Month: May 2015

Duped again

by digby

I certainly hope he was joking:

Come on

Discredited Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer is the president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), a conservative group with close ties to a billionaire family funding Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential run. GAI has also received substantial support from groups backed by Charles and David Koch.
[…]

[A]s MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow explained on her show, “[W]hen you take a closer look at Mr. Schweizer’s organization and who is backing him, it is a who’s who of big right-wing funders, including one of the guys behind the right-wing media site Breitbart.com, for which Mr. Schweizer has previously written — also the billionaire family that is currently bankrolling Ted Cruz’s presidential run.”

Indeed, as Crooks and Liars also noted, IRS tax forms reveal GAI is funded by some of the top donors on the right, including the billionaire Mercer family.

Robert Mercer was described by Bloomberg News as the “ultimate behind-the-scenes kingmaker” during the 2014 midterm elections. His daughter, Rebekah Mercer, runs the Mercer Family Foundation, which “has also supported a slew of conservative causes.”

According to IRS filings, the Mercer Foundation donated $1 million to GAI in 2013 alone. (Rebekah Mercer was listed on the GAI’s board of directors in its 2013 tax documents, but is not currently listed among board members on the group’s website.)

Rebekah Mercer has close ties to potential Clinton opponent Ted Cruz. The same day Cruz announced his bid for the presidency, Mercer reportedly threw him a cocktail party at her New York City apartment to launch his fundraising tour.

Schweizer’s GAI has also benefited from substantial donations from other Koch-linked groups. Donors Trust, described by Mother Jones as the “dark-money ATM of the right,” gave $1,500,000 to GAI in 2013. Donors Trust provides individuals and organizations a way to hide their donations to various right-leaning causes and media outlets, and as Mother Jones noted, they are a key funnel for Koch funds.

Donors Trust has also heavily funded the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, which itself has donated substantial sums to GAI, including $2 million in 2012.

Schweizer gave a February 2014 address to the Charles Koch Institute. He also spoke at an undergraduate Koch Leadership program at Regent University, and according to documents originally obtained by The Nation, he spoke at the Koch’s brothers “secret billionaire summit” in June 2014. At the conference, attendees reportedly “discussed strategy on campaign finance, climate change, healthcare, higher education and opportunities for taking control of the Senate.” [Links at original]

(Here’s more about his address to the secret Koch Summit)

No seriously. How embarrassing for the NY Times:

During a May 4 appearance on The Dana Show, Loesch told Schweizer “there is always that concern for anyone who goes up against the Clinton machine that they could be Vince Fostered” and asked if he considered that possibility when “getting himself security.” Schweizer replied: “Yeah, I mean look — there are security concerns that arise in these kinds of situations.”

And yes, I’m sure it’s possible that everyone mentioned in this post have Citibank cards. But that’s not really the point is it?

Wookies in Wisconsin

by digby

This is so weird:

Hope for Republicans there still is. #MayTheFourthBeWithYou #StarWarsDay @StarWars -TW pic.twitter.com/DEqTUQE5gA

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) May 4, 2015

Ok, for those of you who don’t speak Star Wars, Simon Maloy explains:

There is nothing good about this tweet. It’s just terrible on every level.

First off, the message it sends is thoroughly confusing. The lines Team Walker quoted are spoken by Obi-Wan Kenobi’s ghost and Yoda in “The Empire Strikes Back” as Luke Skywalker cuts short his Jedi training to rashly confront Darth Vader. Obi-Wan bemoans that Luke is probably going to get killed or be turned to the Dark Side and the Jedi will be screwed, and Yoda reminds him that they have another potential savior-in-waiting, Luke’s twin sister Leia.

