When people who are supposed to protect someone’s privacy fail, what should their responsibility be following the failure? How do you make “someone whole,” as they say in the insurance biz, following a privacy breach?
What are the valid reasons someone’s privacy is violated? National Security? Public safety? Potential violence? Donating to the wrong cause? Who gets permission? Who oversees this?
“I don’t care if the government listens to me, I don’t have anything to hide. If you don’t have anything to hide, what are you worried about?”
— US citizen comment I read in response to Snowden revelations
Are there standards and regulations that organizations should meet? Who enforces them? What are the penalties if they don’t?
If they don’t follow the standards should there be additional sanctions? Who decides?
“JPMorgan Chase Hacking Affects 76 Million Households”
Announcement of breach delayed months, only revealed due to SEC filing–Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Matthew Goldstein and Nicole Perlroth
What are the requirements for reporting to people when private information is revealed? Who sets these requirements and who enforces them? Do the agencies suffer from regulatory capture? Do they have a budget or was it slashed so “the market” can decide?
Yesterday on Virtually Speaking Jay Ackroyd and I talked about cybersecurity, cyberterrorism and end-to-end encryption. I touched on some of these questions, but I think the Ashley Madison breach might get more people to pay attention to this issue. Here are for two reasons why, plus an attitude to notice.
1) Salacious! Schadenfreude!
2) Famous people having sex.
Moral superiority, (“It serves them right, those cheating bastards!”)
The news media will cover all the juicy details because it’s fun, but, like some 1st Amendment fights, privacy protecting should extend to unsavory characters, such as lying cheaters, who DO have something to hide.
There are criteria on privacy that need be discussed. It’s easier to say some people don’t deserve it, especially when it’s an activity you don’t approve of. But think about what activities that happen between consenting adults in the bedroom that recently became approved of in many states.
My favorite response to the US Citizen comment is from Glenn Greenwald following the Snowden revelations:
@kill_brian Can I put a video camera in your bedroom and bathroom and will you give me the passwords to your email accounts?
Jay and I discussed the massive Office of Personal Management breach quite a bit but not much about privacy. Part of that was because of a question Jay poised:
‘What will it take for people to take this computer security and cyberterrorism seriously?”
My first response was, “An effective attack on the power grid by a non-state actor in which important people die.”
I quoted from Shane Harris’ book @War, (page 52-53) What most people don’t know is that our power grid has been hit twice (that we know of) in 2003 and 2008. But because the entity that appear to be behind it was a State Actor (China) the cases were covered up.
If people die, and those attacks get pointed to ISIS as the entity behind it, that would give certain groups a “Cyber 9/11!” power that they want. But it has to be pointed at a group or individuals that aren’t a huge trading partner.
Today I realized that my answer was incomplete. There needs to be multiple attacks on the right kind of infrastructures, in the right regions, and from the right sources. So for example, power grids, in media dense areas. There needs to be TV visuals. Innocent and powerful people or children need to be hurt. The source needs to be an individual or an entity without state backing
Also, the reasons need to be the right ones. As we might be seeing in the Ashly Madison case WHY someone starts an attack is important. It’s NOT always about the money. Sometimes it’s revenge. Other times scores to settle. “Senseless” reasons, like the kind that does not pay off in cash are harder for the media to understand. It’s all about the Leverage.
The other big issue I mention on the show is leverage. If you are an entity that has personal information on government employees and their relatives from one hack and you also have information on their financial status from another hack, together you have a perfect tool kit for a Spymaster.
Spymasters don’t sell their info on the open market. They save it. And use it when they need something bigger to happen, like a “Trade” deal.
Maybe I’m like Richard Clarke running around with my hair on fire, telling people to do something on this issue and they can’t see the fire.
Vulcans love to be right on things and have nobody listen to them. Just like dirty hippies loved to be right about the war in Iraq and have nobody listen to them then or now.
As Jay pointed out there ARE things that can be done, both personally, corporately and federally. But the policies of “small government” and weak regulation that conservatives always push is harming our economy and jeopardizing people’s lives.
But I guess they need to wait until a cyber attack or computer breach leads to physical deaths to do some deeper investigations into failures and make changes to secure our systems and people’s private data.
I don’t want to assume that mostly conservatives are on the Ashley Madison list, it’s none of my business if they aren’t breaking the law with consenting adults. But if they dodge a bullet this time, maybe they will consider the importance of privacy for everyone. And do it soon before more lives are ruined, after all, as the people at Ashley Madison say, life is short.
