Month: May 2015

Death and dishonor
by Tom Sullivan

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

– General George S. Patton

The Patton quote above gained new notoriety after it opened the movie Patton in 1970. For several years, an autograph my father-in-law got from Patton during the war has been in a large envelope on the shelf here. I never looked at it until just now. It’s on a program from the Folies Bergère. I looked at it this morning because I’m still processing the week’s events in the aftermath of the Freddie Gray homicide in Baltimore. I looked at it because it seems some of our police believe they’re fighting a war, a war to be won by ensuring the other poor dumb bastard dies first.

Six Baltimore police officers now face “a litany of charges that include second-degree depraved-heart murder, involuntary manslaughter, false imprisonment and misconduct in office.” Recent killings by police in Ferguson, in New York, and in North Charleston brought to mind another well-known quote, not from war, but policing:

Malone: You just fulfilled the first rule of law enforcement: make sure when your shift is over you go home alive. Here endeth the lesson.

– The Untouchables (1987)

Protests turned to riot and looting after Freddie Gray’s funeral last week. Whenever that occurs in a black neighborhood, pundits rush to explain it as a symptom of a dysfunctional culture in the black community. Maybe it’s time to examine whether “the first rule” hasn’t bred a dysfunctional police culture in some departments. Because it’s not just a dramatic device from the movies.

Steve Blow of the Dallas Morning News has heard that trope too: “The No. 1 duty of a police officer is to go home to his or her family at the end of the shift.” Really? he asked back in March:

If self-preservation is the first and foremost priority of a police officer, then you get what we have seen in recent months and years — a series of unsettling police shootings.

You get what we saw on that video released last week showing Dallas police shooting a mentally ill man nonchalantly holding a screwdriver in his hands.

You get the questions swirling around the shooting death last month of an unarmed man said to be approaching a Grapevine officer with his hands raised.

It would explain other such shootings in situations that seemed to pose no immediate threat to officers.

Maybe it’s time to quit nodding along and question the maxim that going home at the end of the day trumps all other considerations.

Is that how we train firefighters? Not to save people trapped in burning buildings because they might not go home to fight fires another day?

From childhood we are taught that policemen and firefighters (and soldiers) who risk their lives to save their fellow citizens deserve honor and respect. Putting others’ lives before their own is how that respect is earned. Yet “the first rule of law enforcement” is in direct conflict with that. Perhaps it is
“better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.” But where is the honor in being paid to put your own safety first?

The “officer survival movement” has made it a key part of the training that officer safety is paramount. And that’s fine to a point. But combined with the military surplus gear being handed out like candy by the federal government, the “first rule” has bred an officer survival culture. It trains for a “warrior mentality [that] makes policing less safe for both officers and civilians,” writes Seth Stoughton, a former officer and professor of law at the University of South Carolina. Furthermore:

Police training needs to go beyond emphasizing the severity of the risks that officers face by taking into account the likelihood of those risks materializing. Policing has risks—serious ones—that we cannot casually dismiss. Over the last ten years, an annual average of 51 officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty according to data collected by the FBI. In the same time period, an average of 57,000 officers were assaulted every year (though only about 25 percent of those assaults result in any physical injuries). But for all of its risks, policing is safer now than it has ever been. Violent attacks on officers, particularly those that involve a serious physical threat, are few and far between when you take into account the fact that police officers interact with civilians about 63 million times every year. In percentage terms, officers were assaulted in about 0.09 percent of all interactions, were injured in some way in 0.02 percent of interactions, and were feloniously killed in 0.00008 percent of interactions. Adapting officer training to these statistics doesn’t minimize the very real risks that officers face, but it does help put those risks in perspective. Officers should be trained to keep that perspective in mind as they go about their jobs.

Here endeth the lesson.

Black Dads aren’t absent after all

by digby

Think Progress on the myth of the absent black father. In many respects they’re more involved with their kids than Whites or Latinos:

This is going to shake the foundation of every pundit on TV.  I don’t think they know how to think about any social ill without relying on this trope to explain everything.

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Samantha Bee — unsung Daily Show hero

by digby

Honestly, I thought she was the obvious choice to replace Stewart. But I should have known that wasn’t going to happen. The good news is that she’s getting her own show on TBS which should be really good.

This piece in Vanity Fair is a nice little tribute:

There’s a lot of change coming to The Daily Show this year, with Jon Stewart leaving in August and newcomer Trevor Noah planning to take over, so perhaps this is just our chance to start bracing ourselves. Still, watching this reel of Samantha Bee’s many, many highlights on The Daily Show is an emotional experience—no matter how incredible you knew she was on camera, seeing it all in one place just makes it more clear how much we’re losing.

