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Month: November 2015

Yes Lady Liberty is bowing her head. For a lot of reasons.

Yes Lady Liberty is bowing her head.  For a lot of reasons.

by digby

Greenwald on the CNN debacle:

Labott’s crime wasn’t that she expressed an opinion. It’s that she expressed the wrong opinion: after Paris, defending Muslims, even refugees, is strictly forbidden. I’ve spoken with friends who work at every cable network and they say the post-Paris climate is indescribably repressive in terms of what they can say and who they can put on air. When it comes to the Paris attacks, CNN has basically become state TV (to see just how subservient CNN is about everything relating to terrorism, watch this unbelievable “interview” of ex-CIA chief Jim Woolsey by CNN’s Brooke Baldwin; or consider that neither CNN nor MSNBC has put a single person on air to dispute the CIA’s blatant falsehoods about Paris despite how many journalists havedocumented those falsehoods).
Labott’s punishment comes just five days after two CNN anchors spent 6 straight minutes lecturing French Muslim civil rights activist Yasser Louati that he and all other French Muslims bear “responsibility” for the attack (the anchors weren’t suspended for expressing those repulsive opinions). The suspension comes just four days after CNN’s Jim Acosta stood up in an Obama press conference and demanded: “I think a lot of Americans have this frustration that they see that the United States has the greatest military in the world . . . .  I guess the question is– and if you’ll forgive the language– is why can’t we take out these bastards?” (he wasn’t suspended). It comes five days after CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour mauled Obama on-air for not being more militaristic about ISIS (she wasn’t suspended); throughout 2013, Amanpour vehemently argued all over CNN for U.S. intervention in Syria (she wasn’t suspended).
Labott’s suspension also comes less than a year after Don Lemondemanded that Muslim human rights lawyer Arsalan Iftikhar state whether he supports ISIS (he wasn’t suspended); in 2010, Lemon strongly insinuatedthat all Muslims were responsible for the 9/11 attack when he defended opposition to an Islamic Community Center in lower Manhattan (he wasn’t suspended). During the Occupy Wall Street protests, CNN host Erin Burnettcontinuously mocked the protesters while defending Wall Street (she wasn’t suspended) and also engaged in rank fear-mongering over Iran (she wasn’t suspended). I could literally spend the rest of the day pointing to opinions expressed by CNN journalists for which they were not suspended or punished in any way.
By very stark contrast, career CNN producer Octavia Nasr was instantly fired in 2010 after 20 years with the network for the crime of tweeting a positive sentiment for a beloved Shia imam who had just died, after neocons complained that he was a Hezbollah sympathizer. Earlier this year, Jim Clancy was forced to “resign” after 30 years with CNN for tweeting inflammatory criticisms of Israel. As I’ve pointed out over and over, “journalistic objectivity” is a sham for so many reasons, beginning with the fact that all reporting is suffuse with subjective perspectives. “Objectivity” does not ban opinions; it just bans opinions that are particularly disfavored among those who wield the greatest power (obviously, no CNN journalist would be punished for advocating military action against ISIS, for instance).
But there’s a more important point here than CNN’s transparently farcical notion of “objectivity.” In the wake of Paris, an already-ugly and quite dangerous anti-Muslim climate has exploded. The leading GOP presidential candidate is speaking openly of forcing Muslims to register in databases, closing mosques, and requiring Muslims to carry special ID cards. Another, Rand Paul, just introduced a bill to ban refugees almost exclusively from predominantly Muslim and/or Arab countries. Others are advocating exclusion of Muslim refugees (Cruz) and religious tests to allow in only “proven Christians” (Bush).
That, by any measure, is a crisis of authoritarianism. And journalists have historically not only been permitted, but required, to raise their voice against such dangers. Indeed, that is one of the primary roles of journalism: to serve as a check on extremism when stoked by political demagogues.

Click over and read the rest about Cronkite and Murrow and real journalism.

I wrote yesterday about Chris Hayes’ coverage of the Paris attacks and the reactions in the US. He’s the one who’s carrying on in their tradition.