The situation Team Walker has presented would seem to put the governor in the role of Leia. And that’s cool – Leia’s an ass-kicker in her own right. But that doesn’t make any sense politically. In Yoda’s mind, Leia was there as the backup to Luke. He wasn’t bringing her up as the person who would emerge as the hero at the end of the day, he was just trying to reassure his despairing ghost companion that they had a fallback in case Plan A went to shit, which certainly seemed to be happening at that point in the movie. So the message from Team Walker is that their guy is the last-resort candidate, the person Republicans will turn to only when their preferred candidate commits one too many gaffes or is dismembered by a lightsaber-wielding cyborg.

NARAL responded perfectly:

.@ScottWalker thinks he’s the next Princess Leia, apparently… #MayThe4thBeWithYou #OwnIt https://t.co/UEQO0LIBbU pic.twitter.com/MyyqgrdNrB

— NARAL (@NARAL) May 4, 2015

“Pure authoritarianism”

by digby

Good insight from Greenwald in this interview with Elias Isquith:

Is there a connection between the era of mass incarceration and the era of the burgeoning national security state?

Oh they’re completely connected and inextricably linked. There’s so many different similarities that bind them together, but the most important one is just the mentality. Part of the War on Terror is how we’re taught to think that once you have a group of people who are identified as some kind of menace or threat to security, essentially anything can be done to them. They can be killed or brutalized or imprisoned without any real due process, and that’s all justified because they’ve demonstrated themselves to be a threat.

It reminds me a bit of how you hear some people say they don’t care about the NSA because they aren’t doing anything wrong. That logic seems to inform the “just do what a cop says and you won’t get hurt” argument you’ll see on Facebook or Fox News.

Yeah, it’s pure authoritarianism, in both cases. The idea that the people you should fear are not the ones who wield … political or corporate power — that those are the people you actually trust and want to even be more empowered because they will protect you from the people you’ve been told to fear (the terrorists or African-Americans or people deemed to be criminal or immigrants); that’s what power centers need to do to breed acquiescence and submission. I think you’re exactly right that it’s the same dynamic in both cases.

Here’s a little example of this for your average citizen who doesn’t normally find themselves interacting with the authorities: the TSA. We are expected to behave very compliantly with this authority, speak in low tones, no complaining, even take off pieces of our clothes for no good reason in public. (The Europeans look at us like we’re nuts when we automatically start disrobing in the security line.) We have learned to just accept whatever indignity they choose to inflict on us without question.

This is not the biggest deal in the world. But it’s training us all to unquestioningly accept conformity of action and ultimately thought. That’s authoritarianism.

Put the real issues on the table this time

Guest post by Jay Ackroyd

I’ve had a lot of excited email come into my inbox last few days, excited about Bernie Sanders. At this week’s Virtually Speaking Sundays, I talked to Cliff Schecter and Dave Johnson about Sanders. I really feel like we have an opportunity here. Not an opportunity to make Clinton say things she’d rather not say. Not an opportunity to raise a big huzzah because, finally, we have a candidate from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.

What Sanders offers is the opportunity to change a narrative that has been beating on us for at least the last fifteen years—a narrative that excludes good, popular public policy from consideration. Raising the minimum wage to where it was in the 70s, adjusted for inflation, is good, popular public policy. Recognizing that the 401K experiment for replacing pensions has failed, and we need to increase social security benefits to make up for that failure is good, popular public policy. Making it possible for a student to graduate from college without a crushing debt burden is good, popular public policy. So is the adoption of trade and industrial policies that benefit everyone, not just the rentiers.

This stuff polls well. Really well. In the 70s, even the 80s. We don’t hear about it because the gatekeepers—the centrist media and the campaign funders–don’t want these issues on the table. These are unifying issues. How do you think 50 something white men in West Virginia feel about medical coverage in the years between the corporate job with health benefits and Medicare? How do you think they feel about their retirement security?

Sanders presents us with an opportunity for an inclusive campaign, a coalition of people across a broad spectrum of American society who have been, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed. They know it—they can read the 401K statement. They get the student loan bill. They’re gonna be working at Home Depot to carry them from their last real job to retirement at 67. They hate the banksters, coming and going.

