Month: June 2015

A welcome moment of decency

by digby

Via Mother Jones:

For months at a time, desperate Central American mothers and their children seeking asylum in the United States encounter little access to legal counsel, inadequate health care, and even alleged extortion and sexual assault by guards in detention facilities.

On Wednesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson offered some hope, announcing reforms that could allow the release of hundreds of women and children on bond if they’ve successfully shown a “credible or reasonable” reason for seeking relief.

The changes came a week after Johnson visited a detention center in Karnes City, Texas, one of three facilities that house families that have illegally crossed into the United States from places like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. On a recent trip with other House Democrats, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) described it as a “jail camp.” In late May, Lofgren et al. wrote a letter to Johnson calling for an end to family detention facilities.

“In short, once a family has established eligibility for asylum or other relief under our laws, long-term detention is an inefficient use of our resources and should be discontinued,” Johnson said in a statement.

I’m sure most of those mothers are rapists and criminals so we’d better lock our doors.

Speaking of which, have any reporters asked the other GOP candidates whether they agree with Donald Trump about immigration and his characterization of immigrants? they should. Trump is in second place now. Somebody must like what he’s got to say.

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The best convention speech you’ll never hear
by Tom Sullivan

Perhaps America does have a reckoning coming. If so, it will not be the fiery one predicted by conservative ministers and pundits in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court rulings on Obamacare and same-sex marriage. But perhaps a reckoning nonetheless.

Popping up now and again since his 1988 presidential campaign collapsed, Gary Hart is not remembered for his speeches. The former Colorado senator’s presidential aspirations, like so many others’, died in the glare of public scrutiny. In a Time magazine extract from his upcoming “The Republic of Conscience,” Hart gives the best convention speech we will never hear.

Hart has had a lot of time to watch what has happened to the republic he hoped to lead. Distanced from the Village bubble, he offers a blistering indictment of systemic corruption in Washington that is now so ubiquitous as to be invisible. The army of lobbyists. The rise of the consultant class. The revolving doors. Campaigns as a billion-dollar industry. Rentier capitalism. “[S]pecial interest stalls in the halls of Congress.” The abandonment of “the common good and the interests of the commonwealth.” All of it is an outcome, Hart believes, “our founders would not recognize and would deplore.” Hart writes:

On a more personal level, how can public service be promoted as an ideal to young people when this sewer corrupts our Republic? At this point in early twenty-first-century America, the greatest service our nation’s young people could provide is to lead an army of outraged young Americans armed with brooms on a crusade to sweep out the rascals and rid our capital of the money changers, rent seekers, revolving door dancers, and special interest deal makers and power brokers and send them back home to make an honest living, that is, if they still remember how to do so.

What angers truly patriotic Americans is that this entire Augean stable is legal. Even worse, recent Supreme Court decisions placing corporations under the First Amendment protection of free speech for political purposes compounds the tragedy of American democracy. For all practical political purposes, the government of the United States is for sale to the highest bidder.

Yet, a Washington media enamored of its own savviness and protective of “access” greets legalized corruption with a shrug and a “So what?” Hart continues:

Restoration of the Republic of Conscience requires reduction and eventual elimination of the integrity deficit. Virtue, the disinterestedness of our elected officials, must replace political careerism and special interests. The national interest, what is best for our country and coming generations, must replace struggles for power, bitter partisanship, and ideological rigidity. This is not dreamy idealism; it is an idealism rooted in the original purpose of this nation.

Don’t hold your breath or expect to stay up late to hear this as a convention speech. Hart may be just a voice crying out in the wilderness.

Then again, perhaps we are on the cusp of a different kind of reckoning. Since the Trayvon Martin shooting and all the other deaths of young, black men at the hands of police — recorded in living color — law enforcement in America may finally be emerging from its bunker. Those videos have shown us all, and police themselves, what policing has become. Training police for a “warrior mentality” may be giving way to a new emphasis on de-escalating encounters that too often needlessly became deadly. And what do you know? “If we just started to treat people with dignity and respect, things would go much better.”

