Month: June 2015

No more judges

by digby

ICYWW President Obama has gotten all he’s going to get:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Thursday that he doesn’t expect to confirm any of Obama’s circuit court nominees for the remainder of his time in office, a blow to White House efforts to fill empty federal court seats despite working with a Republican-controlled Senate.

In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, McConnell was asked about judicial confirmations.

“So far, the only judges we’ve confirmed have been federal district judges that have been signed off on by Republican senators,” McConnell said. Asked if he expects that to be the case through 2016, McConnell said, “I think that’s highly likely, yeah.”

There you go. That advise and consent thing now means that the Senate chooses the nominee, period. Well, if it’s a Republican Senate. Democrats would never be so rude as to issue a blanket rejection of all of a Republican president’s nominees and tell him that Democratic Senators would be doing the choosing from now on. Wouldn’t be nice.

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The panic artists are back


by digby

Via Politico:

Hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton was confronted by an anti-war activist on Friday, provoking a tense and awkward exchange about the United States’s role overseas.

Fred Boenig, whose son died in Afghanistan in 2010, was seated next to Cotton at a foreign policy discussion at Johns Hopkins’ campus in Washington. As Cotton, a veteran of military conflicts in the Middle East, went through his brawny foreign policy views and bashed President Barack Obama’s “dangerous” vision in Iran and other global hotspots, he turned to ask Boenig about the four pins he was wearing.
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The Pennsylvania man explained they signify the service of four of his children in the military, then said when Cotton speaks all he hears is “somebody knocking at my door again” with bad news, challenging the senator to identify when the last U.S. military casualty overseas occurred, the same challenge he gave self-proclaimed hawk Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) in February.
ericans have died in Afghanistan but couldn’t give the precise answer, which Boenig said was 58 days. He then asked when Americans can truly say war is over in the Middle East.

“There’s no definite answer because our enemies get a vote in this process. I’m deeply sorrowful for your loss and I greatly honor the service that all of your children have rendered, like all of our veterans do. But in the end the best way to honor our veterans … ” Cotton responded.

“Is to have more killed?” interrupted Boenig.

“ … Is to win the wars in which they’ve fought,” Cotton finished.

The anti-war Boenig, a radio host in Pennsylvania, was unimpressed and went on to criticize Cotton for attending a defense contractor’s meeting after sending an open letter to Iran’s senior leadership.

“It’s very clear what your views are sir. My views are keeping our kids safe, which include my children. Now that you have a child, you will understand,” Boenig warned Cotton, who just celebrated the birth of his first son. “When you speak of sending our kids again, let’s make it worth it not just to send them to politically help some Haliburton or somebody else.”

Cotton insisted that the current “threat environment that we face here at home and throughout the West is more grave today than at anytime during our lifetimes.”

“I wish that weren’t that case,” Cotton said. “But for the time being it is. We have to remain vigilant and we have to continue to take the fight to the terrorist.”

It has become an article of faith on the right that “the threat environment we face here at home is more grave today than anytime during our lifetimes.” Is that true? Mr Boenig brought up the fact that they don’t have an air force or a navy with which to invade our shores so we don’t have anything to fear from a bunch of people running around in pick-up trucks in the middle eastern desert.  So what are we facing? Lone wolves who want to come in a shoot up places? Well, I hate to inform these people that we’ve had lone wolves shooting up the place for decades.

Fort Hood was terrorist related. The rest, not so much. The Boston bombing was terrible but so was Oklahoma City and there was no muslim connection to that one.

The point is that if we didn’t panic over all those “Lone Wolf” shootings it seems like we should be able keep our heads about this Islamic Lone Wolf threat that has Tom Cotton and Lindsay Graham running around in circles screeching that they’re all coming to kill us in our beds.

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The easy war

by digby

71 years ago today:

That was D-Day in a shot by the great wartime photographer Robert Capa.

I thought about that when I read this piece earlier about how all of our previous wars were easy to win and now we’re stuck with the really “hard ones.”

He doesn’t mention how “easy” it was for 60 million people to die. Nor does he mention how “easy” it was for us to drop two nuclear bombs on a civilian population. You know, if we did all that again, I’d guess these current wars would be “easy” too.

You can see a D-Day Gallery here if you’re interested.

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The Big Reveal

by digby

It seems like only yesterday that a lot of political journalists were spitting mad over the Snowden revelations. It was a very weird time.