Eric Boehlert looks at the odd Clinton pile-ons that are happening with the early presidential polling. He notes that while they make a huge story over her approval ratings and cast them in apocalyptic terms, they don’t mention that all the Republicans’ approval ratings have also fallen. And then there’s this, via Smirking Chimp:
There’s an entrenched pattern of media polls echoing Republican talking points about Clinton and her honesty.
Note this from Fox News:
But here’s the possible trouble for Clinton in the general election: 70 percent of voters overall say that a candidate who is sometimes less than honest is a “deal breaker” for their vote — and a 58-percent majority believes Clinton’s natural instincts lean more toward “hiding the truth” than “telling the truth” (33 percent).
What is odd is that Fox never asked voters about Bush’s trustworthiness, or any other Republican candidate’s trustworthiness. Fox only asked about Clinton.
The same was true of a poll released in June by CNN: “A growing number of people say she is not honest and trustworthy.” How did Clinton’s “trust” score compare with Bush’s? We don’t know because CNN didn’t ask if voters trust Bush.
And yes, the latest AP poll is guilty of the same imbalance — it asks if Clinton is “honest,” types up the results as bad news for the Democrat, but doesn’t pose that query about Bush, or any of the Republican candidates.
Why the persistent double standard?
A question for the ages. Boehlert refers to Nate Silver’s recent analysis about the Democratic race who put it starkly:
California Drought, the “Bigger Water Crisis” & the Consumer Economy
by Gaius Publius
Current drought status in the U.S. Note the color-coded legend in the lower-right portion of the graphic (source; click to enlarge)
I started to write a piece about a nice BillMoyers.com write-up of a good set of feature (and media-interactive) reports at ProPublica. The BillMoyers.com write-up is this:
California’s Drought Is Part of a Much Bigger Water Crisis. Here’s What You Need to Know.
It has an easy-to-follow question-and-answer format. The underlying ProPublica report is this:
Killing the Colorado
Both are worth your reading. Note that ProPublica report is actually a series of reports and interactive media explorations. Also, that the Moyers piece is also the next-to-last report in the ProPublica series. (Tom Sullivan covered the ProPublica piece as well, in this post.)
The Moyers-ProPublica write-up makes a nice set of points, many of which are bulleted below, and many of which you know. Where the piece falls short is what this adds up to. Some of the details:
■ California is in a severe multi-year drought:
Most of California is experiencing “extreme to exceptional drought,” and the crisis has now entered its fourth year. In June, signaling how serious the current situation is, state officials announced the first cutback to farmers’ water rights since 1977, and ordered cities and towns to cut water use by as much as 36 percent. Those who don’t comply with the cuts will face fines, but some farmers are already ignoring the new rules, or challenging them in court.
The drought shows no sign of letting up any time soon, and the state’s agricultural industry is suffering. A recent study by UC Davis researchers projected that the drought would cost California’s economy $2.7 billion in 2015 alone. …
And a little bit of rain won’t help. NOAA scientists say it could take several years of average or above-average rainfall before California’s water supply can return to anything close to normal.
■ It will take a lot of rain to make things “normal” again: “A half-decade of torrential rains might bail California out of its
crisis…”
■ But the problem has huge structural components:
[T]he larger West’s problems are more structural and systemic. “Killing the Colorado” has shown that people are entitled to more water from the Colorado than has flowed through it, on average, over the last 110 years. Meanwhile much of the water is lost, overused or wasted, stressing both the Colorado system, and trickling down to California, which depends on the Colorado for a big chunk of its own supply. Explosive urban growth matched with the steady planting of water-thirsty crops – which use the majority of the water – don’t help. Arcane laws actually encourage farmers to take even more water from the Colorado River and from California’s rivers than they actually need, and federal subsidies encourage farmers to plant some of the crops that use the most water. And, as ProPublica has reported, it seems that “the engineering that made settling the West possible may have reached the bounds of its potential” — meaning that even the big dams and canals we built to ferry all this water may now be causing more harm than good.
■ According to the government agency NOAA, the drought is not the fault of global warming:
While there are mixed views on whether climate change can be blamed for California’s drought, a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report found climate change was not the cause. Global warming has caused excessive heat that may have worsened the drought’s effects, but it isn’t necessarily to blame for the lack of rain. It’s true that recent years have yielded much less rain and snow than previous times in history, the NOAA report explains, but that’s just a result of “natural variance” and not necessarily because of man-made pollution. But in both California and the larger Colorado River basin, mismanagement of the water supply has left the West more vulnerable to both short and long-term changes in climate.
■ There are levels of “water rights,” and depending on who you are, you have a higher or lower level of right to the water. The highest level of water rights are called “senior rights.”
