Month: July 2015

Yet another sign of respect for our Native American brothers and sisters

by digby

Sigh.

A “sneak law” attachment to a “must-pass” bill gives sacred Native American land to a foreign mining company. How did this happen?

Do you remember that “Citibank budget,” where a budget bill to avert an imminent government shutdown suddenly had in it a Citibank-written provision deregulating certain risky financial trades? If Congress voted against the budget, the government would shut down, so Citibank got its way? This is how “sneak laws” get through. Usually We the People don’t get a chance to learn about them in time to do something about it, and this was one example.

Another example of this happened in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015. On page 1,103 of the 1,648-page bill is a provision giving more than 2400 acres of land in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest to Resolution Copper, which is part of London-based Rio Tinto and Melbourn-based BHP Billiton, giant mining companies. This was done by Arizona Republican Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake and Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar.

The area is known as Oak Flat and is land that is sacred to the San Carlos Apache Tribe and Yavapai-Apache Nation. They compare it to the sacredness of Mt. Sinai in other religions. In 1886, the federal government removed the tribes and expropriated the land.

Sacred Land Given To A Foreign Corporation In A Sneak Law

America of course has a long and disgraceful history of stealing land from Native Americans – to say the least. But this is the first time that sacred Native American land has been stolen to give to a foreign corporation.

However, this land transfer is unusual even before you consider that the beneficiary is a foreign corporation. This land has been given special protection since at least 1955. Even President Richard Nixon protected it, which is saying something. Five times Arizona Republicans have tried and failed to give this land to this company. Only by sneaking it into this must-pass bill did they succeed.

A New York Times op-ed calls the Oak Flat Apache land grab “an impressive new low in congressional corruption” and points out that:

It belongs to the public, under the multiple-use mandate of the Forest Service, and has had special protections since 1955, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower decreed the area closed to mining — which, like cattle grazing, is otherwise common in national forests — because of its cultural and natural value. President Richard M. Nixon’s Interior Department in 1971 renewed this ban.

Yes, this is “an impressive new low in congressional corruption.”

More from Dave Johnson.

Well, it’s not as bad as the genocide our government committed against Native Americans in previous centuries so there’s that. Baby steps …

Republican Lite and lighter
by Tom Sullivan

Long before the craft brewing craze started in the U.S., a German student told me that in America they only made two kinds of beer: light and lighter. How times have changed.

Times have changed politically as well. In the wake of centrist Democrats’ recent trouncings, a resurgent liberal movement has emerged. “Liberal” is no longer a dirty word.

Yet in spite of the fact that Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders drew 11,000 at rally last week in Arizona, red-state Democrats do not seem to have gotten the memo. They have taken the wrong message from their trouncing in the 2014 elections. Politico quotes centrist Democrats fretting over the party’s blue shift:

“The national Democratic Party’s brand makes it challenging for Democrats in red states oftentimes and I hope that going forward, the leaders at the national level will be mindful of that and they will understand that they can’t govern the country without Democrats being able to win races in red states,” said Paul Davis, who narrowly failed to unseat Republican Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback last year.

“Davis and his ilk” (Politico’s words) failed to win in 2014 because their party went too far left rather than that centrist Democrats went too far milquetoast:

“It’s important that the Democratic party be ‘big-tent,’” said Vincent Sheheen, who lost last year to South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. “So if the result of that kind of rhetoric is an antagonism toward or a hostility toward the moderate elements of the Democratic Party then yeah, it’s big trouble and big problems.”

“We’ll never take back Congress unless we can win in the South. We’ll never take back governorships unless we can win in the South,” he added.

Delaware Gov. Jack Markell tells Politico, “I think what we need to do is we need to have a message that is compelling to Democrats, to independents, and even to some Republicans.”

I couldn’t agree more. Republican Lite ain’t it.

In North Carolina, former Sen. Kay Hagan snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2014 running for reelection on her Republican Lite record, dodging questions early in her campaign on her support for the president and Obamacare. Lightweight Thom Tillis was opposed by many in his Republican party, yet prevailed. In Georgia, Democrat Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), “prevaricated, kvetched, and weaved” regarding her support for Obamacare. I could go on.

“Where the hell is the Democratic party?” an exasperated Howard Dean asked in the aftermath. “You got to stand for something if you want to win.”