A century and a half after the end of the Civil War, reflection following the Charleston church shootings has ripped the false history away from Southern myths surrounding the war and the Confederate battle flag. Again, don’t hold your breath, but with Confederate flags coming down from prominent places across the South, perhaps a reckoning with secession, slavery, and a nation’s institutional racism is finally beginning.

If we can be honest enough with ourselves to tackle that, perhaps this country can look itself in the mirror and see that, as Hart writes, “today’s American Republic is massively corrupt,” and maybe even do something about it.

Gay people can now get married in all 50 states. Who ever thought that would happen?

Striking unanimity

by digby

The GOP hopefuls all agree on one thing:

There is a striking unanimity among the candidates who are running for the party’s presidential nomination in 2016: Not one supports allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. And after the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Constitution guarantees a right to marriage for all couples, regardless of their sexual orientation, the degree of difference among the candidates was largely a matter of how aggressively they would continue to resist.

Here’s the breakdown:

Walker, Cruz, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and other candidates on the party’s right are all seeking to consolidate support among conservative voters. That gives them a strong incentive to push issues such as same-sex marriage to the forefront, and they moved to do so in the hours after the ruling.

While Walker backed amending the Constitution to overturn the court’s decision, others pledged support for individuals — business owners, for example — who feel their religious beliefs would be violated if they were to participate in a same-sex wedding. Huckabee warned against “surrender” to the court’s decree, but did not say what form of resistance he advocated.

By contrast, presidential hopefuls including Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who seek support from more moderate Republicans, sought to downplay the issue.

“This is something that should be decided by the people of each state and not imposed upon them by a group of lawyers sitting in black robes at the U.S. Supreme Court,” Christie said. “That being said, those five lawyers get to impose it under our system, and so our job is going to be to support the law of the land.”

Dan Schnur, a veteran Republican strategist who now directs the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at USC, suggested that “you can tell a lot about the candidates for president by the way they reacted to today’s decision.”

Yes you can. The GOP presidential candidates in a nutshell: straight-up bigots vs dogwhistling “states’ rights” phonies.

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150 years of PC

by digby

I’m sure that most people don’t know what Adam Serwer tells us here. But they may be learning it now:

Even after the narrative of a benign and honorable Confederacy fell out of favor with historians, it continued to dominate American popular culture in film and literature, from The Birth of a Nation to The Dukes of Hazzard. The damage wrought by this interpretation of history is immeasurable. It is only now unraveling.

Most important, it was always untrue: Slavery was the cause of the war, white supremacy was the cornerstone of Confederate society, the individual valor of Confederate soldiers cannot hide that the cause for which they fought was one of the worst in human history, their defeat was not solely due to the North’s structural advantages, and they — not the Union — were the aggressors. Though taking down the Confederate flag may itself be of little practical consequence, the backlash against the stars and bars is a result of a monumental shift in popular memory that has the potential to shape our politics just as the Lost Cause once did.

Shortly after the war, Blight writes, former Confederate Gen. Jubal Early gained control of the Southern Historical Society and used it to “launch a propaganda assault on popular history and memory.” Later groups like the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy worked to “control historical interpretation of the Civil War.” In this interpretation, popularly known as “Lost Cause” mythology, the Confederacy was fighting for some vague conception of liberty, not the right to own slaves; its soldiers were unparalleled warriors defending their homeland who were only defeated because of the Union’s structural advantages; and the postwar subjugation of black Americans was a necessary response to lawlessness. Professional historians like those of the late 19th/early 20th century Dunning School bolstered the popular perception that granting equal rights to black Americans after the war was an immoral and tragic error, thus justifying the imposition of racial apartheid in the South.

If political correctness is the suppression of uncomfortable truths in order to avoid offense, then the American popular perception of the Civil War and its aftermath is the result of one of the most effective and devastating campaigns of political correctness in American history. The reversal of the popular understanding of the war and Reconstruction is possible only through the hard work of historians and popular writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates bringing their findings to a broader audience.

