Month: December 2015

They’re not just talking about refugees

by digby

Or rather, here’s how you move the goalposts to make the disgusting anti-refugee sentiment the reasonable compromise:

It Only Takes One: Why We Must Stop Importing Jihad Through Muslim Immigration

George Rasley, CHQ Editor | 12/1/2015

Now-retired General Michael Flynn served in the United States Army for more than 30 years, most recently as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he was the nation’s highest-ranking military intelligence officer.

Previously, General Flynn served as assistant director of national intelligence inside the Obama administration. General Michael FlynnFrom 2004 to 2007, he was stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq, where, as commander of the US Special Forces, he hunted top al-Qaida terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the predecessors to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who today heads the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq. After Flynn’s team located Zarqawi’s whereabouts, the US killed the terrorist in an air strike in June 2006.

In a revealing interview with the German magazine Spiegel Online, Flynn explained the rise of the Islamic State and provided some key insights into why Obama has failed in the war radical Islam has declared on the West.

Among General Flynn’s most incisive observations was this exchange with reporters Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In recent weeks, Islamic State not only conducted the attacks in Paris, but also in Lebanon and against a Russian airplane over the Sinai Peninsula. What has caused the organization to shift its tactics and to now operate internationally?

Flynn: There were all kinds of strategic and tactical warnings and lots of reporting. And even the guys in the Islamic State said that they were going to attack overseas. I just don’t think people took them seriously. When I first heard about the recent attacks in Paris, I was like, “Oh, my God, these guys are at it again, and we’re not paying attention.” The change that I think we need to be more aware of is that, in Europe, there is a leadership structure. And there’s likely a leader or a leadership structure in each country in Europe. The same is probably similar for the United States, but just not obvious yet. (emphasis ours)

General Flynn then further explained that this leadership structure is not one that mirrors our own top-down leadership structure or the structures commonly associated with a nation-state.

Flynn: Exactly. In Osama bin Laden’s writings, he elaborated about being disperse, becoming more diffuse and operating in small elements, because it’s harder to detect and it’s easier to act. In Paris, there were eight guys. In Mali, there were 10. Next time, maybe one or two guys will be enough. (emphasis ours)

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Can an attack of that scope even take place without being coordinated and authorized by the IS leadership in Syria?

Flynn: Absolutely. There’s not some line-and-block chart and a guy at the top like we have in our own systems. That’s the mirror imaging that we have to, in many ways, eliminate from our thinking. I can imagine a 30-year-old guy with some training and some discussion who receives the task from the top: “Go forth and do good on behalf of our ideology.” And then he picks the targets by himself, organizes his attackers and executes his mission. (emphasis ours)

Americans outside the Beltway implicitly understand General Flynn’s insight that “Next time, maybe one or two guys will be enough.”

That is why a nationwide survey of 2016 likely general election voters conducted by McLaughlin & Associates* for our friends at SecureAmericaNow.org found that more than 4 out of 5 voters, 84%, categorize immigration from the Middle East to the United States as “Dangerous,” with a near majority, 49%, answering “very dangerous.”

General Flynn wrapped-up his interview with Spiegel Online with several further insights, among which was this comment: “Instead of asking ourselves why the phenomenon of terror occurred, we were looking for locations. This is a major lesson we must learn in order not to make the same mistakes again.”

As we concluded in our columns “Homegrown Muslim Terrorism Fueled By Obama – Bush Immigration System,” “America’s Suicidal Muslim Immigration Policies,” “Importing Jihad” and “Why Do We Let These Vipers Into America?” Islam, as it is today practiced by millions of Muslims across the globe, is inimical to the separation of church and state and government based on constitutional liberty. We are in a war of ideas, not just with radical Islamists, but with concepts deeply embedded in Muslim culture. And as long as mass legal (and illegal) immigration from Muslim countries continues unabated we are losing that war.

For further information on why we should ban most Muslim immigration to America see our article, “We Can – And Should – Ban Most Muslim Immigration To America.”

See? Those nice GOP candidates aren’t all that bad are they? They just want to ban the refugees from Syria. They aren’t fanatics …

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An inspiration

by digby

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

That was an assessment of Adolph Hitler by the United States Office of Strategic Services.

Huh.