Centrist Democrats have reason to be nervous. The public isn’t buying what they’re selling. Given a choice between Republican and Republican Lite, they will choose the real thing. At least they know what they are getting.

Cute animal vids before there were vids

by digby

Via TIME:

Historical footage from the Associated Press and British Movietone, two of the world’s most prominent newsreel archives, is now available to watch on YouTube. The more than one million minutes of material, which dates back to 1895, will showcase historical moments in everything from sports to science. It will also showcase cute animals.

Baby penguins:

Have a nice week-end everybody …

Our serious problem with gun violence

by digby

There are many ways of defining what constitutes a mass shooting but it’s fair to say that the United States has a lot of them.

Vox did a recap of our very exceptional relationship to guns.

They also pointsout that we have much more gun violence than other developed nations

This chart, compiled using United Nations data collected by the Guardian’s Simon Rogers, shows that America far and away leads other developed countries when it comes to gun-related homicides:

Why?  Well, they speculate that it because we own so goddamned many guns

[T]he empirical research shows places with more guns have more homicides.

But quick, look over here: ISIS!!!

Somebody forgot to give Jeb! the Medicare memo for this decade

by digby

I wrote about Jeb!’s clumsy out-of-date comments about Medicare for Salon this morning:

It’s been a good week for economic reports. For example, we heard that the jobless claims for June were lower than they’ve been in 40 years. Take it from someone who remembers 1975 — it was a long time ago. The job market is finally looking up. And we also found out that Medicare is on stronger footing than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones wrote it up:

Ten years ago, Medicare was a runaway freight train. Spending was projected to increase indefinitely, rising to 13 percent of GDP by 2080. This year, spending is projected to slow down around 2040, and reaches only 6 percent of GDP by 2090.

Six percent! That’s half what we thought a mere decade ago. If that isn’t spectacular, I don’t know what is.

Drum points out that this is largely being driven by the fact that medical costs overall have slowed dramatically. This is due to a number of factors, but one of the most significant has to be the Affordable Care Act’s cuts to provider payments, which you will certainly recall had the Republicans whirling like tops with claims that President Obama was planning to turn the elderly into Soylent Green — or submit them to ghoulish “death panels” at the very least. It was one of the primary motivating factors that drove the white elderly Republican base to invade town hall meetings by the hundreds and storm the voting booths in November of 2010 to decimate the Democratic congressional majority.

[…]

So, what in the world is Jeb Bush up to? Has he been asleep for the past three election cycles? Did somebody forget to tell him that old white people are the GOP’s most loyal voters and the new scheme is to say you’re saving Medicare? He must not have gotten the memo because he’s just spent the last couple of days telling audiences that Medicare is on its last legs and will have to be killed in favor of some new program, which will probably be along the lines of Paul Ryan’s “shop for health care ’til you drop” voucher proposal.

Get a load of this commentary he made at a Koch Brothers sponsored Americans for Prosperity event on Wednesday:

“The left needs to join the conversation, but they haven’t. I mean, when [Rep. Paul Ryan] came up with, one of his proposals as it relates to Medicare, the first thing I saw was a TV ad of a guy that looked just like Paul Ryan … that was pushing an elderly person off the cliff in a wheelchair. That’s their response.

“And I think we need to be vigilant about this and persuade people that our, when your volunteers go door to door, and they talk to people, people understand this. They know, and I think a lot of people recognize that we need to make sure we fulfill the commitment to people that have already received the benefits, that are receiving the benefits. But that we need to figure out a way to phase out this program for others and move to a new system that allows them to have something – because they’re not going to have anything.”

That’s the kind of braindead doofus “policy” talk you might expect from Donald Trump, not one of the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination. Sure, he uses some weasel words about fulfilling the commitment to people “who’ve already received benefits, are receiving the benefits,” but he apparently didn’t get the other memo that says seniors don’t buy that line when Republicans say it about Social Security, and they aren’t going to buy it when they say it about Medicare.

There’s more at the link. I didn’t see this before I wrote it:

“We’re not going to have adequate coverage for our children or our grandchildren without Medicare. I paid into that for years and years just like all these other seniors here and now you want to take it away?” said the woman, who did not identify herself and left before the town hall concluded. “Why are you always attacking the seniors?”

“Well, I’m not,” Bush responded. “Here’s what I said: I said we’re going to have to reform our entitlement system. We have to.”

“It’s not an entitlement,” the woman shot back. “I earned that.”

