Month: June 2015

Aiders and abettors

by digby

Wow, what a lede from Jonathan Allen at Vox:

Hillary Clinton’s not seen as honest and trustworthy by most voters. But on Saturday the Democratic presidential front-runner spoke truths about race and gun violence in America that her Republican rivals have refused to utter after a shooter killed nine worshipers at the historic Emanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C., this week.

It goes on to be one hell of a comment:

If Clinton is to win the presidency, part of the reason will be Republicans’ unwillingness to seriously confront realities that threaten the stability and strength of American society, from race and gun violence to income inequality and climate change.

It’s hard to come up with solutions if you refuse to identify the problems. Clinton didn’t advance the ball much on the former Saturday, but she delivered on the latter — putting tremendous distance between herself and field full of Republican gun-and-race deniers. One would think the GOP would have learned this lesson from the 1990s: If you give a Clinton the obvious middle ground, she’ll take it.

Clinton on Race and Guns

Here’s part of what she said on race.

“Bodies are once again being carried out of a black church. Once again racist rhetoric has metastasized into racist violence. Now its tempting, it is tempting, to dismiss a tragedy like this as an isolated incident. To believe that in today’s America bigotry is largely behind us, that institutionalized racism no longer exists. But despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America’s long struggle with race is far from finished.”

And this is part of what she said on guns, a line that drew a long round of applause from those in attendance at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in San Francisco.

“I know that gun ownership is part of the fabric of a lot of law-abiding communities, but I also know that we can have common-sense gun reforms that keep weapons out of the hands of criminals and the violently unstable while respecting the rights of responsible gun owners.

Clinton called the failure to implement universal background checks and restrictions on gun sales to domestic abusers, the mentally ill and people on terrorist watch lists “a rebuke to this nation we love and care about.” And she called racial tension the “deeper challenge we face.”

He goes on to list the specifics she talked about. And then lists the cowardly, immoral and dishonest statements from the GOP candidates in the wake of the shootings. And then concludes with this zinger:

So, in the wake of Charleston, who is honest and trustworthy? It can’t be these guys.

In her remarks Saturday, Clinton said it’s not just “kooks and Klansmen” who are responsible for racial division in America.

The person who lets the racist joke go unchallenged or feels a twinge of fear at the “sight of a young black man in a hoodie” is also responsible for perpetuating racial tensions, she said.

Maybe, just maybe, the presidential candidates who dare not speak of racism for fear of alienating voters who harbor deep bigotry bear some responsibility, too.

No doubt. No doubt at all.

It’s quite a piece, refreshingly straightforward and on point.

Here’s Clinton’s speech if you’re interested

Update: As Billmon says:

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A symbol “that doesn’t quite strike you right”

by digby

It’s hard to believe that this guy’s supposed to be the “moderate” in the GOP presidential field:

We’re not going to give this a guy an excuse about a book he might have read or a movie he watched or a song he listened to or a symbol out anywhere. It’s him … not the flag,” the Republican senator told CNN’s “New Day” Alisyn Camerota.

When Graham was asked his thoughts regarding the Confederate flag, he said, “It works here, that’s what the statehouse agreed to do. You could probably visit other places in the country near some symbol that doesn’t quite strike you right.”

He’s close, but no cigar. The truth is that people are getting sick and tired of giving neo-confederates and their ignorant sympathisers the “excuse” that their symbol of slavery, hatred and racial violence is benign and allowing them to pretend that they aren’t using it as a symbol of white supremacy. That’s what it is.

And no, it’s impossible to find a symbol in America that doesn’t “strike” anyone quite as wrong as that one unless you’re talking about swastikas and I haven’t seen any of those flying on the grounds of official government buildings lately and you don’t commonly see them on license plate holders and beer cozies. To a lot of us, there is no difference between them. And those who think there is a difference are lying to themselves or lying to everyone else.

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About the guns

by digby

An excerpt from this article about the guns in the wake of Charleston:

Some more conservative commentators seem to be advocating for arming priests and pastors in the same way that they’ve argued in favor of having armed guards in schools. What are your thoughts on this proposal?

