Month: June 2015

Every breath you take …

by digby

Anyone have a problem with this? Nah, I didn’t think so:

Scores of low-flying planes circling American cities are part of a civilian air force operated by the FBI and obscured behind fictitious companies, The Associated Press has learned.

The AP traced at least 50 aircraft back to the FBI, and identified more than 100 flights in 11 states over a 30-day period since late April, orbiting both major cities and rural areas. At least 115 planes, including 90 Cessna aircraft, were mentioned in a federal budget document from 2009.

For decades, the planes have provided support to FBI surveillance operations on the ground. But now the aircraft are equipped with high-tech cameras, and in rare circumstances, technology capable of tracking thousands of cellphones, raising questions about how these surveillance flights affect Americans’ privacy.

“It’s important that federal law enforcement personnel have the tools they need to find and catch criminals,” said Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “But whenever an operation may also monitor the activities of Americans who are not the intended target, we must make darn sure that safeguards are in place to protect the civil liberties of innocent Americans.”

The FBI says the planes are not equipped or used for bulk collection activities or mass surveillance. The surveillance equipment is used for ongoing investigations, the FBI says, generally without a judge’s approval.

The FBI confirmed for the first time the wide-scale use of the aircraft, which the AP traced to at least 13 fake companies, such as FVX Research, KQM Aviation, NBR Aviation and PXW Services.

“The FBI’s aviation program is not secret,” spokesman Christopher Allen said in a statement. “Specific aircraft and their capabilities are protected for operational security purposes.”

The front companies are used to protect the safety of the pilots, the agency said. That setup also shields the identity of the aircraft so that suspects on the ground don’t know they’re being followed.

The FBI is not the only federal law enforcement agency to take such measures.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has its own planes, also registered to fake companies, according to a 2011 Justice Department inspector general report. At the time, the DEA had 92 aircraft in its fleet. And since 2007, the U.S. Marshals Service has operated an aerial surveillance program with its own fleet equipped with technology that can capture data from thousands of cellphones, the Wall Street Journal reported last year.

In the FBI’s case, one of its fake companies shares a post office box with the Justice Department, creating a link between the companies and the FBI through publicly available Federal Aviation Administration records.

Basic aspects of the FBI’s program are withheld from the public in censored versions of official reports from the Justice Department’s inspector general, and the FBI also has been careful not to reveal its surveillance flights in court documents. The agency will not say how many planes are currently in its fleet.

The planes are equipped with technology that can capture video of unrelated criminal activity on the ground that could be handed over to prosecutions. One of the planes, photographed in flight last week by the AP in northern Virginia, bristled with unusual antennas under its fuselage and a camera on its left side.

Some of the aircraft can also be equipped with technology that can identify thousands of people below through the cellphones they carry, even if they’re not making a call or in public. Officials said that practice, which mimics cell towers and gets phones to reveal basic subscriber information, is used in only limited situations.

Well, ok then. Their identity is hidden behind front companies, they don’t bother with warrants and they only use the information for really, really important stuff to catch real criminals. And hey, if it happens to see something the authorities think might look suspicious well, if you don’t have anything to hide you don’t have anything to worry about. And remember, if you are innocent they’ll probably give you your day in court at some point to prove it so no harm done.

And just wait until the drone fleet gets going…

The media is acting silly again

by digby

Stop the presses? Hmmm.

I wrote about this for Salon this morning. Here’s an excerpt:

For Clinton, good news is never just good news. Instead it’s an opportunity to remind the public about the media’s negative narratives about Clinton and then to muse on the fact that her ratings somehow manage to hold up despite these narratives.

Here’s how the Wall Street Journal wrote up an earlier poll showing Clinton beating all opponents:

“Hillary Clinton’s stature has been battered after more than a month of controversy over her fundraising and email practices, but support for her among Democrats remains strong and unshaken, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.”

And here’s how the New York Times wrote up yet another poll showing Clinton beating all opponents:

“Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to have initially weathered a barrage of news about her use of a private email account when she was secretary of state and the practices of her family’s foundation, an indication that she is starting her second presidential bid with an unusual durability among Democratic voters.”

This framing is not surprising, since, among journalists, Clinton is one of the least popular politicians. She is not forthcoming or entertaining with the press. She doesn’t offer good quotes. She doesn’t like journalists, respect what we do, or care to hide her disdain for the media.

Barbarians inside the gates


by digby

Let’s talk some more about the terrorist barbarians we’re up against, shall we?

In the interviews with his lawyers, Khan described a carnival-like atmosphere of abuse when he arrived at the CIA detention facility.

“I wished they had killed me,” Khan told his lawyers. He said that he experienced excruciating pain when hung naked from poles and that guards repeatedly held his head under ice water.

