Monday funnies
by digby
Via The Nation
And this, from 15 years ago …
"what digby sez..."
Month: September 2015
Happy Assets Day!
by tristero
St Ronnie falls short
by digby
Huh:
Morning in America only comes when a Republican is in the White House.
And that’s not to say that the Obama unemployment record is wonderful either. They could have done a lot better a lot sooner. But the difference in perception of the two records is stark nonetheless.
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Enjoy your day off, workers
by digby
It’s very nice of our overlords to give us our little day. But that’s the least they can do. For a country that prides itself on “The American Dream” and being a land of both freedom and equality, we seem to be going in the wrong direction …
The United States is no longer more equal than European nations, but actually deeply more unequal. The chart below shows that the United States has the most unequal distribution of the wealth of any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member country examined. Across the OECD, the bottom 60 percent own about 13.3 percent of the wealth. (The bottom 40 percent own only 3.3 percent.) In Canada, the bottom 60 percent own 12.5 percent of the wealth, and the bottom 40 percent own 2.2 percent. In France, the respective numbers are 11.6 percent and 1.8 percent. And in Britain, they are 16 percent and 4.7 percent.
In the United States, however, the bottom 60 percent own a mere 2.5 percent of the wealth and the bottom 40% own negative 0.4 percent of the wealth.
The piece goes on to point out that the US also depends upon employers to provide most benefits at the same time that the work force is becoming more and more freelance which means they have no benefits. And even more interesting is the fact that most of those freelancers are doing jobs to make the lives of the wealthy easier — in other words are working as servants of one kind or another.
Does any of this sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so. The servant economy is upon us.
But today we have our little day. Here is Southern California the sun is shining brightly and it looks like it’s going to be a hot day at the beach. So enjoy it. Then back to work.
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Don’t victimize me, bro
by Tom Sullivan
Plenty of victimhood going around on this Labor Day.
“Being a conservative is all about grievances,” LOLGOP writes at Electablog. That is why Donald Trump’s complaints about Hugh Hewitt’s gotcha questions, rather than hurting him, play right into the sentiments of his base:
To be a conservative enduring the regime of Barack Obama and facing the end of the end of white Americans making up the majority of population is to be a person who is justifiably pissed at everything.
Jonah Goldberg is pissed at the Trump “cargo cult” masquerading as conservatism. He’s got a list of grievances about how Trump represents “the corrupting of conservatives.” The movement isn’t about politicians or even about self-interest. It is about “shaping a conservative electorate that lines up the incentives so that politicians define their self-interest in a conservative way.”
Except the conservative movement has suckered shaped the electorate for decades by feeding its base a steady diet of bluster and bullshit (as Paul Krugman again points out this morning). It’s what the base has been taught to like. It’s what they’ve been taught to want. Trump is just better at delivering it than mainstream conservatives (if that term has any meaning left).
By riding instead of manipulating public opinion like a proper conservative, Trump makes a mockery of conservatism. Goldberg complains: Trump the populist is running on popularity rather than principle; the megalomaniac has no character; he doesn’t care enough about the country to even do his homework, as if homework is for losers.
In this, Trump’s cargo cult seems to have embraced the supposed attitude towards education among “inner city” youth that conservatives have condemned for years. In this, conservatives are on track to elect a president in the mold of the famous pool hustler, Minnesota Fats. “Practice is for suckers.” “Modesty is for suckers.” “Keeping score is for suckers.” Feeling pressure? “Pressure’s for suckers.”
Movement conservatives have long capitalized on low-information voters to get what they want. Matt Taibbi looks at how that is coming back to bite them:
Republicans won middle American votes for years by taking advantage of the fact that their voters didn’t know the difference between an elitist and the actual elite, between a snob and an oligarch. They made sure their voters’ idea of an elitist was Sean Penn hanging out with Hugo Chavez, instead of a Wall Street bank financing the construction of Chinese factories.