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Your mainstream Republican party ladies and gentlemen

Your mainstream Republican party ladies and gentlemen

by digby

Here’s the Florida dreamboat Marco Rubio:

“It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down any place — whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site — any place where radicals are being inspired,” Rubio said on Fox News’ The Kelly File on Thursday night when asked if he agreed with Trump. “The bigger problem we have is our inability to find out where these places are, because we’ve crippled our intelligence programs, both through unauthorized disclosures by a traitor, in Edward Snowden, or by some of the things this president has put in place with the support even of some from my own party to diminish our intelligence capabilities.”

“So whatever facility is being used — it’s not just a mosque — any facility that’s being used to radicalize and inspire attacks against the United States, should be a place that we look at,” he continued.

So, you now, this is where we are now. We’ve got the media suspending reporters for tweeting “lady liberty bowed her head” after the House voted yesterday to stop Syrian refugees frm coming into the country, even as many of their biggest stars have been behaving like a bunch of hysterical schoolgirls 24/7 ever since Paris. We have the front-runner of the Republican party talking about he necessity to “do things that were unthinkable even a year ago” and “bombing the shit out of them.” He also said we would have to have Muslims register with the government to be tracked by a database.(No word on whether it will be necessary to sew some kind of symbol on their clothing…)

Now we have the leading establishment candidate saying we have to “shut down” not just mosques but websites, cafes, diners — anyplace where radicals are being inspired. He left out libraries and book stores but surely that was an oversight.

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The very very rich, sea level rise & Miami Beach, by @Gaius_Publius

The very very rich, sea level rise & Miami Beach

by Gaius Publius

This painting sold in 2013 for $142 million (source). Are the very very wealthy driving an asset bubble? If so, how large a bubble?

This is a follow-up to this piece, “Can Miami Beach Survive Global Warming?” about Miami Beach, south Florida, and climate change. There we talked about the disconnect between the pace of development, high land valuations, and inevitable sea level rise.

That disconnect flies in the face of an inevitable collapse. But I don’t mean physical collapse (though at some point, that too is inevitable). I mean economic collapse, something less deadly perhaps, but for many, still very painful.

While I didn’t make the point there (I have elsewhere), please keep in mind that sometimes economic collapse — a collapse in prices — precedes the event that causes it. That is, because we are an anticipatory species, a species that can anticipate events, we also act on anticipation. Thus, it may well be true that, as soon as the seed is planted that “you’re going to lose money buying in Miami Beach,” it may well follow that anticipation makes the future immediately present.

And frankly, once prices for any product collapse, the stampede is on — simply because there’s a stampede. Many prices do recover over time. The price of Florida real estate, for example, recovered after the disastrous collapse in the mid-1920s. The difference now, however, is this — once it’s over for the economy of south Florida, there won’t be a recovery until people see the sea stop rising. Meaning, never.

The very rich & the Miami Beach bubble

The problem in Miami Beach, unlike the general problem is south Florida, is that it’s the playground of the very very wealthy, who have turned luxury condos and homes into the same kind of competitive “investments” that condos and homes in Manhattan and the very best parts of London have become. In other words, a massive asset bubble, the same kind of bubble that the fine art market has become, and one that only the very very wealthy can create:

A sale earlier this week of Post-War and contemporary art brought in more than $691 million, the largest haul in the history of the art market, according to the auction house Christie’s.

The highlight was a painting [above] by Francis Bacon, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” which went for over $142 million, the highest price ever for a piece of art sold at auction.

Over at Sotheby’s (BID), a silk-screen painting by Andy Warhol sold Wednesday for $105 million.

The art market has heated up just as Wall Street has been setting records of its own. Stocks are holding near all-time highs. So there may be a spillover to the art market as the already wealthy grow now even richer. There are obvious spillovers into certain real estate markets as well.

Here’s what that looks like in Miami Beach, from the same Vanity Fair article quoted previously (my emphasis):

[Harold Wanless, chairman of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami], who is among the scientists whose work is cited in Hansen’s paper, told me that he and Hansen take issue with the current models for projected sea-level rise—most of which top out at around six feet as the absolute worst-case scenario for 2100—because they don’t account for how rapidly the world’s glaciers and ice sheets are going to melt in the decades to come. “If you ever fly over Greenland, which I’ve done, it’s unbelievable,” he said. “The ice sheet is already melting from global warming, and now it’s also dirty on top, because of dust and soot blowing in from other parts of the world.” The darkened ice absorbs heat more quickly than clean, white ice, hastening its melt rate. Given such factors, Wanless said, he predicts that Miami Beach will experience something in the range of 10 to 30 feet of sea-level rise by the end of the century. I was so stunned by these numbers that I asked him to repeat them, to make sure I had heard him right. He did.

