Month: June 2015

Corruption

by digby

I don’t know what this means except for the fact that it’s a little weird that so many people think the federal government is corrupt but fail to see the other side of the corruption. Where do they suppose the money comes from that corrupting the government?

Thirty-eight percent of Americans chose the federal government as the most corrupt institution in American society followed by the news media 17 percent, banks and financial institutions 16 percent, the police 11 percent and organized religions 7 percent. The size and sway of the government would lead many people to think it is ripe for corrupt behavior. Forty-four percent of Republicans think so whereas only 26 percent of Democrats do. Twenty-nine percent of Republicans chose the news media while 25 percent of Democrats picked banks and financial institutions. Surprisingly, the police who have been in the news so much lately got only 11 percent (4 percent Republicans vs. 17 percent Democrats) it appears that Americans still support their local sheriff.

Policing the internet

by digby

Fergawdsakes:

The Justice Department has issued a federal grand jury subpoena to Reason, a prominent libertarian publication, to unmask the identity of commenters who made alleged threats against a federal judge.

In the June 2 subpoena, first published by the blog Popehat on Monday, the Justice Department orders Reason to provide a federal grand jury with “any and all identifying information” on the identities of commenters who mused about shooting federal judges and/or feeding them through a wood chipper.

A May 31 article on Reason’s blog about the prosecution of Silk Road founder Ross “Dread Pirate Roberts” Ulbricht spurred the anonymous commenters’ vitriol. Ulbricht pleaded for leniency, but a federal judge sentenced Ulbricht to life in prison without parole for setting up the illicit online drug market.

“It’s judges like these that should be taken out back and shot,” one Reason commenter wrote.

“It’s judges like these that will be taken out back and shot,” another responded.

“Why waste ammunition? Wood chippers get the message across clearly,” a third wrote. “Especially if you feed them in feet first.”

Another comment suggested shooting such judges on courthouse steps instead.

If they’re going to start monitoring anonymous comment sections for hyperbolic speech we’re going to see a huge uptick in employment because it will take millions of man hours to wade through all the swill on every web site on the internet. Perhaps they could start on the right wing websites where they commonly talk about killing anyone with whom they have a beef.

You have to love the idea that somebody in the FBI (or the NSA?) was reading blog posts at Reason and decided to police the comment section. Jesus H. Christ.

*And no I don’t think making idle threats about killing judges is acceptable behavior. But then most of the stuff I read in comment sections is unacceptable behavior.

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Chris Christie: president of the 6th grade

by digby

I wrote about the New Jersey Governor for Salon this morning.  He ain’t done yet:

According to an audio recording of the event, he said Mr. Putin had taken the measure of Mr. Obama. “I don’t believe, given who I am, that he would make the same judgment,” Mr. Christie said. “Let’s leave it at that.”

[I]t’s equally possible Christie knows Putin wouldn’t be rattled by a humiliating, Jersey-style tongue-lash—and believes that only actual force, rather than just forceful words, would give Putin pause.

Christie called for a “military approach” to China’s advances to “let them know there are limits to what they’re allowed to do.”

“That is an issue that we can handle militarily by going out there and making sure that we show them that we don’t respect their claims to these artificial islands in the South China Sea that they’re building that they’re saying are theirs that are hundreds and hundreds of miles from the coast of China and are clearly in international waters,” Christie said adding: “We need to send that signal to the Chinese very clearly that we do not acknowledge nor will we respect their claims to those areas.”

Read on.

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Oh, Lawdy-Lawd, he’s desp’at!
by Tom Sullivan

This Tweet went by the other day and I just had to go back and find it:

wow. Gov Walker wants taxpayers to pay HALF of construction costs for Milwaukee Buck's nice new arena; http://t.co/UHnd0FdsK4— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) June 8, 2015

Comparisons have been made and disputed between Walker’s diversion of state funds to the arena and his cuts in state education funding. And yes, team owners have conned Democrats too. But the specifics of the Wisconsin deal are not what interests me this morning.

These deals always remind me of the Blazing Saddles scene in which Sheriff Bart puts his own gun to his head and threatens to shoot himself. Except with sports arena deals it is owners threatening to shoot their teams, “Build us a new stadium or your team gets it!” Flustered officials blurt out, “Hold it, men. He’s not bluffing.” Then they ante up taxpayer dollars. We pay them to make money.

We regularly decry corporate capitalism’s race to the bottom. But the phrasing assumes there is a bottom. I’m not so sure. Considering offshoring, tax incentives, and tax repatriation legislation, you have to wonder just what level of taxation — including none — would rent-seeking, modern corporations accept without whining, without looking for even more ways to squeeze blood from a stone or more work from workers for even less?