But the underlying rule of water in the West is that the first people to show up and claim it were the first people to get it, and everyone who came after took a place further back in line. Called “prior appropriation,” this remains the dominant thread in Western water issues, more than 100 years later.
For an example of the use of the term “senior rights,” note this from the Wikipedia page on the Colorado River (my emphasis everywhere):
Rapid development and economic growth further complicate the issue of a secure water supply, particularly in the case of California’s senior water rights over those of Nevada and Arizona: in case of a reduction in water supply, Nevada and Arizona would have to endure severe cuts before any reduction in the California allocation, which is also larger than the other two combined.
As another example, the water rights of many farmers are “senior” to the rights of many urban entities.
I’d like to comment on the third, fourth and fifth bullets above. Then I’ll add this up.
The Structural Components to the California Drought
Before I deal with the climate change / global warming aspect, I’d like to draw your attention to the other structural components — yes, I disagree with NOAA — which are indeed real. Let’s start with the river itself. The Wikipedia page dealing with the Colorado has a lot of great information in it. For our purposes, I suggest starting with this section, on Engineering and Development.
The Colorado River watershed. Note that it flows into Mexico, which also has rights to the water (source; click to enlarge).
In 1922, water from the Colorado was allocated by agreement. A later agreement added Mexico. A midway point was chosen (Lee’s Ferry) and water measurements were taken. Those above Lee’s Ferry were allocated half of what was calculated as the flow according to the measurement. Those below Lee’s Ferry were allocated the other half.
In 1922, six U.S. states in the Colorado River basin signed the Colorado River Compact, which divided half of the river’s flow to both the Upper Basin (the drainage area above Lee’s Ferry, comprising parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming and a small portion of Arizona) and the Lower Basin (Arizona, California, Nevada, and parts of New Mexico and Utah). Each was given rights to 7.5 million acre feet (9.3 km3) of water per year, a figure believed to represent half of the river’s minimum flow at Lee’s Ferry. This was followed by a U.S.–Mexico treaty in 1944, allocating 1.5 million acre feet (1.9 km3) of Colorado River water to the latter country per annum. Arizona refused to ratify the Colorado River Compact in 1922 because it feared that California would take too much of the lower basin allotment; in 1944 a compromise was reached in which Arizona would get a firm allocation of 2.8 million acre feet (3.5 km3), but only if California’s 4.4-million-acre-foot (5.4 km3) allocation was prioritized during drought years. These and nine other decisions, compacts, federal acts and agreements made between 1922 and 1973 form what is now known as the Law of the River.
The sum of the water rights by state are expressed in the table next to the paragraph that starts “The Lower Basin states also sought”. Note that these are absolute volume numbers, expressed in “million acre-feet” of water. The problem is that the measurement was taken during a very wet set of years:
When the Colorado River Compact was drafted in the 1920s, it was based on barely 30 years of streamflow records that suggested an average annual flow of 17.5 million acre feet (21.6 km3) past Lee’s Ferry. Modern studies of tree rings revealed that those three decades were probably the wettest in the past 500 to 1,200 years and that the natural long-term annual flow past Lee’s Ferry is probably closer to 13.5 million acre feet (16.7 km3), as compared to the natural flow at the mouth of 16.3 million acre feet (20.1 km3). This has resulted in more water being allocated to river users than actually flows through the Colorado. Droughts have exacerbated the issue of water over-allocation, including one in the 1950s, which saw several consecutive years of notably low water and has often been used in planning for “a worst-case scenario”.
Bottom line: Given the fact of increasing climate change, there will never be as much water in the Colorado River watershed as there was in 1922.
Other structural elements to the drought problem include:
Urban growth in California and the Southwest generally has been strong.
“Use it or lose it” water laws encourage farmers to overwater their fields.
The U.S. government subsidizes the planting of very “thirsty” crops.
California farmers have “senior water rights” and use much more than half of the water from the watershed.
All of these elements are discussed in the ProPublica report. There is a terrific set of info-graphics here with easy to scan data. Click the “See more” links for interesting added information.
Taking Issue with NOAA on the “Not Global Warming” Explanation
I’ll keep this brief. The NOAA analysis that global warming isn’t “the cause” is written up in this Mother Jones article:
Climate scientists have warned for years that rising greenhouse gas concentrations will lead to more frequent and severe droughts in many parts of the world. Although it’s generally very difficult to attribute any one weather event to the broader global warming trend, over the last couple of years a body of research has emerged to assess the link between man-made climate change and the current California drought. There are signs that rising temperatures (so far, 2014 is the hottest year on record both for California and globally) and long-term declines in soil moisture, both linked to greenhouse gas emissions, may have made the impact of the drought worse.