A pause to think. If that is true (I personally think it is, given the many non-linearities — and the history of negative surprises — in the climate prediction world), then it follows that people will figure this out way ahead of time. That’s the anticipation I mentioned above.

But that’s for later, for after prices start falling. In the present there’s no end of optimism, even among the local scientists:

I received a more optimistic take on South Florida’s future from Ben Kirtman, a climate-modeling expert at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. While not shying away from dire climatic trends or from the extraordinary measures that will be required to contend with them, he sounded a lot like Mayor Levine, believing that there remains time for human ingenuity to save the day. “I want to see Miami Beach survive,” he said. “When we acknowledge a problem, we diagnose the problem, and then we start to develop really good technology to fix the problem. I believe in that.”

And that optimism, plus more than a little greed, is driving a very hot real estate market:

It’s this sort of determination that allows [Mayor] Levine to believe that the current boom of building and buying, far from being a crazy bet on what’s destined to become Waterworld, makes perfect sense. “If you can show me the first owner of real estate who’s panicky, who would like to sell cheap, please let me know—because I’d like to be the buyer,” he said. “And I have about 100,000 people right behind me.”

The real-estate figures bear him out. Peter Zalewski, the founder of CraneSpotters.com, a Web site and consulting service that monitors the high-end condominium market in South Florida, told me that, while the pre-2008 real-estate boom was actually bigger in terms of units sold, “from a price perspective, this is the biggest boom by far. It’s triple or quadruple anything we’ve ever seen.” To wit, two years ago, Alex Rodriguez sold his mansion on North Bay Road, for which he had paid $7.4 million in 2010, for $30 million. In June, Phil Collins paid $33 million for a home, also on North Bay Road, that had once belonged to Jennifer Lopez—and which Lopez had sold, 10 years ago, for $14 million.

Two of the foremost brokers in this super-luxury market are Jill Eber and Jill Hertzberg, a pair of glamorous, mediagenic Coldwell Banker agents who bill themselves as The Jills®, and who, three years ago, bagged themselves what was then, pre-Faena House, the county record for a single-family dwelling, selling a mansion at 3 Indian Creek to a Russian buyer for $47 million. I met with Hertzberg at her office, where even she expressed surprise at what people are paying for properties nowadays—not just in desirable South Beach but in areas like the one where the Edition and the Faena properties are (“They’re calling it ‘Mid-Beach,’ but no one had a name for it before,” she said) and in the quiet town of Surfside, just north of Miami Beach proper, where the developer Nadim Ashi and the architect Richard Meier are making over the Surf Club, that toffs’ haunt from the 1930s, as a Four Seasons-branded hotel-and-residential complex. It won’t be completed until next year, yet Hertzberg has already sold one of its penthouses for $35 million.

Many of The Jills’ well-off buyers are from overseas and pay for their purchases in cash. For her foreign customers, Hertzberg explained, Miami Beach is precisely the opposite of a risky investment; rather, it’s a safe harbor in which to park their money (and often their extended families) when things get volatile at home. There is even a colorful real-estate term for the cash spent in this fashion: flight capital. Selling super-luxury real estate, Hertzberg said, has provided her and Eber with a continuing education in political unrest around the globe. “Years ago, when they started having all the kidnappings in Bogotá, and newspeople and judges were getting killed, we started to have Colombians coming in,” she said. More recently, she noted, there has been an influx of customers from troubled Argentina. With Miami Beach offering beautiful views, a temperate climate, a stable national political system (well, relative to other countries), and properties that seem to only appreciate in value, sea-level rise is not foremost among the considerations of today’s eight-figure buyer. In fact, when I asked Hertzberg how many of The Jills’ clients have even raised the subject, the answer was precise: one. And that client still proceeded with his purchase.

