Month: May 2015

Hey Nino! Who needs yah?

by digby

Dr Ben Carson, who oddly calls himself a conservative had this to say about the third branch of government:

Carson said Sunday “we need to discuss” the court’s long-held power to review laws passed by Congress. That authority was established in the 1803 landmark case Marbury v. Madison.

Carson was asked on “Fox News Sunday” whether the executive branch is obligated to enforce laws that the Supreme Court declares constitutional.

“We need to get into a discussion of this because it has changed from the original intent,” he said.

Carson has said a president is obliged to carry out laws passed by Congress, but not what he called “judicial laws” that emanate from courts.

Justice John Marshall, the 4th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was as close to original intent as you can get. The originators were all right there, still alive and arguing over what it all meant. If Carson is pressed for time, what with all the campaigning, he could just look up Marbury vs Madison (yes, one of the “originators” himself…) on Wikipedia for a quick primer on the whole thing.

Carson is actually proving a conservative movement trope about pointy headed elites not being all that. Here we have a man who achieved the highest level of accomplishment in a very, very difficult field. You cannot be an internationally acclaimed pediatric neurosurgeon and not be extremely intelligent. But he certainly shows that you can be uneducated and foolish in many other ways.

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Sunday funnies

by digby

Pulitzer finalist FTW:

McFadden New York Times:

Most astute observation: “Don’t worry. Once congress slaps on a few token reforms and reauthorizes this, it’ll be legal and violating your privacy for years to come.”

Not funny really. Just sad.

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QOTD: Rush

by digby

“The left respects and applauds militant Islam’s effort to shut down free expression, i.e., the drawing of cartoons of the prophet.

The same left, however, demands that Christians (say Catholics; Hobby Lobby is an example) pay for health insurance that would pay for abortions and things that make them happen. Well, by the same token, if the left is to be consistent, shouldn’t Muslims be forced to pay for these cartoon contests? Now, follow me on this. I am the mayor of Realville. As such, I am possessed with logic sometimes to my own detriment because other people aren’t.

But if the left says that Christians, despite opposition rooted in their religion, must pay for people who want to have abortions to have them — if the left says that Christians say, like at Hobby Lobby, must pay for any drug or whatever is necessary that facilitates an abortion even though they have a religious opposition to it — by the same token, does it not make sense that the left should be demanding that militant Islamists pay for these conventions that have cartoon contests with the prophet Mohammed?”

It’s this kind of shit that turns conservatives into fools.

Yes, I’ll fight for his right to utter this toxic bilgewater. Free speech is free speech. But I don’t have to defend what he’s saying. Which is utter nonsense.

*I especially like the phrase “things that make them happen.” He’s talking about birth control. Which, by the way, doesn’t make them happen. But that’s just one of half a dozen total bullshit falsehoods in that little speech. Not that it matters. He’s free to say it. And make hundreds of millions of dollars doing it. Poor persecuted wingnut that he is.

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Social conservatism isn’t dead, Part XXIV

by digby

This story about a presidential visit to South Dakota:

The motorcade wouldn’t pass for at least another hour, but already a small crowd was forming on the sidewalk. They huddled under blankets, carried signs and set up lawn chairs.

“Am I wasting my time standing here?” a woman asked the police officer.

“I know, but I can’t say,” said the lone policeman, a smile slipping across his face.

Most in the crowd, which was now three or four people deep, were die-hard Republicans and had little love for this president. “I wonder if he’s a Christian sometimes,” said Kristi Maas, 47, who owns a small hair salon in town. Just the thought was “scary” to her, she said. “He wants to take prayer out of everything. . . . Isn’t this country supposed to be based on religion?” Heads nodded around her.

This country is based on religion?

Now ask yourself where she might get that idea (other than Glenn Beck and her local preacher.) Think back to when you were in grade school and we all dressed up like pilgrims and did little plays about coming to America where we could practice our religion freely. See? Not so ignorant. Depending on when you think of the country’s founding, you can easily believe that it was based on religion.

Now it’s true that a lot of wingnut con artists have tried to sell the bogus idea that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were based on religion but that’s not true, obviously. That came a couple of centuries later after the big religious wars in Europe by which time the Enlightenment had taken hold, which was definitely not based on religion.