But according to new research by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California’s drought was primarily produced by a lack of precipitation driven by natural atmospheric cycles that are unrelated to man-made climate change. In other words, climate change may have worsened the impacts of the drought, but it isn’t the underlying cause.
Even Mother Jones, in the first paragraph, does a yes-but on that analysis. Much of what NOAA says in its report is correct. But note this (Mother Jones again; my emphasis):
Over the last three years, Seager said, unpredictable atmospheric circulation patterns, combined with La Niña, formed high-pressure systems in winter over the West Coast, blocking storms from the Pacific that would have brought rain to California. The result has been the second-lowest three-year winter precipitation total since record-keeping began in 1895. But that pattern doesn’t match what models predict as an outcome of climate change, said Seager. In fact, the study’s models indicate that as global warming proceeds, winter precipitation in California is actually predicted to increase, thanks to an increased likelihood of low-pressure systems that allow winter storms to pass from the ocean to the mainland.
Maybe. Or maybe the models could be wrong, less sophisticated than they need to be, as all of these IPCC models were in predicting collapse of Arctic ice:
Collapse of Arctic sea ice extent. The blue area shows the range of data predicted by 13 IPCC models. The black line shows the mean of the model predictions. The red line shows observations through 2009. Data for 2012 fell below the 2009 mark (source; click to enlarge).
With climate, things are never as good as cautious people say they are. Scientists are inherently cautious by nature, and climate scientists are a battered bunch, so they tend toward extra caution. Common sense says climate, dryness of the entire Southwest via heat and lack of rainfall, is a consequence of global warming.
So me, I go with common sense. The drought in the American Southwest is a confluence of bad things, one of which is climate change, global warming — and that’s the one that won’t go away, that will constantly tighten the screw, until we deal with it directly. There will be upticks in rain and downticks in heat. But the trend? I think you’d have to be prepared to eat your words if you say the ravages of climate change weren’t a deciding factor going forward.
Which leads to our final point…
Those “Senior Water Rights” Are the Tip of the Social Contract War
Consider — the population of the American Southwest, not just California, continues to grow. Water continues to be less and less available. Competing interests — some very very wealthy, like the big farmers and the big oil companies doing the fracking — are in a classic neo-liberal struggle for resources (and the source of their wealth) with ordinary people, like the urban dwellers of Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas.
Urban people need water to live, and by and large, they’re willing to share the sacrifice with others in the state. The entitled wealthy, however, the major corporations, the mega-rich farmers, some of which are hedge funds, by and large aren’t.
First, anecdotally, from the Moyers-ProPublica article:
Well, if you believe Steve Yuhas, a resident of affluent Rancho Santa Fe, California, “we’re not all equal when it comes to water.” (Yuhas made the unfortunate mistake of complaining on social media that he and his neighbors deserve more water because they pay more property taxes, and “should not be forced to golf on brown lawns,” and was pilloried by readers of the Washington Post article that drew attention to his comments.)
The “shouldn’t have to golf on brown lawns” comment says it all. Less anecdotally:
California Water Districts Just Sued the State Over Cuts to Farmers
Drama on the California drought front: On Friday, a group of water districts sued the State Water Resources Control Board in response to an order prohibiting some holders of senior water rights from pumping out of some lakes and rivers.
“This is our water,” said Steve Knell, general manager of Oakdale Irrigation District, to KQED’s Lauren Sommer. “We believe firmly in that fact and we are very vested in protecting that right.”
Water allotments in the Golden State are based on a byzantine system of water rights that prioritizes senior water rights holders, defined as individuals, companies, and water districts that laid claim to the water before 1914. Typically, those with the oldest permits are the first to get water and the last to see it curtailed.
But on June 12, the state ordered the 114 senior water rights holders with permits dating back to 1903 to stop pumping water from the San Joaquin and Sacramento watersheds, a normally fertile area encompassing most of northern California. “There are some that have no alternative supplies and will have to stop irrigating crops,” admitted Tom Howard, executive director of the State Water Resources Control Board. “There are others that have stored water or have wells that they can fall back on. It’s going to be a different story for each one and a struggle for all of them.” This is the first time since 1977 that the state has enacted curtailments on senior holders.
In response, an umbrella group called the San Joaquin Tributaries Authority (which includes the Oakdale Irrigation District) has sued the state.
It’s all on display in that story, the song of the very very rich — “I, me, me, mine.” The social war has started.
The Bottom Lines, and The Bottom Line
I have bottom lines for you, and a bottom line below that. This ProPublica piece has a modest set of solutions to a problem the authors think in time might go away, maybe. These include:
Farmers could be more efficient, plant less water-hogging crops.
