Month: December 2015

With Trumpism mainstream where do professional right wing haters have to go?

by digby

I wrote about the latest wingnut dilemma for Salon today:

As I went to press with this column, the San Bernardino shooters were unknown, but I had a pretty good inkling they weren’t white men. Days earlier, in response to Robert Dear Jr.’s murder of three people at a Colorado Springs shopping mall last week, The New York Times exulted:

“Even as politicians and those in Congress pump up public fears at the supposed threat of refugees fleeing Syria, every day in America people — mostly white men — are walking into movie theaters, restaurants, churches, grade schools and health care centers armed to the teeth, determined to take as many people out as they can.”

Mostly white men???

I know it didn’t happen here, but is the Times really going to ignore the murder of 130 people in Paris two weeks ago?

Here at home, an Oregon Community College was shot up in October — by a mixed-race, half-black immigrant, Chris Harper-Mercer. Nine people were killed. It’s hard to remember every sensational crime, but that was just two months ago.

Last year, another mixed-race immigrant, Elliot Rodger, committed mass murder at a sunny college campus in Santa Barbara, killing twice as many people as Robert Dear did — in half the time! That seemed like a pretty big story to me, but the media passed over it pretty quickly. The Times has airbrushed it from history.

In 2013, two Chechen immigrants — also allegedly fleeing persecution — blew up the Boston Marathon.

In 2012, Haitian immigrant Kesler Dufrene murdered as many people in Miami as Robert Dear did in Colorado Springs. One of Dufrene’s victims was a 15-year-old girl. Dufrene had already been convicted of a felony in the United States, so he should have been deported, but our “Deporter in Chief” Obama had blocked his return to Haiti. As the murdered girl’s mother said, “Because of immigration, my daughter is not alive.”

Have you ever heard of Dufrene? I don’t think his murders got as much press as the “Planned Parenthood” shooting.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Jared Loughner. But have you ever heard of Eduardo Sencion?

In 2011, nine months after Loughner’s shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona, Sencion, a Mexican immigrant, shot up a Carson City, Nevada, IHOP, killing four Americans, including three National Guardsmen and a 67-year old woman.

Eduardo was a Mexican immigrant. The Times ran two stories on his mass murder — on Pages 17 and 18. By contrast, Loughner’s shooting got dozens of write-ups in the Times, including at least three front-page articles, three editorials and 10 op-eds.

The media are tickled pink whenever they have a white perpetrator because it happens so rarely in a country that is majority white.

Traditional buck passing

by digby

It’s good to know that some traditions survive no matter what:

In the wake of the Paris attacks, a majority of young Americans support sending U.S. ground troops to fight ISIS, according to a wide-ranging new poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics.

The institute has asked millennials about the idea of American boots on the ground at three different times this year, and the survey results have fluctuated somewhat, but there seems to be a “hardening of support.”

In this most recent survey, 60 percent of the 18- to 29-year-olds polled say they support committing U.S. combat troops to fight ISIS. But an almost equal number (62 percent) say they wouldn’t want to personally join the fight, even if the U.S. needed additional troops.

The disconnect in joining the fight comes down to how millennials feel about the government writ large, according to Harvard IOP Polling Director John Della Volpe.

“I’m reminded of the significant degree of distrust that this generation has about all things related to government,” said Della Volpe. “And I believe if young people had a better relationship with government … they’d be more open to serving.”

I don’t know about that last bit. It sounds like a very convenient rationalization by the person who did the study.

It’s always a very few who want to go to war unless there is an existential threat. Millennials are smart enough to know that ISIS is not an existential threat. So, they figure it’s fine to send the people who want to join up and like fighting wars over to do their jobs. That’s how we do it these days. I’d imagine if there were a draft the support for troops on the ground would be substantially reduced among this cohort.

Millennials are no different than the rest of the country on this. Surprise. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

.

Responsible journalism

by digby

Was this a cop-out?

This week’s cover — TIME Person of the Year 2015: Angela Merkel #TIMEPOY https://t.co/ulDjnIh8xo pic.twitter.com/GSGSF19rCa

— TIMEPolitics (@TIMEPolitics) December 10, 2015

In the past they weren’t afraid to pick the demagogue:

On the other hand, giving it to Trump would have made him even more popular so not giving it to him was a rare case of journalistic responsibility.