But you knew all that, of course. That lady may not have. And I doubt she even consciously thinks of the pilgrims when she says the country was based on religion. To her, it’s just obvious — everyone she knows is a white Christian and they believe America is God’s country and that’s that. Somebody told her the president hates religion, he’s a black man and that’s all she really need to know. It’s a worldview not a philosophy.

This isn’t some anomaly. Millions of our fellow Americans hold this worldview. And they aren’t going to change because somebody on TV says the “demographics” require them to. They will fight for their worldview using whatever means they have. And in our system the minority has a lot of weapons with which to fight.

So don’t write them off. They are true believers with plenty of power in our system whether majority or minority. They aren’t going anywhere.

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Wingnut war cries in South Carolina

by digby

So a bunch of Republican hopefuls went down to South Carolina to beat the war drums for the folks. The man who seems to have made the biggest impressions was this one:

Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio summed up his hawkish foreign policy in a speech at the South Carolina Freedom Summit on Saturday with a reference to the 2008 thriller Taken.

“On our strategy on global jihadists and terrorists, I refer them to the movie Taken. Have you seen the movie Taken? Liam Neeson. He had a line, and this is what our strategy should be: ‘We will look for you, we will find you, and we will kill you,’” the Florida senator said in Greenville.

The line — referring to Neeson’s character, a CIA operative threatening a human trafficker who had kidnapped his daughter — earned the top-tier candidate thunderous applause.

He is such a dreamboat.

Yes, that’s the level of sophistication we are seeing among the war hawks in the GOP. The base is thirsting for blood again after too many years of having to pretend they only care about keeping taxes low on rich people. (That just doesn’t get the old heart pumping, KWIM?)

He wasn’t the only one who gave the folks a little (tainted) red meat though:

Others framed their speeches as critiques of President Obama’s foreign policy. Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who often speaks of his commitment to religious liberty and social issues, spent more time than usual attacking Mr. Obama’s leadership on foreign affairs.

“Heck, I would just be happy if the president would be able to tell the difference between our friends and enemies,” Mr. Santorum said. “Let me give the current president a little primer: Iran, enemy. Israel, friend.”

South Carolina, which hosts the first primary in the South, could play an outsize role in the 2016 Republican nomination process, even as many Southern states have moved their contests earlier. The current and prospective candidates all promised that they would be back plenty.

“The great state of South Carolina plays a pivotal role in our nation,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said. “Y’all have the blessing and the curse of being an early primary state, so you’re going to see presidential candidates descend upon you like those federal regulators and locusts,” he added, referring to a joke he had made earlier about the differences between the two.

“My one request is: Please hold back on the pesticide,” he joked.

Never say he doesn’t live his principles. He doesn’t believe the government should regulate pesticides. He thinks we should just ask nicely that people not use them. Freedom.

And he’s right about one thing. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union and the first shots of the Civil War were fired there. Pretty pivotal. Of course that’s a tough thing to say outloud. Not because South Carolina is ashamed of its Confederate heritage, far from it. But Ted Cruz is having to walk a bit of a fine line between his wingnut constituents in Texas who insist that Navy Seal death squads are coming to kill small town American Patriots and South Carolina which fetishizes the military to an extreme.

It all gets very confusing in wingnutland around this stuff what with the confederates, the patriots, the anti-government zealots and the pro-military extremists. They don’t know whether they’re coming or going.

And then there’s the Great Whitebread Hope:

Mr. Walker personalized the debate over national security.

“National security is something you hear about,” he said. “Safety is something you feel.”

He described a fear that “it is not a matter of if” but when another “attempt is made on American soil.” He then delivered a line that brought his biggest standing ovation of the day: “I want a leader who is willing to take the fight to them before they take the fight to us.”

Mr. Walker, who does not have as much experience as some of his potential rivals on foreign policy, sought to demonstrate that he is working to address what could be viewed as his greatest weakness. Hours after he left the stage, he boarded a plane to Israel for what is being billed as a “listening tour,” which he has said includes a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to a schedule of his trip obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Walker will also tour the Western Wall in Jerusalem, meet with members of Parliament and the Israeli Defense Forces, and take a helicopter tour of Israel.