Anyway, you don’t see so much of that anymore as some have remembered what their jobs are and others seem to have realized that they didn’t need to be so afraid of having information. But it hasn’t gone away completely.

Of course, Dana Perino isn’t exactly a journalist. She’s a professional Republican. (I don’t suppose anyone noticed that the only Democrat who voted against the USA Freedom Act last week was Tammy Baldwin and that was because it didn’t go far enough. All those Republicans voted against it because it went too far. Just saying…)

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how the worm has turned.  Here’s how media beat reporter Eric Wemple put it in his blog at the Washington Post:

Dana Perino is the quite often levelheaded co-host on Fox News’s “The Five,” which figures among the favorite cable-news programs of the Erik Wemple Blog. She served as press secretary in the George W. Bush White House and recently wrote a book, “And the Good News Is…: Lessons and Advice from the Bright Side,” about her upbringing and her career in politics and media. In keeping with its title, the book treats the Bush administration and her boss, the president, in only the most flattering terms. It’s a tell-nothing volume.

Readers of “And the Good News Is” wouldn’t be surprised at what slithered out of Perino’s Twitter feed today.

That “valuable space” is an op-ed in which Edward Snowden takes something of a victory lap. The former contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, Snowden is the famous figure who leaked documents used by journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Bart Gellman starting in June 2013 to expose the wide-ranging U.S. surveillance state. One of the stories to emerge from Snowden’s leaks was a NSA program that collected bulk records of phone calls made in the United States.

As Snowden writes, immediate reaction to the leaks wasn’t entirely welcoming. “Politicians raced to condemn our efforts as un-American, even treasonous,” writes Snowden, who’s now a director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Among those politicians is New York Rep. Peter King, who said, “I don’t know what’s happening to our country when people are making this traitor and defector into some kind of hero.”

History has treated King and Perino & Co. with hammer blows. As Snowden himself notes in his piece, a New York federal appeals court declared the NSA phone-records program illegal. And Congress just this week sent legislation to the president that cuts off the vacuum hose between the NSA and the phone companies. “After a White House-appointed oversight board investigation found that this program had not stopped a single terrorist attack, even the president who once defended its propriety and criticized its disclosure has now ordered it terminated,” writes Snowden, who fled the country and now resides in Russia. The U.S. government charged him with violations of the 1917 Espionage Act.

Given the events of recent weeks, John Cassidy argued in the New Yorker, “Rather than seeking to incarcerate Snowden for decades, which was the fate that met Chelsea Manning, the WikiLeaks whistle-blower, the U.S. government ought to be seeking some sort of deal with his lawyers that would allow him to return home and carry on with his life.”

In just a line or two, Cassidy knocks the stuffing out of the “traitor” charge: “Rather than transmitting information to foreign powers, Snowden handed over his electronic stash of documents to reporters from the Guardian and the Washington Post, with the stipulation that they treat its contents sensitively and carefully. ”

And yet, at the time, dozens of people who called themselves journalists were wringing their hands saying such an arrangement was an irresponsible act of treason. I understand why government officials would say that. I’ll never understand why a journalist would.

Cassidy’s piece is well worth reading. It reminds us that the US Government is still acting like authoritarian thugs in this matter:

Another matter still at hand is the fate of Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who has been languishing in Vladimir Putin’s Russia for almost two years. In a statement that President Obama issued shortly before signing the new law, he said, “For the past eighteen months, I have called for reforms that better safeguard the privacy and civil liberties of the American people while ensuring our national security officials retain tools important to keeping Americans safe … enactment of this legislation will strengthen civil liberty safeguards and provide greater public confidence in these programs.” Nowhere did the President or the new law’s sponsors on Capitol Hill state the blindingly obvious: that if it hadn’t been for Snowden’s leaks, the intelligence agencies’ excesses would never have come to light, the U.S.A. Freedom Act wouldn’t exist, and the N.S.A. would still be merrily sweeping up phone records and analyzing them as it saw fit. (My colleague Mattathias Schwartz argued last week that Snowden shouldn’t have been necessary.)

Instead of thanking Snowden for his public service and inviting him to come home, the U.S. government is still seeking to arrest him and try him on charges that carry long prison sentences. “The fact is that Mr. Snowden committed very serious crimes,” the White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Monday. “The U.S. government and the Department of Justice believe that he should face them.”