We liberals have had some success shifting the Social Security narrative. We wouldn’t let the president get away with claiming that he just wanted some “tweaks.” We can do it again by using our now much more open media environment to say that what Sanders is advocating isn’t just gonna win votes in the liberal Iowa precincts. It’s gonna win votes in the general as well, because these issues transcend the identity politics embraced by our friends at Politico, and This Week and, sadly, Clinton’s campaign staff.

It’s a good time to write an LTE, talk to your neighbor, tweet Ezra or David Leonhardt and say “Aren’t these American policy positions? Don’t they poll really well across a broad spectrum of voters? Doesn’t that matter?” Because it does matter. Sanders presence in the race makes it much harder for the gatekeepers to pretend that it doesn’t.

You can hear the discussion between Jay, Dave Johnson and Cliff Schecter on this topic here.

“People want a candidate who is prepared to take on the billionaire class”

by Gaius Publius

Bernie Sanders sounds very serious about running. He’s also being taken seriously by hungry for Warren–type voters. As you’ll hear below, he raised $1.5 million in the first 24 hours after announcing, with an average donation of $40. He also has 175,000 people who said they would volunteer for his campaign.

 Here’s his Maddow interview:

I’m impressed. If you want to help (please do), click here to donate.

Thanks!

GP

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A lousy way to Die Hard
by Tom Sullivan

Adopted in the early 1980s, the “21-foot rule” in policing originated from “a rudimentary series of tests” and an article in SWAT magazine. Yet it has since become “dogma” that an armed attacker within 21 feet represents a deadly threat, and could charge and attack before most officers could draw and fire their weapons. Such dogmas die hard. In the aftermath of recent shootings by police, trainers may be beginning to rethink how police use deadly force according to the New York Times:

Like the 21-foot rule, many current police practices were adopted when officers faced violent street gangs. Crime rates soared, as did the number of officers killed. Today, crime is at historic lows and most cities are safer than they have been in generations, for residents and officers alike. This should be a moment of high confidence in the police, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group. Instead, he said, policing is in crisis.

“People aren’t buying our brand. If it was a product, we’d take it out of the marketplace and re-engineer it,” Mr. Wexler said. “We’ve lost the confidence of the American people.”

It’s not as if it is not dangerous out there. A 25 year-old NYPD officer, Brian Moore, died Monday after being shot in the face while attempting to question a suspect. A lousy way to die. Still:

The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said at a policing conference in February: “Sometimes it seems like our young officers want to get into an athletic event with people they want to arrest. They have a ‘don’t retreat’ mentality. They feel like they’re warriors and they can’t back down when someone is running from them, no matter how minor the underlying crime is.”

For Walter Scott, who ran after being stopped by a North Charleston police officer over a broken tail light, that warrior mindest may have been the lousy reason he lost his life. And 12-year-old Tamir Rice’s in Cleveland, and John Crawford’s at an Ohio Walmart, and Seattle woodcarver John T. Williams’ life as well. While no charges were filed in the Williams case, investigators believed the shooting was unjustified. By approaching to within 21 feet instead of backing off, the officer had unnecessarily escalated the confrontation. Per the Times:

“Officer Birk created the situation which he claims he had to use deadly force to get out of,” a police review board concluded. The officer resigned.

Except the shooter only lost his job.

Why does Ted Cruz hate the military?

by digby

Senator Cruz showing his qualifications to be Commander in Chief:

“My office has reached out to the Pentagon to inquire about this exercise,” Cruz said. “We are assured it is a military training exercise. I have no reason to doubt those assurances, but I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty, because when the federal government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this administration, the natural consequence is that many citizens don’t trust what it is saying.”

Sadly, many in the military won’t see the problem with that comment.

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Free speech for me but not for thee

by digby

DEFENDING THE WEST

Exclusive: Pamela Geller calls for American blacklist of pro-jihad TV network

by Pamela Geller

Here is more proof of why terror TV, Al Jazeera, should be kept off the U.S. airwaves.