“It’s an actuarially unsound healthcare system,” said Bush, who said something must be done before the system burdens future generations with $50 billion of debt. “Social Security is an underfunded retirement system; people have put money into it, for sure.

“The people that are receiving these benefits, I don’t think that we should touch that; but your children and grandchildren are not going to get the benefit of this that they believe they’re going to get or that you think they’re going to get, because the amount of money put in compared to the amount of money the system costs is wrong.”

They just never quit.

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The price we pay for freedom. To own guns. 

by digby

Remember this from a few days ago?

Deport them. pic.twitter.com/HdYQxuNftj

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) July 16, 2015

Weirdly, I haven’t heard anyone suggest that the family of the man who shot up a movie theatre last night should be deported. Or punished in any way.

It appears that he was a man with serious mental problems.  So was the Chattanooga shooter as it turns out. They don’t know what specifically motivated this 58 year old man to take up arms last night and killing people. The same with the Chattanooga shooter.  Either way, innocent people are equally dead.

But the reactions to this fellow in Louisiana seems to be calm acceptance that in a society awash in guns this is just something that’s bound to happen and there’s nothing we can do about it. The Chattanooga shooting brought out a flood of toxic xenophobia and calls for the government to throw away the constitution to “protect” us from future crimes like that.

The only real difference between the two crimes is the race and religion of the perpetrators. But the danger to the public is exactly the same:  a person gets a gun and shoots innocent people and (usually) goes out in a blaze of glory.

FBI chief James Comey is completely freaked out by “troubled souls” who are perpetrating these killings — but only the Muslim ones. All the other ones are just a sad price we pay for our freedom. To have lots and lots of guns.

Update: Dave Weigel has an interesting piece on the Lafayette shooter:

John Russell Houser, the man police say opened fire inside a Lafayette, La., movie theater on Thursday night, had boasted in an online profile that he made dozens of appearances on television talk shows.

The hosts of those shows said Friday that Houser over-stated his role, but they do remember him as an argument-starting guest who was angry about high taxes and the growing power of women.

“I had him on strictly because he was entertaining,” said Calvin Floyd, the former host of the talk show “Rise and Shine” on WLTZ NBC 38 in Columbus, Ga. “He was radical, and when you’re looking for a person on a live show, taking calls, that’s what you want.”

On a LinkedIn profile, Houser claimed to have “guest hosted” the show at least “60 times.” According to Floyd, who has since retired from the station, Houser’s role was limited to call-ins and occasional debates on “15 or 20 episodes,” starting with a call about a fight he was having with the city’s water department. Sometimes, Houser – “pretty much a radical Republican,” in Floyd’s view – would be pitted against a local Democrat to tear into the issues of the day.

“Whatever he wanted to talk about, it would generate calls,” said Floyd. “He was anti-abortion. The best I can recall, Rusty had an issue with feminine rights. He was opposed to women having a say in anything. You could talk with him a few minutes, and you would know he had a high IQ but there was a lot missing with him.”

Houser allegedly killed two people and wounded nine others who were watching the new comedy “Trainwreck,” a film written by and starring the feminist comedian Amy Schumer. But the calls and television appearances in Columbus started and ended more than a decade ago.

“He was sort of a gadfly type, a frequent caller to the show,” recalled Doug Kellet, the host from 1991 to 2001 of the Columbus, Ga., series TalkLine. “I don’t remember him as a guest as anything but a candidate for city council. He had lot of anti-tax issues, and apart from that campaign, he was one of the guys who’d show up to city meetings to complain. There were a lot of people going to city council to do that back then. And we had the show where you could really hammer local politicians.”

Well he wasn’t a Muslim. So there’s that.

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Boehner wants a circus

by digby

He wants a gory, bloody, spectacle during the election:

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is throwing cold water on several House Republicans’ efforts to immediately defund Planned Parenthood in the wake of the group’s undercover video controversy.

Boehner said Thursday that he will not yet commit to blocking funding for Planned Parenthood after an anti-abortion-rights group produced two videos that attempt to portray the group as illegally profiting from fetal tissue donation.

“Facts first,” Boehner said when asked twice about Planned Parenthood funding during his Thursday news conference.

Boehner’s remarks, which come several days after he ordered a congressional probe into the videos, put him at odds with the 80 House Republicans who have backed a new bill from Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) that would immediately block Planned Parenthood’s funding for one year while the government investigates. A similar bill has been introduced in the upper chamber by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.).