In a criminal complaint that it filed on June 14, 2013, the Justice Department accused Snowden of stealing government property, communicating national-defense information without authorization, and revealing classified information. The last two charges were filed under the 1917 Espionage Act, which seemed to suggest that the U.S. government regards Snowden as a spy. That is absurd. Despite suggestions in some quarters, back in 2013, that Snowden might be passing along some of America’s secrets to the intelligence agencies of China or Russia, there is no evidence that this happened.

Rather than transmitting information to foreign powers, Snowden handed over his electronic stash of documents to reporters from the Guardian and the Washington Post, with the stipulation that they treat its contents sensitively and carefully. Although the leak led to some sensational stories—Michael Morell, a top C.I.A. official, called it “the most serious compromise of classified information in the history of the U.S. intelligence community”—the journalists largely adhered to Snowden’s stipulation.

The news stories brought to light many details about domestic surveillance, such as the bulk collection of phone records and the PRISM program, which enabled the N.S.A. to retrieve users’ e-mails and search histories from Internet companies such as Google and Facebook. Another story revealed that the N.S.A.’s own internal auditor had concluded that the agency had breached its own privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times a year since 2008. But despite some embarrassing details about overseas operations (such as the fact that the United States had tapped the phone calls of world leaders, including Germany’s Angela Merkel), the stories based on the Snowden leaks didn’t reveal much about specific U.S. intelligence operations around the world. Nor did they compromise individual intelligence agents.

As Snowden intended, the primary impact of the leaks was on political debate inside the United States. Based partly on the information that Snowden released, a federal judge, Richard J. Leon, ruled in December, 2013, that the N.S.A. had violated the Constitution, calling the bulk-data-collection program “almost Orwellian.” That same month, a panel of experts appointed by Obama issued a report calling for some restrictions on the powers of the FISA court and for an end to the N.S.A.’s bulk-data-collection program, which, the panel said, “creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.” Led by the Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, and the G.O.P. Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, of Wisconsin, a bipartisan effort emerged to rein in the N.S.A., which Sensenbrenner, one of the original authors of Patriot Act, accused of misusing and overstepping the powers that Congress had granted to it. The newly passed legislation is an amended version of the original bill that Leahy and Sensenbrenner put forward in the fall of 2013.

To repeat, none of this would have happened without Snowden’s intervention. Doubtless, the intelligence agencies are pressing the White House to stick to its hard line about prosecuting him, on the grounds that dropping the charges, or making some sort of plea bargain, would encourage other leakers. But that is a self-serving argument, and it doesn’t stand up to inspection. In a free society, we want whistle-blowers who have persuasive evidence that great wrongs are being carried out to come forward and tell us about them. The President has argued in the past that Snowden could have taken his concerns to his seniors, and that he would have been protected by an executive order affording protections to whistle-blowers in the intelligence agencies. The notion is risible. As the Times editorial board pointed out last year, the executive order that Obama was referring to didn’t even apply to government contractors like Snowden.

Americans understand that they live in a world that contains people and organizations intent on doing harm to the United States, and they are willing to grant the federal government some intrusive powers in order to protect the country and its citizenry. But they also want reassurance that the authorities aren’t monitoring the every move and communication of ordinary people who have nothing to do with terrorism or any other form of wrongdoing. In the words of the high-level panel of experts appointed by Obama, “Free nations must protect themselves, and nations that protect themselves must remain free.”

After 9/11, for a variety of reasons, some of them eminently understandable, the trade-off between security and liberty tipped too far in the direction of intrusion and authoritarianism. Historians will record that Snowden’s leaks helped, at least somewhat, to right the balance. At great risk to himself, he stood up to the immensely powerful system for which he worked, and cried foul. Rather than seeking to incarcerate Snowden for decades, which was the fate that met Chelsea Manning, the WikiLeaks whistle-blower, the U.S. government ought to be seeking some sort of deal with his lawyers that would allow him to return home and carry on with his life.

Yes they should, although from what I understand the talks are going nowhere because they demand that he be caged for many years as a condition of the deal so that he can serve as a political prisoner and cautionary tale for anyone else who might decide that the public needs to know what its government is doing. (Real spies, on the other hand, the ones who sell out their country for money or from loyalty to an enemy power will not be deterred — nothing’s changed for them.)