Which isn’t to say, Hertzberg hastened to add, that her customers are oblivious or delusional. “I don’t want to belittle my clients, because I think they’re very sophisticated, world-traveled, and well read,” she said. “What it is, I think, is that they have confidence that the city will figure it out.”

Zalewski, the condominium analyst, takes a more cynical view. “Rising sea levels are in the back of everyone’s minds, but it’s all about immediate gratification,” he said. “I would wager that less than 10 percent of these purchases are long-term investments. It’s more like ‘I will buy into that position, I will hold for three, five, seven years, and then I will exit that position.’ I like to say that in New York you trade stocks, in Chicago you trade commodities, and in South Florida you trade condos.”

The capstone — Miami Beach has status it doesn’t want to surrender:

It’s an index of Miami Beach’s ascendant cultural status that it now sits alongside New York, London, St. Barth’s, Portofino, and Aspen on the circuit of the International Set—as the site of a “third, fourth, or fifth home,” in Zalewski’s words, that will sit unoccupied for the better part of the year.

Money chasing money chasing status and money. $30 million, $33 million, $47 million for one condo, one home — there are other markets like these but not many. Yet these men and women aren’t the only property owners in Miami Beach or mainland Miami. They’re just the trend-setters.

So what happens?

So what happens when trend-setting money flies off in a swarm?

There was a horrible collapse in real estate prices in Florida in the mid 1920s, a presage of the 1929 collapse that caused the Great Depression. I’m not predicting the second — a new great depression — but the first, a price collapse in Miami Beach that will last generations, is certain. Even if the ripples of that fall encompass only the rest of south Florida, the crisis may look to the nation like a wake-up call. I hope.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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Home of the shameless by @BloggersRUs

Home of the shameless
by Tom Sullivan

Americans ought to be ashamed. We are not, of course. Shame is for losers.

We love to pledge allegiance to the flag, sing the Star Spangled Banner, and pat ourselves on the back for how much we love the home of the brave. Then we turn tail and run from our own values at the first sign of fear itself.

In the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday 242 Republicans and 47 Democrats voted to erect further barriers to Syrian and Iraqi refugees from entering the United States. President Obama threatens to veto the bill. This follows governors of at least 31 states “either opposing, refusing, or suspending the resettlement of Syrian refugees into their state — either permanently or until after a security review.”

The Nation‘s Julianne Hing was not surprised:

Never mind that none of the identified suspects in last Friday’s horrific Paris attacks were refugees, as was initially rumored. Put aside the fact that current US refugee policy prioritizes the most vulnerable: children, female-led households, victims of torture, and those requiring medical care. Never mind, too, that adding more lengthy checks to a processing time that currently averages two years can directly endanger people who are stranded in war zones. Remember, instead, that we’re living in a twisted political moment when the rules governing Republican political discourse seem to be remarkably simple: The more obscene the better, and there isn’t a blow too low when it comes to going after immigrants, refugees, and outsiders.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid vows to filibuster the bill. Meanwhile, Donald “Buzz” Trump calls for what he himself said would have been “unthinkable” a year ago. Trump would consider closing mosques and creating a database for tracking Muslims. The Democratic mayor of Roanoke, VA ponders internment camps for Syrians, citing the WWII precedent with Japanese Americans.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

How swiftly Americans throw down their values and run in the face of a real or imagined threat from The Other is breathtaking. Especially when our own propensity for lashing out violently in fear gives the rest of the world greater reason to fear us than we them. What have Americans to fear from terrorists? We kill each other in far greater numbers every year.

Our own unholy blending of church and state has made being an American like being “born again.” Once saved, always saved. You don’t really have to live up to the gospels to claim the faith and shove it in others’ faces. And Americans born or naturalized? We don’t really have to live up to our professed ideals either. Or even vote, for that matter. (Plenty of Republicans would prefer that we don’t.) No, this nation of immigrants is free to shout liberty and freedom from the rooftops while brandishing weapons and melting down in a “full-fledged xenophobic hysteria.”

We have proven to the world this week just how situational and disposable our vaunted American values have become. Less a system of operational values than a brand. (Team America: paraphernalia imported from China.) We are just that exceptional, and shameless. Do what we say, don’t watch what we do.