Black’s spokesman said Wednesday that her legislation had been received favorably by House leadership and hoped to see a vote “as soon as possible.”

Republicans have seized on recently released hidden camera footage that shows two Planned Parenthood officials detailing the use of fetal tissue after abortions. One video has been edited to show an official apparently haggling for prices over the fetal tissue with buyers from a medical research firm.

“I think they’re awful,” Boehner said about the videos. “That’s why the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Judiciary Committee are doing an investigation. I expect that we will have hearings. The more we learn, the more it will educate our decisions in the future,” he said.

Uh, huh. And the more they flog this issue the more his lurid hearings will stimulate an uproar among the anti-choice zealots and boost their turn-out.

One might suspect it would also result in a backlash among women who would be offended by a Planned Parenthood witch hunt, but I’m going to guess the Republicans think this is an overall winner for them. Watch Fox for a while. Their excitement is palpable.

Classified BS

by digby

The New York Times blasted out a headline last night saying that Clinton had been referred to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation into her handling of emails. It was completely unintelligible — I had no idea what she was accused of or why they thought she had committed a crime.

Guess what? According to CNN:

The account of the investigation changed overnight. The Times initially reported that the inspectors general sought a criminal inquiry into Clinton’s handling of possible classified material with her private email while working as secretary of state. The story now says the investigation would simply look at whether sensitive information was mishandled — but not necessarily by Clinton.

The request for the Justice Department investigation comes after a June 29 memo from the inspectors general that said Clinton’s private account held “hundreds of potentially classified emails,” The Times reported.

A Democratic presidential contender for 2016, Clinton has insisted that she never handled classified information on her private account.

“Contrary to the initial story, which has already been significantly revised, she followed appropriate practices in dealing with classified materials,” said Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill. “As has been reported on multiple occasions, any released emails deemed classified by the administration have been done so after the fact, and not at the time they were transmitted.”

The New York Times report said it was “not clear if any of the information in the emails was marked as classified by the State Department when Mrs. Clinton sent or received them.”

Don’t worry, though. They got their headline and the wingnuts are making sure it’s being circulated everywhere. I’m sure Trey Gowdy and company will reward them and continue to be forthcoming with any juicy tidbits that will guarantee a steady drip of character assassination. It’s nice to see some things never change.

Update: yup. Here’s Representative Elijah Cummings:

And the New York Times sits there like little baby birds with their beaks wide open waiting to swallow GOP pre-masticated propaganda and then vomit it up for their readers.

Update: Laura Clawson at DKos has more on this ridiculous story. Marcy Wheeler too. 

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Texas DA Told Family that Sandra Bland “Swallowed Or Smoked ‘Large Quantity Of Marijuana’ In Jail”

by Gaius Publius

Ok, this kind of seals it. And we really really need an independent autopsy. If this proves to be murder, everyone in the county who touched this case and perpetuated the cop cover-up need to be indicted, including the medical examiner who ruled suicide.

The news story first, then the reason I said what I said. Huff Post:

Sandra Bland Swallowed Or Smoked ‘Large Quantity Of Marijuana’ In Jail: DA

Sandra
Bland, the black woman found hanging dead in a Texas jail days after a
traffic stop, smoked or possibly swallowed a large amount of marijuana
while in custody, her family’s attorney reported the district attorney
as saying.

Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis made the
disclosure in a text message to attorney Cannon Lambert, who has called
the state’s autopsy on the Chicago-area woman defective, Lambert said.

“Looking at the autopsy results and toxicology, it
appears she swallowed a large quantity of marijuana or smoked it in the
jail,” Mathis said in a text message to Lambert that the attorney
provided to Reuters.

Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the text. Repeated calls to Mathis’ office were not returned. 

There aren’t many options, not many ways to analyze this. If it’s true (that her dead body was filled with
marijuana), it’s bad for the cops for being true. If it’s false, it’s bad for the
cops for saying it’s true. If she got the marijuana without the cops knowing, it’s (a)
not believable — an angry black woman in a white county jail gets dope? — and (b) their fault anyway if she did.

And
the final option, of course, is the one that’s frankly obvious. She may
well have been murdered, and this is as bad, as ham-fisted a cover-up as
you could imagine.

The story just blew up.

Cops Who Kill and the Crisis Management Profession

A side thought, and a speculation, but I’m betting this is true.

