Month: September 2015

Stabbing yourself in the back

by digby

For some unknown reason I’ve been thinking about this all day today:

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was a collection of community-based organizations in the United States and internationally that advocated for low- and moderate-income families by working on neighborhood safety, voter registration, health care, affordable housing, and other social issues…

ACORN conducted voter registration drives, as well as working to remove systemic barriers to registration of low and working-class voters. The Republican Party regularly alleged that it committed voter fraud, but few cases have been found or prosecuted. The organization conducted its own audits and cooperated with investigations of employees, referring some cases to law enforcement.

ACORN suffered an extremely damaging nationwide controversy beginning in the fall of 2009 after two conservative activists secretly made and released videos of staged interactions with low-level ACORN personnel in several offices, portraying them as encouraging criminal behavior. Some media publicized the videos without investigation. These videos were later found in several independent law enforcement investigations to have been partially falsified and selectively edited by the activists, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles.

The organization suffered an immediate loss of funding from government agencies with which it had contracts, and from private donors prior to the results of any investigations. Legislative amendments to spending bills in the United States House and Senate prohibited government funding of the group.

Four different independent investigations by various state and city Attorneys General and the GAO released in 2009 and 2010 cleared ACORN, finding its employees had not engaged in the alleged criminal activities and that the organization had appropriately managed its federal funding. Their reports described the videos as deceptively edited to present the workers in the worst possible light. The loss of funds had been too damaging and by March 2010, 15 of ACORN’s 30 state chapters had already closed. ACORN announced it was closing its remaining state chapters and disbanding.

Yeah, I guess the reason I’ve been thinking about this all day — and Shirley Sherrod and “General Betrayus” too — is because I’m seeing a bunch of embarrassing, timorous Democrats talking about Planned Parenthood and Clinton’s ridiculous email controversy and this story is a perfect example of how often they are easily frightened once the Villagers determine that something’s ripe for one of their feeding frenzies. Planned Parenthood will likely survive the assault but will be seriously weakened. That’s a scalp the Democrats know would be suicidal to give up entirely, no matter how much they would like to do it. It remains to be seen if they will adequately defend Clinton from this inane email nonsense.

I can’t think of such examples on the right. But then they don’t loathe themselves the way Democrats do.

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“Walker had a Walker problem”

by digby

This inside look at the failed Scott Walker campaign featuring his campaign manager spilling his guts (and sounds like he may have even been a little drunk…) is wildly entertaining.  Apparently they spent like drunken sailors secure in the knowledge that they had it in the bag. Until they didn’t. And when they slipped in the polls and the money started to dry up they shrugged their shoulders and walked away. Walker sounds like he was hardly even present.

Boy, does that sound like a Republican president, or what? Downright Reaganesque if you ask me.

But I love this:

But Walker had a Walker problem: He just wasn’t ready for the national stage. It was often overlooked that just five years ago, he was the Milwaukee County executive. As he began the presidential campaign, according to advisers, he knew little about issues like immigration, the Export-Import Bank and foreign policy. Walker’s campaign brought in experts to brief him on those subjects. Aides said he enjoyed the briefings and worked hard to become fluent in policy issues.

But his lack of knowledge showed — like when he said that Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire striking air traffic controllers was the most significant foreign policy decision of his lifetime. Yet expectations were sky-high for the governor, and his early appearances did little to lower them.

Wiley blamed the size of the campaign partly on Walker’s newness to the national spotlight. “It takes a lot to build a campaign to run for president, especially around someone who is introduced to a new set of issues,” Wiley said. “Foreign policy — brand new. And just the dynamics of the federal issues are different, obviously. I mean, my God, this guy is a machine — I mean he really, truly is. But that takes staff, it takes time to do that. And we built the campaign that we needed to get him ready.”

Well, nobody can say he didn’t create some jobs. It’s just that they were a lot more short-lived than anyone expected.

Some of us did notice that Walker was the Milwaukee County executive just five years ago, by the way. Not that this necessarily means that someone can’t be well versed in national and international issues. But it was clear from the beginning that Walker wasn’t the brightest bulb so a closer look by the intelligentsia might have been warranted before everyone anointed him as the frontrunner.

Remember this? I mean, come on …

And then this?