Tell Congress today — Keep the crude oil export ban in place

by Gaius Publius

Short and brutally ugly. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. The White House is reportedly the chief negotiator on behalf of Big Oil’s attempt to lift the crude oil export ban. As part of the government shutdown negotiation, the White House, in collusion with Democrats in the Senate, is willing to lift the crude oil export ban in exchange for “renewable energy … conservation benefits … and other party priorities” (see below for this language). More here; search for “oil”.

To be clear, lifting the four-decades-old crude oil export ban would be a disaster. In particular, it would:

1. Give the GOP and the American Petroleum Institute (API) a huge win on a top-priority item.
    
2. Throw a lifeline to struggling U.S. oil producers, many of whom are terribly over-leveraged and would otherwise default on their debt. (This is one reason API wants the ban lifted so badly.)
    
3. Bail out the industry’s debt-holders (banks and other entities), whose money is at risk should these oil producers fail (yes, another bank bailout).
    
4. Add a great deal to the carbon that enters the atmosphere by removing a choke-point for bringing extracted U.S. carbon to the global market. (Think of this as offsetting the Keystone pipeline rejection. Instead of preventing carbon from coming to the market, this would enable it.)
    
5. Offset any good Obama may be trying to do in Paris, by a lot.
    
6. Offset or destroy his attempt to create a “good on carbon” legacy. Obama, simply put, is acting like a “Big Oil enabler,” and should the deal go through, he deserves to see that phrase on his tombstone every time he looks at it.

Bottom line, President “good on carbon” Obama and the White House are the driving force behind a Big Oil top priority, if it can traded for “other party priorities.” For perspective, realize we have to strangle fossil fuel production and consumption, not enable it, to have a hope in hell of surviving the chaos that’s about to be locked in. Obama, the Republicans, and every Democrat in Congress who votes Yes to lifting this ban is voting to end your children’s future, not preserve it.

(They probably think their own climate-chaos exit is secure, as Chris Hedges notes here: “Those who are despoiling the earth do so for personal gain, believing they can use their privilege to escape the fate that will befall the human species.” I’m not sure they’re going to escape successfully. The carbon-enabling elites had better be living in Sweden, with Blackwater mercs surrounding their isolated compounds, when the cascading collapses occur — though I’m not sure Sweden, or Canada, will let them all in.)

Make no mistake. While the world works hard on a deal in Paris to stave off carbon emissions, the White House and the Senate are brokering a deal (currently S.1372) to “pave the way for the US to become a petro state,” as one commenter put it.

For more, here’s Elana Schor, writing in Politico (no link; subscription only):

White House keeps GOP hopes for oil exports alive
By Elana Schor
12/08/2015 04:04 PM EDT

The White House on Tuesday declined to rule out accepting a Congressional measure to allow U.S. oil exports for the first time in four decades, a potential signal to senior Democrats who are considering striking a deal with the GOP to overturn the ban in exchange for other party priorities.

The White House “continues to oppose” a legislative provision rolling back the decades-old ban on exporting U.S. crude, spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters, “but I’m just not going to get into a detailed list of things we are going to veto or not veto.” …

Climate Hawks Vote political director Brad Johnson urged President Barack Obama to close the door to oil exports to reinforce the administration’s goal of reaching a strong global emissions pact at the climate change conference in Paris this week.

“All the efforts of his climate negotiators in Paris could be blown away by this one boneheaded appeasement of Big Oil,” Johnson said.

One official at a group fighting to preserve the export ban said environmentalists are concerned that the White House’s “door [is] wide open for wheeling and dealing and trading.”

Some in the White House “think there’s a way to get a good conservation package” in exchange for allowing oil exports, said a source off the Hill who is closely tracking the talks who requested anonymity. …

Though Johnson slammed as “unconscionable” the growing openness among some Democrats and green groups to a trade-off that would roll back the export ban in exchange for renewable energy and conservation benefits, that willingness to compromise showed no signs of abating on Tuesday.

