Month: December 2015

Republican lawmakers rejoice at the rise of ISIS

by digby

Sure they have to hype threats and behave like barbarians to achieve their goals. But they figure it’s worth it.

And I’m talking about the Republicans.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) on Thursday suggested that the national debate about the Islamic State and terrorism has likely strengthened the Republican party recently.

During an interview on Bloomberg’s “With All Due Respect,” Portman was asked about the state of the GOP.

“I think the party is strong for a couple reasons. One, we’re in a period in our country’s history, sadly, where we have a threat from abroad again. And people tend to look to Republicans to help protect the country,” Portman said in response.

“I’m certainly finding that back home. It’s probably the top issue I’m getting. I had a tele-town hall meeting yesterday with seniors about, you know, issues like Social Security and Medicare, but what came up, you know? ISIS,” he continued. “And I think that, probably based on the polling I’ve seen, what I hear, it probably helps the Republican Party.”

That IS the conventional wisdom. And some of us knew quite a while ago that they were going to take advantage of any opportunity to turn up the fear factor so they could win this election. From last April:

So where does this leave Hillary Clinton? She seems to have as good a resume for the Commander in Chief job as any woman could have with her close proximity to power in the White House for eight years, her eight years as senator and four years as Secretary of State. The only thing missing is a stint in the armed forces — which is also missing on the CV of most of the Republicans presenting themselves as fierce warriors, so it should be no harm, no foul there. (The exceptions being Texas Governor Rick Perry, a pilot in the Air Force, and South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, a member of the Air Force JAG corps.) But stereotypes are very hard to dislodge; even with her reputation for toughness, and despite her sterling resume, Clinton will be pushing against something very primal. The Republicans know this, which is why some of us have been pretty sure they would try to frame this election as a national security election if they could. And they are.

That piece highlighted and interesting piece by national security expert Heather Hurlburt who wrote that nation security crises often brought women over to the Republicans due to raised anxiety about many things, but safety in particular. (Recall the “national security moms” of yore.) The thought was that her advantage among women might be offset by a national security crisis.

Unfortunately for the GOP, “Daddy Trump” with his crazy talk has made it quite a bit more complicated than they’d hoped. It’s just possible that Daddy being makes Clinton seem less of a risk.

Meanwhile, you have Ted Cruz saying this:

“You look at Paris, you look at San Bernardino, it’s given a seriousness to this race, that people are looking for: Who is prepared to be a commander in chief? Who understands the threats we face?Who am I comfortable having their finger on the button? Now that’s a question of strength, but it’s also a question of judgment. And I think that is a question that is a challenging question for both of them.”

All I can say is that it wouldn’t be the guy who said this:

We will utterly destroy ISIS. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.

At this point we can only hope that 51% of Americans don’t support summary executions, torture, targeted killing of wives and children of suspected terrorists, deportation of millions of Latinos and their American children along with Syrian refugees who are already living here, denial of entry into the country of all Muslims or nuclear war. Those of the policies of the top two frontrunner for the GOP nomination.

This is what the political “advantage” on foreign policy brings in 2016.

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All In with Chris Hayes goes back to Baltimore

by digby

The defense rested in the first trial of the Freddie Gray case today. And tonight Hayes revisits the case with a one hour special in Maddow’s slot, 9PM est, 6PM PST, and repeated at 9 on the West Coast. Set your DVR if you’re going out and watch it over the week-end.

Here’s a link to the 30-second trailer for it.

We are only in the beginning of an overdue debate about urban policing and all the factors that play into the dynamic that lead to events like this. It’s important that journalism does its job, particularly with a new “law and order” movement on the right poised to turn its angry focus on the African American community. Donald Trump was endorsed by the national police union yesterday.

This is Chris Hayes at his best, on the ground covering a story in depth. Highly recommend you watch it.

She’ll never try to “help anyone again. Good.

by digby

A “good guy” with a gun got probation. And she’s boiling mad about it:

Duva-Rodriguez didn’t manage to stop the shoplifters when she rattled off several rounds outside an Auburn Hills Home Depot on Oct. 6, although she did flatten one of their tires.

What she did do, however, was spark a nationwide debate – or at least add fuel to an already raging fire.

The shooting came just days after a massacre at a community college in Oregon, an event that led GOP presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson to call for “more guns” to help fight crime.