Consumers could eat less meat (consider the water that’s poured into feed).
Public officials could reconsider “use it or lose it” water laws.
The government could create a “competitive water market.”
Government at all levels could invest in “conservation technologies.”
Keep your eye on that “competitive water market.” It’s the preferred solution of people with most of the money. It’s also a trap, a way to delay real solutions.
If you think climate change will constantly turn the screw until the social contract breaks in the Southwest, do you see these as actual solutions, as more than just good things to do? I don’t. They are good things, but as “solutions” they are very modest.
Here’s what’s more likely to happen, and more likely to work. These are the “bottom lines” mentioned above:
▪ The social contract will break in California and the rest of the Southwest (and don’t forget Mexico, which also has water rights from the Colorado and a reason to contest them). This will occur even if the fastest, man-on-the-moon–style conversion to renewables is attempted starting tomorrow.
This means, the very very rich will take the best for themselves and leave the rest of us to marinate in the consequences — to hang, in other words. (For a French-Saudi example of that, read this. Typical “the rich are always entitled” behavior.) This means war between the industries, regions, classes. The rich didn’t get where they are, don’t stay where they are, by surrender.
▪ Government will have to decide between the wealthy and the citizenry. How do you expect that to go?
▪ Government dithering and the increase in social conflict will delay real solutions until a wake-up moment. Then the real market will kick in — the market for agricultural land and the market for urban property. Both will start to decline in absolute value. If there’s a mass awareness moment when all of a sudden people in and out of the Southwest “get it,” those markets will collapse. Hedge funds will sell their interests in California agriculture as bad investments; urban populations will level, then shrink; the fountains in Las Vagas and the golf courses in Scottsdale will go brown and dry, collapsing those populations and economies as well.
Ask yourself — If you were thirty with a small family, would you move to Phoenix or Los Angeles County if the “no water” writing were on the wall and the population declining? Answer: Only if you had to, because land and housing would be suddenly affordable.
All of which means that the American Southwest has most likely passed a tipping point — over the cliff, but with a long way to the bottom to go. I wish the ProPublica piece, for all its virtues, had at least considered that set of outcomes. After all, their title is pretty drastic — “Killing the Colorado.”
Now the real bottom line.
If We Try to Have Both “Growth” and Climate Solutions, We’ll Have Neither
The real bottom line — the most far-reaching — is philosophical, but it gets to the heart of a huge debate in the climate war. Which means I’m going to have to expand on this point later. In basic terms, though, it’s this.
The meme of the wealthy is that (a) climate proposals are a threat to “growth” — by which they mean literally GDP, but also by implication they mean “your big-screen, smart-phone lifestyle.” And (b) losing “growth” is a line no consumer will want to cross; not the rich, not the poor, no one. This means that the wealthy think they have a trump card, and you see it played, for example, in those Exxon and oil industry commercials hosted by “Lying Pantsuit Lady” — as in, “Like that television you’re watching? Know where its energy comes from? Yep, oil is right there in the mix.”
Can you hear the threat? “Fix the climate and you’ll have to sacrifice your lifestyle. Can’t have that … there’s a big game on this weekend.”
In response, climate solution advocates counter with an argument that says, in effect, “But wait … we’ve got a way to keep ‘growth’ and also fix the climate problem.”
To which I say, “Not a good answer” (if you click, start at 4:25 for the quote). Accepting the anti-climate-solution assumption means offering only a subset of solutions available. What do I mean by that? Saying “we can have (consumer) growth and a climate solution” is only true … if it’s actually true. What if it’s not true at all? Then what’s the solution on offer? (Hint: There is none.)
Here’s what’s more likely, using the example of the case we’ve been examining, the case of California and the American Southwest:
▪ Any attempt to have (consumer) “growth” and a climate solution means we’ll have neither. Put differently, all fast, effective climate solutions will involve some sacrifice of the consumer economy. The only way to guarantee “growth” in the consumer economy is to have a slow and ineffective solution — until it all comes apart.
Note that the “consumer economy” is not the whole economy, meaning aggregate GDP. Did the World War II economy involve “growth” in a consumer goods sense? Obviously not, yet we survived and even thrived. The country cleared all the debris of the Great Depression in one swoop. All it took was willingness to sacrifice, something the American people were happy to do, given the alternative.
So too with the climate solutions war. To win that will take sacrifice. Something people will be willing to do once climate awareness reaches critical mass. We just have to stop listening to people who sing this song:
Thank you, George Harrison.
They don’t have our interests at heart in any case.
