Month: May 2015

Golly, what could go wrong?

by digby

You may or may not have heard about this proposed motorcycle gang  “protest” in Arizona outside the mosque where the two misfits who attacked Pam Geller’s cartoon contest, but I wrote about it here:

Another group of wingnuts, this time bikers in Arizona (perhaps inspired by the Waco gangsters’ show of force), are planning to convene a “protest” outside the mosque reportedly attended by the two shooters who attacked Geller’s contest. They plan to meet tonight at a local Denny’s to hold a Prophet cartoon contest of their own, and then stage a “peaceful protest” across the street at the mosque.

It’s called the “Freedom of Speech Rally Round II”. They announced it on their Facebook page:

ROUND 2!!!!!!! This will be a PEACEFUL protest in front of the Islamic Community Center in Phoenix AZ. This is in response to the recent attack in Texas where 2 armed terrorist, with ties to ISIS, attempted Jihad.

Everyone is encouraged to bring American Flags and any message that you would like to send to the known acquaintances of the 2 gunmen. This Islamic Community Center is a known place that the 2 terrorist frequented.

People are also encouraged to utilize there [sic] second amendment right at this event just incase our first amendment comes under the much anticipated attack.

1. Date will be Friday May 29th @ 6:15pm. This is when they normally host a large prayer.

2. Bikers wil meet at the Denny’s located at 9030 N Black Canyon Hwy Phoenix, AZ 85051@슠5:00pm. Kick Stands up at 6pm.

3. There will be a Muhammad Cartoon Contest and the winner will be announced at the After Party. Participants must show cartoon at the Rally.

4. We will not have food vendors at this event because we don’t want this to turn into a carnival. People can bring snacks and water but please keep the neighborhood clean.

5. There will be an after party starting at 8:30pm at Wild Bills located at 6840 N. 27th Ave Phx, AZ.

Thank you all for your Support.

It’s good to see they aren’t litterers. Well, unless you’re talking about spent bullets and dead bodies “just in case” their “first amendment comes under the much anticipated attack.” (One assumes they have only seen a version of the First Amendment in which “freedom of religion” is redacted.)

This strange convergence of bikers vs ISIS isn’t all that surprising. It turns out that biker gangs in Europe have actually run off to join the Kurds and that some right wingers are calling for ourlaw bikers to be “retrained” to fight ISIS here at home. Seriously.

Now this is what I call a circular firing squad

by digby

Rand Paul:

“ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS. These hawks also wanted to bomb Assad, which would have made ISIS’s job even easier. They’ve created these people. Everything that they’ve talked about in foreign policy, they’ve been wrong about for 20 years, and yet they have somehow the gall to keep saying and pointing fingers otherwise.”

I’ll give him credit for saying it because it’s true. Of course, there are similar hawks in the Democratic Party, the difference being that Rand Paul is pretty much the only one in the GOP who isn’t one while while the Democrats boast a large dovish faction.

I honestly don’t understand Rand Paul’s thinking. He’s been hedging on foreign policy for months, backtracking on his isolationism trying to differentiate himself from the Democrats while keeping the bloodthirsty base of the GOP open to him. This comment is one that’s guaranteed to create havoc for him with the base. They love war more than they love low taxes and hate gays. I don’t know how he gets more than a few dope smoking college kids to vote for him.

On the other hand, he may have recognized that this isn’t a serious race for president but that he can use the national stage to advance his libertarian philosophy. Let’s hope so. We don’t need to hear any more about libertarian economic ideas — we’ve had quite enough of that, thank you. (And thanks for the inequality too!) But having him challenge the field on foreign policy is a goo thing. Between Paul on one side and Sanders on the other we might even have a real discussion of these issues.

Meanwhile, I don’t know how I missed this one:

“Everything I know about the Iranians I learned in the pool room,” Graham said, during a video address to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, referencing his time working in a bar.

“I ran the pool room when I was a kid and I met a lot of liars, and I know the Iranians are liars,” he added.

Later on, Graham criticized the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran and got more specific, attacking the Iranian “regime.”