” ‘Son, we are going to take care of you,’ ” Khan said his interrogators told him. ” ‘We are going to send you to a place you cannot imagine.’ “

Current and former CIA officials declined to comment on Khan’s account.

Khan’s description of his experience matches some of the most disturbing findings of the U.S. Senate report, the product of a five-year review by Democratic staffers of 6.3 million internal CIA documents. CIA officials and many Republicans dismissed the report’s findings as exaggerated.

Years before the report was released, Khan complained to his lawyers that he had been subjected to forced rectal feedings. Senate investigators found internal CIA documents confirming that Khan had received involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration. In an incident widely reported in news media after the release of the Senate investigation, CIA cables showed that “Khan’s ‘lunch tray,’ consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was ‘pureed’ and rectally infused.”

The CIA maintains that rectal feedings were necessary after Khan went on a hunger strike and pulled out a feeding tube that had been inserted through his nose. Senate investigators said Khan was cooperative and did not remove the feeding tube.

Most medical experts say rectal feeding is of no therapeutic value. His lawyers call it rape.

Khan told his lawyers that some of the worst torture occurred in a May 2003 interrogation session, when guards stripped him naked, hung him from a wooden beam for three days and provided him with water but no food. The only time he was removed from the beam was on the afternoon of the first day, when interrogators shackled him, placed a hood over his head and lowered him into a tub of ice water.

An interrogator then forced Khan’s head underwater until he feared he would drown. The questioner pulled Khan’s head out of the water, demanded answers to questions and again dunked his head underwater, the detainee said. Guards also poured water and ice from a bucket onto Khan’s mouth and nose.

Khan was again hung on the pole hooded and naked. Every two to three hours, interrogators hurled ice water on his body and set up a fan to blow air on him, depriving him of sleep, he said. Once, after hanging on the pole for two days, Khan began hallucinating, thinking he was seeing a cow and a giant lizard.

View galleryFile picture shows the exterior of Camp Delta at the …
The exterior of Camp Delta is seen at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, in this file photo take …
“I lived in anxiety every moment of every single day about the fear and anticipation of the unknown,” Khan said, describing his panic attacks and nightmares at the black site. “Sometimes, I was struggling and drowning under water, or driving a car and I could not stop.”

In a July 2003 session, Khan said, CIA guards hooded and hung him from a metal pole for several days and repeatedly poured ice water on his mouth, nose and genitals. At one point, he said, they forced him to sit naked on a wooden box during a 15-minute videotaped interrogation. After that, Khan said, he was shackled to a wall, which prevented him from sleeping.

When a doctor arrived to check his condition, Khan begged for help, he said. Instead, Khan said, the doctor instructed the guards to again hang him from the metal bar. After hanging from the pole for 24 hours, Khan was forced to write a “confession” while being videotaped naked.

METAL CUFFS

Khan’s account also includes previously undisclosed forms of alleged CIA abuse, according to experts. Khan said his feet and lower legs were placed in tall boot-like metal cuffs that dug into his flesh and immobilized his legs. He said he felt that his legs would break if he fell forward while restrained by the cuffs.

Khan is not one of the three people whom current and former CIA officials say interrogators were authorized to “waterboard,” whereby water is poured over a cloth covering a detainee’s face to create the sensation of drowning. Nor is he the fourth detainee whose waterboarding was documented by Human Rights Watch in 2012.

His descriptions, however, match those of other detainees who have alleged that they were subjected to unauthorized interrogation techniques using water. Human-rights groups say the use of ice water in dousing and forced submersions is torture.

Khan’s account also includes details that match those of lower-level detainees who have described their own interrogations. Like other prisoners, Khan said he was held in complete darkness and isolated from other prisoners for long periods. To deprive him of sleep, his captors kept the lights on in his cell and blared loud music from KISS and other American rock and rap groups.

He said that he was given unclean food and water that gave him diarrhea and that he was held in an outdoor cell and in cells with biting insects. Other prisoners later told him they were held in coffin-shaped boxes.

Conditions improved significantly in 2005, after the U.S. Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act. That measure includes anti-torture provisions sponsored by Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner in Vietnam.

In the recent Frontline documentary about the torture regime, John Rizzo, the CIA’s general counsel ran to McCain at one point and laid out the torture regime for him assuming that he’d understand that it wasn’t really all that bad and that it certainly wasn’t tantamount to torture. He undoubtedly gave him a very sanitized version of what went on, which included little of what’s alleged above. Whatever Rizzo described to McCain resulted in McCain growling at him saying, “it sounds like torture to me.” Rizzo said that “gave him pause.” Seriously.