Sandra Bland’s name featured prominently in the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) shutdown of the Netroots-Phoenix town hall on Saturday. Like the other black women mentioned, Bland died in police custody, in her case just a week earlier. Why? And how? The Los Angeles Times (emphasis mine):
According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, Bland failed to signal that she was changing lanes so a trooper pulled her over. The trooper was going to give her a written warning but Bland became argumentative and uncooperative, officials say.
Trooper Erik Burse, a department spokesman, said last week that Bland was going to be left off with a warning for a minor traffic violation, but was charged with assault on a public servant after she kicked the officer.
The trooper who stopped Bland has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation by the FBI and Texas Rangers for allegedly violating the department’s “courtesy policy.”
The stop escalated over a cigarette, according to the family’s lawyer, Cannon Lambert:
Lambert, citing what he had seen on the dashcam video, said the trooper then asked Bland to put out her cigarette.
Bland, who seemed irritated at having been pulled over in the first place, responded: ‘Why do I have to put out a cigarette when I’m in my own car?'” Lambert said. “And that seemed to irritate him to the point where he said, ‘Get out of the car.'”
Bland, a civil rights advocate who had moved to the Houston area from suburban Chicago for a new job at Prairie View A&M University, “wasn’t comfortable getting out of the car,” Lambert said. So the trooper “looked to force her to get out of the car by way of opening the door and started demanding that she do,” Lambert said.
You don’t even need me to finish this story. Sandra Bland exits the car, yadda yadda yadda, she dies in a Texas jail cell three days later.* The local medical examiner rules Bland’s death a suicide.
However, the Houston Chronicle reported late Monday:
HEMPSTEAD – With new questions being raised into the arrest and death of Sandra Bland, Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis said Monday that his office has not determined a cause of death for the woman who was found hanging in a cell in the Waller County Jail. Her death was initially ruled a suicide by medical examiners.
“This is being treated like a murder investigation,” Mathis said at a news conference late in the afternoon, explaining that he has requested scientific testing from items at the jail, including touch DNA evidence on the plastic trash bag that officials earlier said Bland used to kill herself.
The thing I cannot get out of my head is that this professional woman is dead after failing to signal a lane change [while black]. Who hasn’t done that? But for African Americans, everyday acts from walking to shopping to changing lanes [while black] has become a sick version of that stupid game we play with fortune cookies. Only this game can be deadly.
* We “yadda-yadda” African Americans dying in police custody. Ending both was the point of the #BLM action on Saturday.
I don’t think the political establishment understands just how extreme the right wing is. Or how they normalized that level of extremism.
Here’s a little quote you might remember from 2002:
Has Tom Daschle lost a couple of screws?
Did the normally mild-mannered senator accuse Rush Limbaugh of inciting violence?
He came pretty darn close. There were cameras there. You can watch the replay.
We can understand that Daschle is down, just having lost his majority leader’s job and absorbed plenty of blame for this month’s Democratic debacle.
What we can’t understand is how the South Dakotan can suggest that a mainstream conservative with a huge radio following is somehow whipping up wackos to threaten Daschle and his family.
Has the senator listened to Rush lately? Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He’s so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage.
That was Howard Kurtz when he was writing for the Washington Post.
This was what Limbaugh said that had Daschle so up in arms.
Limbaugh: You seek political advantage with the nation at war. There is no greater testament to the depths to which the Democratic Party and liberalism have fallen. You now position yourself, Senator Daschle, to exploit future terrorist attacks for political gain. You are worse, sir, than the ambulance-chasing tort lawyers that make up your chief contributors.
You, sir, are a disgrace. You are a disgrace to patriotism, you are a disgrace to this country, you are a disgrace to the Senate, and you ought to be a disgrace to the Democratic Party but sadly you’re probably a hero among some of them today…
Way to demoralize the troops, Senator! What more do you want to do to destroy this country than what you’ve already tried? [pounding table] It is unconscionable what this man has done! This stuff gets broadcast around the world, Senator.
What do you want your nickname to be? Hanoi Tom? Tokyo Tom? You name it, you can have it apparently. You sit there and pontificate on the fact that we’re not winning the war on terrorism when you and your party have done nothing but try to sabotage it, which you are continuing to do.
This little speech of yours yesterday, and this appearance of yours on television last night, let’s call it what it is. It’s nothing more than an attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism for your own personal and your party’s political gain. This is cheap. And it’s beneath even you. And that’s pretty low.
That’s how we got to Donald Trump.
Update:Rush on Trump today. He’s standing by him all the way because people are always mean to Republicans and they never defend themselves. He admires Trump’s fortitude:
Trump is not following the rules that targets are supposed to follow. Targets are supposed to immediately grovel, apologize, say something like, “You know, it wasn’t me. That wasn’t me. That’s not the real me. That’s not who I am. And I forever apologize. I have the utmost respect for Senator McCain, and I really regret saying it, and I don’t know that I can go on.”