Oh good. That should clear up any further misunderstandings …

The terrorists won again

by digby

In the wake of Charlie Hebdo and all the stirring defenses of free speech around the world, look what happened in France:

At a moment when American lawmakers are reconsidering the broad surveillance powers assumed by the government after Sept. 11, the lower house of the French Parliament took a long stride in the opposite direction Tuesday, overwhelmingly approving a bill that could give the authorities their most intrusive domestic spying abilities ever, with almost no judicial oversight.

The bill, in the works since last year, now goes to the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, having been given new impetus in reaction to the terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January. Those attacks, which included the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery, left 17 people dead.

As the authorities struggle to keep up with the hundreds of French citizens who travel to and from battlefields in Iraq and Syria to wage jihad, often lured over the Internet, the new steps would give the intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data.

What Would the Law Allow?

▪ The intelligence services could analyze vast quantities of digital data pertaining to a large swath of French society.

Some of the provisions:

▪ The authorities could install recording and filming devices in people’s homes or cars or private space. They could also bug their computers, cell phones and other digital devices.

▪ Associates of people under surveillance could also have their communications monitored, regardless of whether they are implicated in potentially illegal acts.

▪ The right of surveillance would also apply to people in France communicating with someone outside the country.

The provisions, as currently outlined, would allow the intelligence services to tap cellphones, read emails and force Internet companies to comply with requests to allow the government to sift through virtually all of their subscribers’ communications. Among the types of surveillance that the intelligence services would be able to carry out is bulk collection and analysis of metadata similar to that done by the United States’ National Security Agency.

The intelligence services could also request the right to put hidden microphones in a room or on objects such as cars or in computers, or to place antennas to capture telephone conversations or mechanisms that capture text messages. Both French citizens and foreigners could be tapped.

Mr. Valls took the unusual step early last month of personally presenting the bill to the National Assembly and defending the measures, which are already facing opposition from some lawyers, Internet companies and human rights groups.

Hey, if you don’t want the government listening in on your free speech just don’t talk. Simple. It’s not like they’re stopping you or anything.

It’s funny how the government authorities are always ready to pounce when the people are afraid. It doesn’t matter that the countries that have been doing this stuff, like Britain and US, cannot point to any attacks they’ve foiled through these methods. They’re just running with it anyway. Why waste a good opportunity?

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The missing 40,000 NC voters
by Tom Sullivan

An analysis posted Thursday at Daily Kos found that since Pat McCrory moved into the North Carolina governor’s mansion, voter registration applications received through state public service agencies (as required by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993) have fallen off drastically. DocDawg and colleagues did some data mining:

Finding 1: A systematic sharp decline in new voter registrations originating from Public Assistance (PA) programs began on or about January 2013 and continues to this day

Figure 1, below, summarizes statewide new voter registrations originating from PA programs, by month, and compares these with new voter registrations originating from the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

Fig. 1: North Carolina new voter registrations originating via Public Assistance programs (top panel) and via the Dept. of Motor Vehicles (bottom panel) from May 2010 through March 2015. Red and green horizontal lines indicate overall averages for the periods May 2010 through December 2012 (green lines; “Pre-McCrory Average”) and January 2013 through March 2015 (red lines; “McCrory Average”). Months for which reports are missing, or contain incomplete data, are excluded from these averages (5/2010, 9/2010, 3/2011, 5/2011, 8/2011, 5/2012, 6/2012, and 3/2015).

In all, “an overall deficit of 39,177 ‘missing voters’ (i.e., NC citizens who would have been registered had this decline not occurred).” Checking for benign explanations, the study finds that the decline does not appear to be connected to an improving economy and “occurs statewide, not merely in a handful of counties.”

Other groups sniffing around the same trees have put the state on notice:

Democracy NC, Action NC, and the A. Philip Randolph Institute sent a notice letter today to the State Board of Elections and the Department of Health and Human Services, advising both of their findings and giving the state 90 days to comply with the law or face yet another voting rights lawsuit.

North Carolina is already in the throes voting rights battles in the courts. Three federal lawsuits — including one brought by the Justice Department — and another action in state court, all concerning the state’s so called “Monster Voting Law,” are now pending.