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QOTD: Arsalan Iftikhar

by digby

I watched this live on CNN yesterday and it was pretty great:

ARSALAN IFTIKHAR (The Islamic Monthly): “Anytime somebody says ‘Barack Obama is a Muslim’…I feel like Jerry Seinfeld should jump out and say ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that!’…”

“Clearly…Ben Carson has never read Article 6 of the United States Constitution which says that ‘no religious test shall ever be required for any office or public trust under the United States’…So not only should he drop out of the presidential campaign…He should probably retroactively fail 8th grade social studies class…”

Iftikhar is a human rights lawyer. Ben Carson is … not. But Carson feels that he is qualified to be president while Iftikhar must prove that he is not a Muslim fundamentalist.

By the way, this is the same fellow Don Lemon casually asked, “do you support ISIS?” a few months back.

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Oy vey

by digby

For a TV segment on Yom Kippur, which began at sundown last night, Chicago TV station WGN used about the worst graphic you can imagine: the yellow patch Nazis forced Jews to wear in Germany:

They apologized, saying it was inadvertent. I should hope so or they have a Nazi working at the station.

h/t TS

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Your little bit of sunshine for the day

by digby

Not really.

A Michigan city will pay a Detroit woman $40,000 in a settlement reached three years after she was ticketed by a police officer for having HIV.

The embarrassing incident in August of 2012 was recorded by the Dearborn officer’s dashboard camera.

Officer David Lacey can be heard telling Shalandra Jones and driver Mark Scott that her HIV status “might be something you want to tell a cop if they pull you out of a car.”

“This will hopefully change how police all over the world treat people with HIV,” the 43-year-old Jones told the Daily News on Tuesday.

In the surveillance footage, Officer Lacey be heard telling Jones “you just made me mad” after finding out about her HIV status. Jones revealed to him she had HIV after he questioned her about medications in her purse.

“I’ve been going through her purse and she’s got earrings and s— I’m touching, and I don’t want to catch anything,” the officer said.

I was actually shocked. I would have never expected that kind of behavior from a police officer. 

Officer Lacey smelled marijuana in the car, but seemed to say that if they had revealed her HIV status immediately they would have been completely off the hook.

“Honestly, if it wasn’t for that, I don’t think I would have wrote anybody for anything,” Officer Lacey said. “But that kind of really aggravated me, you know what I mean? You got to tell me right away. … Because at that time, I wasn’t wearing any gloves.”

The officer said he initially pulled over the couple because he noticed the brake light was out and he was “kind of bored,” according to the Detroit Free Press.

Lacey eventually gave the driver tickets for driving without a license and for the broken tail light. Jones was given a ticket for the medical pot, but it was eventually thrown out.

I like that he admitted he was “kind of bored.”

I don’t think it takes much to imagine how often that happens.  I’ve been stopped by police a couple of times in the last few years and the excuses were really thin.  I don’t know if they were bored or just thought it was a good idea to check out any older car on the road because poor people are criminals. But let’s just say the stop didn’t make much sense, no ticket was issued and the whole thing was a waste of time. I can only imagine how it would have gone sideways if I hadn’t been a middle-aged white woman.

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Cruzin’ for showdown

by digby

I wrote about our annual government shutdown pageant for Salon today:

It goes on to explain how Ted Cruz is pushing the shutdown and how he thinks it will help his presidential campaign. And in this weird cycle, who knows? Maybe it will.

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Hillary Clinton Opposes the Keystone Pipeline

by Gaius Publius

Looks like my days of wondering what this means are over. Hillary Clinton, at a town hall meeting, has come out against the Keystone Pipeline (h/t Greg Laden’s Science Blog for the report).

Clinton (my emphasis):

“I think it is imperative that we look at the Keystone XL pipeline as what I believe it is: A distraction from the important work we have to do to combat climate change, and, unfortunately from my perspective, one that interferes with our ability to move forward and deal with other issues,” she said during a campaign event in Iowa Tuesday.

“Therefore, I oppose it. I oppose it because I don’t think it’s in the best interest of what we need to do to combat climate change.”

There’s video at the link.

I have two takeaways from this. One, activism works. Two, I’m not sure what she means by “distraction.” I think there’s something she doesn’t understand. The Keystone Pipeline would be a cause of further climate change, not a distraction from efforts to combat it.

But I’ll take the win. Yes, activism works. Thanks to all who helped, and thanks to Ms. Clinton for this decision.

More here.

Update: Looks like she does get it. Via Twitter:

Time to invest in a clean energy future—not build a pipeline to carry
our continent’s dirtiest fuel across the US. I oppose Keystone XL. -H

Is this the first of a number of moves consistent with what’s written above? I hope so.