Bee isn’t leaving our televisions, thank goodness—she’s off to TBS, where she’ll host a show in which she’ll “ “apply her smart and satirical point of view to current and relevant issues,” according to the network. It sounds, essentially, like Bee hosting her own version of The Daily Show, not unlike what her fellow alum John Oliver has done. After 12 years on The Daily Show, Bee’s certainly earned the right to forge her own path—but that doesn’t mean we’re not as sad as Stewart is to see her go.

You can see the tribute reel at the link.

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For those who think the modern “thug” thing came straight outta Compton

by digby

Uhm, no:

@TheAmitie @bernardtrafford cartoons can be very illuminating as to what some people were thinking at the time pic.twitter.com/nxDrhim1UR

— Colfe’s History Dept (@COLFEShistory) May 2, 2015

Keep this in mind when you hear right wingers go on about MLK as a conservative hero They certainly didn’t think so at the time:

Funny that this was written about MLK when people say the same about most civil rights leaders today pic.twitter.com/jBRwOInmJZ

— stoopy poopy (@TheAmitie) May 1, 2015

“How can you, a minister of the gospel,be such a deceitful hypocrite. You’re not fooling anyone but yourself in your nauseating talk of non-violence. You demand a program to overcome poverty and “blow in” untold amounts in your high living and running around the globe to feed your own egotism. “

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A special form of sexism

by digby

When I was in high school a boy I liked told me to “pipe down” that my voice was shrill and annoying and “hurt his ears.” I was devastated, of course, and went to work immediately to fix this horrible flaw. I spent weeks consciously keeping my voice very even, very soft and spoke with as little emotion as I could muster. I ended up feeling very depressed, my girlfriends told me I was being a bore and I finally let it go and went back to being my shrill, annoying self. But I was self-conscious about my voice from that time on and always worried that it was putting people off, especially men. That fear was validated many, many times in my corporate career in business meetings where I was either ignored or shushed to make room for a man to express my exact point in a timbre they evidently preferred to hear it.

Rand Paul’s infamous behavior is a perfect example of how this is done:

I cringed when she laughed. But I’ve done exactly that many times. It’s a reflexive way to shrug off the humiliation of being talked to as if you are a child in a professional setting. I should have told any man who did that to go fuck himself. Of course, they were almost always my bosses …

Even the Fox News women had something to say about this:

In recent years when I heard myself on the radio or saw myself on film I was shocked that my voice sounded so … normal. Even when I was being passionate and unself-conscious. It turned out that I didn’t sound any more shrill than any other woman. Of course, that’s the point. We all do when it’s convenient for someone to say so.

Anyway, I thought of all this because of this sad observation from an article in the New Republic called “Why Do So Many People Hate The Sound of Hillary Clinton’s Voice?”

That brings us to the over-scrutinized voice of Hillary Clinton. To pull one recent example, here’s a New York Times reporter analyzing Clinton’s presidential campaign announcement video last week: “It allows her to use her quieter-but-confident speaking voice, instead of the VOICE she uses at news conference and at rallies, when she sometimes SPEAKS SO LOUDLY in hopes of conveying ENERGY and FORCEFULNESS (rather than simply projecting her voice better).”

Bloomberg Politics has broken down Clinton’s accent as it has changed since 1983, as she moved from Arkansas to Washington and spoke before different audiences. The reporter felt moved to assert three times that Clinton’s changing accent was not a sign of inauthenticity.

First, it’s important to note that women’s voices generally get more scrutiny. (Sample shaming trend piece: a 2006 New York Observer story headlined, “City Girl Squawk: It’s Like So Bad- It. Really. Sucks?”) Vocal fry, the subject of countless trend pieces and Today show segments in the last three years, is supposedly the terrible thing young women do to their voices to sound like dumb sex kittens. Remember uptalk? Before vocal fry, uptalk was the scourge of American English, in which young women would end declarative sentences with rising sounds as if they were asking a question. (As Liberman titled a 2005 Language Log post about uptalk, “This is, like, such total crap?”) The thing is, these things weren’t really new, and they weren’t exclusive to women. Here’s George W. Bush using uptalk. Here he is using vocal fry.

“There’s an idea that men and women talk differently, that men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” Fought says. “That’s really misleading. The biggest differences is in how men and women are perceived, and our ideas about how women should talk and how men should talk.” Men are supposed to be assertive, loud, and competitive. Women are supposed to be soft-spoken, cooperative, and helpful. “No matter who’s saying something, a man or a woman,” Fought says, “they’re being judged on their language via their gender.”