That’s a very typical reaction. In the last decade, this is exactly how the gun rights crowd would’ve responded to this. They take these incidents as a call to arms. I’m not surprised that they think Christian pastors should be armed to prevent these kinds of incidents. The interview you refer to is with a guy named E.W. Jackson, who was on “Fox and Friends” this morning. He was the one who suggested that this was more of a hate crime against Christians and not against African Americans. He himself is African American, but clearly he and the host completely ignored that there was an obvious race element to this though the shooter himself said it. What was interesting about Jackson is that he is no average or ordinary black pastor. “Fox and Friends” picked him for a reason. He was a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia and for the Senate and is a Tea Party favorite, staunch defender of guns, big critic of the black political establishment in complaining that they’re always claiming racism, but that’s beside the point. The major point is this is not anything new. This is part of the larger gun rights agenda to flood our society with guns.

The other piece of interest on Fox News was actually in the written portion. John Lott, who is a major gun rights advocate, wrote a book called “More Guns, Less Crime.” He has been repeatedly discredited, disproved by the public health establishment, but he keeps coming back because he cites data and statistics. His methods have been disproven, but he is called on as an expert in favor of gun rights. He wrote a column this morning for Fox News saying that the real problem was that the church was a gun-free zone, and that makes it an easy target for killers. But that again is a very common argument that we heard many times about the shooter in Aurora, Colorado. They said that that theater was also a gun-free zone, and that’s why he chose it. There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary: that that doesn’t come into the minds of the shooters at all.

What they are really saying is that we must accept that people are going to die in mass killings from gun violence. That goes without saying.  But they believe we just won’t have as many deaths if more people are armed because someone in an armed crowd should be able to cut down the first shooter before he succeeds in killing all of his intended victims.  He will, of course, kill some of them.  Nobody can read his mind and know ahead of time that he is going to start firing at people.  But once the shock wears off one of the armed accountants, schoolteachers and elderly people should be able to get their weapon out and fire at the shooter before he kills every person in the room (as long as he doesn’t see them first.) That’s it. That’s their solution.

Unless we all walk around with guns loaded and drawn and ready to fire at a moments notice, this is the best scenario that they can come up with. The worst, of course is that bullets flying all over the place from multiple shooters will inevitably hit the wrong people and cause even more death. But in the best case, what we will have is possibly fewer victims before someone cuts down the perpetrator. And that is good enough for them.

So, in effect, they are saying that mass shootings are just part of life and we are going to have to live with it. And apparently, that’s what most Americans believe as well.  There is nothing to be done. Well, that’s not true.  The gun proliferation zealots are succeeding in state legislatures in loosening gun laws and putting even more guns into circulation everywhere. So there’s that.  But that’s it.

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Remember these names

by digby

After reading Dylann Roof’s disgusting manifesto it seems important to post this:

An overactive sense of history
by Tom Sullivan

We were told during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s that some of the ethnic hatreds there dated back centuries. People in the Balkans were re-fighting battles lost 600 years earlier.

One knock against Americans is, it is said we have no sense of history. But during the Bosnian genocide, it struck me that the flip side to having no sense of history was having an overactive one.

Here in the South, there are some people with overactive senses of their own history. Specifically, a history symbolized by flying flags of the Confederacy from lawns, from pickup trucks, and in South Carolina, on the state capitol grounds. That particular flag flies on a pole from which, by law, it cannot be removed.

Why?

Americans with no sense of history will not appreciate how in the South the loss of the Civil War is, a mere 150 years after the fact, still the source of a gnawing, grinding anger for a minority with an overactive one. The myths of the Lost Cause, the Bloody Shirt, “heritage not hate,” “states’ rights,” “Forget, Hell!” and all the other post hoc rationale for whitewashing slavery, treason, Jim Crow, and decades of lynchings and other domestic terrorism are still alive, if only in small pockets. But they won’t let it go. Call it pride. Call it Scots-Irish stubbornness. (And a lingering inferiority complex.) But it is toxic. The defeat went down hard, and the memory of a defeated people runs deep. Ask the Serbs.

Enough.

After the mass shooting in Charleston this week, one South Carolina state legislator, a Republican, proposes removing the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds once and for all:

South Carolina state Rep. Norman “Doug” Brannon announced on Friday night that he would introduce a bill to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol, citing the death of Sen. Clementa Pinckney during the terrorist attack in Charleston earlier this week.

“I had a friend die Wednesday night for no reason other than he was a black man,” Brannon, a Republican, told MSNBC host Chris Hayes in a phone interview. “Senator Pinckney was an incredible human being. I don’t want to talk politics, but I’m gonna introduce the bill for that reason.”

He showed more integrity than many of his cohorts this week.