It remains to be seen if more members of the mainstream press will take its obligations seriously in the future. When the Snowden revelations came to light two years ago it was a very revealing moment. Let’s just say that we got a good look at people’s instincts. I know I’ll never forget what I saw.

President Obama could pardon Snowden. Any thoughts on the likelihood of that happening?

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Wisconsin on everything
by Tom Sullivan

The vigor with which our corporate overlords have sought to put the plebs back in their places and return the stars and planets to their spheres has been as stunning as it is pathetic (last dying moments of a cobra?). Still, you’ve got to hand it to them. Like a Jack Russell with a knotted rope, they don’t give up easily. What’s worse, they know most of the rest of us do. Just the way they like it.

In a plot twist that would make Rod Serling proud, conservatives have treated “The Road to Serfdom” as a cookbook for the re-medievalization of society ever since Ronald Reagan broke the aircraft controllers’ strike in 1981. It has been a race to the bottom (except for the top) ever since.

Mark LeVine observes for Al Jazeera, union membership is at a 100-year low in America. “In just the last two years, the percentage of unionized public employees dropped 2 points, just as union leaders feared and conservatives hoped.” Universities are next on the menu:

A similar process is already playing out nationally in academia. The share of the more than 1.5 million faculty (teachers at accredited two- and four-year colleges and universities) who are tenured or on tenure track is as low as a quarter by some counts — half the share of the 1970s and one-third of the 78 percent of the late 1960s, at the height of the postwar boom in university education. At the same time, the share of nontenured or adjunct faculty has skyrocketed to upward of 75 percent of teachers, while the number working in university administration and commanding outsize paychecks has grown massively. With the elimination of tenure, the drive to corporatize the university is reaching its end stages.

Wisconsin under Gov. Scott Walker is one of the premier laboratories for restructuring academia, writes LeVine:

It is not surprising, then, that conservatives — who have long attacked the notions of tenure, shared governance and academic freedom more broadly — would now set their eyes on Walker’s Wisconsin (it’s worth noting here that Walker did not graduate from college) as the moment to break the institution of tenure, based on the same corporate-dominated neoliberal principles that supported the near fatal weakening of unions a generation ago. In fact, as University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee English professor Richard Grusin wrote on his blog, Ragman’s Circles, the “daisy chain of Republican power” now extends from the governor to the regents he appoints, the system president they appoint and the chancellors he appoints.

There is little doubt that, should Wisconsin succeed, corporatized boards of private universities and state legislatures in the majority of Republican-governed states will jump on the bandwagon and move with lightning speed to remove tenure protections, shared governance and, ultimately, academic freedom protections from their universities.

And not just in Wisconsin.

Ed Kilgore previews the examination of Walker’s anti-labor ideology by University of Maryland’s Donald F. Kettl in the June/July/August issue of the Washington Monthly. Walker’s “accomplishments” include “the withdrawal of most collective bargaining rights for public employees, a harsh set of forced concessions from those employees to finance Walker’s own agenda, and then as a coup de grace, enactment of a Dixie-style ‘right to work’ law denying union shop contracts for private-sector unions as well.”

Molly Ivins once warned voters not to let Dubyas’s Mayberry Machiavellis anywhere near Washington or they would do to the country what they did to Texas: Texas on Everything. The same caution applies to Walker and Wisconsin. Kilgore concludes:

My own impression of Walker has always been that he represents a sort of hammer-headed approach to the application of conservative ideology: there’s no real passion or nuanced understanding in how he assesses problems—just an impressive ability to figure out exactly how far he can go in pursuing a prearranged agenda designed to reduce enemies to an impotent rage that he then uses to depict himself as courageous and invincible. There are partisans you can reason with and partisans that you know would be perfectly happy running a one-party authoritarian state. In that second camp Scott Walker proudly pitches his tent.

“Arf! Arf!” says Scotty.

Friday Night Light

by digby

You may recall a story a while back about a bunch of miscreants in the New Hampshire legislature decided to step on the dreams and budding civic enthusiasm of a bunch of 4th graders — because they have the sense and sensibilities of 1st graders:

Fourth graders from Lincoln Akerman School in Hampton Falls received a warm welcome at the State House last Thursday. They and their teacher, James Cutting, were guests in the Gallery.

That reception quickly turned chilly as students got a glimpse of the cold, harsh realities of politics in the Granite State.