Hence the extreme scrutiny for a woman politician’s voice. A fascinating anthropological document is a 2008 video of Republican pollster Frank Luntz explaining Clinton’s voice to Sean Hannity on Fox News. A clip rolls of Clinton speaking in a lecture hall with reverberation that wrecks the audio quality. Of course Clinton sounds awful. Luntz says, “Forget the words. Listen to the way she communicates. It’s ALL AT THE SAME LEVEL AND I DONT WANT TO MAKE YOUR CONTROL ROOM GO NUTS BUT IT GETS LOUDER AND LOUDER but her voice doesn’t go up or down.” Then Luntz looks like a little boy about to tell a dirty joke: “Her voice is … and we’ll end up getting hit by Media Matters, but it’s true. In the research I have done … her voice turns people off. Because they feel like they’re being lectured.” This clip exists on YouTube as “Hillary Clinton’s Voice is a Turn Off!”

“I don’t know that the best evidence of the effect of Hillary’s voice would be in a recording of her giving a speech over a PA in a reverberating hall, captured on a cell phone, rebroadcast over TV and then recaptured on cell phone,” NPR linguist Nunberg says.

If you watch old clips of Clinton from the 1992 campaign, she is presenting herself in a much more feminine way, Fought says. She sounds more emotional—even if that means being pissed off when reporters ask about Gennifer Flowers. She sounds a little bit more Arkansas. She even wears a headband. But not anymore. “I think the advice she’s gotten is to get anything marked out of her speech,” Fought says, “anything that people can pick up on and make fun of.” It’s not masculine of feminine, it’s not regional, it’s not overly emotional or overly assertive. Hillary Clinton, having learned some lessons from the 2008 presidential race, might be playing up her femininity, talking about weddings and yoga and babies. But when you hear her voice, she doesn’t want you to think “girl.”

Let’s face it, she’s going to be hit whether she sounds like “a girl” or whether she doesn’t. When we’re trying to speak with authority we will either be criticized or shushed for sounding ditzy or grating by people who want to shut us down.

(Links to all that at TNR and they are fascinating. I just didn’t feel like copying and pasting them all.)

Here’s an example of this phenomenon. I know it’s cheap to use Tweety but in my experience he was just a guy who said what others were thinking:

MATTHEWS: Let me go back to Frank Luntz. Frank, you were talking about smooth transitions and I was thinking how hard it is for a woman to take on a job that’s always been held by men. And it is so hard.

We were watching Hillary Clinton earlier tonight; she was giving a campaign barn-burner speech, which is harder to give for a woman; it can grate on some men when they listen to it — fingernails on a blackboard, perhaps.

Now, here’s Nancy Pelosi who has to do the good fight against the president over issues like minimum wage and reforming — perhaps — prescription drugs, so that people can afford drugs and get them in a program that’s easy to understand. All kinds of things like that she’ll have to go head-to-head with this president. How does she do it without screaming? How does she do it without becoming grating?

“…to men”, he should have added. Women don’t seem to have this problem. But does it even matter what they think?

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A sadly necessary app

by digby

Via The Nation

The ACLU in California today released a free smart-phone app that allows people to send cellphone videos of police encounters to the ACLU, automatically—and the ACLU will preserve the video footage, even if the cops seize the phone and delete the video or destroy the phone. The app, “Mobile Justice CA,” works for both iPhones and Android users. It’s available at Apple’s App Store and at Google Play.

The app features a large red “Record” button in the middle of the screen. When it’s pressed, the video is recorded on the phone and a duplicate copy is transmitted simultaneously to the ACLU server. When the “stop” button is pressed, a “Report” screen appears, where information about the location of the incident and the people involved can also be transmitted to the ACLU. The video and the information are treated as a request for legal assistance and reviewed by staff members. No action is taken by the ACLU, however, unless an explicit request is made, and the reports are treated as confidential and privileged legal communications. The videos, however, may be shared by the ACLU with the news media, community organizations or the general public to help call attention to police abuse.

The app is available in English and Spanish. It includes a “Know Your Rights” page.

The value of the Mobile Justice app was dramatized this month in the Los Angeles suburb of South Gate, where a bystander taped cops detaining people in her neighborhood. A second person was recording her, and in that video, a lawman rushes at the first woman, grabs her cell phone, and smashes it on the floor. The second video ended up on YouTube. (South Gate police later said the officer was not a local cop but rather a deputy US marshal.)

Other states ACLUs have similar apps so be sure to check. Unfortunately, in places like Texas they are trying to make taping the police illegal. (I think they call that “freedom” or something …)

Anyway, we should all have this on our phone. You just never know these days.

h/t to Tom S.

Following the money
by Tom Sullivan

Sen. Bernie Sanders just solved our get-out-the-vote problem here for 2016. At least for next year’s primary. In this very blue town, Dennis Kucinich handily won the county’s presidential primary over North Carolina’s John Edwards in 2004. Democratic insiders were mortified. Sanders entering the 2016 presidential race this week will goose our turnout for sure.