But Duva-Rodriguez’s attempt at being a good samaritan badly backfired.

She was widely pilloried for pulling out her piece when nothing but property was at stake. Gun experts slammed her, saying she was lucky not to have killed an innocent bystander. Prosecutors called her decision to fire her weapon in a busy parking lot “disturbing” and charged Duva-Rodriguez with misdemeanor reckless use of a handgun.

Duva-Rodriguez did not contest the charge in court, but she was hardly contrite.

“I tried to help,” she told WJBK after her sentencing on Wednesday, before wryly adding: “And I learned my lesson that I will never help anybody again.”

Her lawyer was even more defiant.

“We need more people like Tatiana Duva-Rodriguez in our society,” defense attorney Steven Lyle Schwartz told the Associated Press.

I wonder if Donald Trump would be for summary execution of shoplifters? Probably. Meanwhile “good guys” like this woman are multiplying rapidly in our society as more and more people indulge their Wale Mitty “hero” fantasy and carry guns in public, endangering us all.

There are now about 12.8 million concealed carry permit holders in the U.S., up from 4.6 million in 2007, Ingraham reports. And a recent Gallup poll found that 56 percent of Americans [!!!]say the country would be safer if more people carried concealed firearms.

Despite anecdotal evidence that “good guys” with guns are good for public safety, scientific evidence is much harder to come by. A recent study by Mount St. Mary’s University found that people without firearms training had either dangerously itchy or dangerously slow trigger fingers. “Carrying a gun in public does not provide self-defense unless the carrier is properly trained and maintains their skill level,” the study’s authors wrote.

Duva-Rodriguez saw herself as somebody’s savior. She was in the Home Depot parking lot when she heard a scream. A loss prevention officer was chasing a shoplifter with a cart full of stolen power tools. When the man loaded the tools into a waiting getaway car, Duva-Rodriguez pulled out her pistol and fired two rounds.

“I made a decision in a split second,” she told judge Julie Nicholson on Wednesday, according to WJBK. “Maybe it was not the right one, but I was trying to help.”

That is, of course, the problem. One split second decision and someone could be killed. For no good reason. After all, she could have gotten the license plate number and called the police who could have arrested the shoplifter and that would have been that. Instead, she risked the lives of bystanders and the shoplifters who, unless things have changed drastically, we don’t execute for their crimes.

She’s learned her lesson. She won’t try to help anymore. Thank God. But I am seriously worried about the 12 million and counting other “good Samaritans” out there who are just like her.

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Il est Zombie

by digby

This man has a TV show:

A zombie nativity scene in Ohio drew the ire of Fox Business host Lou Dobbs Wednesday, who suggested the “appalling” display should mock a religion other than Christianity — namely, Islam.

“The creator of this obscenity, Jasen Dixon, insists that the display in his front yard is not anti-Christian. It would be interesting to see if he had the guts to be anti-Muslim,” Dobbs said in his introduction of the segment, later adding the scene seems “insensitive” to Christians.

“I think if you’re going to mock a religion, I’m thinking they should have chosen the Islamic religion,” Dobbs suggested. “Wouldn’t that have been, somewhat, a display of courage?”

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It’s all good

by digby

The Establishment's only hope: Trump & me in a cage match. Sorry to disappoint — @realDonaldTrump is terrific. #DealWithIt— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 11, 2015

And the sad thing is that he’s running a smart campaign. He knows those Republican voters.

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“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
by Tom Sullivan

Flipping channels the other night, I caught this key scene from The Dark Knight. Bruce Wayne is having trouble wrapping his brain around just what the Joker is after. Alfred explains that trying to understand the Joker logically might be futile:

Alfred Pennyworth: … some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Hold that thought.

As Matt Bevin was being sworn in as the new governor of Kentucky this week, NPR ran a story about struggling people in rural Kentucky who, in spite of Bevin threatening to roll back Medicaid expansion in the state, voted for him anyway. Liberals have a hard time wrapping their brains around that (emphasis mine):

Among those on Medicaid in Jackson County is Angel Strong, an unemployed nurse in McKee, Ky. — one of roughly half a million Kentuckians who received health insurance after outgoing Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat, embraced the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. Kentucky saw one of the sharpest declines in the rate of uninsured adults.