When I was in the 8th grade we spent the hole yer in history class studying the Civil War. And I learned that the southern fighters were particularly valorous, that the slaves were actually very content and that it was all about States’ Rights not slavery. We watched “Birth of a Nation” and there was no criticism of its politics. I did my report on John Wilkes Booth and found out that he was a misguided patriot fr his cause.

Granted, that was back in the dark ages. But it wasn’t in the South. It was in California.

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If you value your life you will learn this lesson

by digby

Do not ever assume that you can walk toward a police officer and ask for help or report a crime or anything else unless your hands are up and you are being very, very deliberate, walking slowly, eyes cast down, submissive and servile. You see, “they aren’t clairvoyant” so they might just shoot you on the spot if you don’t:

A week after Los Angeles police shot and critically wounded an unarmed man whose hands were covered with a cloth, department officials on Friday identified the officer who pulled the trigger.

The LAPD identified Cairo Palacios as the officer who shot Walter William DeLeon, 48, along Los Feliz Boulevard. Police said DeLeon walked “aggressively” toward two officers and pointed his hands at them, leading them to believe he had a gun hidden under the gray cloth.

DeLeon remained in critical condition on Friday.

Palacios previously worked as a sworn public safety officer with the city’s General Services Department, which patrolled parks, libraries and other city-owned properties. That department merged with the LAPD in 2013, part of then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s effort to boost police staffing to the 10,000-officer mark.

Palacios began working with the General Services Department after he graduated from the Los Angeles Police Academy in 2006, the LAPD said. He was assigned to patrol Griffith Park as part of the LAPD’s Security Services Division, but was removed from the field after Friday’s shooting.

An attorney representing Palacios said his client thought DeLeon had a gun and was going to shoot the officers, saying there were no indications DeLeon was trying to get their help. Attorney Gary Fullerton acknowledged it can be difficult for the public to grapple with police shootings of unarmed people, but said officers have the right to protect their own lives.

“The officer, when he went up to handcuff the man, was shocked to find just the cloth there and nothing under the cloth,” Fullerton said. “It’s unfortunate, but you can’t expect officers to be clairvoyant and wait until they get shot at to actually know what this person is doing or thinking.”

Fullerton said he believed “100%” that Palacios followed LAPD policy in the shooting. But, he added, the officers “were obviously traumatized by what happened because nobody likes shooting what ends up being an unarmed man.”

DeLeon’s son told The Times he was shocked to learn his father was shot by police. William DeLeon, 18, said his father often walked with a towel to wipe away sweat.

Kevin Boyle, an attorney who is representing DeLeon’s children, said his firm would “leave no stone unturned” in its own investigation of the shooting.

“From everything I have seen, this is a wonderful family and I would be absolutely shocked to learn that he was approaching police in some sort of an aggressive way,” he said. “Maybe he was feeling ill. He may have been reporting a crime. It’s just unknown at this time.”

The LAPD said they found no broken down car anywhere and his hand wasn’t hurt so there was no indication that he might have needed help. He’s still in critical condition so he can’t tell them what was going on. But I don’t think it matters. Even if he’d had an injury and needed help or wanted to report a crime, it seems they would have shot him anyway because he didn’t drop the non-existent gun in his hand when they ordered him to.

Nowadays police often just shoot people if they simply think they might have a gun. Use extreme caution whenever they are near.

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Taking history into her own hands

by digby

In Charleston this morning a woman named Bree Newsome did something wonderful:

Good news for the racists though: the cops had the flag back up on the pole in time for a white supremacist rally.

She has been arrested, as you can see in the video. Color of Change has a petition going to have the charges dropped. 

If you’re a tweeter, here’s the hashtag:

She’s awesome.