And then everybody cheers that the target has seen the light and is now going to shrink away from public life, never to ever be heard from or seen from again. And that usually means another Republican has been taken out. And again, guiding all of this is the arrogant presumption that the majority American people are as outraged as all these media types are. So we shall see. Not only is Trump not following the rules, he’s doubling down on the criticism.
The American people haven’t seen something like this in a long time. I’m serious. They have not seen an embattled public figure stand up for himself, double down, and tell everybody to go to hell. What they’ve seen is an embattled public figure apologize and shrink away.
Greg Sargent notes an emerging feud between Bush and Walker:
The Weekly Standard reports that Bush said this to a voter in Nevada:
“One thing that I won’t do is just say, as a candidate, ‘I’m going to tear up the agreement on the first day.’ That’s great, that sounds great but maybe you ought to check in with your allies first, maybe you ought to appoint a secretary of state, maybe secretary of defense, you might want to have your team in place, before you take an act like that.”
That was a shot at [Scott] Walker, who has said he would undo an Iran deal on Day One of his presidency, regardless of what our allies have to say about it. Bush subsequently stood by his remarks, noting that on Day One, he would not yet have had the intelligence briefings required to make an informed decision. Bush added: “If you’re running for president, you know, I think it’s important to be mature and thoughtful about this.”
The Weekly Standard report continues thusly:
At a press conference after his appearance at the Family Leader Summit here Saturday, Walker was asked if he thinks Bush is wrong. “He may have his opinion. I believe that a president shouldn’t wait to act until they put a cabinet together or an extended period of time,” Walker said.
“I believe they should be prepared to act on the very first day they take office. It’s very possible – God forbid, but it’s very possible – that the next president could be called to take aggressive actions, including military action, on the first day in office. And I don’t want a president who is not prepared to act on day one. So, as far as me, as far as my position, I’m going to be prepared to be president on day one.”
As Sargent explains, this is really not a huge difference in approach. Bush is just trying to establish himself as the mature, tested leader in contrast to Walker the callow, inexperienced rube.
Jeb’s suggestion that he will approach the situation based on the conditions of the moment (that’s crazy talk!!!) suggests an awareness of something that Walker may or may not share: Undoing the deal in 2017 could have all sorts of unpleasant consequences that haven’t been sufficiently gamed out yet. As one expert put it recently, it could undermine our relationships with allies in ways that could have “a lot of ripple effects around wherever the U.S. and Europe have security cooperation.”
What’s more, vowing to undo the agreement would put pressure on the GOP nominee to articulate his alternative. As Axelrod argues, if Democrats can successfully make the case that the only alternative to the Iran deal is likely to be war, then supporting the agreement may well end up being the majority position in this country. (A new Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that 56 percent of Americans support the deal, though a large majority is skeptical that it will work, suggesting Americans want to give it a try even if success is far from assured.)
I think they both basically want war with Iran. Jeb hasn’t said whether he’d use his “political capital” to launch one, but if he doesn’t he’d be the first president Bush not to. They launched one in each of the last two decades. It’s a family tradition. Walker is so muddled he doesn’t know what he wants or what he’s saying. But he’s the one bringing up military action so it’s fair to assume he’ll eagerly muster the troops as soon as possible.
It’s hard to know if public support for the deal will hold up or if that support means all that much for its success. From what I can tell this is all about the dynamic in DC, mostly among the Democrats who are being pressured by lobbyists and big donors to vote against it. But this is a presidential election and I have little doubt that the Republicans will be beating the war drum all the way along. And if they win, regardless of whether it’s mature Jeb! or teeny-bopper Scott, it seems to me that it’s highly unlikely that this deal will stick regardless of what the people say. It’s what they do.
What happens if this American Muslim Chattanooga shooter turns out to just be one of the usual screwed up young American males who decide they need to commit suicide by mass killing?
Four days after the shooting, the FBI has not found any connection to overseas terrorist groups, but Mohammod Abdulazeez’s diary says that as far back as 2013, he wrote about having suicidal thoughts and “becoming a martyr” after losing his job due to his drug use, both prescription and non-prescription drugs, the family representative said.
In a downward spiral, Abdulazeez would abuse sleeping pills, opioids, painkillers and marijuana, along with alcohol, the representative said.
Most recently, the 24-year-old was having problems dealing with a 12 hour overnight shift, and had to take sleeping pills, according to the representative. The young man was also thousands of dollars in debt and considering filing for bankruptcy.
