Month: August 2015

When nobody believes your transparent propaganda, it can be so depressing

by digby

So sad ..

Most people undoubtedly understand quite well that medical research is vital and that people have a right to abortion and a right to donate the fetal tissue from their own body to that cause. They appreciate that horrifying diseases like polio were eradicated via this process and want to see actual living, sentient humans saved in the future from dreaded diseases like ALS and Parkinsons. 

It seems completely absurd to a thinking person that anyone would think it’s more important to keep a dead fetus intact than to allow it to help save living people who are suffering. It’s really not  a controversial concept. 

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Speaking of flags

by digby

Considering the bloodthirsty nature of the modern GOP it’s ghoulishly fitting that the first presidential primary debate would be held on the anniversary of the dropping of the bomb of Hiroshima. The way they’re all talking about Iran and the middle east, it’s fair to say they’re all pretty excited at the possibility of dropping another one.

I was wondering if the Fox News team would ask any of these presidential candidates about the controversy over the Confederate flag but then realized that unlikely. And yesterday Dennis Hartley sent me this story of reconciliation that brought home just how ridiculous that controversy really is:

Some aging veterans of World War II are embarking on one more mission. The object is to return Japanese flags taken as war souvenirs from Pacific battlefields.

In some cases, wives or children are taking on the mission if the vet has passed away.

Back in WWII, Woodburn, Oregon’s Leslie “Buck” Weatherill fought across the beaches and jungles of Southeast Asia with the U.S. Army’s 41st Infantry Division. After one bloody engagement late in the war, he says he and his comrades looked for souvenirs on the battlefield.

“It was on a dead Japanese soldier,” Weatherill recalled. “The flag was in his pocket, sticking out. I took it off him.”

The Japanese flag Weatherill picked up measured about three feet by two feet. Calligraphy bedecked the white spaces around the red center… personal messages from the soldier’s family and friends. This war prize was so common, it has an English name: a good luck flag.

The Japanese name for “good luck flag” is yosegaki hinomaru, which literally translated means “group-written flag.” It was traditionally presented to a serviceman prior to his deployment.

‘They should get the flag back’

Seventy years later, Weatherill is 93 years old. At the suggestion of his daughters, he decided to try to return the captured memento to the dead soldier’s family.

“I just thought, the war is over. We’re not enemies anymore, we’re friends,” he said. “They should get the flag back.”

They did. And they’re not the only ones.

The Japanese consulates in Seattle, Portland and elsewhere have gotten dozens of inquiries from American veterans or their wives or children asking how to return war memorabilia. And now a Northwest-based nonprofit has sprung up. A Japanese-American couple from Naselle, Washington, Rex and Keiko Ziak, co-founded the group Obon 2015 to facilitate the return of flags.

“Each one is in most cases the last surviving trace of that one individual,” Rex Ziak said. “Back home are wives, children, brothers and sisters who lost that person. Nothing ever came back.”

Meanwhile we have 25 yahoos here in America, still angry about a war from 150 years ago who can’t give up their lost cause flag.

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Who Wants To Be A President?
by Tom Sullivan

Hiroshima at 70, the Voting Rights Act at 50, Jon Stewart, tonight’s Republican debate, the Texas voter ID ruling. It’s a bit much to take in before work. But I’m going to go with what E.J. Dionne calls Bernie Sanders’ “authentic authenticity” and what that, plus Donald Trump lapping the Republican presidential field in the polls, says about the mood of the country.

Dionne explains that Bernie Sanders “taps into a deep frustration with inequality and the power of big money in politics while also reflecting the public’s interest in bold proposals to correct both.” But at the New Yorker, James Surowiecki observes that fully one third of Republicans with no college education support the candidacy of Donald Trump. They support the billionaire, according to pollster Stanley Greenberg, because of their deep sense that the system is corrupt and that Trump can’t be bought.

Why then would they not demand Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, both of whom have established bona fides in that area? Besides political tribalism, perhaps it’s the money, and because Trump is the perfect game-show candidate. Because as jaded as they may be, voters still haven’t let go of the American dream. Plus, decades of quiz shows (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire) and reality TV have programmed them to think they’re just one right answer or good idea away from being Donald Trump, the showman. Surowiecki writes:

Trump is hardly the first Western plutocrat to venture into politics. Think of William Randolph Hearst or, more recently, Silvio Berlusconi. But both Hearst and Berlusconi benefitted from controlling media empires. Trump has earned publicity all on his own, by playing the role of that quintessential American figure the huckster. As others have observed, the businessman he most resembles is P. T. Barnum, whose success rested on what he called “humbug,” defined as “putting on glittering appearances . . . by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear.” Barnum’s key insight into how to arrest public attention was that, to some degree, Americans enjoy brazen exaggeration. No American businessman since Barnum has been a better master of humbug than Trump has.