“The Iranians cheat and they lie. They are a radical regime,” he said. “They want a master religion for the world; the Nazis wanted a master race.”

He’s getting downright psycho…

And by the way, he won his race in South Carolina going away because they love that about him.

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“I’m really sorry for what’s about to happen.”
by Tom Sullivan

As the saying goes, this is why we can’t have nice things.

Perhaps you remember #JustOneLegislator from February? Freshman North Carolina state senator Jeff Jackson made national news when the Charlotte Democrat was the only legislator to show up for work in Raleigh after a snowstorm. Jackson took to Twitter to muse about all the things he was getting done as a legislature of one. His Tweets landed him on Buzzfeed and made him Rachel Maddow’s Best New Thing in the World.

It turns out it really is a lot easier to get things done when Republican leaders stay home.

Jackson filed two bills in March meant to clean up some loopholes in existing laws, one concerning the definition of statutory rape and another regarding federal sex offenders. In Jackson’s words, “low-hanging fruit.” No-brainer legislation with Republican co-sponsors. But the bills stalled in committee. One GOP legislator apologized, saying, “I’m really sorry for what’s about to happen.”

An editorial in the Charlotte Observer explains:

On Wednesday, Jackson’s fears were confirmed. The bills have both been added to the House abortion bill that would, among other things, extend the mandatory waiting period for abortions to 72 hours.

Why add two good bills on sex crimes to one bad and unrelated bill on abortion? Because now, when Democrats vote against the abortion bill, they’ll also be voting against tighter rules on sex offenders and statutory rapists. You can imagine the TV ads the next time one of those Democrats faces a Republican election challenge.

No one has a clue which Colonel Mustard did it, in the committee room, with the monkey wrench. As usual, Republican leaders won’t say.

Since Jackson’s bills have Republican support, and since the GOP holds supermajorities in both houses, Jackson’s Republican co-sponsors will get their language passed regardless of how the Democrats vote. Perhaps the GOP leadership also wants to slap down the freshman Democrat for being uppity. These guys rarely do anything that is not at least a twofer.

This is not the first abortion restriction to advance since Pat McCrory won North Carolina’s governorship in 2012. McCrory was blunt when asked in a debate what further abortion restrictions he would sign into law, answering, “None.” Then in July 2013, claiming, “This law does not further limit access,” McCrory signed a bill that would “eliminate abortion coverage for public employees and individuals who have insurance through federal health care law’s public exchanges … ban sex-selective abortions and impose additional regulations on abortion clinics.” Several clinics across the state shut their doors.

The 2013 bill was just a warmup. A final Senate vote on the newest abortion measure could come next week.

The proverbial needle in a haystack

by digby

Via the Intercept — well, well, well:

AS MEMBERS OF CONGRESS struggle to agree on which surveillance programs to re-authorize before the Patriot Act expires, they might consider the unusual advice of an intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency who warned about the danger of collecting too much data. Imagine, the analyst wrote in a leaked document, that you are standing in a shopping aisle trying to decide between jam, jelly or fruit spread, which size, sugar-free or not, generic or Smucker’s. It can be paralyzing.

“We in the agency are at risk of a similar, collective paralysis in the face of a dizzying array of choices every single day,” the analyst wrote in 2011. “’Analysis paralysis’ isn’t only a cute rhyme. It’s the term for what happens when you spend so much time analyzing a situation that you ultimately stymie any outcome …. It’s what happens in SIGINT [signals intelligence] when we have access to endless possibilities, but we struggle to prioritize, narrow, and exploit the best ones.”

The document is one of about a dozen in which NSA intelligence experts express concerns usually heard from the agency’s critics: that the U.S. government’s “collect it all” strategy can undermine the effort to fight terrorism. The documents, provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, appear to contradict years of statements from senior officials who have claimed that pervasive surveillance of global communications helps the government identify terrorists before they strike or quickly find them after an attack.

 Again, this seems like common sense to me.

The jam vs. jelly document, titled “Too Many Choices,” started off in a colorful way but ended with a fairly stark warning: “The SIGINT mission is far too vital to unnecessarily expand the haystacks while we search for the needles. Prioritization is key.”