Trump similarly is scoring points with voters who don’t know the difference between feeling sorry for themselves and actually being victims. We live in a society that is changing for a lot of reasons, and some of those changes feel annoying to certain kinds of people, particularly older white folks who don’t like language-policing and other aspects of political correctness.
The 2016 election may be, at least for conservatives, Taibbi writes, a “referendum on white victimhood.” Well, there are plenty of victims to go around.
Look who’s talking
by digby
Palin went on CNN today and blabbered some nonsense about how it’s nice that Jeb! Bush can speak Spanish and “we have a large and wonderful Hispanic population building America” but:
I think we can send a message and say, ‘You want to be in America, A, you’d better be here legally or you’re out of here. B, when you’re here, let’s speak American. … Let’s speak English, and that’s a kind of a unifying aspect of the nation is the language that is understood by all.”
She must have been in a foreign country when she said that because she certainly wasn’t speaking any recognizable form of English or even “American” when she said this:
Palin also disagreed with a recent statement by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who said last week that the Republican Party “often appears cold and unwelcoming to minorities.”
“I can’t think of any Republican that I know who would have that in their heart,” Palin said. … is the party that would wish to bring people in together, standing together, putting America first, even in terms of the culture, accepting people’s differences and the diverse views and everything else, because we have common sense driving our party,” she said.
Actually, she must have been on a foreign planet … that bears no relationship to any language known to humankind. Palin telling people how to talk is the funniest thing I’ve heard all week-end.
Latinos to Palin: “You go first”
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So Hugh Hewitt is now liberal media? Who knew?
by digby
A fine whine from Rush:
LIMBAUGH: This was even done to Reagan, folks. Reagan was running for president, he and the other candidates were asked if they knew the names of various obscure heads of state — these questions are never ever asked of Democrats, by the way. Make note of this.
The question that Trump got, Democrats will never get those questions in the normal ebb and flow of things. Hillary will never get them. Clinton will never get them, never did.
It’s just they are questions that are designed to further the narrative that Republicans are just not bright, they’re just not hip, they’re just, and when it works on one of them, then every other Republican is going to get the same treatment. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 9/4/15]
FYI:
How are conservative Christians going to handle this one?
by digby
I think it’s going to make their little heads hurt:
Mohammed Ali Zonoobi bends his head as the priest pours holy water over his black hair. “Will you break away from Satan and his evil deeds?” pastor Gottfried Martens asks the Iranian refugee. “Will you break away from Islam?”
“Yes,” Zonoobi fervently replies. Spreading his hands in blessing, Martens then baptizes the man “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”
Mohammed is now Martin — no longer Muslim, but Christian.
Zonoobi, a carpenter from the Iranian city of Shiraz, arrived in Germany with his wife and two children five months ago. He is one of hundreds of mostly Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers who have converted to Christianity at the evangelical Trinity Church in a leafy Berlin neighborhood.
Like Zonoobi, most say true belief prompted their embrace of Christianity. But there’s no overlooking the fact that the decision will also greatly boost their chances of winning asylum by allowing them to claim they would face persecution if sent home.
Martens recognizes that some convert in order to improve their chances of staying in Germany — but for the pastor motivation is unimportant. Many, he said, are so taken by the Christian message that it changes their lives. And he estimates that only about 10 percent of converts do not return to church after christening.
“I know there are — again and again — people coming here because they have some kind of hope regarding their asylum,” Martens said. “I am inviting them to join us because I know that whoever comes here will not be left unchanged.”
Actually,now that I think about it, It won’t confuse the religious right at all. They’ll just reject these people outright and claim they are all phony Christians who don’t deserve asylum. They will probably say they are terrorist infiltrators or worse.
Because it’s not really about religion, is it?
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“Exceptions” to the rules
by digby
This makes me sick. And don’t kid yourself, there isn’t one candidate running for office in either party who will change it. I’m not even sure any of them would want to, but you can be sure it’s not something they’d fight for regardless.
In a dry document, quietly posted Tuesday to a United States State Department website, the US rattled down a list of issues that it didn’t consider to be its human rights obligations.