“I had never had Medicaid, because I had insurance at my job,” said Strong. “Now I am out of a job and I am looking for another job, but in the meantime I had no income.”

Bevin’s lack of support for expanded Medicaid didn’t faze Strong, who voted for Bevin because she supported his socially conservative stands against gay marriage and abortion.

“My religious beliefs outweigh whether or not I have insurance,” Strong said.

[snip]

Strong, and her hair stylist, Stephanie Wilson, both voted for Bevin because they believe too many people in Jackson County rely on the government.

“They want everything they can get for free,” Strong said.

“They think somebody owes it to them — just because,” chimed in Wilson. “Nobody owes you anything. You earn what you get.”

Let’s keep going. A friend last night mentioned this Daily Kos diary about how conservatives, even Christian ones, believe justice works in the universe. The setting was a Bible study in which the writer and a group of “Fox News watchers and Tea Party sympathizers” are discussing the parable of the Prodigal Son (emphasis mine):

After rereading the story, the pastor asked each of us with which character we identified. Ironically, even though I was the only childless person present, I was alone in identifying with the father. I’ve been in situations where I was so happy to see a person again whom I had missed that I was perfectly willing to forgive and forget whatever had happened in the past.

The old ladies, without an exception, identified with the prodigal son’s brother, who they believed had been wronged by the father. The poor brother had done everything right, yet the other one, the bad one, got the party. How was that fair? Why wasn’t the good brother rewarded and the irresponsible one punished?

I pointed out to them that while the prodigal son had a brief time of debauchery, it was followed by a rather miserable life, during which he had to work as a swineherd — not a pleasant occupation for a Jew. “Yes,” a woman named Elaine replied, “but that was his own fault! He brought it on himself! Besides, the only reason he even came back was that he was broke and miserable. He probably wasn’t even really sorry.”

“So what would you have done if you were the father?” the pastor asked.

“I would have told him off, of course,” Elaine answered. “I would have said, ‘You made your bed, so now lie in it. Go right back to where you came from!'”

“But what if the father loved the son so much that he wanted to forgive him?” the pastor followed up.

“Well, but that’s not love; that’s enabling. Besides, the son did not DESERVE to be forgiven.”

“That’s exactly the point of the story,” I chimed in. “The son didn’t deserve forgiveness but received it anyway. According to Jesus, that’s how the Kingdom of Heaven works.”

“Well,” fumed Elaine, “sometimes Jesus is just plain wrong.”

That is their world view, and the Savior himself cannot change it. For some people, faith in the Constitution, fair play, honesty, e pluribus unum — even their faith in Jesus — is a mile wide and an inch deep compared to gut-level ideology, however loudly they proclaim otherwise. Their belief in salvation may indeed be deeply held, but not as deeply as their dualistic, quasi-eastern, contra-Christian sense of how the universe is supposed to work. Salvation for me but not for thee.

Policy arguments do not sway such people. Democrats should just stop trying. It is not how they vote, no matter how the left finds that confounding. I’m thinking here about ideologues (left or right). True believers. Fundamentalists of any stripe. Fire-and-brimstone preachers. Do they all, on some level, just want to watch the world burn for rejecting them? Or at least, anyone who is not with them?

Conveniently, Jesus gave Christians a choice in how they approach that:

Mark 9
40 “For he that is not against us is on our part.”

Luke 11
23 “He that is not with me is against me”

Guess which one this woman chose:

Update: Oops, that was Mark 9:40.

A poll of Bizarroworld (I hope)

by digby

I don’t know what these Republicans are smoking but I need some:

Unless they’re right. In which case, I really need some of that stuff they’re smoking.

A lesson for Chicken Little

by digby

Maybe some of these right wing panic artists will listen to Daniel Larison at the American Conservative. (I doubt it, but it’s worth a try.)