These doubts are infrequently heard from officials inside the NSA. These documents are a window into the private thinking of mid-level officials who are almost never permitted to discuss their concerns in public.

They never are. The megalomaniacal showboaters who run these shows think they know everything. And yet they always prove otherwise with nonsense like this:

In addition to consulting Nobel-prize winning work, NSA analysts have turned to easier literature, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The author of a 2011 document referenced Blink and stated, “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” The author added, “Gladwell has captured one of the biggest challenges facing SID today. Our costs associated with this information overload are not only financial, such as the need to build data warehouses large enough to store the mountain of data that arrives at our doorstep each day, but also include the more intangible costs of too much data to review, process, translate and report.”

Remember when Paul Wolfowitz passed around Laurie Mylroie’s book about Saddam being behind the first WTC attack after 9/11? Remember when Newt Gingrich brought the Tofflers into the Pentagon? Hey, remember when Dick Cheney sent Norman Schwartzkopf Ken Burns’ “Civil War” series to give him tips on winning the first Gulf War? They’re not what you’d call well-rounded people and so they are all suckers for pop futurism, conspiracy nonsense and bourgeois romanticism. That’s what so scary about them.

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Hastert broke the rule

by digby

Yikes. Another ex-Speaker of the House goes down in disgrace:

Prosecutors said that in 2010, when the unnamed individual confronted Hastert about the allegations of misconduct, the former speaker agreed to pay out $3.5 million “to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against” this person.

Over the next five years Hastert withdrew about $1.7 million in cash from his various bank accounts, at one point last year delivering $100,000 at a time to the person, the indictment alleges.

Beginning in 2013, the FBI and Internal Revenue Service began investigating “possible structuring of currency transactions to avoid the reporting requirements.” Hastert had made more than a dozen withdrawals of $50,000 in cash, which was provided to the unnamed individual every six weeks, the indictment said.

After bank representatives questioned him about the withdrawals, he began taking out less than $10,000 at a time, providing it to the unnamed person at set locations and times, prosecutors say. When Hastert was asked about the withdrawals, the indictment states that he told agents: “I kept the cash.”

However, the indictment states that this is a lie, and Hastert was trying to keep his agreement to pay the unnamed person “secret so as to cover up his past misconduct.”

The indictment doesn’t say what he was being blackmailed for, it just notes that he was a high school teacher and wrestling coach.

I have to laugh though to think that this guy was a high school teacher and a congressman and parlayed that into enough money to pay off a blackmailer in the millions. What a racket.

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Democrats wake up from their slumber


by digby

James Vega at the Democratic Strategist discusses the mainstream media  snivelling about Clinton failing to pay enough attention to them and even praises progressive commentators for taking them to task.  But he makes a further point that I think is important:

The problem with the mainstream D.C. press is not simply that they are obsessed with seeking scandals and “gotcha” moments. It is that for all practical purposes many have become salesmen for a clearly and unambiguously partisan anti-Democratic narrative. This fact has significant implications for Democratic political strategy.

This is not to say that the group of mainstream commentators in question says exactly the same thing as Fox News and the overtly pro-GOP press. Quite the contrary, the distinct role these commentators are playing in the American partisan ideological debate is leveraging their pretence of neutrality in order to minimize and conceal the massive extremist trend within the GOP. Their method is to continually insist upon a false equivalency between the two parties.

In the latest issue of The American Prospect Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson provide one of the most carefully documented demonstrations of this point. They conclude:

Despite the evidence of increasing Republican extremism, elite discourse–in journalism, academia, and foundations–resists the notion that Republicans are primarily responsible for polarization and deadlock. To argue that one party is more to blame than another for political dysfunction is seen as evidence of bias, not to mention bad manners. Foundations will fund nonpartisan vote drives; they will not fund efforts to shame right-wing Republicans for crippling governance. Academics worry about seeming biased when the truly biased perspective is the one that treats the parties as equally extreme. And while Fox News takes an avowedly partisan line, most of the media world retreats into self-defeating denials of the truth that stares them in the face.