Is Ryan about to get Boehnered?

by digby

I wrote about the House’s dilemma in the wake of the Planned Parenthood attack for Salon today:

Read on to see what the odds on that look like…

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How about they stop with the cynical “strategizing”?

by digby

This Buzzfeed article goes into the truly tough position in which all these forced childbirth zealots find themselves when somebody takes their shrill, lurid propaganda seriously:

The pro-life movement, as it describes itself, has not found its high-profile success so squarely linked to violence since the late 1990s, when the organized Army of God network murdered seven in a series of attacks. Anti-abortion killings fell dramatically since then, with the horrific exception of the murder of Dr. George Tiller in 2009 by a man who had been in contact with a former Operation Rescue official.

But Dear represents a different, and in some ways more confounding, challenge that increasingly arises for movements of all stripes, particularly when they capture the power and passion of social media: How to prevent public momentum from spilling over into deadly violence.
Movement leaders have few answers, but say they are alert to the dangers of extremism.

How about they stop putting out hoax videos and using incendiary and inaccurate language like “baby parts” when they know very well that they are employing a “tactic” to rile up the public?

How about they stop enacting laws in states around the country by putting onerous, ridiculously unnecessary regulations on clinics so they will be shut down?

How about they stop all this smug, cynical “strategizing” to achieve their goals and simply make the arguments on the merits? How about they stop lying?

When you decide to try to attain your goals by any means necessary, people get the idea that anything goes. Including murdering innocent bystanders and police officers.

This is on them.

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A whole pack of Lone Wolves

by digby

All this “killing babies” talk has nothing to do with though.

Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion extremist who fatally shot Tiller outside of a church service Tiller had attended, said about the incident, “I did what I thought was needed to be done to protect the children. I shot him.” When asked if he felt remorse, Roeder said no but that he felt “a sense of relief.”

And all this murder, mayhem and tragedy is the price we pay for all this freedom.

Bill O’Reilly on Planned Parenthood attack: Shit happens. pic.twitter.com/b97WgTTBsq

— Angelo Carusone (@GoAngelo) December 1, 2015

If only other countries could be this free:

The problem here is not caused by our “freedom”. It’s right wing radicals in the gun proliferation and anti-abortion movements who refuse to behave like civilized people.

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It’s Giving Tuesday

by digby

This went out to all out Blue America members this morning:

With Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday having become something of an orgy of over-indulgence, somebody somewhere came up with the idea that the Tuesday after Thanksgiving should usher in the benevolent side of the holiday with a call to give back. They are calling it Giving Tuesday and it seems as though it might be refreshing reset from the endless eating and shopping of the long holiday week-end.

Unfortunately, this past Thanksgiving holiday was not just marked by the usual Walmart brawls and long lines waiting for Best Buy to open. This year we had to endure an act of terrorism perpetrated on our own soil: a man gunned down 12 people, killing three, in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. Afterwards, he was said to have declared “no more baby parts.” Those two words– “baby parts”– are used by Republican demagogues to describe the practice of life-saving scientific research which uses fetal tissue. It refers to some hoax videos circulated by anti-choice zealots in furtherance of their cause.

It is inflammatory incitement and it did its job this last week-end.

The GOP presidential candidates were all very slow to condemn this murderous attack. And when they did, it was in the most grudging terms possible. Carly Fiorina, the candidate who blatantly lied before 25 million people in the GOP presidential debate, describing something that never happened in lurid, graphic detail even went so far as to cast blame on the left for even bringing up the possibility that rhetoric such as theirs may have contributed to this atrocity.

All Blue America candidates are crystal clear on where they stand, both in support for Planned Parenthood and against the NRA which makes it possible for zealots to easily acquire the firearms they use to carry out their deadly missions. This statement from state Senator Jamie Raskin, candidate for Maryland’s 8th Congressional District speaks for all of us: 

“The nightmare in Colorado Springs brought together two lethal threats to the American people: the epidemic of gun violence made possible by lax gun laws and the NRA, and the relentless attacks by right-wing fanatics on Planned Parenthood and the right of American women to access basic reproductive health services. Let this outbreak of homegrown terror in Colorado give us the resolve we need to impose civilized gun safety laws in our country and to stop all of the appalling efforts to defund and destroy Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of reproductive health services in the U.S.”

In the spirit of Giving Tuesday, Blue America has decided to match the first $1,000 we collect for any candidates on this page and donate it to Planned Parenthood. We want to help the organization in every way we can and that means giving directly but it also means electing leaders to congress who will stand up and fight for women’s rights. It is imperative that we do both.