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All American extremism

by digby

I wrote about right wing extremism for Salon yesterday:

In the 14 years since Al Qaeda carried out attacks on New York and the Pentagon, extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal assaults in the United States, explaining their motives in online manifestoes or social media rants.

But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.

The slaying of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church last week, with an avowed white supremacist charged with their murders, was a particularly savage case.

But it is only the latest in a string of lethal attacks by people espousing racial hatred, hostility to government and theories such as those of the “sovereign citizen” movement, which denies the legitimacy of most statutory law. The assaults have taken the lives of police officers, members of racial or religious minorities and random civilians.

Some killings by non-Muslims that most experts would categorize as terrorism have drawn only fleeting news media coverage, never jelling in the public memory. But to revisit some of the episodes is to wonder why.

In 2012, a neo-Nazi named Wade Michael Page entered a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and opened fire, killing six people and seriously wounding three others. Mr. Page, who died at the scene, was a member of a white supremacist group called the Northern Hammerskins.

In another case, in June 2014, Jerad and Amanda Miller, a married couple with radical antigovernment views, entered a Las Vegas pizza restaurant and fatally shot two police officers who were eating lunch. On the bodies, they left a swastika, a flag inscribed with the slogan “Don’t tread on me” and a note saying, “This is the start of the revolution.” Then they killed a third person in a nearby Walmart.

And, as in the case of jihadist plots, there have been sobering close calls. In November 2014 in Austin, Tex., a man named Larry McQuilliams fired more than 100 rounds at government buildings that included the Police Headquarters and the Mexican Consulate. Remarkably, his shooting spree hit no one, and he was killed by an officer before he could try to detonate propane cylinders he drove to the scene.

Knoxville police Sunday evening searched the Levy Drive home of Jim David Adkisson after he allegedly entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and killed two people and wounded six others during the presentation of a children’s musical.

Adkisson targeted the church, Still wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, “because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.”

Adkisson told Still that “he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office.”

Inside the house, officers found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.

There’s lot’s more at the link. It’s a long one. But I think this is important to think about:

Reid doubled down and called Bundy himself a “domestic terrorist.”

The next day Reid appeared with Heller on a Las Vegas television program. That’s when Heller deviated from talking points he had been given and disagreed with Reid: “What Senator Reid may call domestic terrorists, I call patriots.”

The most common reaction this piece got from right wingers is that right wing extremism is a fantasy made up by the left. Proving my point. They don’t see any of this as extreme.

You can read the whole thing here.

Hearts still need to be opened
by Tom Sullivan

In “the land of the free,” the fight for equality is far from over.

In a 5-4 decision yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges  that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry in all 50 states. We won’t dwell this morning on the particulars of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority decision, nor on Justice Antonin Scalia’s bitter dissent, but rather on what comes next.

Marriage equality victory rally last night in Asheville, NC.

At the victory rally in Asheville, NC last night, social justice activists addressed the crowd:

“It’s extraordinary,” said the Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality. “There are people who have been waiting their whole lives to marry the person they love, and now they are equal under the law. Think about the families racing to the courthouse in Mississippi right now. I’m overwhelmed by the emotion and historical significance of this. It took decades and decades of work to get to this moment.”

Now, about Mississippi …

All things old are new again

After the ruling, I emailed a friend with the Campaign for Southern Equality (CSE is based in Asheville, NC) and asked how soon he would be out of a job. Not anytime soon. Just because SCOTUS ruled that states must allow same-sex marriages doesn’t mean they will any more than Brown v. Board of Education  meant states would integrate their schools. In some places, that took federal troops. And wouldn’t you know, some of the same Brown v. Board  holdouts are balking again?

In Mississippi and Louisiana, the states’ respective attorneys general cited different reasons as to why the court’s decision does not yet immediately apply.

In Louisiana, Attorney General James D. “Buddy” Caldwell called the Supreme Court’s ruling “yet another example of … federal government intrusion into what should be a state issue.”

Nothing in the court’s decision makes its order effective immediately, Caldwell’s office said in a statement posted on its website. Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2004 that banned same-sex marriage and civil unions.