No, you do not really have to live your values to claim being a Real American anymore. You only have to show up wearing them on your sleeve. Everybody goes home with a participation trophy.

The long arm of the network executive suite

The long arm of the network executive suite

by digby

They’re doing it again:

CNN global affairs correspondent Elise Labott has been suspended for two weeks, a source at CNN confirmed to POLITICO.

Earlier on Thursday Labott had tweeted about the House voting on a bill that would make it harder for Syrian refugees to enter the United States.

“House passes bill that could limit Syrian refugees. Statue of Liberty bows head in anguish,” she wrote, linking to a CNN article on the vote.

Several critics, including the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, said the tweet showed bias.
Labott did not respond to a request for comment.

But Christiane Amanpour could pretty much characterize President Obama a lily livered coward for failing to promise a full scale invasion of the middle east and Jim Acosta and the rest of the crew’s screaming bloodlust hour after hour day after day was straight professional journalism. Got it. CNN has been absolutely horrible in the wake of these attacks, emoting and chewing the scenery 24/7. It’s like watching a fucking Italian opera.

This is how it goes, folks. All the reporters now understand that there is only one way to present this story.

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Chris Hayes, unique among journalists this week

Chris Hayes, unique among journalists this week

by digby

His broadcast has been great all week taking a serious, sober, unemotional approach to reporting on this story. I doubt it’s been easy. The cable news reporters in general have been over-stimulated and nearly hysterical at times and there is no doubt in my mind that they have helped to unleash what was already a barely restrained bigotry toward Muslims that could have some severe repercussions over the next year or so.

Hayes is an exception, giving us common sense analysis and information and unafraid of telling the whole story without pulling punches. He has not been breathlessly passing on rumors or excitedly fulminating about jihadis coming to kill us all in our beds. These events are frightening enough, we don’t need the news media treating it like a horror movie or stoking it with warporn.

What Hayes has been doing is the role the news anchors used to play when scary things happened in this world. They did not run around like Chicken-little demanding that the government “do something, anything” to keep us safe. They were professionals to whom we turned for calm, clear-headed reporting and analysis. That’s rare today. Very rare.

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Chris Hayes compares the French discussion in the aftermath of the Paris attacks with the American discussion, which has…
Posted by All In with Chris Hayes on Thursday, November 19, 2015

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Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

by digby

This quote from Milton Eisenhower (I like Ike’s brother) is via a very interesting piece by Michael Tomasky on that Roanoke mayor’s implied call for internment of Muslims:

“When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, our West Coast became a potential combat zone. Living in that zone were more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry: two-thirds of them American citizens; one-third aliens. We knew that some among them were potentially dangerous. But no one knew what would happen among this concentrated population if Japanese forces should try to invade our shores. Military authorities therefore determined that all of them, citizens and aliens alike, would have to move.”

Substitute Muslims for Japanese and ask yourself if we might not hear that from someone like Donald Trump in the days ahead. I don’t know if he’ll go that far but the fact that one could easily hear him saying that in much cruder terms tells you everything you need to know.

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“Every one of you are terrorists, I don’t care what you say!”

“Every one of you are terrorists, I don’t care what you say!”

by digby

I sure hope the 47 Democrats who voted with the unanimous GOP House to ensure the US makes it almost impossible for Syrian refugees to find asylum in the land of the free are very, very proud that they’re adding fuel to this fire:

Spotsylvania’s Muslim community is well-established, having roots that date back 30 years, and Samer Shalaby was there to update members of it about plans for the construction of a new mosque. However, two unknown men arrived at the meeting and began shouting at the civil engineer, one of them yelling “this is evil!”

The other was more specific, informing Shalaby and his guests that “every one of you are terrorists. You can smile at me. I don’t care what you say — every Muslim is a terrorist.”

When some of those in attendance attempted to inform the man otherwise, they were told to “shut your mouth. I don’t want to hear your mouth. I will do everything that I can do to keep you from doing what you’re doing. It will happen. That will happen.”

Many in the meeting applauded the men’s violent outburst, with some telling WUSA9 that they’re concerned the new, larger mosque might be used to house Syrian refugees.

Shalaby told WUSA9’s Peggy Fox that “it just kept getting worse and worse — people were pointing fingers and waiving arms.”