I get that these terrorists (the real ones not the innocent ones) are terrible people. This one is a cooperating witness now who is facing another 20 years in prison for spilling what he knows. But America is full of terrible people who may be a threat and who may know things that could save lives in the future. I don’t think they tortured Timothy Mcveigh and he had held the record for most people killed in a terrorist attack prior to 9/11. He certainly could have been part of a conspiracy. But there’s no record of them using these sick primitive methods to question him.

Regular law enforcement is certainly guilty of torture.(See:Chicago) But it’s rightly seen as illegal and immoral when it’s revealed and decent people do not defend the practice. But we seem to think that this is fine when applied to terrorist suspects, many of whom have proven to not be terrorists. (“That’s what the torture is for!”)

When a society says that torture is justified “in order to save lives” it becomes very difficult to stop that society from doing such things in any threatening circumstance, not just war (or “war”). There is no logical reason that Americans who approve of torture for suspected terrorists should not approve of torture for suspected mass murders or the head of a violent drug cartel is there? Is there any reason it shouldn’t be applied to someone suspected of being involved in a kidnapping? Or a person suspected of running a pedophile ring or a human trafficking operation? There is no logical reason other than racism which certainly plays a part but since I doubt that being a white member of Al Qaeda would prevent them being tortured, it’s not the controlling reason.

No, we’ve just given ourselves the authority to torture a specific group of people under the phony rationale that we have no choice. Even though it doesn’t work. Even though there are better methods of getting information. (And I write that in the present because I can see no reason why the same thing will not happen again if the authorities say it’s “necessary.”) This is one of the tools in the toolbox now.

I don’t know if they wanted the Islamic terrorists to know that we did these things so they would be “afraid”, if they thought it was truly effective despite the evidence that it was unnecessary or if they just thought sadism was normal and reasonable. None of those things are moral excuses for doing it. But the first is especially vacuous: they are not “afraid.” They do these things themselves and consider it normal. Why would our willingness to stoop to that level make even the slightest amount of difference? It certainly hasn’t in Syria where ISIS knows very well that the Assad regime is one of the pre-eminent torturers in the world. (After all, we “rendered” prisoners there. Even innocent ones.)

Personally, I figure it’s sadism. The Frontline documentary discussed how they big wigs in DC would meet every day and talk about all this violent torture in detail. Unlike the actual torturers in the secret prisons who were getting sick and horrified by what they were doing, the more the big wigs heard about what they were doing, the more of it they demanded. It’s pretty clear they felt empowered, alive, in control.

If one has a propensity for that sort of thing, that’s probably like any other addiction: you need more and more of it to scratch that itch. Abstinence is the only answer for this one.

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Megyn Kelly Will Tell Fox Viewers What’s Okay To Feel About the Duggars 

By Spocko

This Wednesday Fox New’s Megyn Kelly will interview Jim Bob and Michelle  Duggar 

Fox and Kelly will be shoring up, or breaking up, a narrative that the Duggars are trying to control. Just the fact that Kelly was chosen means part of a narrative is already in place.

I know, I know. “Why should I give a fig about these people and this interview?” I think this interview and the narrative line will be important because it will show what’s acceptable on certain issues for GOP Presidential candidates. Why Kelly? Because it’s been pointed out that Kelly has been given the latitude to ask a few sane questions.

She might give candidates permission to move to the left on the issue of female abuse victims. (Yes, they will need permission.)  What I don’t think we will see are challenges to a powerful version of Christianity. She might address female agency, but won’t attack the religion. The position most likely will be, “These flawed human vessels tried hard to be good but failed, they are only human. They need forgiveness for their sins.

It will be Roger Ailes who will make the decision on how hard to hit the Duggars and what to focus on.  But first he has to answer these questions three:

1) How important are the Duggars to the conservative movement now?
2) How important are they to GOPs electoral success?
3) How important is the powerful version of Christianity the Duggar’s represent?

As of today the Duggars have lost most of their power and won’t play much of a role in the GOP’s electoral success. However, their version of Christianity is still a big deal, so she will tiptoe around that almost entirely, with the exception of a few easily answered question.

The other question that Ailes and the Fox producers ask themselves is:

In this story, who do our Fox News viewers relate to?

Is it Jim Bob, Michelle, Josh or various unnamed Duggar daughters? What do they think about the actions of that person? Will Kelly’s questions, and the subjects’ answers leave them satisfied? My guesses on the thinking of Fox viewers are in quotes:

 Jim Bob (“He failed as a protector/father. He should take responsibility for his failures. I would never let anyone hurt MY girls like he let Josh!” )

They will want to see him as a horrible failure.  I think he will take the brunt of the heat and he will “accept responsibility.” What is interesting is that the world will see  Kelly’s “wimmin libber” type questioning as normal, so any condescension or cockiness on his part will look especially bad. Defensiveness will look like he is hiding even more.