The truth is that ISIS and its affiliates don’t pose an “existential threat” to Western societies, and it is laughable to think that they ever could. They arguably don’t pose an “existential threat” to anyone except the people that have unfortunately fallen under their control and possibly their immediate neighbors. At the very least, the threat they pose to us and to other Western nations remains a relatively small and manageable one. The only real “existential threat” that Western nations have faced since WWII was the Soviet Union and their satellites, and in the end the threat from them proved to be a manageable one that the U.S. and its allies successfully faced down and outlasted. ISIS poses a much smaller threat to the U.S. and its allies than the Soviets ever did, and we should not inflate that threat into something that it clearly isn’t. The problem isn’t just that threat inflation is bad analysis (though it is), but that it often leads to reckless and irresponsible policies that aren’t even required to address the danger. Threat inflation prompts us to favor unnecessary and excessive measures here and overseas, and it causes us to obsess over combating certain adversaries to the detriment of other more important interests. Describing something as an “existential threat” is the worst and most irresponsible kind of threat inflation. It is a phrase that ought to be reserved to describe only the most dire threats to our very survival. That doesn’t apply to ISIS or indeed to any terrorist group.

Thank you. But I suspect this is just spitting into the wind. These people deeply desire an “existential” threat so they can justify their free-floating fear of everything and their deep desire for violence to be the silver bullet that will fix it for them. It’s primitive human species stuff which civilized leadership from institutions like the church and the government are supposed to mediate. Instead they’re stoking it for their own ends.

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We tried to warn you …

by digby

This is a nice piece by Brian Beutler on the fact that liberals (and even centrists) have been trying to warn the GOP of the danger of going down the path they’ve gone:

While closing the country to foreign Muslims altogether is a radical idea relative to our founding ideals and current policy, it is but an incremental step relative to the outer bounds of legitimate debate in the GOP primary. Republican presidential candidates have supported discriminating against Muslims in our refugee policy, and opposed the very notion of a Muslim-American president, all without subjecting themselves to universal condemnation. The most surprising part of the latest Trump story is that it proves a Republican candidate can take Islamophobia too far for his party’s tastes.

For most liberals, and for the Trump-backing or Trump-curious segments of the right, the Trump phenomenon needs little further explanation. The only people who claim to be befuddled by the Trump phenomenon are officials on knife-edge in the party he leads.

On the left, the view that Republicans allowed the conservative grassroots to turn their party into a political action committee for white ressentiment has evolved over the years from an argument into a creed. Since at least 2012, liberals have been warning (at times mockingly, but never disingenuously) that by indulging and at times fanning the hostilities and procedural extremism of this part of their coalition, Republicans were letting expediency get the better of them.

Actually liberals have been issuing this warning for a lot longer than that. One might even say forever. But this specific spasm of outrageous extremism really hit its stride in 1998 when it impeached a duly elected president over a personal indiscretion and turned politics into an embarrassing tabloid obsession. This may seem like a trivial thing now but it was their first serious foray into the breaking of norms and rules of governance that had up to that point kept the system running with at least baseline efficiency. When they pulled out their partisan IEDs in the 2000 election they proved all bets were off.

This form of slash and burn politics has always been part of American politics on some level but this latest iteration hit warp speed in the 1980s when Gingrich and the back benchers, followed by right wing media, started making their move. Trump is the inevitable result.

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Cruz’s pivot to normal human

by digby

The New York Times today has a story about Cruz showing his human side on the trail:

Senator Ted Cruz had been at it for several minutes, offering handshakes and uneasy smiles, when he encountered an apparent holdout in the crowd.

Mr. Cruz squatted. He squinted. He had heard something about a toy collection. And so, about three feet above the floor of an American Legion hall here, the senator began his questioning.

“You have lots of toys?” he asked 3-year-old Isaac Josselyn. Nothing.

“What’s your favorite toy?” More silence.

“Do you have a dinosaur?’”

“Do you have a fire truck?”

“You have a toy monkey?”

Isaac stared blankly.

“A toy monkey!” Mr. Cruz shouted, revving for a punch line no one understood. “You know what that means? You get to be the monkey in the house!”

Isaac shuffled away. Mr. Cruz turned quickly to an adult well-wisher. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said softly.

Less than two months before voting begins, Mr. Cruz, of Texas, has vaulted into the Republican presidential race’s top tier as the consummate Washington bomb thrower — wagging fingers, pounding lecterns and gleefully accumulating enemies in both parties.

Now comes the hard part: making friends.

As his crowds swell in Iowa and he battles with Donald J. Trump to lock down the party’s more conservative voters, Mr. Cruz — appraised as grating and pompous as a matter of bipartisan consensus — is working diligently at the simple task of establishing human connections.