We are at a critical time in American politics. Please consider spending some of your “Giving Tuesday” dollars by donating to the Blue America candidates of your choice and we will double the effort by matching it with a donation to Planned Parenthood.

Goldman eyes $20 oil — Glut overwhelms storage sites

by Gaius Publius

Ever since the “Exxon Knew” story broke, and especially since NY AG Eric Schneiderman announced his Martin Act investigation of Exxon and other carbon companies for fraud, I’ve been watching to see how this disrupts the oil and gas markets.

To be clear — I consider a disrupted carbon fuel market to be good, since the supply of fossil fuel does have to be interrupted, and forcefully. Consider that if they dig it, we will burn it. So we have to prevent them digging it, and again, with force. The law, when applied with penalties, counts as force. A collapsing commodity price market also counts as force, as does a collapsing stock market price for companies like Exxon.

The alternative, if the market for extracted carbon starts to collapse or become wildly chaotic, is for government to prop it up with even more subsidies and “bailouts” — the opposite of what any climate-aware citizen should want. We need to get off of oil, as a nation, quickly, and we need all the help we can get doing it. I don’t want to see government standing in the way of the destruction of the oil and gas industry. (Do you?)

So, is the carbon market headed for chaos? I don’t know, but the possibility of oil at $20/barrel is frightening many analysts, including those at Goldman Sachs. From the Telegraph (my emphasis):

Goldman eyes $20 oil as glut overwhelms storage sites

“The world is floating in oil. The numbers we are facing now are dreadful,” said David Hufton from PVM Group

The world is running out of storage facilities for surging supplies of oil and may soon exhaust tanker space offshore, raising the chances of a violent plunge in crude prices over coming weeks, experts have warned.

Goldman Sachs told clients that the increasing glut of oil on the global market has combined with mild weather from a freak El Nino this winter. The twin-effect could send prices plummeting to $20 a barrel, the so-called ‘cash cost’ that forces drillers to abandon production. “Risks of a sharp leg lower remain elevated,” it said.

Oil has fallen from $110 a barrel early last year and is hovering near $40 for US crude, and $44 for Brent in Europe.

The US investment bank said the overall glut in the commodity markets may take another twelve months to clear. It cited ‘red flag’ signals on the Shanghai Future Exchange over recent days. Copper contracts point to “imminent weakening” in China’s ‘old economy’ of heavy industry and construction, it said.

The chart at the top shows that benchmark prices have dropped to about $36/barrel, risen but not to new near-term highs, then dropped again. A technical analyst would say, watch that $35 price point. A drop below that could be trouble.

Now for the fundamentals. Note in the quote above: “$20 a barrel [is] the so-called ‘cash cost’.” At present, people are keeping their oil off the market, not selling their inventory in hopes of a better price …

It is estimated that at least 100m barrels are now being stored on tankers offshore, waiting for better prices. A queue of 39 vessels carrying 28m barrels is laid up outside the Texas port of Galveston, while the Iranians have a further 30m barrels offshore ready to sell as soon as sanctions are lifted.

“The world is floating in oil, and commercial stocks on land are at a record high,” said David Hufton, head of oil brokers PVM Group. “The numbers we are facing now are dreadful. Stocks have been building continuously for two years. This is unprecedented.”

… yet even so, prices are falling, despite current buying by the Chinese for their strategic reserve (see the article for those details). We’re in new territory at present — low prices, high inventory, high production — and could be headed for even newer territory.

The story is complicated; the outcomes are many

This is not a simple story, as the article makes clear. No one in position to comment expects a permanent collapse, yet the items in play are both many and varied. To name just a few, they include conflict among the OPEC nations about how much to produce, the length of time the bear market in oil will stay depressed, the ability of marginally-financed producers — the U.S. shale oil producers qualify here — to stay afloat in a “below cost of production” sales environment, the worldwide growing awareness that climate change and carbon emissions are linked, and so on.

At some point, if these conditions prevail (the last will certainly grow stronger), carbon production will drastically slow and companies will simply go bankrupt. At that point, absent government intervention, if you’re an investor do you buy or sell the stock of these companies?

