Month: October 2015

Quote of the century

by digby

A friendly reminder as we talk about the Republican lying phenomenon:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

It helps to remember that as we try to sort things out in the post-modern conservative world.

h/t to @edgeoforever

How the “illegals” will ensure a Democratic victory

by digby

Politico features an inflammatory article about how undocumented immigrants will tip the election to the Democrats because they are counted in the census and therefore Democratic states which have higher numbers of undocumented immigrants will have more votes in the electoral college. It’s very compelling stuff for the rubes and I’m sure they’ll eat it up:

Using citizen-only population statistics, American University scholar Leonard Steinhorn projects California would lose five House seats and therefore five electoral votes. New York and Washington would lose one seat, and thus one electoral vote apiece. These three states, which have voted overwhelming for Democrats over the latest six presidential elections, would lose seven electoral votes altogether. The GOP’s path to victory, by contrast, depends on states that would lose a mere three electoral votes in total. Republican stronghold Texas would lose two House seats and therefore two electoral votes. Florida, which Republicans must win to reclaim the presidency, loses one seat and thus one electoral vote.

But that leaves the electoral math only half done. The 10 House seats taken away from these states would then need to be reallocated to states with relatively small numbers of noncitizens. The following ten states, the bulk of which lean Republican, would likely gain one House seat and thus one additional electoral vote: Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.

Iowa has gone Democratic six out of the last seven times. Michigan and Pennsylvania have both gone comfortably Democratic in every election since 1992. But five states—Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma—all went by double-digit margins to GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. And Romney carried North Carolina by two percent while losing nationally by nearly four percent, a large difference. Likewise, despite solidly beating 2008 GOP nominee John McCain by seven percent nationally, President Obama eked out a bare 0.3 percent win in the Tar Heel State. The current Ohio polls also look promising for the right GOP nominee, and no Republican has ever won the Presidency without carrying the Buckeye State. There is no plausible statistical path for the Republican Party’s nominee to win an electoral majority without these states.

Accordingly, for analytic purposes, three of the states that would gain electoral votes are Democratic. The remaining seven are fairly put in the GOP column. Combining the two halves of the citizen-only population reapportionment, states likely in the Democratic column suffer a net loss of four electoral votes. Conversely the must-win Republican leaning states total a net gain of four electoral votes. These are the four electoral votes statistically cast by noncitizens.

There’s just one problem with this analysis. The electoral college also includes the two Senators from each state giving small states which represent far fewer actual humans whether undocumented or not “extra” electoral college votes by population. In other words, while California may benefit from having some undocumented workers in its census, Montana benefits from having some undocumented cows and horses.

Someone more ambitious than I am may want to crunch some numbers to see exactly how all that breaks out. I have no idea how this would compare if only human beings vs citizens living in America, without the 100 Senators included, determined the electoral math. Perhaps it would still end up benefitting the Republicans. But it seems a just a little dicey to create an entire thesis around the idea that the electoral college should only represent citizens when this existing imbalance is already baked into the cake.

Oh, and they do point out that this “unfair advantage” might just benefit Republicans because: Florida. Imagine that. I think it’s fair to say that if anyone complained about that they would rabidly defend the census from anyone who dared to otherwise “divaaaahn the will of the constitution.”

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Stats for days

by digby

After President Obama challenged the media to produce charts showing the difference in deaths from terrorism vs firearms such charts have exploded all over the internet. There is this one:

And this one:

But it’s this one that remains the most shocking one to me: More people have been killed in gun deaths since 1989 than in all of America’s wars since 1776 combined. Does that make any sense at all?

“The ineptitude of failure theatre”

by digby

Politico reports:

House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz is planning to run for House speaker, taking on Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy in what appears to be a long-shot bid to lead House Republicans, according to multiple sources.

The Utah Republican, first elected to Congress in 2008, is launching a campaign less than a week before the Oct. 8 leadership elections for the House GOP Conference. The date for a floor vote to pick the next speaker has not been set yet.

