Month: August 2015

The taming of the shrews

by digby

This piece by Joan Walsh on the phony GOP pearl clutching over Megyn Kelly is worth reading. She’s been on the receiving end of a lot of this crap over the years, including an infamous episode in which Dick Armey said to her face, “I’m so damn glad you can never be my wife, because I surely wouldn’t have to listen to that prattle from you every day.” I saw it in real time and was sadly not entirely shocked that a throwback cretin like Armey would say such a thing on Hardball (which had been a toxic slew of sexist commentary for months by that time.)

But I had never heard this:

A lot of folks on the left were outraged; on the right, they laughed and cheered Armey.

One of those who laughed was Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, a debate moderator along with Kelly Thursday night. On conservative Mike Gallagher’s radio show, Wallace said he found feminist anger over Armey’s insult “pretty funny.” Here’s how it went:

GALLAGHER: Now, now, feminists are very angry that he said, “I’m glad you couldn’t be my wife.” I mean…

WALLACE: It’s pretty funny actually.

GALLAGHER: It’s hysterical. Do you know how many times a week I say, “thank God I don’t have to wake up next to her.” I mean some of these callers, these shrews that call…

Ah, the “shrews.” Gallagher put us in our place, and Wallace laughed.

Let’s remember, some of the shrews are menstruating. Just a few months later, Watergate felon and torture apologist G. Gordon Liddy decided that it had been my “time of the month” when I beat him in a CNN debate on torture. “It upset her greatly,” Liddy told his radio sidekick. “Probably that time of the month.” Later the two men discussed searching my bio page. “There’s no mention of a husband there at all is there?” Liddy asks.

“No sir,” his buddy quips. “But the next time you’re tempted to feel sorry for yourself, just remember–”

“You could be married to her,” Liddy says, laughing.

“Somewhere there is a Mr. Pelosi,” his pal replies.

Despite the sexist slurs directed at me and at then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, conservatives continued to go on Liddy’s radio show until he retired in 2012.

Then there’s John Kasich, who won praise merely for seeming like a decent guy in Thursday night’s debate. He angrily told me to “learn to control yourself” — ah, the ancient idea of woman as hysterical shrew — after I mentioned his work for Lehman Brothers when we were guests on “Hardball” in 2010. At least Kasich is consistent: He refuses to denounce Trump for his attack on Kelly.

We’ve watch Rand Paul do his little “shushing Daddy” thing to two different women this cycle. Megyn Kelly was rudely insulted by Donald Trump the other night and in the aftermath. But she sat next to a man who was just as rude to a different woman in exactly the same way. It’s not ancient history, either.

I won’t go on television so I am spared the worst of the ugly sexism. But I have gotten my share over the years, believe me. It always feel as if you’ve been slapped in the face. And yes, I wish I could say that liberal men never do this. They certainly do and I’ve been on the wrong side of plenty of them over the years I’ve been writing about politics. But they tend not make a fetish of it the way the right-wingers do.

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Let’s help GOP billionaires attack each other 


by Spocko

“When your opponent is drowning, them ’em an anchor.”
–old phrase from some famous person you admire

“Great job on Trump Kelly! BTW, did you know Trump screwed your old client Experian out of millions? – Your friend at Bickel & Brewer LLP?”

If one group of ham handed right wing ratf****** try to sell deceptively edited video about Trump passing themselves off as “journalists,” well you didn’t tell them to do it.

Remember in Animal House, where they assigned Neidermeyer to do the dirty work?  Why not? They are good at it.

It was sadly hilarious to watch Fox ask “tough” questions and then get praised for it on the left. But Trump fired back.

Ailes doesn’t want Trump? Let’s help Fox uncover dirt. Ask them for journalism!

Of course they won’t listen to us, but maybe one of their billionaire backers can take it as a challenge, “You look weak against Trump, why don’t you un-cover the hidden truth behind his ….”

Get the supporters of Lindsey Graham to dig into Trump like he dug into Obama’s birth certificate. But…and this is important, don’t ask the MSM to do this. Because that would mean doing their actual jobs, not just reporting on the horse race.