There is a runaway, kudzu-ish element to corporate capitalism, but there is a Tom Sawyer-ish feature as well. Public corporations won’t be satisfied until We the People are paying them for making a profit — the way Tom Sawyer tricked friends into paying for the privilege of whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence. These sports arena deals remind us that when an Obama tells business owners, you didn’t build that, he’s right.

Pretty soon working people will be paying the elite in brass door knockers (or their equivalent) for building it for them.

Guardian vs Warrior


by digby

Here’s a very interesting article by a police scholar about what happened in McKinney:

An officer in McKinney, Texas, dashes down a sidewalk, losing his flashlight as he runs past a teenage videographer toward an emergency. Seconds later, the teen with the camera walks up to another officer, one who is standing with a group of kids. “I’m just saying,” the officer is saying in a calm, corrective tone that parents and school teachers everywhere will recognize. “Don’t take off running when the cops get here.”

He thanks the videographer for returning the flashlight, then listens for a few seconds as the kids around him try to explain who was and was not involved in a prior incident. “Okay, guys, I appreciate that,” the as-yet-unidentified officer says. He responds to their concerns—that the police had detained the wrong people—by saying, “Okay, that’s what I’m saying. They’re free to go.” While not casual, the officer is composed. His tone is friendly and professional as he engages with the kids.

Seconds later, another officer, Corporal Eric Casebolt, is shown interacting with some of the same kids. His angry tone and aggressive attitude stand in marked contrast to the first officer in the video. “Get on the ground,” he commands sharply while pulling on a young man’s wrist in a way that looks like he’s trying to force the man to the ground with a painful joint manipulation (technically a supinating wrist lock or, for martial arts enthusiasts, kote gaeshi).

When that proves ineffective, he grabs the back of the young man’s head and shoves him down. “I told you to stay,” he yells, pointing a large metal flashlight at someone off camera. “Get your asses down on the ground.” Like the first officer, he lectures some of the kids about running from the police, but he takes a very different approach. “Don’t make me fucking run around here with thirty pounds of god-damned gear on in the sun because you want to screw around out here.” He is anything but composed, calm or professional.

The two officers in this brief video represent two different policing styles, two different mindsets that officers use as they interact with civilians: the Guardian and the Warrior. As a former police officer and current policing scholar, I know that an officer’s mindset has tremendous impact on police/civilian encounters. I’ve described the Guardian and Warrior mindsets at some length here and here; for now, suffice to say that the right mindset can de-escalate tense situations, induce compliance, and increase community trust over the long-term. The kids interacting with the first officer were excited, but not upset; they remained cooperative. Had they gone home at that moment, they’d have a story for their friends and family, but it would be a story that happened to have the police in it rather than being a story about the police.

The wrong mindset, on the other hand, can exacerbate a tense encounter, produce resistance, and lead to entirely avoidable violence. It can, and has, caused longterm damage to police/community relations. We shouldn’t be surprised that the kids Corporal Casebolt was yelling at weren’t eager to do what he was ordering them to do—no one likes being cursed at and disrespected in front of their peers, and people of all ages, especially teenagers, resent being treated unjustly. That resentment can lead to resistance, and Police Warriors—taught to exercise unquestioned command over a scene—overcome resistance by using force.

I think everyone got so caught up in the story of military gear appearing on the streets of America that our discussion of the militarization of police got short changed. This is the big problem that stems from militarization — bad training and bad attitudes.

If you live in a big city you see police in action all the time. I certainly do. And most of the time it’s a respectful, often even friendly interaction. But it’s not uncommon to see this aggressive, hostile belligerent approach and it always seems to come out of nowhere. This author says that there should be some training for police on the scene to intervene and give cops who’ve become too wound up some space to calm down and get their act together but it’s rare. I’ve never seen that, actually. What I’ve observed is that the wound up cop is left to do his thing while other cops ignore it. In McKinney it did look as though a couple of officers intervened a little bit when their colleague pulled a gun, but it was brief and mostly worked because they took up the chase leaving our amped up officer to go back to assaulting the girl in the bikini.

There are people who are thinking about this stuff and over time this really could change. But the police have to take it seriously and the communities have to back their attempts to change. from what I’ve seen of this white community and the toxic swill that’s been spewed on facebook and blog comment sections, I’m not holding out a lot of hope for that.

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Seriously, What is Wrong With This Country?

by tristero

Rick Santorum held a campaign rally and someone actually showed up. This is a very strange country.

Untidy remembrances

by digby

Donald Rumsfeld said something. It wasn’t earth shattering:

[T]he idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic. I was concerned about it when I first heard those words … I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories.

That wasn’t what he said at the time but he really wasn’t one of those starry-eyed neocons who talked about turning Iraq into a Jeffersonian democracy. He was always one of those Kissinger Realist types who just wanted to topple Iraq because it had been determined that we needed to topple someone and everything had been set up to topple Saddam. He was always more of a “shock and awe” guy than a “birth-pangs of democracy” guy like Wolfowitz.