GP

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Francis arrives: The Midas Cult goes ballistic
by Tom Sullivan

Pope Francis arrived in the United States yesterday and the Midas Cultists were out somewhere rending their Brunello Cucinellis. Their media toadies reacted as if the pope had stolen the Cucinellis they don’t have to rend. It might be useful this morning to revisit just why (2013, emphasis mine):

In his strongest remarks yet concerning the world’s economic and financial crises, the pope said, “Money has to serve, not to rule.

“We have created new idols,” Pope Francis told a group of diplomats gathered at the Vatican on May 16, and the “golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.” According to Pope Francis, a major reason behind the increase in social and economic woes worldwide “is in our relationship with money and our acceptance of its power over ourselves and our society.”

Blasphemy! Get a load of the intensity of the cultists‘ overreaction:

I’m sorry, who needs an exorcism? Because, sure, this is just the way all well-adjusted, non-zealots react to having their dogma faith economic theories challenged. Francis might as well have suggested George Washington had sex with sheep. I don’t know what psychologists would call the over-the-top response, but it is what friends from a prayer group once called “being convicted of God.” That is, having God prick your conscience in a most uncomfortable way. The guilty always get pissed at prophets. Attacking the messenger goes back a long, long way.

Capitalism has metastasized into a cult, as Francis said, and the cultists are not amused at being called on it. “No one challenges the golden calf of predatory capitalism or overturns the money tables of the global warming deniers and gets away unscathed.”

As I wrote before:

What Milton Friedman called capitalism in 1962 looks more like an economic cult today. Question the basic assumptions behind corporate capitalism, publicly point out its shortcomings and suggest we are overdue for an upgrade, and the Chamber of Commerce practically bursts through the door like the Spanish Inquisition to accuse you of communism and heresy. Why you … you want to punish success! It’s weirdly reflexive and a mite hysterical…

We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults” since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900.

And go figure, all supporting local economies and families for countless generations without being incorporated in Delaware or in a single building in a tax haven like the Cayman Islands. Those are late accretions on the capitalism model for organizing an economy. But question them and you’d think they had been written in stone on Mount Sinai.

Wonder if there is still room in Petersburg, Kentucky for a Milton Friedman Museum?

Trump says NO to refugees

by digby

Apparently, he’s going all in now, no exceptions:

Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Tuesday that the United States “should take in zero” Syrian refugees.

“This is very simple, the bottom line is we should take in zero,” Lewandowski said when asked by radio host John Fredericks what a President Trump would do about the refugee crisis.

“t is time — and Mr. Trump has said this, time and time again — to put Americans first.”

He says Syrians don’t qualify because they are fleeing a civil war.

Interestingly, Trump was more equivocal earlier:

On September 8th, Trump told Bill O’Reilly: “I hate the concept of it, but on a humanitarian basis, you have to” accept some refugees.

On September 15th, Trump told Morning Joe that “the answer is possibly yes” to accepting refugees, even though “we have so many problems of our own.”

“There’s only so much we can do — we have to fix our own country,” he explained. “Now, Europe is handling it, Germany has been very generous so far, which is very surprising to me, to be honest with you.”

“But it’s a huge problem, and we should help as much as possible, but we do have to fix our own country,” Trump concluded.

Rubio definitively ruled out a path to citizenship for undocumented workers today which signals a harder line for him as well. And, as you know, Carson ruled out any Muslim president unless they agreed to some ritualized denunciation presumably designed by right wingers.

At the rate these guys are one upping each other, how long before one of them suggests internment camps or full on ethnic cleansing?

The grossest One Percenter of them all?

by digby

It’s a very hard choice, but I think this fine fellow may be the one:

Martin Shkreli’s current company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, has been criticized by Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for spiking the price of a 62-year-old drug called Daraprim now used to treat AIDS patients. The price of one pill, which once cost $1, went up from $13.50 per tablet to $750 after Turing purchased it.

It’s not the first time. He did the same thing as CEO of a previous pharmaceutical company and it was reported last month that he is being sued for misappropriation of funds and a federal prosecutor is issuing subpoenas over something or other.

But he’s such a nice guy it’s hard to see how anyone could think it’s not a wonderful idea to lionize businessmen such as him and allow the health of normal people to rest upon his greedy whims. Here’s how he reacted to news of the suit:

Trump doesn’t like hedge fund guys but this one might be an exception. He sounds like the kind of asshole he could be pals with.

Update: He’s just a straight-up sociopath.