Consider what happened in 2013 when Mann and Ornstein, who had probably been the most quoted observers of Congress during the previous two decades, issued their well-documented critique, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. The book emphasized the responsibility of the GOP for government dysfunction. After it came out, the authors were not quoted in the press or invited to the public affairs shows on which they had regularly appeared. As Mann explained, “I can no longer be a source in a news story in The Wall Street Journal or the Times or the Post because people now think I’ve made the case for the Democrats and therefore I’ll have to be balanced with a Republican.”

Balance is one thing when you are talking about ideological differences; it is dangerous when you are talking about basic facts of American political life. In too many crucial venues, the mainstream media’s desire to maintain the appearance of neutrality trumps the real need for truth-telling. The inevitable complexity of the governing process further increases the temptation to offer narratives that do not help more casual observers of our politics to determine accountability. This isn’t just bad journalism; it’s a green light for extremism.

To repeat, this has substantial implications for Democratic political strategy.

In the first place, it means that Hillary is entirely right in refusing to play by the traditional rules. The mainstream political press has itself rendered these rules obsolete by failing to report on the most important political story of recent years – the extremist conquest of the GOP. Reporters and commentators who refuse to report this reality as an objective fact about modern American politics cannot possibly also play the role of impartial arbitrators or objective journalists when covering a Democratic political candidate.

Second, Hillary’s decision to act in accordance with this insight presents a profound challenge and threat to the GOP crypto-partisans among the press corps, one which will inevitably engender a deep and profound hostility and desire to cut her down to size. As Greg Sargent notes:

I suspect that to at least some degree reporters share conservatives’ frustration that all the Clinton scandals and mini-scandals and pseudo-scandals haven’t taken them down. In a way it’s an affront to the power of the press. When we splash headline after headline about allegations of misbehavior across our papers, when we devote hour after hour on television to the fact that “questions are being raised,” well that’s supposed to make an impact. It’s supposed to drive the politician in question to the depths of ignominy. It’s not supposed to leave them in exactly the same position as they were when it started.

Everything [Hillary is] doing communicates to the press that they aren’t as important as they once were. It’s bound to get them angry and make them like her even less than they already do, which could make their coverage even harsher.

As a result, Democrats should prepare themselves for the uncomfortable fact that in the coming months the mainstream press will become increasingly and stridently anti-Clinton. So long as she does not play by their rules they will describe her as “remote,” “fake,” “robotic”, “inauthentic” “scripted”, “cynical” “manipulative”, “dishonest” and “insincere”. Her Republican opponent, whether it is Bush, Walker, Rubio, or any of the other contenders will then be described in contrast as much more “real” “down to earth” “authentic” “open” “honest” and “sincere.” Fueled by their wounded vanity and the very real threat to their influence, the mainstream commentators will create a narrative that continually frames the 2016 election in precisely this way.

To be fair, the “progressive commentators” have also been pointing this out for a long, long time. Democrats didn’t want to hear it before but it seems it’s become to obvious to ignore any longer.

This isn’t a problem that applies only to Clinton’s candidacy.  It’s been an ongoing problem in journalism for many years. And as Hacker and Pierson demonstrate, the effect is to empower the right whether they win or lose elections. The consequences of this are profound and the mainstream media bears substantial responsibility.

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Poor Paula

by digby

I always felt sorry for Jones. It wasn’t so much because of the alleged harrassment — there was a lot of evidence going in different directions on that.  (If it happened the way her lawyers wrote it up, I’m sure it was creepy.)  No, I felt sorry for her because the right used her like a prop for their little spectacle and the exploitation was over the top. I’ll never forget the look on her face when those big-time lawyers (who’d been recruited by the cabal of Washington GOP operatives at the center of the anti-Clinton crusade) introduced her to the nation on TV. Let’s just say that Jones wasn’t the one who benefited from that episode.

Of course, this was before the advent of reality TV in which people go on television and share their disgusting secret habits for fun and profit, so that concern is no longer even slightly relevant.

Still, I always thought of her a “poor Paula.” She was a pawn in that whole thing.