But seeing him in the news made me nostalgic for the good old days. Remember this?

Kathryn Jean Lopez: You’ve taken a little criticism already from the likes of Maureen Dowd (do they give medals for that yet?) for being a little too Rumsfeld-friendly (I believe I’ve seen the words “hero worship)? How do you plead?

Midge Decter: I certainly and happily plead guilty to the idea behind Maureen Dowd’s column, absurd though her general posture is. (I have said that had she known what a great favor she was doing me by telling other Rumsfeld admirers about the book as she did, she would surely never have done it. Too bad for her.)

Lopez: How noteworthy is it that Rumsfeld was a high-school wrestler? Decter: He was not only a high-school wrestler, but a college and navy wrestler as well–and a champion at all three levels. Now, I myself happen to know very little about wrestling: I must confess, for one thing, never in a long life to have seen a single wrestling match. Several of Rumsfeld’s friends, however–as I report in the book–find it very significant about him, in that wrestling is a sport in which, relying only on yourself, you can be either the lone winner or the lone loser. “In wrestling,” as one of them put it, “there is no such thing as second-place money.”

Lopez: Did I read right? There was a day when Donald Rumsfeld was not a good speaker?

Decter: When he decided to run for Congress, his only support at first was from his high-school friends and classmates. And that is the story: He was at first not a very good speaker, and in what has in hindsight to be viewed as predictable fashion, he set about to remedy the situation, by hiring a speech teacher and making his friends listen to him and offer their criticisms.

Lopez: In 1963, as a young congressman, Rumsfeld, you write, “criticized the State Department for the way it had recently been engaging in friendly relations with the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev and Hungary’s Janos Kadar.” Does Rumsfeld hostility toward Foggy Bottom have a long history?

Decter: He was certainly a Cold Warrior, and Cold Warriors were opposed to the policy that later came to be called dÈtente with the Soviet Union. At the time, any such hostility would not have been directed only at Foggy Bottom, of course, but at the then growing number of advocates of warmer relations with the Soviets. By the way, he would not agree to the idea that he even now feels any hostility to the State Department. The most you can get him to say is that the people in Foggy Bottom have their role and the people in the Defense Department have theirs. He is someone who does not gossip, no matter how much one urges him to (the most disparagement of anyone I was ever able to get out of him was a mention of how Nixon’s inmost circle of friends made him feel “uncomfortable”).

Lopez: What do the secretary and his wife make of his “Rumstud” status?

Decter: His wife, Joyce, and his children mainly seem to be amused by the “Rumstud” phenomenon. As for the secretary’s feeling about it, how could he (or any man) be as indifferent to it as he often pretended to be? Lopez: What does it say about our culture today–and about American women (of all ages!) that Rumsfeld’s become a sex symbol?

Decter: What Rumsfeld’s having become an American sex symbol seems to say about American culture today is that the assault on men leveled by the women’s movement, having poisoned the normally delicate relations between men and women and thereby left a generation of younger women with a load of anxiety they are only now beginning to throw off, is happily almost over. It’s hard to overestimate the significance of the term “stud” being applied to a man who has reached the age of 70 and will not too long from now be celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary.

And it wasn’t just the wingnutty neoconservatives who loved Rummy, remember? The press treated his press conferences as if they were watching a Richard Pryor stand-up.

God, that was a weird time.

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The 64 billion dollar question

by digby

I wrote about the billionaire donor problem for Salon today:

It seems as though every few months I come across another article trying to explain why the Citizens United ruling, while disturbing in many ways, is not the reason for the explosion of the Super PAC or the recent surge of wealthy billionaires involving themselves directly in political campaigns. The most recent comes from free speech advocate Wendy Kaminer in the Boston Globe, who writes:

Super PACs are not dependent on corporate funding. They’re primarily funded by super-rich individuals, whose right to devote unlimited amounts of their own money on independent expenditures (those not involving direct contributions to candidates) was confirmed by the Court in 1976, in Buckley v. Valeo. As the Brennan Center, a fierce critic of the Citizens United ruling, has acknowledged, “the singular focus on the decision’s empowerment of for-profit corporations to spend in (and perhaps dominate) our elections may be misplaced.”

I’m not suggesting that the great majority of Americans who agree that money has “too much influence” in elections should be relieved that a handful of multibillionaires instead of for-profit corporations exercise that influence. But I am saying the Citizens United decision is not the source of all campaign finance evils.