Commit to opening new investigations of Central Intelligence Agency officials involved in torture? The US said no. Compensating the families of migrants killed by Customs and Border Protection? No. Protecting children from having to work in dangerous conditions on farms? No. Ending life without parole sentences for non-violent crimes? No again.
The occasion for this panoply of rejections was the US response to its Universal Periodic Review (UPR), held in May, where the US rights record was scrutinized by its peers at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. Every UN member country goes through a review process every four years. The council had made 343 recommendations, including duplicates, to the US; Tuesday’s document was its response.
Some of the rejections weren’t surprising. Thirty countries recommended that the United States abolish its death penalty. The US outright rejected this one – presumably based on its claim that it cannot act at the state level, where most death sentences are handed down, though that doesn’t address the US unwillingness to abolish the federal death penalty. In a more narrow recommendation, France recommended that the United States “commit to full transparency on the combination of medicines used during executions by injection.” Here the US also said no.
There were a few significant positive responses. The United States accepted two recommendations to look into racial and ethnic disparities in application of the death penalty (though it committed to do the same during the last UPR cycle – without result.) Also, the United States expressed support for legislation to end sentencing children to life without parole at the federal level. They agreed to “invest further efforts in addressing the root causes of recent racial incidents.” The United States even accepted a recommendation to “eliminate gun violence” and expressed support for expanded background checks for firearm transfers.
The US, however, missed the opportunity to address some other key gaps in its human rights record. The government refused to interpret US law to ensure that foreign aid could help women and girls raped and impregnated during wartime access safe abortions and counseling, if they want it – as we have called for in the past.
And when the United States agreed with a recommendation, it often undercut it. When Brazil recommended that US surveillance policies comply with international human rights law “regardless of the nationality or location of those affected,” the US only partially accepted this recommendation, stating that this responsibility only applies to individuals within US territory and subject to US jurisdiction.
The United States holds itself out as a “strong supporter” of the UPR process, since it “provides a unique avenue for the global community to discuss human rights around the world.” For many important domestic human rights issues, the US response to this most recent UPR served as more of a dismissal than a discussion.
That’s American exceptionalism in a nutshell: do as we say, not as we do. We’re special. We don’t have to adhere to the principles we smugly espouse because well … we’re us.
As I’ve matured I’ve come to realize that most of what we think of as politics happens on the margins. And I don’t discount that. Those margins affect real people and they matter. But for the most part the American system runs on a separate track with powerful elites at the helm of a massive national security bureaucracy and democracy has little to do with it. It may not be this way forever, but as long as the United Stares is the world’s global empire and superpower it’s going to be that way.
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Ten years ago today
by digby
This was what I was thinking about right here on this rickety old blog:
I had the misfortune to be around some bigots this week-end as I watched the footage from New Orleans. I hadn’t heard some of this stuff so frankly admitted since I was a kid (when I heard it a lot.) The twisted, subterranean, politically incorrect world of racism has reared its ugly head.
This is just the latest chapter in the oldest story in America. We should be aware of it and understand it. And we should also be glad that it isn’t worse because in the past it certainly was.
Ever since 1791, there have been white Americans who get very nervous when they see a large number of angry black people in one place. That was the year that Haiti’s slaves rebelled and killed almost every Frenchman on the island. The fear of slave revolt — black revolt — entered the consciousness of the American lizard brain and has never left. From Gabriel Prosser to Nat Turner to Malcolm X to Stokely Carmichael and the long hot summers of 66 and 67, notions of barbaric vengeance being wreaked upon unsuspecting white people has lurked in our racist subconscious. During slavery it was the immoral institution itself combined with horrible inhumane treatment. After the civil war it was the knowledge of seething anger at Jim Crow. During the 60’s the anger became explicit and words like “by any means necessary” reached deep into the American psyche and fueled the backlash against the civil rights movement — and set the conditions for the Republican dominance of politics today.
Race is America’s deepest psychic wound that festers in different ways over and over again. It has lost much of its original blazing pain, but it is still there, buried and waiting to come to the surface.