The so-called “green groups” are not innocent bystanders. Many are enablers, along with so-called “liberals” like Barbara Boxer:

Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.), top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, shrugged off environmentalist fears about trading conservation and renewables’ benefits for oil exports. There is “division” among green groups over whether to cut a deal, she said in a brief interview. “I’ve heard environmentalists say this is a great opportunity; others say it’s not,” she said.

Any deal would also likely include some type of aid for refineries in the Northeast that have benefited from cheap domestic crude that cannot be exported currently. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) said he said he is in discussions for an approach “to make whole American refineries that in many cases would simply go out of business” should exports be permitted.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters that oil exports were not objectionable enough to sink a possible deal on their own.

Ending the 1970s-era ban on exports, the year’s top priority for the American Petroleum Institute, is “not where we want to go,” Hoyer said. “But on the other hand, if there were substantial agreements by the Republicans on some things that we thought were very important, that might be something” to consider during the budget talks.

Among the perps are some of the solar companies, who would get a small benefit for themselves from a Democratic “compromise.” For example:

SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive, head of the nation’s biggest rooftop solar power company, fueled talk of a deal that would marry clean-energy tax benefits with conservation funding – as well as other Democratic priorities – during an interview in Paris yesterday. If allowing exports “in return, enabled us to have long-term visibility into continuing to incentivize and promote solar, then I think that’s a fair trade,” Rive said.

Another perp is the National Wildlife Federation. Yes, NWF is supports the deal. Feel free to read their sell-out logic for yourself. One reason we can’t have nice climate is our enemies. The other is our “friends,” like NWF, Barbara Boxer, Barack Obama and the rest of that crew.

What You Can Do

The deal is not done, and the carbon part of the shutdown negotiation may be sabotaged for any number of reasons, including your opposition. But it’s an all-hands-on-deck moment. If your senators are listed below, please call them now and say, “To keep the earth habitable, the ban must stand.”

Senate phone numbers here. You can also support the strongest pro-climate candidate in the presidential race, Bernie Sanders (adjust the split any way you like at the link).

The deadline for the biggest climate tipping point — irreversible warming to an uncivilized planet — is less than 10 years away, by my estimation, if we do nothing to stop the carbon industry and its lust for money. Ten years — which means we should be permanently decelerating emissions as aggressively as possible, and doing it now. Everything on the climate front is happening faster than anyone predicted — sea level rise, glacial melt, everything. Preserving the crude oil ban is at least as important is stopping the Keystone pipeline, and likely more so, given the number of other pipelines we continue to build.

This really needs to stop, these accelerating emissions — by which I mean, be stopped. Please, if they won’t take action, you still can. Because frankly, if we don’t manage the chaos that’s on the horizon, it will manage us, and I hear chaos is a very bad manager.

GP

.

Trump’s right. We have gotten soft.
by Tom Sullivan

Donald Trump’s “bold statement” on banning Muslims from the country has freed us (at last). Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) told Chris Hayes on All In last night that Trump has freed us from “politically correct enforcement” and opened up space for serious consideration of his immodest proposal. Meaning Muslim is the new N-word (or something) and can be used derisively in polite company by Real Men. The segment was jaw-dropping.

Transcript at Crooks and Liars.

A stunned Hayes offered past cases where Americans traveled the Road to Xenophobia before — sans Hope and Crosby — to their historical regret. King brushed them aside and went off on Sharia law and how Islam is incompatible with the Constitution:

HAYES: Let me ask you this. Why are you so confident that they got that wrong, that we now look with the sort of benefit of hindsight, we say well, clearly that’s bigotry. Catholics weren’t infiltrating America to bring it orders down from the Vatican.

How can you be so confident that you are correct about the religion of Islam that it is really different in this insidious way, and 50 years from now, people aren’t going to look back on what you are saying and put it in that same category?

KING: Well, first, I would say that Catholics came in and competed with the Protestant work ethic. That was one thing. And they did assimilate into the broader society, and a lot of them, especially Irish Catholic, did their best to sound like they were English rather than Irish by dropping the O and the apostrophe would be one of the things. They changed their names to blend in more —

HAYES: Congressman, I can cite you chapter and verse of literature at the times saying these Italians, they speak only Italian. They don’t speak our language. These folks coming from other places — it sounds identical to what you are saying about Muslims now. It really does.