McCarthy (R-Calif.) is the overwhelming favorite to win, and it’s unclear how many votes Chaffetz can garner.

Chaffetz’s office would not comment.

They say that Chaffetz made headlines this week when he stood by his friend Trey Gowdy. But those weren’t the only headlines he made. it’s been a busy week for Chaffetz. It was also revealed that the Secret Service sought to discredit him by releasing private information to the public, simply because he is a fierce critic of the agency, which validates every civil libertarian’s fears of what police agencies are capable of.

But he really made headlines this week with his outrageous interrogation of Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards. It was so bad that one has to assume that he would not get even one Democratic vote for speaker. But even more problematic, it’s unlikely that he would get the wingnut faction to vote for him. Remember, they thought the hearings were an abject failure because Chaffetz failed to send Richards crying from the room resulting in a voice vote to defund Planned Parenthood immediately. This is what one activist called “the ineptitude of failure theatre” (They have a slightly skewed view of how government actually works.)

So Chaffetz could perhaps get the support of the three or four civil libertarians because of the Secret Service flap. And maybe a couple of people will see his defense of Trey Gowdy as a sign of loyalty to the GOP cause. But other than that it’s hard to see how Chaffetz had such a successful 15 minutes that he thinks it’s time to go for the gold.

On the other hand, it is a sign of McCarthy’s “ineptitude of failure theatre” that he even thinks there’s an opening.

Get a load of this from wingnut central (via email):

Just as the House Republican leadership races slipped off the front pages and lead segments of the news and back behind the closed doors of Capitol Hill House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy put the race for Speaker – which he hopes to win – back in the public eye, and not in a way that benefits his campaign. 

A few days ago McCarthy appeared on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News and Hannity hammered him with a list of House Republican failures, broken promises and outright betrayals. (While we don’t necessarily agree with all of Guy Benson’s analysis you can watch the video through this link to Townhall) 

McCarthy relies heavily on Speaker Boehner‘s philosophy that “we have to formulate a strategy to win before we can even start the battle” not recognizing that Democrats see the battle as the whole game, and so merely to fight is to gain a victory because it shows ideological commitment, forces the agenda, motivates the base, and makes the Party relevant. 

McCarthy understands none of this, and what’s more he is completely inept when forced to think on his feet. 

After being goaded by Hannity’s long list of failures McCarty finally comes forth with what he thinks is a “win.” 

He claims the select Benghazi committee drove Hillary Clinton’s polling numbers down and that was a “win,” noting that nobody would have known about her email scandal “had we not fought.” 

First of all if the Benghazi hearings are strictly political how could Kevin McCarthy be so dumb as to admit it? 

What’s more, to claim a purely political motivation for the Benghazi committee’s creation and investigation is quite possibly the dumbest and most disrespectful thing a Republican “leader” could say about the multimillion dollar effort to get to the bottom of the events leading to and flowing from the death of four brave Americans; U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith and CIA contractors, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty. 

Not that we have any sympathy for Hillary Clinton – but if McCarthy’s statement is true then it is also truly frightening because it shows that establishment Republicans, like Kevin McCarthy, are happy to use the power of the government against their political opponents and engage in exactly the same kind of abuse of citizens that was perpetrated against conservatives by Lois Lerner and her enablers at the IRS. 

Second, what McCarthy said is demonstrably not true as regards the effect of the House Benghazi committee’s actions – which have been at best inconclusive and have treated Hillary Clinton and her associates, such as her Muslim Brotherhood influenced confidant Huma Abedin, with a kid glove deference no other witnesses would have received in similar circumstances. 

Judicial Watch, not the Benghazi committee, was the organization that has forced the most damning revelation about the Hillary Clinton’s email. The incontrovertible evidence that she used her private server to send and receive classified email – a felony violation to say nothing of a national security disaster – was generated by Judicial Watch and its relentless pursuit of its Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. 

