Month: August 2015

Who helps shooting survivors deal with the media?

 By Spocko

The day before the GOP presidential candidates were on TV ignoring the issue of gun violence, there was another attack in a theater in Tennessee. We saw the now standard scenario unfold:  ID of assailant unknown. First reports –assailant is white male and 51. Killed by police. Theatergoers injured, but alive.

Then as details came out we found out the assailant was a 29 year-old white male who had been committed four times for mental illness. He used pepper spray in the theater and had an Airsoft gun, not a real one.  Details from The Tennessean here 

What struck me about his story was the response of one of the survivors. He asked the media to leave him alone. It got me thinking about how people cope with the media blitz following a shooting.  I wrote a post on the issue (below) and then asked some experts.

.@everytown Do you have people who help shooting survivors deal with the media? Need shown: http://t.co/999NRudHAn

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) August 7, 2015

Following big shootings the media swarm to get comments from survivors, witnesses and officials.

When there is a high body count the official NRA spokespeople lay low. In comments sections or on twitter people suggesting anything but prayers are scolded, “It’s too soon to push any agenda, the bodies aren’t even cold!”

However, the one group of people that it is deemed appropriate to hear anything from following an attack are the survivors. Because of their involvement they are expected to answer questions, first to the authorities, and then to the media.

In the case of the recent Tennessee theater attack, one of the survivors had seen how shootings play out and asked the media for anonymity and wants no questions beyond his statement. (See video)

In it he:

• Praises the police for their rapid response
• Asks people to pray for the family of the man involved who, “obviously has some mental problems.”
• Asks the media to leave him and his family alone,
• Says he didn’t do anything to bring this on,
• Is grateful no one else was injured,
• Thanks the EMTs who helped him and his daughter when they were pepper sprayed.
• Thanks the citizens who gathered around to help, “That kind of gives me a little more faith in humanity again.”

Following violence involving guns (or gun-shaped objects) in public leads to the “What is to be done?” question. Since Steven doesn’t want to talk anymore, who will fill in the void? First, the professional “Guns Everywhere” people.

I’ve said before how skilled the PR and lobbying people for gun manufacturers are. Not only are they the best in the county at creating arguments and counter arguments on an issue, they effectively spread them to their followers. They also create great bumper sticker slogans while attempting to churn out Constitutional scholars.

They actively work each event, stoking preemptive fears that lead to more gun sales. “This time Obama is REALLY going to take your guns!”

They spin scenarios of the wonderful world of polite armed people everywhere (more sales!) They ignore the successful cases of places without guns like Australia.

Understanding how they work is important if any change is to be made.

I have a Ph.D in Argueology! What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ don’t you understand?

In last weeks Virtually Speaking my friend Cliff Schecter and David Waldman (Daily Kos Radio, Kagro X in the morning) had a great discussion where they demonstrated responses to the various gun and constitution arguments and counter arguments.

Cliff even suggested questions to pose to the guns everywhere crowd and how to counter their rebuttals. It was great to hear and learn from them, but frankly I don’t want to spend time arguing with the guns everywhere people.

Here’s the deal, people who believe the answer to gun violence is more guns spend a tremendous amount of energy, thought, time and money to work the issue and push their views.

When someone does spend the time to look at the arguments and counter arguments they find that they can be dismantled rather easily. Which brings me to the recent attack.

We saw a traumatized person who may now have a new view about guns, but he hasn’t had the time to incorporate that information with his experience.

We don’t know what Steven thinks about his states’ laws for dealing with people with a history of violent mental illness. We know that the attacker didn’t have a real gun, does that mean that he was on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System list and was denied one?

Does that mean that because that part of the system worked, he had to use pepper spray and an ax instead of an automatic weapon with a 100 round clip?

The media could look into the state of Mental Health Reporting in Tennessee from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, but that is boring.

This is important information that should come up ever time someone says, “The suspect had a history of mental illness” and shooting in the same news story.

If Steven later decides to engage in the media whirl, he will be listened to because he was a survivor. But that doesn’t mean he will instantly become an expert in arguing about guns in society, public policy or the Constitution.

One of the reasons that the gun lobby’s views keep sticking, even after tragic events, is a combination of the passion of their supporters, the cleverness of their sloganeering and the emotional appeals of freedom and liberty to certain audiences.

These are all powerful tools, another is when the guns everywhere believers are encouraged to challenge those who don’t share their views.

For some people this is great fun. That is why they like to do it. They like to argue and bait others on issues. They like to “win” the conversation, even thought it doesn’t mean any minds were changed. If they lose on one point, they shift to another and another and another.

I like to educate, persuade or influence people. I like to get people to see things from a different point of view.

I like it when people act based on the concepts and ideas that I have convinced them is the right thing to do.