Clinton’s Twitter feed welcomed Sanders to the race on Thursday:

I agree with Bernie. Focus must be on helping America's middle class. GOP would hold them back. I welcome him to the race. –H— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 30, 2015

I’d have thought he would have to change his registration, but Steve Benen thinks not:

There is one nagging issue, though, that’s likely to come up in the coming months: Sanders is running in a Democratic primary despite not being an actual Democrat. In the Senate, the Vermonter caucuses with Dems, but is officially an independent. That remains true today – Sanders’ office has made it quite clear that, despite his bid for national office, the senator has not changed his party affiliation, is still not a Democrat, and remains a proud independent.

Indeed, Sanders has never been a Democrat – as the multi-term mayor of Burlington, he was a member of a small, state-based party, and as a multi-term U.S. House member, Sanders was a member of Vermont’s Progressive Party. (In recent years, the state Democratic Party has had no interest in running candidates against Sanders, so Dems formally nominate Sanders as their Senate candidate, and he then declines that nomination.)

As a procedural matter, there’s no rule that says only Democrats can seek the Democratic nomination, but as a practical matter, it may add an additional challenge for Sanders while appealing to Democratic diehards.

Sanders might still have trouble getting on the ballot in some states.

Comparisons between Sanders and Hillary Clinton are already surfacing that will put some heat on Clinton’s candidacy. Not to put a fine point on it, somebody online combined these screen grabs from OpenSecrets.org:

As CNN reported on Thursday:

The Vermont senator who entered the 2016 race for the White House on Thursday told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in his first interview as a candidate that he’ll instead look to small-dollar individual donors.

And he lambasted the growing influence that major donors like Charles and David Koch on the right and Tom Steyer on the left now have on the political process.

“Frankly, it is vulgar to me that we’re having a war of billionaires,” Sanders said.

Asked whether he would bless a wealthy donor’s support for a pro-Sanders Super PAC, he said: “No.”

Sanders’ donations history, if not his policies, will set him clearly apart from Clinton, but as the graphic illustrates, in terms of raw numbers he might not want to get into a “his pacs – her pacs” debate.

A little Friday evening respite from the storm

by digby

Another Girl,”the Lennon/McCartney track off 1965’s “Help!” has never been performed live, neither by the Beatles as a group nor as part of a solo performance. That is, until Tuesday, when Paul McCartney performed the song at a concert at Japan’s Budokan, a venue the Beatles played together back in 1966. “It was sensational and quite emotional remembering the first time and then experiencing this fantastic audience tonight,”McCartney said. “It was thrilling for us and we think it was probably the best show we did in Japan and it was great to be doing the Budokan 49 years later. It was crazy. We loved it.”

A fan video:

Look who was featured speaker at the Koch Summit

by digby

Peter Schweizer author of “Clinton Cash”, who they humorously call a “researcher.” And there’s audio of it:

[A]ccording to audio obtained by The Undercurrent and Lady Libertine from a source who was present, Schweizer spoke at a political strategy summit for the Koch brothers last summer, urging donors to relentlessly pursue the left and rallying them ahead of a big fundraising pitch. His own organization, the Government Accountability Institute receives funding from Koch-funded groups.

Schweizer told the crowd:

That debate is going to come down to the question of independence versus dependence… The left and the academic sphere is not going to let up. The question is, are we going to let up? And I would contend to you that we cannot let up.

Asked if “Clinton Cash” was motivated by this strategy of relentless pursuit, Kurt Bardella, whose firm, Endeavor Strategies, represents Schweizer, said:

As he has in several speeches as a lifelong conservative, Schweizer was espousing his view that conservatives should be informed, engaged, and active.

Kevin Gentry, the emcee and a vice president of the Charles Koch Foundation, later named “competitive intelligence,” the business terminology equivalent of opposition research, as one of the enumerated Koch political investment areas.

Here’s the audio:

You can find a transcript at the link.

He’s a Koch hitman:

Schweizer’s speech, entitled “The Stakes: Who Will Define the American Dream,” teed up the Kochs’ appeal to raise $290 million in donations for their fundraising hub, Freedom Partners, its affiliated network of non-profits, and a newly created super-PAC called Freedom Partners Action Fund. Bardella declined to answer whether Schweizer was speaking in a fundraising capacity for GAI, or whether Schweizer or GAI received any funds from Koch-affiliated organizations.

Stephen Bannon, the director of conservative propaganda films like the Sarah Palin biopic “The Undefeated” and a frequent collaborator with Citizens United Productions, chairs GAI’s board. Another GAI board member is Ron Robinson, who also sits on the boards of Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation.

Citizens United Productions was the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – the decision that rolled back significant campaign finance law pertaining to independent expenditures. At the center of that landmark case was a political documentary-cum-attack ad on Hillary Clinton called “Hillary: The Movie,” released ahead of the 2008 primary. Now nearly eight years later ahead of the 2016 primary, Schweitzer has published what could be considered the follow-up, Hillary: The Book.

And Citizens United goes all the way back to Whitewater.

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