I particularly love that creepy racist pig saying “shut your mouth, I don’t want to hear your mouth…”

I just love such liberty loving patriots. Like an opinion writer in the Washington Times:

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Mike Pence, humanitarian

Mike Pence, humanitarian

by digby

Give me your tired, your poor …

Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy welcomed to his state Wednesday a family of Syrian refugees diverted from Indiana because of security concerns raised by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.

“It is the right thing, the humane thing to do,” Malloy told reporters. “Quite frankly, if you believe in God, it’s the morally correct thing to do.”

The family of three fled from Syria to Jordan when their 5-year-old son was less than 1 and is the first family to be redirected after 26 governors objected this week to accepting Syrian refugees, according to The New York Times.

The status of a family of four that was supposed to arrive Dec. 10 in Indianapolis, where they have friends, is in limbo as Catholic Charities weighs how to respond to Pence’s request that the family be directed elsewhere.

“There’s still just a lot of information that we’re all waiting on,” said Heidi Smith, director of refugee services for Catholic Charities Indianapolis. “In the meantime, there’s refugees that have no control of their lives and no place to go and nobody wants them. And we have to think about what it would be like to be in their shoes.”

The state Division of Family Resources sent a letter Tuesday to Exodus Refugee Immigration and to Catholic Charities Indianapolis asking that all Syrian arrivals be “suspended or redirected to another state that is willing to accept Syrian placements until assurances that proper security measure are in place have been provided by the federal government.”

“It’s heartbreaking. It’s a really sad week for Hoosiers,” said Carleen Miller, executive director of Exodus. “I don’t think this represents Hoosiers, as we’ve been overwhelmed with calls from supportive people wanting to help Syrian refugees. We need to have a welcoming message for refugees in this state.”

It’s a sad week for humanity.

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I feel young again. The faint-hearted jellyfish party is back, baby!

I feel young again. The faint-hearted jellyfish party is back!

by digby

I feel young again. It’s as if the last 15 years never happened. I just put some Dixie Chicks on the iPod and I’m getting out my Comfort Food cookbook to celebrate. The Democrats are acting like timorous wimps in the face of bogus right wing fearmongering. Booyah: 

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and White House chief of staff Dennis McDonough made their case against the measure in a closed-door meeting, but members coming out of meeting said their pitch wasn’t effective.

“I’ve seen better presentations in my time here,” said Democratic Rep. Steve Israel of New York, who was still undecided. “They may have strong arguments on their side, but they’re not expressing those strong arguments sufficiently.”

“There’s no question that the Republicans have expertly politicized this,” Israel, who runs House Democrats’ messaging strategy, added.

The House will take up the bill Thursday afternoon, following the release of a Bloomberg poll that found the majority of those surveyed do not want the administration to continue with its plans to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.

During the meeting with administration officials, some Democrats expressed concern about a backlash from their constituents if they voted against the Republicans’ bill. According to a Democratic aide in the room, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York said the party could lose seats if they voted against the bill.

And Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, who will vote in favor of the bill, told reporters it was “carefully crafted” and the administration should work with Republicans on the legislation instead of urging Democrats to vote against.

“(The bill) adds more of a burden in the screening, but it’s not a devastating added burden and it does give assurance that those coming into the country are properly screened and not a threat to anybody.”

From what I understand the bill will require top officials to personally vet the refugees and certify that they are not terrorists. That creates a major roadblock — which is the point.

They can’t even take a stand when they don’t have the majority. You can be sure that if their constituents are quivering in fear of Syrian orphans and want a big daddy figure to crack some heads so they can feel safe again, this is not something that will make them vote for them. In fact, it just makes them look like cowards to everyone.

According to Greg Sargent at the Washington Post, the Democrats in the Senate may block this bill with some kind of poison pill requiring that we close off visas to all Middle Eastern countries, including our allies. I wish I had faith that the Senate would hold the line on this but I doubt it. In any case, the French terrorists all held European passports so unless they’re ready to go there this whole thing is just more fearmongering nonsense.

These Democrats have the cover of their president and both Democratic candidates on this issue. They could take a chance for once that doing the right thing on a national security issue is worth it.

But here we are. Again.

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