It is the Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuits, not the Benghazi committee, that have provided the “drip, drip, drip” that Hillary Clinton complained are hurting her poll numbers. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Kevin McCarthy’s incoherent attempts to clean up the mess he created with his braggadocios response to Hannity’s goading was a political gift to Hillary Clinton that just keeps on giving.

by digby

It’s called The Intelligence Report …

The Intelligence Report with Trish ReganFox Business Network 
Trish Regan: Joining me right now with a plan to stop government shutdowns from happening all together is Alan Grayson, Congressman from Florida, now running for U.S. Senate. Congressman, welcome. 
Rep. Alan M. Grayson: Thank you. Thank you very much.
TR: Tell me how this plan, this bill of yours, would work? 
AMG: The Shutdown the Shutdown Act, very simply, substitutes level funding for the plunge in funding that we’d be seeing the day after tomorrow [Oct. 1]. It says that whenever we have a gap in funding we simply continue with the existing funding level, instead of dropping down to zero. It’s just common sense. 
TR: Let me ask you, Congressman, though, isn’t part of our democratic process the ability, giving our representatives to ability to act, to do what they think is right and, some would tell you, that these shutdowns, as miserable as they are, they’re actually an important part of our political process. You want to take that away? 
AMG: I don’t know anybody who feels that way. I’m not even sure you feel that way, as you’re saying those words. That doesn’t make any sense to me. 
TR: Oh I absolutely do. I mean, there are moments when you need to stand your ground. I mean nobody wants a shutdown, I give you that. Nobody wants that. But, if this is what it comes to, isn’t that part of the democratic process? This is what it comes to? If you supersede that, what’s the alternative? 
AMG: The alternative is called constitutional government. And I invite everyone to familiarize themselves with it. The way we change funding levels in this country is very simple. The House passes a law. The Senate passes a law. Then the President either signs it, or we overcome his veto. That’s the way the Founding Fathers wanted it. The Founding Fathers didn’t have shutdowns. Why should we? 
TR: What do you think the economic toll is of a shutdown? 
AMG: Well, we know what it is. The last time, the three-week shutdown (less than three weeks), ended up costing us the better part of 1% of our gross national product. It cost us well over $20 billion. We had export/import licenses that weren’t issued. We had tax refunds that weren’t sent. We had all sorts of economic chaos. And it served no purpose whatsoever.
TR: That said, Congressman, most people would point to the fact that that is all temporary, and while it’s painful in the here and now, as economist Steve Moore just said on this program the other day….
AMG: Well, cancer is temporary too, isn’t it? 
TR: Congressman, eventually some of that pent-up demand that wasn’t met during that time actually does get fulfilled. 
AMG: What pent-up demand? 
TR: And those licenses do get issued.
AMG: Not according to Standard & Poor’s. 
TR: Anyway we’re going to continue watching your bill. 
AMG: Standard & Poor’s disagrees with you.
TR: Good luck in your Senate race. Mark Serrano, Chris Hahn, still with me. Thank you, representative. 
AMG: Thank you. 

Truth is no longer an American value
by Tom Sullivan

As a kid, I watched Superman on TV in black and white fighting his never-ending battle for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” All three have since fallen out of fashion. Carly the Fabulist’s tales of Planned Parenthood reminded us just how far we have fallen. Her “willingness to unrepentantly and repeatedly” look into the camera and lie to our faces recalls Dick Cheney’s talent for that, Digby reminded this week at Salon.

Digby references a post (in part about Mitt Romney) by Rick Perlstein that I want to revisit. While his books might bear pictures of presidents to please the marketers, Perlstein writes, he is much more interested in how “both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal about them?”

Indeed. Direct-mail maven Richard Viguerie is one of his Perlstein’s touchstones for seeing into the conservative mind. Perlstein’s insights also come in part from examining the snake-oil ads in conservative publications such as Human Events and Townhall, as well as the more plebian Newsmax. My viewport is the conservative pass-it-on spams that land in my in-box. I collect them. I lost count somewhere around 200.