In the spirit of learning by doing, students drafted a bill to learn the process of how a bill becomes law. They proposed House Bill 373, an act establishing the Red Tail Hawk as the New Hampshire State Raptor. Even though it passed through the Environment and Agriculture committee with a majority vote, some representatives were far from receptive.

Rep. Warren Groen, a Republican from Rochester said, “It grasps them with its talons then uses its razor sharp beak to basically tear it apart limb by limb, and I guess the shame about making this a state bird is it would serve as a much better mascot for Planned Parenthood.”

That comment, considered offensive by many, was made while the fourth graders sat, watched and listened. The tough lesson didn’t end there.

Rep. John Burt, a Republican from Goffstown said, “Bottom line, if we keep bringing more of these bills, and bills, and bills forward that really I think we shouldn’t have in front of us, we’ll be picking a state hot dog next.”

Nice.

As it turns out a red-tailed hawk happened to recently take residence at the White House. And the administration, trolling with incredible finesse, decided to ask these 4th graders to name it!

Thy decided to call him Lincoln. Here he is with his first tweet (so to speak — I’m sure he screeches IRL):

I’m taking my talons to the South Lawn of the @WhiteHouse! pic.twitter.com/nNzd5xBxSe

— Lincoln (@LincolnTheHawk) June 5, 2015

“The students’ reasoning? Well, a political moniker seemed apt, given this young bird’s proclivity for the East Wing. And the name recognizes the visionary leadership of our 16th President and the proximity of the Lincoln Memorial to the White House — all with the added bonus of sneaking in a plug for their school (Lincoln Akerman School in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire).”

I know it’s hard to believe, but there was a time when a Democratic White House would have been afraid to do this because it might offend creepy Republicans.

Is it possible that those days are finally coming to an end?

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Lawdy Miss Mellie, bring me mah smellin’ salts

by digby

…I’d like to faint dead away:

Under the bylines of Alan Rappeport and Steve Eder, the New York Times today published an article looking at the long docket of traffic citations accumulated by 2016 presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and his wife, Jeanette, since 1997. A combined 17 citations, noted the newspaper — four for the senator and 13 for his wife.

The piece was instantly controversial, and only in part because folks are questioning the news value of a candidate’s occasional brushes with traffic authorities over the past 18 years:
The Washington Free Beacon chimes in with a post wondering whether the New York Times received its information from American Bridge, which calls itself a “progressive research and communications organization committed to holding Republicans accountable for their words and actions and helping you ascertain when Republican candidates are pretending to be something they’re not.” Opposition researchers, that is.

Brent Scher of the Free Beacon cited Miami-Dade County online records showing that American Bridge had pulled the records. “Neither of the reporters, Alan Rappeport and Steve Eder, appeared on the docket records for any of the traffic citations for Rubio and his wife,” reported Scher. “An additional researcher credited in the New York Times, Kitty Bennett, also does not appear on any of the court records.” The piece’s headline reads, “Democratic Oppo Firm’s Fingerprints on NYT Rubio Hit.”

Right. No word on who tipped them on the Clinton email story. (Trey Gowdy, please come to the white courtesy phone …)

Whatever. Apparently Washington is all atwitter that American Bridge gave some oppo research to the NY Times. They are shocked and appalled at such a practice.

As Greg Sargent pointed out on twitter:

Look, the right is trying to “ACORN” American Bridge and the press corps wants to help them do it because AB is pro-Clinton which is tantamount to being pro-Josh Duggar in Villager media circles. It’ll probably work.

Oh, and speaking of oppo, remember this?

For his communications director, Jeb Bush is turning to a Republican operative who specializes in opposition research and runs a conservative outfit that has become a persistent thorn in the side of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats running for office.

America Rising executive director Tim Miller confirmed Friday that he is joining Bush’s new political action committee ahead of a likely White House campaign. The former Florida governor has been staffing up and fundraising as he explores a run.

[A] BBC documentary titled Digging the Dirt … was filmed during the 2000 campaign and never aired in the United States. The film centers on a team of Republican opposition researchers —a species that has existed in politics for eons but had recently undergone an evolutionary leap. From deep within the Republican National Committee headquarters the BBC tracked the efforts of this team, whose job it was to discredit and destroy Al Gore.Political campaigns always attempt to diminish their opponents, of course. What was remarkable about the 2000 effort was the degree to which the process advanced beyond what Barbara Comstock, who headed the RNC research team, calls “votes and quotes”—the standard campaign practice of leaving the job of scouting the target to very junior staff members, who tend to dig up little more than a rival’s legislative record and public statements. 