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QOTD: Marco the Magnificent

by digby

This is the most level headed guy they’ve got:

“We are at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech because today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage, you are labeled a homophobe and a hater. So what’s the next step after that? After they’re done going after individuals, the next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church, is hate speech. That’s a real and present danger.”

This is such utter nonsense it’s hard to believe than anyone serious would say such a dumb thing. They used to be the kind of silly thing that came out of the mouths of talk show frothers like Sean Hannity. They’re mainstream talking points in the Republican Party now.

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Lindsay Graham the giant slayer

by digby

I wrote about the Tea Party’s one big electoral loss in South Carolina and what it means for Salon today:

[T]here was one notable exception to the Tea Party’s continued success and it happened in the state widely considered to be the most conservative in the nation, the home of the man many believe is the real Godfather of the Modern Conservative/Tea Party movement, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. For all of the Tea Party’s clout in the Republican Party it could not manage to unseat one senator they consider to be among the most traitorous of all RINOs (Republican in name only), Lindsey Graham.

Jenna McLaughlin at Mother Jones wrote about this last week:

“I’m making that a tea party goal to get scoundrels like Lindsey Graham out of office,” Greg Deitz, a Charleston Tea Party organizer, told Politico.

In 2010, about 100 tea party activists gathered outside Graham’s office in Greenville, South Carolina, to protest his support for the bipartisan climate bill. “No cap and trade,” they chanted. Two different countywide GOP organizations in South Carolina voted to censure Graham noting that “in the name of bipartisanship—[he] continues to weaken the Republican brand and tarnish the ideals of freedom, rule of law, and fiscal conservatism.”

Tea party activists routinely booed him when he spoke at town hall meetings. At one gathering at the Bluffton Library in June 2010, activists in the audience interrupted Graham with angry questions and accusations when he asked what the biggest problems facing the world were. One audience member, according to the Beaufort Gazette, told Graham to “be conservative and quit reaching across the aisle.”

Graham further upset the tea party by meeting with Obama several times to discuss working together on various issues, such as “closing Guantánamo Bay and bringing terror suspects to justice,” according to Newsweek. Graham was a former military prosecutor who served on the Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, and Joe Biden invited him over to his home for a steak dinner to discuss Afghanistan.

And Graham hates them right back. He even called them bigots and said they were a flash in the pan. And yet he won the general with 55 percent of the vote after winning huge in the primary. Odd that in places like Indiana and Utah the Tea Party can unseat a Republican incumbent but not in the blood-red state of South Carolina, isn’t it?

“There was speculation that he would face severe tea party resistance,” says Robert Wislinski, a political strategist based in South Carolina. “[But] that never really materialized.” Graham raised $13 million for the primary race, and mobilized a powerful campaign. Five challengers who were seeking their first elected office, and one incumbent state senator, ran against him, but their combined campaign war chest was only about $2 million. The Republican opposition was split, and Graham’s opponents weren’t particularly well known. Nor did the opposition get any help from national tea party activists like Sarah Palin, who remained silent on the race. “The conservative opposition could not unify for the singular purpose of defeating Graham,” wrote the conservative blog RedState in January, and Graham won with 56 percent of the vote.

So, why couldn’t they get it together? True, the rumors about Graham’s sexuality are always lurking under the surface but that doesn’t explain it. In a hardcore right-wing state with many politically active social conservatives, that would not likely work in his favor. Certainly he didn’t win because those same right-wingers are yearning for bipartisanship and Graham’s willingness to chow down on rib-eye with Joe Biden. They hate bipartisanship almost as much as they hate food stamps.

There is only one reason that South Carolina would reelect Graham with a solid majority: They may not like his willingness to break bread with a Democrat but they love Graham’s extreme hawkishness.

Read on …

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“It’s a club” and here’s who’s in it

by Gaius Publius

I can’t not post this, a wonderful video I found at DownWithTyranny. You may have heard of the Princeton study of who rules America. This makes the results strikingly visual —  must-watch if you’ve got five minutes to spare:

Consider that a lab notebook illustrating this:

George Carlin will never die, not in our hearts at least. Thank you, sir.

GP

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