Now add in AG Schneiderman’s fraud lawsuit, and then, way down the road, the potential for a Sarbanes-Oxley prosecution to yield criminal charges and jail time for oil and gas execs — assuming some AG (that’s you, Ms. Lynch; that’s you, whomever President Sanders appoints) is bold enough to pursue that course. That will certainly stir the pot even further, and not in a good way. Just the announced intent to pursue Sarbanes-Oxley prosecution could further roil this market — the roilage of which is your friend, since an uncertain energy market drives an increased move to “safer” renewables.

At this point, it’s all up in the air. Oil prices may recover and the market re-stabilize. That would be a bad thing, assuming you have grandchildren and care about them. But the good news is … right now, it really is all up in the air. That good thing that could turn into a very good thing with just a few more breaks our way. 

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

GP

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Trumpmentia
by Tom Sullivan

Is Donald Trump inspiring the crazy or simply reflecting it? And I mean simply. The guy seems to be running for president of the 8th grade.

If violent rhetoric can inspire violent action, I am wondering, can widely reported crazy talk inspire craziness in a population?

I suggested yesterday, if Edward Snowden somehow “inspired” the Paris attacks by ISIS (as some authorities allege), couldn’t wild talk by Republican presidential candidates have inspired the attack on the Planned Parenthood office in Colorado Springs?

Digby pointed out as Salon yesterday how authorities worry about homegrown terrorism from “troubled souls” radicalized to violent action by propaganda. It might be talk of jihad or it might be talk of Planned Parenthood allegedly “dismembering children purely for monetary profit.”

Matt Taibbi traded barbs on Twitter with people convinced that is true:

@mtaibbi @AdamBaldwin Baby parts go out, money comes in. In what way is that "not an accurate description"?— Lucky Eat-Anter (@LuckyEatAnter) November 29, 2015

@mtaibbi Mhm. That's why PP is fighting OTC birth control for $7 instead of paying them $500 for abortions and selling parts. @AdamBaldwin— Dan (@Maverick_SS_49) November 29, 2015

Last night, Chris Hayes observed that Trump makes wild, disproved assertions about American Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks and, when his followers echo them back, uses their support as proof that his false claim is true. Dick Cheney did the same thing by leaking bogus “intelligence” about Iraqi WMDs to the media and then after the New York Times reported it, Cheney went on TV and used their reporting as support for his bogus claims. He convinced a wide swath of the American public that attacking Iraq was justified. I’ll bet a few of them — in New Jersey — even celebrated bombing Baghdad. As Herman Cain said, “I don’t have facts to back this up.” Conveniently, facts no longer matter, do they?

What is most worrisome is the possibility of crazy talk inducing a kind of moral panic or a “virus of the mind” (to use the Richard Dawkins’ term) in the broader public.

Vice President Joe Biden worried about that back in September. He sought to reassure Americans we would overcome it:

“There’s one guy absolutely denigrating an entire group of people, appealing to the baser side of human nature, working on this notion of xenophobia in a way that hasn’t occurred in a long time,” Biden told the group of about 75 people.

“This isn’t about Democrat – Republican. It’s about a sick message. This message has been tried on America many times before. We always, always, always, always overcome,” he said.

Let’s hope he is right.

He’s not 69, he’s 6

by digby

We need a great leader- now!

A video posted by Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) on Nov 30, 2015 at 10:22am PST

This guy:

Listening to the military

by digby

All the Republicans are saying they would “listen to the military” and follow the Pentagon’s advice on how to keep America safe. (Ben Carson is pretty much saying now that he’d turn over all national security to the Pentagon, no questions asked.)

Well, not always:

The 2014 Department of Defense Climate Change Adaptation Road Map report details all the ways our changing climate will impact international conflict and military operations. Sea level rise and more extreme weather events will exacerbate ongoing global conflicts. The effects of climate change will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic diseases, as well as disputes over refugees and dwindling resources.

The Pentagon report does not just allude to terrorism—it mentions it by name:

“We refer to climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today—from infectious disease to terrorism. We are already beginning to see some of these impacts.”

The report goes on to explain how climate change could topple fragile governments by creating an environment that fosters extreme ideologies and terrorism.

But Republicans on Tuesday (the same day the Senate voted to undo President Obama’s power-plant regulations) treated Sanders as if he had made a ludicrous claim. “There is a ballot initiative in Arizona concerning the substance that he must have been consuming,” Senator John McCain said, referring to a measure that would legalize marijuana.

Grown-ups.

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