John Fugelsang has one of the best (and upbeat) takedowns of Confederate flag-waving and why the South ought to let it go:

Of all the periods of your history, why do you want to celebrate those four years? … You are better than them! You are better than your ancestors who quit America because they wanted to keep people as pets.

A little something for Friday Happy Hour

by digby

There’s something very wrong with these people:

The video was produced by FreedomWorks before its “FreePAC” event in Dallas in July 2012, a conference attended by several leading conservative politicians as well as thousands of activists.
[…]
[T]he part of the video that caused the most internal consternation at the time was the scene featuring the intern dressed up as a panda appearing to be caught in the midst of giving oral sex to the intern dressed up as Hillary Clinton. Staff were against the video being shown at FreePAC, which had an audience composed mostly of older conservatives.

What’s the problem? Why would anyone find that offensive?

Here’s the twisted video featuring the twisted freak that runs FreedomWorks, Adam Brandon (who, incidentally, really pushed to show that video.) Frankly, all the videos are exceedingly creepy.

Here’s a real baby panda to cleanse your brain of that depraved weirdness these weirdos call “activism”:

He doesn’t stand a chance

by digby

He’s a little too testy for the billionaires:

Kasich’s temper has made it harder to endear himself to the GOP’s wealthy benefactors. Last year, he traveled to Southern California to appear on a panel at a conference sponsored by the Republican mega-donors Charles and David Koch. At one point, according to accounts provided by two sources present, Randy Kendrick, a major contributor and the wife of Ken Kendrick, the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, rose to say she disagreed with Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid coverage, and questioned why he’d expressed the view it was what God wanted.

The governor’s response was fiery. “I don’t know about you, lady,” he said as he pointed at Kendrick, his voice rising. “But when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor.”

The exchange left many stunned. About 20 audience members walked out of the room, and two governors also on the panel, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, told Kasich they disagreed with him. The Ohio governor has not been invited back to a Koch seminar — opportunities for presidential aspirants to mingle with the party’s rich and powerful — in the months since.

And here I thought all it took to get into heaven in tax cuts and tort reform.

Unfortunately for Kasich, he thinks he can be the establishment candidate. But the establishment candidate has to kiss the rings of the billionaires. And they’re just as nuts as the Tea Party. He has no constituency.

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Under color of law

by digby

This statement was released by Fraternal Order of Police in Louisville Kentucky:

Consider this an open letter to the public we serve, the criminal element in our city, and the self appointed spokespersons who choose to remain blind to reason, who use misinformation and who sensationalize tragedy at every opportunity to forward their political agendas.

Know this: The members of River City FOP Lodge 614, who serve and protect Louisville every day, will no longer stand on the sidelines while anyone continues to assault and demonize us.

To those of you that support us while we serve and protect you — Thank You. Although you are not chosen for media interviews, we know that you understand we are here for you and your families. We know that the vast majority of you see that ninety-nine percent of police officers serve with integrity and courage. Although we know in our hearts that you are the silent majority, sadly, that may not be enough. Soon, we may have to ask for you to rise with us against the small, but very vocal group of people in our city who resist everything we all strive to attain — freedom, safety and the ability to live our lives happily and without fear.

To the criminal element in our community-we do not fear you. We are not your punching bag and we will not simply stand by and accept your verbal or physical assaults. No matter what craziness occurs, we will always protect our citizens and ourselves. No matter how weak our criminal justice system, we will hunt you down again and again until they put you away or you go away. No matter how weak our policies we will find a way to make you understand that Louisville isn’t where you want to live. Most importantly, though, take note of the following: If you actively resist or assault us, we will use every option available to take you into custody. If you use deadly force against us or use or attempt to use a dangerous instrument or deadly weapon against us, we will use deadly force against you and we WILL stop the threat to us, our fellow officers or the citizens we serve.

To the sensationalists, liars and race-baiters —we are done with you. At first it was good enough just to sit back and watch your ridiculous spectacle. No more. Now your rhetoric, lies and hate puts all of us, police officers and citizens alike, in danger. From now on we will call you out each and every time you tell a lie, twist the truth or otherwise engage in vile behavior meant to push your selfish agendas. If your behavior or untruths causes harm to us or the public, we will make every attempt to have you investigated, charged and prosecuted at the local, state or federal level. Your idiocy and lies are what caused the destruction in Ferguson and other cities around our country and we won’t be tolerating that here. We watched in shock most recently as some of you flat out lied to the media after a critical incident here in Louisville. Many in the media are self serving too, and we watched as they stood on the sidelines and fanned the flames for financial gain.

