault weapons alone will not address the issues of gun violence we are facing in our country today.”

Nor would limiting magazine capacity, it said: “The problem is not the law-abiding citizen that will follow the restrictions; the problem again is one of access. … (E)ven if you can’t buy in bulk, you can still buy multiple boxes of smaller quantities.”

Similarly, the International Association of Chiefs of Police said in a position paper (.pdf) that it was “a strong supporter of the assault weapons ban” and measures to limit ammunition capacity. But the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association applauded what it called efforts to “uphold and defend the Constitution against Obama’s unlawful gun control measures.”

Chiefs vs. sheriffs
The divide reflects a cultural and political gulf between police chiefs and sheriffs in a number of areas, criminal justice experts told NBC News.

Police chiefs run departments in cities where most gun crimes take place, according to FBI crime statistics over the past decade. Sheriffs run departments in counties, some or all of their jurisdictions covering rural areas where hunting and sport shooting are cherished rights. As a result, “you have these wildly different views of guns,” said Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

In counties, particularly heavily rural ones, “guns equal hunting, fishing, father-and-son-bonding-type things,” he said, while in cities, “guns equal crime.”

Those community views have real political effects, according to Kleck and another expert, Scott H. Decker, a professor of criminology at Arizona State University in Tempe.

“The big difference is a sheriff is elected and has to face the voters every four years,” Decker said, but police chiefs are almost always appointed.

“If you’re a police chief, you’re not responsible to an electorate,” Kleck said, and are therefore more free to advocate for politically unpopular policies like bans on certain kinds of weapons.

Oh, and in case you googled police polling on this question and came up with dozens of hit for some survey by a group called “Police One” check this fact check:

(The) March survey by a group called PoliceOne.com, a news and resource site for law enforcement officers. The survey wasn’t a scientific poll that aimed to gather responses from a random sample of the nation’s police officers. Rather, it was a self-selected Internet poll, in which more than 15,000 of PoliceOne.com’s 400,000 registered members chose to respond, either because of email solicitation or a link to the survey on the PoliceOne.com website.

In other words, it’s completely useless.

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