If they did a story they would be all “both sides do it” and ask everyone involved before they ran a Graham engineered smear.  That is why we have to encourage the RW media to do it. And then double dog dare them to hit harder. Trump can take it, and then he can start dishing it out back, on the other billionaires…

Productive anger with your eyes on the prize.

My anger at right wing talk radio hosts, their distributors and their disgusting violent rhetoric, led me to act. Since 2007 it has cost the industry 100’s of millions of dollars in lost ad revenue (mostly from customer facing sponsors.) People have lost jobs. Distributors have had to make embarrassing statements to stockholders about their failure to keep the cash coming.

This includes the great work done by my friends who focused on Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. They have stopped 100’s of millions of commercial advertising dollars from going into the wallets of distributors. 

This cutting of an easy revenue stream hurt them.  They fought back, but, because we had the law and sponsors on our side, we had cover.

So who will help us in our fight between GOP billionaires? All the people working for GOP billionaires, Fox News and all the people working for Donald Trump. Let’s use these people to our ends.  I derived this idea from another old saying.

“Let’s you and him fight.” –clever old guy who wins when his competition fight each other, instead of him.

We assume that eventually the candidates “throwing red meat to the base” stuff will stop, but not yet. And you can’t just go into one RW billionaire’s puppet lair secret bast headquarters and work on his behalf to attack another billion—oh wait a minute, yes you can. It happens all the time. The Ron Paul people were great at this.

Various candidates are trying to distance themselves from the crazy to seem moderate for the general election, but as we know, when you fight crazy people they fight back. I suppose it’s like bear bating, only you aren’t the bait, they are.

It might be fun to watch. BTW, I’m not suggesting this just clears the path for my favorite candidate. I’m suggesting we use the momentum of one big nasty player on another. Who wins after that is still up in the air.  Help them focus their own arrogance, pride and deviousness on each instead of our candidates–and the rest of the country.

The thin Blue Monday
by Tom Sullivan

It’s like a riff on a bad joke. How many cops does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the cop has to want to change.

A year after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, not a lot has changed. Subsequent events have made relations between police and communities worse. In Baltimore, Freddie Gray’s death is still raw. Interim police chief, Kevin Davis, acknowledges there is some introspection happening. Half of white Americans, Gallup reports, are dissatisfied with how police treat blacks (down from the high 60s two years ago). Davis says:

“We have a profession with authority that no other profession has,” Mr. Davis told the AP last month. “We can take a person’s freedom away and … a human life if justification exists to do so. Where we are in this moment in time is, we have to engage in a great deal of self-examination, and look at how we can do things better.”

But the basic dynamic hasn’t changed:

Adding to the tension: The country is still entrenched in a post-9/11 national security environment that saw a widespread militarization of local police, and where soldier traditions and paramilitary tactics seeped deeper into policing culture, according to “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” by libertarian author Radley Balko.

That trend has hardened an already significant “us versus them” approach by many especially urban police departments, where some parts of town feel, at least to cops, like war zones. As part of that defensiveness, police academies focus first and foremost on the gun. US police cadets spend an average of 58 hours at the gun range and eight yours learning how to de-escalate tense situations.

Cops are taught to fear citizens; citizens fear the cops in a self-reinforcing cycle. Slate takes a ride through Baltimore with ex-cop Michael Wood Jr., a critic of police culture. “I never feared the streets,” says Wood, “But I constantly feared other officers.” (Video at the link.)

The ones who cross the line are the ones who are afraid, Wood explains. Giving them a badge and a gun doesn’t necessarily change that. Plus, fear is a legal standard. “If I am afraid that you can take my life, then I’m allowed to take yours, legally.” Living with fear day to day has a way of turning into a persistent, low-level, unhelpful anger.

A detective slapping a completely innocent female in the face for bumping into him, coming out of a corner chicken store.— Michael A. Wood Jr. (@MichaelAWoodJr) June 24, 2015

Worth a watch if you’re already having a Blue Monday.

Akin Rubio mashup

by digby

Hey, it’s standard now in the GOP. No exceptions. And if you ask them about whether doctors should spare the life of the woman if it came to that, they’d say that never happens.