Michelle. (“It’s hard being a parent with kids! You try raising 19 kids! She was clearly out of the loop.  Cut her some slack!”

 She will wring her hands a lot in contrition and talk about how she failed Jim Bob, Josh and the whole family. Female Fox viewers who never experienced any abuse will feel sorry for her. They will heap more blame on Jim Bob. Any viewers who experienced abuse will be furious, ‘She KNEW! She ALWAYS KNEW! She’s the worse because she didn’t protect the most vulnerable.” )

Josh (“I remember being a horny teen, especially when my sisters had friends over for a sleep over, but but ick! Those are little kids, that’s sick.  I would never do something like that. Hopefully he has been cured, maybe he deserves a second chance. But I’d never let him be around my kids.”

Nobody will admit to identifying with Josh, but they might allow him the old, “The Power of Christ cured him, we can forgive him.” line that Christians on the right use as their get out of Hell Free card.)

Daughters, If the viewers are men, “I can’t imagine what those poor kids went though. Their dad and mom should have protected them.”
If the viewers are women they CAN imagine what they went through. “Both parents are guilty. Even if Mom and Dad claim they didn’t know right away, they are messed up, they didn’t listen to the girls. Not enough people listen to girls.”

 A number of them will acknowledge that something is messed up with the Duggar’s version of Christianity. But it is mostly with just that version, their version of Christianity is better.”

Kelly will voice her concern for the daughters. The issue will be:

What is the correct amount of concern for the Duggar daughters that needs to be addressed?  This is where you will see Kelly support women and probably attack the parents. That is the “politically correct thing” to do, but will she give the religion a pass? I think so, because the religion can not be blamed.

The parents have failed, they are flawed humans, and you never go after Christianity, even the version of Christianity the Duggars practiced. Because if you do, then you are siding with the terrorists.

Faith, Family and Community, Good for Life, Bad for TV

When I read the Duggar stories I feel some emotions I’m not proud of, but they are there. One is my judgmentalness (Is that even an emotion?) Not just of the Duggar family-but of the people who watched the show and liked it.

I also feel my own anger at these men who want to control everything. And I want to punish them, make them pay. It pleases me when I see that they actually have been paying a financial price, because losing revenue is the key marker of failure in America.

But I also feel my own sadness and shame for knowing I’m more focused on the anger and punishment of certain men and their enablers than of offering an alternative–either in programming, or in life.

I don’t think it would make good TV, but it would be nice to see some stories about people who have faith, family and community in their lives that reflect progressive values. I know they exist and there are more than 20 of them, but who’s counting?

QOTD: Barney Frank

by digby

I think this nails it:

“I think Rand Paul sincerely believes what he says,” Frank, the former Massachusetts Democrat, told HuffPost Live’s Alyona Minkovski. “On the other hand, my right to marry my husband is not one of the civil liberties that Sen. Paul was prepared to recognize, so I’m not ready to grant him the total crown.”

Frank said he doesn’t expect Paul’s staunch opposition to the Patriot Act and the USA Freedom Act reform effort, which aims to curb the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection powers, to be fruitful.

“What will now happen is Paul will be swept aside,” Frank said. “Paul does not want to see the USA Freedom Bill … that’s now going to get adopted over Paul’s objection.”

Frank added that Paul’s criticism of the Patriot Act did “raise the issue” and influence the overall debate.

“Rand Paul intelligently decided that his views on this are so far out of what’s achievable on this that his job is just to wave the flag, and that’s a useful role to play,” Frank said.

We’ll see what happens today. But if the McConnell backed amendments pass, they’re also going to succeed in making the USA Freedom Act a more terrible bill. If they don’t pass, then all this has succeeded in some tepid reforms which are better than nothing.

The good news, as far as I’m concerned, is that the national security establishment has had to come at least a little bit into the light. And like all creatures that live in the dark they don’t like it. That’s worth doing.

Read emptywheel if you are interested in the details.

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We have passed the tipping point for extreme weather

by Gaius Publius

The concept of “tipping point” — a change beyond which there’s no turning back — comes up a lot in climate discussions. An obvious tipping point involves polar ice. If the earth keeps warming — both in the atmosphere and in the ocean — at some point a full and permanent melt of Arctic and Antarctic ice is inevitable. Permanent ice first started forming in the Antarctic about 35 million years ago, thanks to global cooling which crossed a tipping point for ice formation. That’s not very long ago. During the 200 million years before that, the earth was too warm for permanent ice to form, at least as far as we know.

We’re now going the other direction, rewarming the earth, and permanent ice is increasingly disappearing, as you’d expect. At some point, permanent ice will be gone. At some point before that, its loss will be inevitable. Like the passengers in this car, its end may not have come — yet — but there’s no turning back.