Perlstein contrasts the ubiquitous “get rich quick” appeals in these publications to one he noticed in the liberal The American Prospect for donations to help starving children in the Third World. I contrast them with the lack of appeals found in pass-it-on spam. They are lies, smears, distortions, propaganda — passed along dutifully by the parents who warned us about communist propaganda as kids:

Pass-it-on spams don’t ask people to write their congressman or senator. They don’t ask people to get involved in or contribute to a political campaign. Or even to make a simple phone call. No. Once you’ve had your daily dose of in-box outrage, conservative reader, all these propaganda pieces ask is that you “pass it on” to everyone you know. So now that you’re good and angry — and if you’re a Real American™ — you’ll share it with all your friends so they’ll get and stay angry too.

That really is the point of Carly Fiorina’s Planned Parenthood lie. It’s not even a particularly original one, as Perlstein observed of Viguerie’s efforts at Huffington Post a decade ago:

With a couple of hours’ research I was able to find a mailer from an organization that was then one of his direct-mail clients that said “babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood.”

Perlstein continued that thread of thought at The Baffler in 2012 (emphasis mine):

The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.

This has made the RNC “less the party of Goldwater, and more the party of Watergate,” as Perlstein wrote. But the long march of lies in service to ideology has over time also served to “dissolve external reality” among extremists, as Larry Massett once said of New Agers. People marvel at how Donald Trump supporters can take his pitches for anything other than a mountebank’s. Yet comforting lies are the junk food the extremist faithful have been conditioned over decades to prefer, like kids and sugary cereals. Truth? Truth is like eating your vegetables. As Larry Haake, the general registrar in Chesterfield County, Virginia, said of a deceptive Americans for Prosperity election mailer, “Most of their information is wrong. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.” If truth used to be an American value, it is no longer.

It reveals “a structure of thought,” as Perlstein once put it that Stephen Colbert’s faux-conservative parodied with “truthiness,” that “quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.” For the Fiorinas, the Trumps and their followers reality is now as bendable as Dali’s clocks. It bends according to the tribal affiliations of the person making the truth claims. “True facts” support their underlying ideology. These they open wide for. Garden-variety facts are suspect, and they clamp their mouths shut like toddlers to strained spinach.

Truthiness is not funny anymore.

Because you need this

by digby

It’s Friday and you have never need this more:

Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom host Stephanie Arne spreading the “OTTER” joy of swimming with baby Asian Small Clawed Otters at Nurtured by Nature!

Ok, it’s been such a bad week that I think you need another one:

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Hysterical Huckleberry channels Donald Trump

by digby

Runferyerlives!

In an interview Friday afternoon, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham tore into President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry in the wake of Russia’s stepping up its role in the ongoing conflict in Syria – calling the former “incompetent” and the latter “delusional” with regard to the politics of the Middle East.

“Number one: Our biggest problem is that our commander in chief is incompetent, and our secretary of state is delusional, regarding the politics of the Mid-East, Putin, Iran, and just the entire situation over there,” said the South Carolina senator during an interview on the Fox News Radio show Kilmeade and Friends.

“Our president, quite frankly, is weak, he is indecisive, and what does it mean for America?” Graham went on. “With Assad being propped up by Russia and Iran, it means the war [in Syria] never ends.”

Graham said that Obama views Putin as a “Bush-type figure” who is going to get himself trapped in Syria, but said that Putin was actually making a “bold play.”

“The president believes that Putin’s kind of a dummy, he’s sort of a Bush-type figure that’s blundered his way into Syria and he’s gonna get in a spot where he can’t get out,” the senator continued. “Obama’s writing him off as sort of some kind of cowboy, and what Obama doesn’t understand is that Putin’s making a bold play, a smart play from the Russian point of view, but a nightmare for us.”

“What Barack Obama doesn’t understand is that he’s making the job of the next president exponentially harder,” said Graham. “He’s, in his own way, delusional about the way the world is working.”

Graham added that Russia and Iran are sending a message to Obama that he’s “weak.”
“At the end of the day, Russia and China have been given a pass by Obama, because they wanted a deal with Iran so badly – they had to have Russia and China’s support,” Graham said. “Here’s what Russia and Iran are saying to Obama: ‘You’re weak.’ They’re slapping him in the face – they have no respect for the man, they have no respect for the United States.”