When Citizens United came down many people believed it would unleash a torrent of corporate money into politics and that hasn’t yet happened. Because of the disclosure rules, corporations that have tried to involve themselves in political campaigns have found that it can hurt the bottom line. This happened to the Minnesota-based Target back in 2010, when their board gave $150,000 to the Republican running for Governor and his anti-LGBT stances prompted a boycott threat. The corporation, which has generous LGBT policies, explained that it wasn’t done as a measure of support for the candidate’s position on social issues but for purely on an economic reasons — but it didn’t matter. The lesson was clear: Corporate support for political candidates could cost a company its customers. (One assumes they realized it was safer to simply pour that money into lobbying as they’ve always done before to get the same results.)

In her Boston Globe piece, Kaminer pretty much throws up her hands and says that there’s nothing new under the sun; the rich will always run the show one way or the other and that’s just the way it is.

She’s kind of right unfortunately. I go on to talk about various other theories about what’s caused the tsunami of money suddenly coming into elections from these billionaires and there aren’t any really good answers. My personal feeling is that these billionaires have just lost all sense of shame or dignity and are now openly demanding to run the world — they’re all a bunch of Auric Goldfingers

Anyway, read on.

The crime in McKinney

by digby

Via Salon, I see that last night on Fox News, Megyn Kelly cleared the whole thing up:

On “The Kelly File” Monday, host Megyn Kelly spent almost half the program trying to justify the decisions made by the police during the incident at a McKinney, Texas pool party on Friday.

Kelly began by talking to “Sean,” a man who was at the pool party with his wife and young children. He said he called police because “the music that the DJ was playing wasn’t appropriate for my son, or even for the teens.”

“Sean” said that situation only got out of hand, however, when the teens at the party began to “attack” residents by calling them “racist.” White residents had complained to the pool security guard that the group of teens — who were attending a combination graduation/birthday party — didn’t look like they lived in the community.

“So the teens who were jumping the fence were calling residents ‘racist,’” Kelly said, speaking for aggrieved white conservatives everywhere who know that there’s no violence more violent than being accused of believing what many white conservatives proudly believe.

I can see what happened. A bunch of black teenagers were playing their dirty black music. And then for no apparent reason, out of the blue, they started calling the white people racists which is tantamount to a lynching. They were asking for it.

When I first wrote about this on Sunday, I entitled the post “he only saw the black kids” and people told me that there weren’t any white kids for him to chase. But the fact is that the kid who filmed the whole thing was white and here’s what he said:

The footage was taken during a party held at a local pool. Some residents have argued that attendees were being unruly, prompting them to call police for assistance. But according to Brooks, residents wrongfully pushed to escalate authorities’ response.

“Most of the kids weren’t even involved,” he said. “It was a fight between a mom and girl, which had nothing to do with all the other kids that she apparently needed more cops for.”

Casebolt then arrived and started “going crazy” after tripping and dropping his flashlight, Brooks said.

“I was one of the only white people in the area when that was happening,” he explained. “You can see in part of the video where he tells us to sit down, and he kinda like skips over me and tells all my African-American friends to go sit down.”

Last night’s Chris Hayes interviewed another participant in the incident, a 14 year old white girl, also handcuffed and manhandled by the police, who said that it was the white residents who started the insults and she and her friends felt they had to step up and defend the other kids. Then a couple of white women got physical and a fight broke out. The cops arrived shortly and just started running around like Starsky and Hutch chasing kids willy nilly, which we all saw on the video.

That interview was extremely interesting because this girl’s father came to the scene found his daughter handcuffed and couldn’t get any police officer to explain why. He assumed that the police must have had a good reason and blamed his daughter until he got the facts from other adults at the party at which point he realized that his girl had been in the right.

I’ve been watching this story on cable with horror. To me this is one of the Rodney King incidents where I look at the footage and what I see is very clear: cops acting completely out of control. This is not debatable in my view. Setting aside the assault on the girl in the bikini, which is obviously obscene, the way he screams at those two young boys sitting handcuffed on the grass who are crying and saying “sir we just came for a birthday party” tells you exactly what was going on. This cop demands to be in control at all times and if he isn’t he will get violent. And when he pulled a gun in a situation where there were many children, none of them armed and dangerous, there’s little doubt about his mindset. His screaming lecture to them about how they didn’t jump to when he ordered them to and how they have to obey him no questions asked is just chilling.

Every one of the kids I’ve seen interviewed are just average American teens. These aren’t crips and bloods, hardcore street toughs or even slightly threatening people. They are just kids and it’s completely obvious. They didn’t know they were endangering their lives by simply being teenagers.

We knew that it was terrifying to have a black teenage son in America. Now we know it’s just as terrifying to have a black teenage daughter. That white father had obviously taught his daughter to have integrity and stand up for the underdog and she paid a price for that by being handcuffed by the cops. But black parents cannot afford to teach their children to speak up and speak out. Those kids could very well die because they don’t know that what they learn in school about rights and free speech and justice doesn’t apply to them. Those two handcuffed young boys who were trying to explain themselves to the police officer certainly know better now. They’ll never really feel free again, will they?

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