There are many tipping points associated with our current change in climate, our overall warming of the planet. For example, I think the American Southwest is beyond a tipping point for available fresh water. I’ve written several times — for example, here — that California and the Southwest have passed “peak water,” that the most water available to the region is what’s available now. We can mitigate the severity of decline in supply (i.e., arrest the decline at a less-bad place by arresting its cause), and we can adapt to whatever consequences can’t be mitigated.

But we can no longer go back to plentiful fresh water from the Colorado River watershed. That day is gone, and in fact, I suspect most in the region know it, even though it’s not yet reflected in real estate prices.

Extreme Weather Has Its Own Tipping Point

We’re also noticing this spring a wave of especially extreme weather throughout the country, and indeed the world. This is from Texas, land of freedom (from use of the phrase “climate change”):

Another two bodies found in Texas after extreme weather

… [A]uthorities in Central Texas have recovered the body of a second woman killed in flash flooding last weekend along the Blanco River.

Hays County officials say a search team recovered the body Saturday afternoon near the river in the Wimberley area.

It was the second body recovered Saturday along the river. Earlier in the day, a search team recovered a woman’s body along the river about midway between Wimberley and San Marcos.

The discovery brings to eight the number of people confirmed as killed in the flood and 27 killed in last weekend’s storms statewide. Eleven people remain missing.

At least 31 people have died in Texas and Oklahoma since the storms began last weekend. [emphasis mine]

And from around the world (emphasis mine):

May has been a month of extreme weather around the world

Even for a world getting used to wild weather, May seems stuck on strange.

Torrential downpours in Texas that have whiplashed the region from drought to flooding. A heat wave that has killed more than 1,800 people in India. Record 91-degree readings in Alaska, of all places. A pair of top-of-the-scale typhoons in the Northwest Pacific. And a drought taking hold in the East.

“Mother Nature keeps throwing us crazy stuff,” Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis says. “It’s just been one thing after another.”

Jerry Meehl, an extreme-weather expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, points out that May is usually a pretty extreme month, with lots of tornadoes and downpours. Even so, he says, this has been “kind of unusually intense.”

So drought has an arc — either back and forth or marching toward an extreme — and so does the occurrence of extreme weather. Especially severe storms come and go, or they just keep coming. And just as drought can have a tipping point, beyond which you can’t go back, so can the incidence of extreme weather. At some point, crazy weather becomes the “new normal,” or worse, the “new normal” just keeps getting worse.

Has Extreme Weather Passed a Tipping Point?

There’s no way to tie any one storm to global warming or climate change. In the same way, there’s no way to tie any one lung cancer death to smoking. But over a broad population of smokers, when smokers are dropping like autumn leaves, each of them laced with throat and respiratory cancer, each of them puffing like the Marlboro Man as they fall (several of whom have also dropped like leaves), odds are there’s a cause that can be named. Odds are it’s already known, looking you straight in the face. Odds are not smoking will change the odds.

The art of analyzing those odds and seeing if they’re indeed significant is also known, a statistical process called “event distribution” (think “bell-shaped curve” — how many events fall in the middle and how many at the ends) — measured in units called “standard deviations” or “sigmas” away from the center. As carbon emissions have increased over time, our climate has moved out of its normal distribution, toward more extremes.

For example, if before a nuclear facility was built, a certain town had a certain incidence of cancer linked to radiation (called a baseline incidence), then afterward it had an increased incidence which itself increased over time, you’d suspect radiation from the facility was the cause. Why? Because the kinds of cancer you’re tracking are already associated with radiation.

We know that change in heat in the atmosphere changes the weather; that’s not in dispute. The difference in temperature between warm fronts and cold fronts, for example, is an indicator of the strength of a storm — smaller temperature differences bring weaker storms; greater temperature differences bring stronger, more violent storms. There are many relationships like these in meteorology.

Atmospheric heat is rising; that’s a known. Are storm strength and other indicators of more extreme weather also rising? If so, to what degree?

Those are two questions many are asking. But there’s a third question few are asking — Are we so far beyond the “normal” that we’ll never go back? In other words, have we crossed a tipping point for extreme weather? The authors of the following video have looked at distributions over time of extreme weather from the 1951–1980 baseline onward and have an answer.

Sadly, the answer is “yes.” In every decade since 1980:

• The midpoint has moved toward more extreme weather.
   
• The move toward more extreme weather has not paused from decade to decade.
   
• And worst of all, the odds of a “6 sigma” (very very extreme) event have greatly increased. Events that would almost literally never have occurred, where the odds were one in over 500 million, are now starting to appear as possibilities under the “new normal” bell-shaped curve.