It is obvious to nearly everyone that you are attacking and lashing out at the police instead of attacking the real problem — those who commit crimes in our city and those who enable the criminal element. Are you not paying attention to what is happening around the country? As police are disempowered the predominately minority areas of cities, including Louisville, are suffering at the hands of killers and violent felons. Yet you continue to attack law enforcement. Your attacks can’t stop the truth from shining through. The truth is that every day there are millions of encounters during which police officers interact peacefully with all kinds of people, even during very difficult circumstances.

Your flawed logic and lack of reason regarding events that occur in our society makes you appear stunningly inept. Let me help you. All citizens in Louisville, regardless of race, creed, color, gender or national origin have the SAME rights and responsibilities. No one gets a separate set of rules. Politicians may fear you and your tactics-we do not. You and those you enable must abide by the law and comply with law enforcement like everyone else. If you refuse to comply or even worse, attack a law enforcement officer, expect to be met with force.

Your ridiculous demands and anti-law enforcement attitude has reached a level that is unacceptable. You want our attention? Well you have it. Consider yourselves on notice. We challenge you to have the same integrity and dedication to serving the community that you say you seek in the police. We already have it. You need to get it.

On behalf of the members of RCFOP Lodge 614,

Dave Mutchler

President

River City Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 614

There’s nothing authoritarian about threatening to hunt down critics of the police. Nothing at all.

This is exactly the type of person you want to be entrusted to ensure public safety, amirite? Level-headed, mature and full of common sense and good judgment. It’s hard to imagine that such a person isn’t respected by everyone in the community.

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Why libertarians vote for Republicans

by digby

As Paul’s Wall Street Journal op-ed notes, he crafted this plan with the assistance of some of the high priests of supply-side economic theory: frequently and flagrantly wrong bozo Stephen Moore, flat-tax evangelist and dimwit billionaire rights activist Steve Forbes, and the also frequently wrong Art Laffer, who launched the trickle-down revolution that’s given us over three decades of bad economic policy. Anyone familiar with these knuckleheads and the economic philosophy they espouse should already know what they’re promising with Rand Paul’s tax scheme: huge tax cuts aimed primarily at corporations and the wealthy will supercharge the economy and produce untold millions of jobs and untold trillions of dollars in tax revenue.

As Simon Maloy points out in his piece, if you like what Sam Brownback has done to Kansas you’re going to love what Rand Paul is going to do to the whole country. These are all Brownback’s guys and they haven’t repudiated any of it.

These people are good allies on civil liberties and will often be on the right side when it comes to foreign policy. But when it comes to social policy, regulation and economics they’re with the other side. And social policy, regulation and economics are clearly their priorities or they wouldn’t vote Republican.

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Just don’t call it terrorism. Or racism.

by digby

I wrote about Charleston for Salon this morning:

Despite public anxiety about extremists inspired by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, the number of violent plots by such individuals has remained very low. Since 9/11, an average of nine American Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorism-related plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years.

In contrast, right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities, according to a study by Arie Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. The toll has increased since the study was released in 2012.

Other data sets, using different definitions of political violence, tell comparable stories. The Global Terrorism Database maintained by the Start Center at the University of Maryland includes 65 attacks in the United States associated with right-wing ideologies and 24 by Muslim extremists since 9/11. The International Security Program at the New America Foundation identifies 39 fatalities from “non-jihadist” homegrown extremists and 26 fatalities from “jihadist” extremists.

Read on. I go on to talk about the Republican response to these events. Unfortunately, at the time I wrote it I hadn’t heard Lindsay Graham make the second stupid comment he’s made about this event, this time defending the rebel flag. And I didn’t know Jeb! was going to say that he didn’t know if the shootings were racially motivated. Seriously:

The candidate opened his remarks with some words about the shooting, which took the lives of nine African-American churchgoers. I don’t know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes,” Bush said near the top of his speech. “But I do know what was in the heart of the victims.”

Bush said the events had a “big impact” on him, adding, “I know that your hearts and prayers are with the families and the pastor who lost their lives and let’s hope it never ever, ever, happens again.”

But unlike President Barack Obama and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, Bush made no mention of the racial motives for the attack and offered no policy proposals to prevent mass shootings like this one from happening again.