The state is also fighting a challenge to its 2011 voter redistricting plan, a case that is now back in state Supreme Court after being remanded by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The groups’ field investigation at 19 DHHS offices in 11 North Carolina counties last October found:

• Three-quarters of interviewees received no offer of voter registration of any kind. Specifically, 146 clients (74.5%) did not see a voter registration question on their forms, were not verbally asked whether they would like to receive a voter registration application, and did not receive a voter registration application.
• At offices that claimed to distribute voter registration applications to everyone, 74% of interviewees stated that they had neither (i) received an application, nor (ii) declined the opportunity to register to vote, either verbally or in writing.
• At the four offices that claimed to ask each client whether s/he would like a voter registration application, 92% of the interviewees stated that they had not seen or responded to a voter registration question on their forms, and 93% of interviewees stated that no one had verbally offered them a registration application.

The groups noted that:

Although the recent drop coincides with McCrory’s first two years in office, the groups point out that a similar drop occurred 10 years ago when the state was under Democratic control. Voting-rights organizations at that time prompted the state to do a better job of increasing registrations from public assistance agencies.

Far be it from me to suggest the big drop-off in voter registrations this time is part of an organized plan by the NCGOP to reduce participation by poor, Democratic voters. That’s what North Carolina’s photo ID bill was designed for. DHHS has simply been a scandal factory since McCrory’s under-qualified cronies arrived.

Hanlon’s razor may apply here: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Scotty’s got a gun

by digby

I just love this picture of the Great Whitebread Hope, (via Crooks and Liars)

Yes, that’s Scott Walker. And yes, he’s running as a big gun guy.

C&L points out that Wisconsin suffered a mass shooting last week:

Police said Wednesday that Jonathan Stoffel of Neenah was shot seven times Sunday on the Fox Cities Trestle Trail bridge, and his 11-year-old daughter was shot three times. A third victim, Adam Bentdahl of Appleton, was shot once, according to preliminary autopsy results.

Meanwhile, Post-Crescent Media learned that the shooter, Sergio Valencia del Toro of Menasha, had been on the bridge at least 45 minutes before opening fire.

Valencia del Toro used a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol to kill the victims, all of whom died on the bridge, police said.

Stoffel’s wife, Erin, the fourth person shot by Valencia del Toro, suffered three gunshot wounds during the shooting spree.

And rather than issuing condolences or comforting the family, Walker sent out this message to his Facebook followers:

Every law-abiding citizen has a right to own a gun, but under the Obama Administration, our Second Amendment rights have been under constant attack. I’m committed to fighting to ensure that this freedom is protected. Join with me and show that you’re a staunch defender of our Second Amendment rights by signing this petition.

What a guy.

The Village Holy Grail

by digby

I am always grateful when Village scribes are upfront with their agenda. It makes things so much clearer:

The conventional wisdom among Clinton’s supporters is that Clinton is invincible, because she has already weathered all the storms of media scrutiny. She has been in the public eye for 25 years and endured countless controversies, from Whitewater to Lewinsky to Benghazi. The book has been thrown at her, and the book lost.

This argument overlooks two important factors: First, the national media have never been more primed to take down Hillary Clinton (and, by the same token, elevate a Republican candidate). Even before she announced her presidential bid, The New York Times alone had publishedmore than 40 articles related to her private email account, spurring other stories across the national print, digital and television media. Since announcing her bid, the national media have spent the bulk of their time investigating potential lines of influence between Clinton Foundation donations/speaking fees and Clinton’s actions as secretary of state. The Times, The Washington Post and others even struck deals for early access to anti-Clinton research.

They want to “take down Hillary Clinton and by the same token, elevate a Republican candidate.”

Not surprising to those of us who’ve been watching these people for decades. They managed to get rid of Al Gore. They got a slew of lesser knowns like Mike Espy (for accepting football tickets) and Henry Cisneros (for lying to the FBI about payments he made to an old girlfriend.) They even ran that poor schmuck Gary Condit out of town. But so what? The big fish got away.

“Taking down” Clinton (either or both) is the Village’s Holy Grail. And the young Village turks, eager to prove their manhood, are taking up the challenge and joining the crusade. Maybe they’ll be the ones who’ll finally get ‘er done.

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