As the writer above said, weather is “stuck on strange.” Have we crossed a tipping point for weather? In a word, yes. All of this is nicely explained in the short video below. Please watch:

Note that the underlying scientific work is a paper by James Hansen and his colleagues, a draft follow-on to this published paper, “The New Climate Dice: Public Perception of Climate Change.” Hansen, formerly of NASA, is one of the most prominent scientists in this field; in fact, he’s America’s original prominent climate scientist.

A Final Word

This is “a” tipping point, not “the” tipping point. We have slid into a “new normal” for weather, but please note:

• We’re talking only about the weather, not a host of other effects, like extreme sea level rise. I don’t think we’ve passed that tipping point yet.
   
• We can stop this process whenever we want to — or rather, we can force the “carbon bosses” and their minions in government to stop whenever we want to stop them. They have only the power we collectively allow them to have.

It really is up to us, and it really is not too late in any absolute sense. For my playfully named (but effective) “Easter Island solution,” see here. For a look at one sure way out, see here.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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Lunatic mainstream
by Tom Sullivan

Newsweek examines how Timothy McVeigh’s anti-government ideas have crept into the body politic since he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. What once was the lunatic fringe is now the Republican base:

Militia sympathizers today have the ears of many Republican politicians. Texas Governor Greg Abbott vowed to keep watch on the U.S. military this spring as it runs a series of war games called Jade Helm 15. Some Texans sensed an armed federal takeover of the Lone Star State and demanded action. Senator Cruz said of their fears, “I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty, because when the federal government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this administration, the natural consequence is that many citizens don’t trust what it is saying.”

As the Jade Helm 15 nonsense demonstrated, from the militias to the gold bugs to the Agenda 21 nuts to the Cliven Bundys to the Tenthers, the fringe has gone mainstream. Laws nullifying federal gun laws – even banning their enforcement – have sprung up in red states across the country:

Besides freeing guns from Washington’s control, there are also bills nullifying Obamacare, the National Security Agency and Common Core, as well as federal laws on other environmental standards, marijuana and tracking license plates. The federal government is “diving off into areas unchecked that they’re not supposed to be involved in,” said Montana state Representative Krayton Kerns, who introduced a bill in 2013 to limit the ability of local police to help enforce federal laws. “Not only is it our right in state legislatures to do this, it’s our obligation to do it,” Kerns told NBC News. “Somebody’s got to put a ‘whoa’ on it.” Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt is such a nullification enthusiast that he created a separate “Federalism Unit” devoted to fighting federal government “abuses of power.”

Oklahoma, once the victim and symbol of where the paranoia leads, now leads the way in furthering McVeigh’s anti-government agenda. Newsweek reports that last year Oklahoma lawmakers passed an Agenda 21 nullification act. In 2014, it made any federal gold coins legal tender.

There are some intriguing similarities between the current political climate and that of the mid-’90s, when McVeigh gathered up the fertilizer for his Ryder truck bomb. Back then, as now, a Democratic president presided over an improving American economy, and his popularity provoked the fear and loathing of an edge of the right-wing political spectrum contemplating—and occasionally engaging in—armed resistance.

Leading Republicans both feed and feed off of the government-as-enemy sentiment. As Newsweek makes clear, GOP lawmakers and presidential candidates such as Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, and Mike Huckabee are all too eager to feed the anti-government sentiment against the beast they themselves want so badly to ride.

It reminds me of George Burns in Oh, God! sending a message to a popular televangelist that he’s a phony: “If he wants to get rich, tell him to sell Earth shoes. But personally tell him I’d like him to shut up.”

[h/t Dave Neiwert]

The Hunger Games reality series

by digby

Oh my God this is awful. From Raw Story:

The Briefcase focuses on two “middle-class” families—a questionable but highly American take on the phrase, since both are debt saddled, with one primary breadwinner, and essentially living on the edge of financial ruin. Both are told they’ll be participating in a documentary about money. Instead, a producer from the show unexpectedly comes to their house with a suitcase full of cold, hard cash: $101,000 to be exact. That could be a life-changing – and in the case of families so near the financial cliff, nearly life-saving – sum of money. But this being reality TV, instead of just giving them the cash, there’s a major catch.

Both families are informed that somewhere out there, there’s another family “who’s also in need,” and are given a choice: “You can keep all of the money, you can keep some of the money, or you can give it all away.” Neither family knows that the other family also has a suitcase full of cash and is debating how much, if any, they’ll share. And since both families were originally told they were merely going to be the subjects of a documentary, neither of them really signed up for this exercise in televised torture.