And now, Bush is facing some heat from critics who believe that we do know what we in the shooter’s mind and heart due to witnesses who specifically heard him say he was there “to shoot black people.”

Pressed to explain whether Bush believes the attack was “racially motivated,” his communications director [Tim Miller] said, “of course.”

Update: Despite Tim Miller’s insistence that Bush “of course” thinks the attack was racially motivated, the candidate was more tentative in a follow-up interview with The Huffington Post’s Laura Bassett.

“I don’t know. Looks like to me it was, but we’ll find out all the information,” Bush said. “It’s clear it was an act of raw hatred, for sure. Nine people lost their lives, and they were African-American. You can judge what it is.”

Dear God, how can anyone think this man can be president? He’s such a coward that he won’t even admit that the shooting of nine black people in a famous black church by a young white man who wears white supremacist symbols on his clothes, was known to be a racist among all his friends,tells the victims “you’re raping our women and taking over the country” and confesses to the police that he wanted to start a race war was motivated by race. It’s pathetic. These Republicans are obviously so scared of offending their racist, white base of voters that they can’t even admit something this obvious for fear of upsetting them?

Good luck with that minority outreach Heb!

Update: The Wall Street Journal outdid itself with this one:

Mr. Obama recalled the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls.

The President quoted at some length Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s remarks on the bombing: “They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely with [about] who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American Dream.”

Amid the horror of Charleston, it is also important to note that the U.S., notably the South, has moved forward to replace the system that enabled racist killings like those in the Birmingham church.

Back then and before, the institutions of government—police, courts, organized segregation—often worked to protect perpetrators of racially motivated violence, rather than their victims.

The universal condemnation of the murders at the Emanuel AME Church and Dylann Roof’s quick capture by the combined efforts of local, state and federal police is a world away from what President Obama recalled as “a dark part of our history.” Today the system and philosophy of institutionalized racism identified by Dr. King no longer exists.

What causes young men such as Dylann Roof to erupt in homicidal rage, whatever their motivation, is a problem that defies explanation beyond the reality that evil still stalks humanity. It is no small solace that in committing such an act today, he stands alone.

I’m sure those nine dead black people and their families will be relieved to hear that.

All these acts of terrorism against black churches are coincidental. The mass incarceration of black people is coincidental, The killing of unarmed black teenagers is coincidental. There is no racism. It just so happens that black people are born criminals, act suspiciously and are, for some reason, often the targets of crazy people who aren’t motivated by the racism they see around them in the form of symbols like the confederate flag or the vile racist rhetoric that comes from right wing extremists in every form of media.

They managed to catch the kid who obviously wanted to be caught. Huzzah. Thank God racism is over and done with.

Now let’s get back to the real problem we face. The war on Christians. Ok????

Update II: And the hits just keep on coming. Rick Perry, ladies and gentlemen:

“This is the MO of this administration, any time there is an accident like this — the president is clear, he doesn’t like for Americans to have guns and so he uses every opportunity, this being another one, to basically go parrot that message,” Perry said.

Instead of talking about guns, Perry said, we should be talking about prescription drugs: “Also, I think there is a real issue to be talked about. It seems to me, again without having all the details about this, that these individuals have been medicated and there may be a real issue in this country from the standpoint of these drugs and how they’re used.”

He said that such drugs are responsible for high suicide and joblessness rates, adding that “there are a lot of issues underlying this that I think we as a country need to have a conversion about rather than just the knee-jerk reaction of saying, ‘If we can just take all the guns away, this won’t happen.’”

He added that while the shooting was “a crime of hate,” he didn’t know if it should be called a terrorist attack.

I just can’t …

Update III: Another GOP cretin weighs in:

Mike Huckabee spoke today to Todd Starnes of Fox News, who was agitated that the “despicable” President Obama “wants to go after the guns” following the shooting at an African American church in Charleston. Huckabee agreed, claiming he was “disappointed” that the president considered the shooting “a great opportunity for me to grandstand and jump up on the stump and talk about gun control.”

The GOP presidential candidate said that the only thing that could have stopped the shooting would have been an armed member of the church. Channeling the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, Huckabee said: “It sounds crass, but frankly the best way to stop a bad person with a gun is to have a good person with a weapon that is equal or superior to the one that he’s using.”

Starnes ended the brief interview by castigating Obama for “playing politics” and “scoring cheap political points on the graves of the innocent” when he should’ve remained silent.

Anyone remember this?

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