Here’s where all that’s headed:

When Guadalupe Vasquez became pregnant at 17 after being raped by a neighbor of the house where she worked as a maid, she decided she wanted the baby. She even picked out a name: Gabriel.

Then, on a day in late 2007, pain shot through her back and abdomen. Vasquez says she started bleeding, but her employer wouldn’t let her leave the house to get medical care. Sick in her room and alone, she went into labor.

She heard the baby cry briefly, and then he was dead.

Only then did the employer send her to the hospital, saying she did not want to “deal with two dead in my house,” Vasquez recalls. She passed out, and when she came to, she was handcuffed to the bed at a state hospital.

The rapist was free, but now it would be Vasquez who would go to prison — for seven years and three months.

asquez is one of several women in El Salvador who have been sentenced to as long as 50 years behind bars — not for having an abortion, which is illegal in the country, but as a result of miscarriages or stillborn births. In these cases, prosecutors have accused the women of causing the death of their fetus or infant.

El Salvador, along with neighboring Nicaragua and three other countries, has the strictest abortion laws in the hemisphere. Virtually no exception is allowed for the termination of pregnancy, not for rape, incest, malformed fetus or danger to the woman’s life.

Yet the law is being taken to another extreme: imprisoning women who say the loss of their fetus or child was not their doing.

Four days after Vasquez awoke in handcuffs, she was whisked to a courtroom. After two brief hearings, she says, she received a 30-year prison sentence for homicide.

“I didn’t understand what was happening,” said the recently freed Vasquez, who is from a rural village and never made it past third grade. A court-appointed attorney “barely spoke to me. He didn’t defend me in anything.”

Salvadoran activists who have taken up the cause of Vasquez and other women have identified 17 similar cases and believe at least 15 more such prisoners languish in overcrowded Salvadoran prisons, alongside gangsters and murderers.

The Salvadoran Citizens’ Coalition for the Decriminalization of Abortion offers even bleaker statistics: 129 women prosecuted between 2000 and 2011 for “abortion” crimes, 23 convicted for having received an illegal abortion and 26 convicted of homicide.

Keep in mind that when it comes to making compromises for electoral expediency women’s rights are always the first chip that’s given up regardless of partisan affinity:

The irony for some is that two countries with such strict laws, El Salvador and Nicaragua, are run by leftist governments.

In the case of Nicaragua, the explanation is rooted in political expediency. Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, struggling to regain the presidency after a series of electoral defeats, needed Nicaragua’s powerful Roman Catholic Church on his side. He struck a deal with erstwhile enemy Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the man who had vehemently opposed him when Ortega was a fiery revolutionary comandante in the 1970s and ’80s.

With the church’s help, Ortega won the presidency in late 2006, was inaugurated in January 2007, and a year later, a congress controlled by Ortega strengthened Nicaragua’s 100-year-old abortion law to make the procedure illegal in all cases.

In El Salvador, the abortion ban dates to the two-decade reign of the conservative Arena party. In 1998, when the country had only recently emerged from a devastating civil war, conservative sectors of the Catholic Church, including the ultra-right-wing Opus Dei, campaigned successfully for a change in the constitution that declared life began with conception.

An absolute prohibition of abortion has stayed in place even though the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front won the presidency in 2009 and has governed since. Only in the last months has President Salvador Sanchez Ceren said the matter “needed discussion.”

That’s happened many times here too. No we’re not jailing women for miscarriages yet. But the logic behind all this “personhood” folderol inexorably leads there.

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How embarrassing for all of them

by digby

Thanks to @SenSchumer, @RepEliotEngel and the Democrats joining them in principled opposition to Pres Obama’s Iran deal. Hope more will join

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) August 9, 2015

Speaking of Schumer, I thought this Foreign Policy piece was quite informative — and entertaining:

On Thursday evening, right in the middle of the first GOP debate, Schumer reached back, took aim, and heaved a large one. He penned a long piece for Medium that some anonymous hack described as “thoughtful and deliberate.” Uh, ok. Maybe compared to Mike Huckabee’s outrage about “oven doors,” but good grief our standards for political discourse have fallen. Schumer’s missive came across a bit like your crazy uncle who gets his opinions from talk radio and wants to set you straight at Thanksgiving.