What follows, predictably, is a gut-wrenching look at the two families being guilted this way and that over whether to choose charity or financial survival. In the first episode, the Bergins of North Carolina, a family of five—mom, Kim; dad, Drew; and three teenage daughters—are trying to make do on Kim’s salary of $15.50 an hour, since Drew’s ice cream truck business is failing. And in New Hampshire, the Bronsons—featuring dad Dave, an Iraq war vet who lost his leg in combat—are scraping by on the earnings of mom Cara, who works the night shift as a nurse and is pregnant with their second child.

The families are told they have to take the first $1,000 and spend it on themselves, which is basically a way of giving people who’ve been in dire straits for eons a fleeting taste of the kind of the financially carefree existence they’ll soon have to feel bad about wanting. From there on, the show does all it can to ensure the decision over the money is as guilt-ridden and uncomfortable as possible. Each clan is, bit by bit, given information about each others’ lives—including financial details, outstanding debts and shortfall salaries—and even allowed to tour each others’ houses. If you have any doubt about the cynicism that birthed CBS’s latest show, watch as mom Kim spots Dave’s prosthetic leg. It induces just the level of empathy—and guilt; always with the guilt—you might expect, and ensures exactly the sort of anguish CBS was hoping to capture on camera.

Now we don’t really know what the real deal is. They may have been promised the money no matter what. This is “reality TV” after all. But the premise alone is disgusting. Exploiting the economic fears of average Americans suffering in hard times to sell the idea that the only decent thing for them to do is to “sacrifice” even more for other people while the wealthy get richer and richer, is a sick joke. (It’s this come to life.)

So perfect that bunch of rich TV executives tossed this idea around and thought it was a great way to explore empathy and morality…

The new guy

by digby

I think it’s fine for Martin O’Malley to make his “youthful” age of 52 a selling point in his campaign. It’s not as if he’s the first. President Obama wasn’t shy about running as the “young” candidate in 2008 against both Clinton and McCain. Mondale certainly tried to do it against Reagan.

But here’s where he goes wrong:

On Saturday — with supporters on stage behind him, their “New Leadership” campaign signs raised in the air — O’Malley made his pitch to be that candidate. He outlined his eight years as governor of Maryland, where he ushered in same-sex marriage, a bill granting in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants, and an increase in the minimum wage. The speech touched only briefly on foreign policy, focusing more on the left-leaning economic policies he’s pushed on the campaign trail in recent months.

Arguing for more regulation on the Wall Street, O’Malley wove in a line casting Clinton — along with Jeb Bush, a leading Republican candidate — as an establishment figure.
“Recently, the CEO of Goldman Sachs let his employees know that he’d be just fine with either Bush or Clinton. I bet he would,” said O’Malley…

At a union hall in Davenport, asked if he thought his age gave him an advantage in the Democratic contest, O’Malley didn’t answer directly, making a joke instead about how young he was, at 36, when he became the mayor of Baltimore. And in Des Moines, surrounded by dozens of “New Leadership” signs stapled to the wall of his state headquarters, O’Malley was asked if he was making age an issue in the campaign.

“No,” he said, “but I do believe that as times change our challenges change. And the things that we were able to do both in Baltimore and in Maryland required new thinking and new perspectives and, yes, new leadership that’s willing to try new approaches.”

That sounds great. But if Clinton is going to be held responsible for ideas her husband held back in the 90s it’s probably fair to ask what ideas O’Malley held much more recently. Here’s a hint:

Our Chance to Capture the Center

By Martin O’Malley and Harold Ford Jr

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

With President Bush and the Republican Party on the rocks, many Democrats think the 2008 election will be, to borrow a favorite GOP phrase, a cakewalk. Some liberals are so confident about Democratic prospects that they contend the centrism that vaulted Democrats to victory in the 1990s no longer matters.

The temptation to ignore the vital center is nothing new. Every four years, in the heat of the nominating process, liberals and conservatives alike dream of a world in which swing voters don’t exist. Some on the left would love to pretend that groups such as the Democratic Leadership Council, the party’s leading centrist voice, aren’t needed anymore.

But for Democrats, taking the center for granted next year would be a greater mistake than ever before. George W. Bush is handing us Democrats our Hoover moment. Independents, swing voters and even some Republicans who haven’t voted our way in more than a decade are willing to hear us out. With an ambitious common-sense agenda, the progressive center has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win back the White House, expand its margins in Congress and build a political and governing majority that could last a generation.

A majority comes hard for Democrats. In the past 150 years, only three Democrats, one of whom was Franklin Roosevelt, have won the White House with a majority of the popular vote.

What’s more, political success built on the other party’s failure is fleeting. Jimmy Carter won a majority in the wake of Watergate, but his own shortcomings on national security and the economy took him from majority victor to landslide loser in four years. Repudiating the other side’s approach is only half the battle. Since neither side has a monopoly on truth, the hard part is knowing when to look beyond traditional orthodoxies to do what works.