However other times I also want to “win” the conversation. That involves learning all the tricks and techniques of the arguers. “Yes, I know it’s a magazine not a clip. Let’s talk about gun show loop holes.”

Overall I want to reach the people for whom the issue only comes up when they are watching the news, which as we have seen, is not the place to talk about gun policy unless you are a survivor.

If I wanted to provide the media with insight on a shooting where no survivors are ready to talk, I would want to parachute in former survivors of shootings who are now educated on the issues. That person’s opinion is relevant, and they can point out all the weakness with the arguments made on the internets that someone wouldn’t make to the face of an educated survivor. (BTW, if the TV station really wanted to some intense TV they could put the two on camera together.)

But I know how the media works, unless you can quickly provide a compelling narrative, one will be assigned to you. Right now the narrative “you need more guns to stop guns” and “there really is nothing anyone can do” is being driven by the people who make money selling guns.

When even notorious totalitarians are more logical and sane than Republicans

by digby

This piece by James Fallows about an on the record discussion between President Obama and a number of journalists about the Iran deal is a must-read. I remain a little bit stunned that the Republicans are so far down the rabbit hole that they are eager to start WWIII, but that’s what we’re dealing with.

This struck me as the most salient observation although it’s all quite revealing:

Obama is clearly so familiar with these arguments that he was able to present them rapid-fire and as if each were a discrete paragraph in a legal brief. (At other times he spoke with great, pause-filled deliberation, marking his way through the sentence word by word.) And most paragraphs in that brief seemed to end, their arguments don’t hold up or, follow the logic or, it doesn’t make sense or, I don’t think you’ll find the weakness in my logic. You’ll see something similar if you read through his AU speech.

The real-world context for Obama’s certainty on these points is his knowledge that in the rest of the world, this agreement is not controversial at all.

There is practically no other big strategic point on which the U.S., Russia, and China all agree—but they held together on this deal. (“I was surprised that Russia was able to compartmentalize the Iran issue, in light of the severe tensions that we have over Ukraine,” Obama said.) The French, Germans, and British stayed together too, even though they don’t always see eye-to-eye with America on nuclear issues. High-stakes measures don’t often get through the UN Security Council on a 15-0 vote; this deal did.

Seriously.  The fact that the administration was able to get all of these countries together for this deal says volumes. That our own conservative party is out of sync on such an important issue also says volumes. And what it says is frightening.

Oh, and Chuck Schumer announced that he’s going to oppose the deal. Can someone please explain how a Democratic Senator who would do such a thing can possibly be minority leader? I don’t get it.

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Medieval martyrdom in the 21st century

by digby

One of the more fatuous notions among the liberal left is that it’s really great that the right wing is showing its craziness because it will show the public once and for all that they shouldn’t lead the country. “Heighten the contradictions.” In reality, what happens far more often is that the political center just moves to the right.

There is no more obvious illustration of that phenomenon than what we are witnessing on the issue of abortion. Setting aside the Planned Parenthood nonsense, there is something even more insidious going on that last night’s debate vividly brought home. Irin Carmon has the details:

Moderator Megyn Kelly asked Scott Walker how he could justify opposing an exception to an abortion ban in cases where a woman’s life was in danger, though he did sign a bill with such an exception. Then she turned around and asked Marco Rubio how he could support exceptions in the case of rape and incest if he believed abortion was murder.

Kelly’s question to Walker pointedly played from the left: “Would you really let a mother die rather than have an abortion, and with 83% of the American public in favor of a life exception, are you too out of the mainstream on this issue to win the general election?” She took the opposite rhetorical position in questioning Rubio: “If you believe that life begins at conception, as you say you do, how do you justify ending a life just because it begins violently, through no fault of the baby?”

Walker, who asked the Wisconsin legislature for a 20-week abortion ban that had no exceptions for rape and incest but ultimately decided not to heed the anti-abortion activists who begged for a no-exceptions bill, replied, “I believe that that is an unborn child that’s in need of protection out there, and I’ve said many a time that that unborn child can be protected, and there are many other alternatives that can also protect the life of that mother. That’s been consistently proven.” The claim that an abortion is never needed to save a woman’s life is a common one in anti-abortion circles. Medical experts disagree.

As for Rubio, he denied he had ever advocated for such exceptions. “What I have advocated is that we pass law in this country that says all human life at every stage of its development is worthy of protection,” he said. “In fact, I think that law already exists. It is called the Constitution of the United States.” In fact, Rubio was a cosponsor on a 20-week abortion ban that contained rape, incest and life endangerment exceptions.

Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee did him one better and actually named which amendments of the constitution he believes already ban abortion. Specifically, the fifth and fourteenth.

Even for the party long aligned in opposition to the procedure, the issue of exceptions has been politically challenging. Though the Republican party platform calls for a ban without exceptions, previous GOP presidential nominees Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush generally said they favored such exceptions. The politics around rape and the specter of a woman dying are considered too toxic for a general election.