It’s all about us.

So, will Donald Trump or Lindsay Graham be the one to Make America Great Again? I’m thinking it’s a toss up.

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The insurrectionist sheriff


by digby

Ian Millhiser of Think Progress unpacks the letter the Sheriff of Roseburg Oregon, a gun proliferation activist, sent to Vice President Joe Biden in the wake of the Newtown massacre of 20 tiny 6 year olds. He goes over the language of the letter, which echoes Oath Keeper rhetoric, and then notes:

Hanlin’s letter also blurs the line between a matter that is lawfully within state officials’ discretion and something much more akin to insurrection. Under the Supreme Court’s “anti-commandeering doctrine,” states may refuse to enforce federal laws that they do not wish to devote their resources to enforcing. For this reason, provided that state law gives him the discretion to do so, Hanlin is permitted to deny his department’s resources to federal officials seeking to enforce federal gun laws.

What Hanlin may not do, however, is unilaterally assign himself the power to decide what is or is not constitutional and then refuse to “permit the enforcement” of federal laws by “federal officers within the borders of Douglas County Oregon.” This rule stretches back at least as far as the late nineteenth century, when California charged a United States Marshal with murder after the marshal shot and killed a man who threatened the life of a sitting supreme court justice. In ordering the charges dropped, the Supreme Court explained that a federal official who “is held in custody in violation of the Constitution or a law of the United States, or for an act done or omitted in pursuance of a law of the United States. . . must be discharged.”

If Hanlin believes that the federal government is acting unconstitutionally, he can file a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s action. But local sheriffs are not permitted to use the powers of their office to thwart federal officials trying to carry out their own duties.
The reason why local sheriffs do not have this power should be obvious. If local law enforcement did have the power to decide on their own what the Constitution says, and then to enforce their idiosyncratic notions about our founding document against federal officials, then this would be a recipe for armed conflicts between federal and local officials.

This isn’t about some nonsensical conspiracy theory that the Feds are confiscating guns and putting real Americans in FEMA camps. This is about whether or not some sheriff decides that his view of what the constitution differs from that of the government and the courts and decides which laws to enforce on that basis. It’s very radical stuff.

But then this sheriff is a radical conspiracy theorist:

The sheriff in charge of investigating a mass shooting at a community college in Oregon removed a video that raised questions about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre from his Facebook page on Friday afternoon.

The video opens with text that reads: “In this video I will prove to you there has been a lot of deception surrounding the Sandy Hook shooting. This is a simple, logical video. No aliens, holigrams (sic), rituals or anything like that, just facts.” It then intersperses news clips from the time with text raising questions about the “official story” presented in the media, including whether there was more than one shooter and whether grieving parents were actually so-called “crisis actors.”

The viral video was quickly debunked in arenas as disparate as The Huffington Post and Glenn Beck’s website TheBlaze, however.

Two days after posting the debunked video, Hanlin sent a letter to Vice President Joe Biden in which he expressed his view that stricter gun control measures would do nothing to prevent future massacres.

He kept that post on his Facebook page until yesterday.

Let’s just say that it’s a good thing that some real law enforcement is investigating the shootings yesterday along with this local kook. It certainly seemed to me that in each of his appearances he’s sounded irritated that the national media is following the story and that the sheer number of people gunned down yesterday requires that the federal government be involved.

He’s quite the piece of work.

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Is there something wrong with him?

by digby

There was a lot going on yesterday and I think this got lost. But it strikes me a something people should be wondering about:

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech at the UN on Thursday, in which he castigated the international body for not criticising Iran over threats made to the existence of his country.

The Israeli leader said the UN had done nothing in response to recent comments by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that “there will be no Israel in 25 years”.

For 44 seconds the Israeli leader stood, in silence, and stared at the half-full room of delegates from countries around the world.

Remember the last time he was there?

Whatever you think of his politics, there is just no doubting that the man is … odd.

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