Comstock’s taking over the research team marked a significant change. She was a lawyer and a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill who had been one of Representative Dan Burton’s top congressional investigators during the Clinton scandals that dominated the 1990s: Filegate, Travelgate, assorted campaign-finance imbroglios, and Whitewater. Rather than amass the usual bunch of college kids, Comstock put together a group of seasoned attorneys and former colleagues from the Burton Committee, including her deputy, Tim Griffin. “The team we had from 2000,” she told me recently, to show the degree of ratcheted-up professionalism, “were veteran investigators from the Clinton years. We had a core group of people, and that core was attorneys.” 

Comstock combined a prosecutor’s mentality with an investigator’s ability to hunt through public records and other potentially incriminating documents. More important, she and her team understood how to use opposition research in the service of a larger goal: not simply to embarrass Gore with hard-to-explain votes or awkward statements but to craft over the course of the campaign a negative “storyline” about him that would eventually take hold in the public mind. “A campaign is a lot like a trial,” Comstock explained. “You want people aggressively arguing their case.” 

Maligning an opponent, even with his own words and deeds, is a tricky business; voters take a dim view of “negative” politics, and are liable to punish the campaign carrying out the attacks rather than the intended target. 

Digging the Dirt provides a rare glimpse of how political operatives have learned to use the media to get around this problem, by creating a journalistic black market for damaging stories. During the first debate between Gore and Bush, in October of 2000, the BBC crew stationed itself inside the RNC’s war room, filming researchers as they operated with the manic intensity of day traders, combing through every one of Gore’s statements for possible misstatements or exaggerations. The researchers discovered two (Gore erroneously claimed never to have questioned Bush’s experience, and to have accompanied a federal official to the site of a Texas disaster), and immediately Tim Griffin tipped off the Associated Press. Soon the filmmakers would catch the team exulting as the AP took the story.

During their months of filming BBC producers also observed producers for NBC’s Tim Russert among others calling to enquire if the team had any new material.

I wonder if anyone checked to see if American Rising was looking for those records too …

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Caitlyn and Kristen are shaking it up 

by digby

It’s a tough time for social conservatives.  In one week we have seen one of their elder statesmen outed as a molester of teenaged boys in his care when he was a wrestling coach while television’s favorite patriarchal throwback family has been outed as one which covers up pedophilia and basically doesn’t think it’s a big deal if 14 year old boys fondle 5 year olds.  Hastert doesn’t seem to be getting a ton of support from the right although I’m not seeing much condemnation either. The Duggars are about to be anointed as martyrs for the cause.  Witness none other than Sarah Palin defending them by screeching incoherently that liberals are always doing this stuff and nobody cares — as if that’s supposed to be a defense.

But that’s actually old hat, if you can believe it.  Right wingers being exposed as sexual hypocrites is hardly a new.  They ask for forgiveness and then everyone just goes back to condemning liberals who don’t lie about sex the way they do.

However there is another story this week that seems to have really made them lose their bearings:

In the four days since Bruce Jenner came out as a woman named Caitlyn, many Americans have celebrated her transformation as a courageous and even heroic act.

But among the social conservatives who are a powerful force within the Republican Party, there is a far darker view. To them, the widespread acceptance of Jenner’s evolution from an Olympic gold medalist whose masculinity was enshrined on a Wheaties box to a shapely woman posing suggestively on the cover of Vanity Fair was a reminder that they are losing the culture wars.

Across social media, blogs and talk radio this week, conservatives painted an apocalyptic view of America. They said they felt frustrated and increasingly isolated by the country’s sudden recognition and even embrace of transgender people. They see it as immoral and foreign. They drew comparisons to two grimly futuristic novels, George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”

“People feel like they’re under siege and that the terms of the debate are now you either applaud it or you’re a bigot,” said William J. Bennett, education secretary in the Reagan administration. “It’s like American culture is being dragged kicking and screaming not only toward acceptance but approval.”

Jenner’s watershed moment — which coincides with the Supreme Court preparing to rule on whether to allow same-sex marriage nationwide — leaves the GOP and its stable of presidential candidates grappling with how to represent conservatives who don’t wish to accept Jenner and more moderate voters who have already done so.