There’s one born every minute, and Trump has suckered his share of drought-stricken dirt farmers into thinking he’s an economic rainmaker. But there’s a difference, explains Dionne:

As for alienation from the system, Trump and Sanders do speak to a disaffection that currently roils most of the world’s democracies. But their way of doing it is so radically different — Sanders resolutely programmatic, Trump all about feelings, affect and showmanship — that they cannot easily be subsumed as part of the same phenomenon. Sanders’s candidacy will leave behind policy markers and arguments about the future. Trump’s legacy will be almost entirely about himself, which is probably fine with him.

True. But whether Sanders’ candidacy, if unsuccessful, has any policy legacy on the left remains to be seen.

Finally, I’ll welcome back Charlie Pierce from his vacation. Pierce looks at the Jade Helm 15 nonsense and the arrest of three North Carolina men for preparing to meet the Kenyan usurper’s martial law with improvised explosives. It is symptomatic of some Americans’ darker response to disaffection:

For all the talk about how Donald Trump has tapped into some general dissatisfaction with government and some ill-defined populist moment, the energy behind his campaign comes mainly from these sad and angry places, deep in the tangled underbrush of fear, hate, and profitable ignorance, where it’s all funny until somebody builds a bomb.

But tonight, at least, it’s Bread and Circuses in Cleveland.

Christian Right couple think God has memory loss

by digby

I know it’s weird. But if the omnipotent God is having some senior moments (he is very, very old, after all) perhaps they should point him in the direction of the Holy Bible. The Lord used to be a lot more flexible on this question:

Deuteronomy 21:15 – 21:17

1 Chronicles 4:5 – And Ashur the father of Tekoa had two wives, Helah and Naarah.

The people who put up this billboard are officially with Ted Cruz’s Iowa campaign. They are nationally known poster children for “religious liberty.”

Poor Huckabee and Santorum. Cruz is not only getting billionaires to write huge checks, he’s horning in on the Christian Right crusaders. He’s a comer.

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To hell with human suffering they have an election to win

by digby

These so-called pro-life people don’t give a damn about the suffering of sentient human beings. Irin Carmon and Benjy Sarlin have a good piece up about the history of controversy over fetal tissue research:

Among Republicans now running for president, Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Rick Santorum, who as a congressman voted against lifting the ban on fetal tissue research, have come out strongly against voluntary fetal tissue donation.

“I’ve always said that we create a rationale where you’re saying ‘Oh, it’s a good thing that’s going to happen. You can have an abortion and you’re going to help save lives,’” Santorum told msnbc after Thursday’s Voters First Forum. ”You’re talking to a woman in a very vulnerable situation who’s going through a tremendous amount of pain and going through a very difficult time and I think using that type of manipulation is actually cruel.”

“Really, we probably shouldn’t be doing research on these babies, because you would hate to think there is any kind of incentive for that to occur,” Paul told The Washington Post. “Donating tissue when you die is an incredibly noble thing. I’ve worked with donated corneas to give people back vision. But this baby really didn’t have a choice. Some people are horrified by the idea of having factories where you’d grow babies for their body parts. Will technology allow that? Technology probably almost already does allow that. But should a civilized society allow that? I don’t think so.”

I love the fact that our avatar of individual freedom isn’t just against abortion but against this too “just in case” it might encourage someone to have an abortion. Too bad about all the Parkinson’s and ALS patients who will suffer for his delusional slippery slope

The rest of them are actually just as bad if sometimes a little bit more chickenshit:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told msnbc, “I think what Planned Parenthood did was barbaric,” but did not directly respond to a question on whether voluntary fetal tissue donation should be legal. Nor did Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who voted against legalizing donation in 1993.

“We have a ban on anybody making a profit on all that and I’m glad the Senate has taken this up,” Kasich said.

Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, said he was skeptical of the practice, but reluctant to call for its elimination.