It is a bigger lift than it might seem. Mr. Cruz appears keenly aware of his charm deficit, acknowledging in private that his retail campaigning skills can lag behind his grasp of policy. At a debate in October, he became perhaps the first candidate in modern history to declare himself unappealing bar company.

“If you want someone to grab a beer with, I may not be that guy,” he said, when asked to name a weakness. “But if you want someone to drive you home, I will get the job done and I will get you home.”

This is all strategic on his part. He’s proved his fiery wingnut bonafides. He’s got the evangelicals. (Iowa evangelical leader Bob VanderPlatz and OG Movement conservative leader Richard Viguerie both endorsed him today.) Now he’s going to try to boraden his reach.

He’s pretty Nixonian when it comes to the personal touch. But he’s not as bad as some people think. Back in November I noted an interview with Jake Tapper in which he seemed like a normal human being and it startled me. Don’t assume he can’t do it because he can:

CRUZ: You know, I will say something.

As you know, I met my wife, Heidi, on the Bush 2000 campaign. And we were one of eight marriages came out of that campaign, which — something I tell young people, if you’re looking to meet a spouse, come to a presidential campaign.

(LAUGHTER)

CRUZ: And it led to a lousy joke that I have told all over the state of Texas, which is, whatever anyone else thinks of George W. Bush, in our house, he will always be a uniter, and not a divider.

(LAUGHTER)

TAPPER: Let’s — let me — let’s stay on the family theme, but a slightly more serious one.

Jeb Bush has been talking about his daughter’s struggles with addiction recently. It’s a huge issue out there, especially in New Hampshire, where…

CRUZ: Yes. Yes.

TAPPER: … you’re campaigning a lot these days.

In your book, which I have read and I do recommend — it’s a great — it’s a great campaign book, one that you actually wrote — you write rather movingly about your older sister Miriam…

CRUZ: Yes.

TAPPER: … her struggles with anger, and ultimately with drugs. And she died in 2011, after accidentally overdosing.

CRUZ: Yes.

TAPPER: Did that experience teach you anything in terms of dealing with addiction as a society or as a representative of the government?

CRUZ: It’s a horrible disease. And I have seen it firsthand.

I mean, my sister Miriam was 9 years older than I am, so I grew up with her. She was my half-sister from my dad’s first marriage. And her parents got divorced when she was a little girl. And Miriam was always very angry about it. And it — it consumed her.

And she was — she was smart. She was beautiful. And yet, her whole life, she lived basically as an angry teenager. She was sort of frozen emotionally in a state of rebellion. And she — she made decision after decision that was the wrong decision. And she struggled her whole life with drug and alcohol addiction.

She was in and out of prison for petty crimes, I mean, for shoplifting, for — for little things. But she kept associating with people who were really bad actors.

And, you know, when I was in my mid-20s, things got really bad for Miriam. She actually — she was living in a crack house.

TAPPER: In Philadelphia.

CRUZ: Yes.

And so my dad flew up to see me, and the two of us, we left our rings and our watches and our wallets and everything, because we were driving to a crack house to try to get my sister out. And, you know, we didn’t know if we’d be robbed or shot or what — what we were going to experience.

And we pulled her out. We went to a Denny’s and spent about four hours trying to talk to her, saying, Miriam, what are you doing? And she was just angry. She wouldn’t change.

And you can’t — with an addict, you can’t make them change if they’re unwilling to get treatment, if they’re unwilling to walk a different path. And, you know, Miriam had a son, my nephew Joey, who was going into seventh grade at the time. And we’re saying, “Miriam, look, Joey needs you.”

She wasn’t able to provide for him, so I had just gotten out of law school. I ended up putting a $20,000 cash advance on my credit card and paying to put Joey in a military school, Valley Forge Military Academy.

And I think that year made a real difference in his life, providing some structure and some order. And then, by the end of the year, she had improved somewhat and was able to care for her son again.

But then, as you noted, she…

TAPPER: Yes.

CRUZ: … a few years ago overdosed one night. And Joey came to the apartment and — and found her dead.

TAPPER: That’s a horrible story. And our — my deepest condolences.

CRUZ: Yes.

This guy is smart and he’s strategic. And he’s a nightmare.

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