I think this is going to be a big deal for them and I don’t think they have a clue about how to handle it. The level of discomfort with this whole thing is extreme.

[A]lthough President Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats uniformly praised Jenner’s bravery — no top-tier Republican candidate had anything to say about her this week. Even Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has made a point of reaching out to people who are normally resistant to his party, declined to comment.

There is no middle ground with this one:

“When did this get legs? When did this start being taken seriously?” talk radio host Rush Limbaugh asked his millions of listeners on Tuesday’s program. “We should not be lionizing this. We should not be encouraging this.”

If Republicans don’t speak out against Jenner, “you might as well just forfeit the 2016 election now,” Steve Deace, a syndicated talk radio host based in Iowa, said in an interview.

“If we’re not going to defend as a party basic principles of male and female, that life is sacred because it comes from God, then you’re going to lose the vast majority of people who’ve joined that party,” Deace said.

As Limbaugh put it, the public acclaim of Jenner’s gender identity makes those who believe in traditional values and gender roles seem like the outcasts. “Conservatives and Republicans are the new weirdos, the new kooks, and that is part of the political objective here in normalizing all of this really marginal behavior,” he said.

ESPN’s announcement Monday that it would honor Jenner at this year’s ESPYS with the Arthur Ashe Courage Award further enraged conservatives. Online, there was fury that Jenner beat out Noah Galloway, a former soldier who lost limbs in Iraq and now competes as a distance runner. In Twitter posts and on message boards, conservatives railed against the cable sports network for seeming to value a transgender celebrity over a military veteran.

A Facebook post by Terry Coffey of Salem, Ore., which went viral and was shared by more than 750,000 people, captured the sentiment: “Just thought I’d remind all of us what real American courage, heroism, and bravery looks like!” It included a black-and-white photo depicting two servicemen in combat.

I wonder what they would have done if ESPN had chosen this ex-Navy SEAL. I suspect their heads would have exploded:

You can watch the whole documentary here. I found it very moving.

I don’t know what kind of backlash this is going to cause but it’s going to cause a backlash. It will be a big test of our progress as a culture to see how we deal with it.

I can’t imagine why these people care so much about this. “Live and let live” used to be an All-American value. But then there were always busy-bodies who had to tell other people how to live too. It’s part of our ongoing culture war. But maybe we’ve come to a point at which we are ready to say that nobody should be required to live a lie in order to please those people.  Wouldn’t that be something?

Update: By the way: Kristen Beck is running for congress against Steny Hoyer. As a Democrat. 

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When Petrostates dry up

by digby

Krugman’s column today is well worth a read. He talks about Rick Perry’s Texas and its alleged economic miracle. Turns out not so much:

The facts: For many years, economic growth in Texas has consistently outpaced growth in the rest of America. But that long run ended in 2015, with employment growth in Texas dropping well below the national average and a fall in leading indicators pointing to a further slowdown ahead. In most states, this slowdown would be no big deal; occasional underperformance is just a fact of life. But everything is bigger in Texas, including inflated expectations, so the slowdown has come as something of a shock.

Now, there’s no mystery about what is happening: It’s all about the hydrocarbons. Texans like to point out that their state’s economy is a lot more diversified than it was in J.R. Ewing’s day, and they’re right. But Texas still has a disproportionate share of the U.S. oil and gas industry, and it benefited far more than most other states from the fracking boom. By my estimates, about half the energy-related jobs created by that boom since it began in the middle of the last decade were in Texas, and this extractive-sector windfall accounted for about a third of the difference between growth in Texas and growth in the rest of the country.

What about the other two-thirds? Like the rest of the Sunbelt, Texas is still benefiting from the long southward shift of America’s population that began with the coming of widespread air-conditioning; average January temperature remains a powerful predictor of regional growth. Texas also attracts new residents with its permissive land-use policies, which have kept housing cheap.

Now one of the three big drivers of Texas growth has gone into reverse, as low world oil prices are bringing the fracking boom to a screeching halt. Hey, things like that happen to every state now and then.

But Texas wasn’t supposed to be like other states. It was supposed to be the shining exemplar of the economic payoff to reverse Robin-Hood economics. So its recent disappointments hit the right-wing cause hard — especially coming on the heels of the Kansas debacle.