Still, in a presidential debate in 2008, John McCain put “women’s health” in scare quotes and sneered, “ ‘Health for the mother.’ You know, that’s been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything. That’s the extreme pro-abortion position, quote, health.” The party’s last vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, once said of another abortion bill, “The health exception is a loophole wide enough to drive a Mack truck through it.”

On Monday night, that impulse won out.

It’s been a long time coming and those who track this issue closely have been sounding the alarm for a while. Presidential candidates for one of America’s two major parties are explicitly saying that a fetus is more important than the live woman inside whom it is gestating. If they had to choose, they would not choose the woman.

I don’t know how they can make their misogyny more obvious. Whatever reverence they have for fetuses is equalled by their disdain for women as anything but human sacrifices.

Here’s just one example of how they are framing this:

When Elizabeth Joice found out she was pregnant, she was overcome with joy because doctors told her she would never be able to have children. But doctors then told her that she would be forced to make a decision to take the live of her unborn baby to begin cancer treatment or put her own life in danger by forgoing it.

Joice pondered whether she should join a club of other courageous women who decided to protect their unborn babies. Ultimately, saving her baby was an easy decision.

“Having a kid was one of the most important things in the world to her,” her husband Max told The Post at the time. “She said, ‘If we terminate the pregnancy and it turns out I can’t have a baby [later], I’ll be devastated. She knew this might be her only chance.”

Ultimately, Liz was only able to spend seven weeks with her daughter before she passed away.

“A courageous woman who decided to protect her unborn baby” — by choosing to die. That was her choice and her right, of course. But it’s a choice these people don’t want anyone else to have the right to make. Indeed, they are fetishizing the deaths of women like this as medieval martyrs. It’s sick.

The lesson here is that anyone who takes their rights for granted is a fool. It’s all well and good to say “it’s over” and now we can put all that unpleasantness behind us. But we are dealing with primal issues here and they do not change easily. Don’t ever assume that we can’t go backwards. We’re watching it happen before our eyes.

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Fear and loathing at the GOP debates

by digby

I wrote about the debates on Salon today:

“Planned Parenthood had better hope that Hillary Clinton wins this election, because I guarantee you that under President Jindal, January 2017, the Department of Justice and the IRS and everybody else that we can send from the federal government will be going into Planned Parenthood.”

Read on for more highlights …

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Trump on America: We suck
by Tom Sullivan

There will be hundreds of commentaries written today about last night’s Republican debates. The most interesting exchange last night, however, was over Donald Trump’s campaign donations:

BAIER: You’ve also supported a host of other liberal policies, you’ve also donated to several Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton included, Nancy Pelosi. You explained away those donations saying you did that to get business related favors. And you said recently, quote, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.

TRUMP: You better believe it… I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.

BAIER: So what did you get from Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi?

TRUMP: I’ll tell you what. With Hillary Clinton, I said, be at my wedding and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had no choice! Because I gave.

Let’s hope the Supreme Court was watching.

When Trump “tells it like it is,” his supporters cheer. But they are too busy pumping their fists to notice that while Trump is blunt enough to call out the broken system, he is not principled enough to eschew taking advantage of it. Somehow his lack of principle in enriching himself from the system’s brokenness makes him the perfect guy to fix it. Go figure.

Ezra Klein calls Trump a honey badger. “He just doesn’t fucking care.” Klein writes:

You cannot embarrass Donald Trump. You cannot back him down with questions that make other candidates buckle. And the crowd loves him for it. They love him because he does not back down. The fact that Trump doesn’t back down is the core of Trump-ism. It is the answer to how he will negotiate with the Democrats, with China, with Mexico. He will get what he wants because he doesn’t back down.

Strength. Stubbornness. Savvy. Aggressiveness. Those are what eager Trump followers — and many other Americans — want in their alpha dogs. Not real character or principles. Just the appearance of having them. Plus a large dash of xenophobia. Others dither. Trump delivers.

A priest I know says Americans think one ought to have faith. Not in anything in particular, just faith. That’s Trump’s secret. His unshakeable faith is in himself.

So he gets away with saying things that would have lesser dogs crucified by conservative media:

This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody.

Trump more or less tells supporters,”We suck.” They cheer.

The new American exceptionalism: We suck and everyone is better than us #GOPDebate— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) August 7, 2015

Just a friendly reminder here folks.  Trump may have turned the immigration debate into a national earthquake but nobody should have been surprised that the issue was going to be front and center for 2016.  There was a very substantial warning tremor more than a year ago:

The Tea Party has proven it still packs a political punch in 2014, thanks to the debate over immigration reform.