At least 22 staffers at the Al Jazeera network in Egypt have quit in protest of the pro-jihad network’s coverage of events in Egypt. The staffers who have quit assert that Al Jazeera brass forced them to take a pro-Muslim Brotherhood stance on the air during the recent anti-Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

This further discredits the president and his former secretary of state. They publicly came out for this jihad network. Back in April 2011, Obama said in remarks recorded by CBS News’ Mark Knoller, “the emir of Qatar come by the Oval Office today, and he owns Al Jazeera basically. … Pretty influential guy. He is a big booster, big promoter of democracy all throughout the Middle East. Reform, reform, reform. You’re seeing it on Al Jazeera.”

Seven years after then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the broadcaster’s reporting “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable” and President George W. Bush joked about bombing it, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised it as “real news” in her Senate testimony.

Once again, Obama supports and legitimizes the most vicious jihadists. In every war between the civilized man and the savage, Obama supports the savage.

Jihad murder mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki has praised Al Jazeera, and several years ago one of its most prominent reporters was arrested on terror charges. Al Jazeera also has, for years, been the recipient of numerous al-Qaida videos featuring Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and American traitor Adam Gadahn. Yet it never seems to be able to trace where these videos are coming from. It has repeatedly been set up at the point of attack right before a bomb went off so it could take the picture of the slaughtered, dismembered bodies.

Al Jazeera has provided material support for jihad terrorism. A number of people in its employ are members of al-Qaida. Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Afghanistan, who interviewed Osama bin Laden, was sent to prison for being an agent of al-Qaida. Al Jazeera’s first managing director was exposed as an agent of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the channel promoted the bloody jihad against American forces in Iraq.

Of course, the leftist barbarians at Columbia University awarded top honors to “Terror TV” Al Jazeera, which does more to expose the left than to put lipstick on the Al Jazeera pig.

My colleague, Cliff Kincaid of America’s Survival, Inc., has been reporting for more than six years that this anti-American channel works hand-in-glove with the Muslim Brotherhood and its associated terrorist groups, including al-Qaida and Hamas. Nothing has changed. In fact, Al Jazeera has become more open about its work as a foreign policy instrument of Qatar, including the promotion of al-Qaida-linked terrorist groups in Syria.

As Kincaid said when Gore’s Current TV sold out to Al Jazeera: “While Americans are packing theaters to watch the movie ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and celebrate the death of terrorist Osama bin Laden, the former al-Qaida leader’s favorite TV channel is coming to 40-50 million American homes. Al Jazeera should be exposed as a homeland security threat that already has American blood on its hands. ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ mentions that the courier who eventually led the CIA to bin Laden was located in Pakistan near an Al Jazeera office in order to get the terrorist leader’s videotapes to the channel for worldwide distribution. This captures an essential truth about al-Qaida – its use of Al Jazeera as a weapon of war.”

We are at war. And there are many theaters in any given war, but the war in the information battle-space is key to conquest and colonization. Hitler and Goebbels understood this. The Nazi government had an entire ministry of propaganda – a war division. The Muslim Brotherhood understands this, too. It has its own ministry of propaganda: Al Jazeera. Muhammad said, “War is deceit.” The U.S. once understood the power of ideas. We had a war department that had Hollywood greats like Frank Capra and John Ford making films for freedom. Where are our cheerleaders now?

There is a real danger that Al Jazeera’s pro-jihad broadcasting and its influence over jihadists in this country and elsewhere will inspire terrorist acts against Americans. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey once said that Al Jazeera’s purchase of Al Gore’s Current TV should be the subject of a congressional inquiry because of the channel’s foreign sponsorship.

I have been working closely with Kincaid for years to keep Al Jazeera off American airwaves. There is still time to keep this vicious jihadist network off American airwaves. Urge the House Homeland Security Committee to convene hearings into the national security threat posed by Al Jazeera on American soil.