KING: But you’re hearing the imams that are preaching in places like the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. The imam there preached to the migrants go in to western Europe, build your enclaves there, breed their women, and do not associate or assimilate into the broader society.

You might call that a peaceful invasion, but that’s the nicest thing can you call it. They’re not assimilating, and they’re not assimilating because Sharia law is incompatible with the Constitution of the United States. And that’s an important principle that we need to have a debate about.

An imam? Seems I remember some guy named Khrushchev shaking his fist and pounding the table at the United Nations and promising the West “We will bury you.” That guy was the leader of a military empire. He had at his disposal an army, a navy, an air force, and a fleet of nuclear-tipped, intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Whatever happened to that guy anyway?

Trump’s right. If America’s next existential threat is Muslims breeding with our women, we have gotten soft. And speaking of “soft”…

Conservatives like King have been obsessed with the birthrate gap between the West and Islam for at least a decade now. I wrote this in response to Mark Steyn’s “It’s the Demography, Stupid” in the Wall Street journal back in 2006:

… the Christian world risks being eventually overrun because of “our lack of civilizational confidence.” (The cure for which is, no doubt, civilizational Viagra.) Americans are not afraid enough of the urgent threat posed by Muslim children and must retaliate by stockpiling more of our own.

To plagiarize a quote from a review of one of nuclear-alarmist Jonathan Schell’s old books, “I shudder to think how I’ve failed. I shudder for Mark Steyn, for all the time he’s spent banging away at his typewriter instead of banging away elsewhere.”

But thank heavens average Americans can still muster the cojones to verbally assault these implacable, Sharia-wielding breeders when they are peacefully praying in a park.

It’s 6 a.m. and I already need a drink.

QOTD: Aqua buddha

by digby

Rand Paul is upset that Trumpie’s getting all the attention for his Muslim ban when his exclusion plan was so much more practical:

I’ve called for something similar, which is a moratorium based on high risk. And so we have examined where the high risk of terrorism comes from and it’s about 34 countries. I would put a pause on all immigration from those 34 countries. I have actually introduced legislation and got a vote on it. I had a vote on it just last week. Which is kind of interesting, all the hoopla, because people don’t seem to understand a similar concept has already been voted on.

It was voted on and only got 10 votes in favor. Of course that was before Trump moved the goalposts. Maybe Paul can get it back on the schedule now that everyone knows the GOP voters really, really hate those Muslims so much. Paul’s could be the “compromise.” Maybe he could even get a few Democrats to vote for it.

In the past I might have remarked on the awesome evolution of Rand Paul the libertarian into a jackbooted authoritarian (and for no good reason since his chances of becoming president are less than zero.) But why bother? He’s just another GOP wingnut. Actually he’s always been just another GOP wingnut.

.

My oh my

by digby

Fair ‘n balanced. And unafraid:

On presidential power and the potential to do great harm

by digby

This is a great piece at the Vox blog called Mischiefs of Faction about the power of the presidency which examines the unfortunate tendency among some political scientists to mock those who suggest that a president has any power. We are seeing more of this emerge as the prospect of Trump as president becomes something people are taking seriously.

… The American presidency is not omnipotent or magical. But it is very, very powerful…

They can’t make people do things they don’t want to do, or dislodge entrenched aspects of the system. But presidents still occupy a unique place in the system. They are part of it — they lead the executive branch, where a lot of power resides, much of it bureaucratic and unsexy but nevertheless consequential.

Policy really comes to life in its enforcement. Presidents can use this process in a variety of ways to infuse their own priorities — see executive orders on the “global gag rule” about abortion counseling, for example. Presidents can also empower or strangle agencies, depending on what they think of the mission. Civil rights enforcement has contracted under recent Republican administrations, as has enforcement of environmental regulation. And Obama’s presidency has provided plenty of examples of selective enforcement to support liberal priorities, such as executive action on deporting undocumented immigrants.

Second, although presidents cannot make members of Congress do anything they don’t want to do, they can exercise considerable leadership and influence over the agenda. Obama’s pursuit of health care reform is a good example of this — it’s entirely possible that Democratic members of Congress would have preferred to start with a broader economic bill or environmental issues or something along those lines. Presidents can set the agenda based on personal conviction — but they’re also in a position to look at the big picture of what party members might be prepared to support, or what might fit a national party agenda, while members of Congress have historically had more narrow political incentives. A misfire in this regard can make a difference, too. What if Bush had pursued something other than Social Security reform in 2005?