In the most stunning upset so far of this midterm season, the second-highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives lost his party’s primary on Tuesday. Eric Cantor, the man seen as next-in-line to become House Speaker, was handily defeated by college professor Dave Brat.

It’s extraordinary for a congressional leader to lose his or her primary race and, in this case, one of the big reasons for the upset was the highly charged issue of immigration.

Cantor had previously supported a “Dream Act”-like proposal to provide a path to citizenship for children who were brought to the United States illegally. “One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents,” Cantor said in a speech a year ago. “It is time to provide an opportunity for legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children and who know no other home.”

In his long-shot campaign, Brat attacked Cantor on that stance. “Eric Cantor is saying we should bring more folks into the country, increase the labor supply – and by doing so, lower wage rates for the working person,” Brat charged.

To protect his right flank on immigration, Cantor sent out mailers saying he led the fight against President Obama’s “amnesty” — that is, comprehensive immigration reform that had passed the Senate a year ago.

But as Tuesday’s Virginia primary proved, that ultimately wasn’t enough.

That was from Mark Murray at NBC News.

Nobody wanted to admit at the time that the GOP was going over the cliff on an issue that is bound to damage them substantially for a long time to come, but they have been rushing for the edge for some time now.

For all the blabber about Trump being the avatar of “tell-it-like-it-is”, anti-Washington fervor, they really just love him for articulating their hatred for people who don’t look and sound like them. That’s what powers right wing populism, here and elsewhere. Sure they are against Big Gummint and bailouts etc. But mostly they just hate foreigners and African Americans taking things they don’t deserve.

Regular Republican elites are nervous about all this because they can see the demographic problem they face nationally if large numbers of young American Latinos come to identify as Democrats and see Republicans as their enemies. (Party ID tends not to change.) It wouldn’t last forever but it’s likely to be a problem for quite some time, particularly since Mexican and Central American migration is different than earlier waves of immigration. It’s always there.

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Pretty sure this says everything you need to know about the JV Debate

by digby

Number of words the candidates used for their “2-word answers”: PATAKI: 9 FIORINA: 4 SANTORUM: 3 PERRY: 3 JINDAL: 4 GRAHAM: 11 GILMORE: 6

— Molly Ball (@mollyesque) August 6, 2015

In case you missed it, they were all meh, but everyone thinks Carly Fiorina was the big winner because they know they need a woman running to really stick it Clinton without being called a sexist.

She’s got the chops:

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Shame the hussies

by digby

Jeb!’s philosophy:

Maybe Jeb! should move to Afghanistan. The Taliban still believes in those good old fashioned virtues. So does Boko Haram. If you take your primitive, throwback sexual morality seriously you’ve got to walk the walk.

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Loving the guy’s guys

by digby

Oh lordy please spare me any more bullshit about this or that politician being “real” and “authentic.” This piece by Matt Bai says that Clinton has a huge problem with Joe Biden even if he doesn’t run because he’s so real and she’s so phony. Zzzzzz.

I like Biden too and he really does seem to be an unfiltered kind of guy. But “real” and “authentic” simply cannot be applied to someone who plagiarized his presidential candidate speeches!!!! It is an oxymoron. Bai mentions it, but only as proof of Biden’s incredible resilience and strength and calls it a “pseudo-scandal”.

Obviously, the boys on the bus are yearning to feel the love for old Joe right now, much in the same way they loved John McCain in 2000. They just want to cuddle up and have a big old fashioned slumber party with the guy who has the fun gene.

Clinton, on the other hand, according to Bai, is the reincarnated Richard Nixon. Not kidding:

Clinton’s argument is, at its core, like Richard Nixon’s in 1968: You’re not hiring a friend or a babysitter. You just have to believe that I get what’s wrong, and I’m the only one with the competence to fix it.

You can see why the Clinton team is going this route. Yes, it plays to her strengths; she’s got more experience than anyone in the field, and a tireless work ethic is pretty much her calling card as a public servant. But it also nicely sidesteps her evident weaknesses. You work with what you’ve got.

Needless to say Sanders is dismissed completely — only Biden (or someone like him) can really bring home the reality that Clinton is a monster. The argument being waged right now in the Democratic Party is all boring, icky policy stuff that nobody really cares about.

It’s going to be a long campaign.

Also too: this

Pull up a chair and get ready for the clown car

by digby

I did a little preview of tonight’s premier of The Greatest Show on Earth for Salon this morning:

The idea that they have left out the runner-up for the 2012 nomination (Santorum), the former 4-term Governor of Texas (Perry), the Governor of Louisiana (Jindal), the first female Fortune 50 CEO (Fiorina), and the 3-term Senator from South Carolina (Graham) due to polling 7 months before a single vote is cast is preposterous.

Read on for more fun…

I’ll be (slightly drunkenly) tweeting the debate tonight as I always do: @digby56

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