Like FDR, we can build a lasting majority only by earning it — with ideas that demonstrate to the American people that if they entrust us with national leadership, we can deal effectively with the challenges our country faces and the challenges they face in their everyday lives.

Over the past six years, we’ve seen what happens when an administration writes off the political center and manipulates every decision for partisan gain. Bush’s failure to solve — or even address — America’s great challenges has left our country dispirited, disillusioned and divided.

Contrast the collapse of a conservative president with the success of the last centrist president. Bill Clinton ran on an agenda of sensible ideas that brought America a decade of peace and prosperity. He was the only Democrat to be elected and reelected president in the past seven decades, and he left office more popular than almost any other president in recent memory.

Nearly seven years after Bush succeeded Clinton in the White House, America is facing challenges as great as we’ve ever seen — a war against Islamist radicals who would destroy our way of life; global economic competition that demands we raise our game; and a quest for energy independence and efficiency that Al Gore has shown us could make or break our planet. To conquer such enduring problems, Democrats will need a broad, enduring majority — and a centrist agenda that sustains it by making steady progress.

Most Americans don’t care much about partisan politics; they just want practical answers to the problems they face every day. So far, our leading presidential candidates seem to understand that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. That’s why they have begun putting forward smart, New Democrat plans to cap and trade carbon emissions, give more Americans the chance to earn their way through college, achieve universal health care through shared responsibility, increase national security by rebuilding our embattled military and enable all Americans who work full time to lift themselves out of poverty.

As the caucuses and primaries approach, candidates will come under increasing pressure to ignore the broader electorate and appeal to the party faithful. But the opportunity to build a historic majority is too great — and too rare — to pass up.

A new Democratic president will have the chance to unite Americans around solutions that will make all Americans proud of their country again. For the sake of the hardworking Americans who are depending on us to fix Washington and put our country on the right track, we pray that Democrats set out to build a majority that can last.

Maybe he’s gotten younger in the intervening years. But someone should ask him because that stale centrist claptrap makes Clinton 2008 look like Bernie Sanders. (And Sanders might as well be Che Guevara.) If he’s to the left of her today then the odyssey that brought him from that DLC scold to a left wing populist crusader must be a fascinating tale.

Update: And then there’s this, from Lee Fang.

While much of the talk about a progressive revival revolves around populist figures like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Senator Elizabeth Warren, there are other, better funded efforts afoot. Corporate titans from finance to natural gas to big retail to telecom are attempting to steer the party, and as the midterms shape up, these interests are pushing to ensure they continue to have wide sway over America’s only viable outlet for center-left expression at the polls. Which brings us to the latest venture in corporate-centered party-building and the group hosting a chat in ANGA’s headquarters: The NewDEAL.

Created by Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and Senator Mark Begich of Alaska, the NewDEAL is one of several cash-rich efforts to resurrect the Democratic Party’s flailing bench of electable candidates.

This NewDEAL has little in common with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal platform, which pledged to save capitalism from itself by cracking down on predatory banking institutions and restoring workplace rights for Americans. No, this NewDEAL is a 501(c)(4) issue-advocacy nonprofit, a tax vehicle which allows campaign activity without disclosure of donors, and its name is an acronym for “Developing Exceptional American Leaders.”

The group, touted as a platform to “highlight rising pro-business progressives,” is led by Democrats who have made a name for themselves by bucking the populist trend. They include NewDeal co-chair Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, whose zeal for the charterization of public schools and love of Wall Street makes him indistinguishable from many across the aisle. The other co-chair, Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado, has staked a position in his state’s energy wars as a staunch defender of drillers.

That group was started in 2012. That odyssey from pro-business DLCer to populist crusader must have been very fast indeed.

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Mean, cruel jerks ‘o the day

by digby

Via Think Progress:

A segment on Fox Business’ Cavuto repeatedly mocked Caitlyn Jenner, who debuted her new identity Monday on the cover of Vanity Fair, and misidentified her with male pronouns. 

Neil Cavuto introduced the segment by asking in an exaggerated voice, “What the hell is going on?!?” The reporter, Dagen Mcdowell then proceeded to incorrectly use the pronouns “him” and “his” to refer to Caitlyn seven times.

Cavuto makes a joke of wanting to end the segment quickly, “Look at the time…” He then introduces his next guest, Charles Payne, as “Charlene Payne” to uproarious laughter.

Cavuto wraps of the discussion by suggesting the Vanity Fair cover was a sign of the end of American civilization. “Rome, final days. But that’s fine,” he concludes.

Watch:

They didn’t have to do this. They could have just ignored it. They certainly didn’t have to make fun of her.

But this is who they are: emotionally immature, compassionless creeps. Caitlynn says she is a Republican and someone should tell her that this is how Republicans look at her. Horrible people.

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