Once again, dissenters are invoking “states’ rights.”

Mississippi is considering not issuing marriage licenses at all:

As the state’s governor and lieutenant governor condemned the court’s decision, state House Judiciary Chairman Andy Gipson began studying ways to prevent gay marriage in Mississippi. Governor Phil Bryant said he would do all he can “to protect and defend the religious freedoms of Mississippi.” To Bryant’s point of doing “all” the state could do, Gipson, who is a Baptist minister, suggested removing marriage licenses entirely.

“One of the options that other states have looked at is removing the state marriage license requirement,” Gipson told The Clarion-Ledger, a local newspaper. “We will be researching what options there are. I personally can see the pros and cons to that. I don’t know if it would be better to have no marriage certificate sponsored by the state or not. But it’s an option out there to be considered.”

All others need not apply

Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn told the Clarion-Ledger:

“As Christians, we are to speak the truth in love,” Gunn said. “But we are not to shy away from speaking the truth, even though the truth may be unpopular or not embraced by the culture around us. This decision is in direct conflict with God’s design for marriage as set forth in the Bible. The threat of this decision to religious liberty is very clear. I pledge to protect the rights of Christian citizens to teach and operate on the basis of Christian conviction.”

Evidently, requiring people wanting to marry to first obtain government approval was not in direct conflict with God’s design nor a threat to religious liberty until yesterday.

(L to R) Carmen Ramos-Kennedy, Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Lindsey Simerly of Campaign for Southern Equality.

At the Asheville celebration last night, CSE’s Carmen Ramos-Kennedy addressed the crowd in the shadow of a monument to the state’s Civil War governor. People wonder why a straight, black woman joined the effort to secure marriage equality, she said, holding back tears. Because it was not so long ago that she would not have been able to marry her husband. Ramos-Kennedy’s husband is white.

President Obama’s eulogy in Charleston yesterday for the slain Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney spoke of the “uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society.” We must not “settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change — that’s how we lose our way again,” the president said.

Reverend Pinckney once said, “Across the South, we have a deep appreciation of history — we haven’t always had a deep appreciation of each other’s history.” (Applause.) What is true in the South is true for America. Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other. That my liberty depends on you being free, too. (Applause.) That history can’t be a sword to justify injustice, or a shield against progress, but must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past — how to break the cycle. A roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind — but, more importantly, an open heart.

Campaign for Southern Equality heads to Mississippi next week. There is still hard work to be done and hearts there still needing to be opened.

What a week

by digby

As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves. We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency, and short-sightedness and fear of each other — but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace. But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.

It’s been a helluva a week. Epic tragedy, epic evil and epic triumph condensed into a very short period of time. It’s emotionally exhausting but exhilarating too.

We’re still horrified by the massacre in Charleston. I don’t think we ever will not be. The funeral of Reverend Pinckney was so poignant and sad although I think the people of that community and the president’s eloquence took a little bit of the pain away for a little while, if such is even possible. The reaction of so many, after so many years, to the hideous provocation of that awful flag was uplifting. It’s not everything but it’s a long overdue step along that long road leading to racial justice in America.

This country sentenced a young man to death too, for another heinous act of terrorism. Nobody feels sorry for him. But I think we should feel sorry for ourselves. Capital punishment is an arbitrary act of revenge. As a society we could stand to have a little of that grace President Obama was talking about and end that barbaric practice.

Yesterday, a majority of the Supreme Court decided not to submit to hackish right wing sophistry, even if they really would have liked to. This is not only a win for the people who were on the verge of losing their ability to get needed medical care, it’s a win for reason itself.

And the affirmation today of the basic human right of people to marry someone they love is an amazing step forward for our misbegotten species. It is a privilege to be alive to witness it.

So, I’m having a drink on this Friday night to toast all the victims, all the survivors, all the people who will survive and all the people who will thrive after all this.

L’chayim.

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