“I don’t know that it needs to be banned, but it should be made very clear to people that the types of things we’re discovering by using fetal tissue can also be discovered by using non-fetal tissue. So it’s not like it is the only source as they try to make it sound,” Carson told msnbc.

That’s not the medical consensus, however. Sheldon Miller, the scientific director of the intramural research program at the National Eye Institute, told The New York Times, “We couldn’t get this information any other way.” Other researchers also described fetal tissue as essential.

Some prominent GOP lawmakers are also hesitant to address the research question. At a press conference last week in which top Republicans announced legislation to defund Planned Parenthood in response to the undercover videos, one reporter asked if Republicans opposed fetal tissue research itself. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa replied, “That is a separate issue.”

Actually, it is the issue with these sting videos but devious creeps like Ernst are using it to cynically destroy an institution they don’t like.

Lifting the ban, put in place in 1988, split Republicans back then as well. President George H. W. Bush claimed to find a middle ground by proposing a fetal tissue bank that would be made up only from involuntary miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies, and not elective abortions. Researchers publicly protested that their experience showed that there was not enough usable tissue without drawing from abortion clinics.

In 1992, Rep. Fred Upton, who opposes abortion, personally lobbied President George H. W. Bush to lift the ban on fetal tissue research, in place since the Reagan administration. ”We’ve written safeguards into the bill to assure that the research does not encourage more abortions and, in the long run, should reduce them,” Upton said then. At the time, the focus was on the potential for transplanted fetal tissue, particularly for Parkinson’s patients. “Being for fetal tissue transplantation is consistent with being for life,” Upton said.

Upton is now leading one of two House investigations into whether Planned Parenthood has violated the regulations he helped put into place. On July 28, he published an op-ed in a local newspaper about the undercover recordings, in which he writes, ”On viewing the video, the contents can’t help but make you weep for the innocents who were sacrificed in such a cavalier manner for alleged profit.” Msnbc reached out to Upton’s office to clarify his position but did not hear back.

Bush held firm in his opposition, though according to reports at the time, he wavered behind the scenes. “In the end, Mr. Bush decided to heed the advice his late political tactician, Lee Atwater, used to give that flip-flopping on abortion was far more dangerous than sticking to a seemingly unpopular stand,” The New York Times reported in 1992.

Bush vetoed the bill. “He will have to tell the people with Parkinson’s disease and diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease that it’s more important to throw fetal tissue in the trash than it is to use it for saving their lives,” then-Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat, said at the time. But after Bill Clinton won the presidency later that year, the bill was the first to be introduced in the Senate, and Clinton signed it into law in June 1993.

Good old Poppy. Now that he’s in his dotage everybody thinks he was a stand up guy. But he was one cynical piece of work.

There are many ways in which having a Republican in the White House will kill you or someone you know. This is yet another one.

Elizabeth Warren, badass feminist warrior

by digby

I wrote a quick little note of appreciation for Elizabeth Warren’s great speech yesterday for Salon:

“Do you have any idea what year it is? Did you fall down, hit your head, and think you woke up in the 1950s or the 1890s? Should we call for a doctor? Because I simply cannot believe that in the year 2015, the United States Senate would be spending its time trying to defund women’s health care centers. You know, on second thought, maybe I shouldn’t be that surprised. The Republicans have had a plan for years to strip away women’s rights to make choices over our own bodies. Just look at the recent facts.”

“The Republican scheme to defund Planned Parenthood is not some sort of surprised response to a highly edited video. Nope! The Republican vote to defund Planned Parenthood is just one more piece of a deliberate, methodical, orchestrated, right-wing attack on women’s rights.I’m sick and tired of it. Women everywhere are sick and tired of it. The American people are sick and tired of it.”

There’s more at the link. People use this phrase too often, but in this case it’s absolutely true: Warren is a national treasure.

“You’ve covered your ass”

by digby

14 years ago tomorrow, George W. Bush was sitting on his porch at the fake ranch in Crawford when he received a memo entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike inside the United States.” It was later reported he told the briefer, “All right. You’ve covered your ass now.” And then he went fishing.

The memo

Let’s vote for another Bush shall we? Both daddy and firstborn son started wars in the middle east leading to the horrifying situation that exists there today. Jeb! will undoubtedly want to finish the job one way or the other.