When Burger King, say, or Jack in the Box, or Ford Motor Company, kills its customers through neglect or “cost-benefit analysis” — and the public learns about it — the organization whose reputation faces ruin brings in a PR team specializing in “crisis management.” Crisis managers, good ones, cost a ton of money. It’s a real profession and a lucrative one. The job is to turn public perception around, to make the public return to thinking, “This is the corporation that loves us” from “This is the corporation that kills us.”

(All corporate advertising, by the way, sells corporations in general as loving and caring. Then some of it sells a product.)

It’s got to be obvious by now that the cop profession needs crisis management, so that when these “eruptions” (a Clinton-era term) occur, they can be dealt with.

So, a thought exercise: Let’s assume cops know they need this help (they’d have to be blind not to). Let’s also assume that they know it can’t be just on a county-by-county, or department-by-department basis. That’s too haphazard, it “reinvents the wheel” each time, and it’s also too pricy. There has to be “industry-wide” help so cops can can devise responses once, then leverage the results to departments in crisis as needed. Sure, departments will need a crisis management team, but there have to be templates and coordinated wisdom.

The goal — Cops need a way to re-delude (or re-educate) the public into thinking that “protect and serve” still means protecting and serving the public, not protecting and serving the cops and their needs. 

For example, here’s an instance of excellent crisis management–style turnaround. The Notre Dame women’s basketball team was photographed wearing Eric Garner “I can’t breathe” T-shirts at practice. The cops “met” with the team. The team showed public support for cops at the next game. (Write-up, with pictures, here.) Complete with salutes and hands over hearts. Female black athletes standing shoulder to shoulder with cops, affirming the “goodness” and patriotism of cops.

(By the way, I don’t blame the athletes. At a fairly right-wing university like Notre Dame, the pressure on them to deny that their protest had meaning must have been enormous.)

Very professionally done, on the part of the cops. Rebellion entirely shut down. Rebels made to bow and recant, black rebels at that. And quickly. So how was it managed? Did the South Bend PD hire a crisis manager and come up with the solution on their own, or did they look to some more centralized source for guidance?

In a more general way, looking forward, what would you do if you were a high-level cop strategist? How would you hire a crisis management team to do triage on all these stories? Where
would the money come from? Who would manage and oversee the project? How
would you nationalize and distribute the results on a county-by-county basis so that each department facing “crisis” got the benefit? 

I’m going to let you think about that. As you do, ask yourself, what are largest, most well-funded national cop organizations? I’ll bet you know. And yes, that’s my guess too, and that this speculation may already be happening.

GP

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Your daily death count
by Tom Sullivan

Wonder what time Lester’s Guns and Ammo opens? ‘Cause it’s time to run down and stock up again. Again.

The gunman who opened fire inside a packed movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, Thursday night, was John Russel Houser, police said at a news conference this morning.

Houser, 59, who killed himself, is among three people who died, police said. The other two were Mayci Breaux, 21, of Franklin, Louisiana, who died at the theater, and Jillian Johnson, 33, of Lafayette, who died at the hospital.

Nine others were injured, including one who was in critical condition, police said.

Gov. Bobby Jindal praised two New Iberia teachers as heroes. One leaped over the other to shield her and pull a fire alarm:

“Her friend literally jumped over her, and in her account actually saved her life,” Jindal said during a press conference. “If she hadn’t done that … that bullet, she believed it would have hit her in the head.

“Even though she was shot in the leg, she had the presence of mind to pull the fire alarm to help save other lives.”

So there’s a bright side. Sure, more people are dead and traumatized this week. After others were dead and traumatized last week — the same day Colorado convicted another guy for killing 12 and wounding 70 at another movie theater two years ago. But, you know, heroes.

At least I know I’m free

We may be slow on the uptake, but Americans have finally learned to respond appropriately to the ongoing gun-rampage carnage. We set up GoFundMe accounts for survivors. Private charity is an appropriate response to gun violence because government action is tyranny. And we buy even more guns. That goes without saying.

So for many of our neighbors, it will be off to Lester’s once again for another backup weapon, more magazines, ammo, and maybe one of those new laser sights. Because soon the only way they’ll feel safe going outdoors is wearing a web harness with magazine pouches and grenades hanging off it.

If needing an arsenal to defend against neighbors and your government is your idea of freedom, you don’t need weapons. You need medication.