For those who haven’t been following the Kansas story, in 2012, Sam Brownback, the state’s hard-right governor, pushed through large tax cuts that would, he promised, lead to rapid economic growth with little, if any, loss of revenue. But the promised boom never materialized, while big budget deficits did.

And, meanwhile, there’s California, long mocked by the right as an economy doomed by its liberal politics. Not so much, it turns out: The budget is back in surplus in part because the emergence of a Democratic supermajority finally made it possible to enact tax increases, and the state is experiencing a solid recovery.

The states, Louis Brandeis famously declared, are the laboratories of democracy. In fact, Mr. Brownback himself described his plan as an “experiment” that would demonstrate the truth of his economic doctrine. What it actually did, however, was demonstrate the opposite — and much the same message is coming from other laboratories, from the stumble in Texas to the comeback in California.

The same thing is happening in Alaska, also a petroleum state. The budget is a mess and the Republicans are demanding draconian cuts to any program that helps poor people, just as Brownback did. But they need some Democrats to help and so far they aren’t budging. They have had very painful deals worked out only to be sabotaged by Republicans who demanded more from the young, the sick and poor. As usual.

They are running the government shutdown playbook thinking they’ll get the Dems to blink. Hopefully, the indie Governor and the Democrats have learned from watching what’s been happening in DC and in places like Kansas and have recognized that once you give in to budget terrorists there will never be an end to it.

Here’s the latest:

If Alaska takes the unprecedented step of partially shutting down state government in July, many of the 10,000 employees who would lose their jobs could also get a cash windfall — whether they want it or not.

For years, state employees were able to save up annual or personal leave that they didn’t use, and some have amassed substantial amounts, state personnel officials say. In the event an employee is laid off, for whatever reason, they have to receive the value of that leave as a cash payout.

“There’s a fair amount of accrued leave built up over the years,” said Sheldon Fisher, commissioner of the Department of Administration, which oversees state payroll and union contracts.

The state calculates the value of leave held by employees to be worth $175 million, and those who are laid off will be paid the value they’ve each earned.

But that’s not all state employees. There are about 16,000 workers in the executive branch facing possible layoffs, but only about 10,000 have received notices of possible layoffs because funding is available for some government functions. Certain departments key to the safety of the public, such as Corrections and Public Safety, are fully funded, meaning that prison guards and troopers would stay on the job, as would a selection of others.

The state’s largest department, Health and Social Services, is partially funded and won’t face immediate layoffs. The Legislature and Alaska Court System won’t be affected at all.

That makes it difficult to get a precise estimate of the immediate cost to the state of a shutdown.

Some employees have “bumping rights,” meaning that if their job is slated for layoff, their seniority may allow them to move into a remaining job.

“It’s virtually impossible at this stage to know who is going to be laid off, ” Fisher said.

He estimated the immediate cost to the state as being in the tens of millions of dollars.

That sounds like typical GOP governance to me. Hurt people and spend millions to make a point about fiscal responsibility.

Schmaht as whips …

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Supreme Creationist

by digby

Yes, he went there:

“Class of 2015, you should not leave Stone Ridge High School thinking that you face challenges that are at all, in any important sense, unprecedented,” Scalia said, adding that “Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so, and I doubt that the basic challenges as confronted are any worse now, or alas even much different, from what they ever were.”

Really your Supreme Justiceship? You’re dogwhistling creationism now?

As Think Progress notes:

Humanity began to develop much more than 5,000 years ago. Early human ancestors began to diverge from the chimpanzee lineage about six million years ago. The first members of the species Homo sapiens are believed to have lived in Africa about 100,000 years ago, and cave paintings and other evidence of human culture exist that are believed to have been created 50,000 years ago.

Young earth creationists generally believe that God created the earth within the last 10,000 years. This is a fringe view, however, within Scalia’s Catholic faith. In 1950, Pope Pius XII wrote in a letter to bishops that the Catholic church “does not forbid” research or discussions regarding “the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter.” More recently, in 1996, Pope John Paul II wrote a similar letter to bishops saying that evolution is “more than a hypothesis.”

Also too: duh.

Ok, so he said, “at least” which reduces this crime from one of sheer idiocy to common trollishness. It makes no difference.

I find it truly embarrassing that we have a cretinous troll of this magnitude on the Supreme Court. Regardless of the ideology which drives them, they should have at least a modicum of dignity.

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