The memories of Nat Turner are still fresh to many for whom the Lost Cause is their defining cultural benchmark:
Starting with a trusted few fellow slaves, the insurgency ultimately numbered more than 40 slaves and free blacks, mostly on horseback. The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing slaves and killing all the whites they could find; men, women and children alike. In all 55 whites were killed in the revolt.
In total, 55 blacks suspected of having been involved in the uprising were killed. In the aftermath, hundreds of blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were beaten, tortured and murdered by hysterical white mobs.
In the summer of 67, the cities of this country went up in flames. The rhetoric was the same as what we heard coming from the right this past week. Peggy Noonan suggested that looters be summarily shot. And, in that summer of fire, they were. In large numbers. Only, it turned out, they weren’t necessarily looters or rioters — they were just black. Ordinary people, housewives, kids were gunned down by renegade cops and national guard who were given orders to shoot to kill. Every african american killed by police that summer became a symbol of collective punishment. If you were black, you could be asked to pay with your life for the sins of other blacks. That’s just the way it worked.
In Rick Perlstein’s (as yet unpublished) new book, [Nixonland] which I’ve had the privilege to read a bit of, this is the real crucible of the 1960’s. Here is just a little bit of what happened in Newark that long hot summer after the cops took off the gloves and started doing what Peggy Noonan and Jonah Goldberg have been agitating for this past week in New Orleans:
“The press was interested in making the carnage make sense. A turkey shoot of grandparents and 10-year-olds did not make sense. The New York Daily News ran an “investigation” of the death of the Newark fire captain [killed by police] and called it “The Murder of Mike Moran.” The Washington Post left his cause of death as more or less a blank. The alternative–that when law enforcement spent days spraying … rounds of ammunition, more or less at random, even white people can get killed–seemed too horrifying for mainstream ideology to contemplate. Twelve-year-old Joey Bass, in dirty jeans and scuffed sneakers, his own blood trickling down the street, lay splayed across the cover of the July 28 Life.
The feature inside constituted a sort of visual and verbal legal brief for why such accidents might have been excusable. The opening spread showed a man with a turban wrapped around his head loading a Mauser by a window with the caption, “The targets were Negro snipers, like the one above.”
In actual fact the photo had been staged by a blustering black nationalist by the name of Colonel Hassan, what the copy claimed was an upper-floor vantage onto the streets actually a first-floor room overlooking a trash-strewn back yard. “The whole time we were in Newark we never saw what you would call a violent black man,” Life photographer Bud Lee later recalled. “The only people I saw who were violent were the police.”
Bud Lee’s famous photograph of Joey Bass:
Today the NY Times reports this about snipers:
In a city racked by violence for a week, there was yet another shootout on Sunday. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers came under fire as they crossed a bridge to work on a levee and police escorts shot back, killing three assailants and a fourth in a later gunfight. A fifth suspect was wounded and captured. There was no explanation for it, only the numbing facts.
Perlstein reports on this incident from Newark:
And around 4 pm a group of citizens were milling around outside front of the Scudder Homes housing project off Springfield when three police cars turned the corner. The crowd assumed the police must be firing blanks at them,until a .38 caliber bullet ripped through Virgil Harrison’s right forearm.
Men took off their undershirts to wave them as white flags. The cops just kept on shooting. They said they were looking for a sniper on the upper floors of the building. But they sprayed their shots at ground level. That was how Rufus Council, 35, Oscar Hill, 50, and Virgil’s father Isaac “UncleDaddy” Harrison, 72, and perhaps Robert Lee Martin, 22, and Cornelius Murray, 28, lost their lives. Oscar Hill was wearing his American Legion jacket. Robert Lee Martin’s family reported that money was taken from his body. Murray’s body was missing $126 and a ring.
There indeed were three snipers in Scudder Homes. But they began their shooting in response to these fusillades. They killed a police detective, Fred Toto, 33, a father of three, about on hour later, though in later testimony police claimed the order of the shootings was reversed.