Just sayin …

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Sick GOP misogyny of the day

by digby

They never quit:

As Andrea Grimes first reported in RH Reality Check, Republican State Representative Matt Schaefer has recently proposed an amendment to the Health and Safety Code for medical facilities that would “prohibit the performance of an abortion at the facility on the basis that the fetus has a severe and irreversible abnormality.” And as he explained last month on Facebook, “Fetal abnormalities should not justify taking the life of unborn babies.” In other words, regardless of the viability of a fetus, Schaefer would like to make sure that a woman be forced to carry it as long as possible. Why? Because as he sees it, those fetuses “are going to suffer, they’re going to feel pain” and well, “That’s part of the human condition, when sin entered the world, and it grieves us all.” 

I’m going to guess this guy is also a believer in outlawing early abortion because of alleged “fetal pain”. Consistency is the enemy of zealotry. It really messes up the storyline.

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Rebuilding trust in the wake of Rodney King and (hopefully) Freddie Gray

by digby

I wrote about what happened after the LA Riots in the context of Baltimore today for Salon:

Many publications, including this one, have remarked on the terrible coincidence of the Baltimore unrest coming almost 23 years to the day after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. It’s a sad comment on our nation that for nearly 50 years we can look back on riots on American streets, almost always started in reaction to police brutality against racial and ethnic minorities. Of course, America has suffered urban rioting for centuries, not just decades, many of which were brought on by different precipitating events. (For instance, L.A.’s famous Zoot Suit riots in 1943 were also racially based, but featured white members of the US military, rather than the police, assaulting Mexican American and African American men on the streets.)

There is a lot of important discussion these days setting forth the idea that America’s propensity to throw large numbers of racial minorities into the prison system is at least partially to blame for these sporadic bursts of racial unrest. In her celebrated book “The New Jim Crow,” legal scholar Michelle Alexander made a compelling case that the blatantly racist structure of the past has simply been repackaged as “law and order” policies, leading to mass incarceration at the highest levels on the planet.

After decades of cruel, failed policies like “three strikes” and mandatory minimums there is finally some movement across party lines to address this problem. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gave a well-received speech on the subject just last week, even repudiating, if not by name, some of former president Bill Clinton’s initiatives. There is talk of the Koch brothers and other wealthy conservatives and libertarians joining the fray. There does seem to finally be some recognition that these policies have done far more harm than good. In the wake of protests all over the nation — after the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray — these discussions are even more urgent.

But mass incarceration is only a piece of the puzzle. The other piece is police tactics in the communities they are allegedly protecting. So it’s worth taking a look at what happened in Los Angeles after the riots in 1992. Keep in mind that compared to what we’ve seen so far in Baltimore, the unrest and damage then was massive. There were at least 53 deaths, 2,383 injuries, over 16,000 riot-related crimes, over 12,000 arrests, 7,000 fires and $1 billion in damage reported. California deployed more than 10,000 National Guard troops and even had thousands of active duty federal troops and Marines patrolling the streets.

Everyone knows why that happened. Four white officers charged with beating of Rodney King one night by the side of the road were acquitted by an all-white jury in a Los Angeles suburb favored by LAPD. It was emblematic of the injustice that members of the black community dealt with every day at the hands of the police and the judicial system. And their anger burst in an ugly and destructive way for 6 long days. At the end of it, much of South Central LA was ruined. There were many promises to rebuild and some improvements in corners of the area were made. But the poverty and lack of opportunity that existed there then are little-improved today.

However, one thing is different now: The relationship of the police and the people of South Central. And this is because, for all the promises that were made in the aftermath, reforming of the police department actually happened. It took years and it’s still imperfect — police brutality still happens — but the culture seems to have changed for the better.

Read on to see what they did. It’s still far from perfect. But there has been some improvement and it’s largely a result of some specific reforms.