Three months before the shooting, Abdulazeez was arrested on April 20 — a day celebrated annually by marijuana users — and charged with drunk driving. The arresting officer noted a smell of marijuana in the car.
I didn’t know that ISIS was a big pothead organization. It surprises me, frankly.
It’s unknown if this kid was in contact with ISIS or inspired by jihad or whatever. But it sounds as though it doesn’t really matter. He wasn’t any different than all these other young shooters with mental and emotional problems and easy access to guns.
They don’t mind the NSA tracking everybody’s internet activity and phone calls, but this is a bridge too far:
A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”
Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.
This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.
Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.
So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.
They get apoplectic over the gathering of gun statistics too. No problem rounding up Muslims though.
“Max Cleland should stop allowing Democrats to portray him as a war hero who lost his limbs taking enemy fire on the battlefields of Vietnam,” she writes, claiming that he “lost three limbs in an accident during a routine non-combat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix. In fact, Cleland could have dropped a grenade on his foot as a National Guardsman …. Luckily for Cleland’s political career and current pomposity about Bush, he happened to do it while in Vietnam.”
Cleland won the silver star for the battle of Khe Sanh.
Funny, I don’t remember any Republicans taking either Chambliss or Coulter to task for that one. Indeed, as Conason’s piece reminds us, denigrating war heroes in the most malignant terms is a Republican specialty. It was only a decade ago that they were profiting smartly by doing it. The Cleland attacks, you’ll recall, didn’t just come from the likes of Coulter — it came from Saxby Chambliss, his GOP rival. He was a man who, like Donald Trump, successfully managed to avoid going to Viet Nam.
The former Senator Chambliss most recently made news by proclaiming that Edward Snowden should be “hung from the public square.” He’s quite the tough guy.
This attack on Planned Parenthood is just the latest skirmish in the long abortion-rights war in this country. And it appears to have been coordinated (or at least with the knowledge of) Republicans in Congress. At least two members of the Pro-Life Caucus in the House admitted to CQ Roll Call that they were aware of what this group was planning. Rep. Trent Franks (R-Az) said that he knew about the video a month ago but was waiting to get all the information in place so he could alert the authorities before the media. And Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) said he saw the video weeks ago and then backtracked saying “this interview didn’t happen.” His spokesman later said that he wanted to do his “due diligence” before he investigated on his own. If they truly believe a crime was being committed, they had an obligation to inform the authorities immediately. The fact that they didn’t indicates that this is a partisan political act designed to stoke enough public outcry to defund Planned Parenthood.
When the speaker opens up on it, and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee opens up, that means that the members who want to move on this, they’ve got license now,” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said. “It isn’t like me pushing a rock uphill like Sisyphus. It’s the other way around. This is a downhill roll. […]
King, for example, was one of the first lawmakers to urge the defunding of low-income housing group ACORN, which went belly up following similar undercover videos suggesting criminal activity.
To this day, he keeps a tiny acorn in his pocket to remember his crusade. Now, he’s got his eyes on another organization.
“This represents ACORN’s scalp,” King said off the House floor Thursday, pulling the acorn out of his pocket. “Ask me after the appropriations cycle and see if I have a talisman in my pocket for Planned Parenthood’s.”
One would think that Democrats would never go along with the de-funding of Planned Parenthood, since the ramifications for millions of low income women would be so dire. But the ACORN precedent is instructive. When those doctored videos were released, the Democrats had a majority in congress and the first African American president had just been elected. And ACORN was not just another community organizing institution, it was essential to voter outreach among an important Democratic Party constituency. Yet the Democrats in Congress simply crumbled like a cookie made with way too much white flour.
After the big “autopsy” of the last election, the important people in the Party decided that some politicians’ and pundits’ unfortunate propensity to deride women as sluts for using birth control, or to proclaim that “some girls rape easy,” wasn’t really working for them. The idea was that they would take a more measured approach toward women’s rights.
One would think that Big Money Jeb would be the candidate most likely to carry out that vision, but he seems to be going with the clown car on this. He jumped on the Planned Parenthood story with the same hyperbolic language, tweeting ”this is a shocking and horrific reminder that we must do so much more to foster a culture of life in America.” He also believes in a ban on abortions after 20 weeks and supports the junk science based “Pain-capable Unborn Child Protection Act”. The only reason he’s considered a “moderate” in the field on these issues is that while he believes that abortion should be banned altogether, he still thinks that there should be an exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. That’s now the official “compromise” position.
More at the link.
They seem to be doubling down on abortion. I’d guess it’s because they have to find some way to appease the social conservatives who are demoralized over gay marriage. Going after women is evergreen.