President Obama made a stirring speech today, exhorting Democrats to stand firm against another war, this time with Iran which has agreed to a nuclear non-proliferation deal. Let’s hope he has the votes in congress to fail a veto override.

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QOTD: a former spook

by digby

From Dan Froomkin at The Intercept:

Alvin Bernard “Buzzy” Krongard, who was the CIA’s executive director from 2001 to 2004 — the number-three position at the agency — was asked on a BBC news program if he thought waterboarding and putting a detainee in painful stress positions amounted to torture:

“Well, let’s put it this way, it is meant to make him as uncomfortable as possible. So I assume for, without getting into semantics, that’s torture. I’m comfortable with saying that. We were told by legal authorities that we could torture people.”

How refreshingly honest.

And, by the way, always keep in mind that many of the torturers were sickened and told the brass in DC that it wasn’t working but the big boys met every day at 5 o’clock to read gory reports of torture and pain and apparently enjoyed it so much they told them not to stop.

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Where’s the “W” t-shirt?

by digby

For some unknown reason Jeb! isn’t highlighting his brother the way he is his father:

The Republican presidential candidate unveiled a new online store on his campaign website that is offering a $25 T-shirt with the quote: “My dad is the greatest man I’ve ever known, and if you don’t think so, we can step outside.”

I guess he figures that his father is such an elder now that nobody will be crass enough to bring up his tarnished legacy. And the media certainly won’t mention Junior because they’re still embarrassed about their own bowing and scraping toward him. It’s a nice little dodge when you think about it. He might be a bit of a clumsy dolt but he’s got some good people on his campaign.

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The courage of our exceptionalism
by Tom Sullivan

In the home of William Blackstone, they are at least investigating whether the Iraq war was illegal. Just very, very slowly:

An impatient David Cameron will demand that Sir John Chilcot name the date by which his report into the British invasion of Iraq will be ready for publication.

The prime minister is expected to tell Chilcot he wants to see the report as soon as possible. “Right now I want a timetable,” he told journalists.

Its release is not expected before September, and could be delayed until the middle of next year. Chilcot has been at this for some time and has spent £10.3m:

Chilcot has so far declined to give a timetable for the publication of the findings of the Iraq war inquiry, which opened in 2009 and concluded in 2011. He previously told Cameron and separately the chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, Sir Crispin Blunt, that he was still waiting for witnesses to respond to planned criticisms in the report. He is also examining fresh evidence.

Much of the Chilcot report is expected to examine communications between Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush:

In January Chilcot announced that 29 of Blair’s notes to Bush had been cleared for publication, as well as extracts of 130 records of conversations between the two leaders and records from up to 200 cabinet-level discussions. Chilcot also plans to release documents that reveal which ministers and officials were excluded from discussions on military action.

That snip above is from late April. British families are still waiting to know why their loved ones were maimed or killed.

Jeremy Corbyn, current frontrunner for Labour leader in next month’s elections, is still waiting:

He said: “The Chilcot report is going to come out sometime. I hope it comes out soon. I think there are some decisions Tony Blair has got to confess or tell us what actually happened. What happened in Crawford, Texas, in 2002 in his private meetings with George [W] Bush. Why has the Chilcot report still not come out because – apparently there is still debate about the release of information on one side or the other of the Atlantic. At that point Tony Blair and the others that have made the decisions are then going to have to deal with the consequences of it.”

Corbyn is leading the polls as union supporters hope a Corbyn win can loosen “the grip of the Blairites” and neoliberals on the party. Corbyn is raising hackles in his own party by suggesting former Labour PM Tony Blair might eventually stand trail for war crimes.

If America really had the courage of its exceptionalism, we might already have dealt with Bush, Cheney, et. al., whose actions with Blair, Corbyn says, “are still played out with migrant deaths in the Mediterranean and refugees all over the region.”

But as with the Chilkot report, don’t hold your breath. Here at home we still refuse to hold Wall Street magnates criminally accountable for the global fraud behind the 2008 financial meltdown that had banks wielding phony paperwork throwing families into the streets. We are still arguing whether to release 28 pages (unredacted, please) of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, we’re still failing to comes to grips with structural racism while trying to bring back Jim Crow. And 239 years after declaring we would no longer bow and scrape to British royalty, American voters are fawning like peasants over their uber-rich betters from Jamie Dimon to Donald Trump, while refugees drown in the Mediterranean and Dick Cheney keynotes Republican party events in Florida.