I’m not saying that’s what happened in New Orleans in the incident I reference above — or any others. I don’t know the facts. I am saying that’s the kind of thing that tends to happen when rumor and paranoia get out of hand.
Here’s the Council of Conservative Citizen’s web site:
Updates! Eyewitness accounts report that at least six people have been murdered inside the superdome. One dozen or more have been raped. Most of the rape victims are very young. A seven year old girl, an eight year old boy, and numerous teenage girls. The US media is extremely reluctant to report any of this because of political correctness!
Yet this doctor who was ministering to the sick in the Superdomereports nothing like this:
Perhaps it’s the stench that Dr. Kevin Stephens will remember the most.
It was a stench that was a gumbo of human waste, sweat, and despair.
For four days, Stephens, the Health Department director in New Orleans, administered to the sick in the Superdome, his primary patients being those in wheelchairs and nonambulatory. He watched conditions deteriorate from one of calmness on the eve of Hurricane Katrina crippling the city, to one of frustration by the time he was evacuated to the adjacent New Orleans Arena on Wednesday. He was taken to Baton Rouge on Thursday.[…]
“I never felt threatened and I walked around the entire place,” Stephens said. “I was talking to people, administering first aid. But people were ready to get out of there. The conditions were horrid and horrible. The stench was unbearable. If we had electricity, it would have been so much better.”
Here’s a report from last Friday:
“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome.
In Detroit during the riots there in 1967, Perlstein reports:
“I’m gonna shoot at anything that moves and that is black” an arriving National Guardsman declared.
(He also reports that the federal government and state blame game almost perfectly mirrors the current crisis. When things are hurtling out of control, politicians will dither until they figure out what the play is, I guess. Too bad about the dead bodies.)
The evacuees are a diaspora all over the country. They are “infiltrating” a bunch of cities and towns in large numbers. Many whites fear blacks in large numbers, especially those from the big city, those who are desperate. Most especially, they fear those who are angry. (Why if they get it in their heads to be mad about how they were left behind to die like animals, who knows what will happen? Lock the doors!)
I don’t honestly think there is any racist conspiracy at work. There doesn’t need to be. All it takes is a reactivation of long held racist beliefs and attitudes — attitudes that led the president to say that they had “secured” the convention center on Friday night — which we all saw in that amazing FoxNews footage actually meant that the desperate survivors had been locked inside the sweltering hellhole. It was the attitude that had tourists staying at the Hyatt hotel being given special dispensation to go to the head of the lines at the Superdome. It was the attitude that made my racist companions disgusted by the “animals” at the convention center because they were living in filth fail to grasp that these people had been expecting to be rescued at any moment for more than four days.
It’s that attitude that led these people to talk endlessly about rape with lurid imagery and breathless, barely contained excitement. This too is part of the American lizard brain.
I have no doubt that there was criminality on the streets of New Orleans. When the law disappears, that’s what happens. But when you look closely at our history you see that whenever large numbers of African Americans are featured, this is the kind of thing that is said and thought and done. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t believe it or that criminals shouldn’t be brought to justice. But our history suggests that when we hear reports of cops gunning down looters, snipers and rapists in the street, we should at least maintain a normal skepticism. Far too often in our history it has been shown later that things were not as they seemed at the time.
This, by the way, is not a neat black and white thing and never has been, as Perlstein’s excerpt shows. As far back as 1822:
Perhaps inspired by the way slaves coordinated their slave revolution in Santo Domingue (know today as the Haitian Revolution), [Denmark Vesey] planned what would have been the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. His insurrection, which was to take place on July 14, 1822, became known by about 9,000 slaves and free blacks throughout Charleston who were to participate. The plot was leaked by slaves loyal to their white owners who overheard talks of rebellion, and 131 people were charged with conspiracy by Charleston authorities.
Nobody will be surprised to learn, I assume, that recent scholarship indicates Denmark Vesey was framed.
193 years later some crazy racist kid gunned down nine people in the church Denmark Vesey was supposed to have hatched his plot.
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