(I’m probably not the only one who thinks so. But then, I don’t have to pretend Schumer is some great statesman lest he put a hold on some future appointment or nomination.)

Consider how Schumer describes the inspection regime in the Iran deal.

Schumer starts by repeating the claim that “inspections are not ‘anywhere, anytime’; the 24-day delay before we can inspect is troubling.” This would be very troubling if it were true. It isn’t. The claim that inspections occur with a 24-day delay is the equivalent of Obamacare “death panels.” Remember those? A minor detail has been twisted into a bizarre caricature and repeated over and over until it becomes “true.”

Let’s get this straight. The agreement calls for continuous monitoring at all of Iran’s declared sites — that means all of the time — including centrifuge workshops, which are not safeguarded anywhere else in the world. Inspectors have immediate access to these sites.

That leaves the problem of possible undeclared sites. What happens when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) suspects that prohibited work is occurring at an undeclared site? This is the problem known as the “Ayatollah’s toilet.” It emerged from the challenge of inspecting presidential palaces in Iraq in the 1990s, which — despite UNSCOM’s demands for immediate access — the Iraqis argued were off-limits.

Far from giving Iran 24 days, the IAEA will need to give only 24 hours’ notice before showing up at a suspicious site to take samples. Access could even be requested with as little as two hours’ notice, something that will be much more feasible now that Iran has agreed to let inspectors stay in-country for the long-term. Iran is obligated to provide the IAEA access to all such sites — including, if it comes down to it, the Ayatollah’s porcelain throne.

There’s more. That’s from arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis. But what does he know?

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Two-tiered system

by digby

Because he cares:

Charles Koch dismissed claims that he has much political power as “ludicrous,” asking, “if I had all this power, why aren’t [the many things I would change] getting changed?”

His statement suggests that he lacks political power — but he and his brother have built and bankrolled a network of political organizations that rival the size of any political party.

The elder Koch made the argument in an exclusive interview with Washington Post national reporter Matea Gold, one of a small number of journalists invited to cover select portions of the brothers’ Freedom Partners conference for wealthy conservative donors and Republican presidential hopefuls this past weekend at the St. Regis Monarch Beach luxury resort in California.

Asked what he says to those “who believe you have too much influence,” Charles Koch told Gold, “wow, believe me, if I had too much, a lot of things would change. Just like the very things we’ve been talking about — this trend toward a two-tiered society and the trajectory we’re on that’s taking us there and criminal justice.”

This new line about the “two-tiered society” is as cynical as it gets coming from a man who’s worth 50 billion and wants to make sure he never has to give up one thin dime of it to another human unless he’s assured of something of greater value to him personally in return.

Ugh. This lugubrious new billionaire’s line is going to make me permanently nauseaus.

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Sign me up

by digby

An important corrective

by digby

… written by Scott Lemieux at TPM about the nauseating praise for Megyn Kelly’s “journalism” in the wake of the Fox debate.

But before we get carried away praising Kelly and the other moderators, we should keep a couple of things in mind. First of all, even if Kelly is a good journalist and asked some good questions last night, she has some views that are nutty enough that Trump would sign for them. In particular, she has expressed consistently bizarre and retrograde views on race: obsessing over the utterly irrelevant New Black Panthers as if Richard Nixon was still in the White House, defending the racist emails sent by police officers in Ferguson as normal, and insisting that the fictional Santa Claus “just is” white. Not to mention her willfully misleading attacks on Black Lives Matter.

Granted, the personal politics of the moderators don’t matter if the questions are fair. But even on this score Fox News has been overpraised. It’s certainly true that some of the candidates were asked tough questions—Trump, most notably, but also other candidates like Walker and Ben Carson. But consider the kind of questions that were given to Florida senator Marco Rubio:

WALLACE: All right, well, Senator Rubio, let me see if I can do better with you. Is it as simple as our leaders are stupid, their leaders are smart, and all of these illegals coming over are criminals?