In addition, presidents, as political theorist Harvey Mansfield famously noted in Taming the Prince, are charged with the necessary discretion to defend and preserve the Constitution, to take care that the laws are faithfully executed — a power that can be read as minimal and even as the president being a “clerk” of Congress — or as a power that, as Mansfield observed, is impossible to fully subsume under the Constitution.

This really makes a difference when it comes to national response to unexpected, unprecedented, and complex situations. Think the Civil War, the Cuban missile crisis, 9/11. These kinds of events are, of course, rare. But the two fairly marginal powers listed above — enforcement and agenda setting — become central in a crisis. The results can be lasting and far-reaching. And the structure of the presidency, set up to enable secrecy and immediate action, makes it very difficult to confine. It’s true, for example, that Bush’s decisions in the Iraq War eventually became unpopular, resulting in Democratic victories in 2006 and a contentious divided government for Bush’s last two years. But nevertheless, we are still contending with the impact of those early decisions.

The piece makes another important point about how a president might function if he or she were not confined by party ties and it isn’t comforting. It’s often the party that keeps a president in check. It concludes with this extremely important observation and one which people should consider very, very strongly when they decide their vote:

One really unpleasant truth that emerges from this is that there’s a certain asymmetry to what presidents can do. A really skilled and brilliant president can’t fix everything. But one with bad judgment can do lasting damage.

.

A little perspective

by digby

The irrationality of the latest Chicken Little terrorists-are-all-coming-to-kill-us-in-our-beds crisis is enough to make my head explode. The violence we just live with every day like it’s nothing is completely accepted. We can’t do a thing about it. God put it into the constitution and that’s that.

But a Muslim terrorist attack on a Christmas party at a county office in San Bernardino has everyone running around in circles screaming “ohmyGODwe’reallgonnadie!!!”

It’s so inane that I’m feeling a little bit crazy just trying to write about it.

Here’s a map which illustrates just how batshit ridiculous it all is:

There is no deal breaker


by digby

I’m not sure I ever understood why Trump’s latest atrocity was seen to be the deal breaker — after all, he has been calling mexicans rapists and saying he was going to deport 12 million people including their American children for months. It’s not like this isn’t entirely in keeping with his other comments.

In any case, it isn’t a deal breaker with the voters:

Almost two-thirds of likely 2016 Republican primary voters favor Donald Trump’s call to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S., while more than a third say it makes them more likely to vote for him.

Those are some of the findings from a Bloomberg Politics/Purple Strategies PulsePoll, an online survey conducted Tuesday, that shows support at 37 percent among all likely general-election voters for the controversial proposal put forward by the Republican front-runner.

“We believe these numbers are made up of some people who are truly expressing religious bigotry and others who are fearful about terrorism and are willing to do anything they think might make us safer,” Doug Usher, who runs polling for Washington-based Purple Strategies, said in his analysis of the findings. “This indicates that, despite some conventional wisdom expressed in the last 48 hours, this is unlikely to hurt Trump at least in the primary campaign.”

Apparently, the only Republicans who oppose this must be office holders and media figures because that’s a very small number in opposition.

The “fearful about terrorism” is just crazy. We had an attack in which people hijacked passenger planes and flew them into buildings killing thousands of people 15 years ago. Nobody proposed anything like this. And, by the way, we haven’t had an attack even close to that scale since then.

Being fearful of lunatics with guns randomly shooting people completely rational. These things happen with terrifying frequency in our country. What isn’t rational is that these Trump people are only afraid of this when a Muslim is on the other side of the semi-automatic weapon. otherwise it’s just the price of freedom.

This is nuts. But then these Republican voters have been working themselves into a frenzy for quite some time. They’re more than ready for a man on a white horse.

.

The GOP establishment is in a tough position. They know that Trump could take his ball and run as an independent and siphon off enough votes to ensure they will lose. (Unlike Perot, Trump draws from them exclusively.) But they are also facing the prospect of Trump doing so much damage to their party that they can’t win anyway, even if he doesn’t get the nomination. (And who know? He might just get it.)