WALLACE: Senator Rubio, when Jeb Bush announced his candidacy for presidency, he said this: “There’s no passing off responsibility when you’re a governor, no blending into the legislative crowd.”

Could you please address Governor Bush across the stage here, and explain to him why you, someone who has never held executive office, are better prepared to be president than he is, a man who you say did a great job running your state of Florida for eight years.

BAIER: Senator Rubio, why is Governor Bush wrong on Common Core?

WALLACE: Senator Rubio, more than 3,000 people sent us questions about the economy and jobs on Facebook. And here is a video question from Tania Cioloko from Philadelphia. Here she is. (begins video clip) “Please describe one action you would do to make the economic environment more favorable for small businesses and entrepreneurs and anyone dreaming of opening their own business.”

KELLY: Senator Rubio, I want to ask you the same question. But I do want to mention, a woman just came here to the stage and asked, what about the veterans? I want to hear more about what these candidates are going to do for our nation’s veterans. So I put the question to you about God and the veterans, which you may find to be related.

Rubio wasn’t so much thrown softballs as he was given softballs set up on a tee with 10 strikes and the defensive team told to leave the field. (When Kelly asked the last question, I expected her to ask Rubio his position on motherhood and apple pie too.)

The questioning, in other words, was much less fair than it might have seemed on the surface. Donald Trump, who isn’t going to win the nomination but has a toxic effect on the party as long as he’s in the race, was treated to a brutal inquisition. Rubio, who is arguably the most appealing general election candidate in the field but whose campaign is floundering, was thrown one life preserver after another. John Kasich and Jeb Bush were also treated more gently than the other candidates.

No, Kelly doesn’t deserve to be treated to sexist nonsense from Donald Trump. But neither is she a feminist  or a legitimate journalist. She’s a tool of Fox News’ propaganda machine, period. Nothing more, nothing less.

Update: And of course I condemn the disgusting stuff Donald Trump said about her. No woman  deserves that. I’ll be anxiously awaiting all the similar condemnation from conservatives when he says such things about Clinton.

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Houston, they’ve got a problem

by digby

Post debate polling:

Post-Debate Poll (NBC)
Trump 23%
Cruz 13%
Carson 11%
Fiorina 8%
Rubio 8%
Bush 7%
Walker 7%

Trump, Cruz & Carson = 47%
#Wow

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) August 9, 2015

Half of GOP voters are batshit insane? Sounds right.

Honestly, did anyone really think that insulting Megyn Kelly and Rosie O’Donnell was a deal breaker for Donald Trump fans? That’s the kind of thing they love about him.  They can’t wait for him to call Clinton “the Hildebeast” to her face.

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No, it’s not a metaphor. Really.
by Tom Sullivan

Comedy writer and playwright David Castro shared some impressions of Thursday’s Republican presidential debate:

Some final thoughts on the 10 Guys at Open Mic Nite at the Chuckle Hut in Cleveland:
1. How did Ben Carson operate as a neurosurgeon when he can barely open his eyes?
2. I want to see Trump and Rand Paul in a wind tunnel.
3. Jeb Bush isn’t even the kind of guy his brother would want to have a beer with.
4. Marco Rubio says he knows what it’s like living paycheck to paycheck. What else does he know?
5. Mike Huckabee said the Supreme Court isn’t the Supreme Being. Is this that Cthulu I’ve heard so much about?
6. Chris Christie is clearly running to be the head of the Five Families.
7. Mike Huckabee believes in DNA so his finally accepting the heliocentric view of our solar system is not out of the question.
8. This Kasich guy – he arm-wrestled Carly Fiorina and won the right to be here, right?
9. Ted Cruz – look up the etymology of decimated. You were decimated tonight.
10. Scott Walker looks like the church group youth leader that parents know not to leave their kids with.

“Man’s Dominion,” David’s show about a 1916 lynching in Erwin, Tennessee drew great reviews at the Hollywood and Toronto Fringe Festivals. The good people of Erwin once lynched a circus elephant. No, really.

“Man’s Dominion” is at the Chicago Fringe Festival – Sept 3 – 13, 2015.