Month: January 2016

QOTD: the car alarm king

by digby

Darryl Issa, the man who destroyed our lives and made hundreds of million with his car alarm business, admitting that in his hands “oversight” means partisan witch hunts:

You know, people often ask Trey Gowdy and myself, what did our investigations do?” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) told Boston Herald Radio on Friday morning. Gowdy currently chairs the House Select Committee on Benghazi, while Issa conducted his own investigation in 2012 when he served as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“Well what they did is that they opened up an opportunity for the American people to sort of smell what’s in the garbage can,” Issa said. “And I think that’s the reason that a devout socialist who wants to nationalize almost everything in America is close to and probably will beat Hillary here in New Hampshire. It’s not because they like Republicans. It’s because they don’t trust Hillary.”

I’m sure right wing Republican taxpayers believe this is an excellent use of their money. They always do, as long as it’s aimed at Democrats or some oppressed minority. I wonder if the rest of America thinks this is an appropriate use of their dollars?

Top Secret political doubletalk

by digby

Vox has provided a nice simple primer on the latest email brouhaha. (In case you haven’t heard, the state department has withheld the release of some of the emails that appeared on Clinton’s server because they are designated Top Secret which is supposed to be the bombshell that will put her in jail. Or something.)

Why are these emails top secret, why is it a big deal, and why would Clinton, of all people, want them released?

It’s impossible to know the answers to those questions with absolute certainty without seeing the emails. But the key dispute is over whether the classification shows that Clinton was emailing out highly sensitive secrets or if these were everyday emails that just got swept up in America’s deeply broken classification system. There’s some real reason to believe that the latter is at least possible. Here’s what we know and how to parse this latest email controversy.

One really key issue here is when the emails were classified

This might seem unimportant. If it’s top secret, then it must be really sensitive, right?

Not necessarily. A large proportion of documents that our government classifies are not actually that sensitive — more on that below. So the key thing now is to try to figure out: Were these emails classified because they contain highly sensitive information that Clinton never should have emailed in the first place, or because they were largely banal but got scooped up in America’s often absurd classify-everything practices?

Obviously we can’t know the answer to that for sure unless we read the emails. But one good way to make an informed guess is by asking whether the emails were classified at the moment they were sent or whether they were classified only later.

The reason this matters is that if they were immediately classified top secret, then that is a good sign that they contained information that is known as “born classified” — that it was information in itself obtained by classified channels or because it was generated internally by classified means. For example, if Clinton were emailing the secret US bombing plans for Libya, or sharing something that the French ambassador told her in confidence, that would be “born classified.”

But if the information were classified only later, then that would indicate it was more banal, or that it was not classified for any reasons particular to the emails themselves. Again, see below on how a boring email could become marked as top secret.

According to a statement by the State Department, “These documents were not marked classified at the time they were sent.”

In other words, they do not contain information that was “born classified,” but rather fall into the vast gray area of things that do not seem obviously secret at the time but are later deemed that way — not always for good reason.

Read the whole thing. It’s not long. It explains the broken and absurd classification system that the wingnuts are defending as if it came down from Mt Sinai. For instance:

As an example of how silly this can get, State Department employees are banned from reading WikiLeaks cables or articles that quote them, as the cables include classified information. So the people responsible for guiding American foreign policy are barred from reading foreign policy coverage that you and I may access freely. Virtually no one in the State Department likes this policy, by the way, but it is a product of the government’s larger, and largely broken, system of assigning and dealing with classifications.

We don’t know what these emails contain obviously. We do know that they were not classified when they appeared on her server. We also know they have been classified after the fact by the one of the intelligence agencies not the State Department. It’s possible, of course, that they were secret lists of clandestine agents but let’s just say it’s doubtful. This is likely a result of intelligence community bureaucratic bungle, an ass-covering ploy or a purely political exercise. NObody really controls the intelligence community, they control us. With the leaks coming from that sector to the Republicans in congress I’d say it could be all three.

Anyway, from what I can gather Democrats and independents have finally figured out that the Republicans have been crying wolf with this stuff for decades so the only people who get excited about it anymore are the GOP and the media, the latter of which have been their usual irresponsible selves.

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Pay equity: Time for a run to the gun store, boys
by Tom Sullivan

President Barack Obama signs into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in the East Room
of the White House. January 29, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Joyce Boghosian)

President Obama yesterday proposed a new rule for employers to make it easier to identify discriminatory pay practices in the workplace:

Women workers in the United States earn 79 cents for every dollar men do. And President Barack Obama doesn’t want you to forget it.

Speaking Friday at a White House event celebrating the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Obama proposed collecting pay data from companies with 100 or more people — and breaking down the numbers by gender, race and ethnicity. About 63 million workers would be covered, according to a news release accompanying his announcement, which aims to “focus public enforcement of our equal pay laws and provide better insight into discriminatory pay practices across industries and occupations.”

The White House also called again for Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, calling it “commonsense legislation that would give women additional tools to fight pay discrimination.”

New York magazine provides some background on the president’s action:

Large companies have submitted reports on their workforce demographics to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission since 1966. Under Obama’s new rule, companies with more than 100 employees will now have to add salary data to those reports. White House officials told the New York Times that the new requirement will allow the EEOC to better target investigations into discriminatory practices, while encouraging businesses to police themselves. The latter objective may prove more consequential — with limited resources to investigate abuses, fear of scrutiny may prove the most effective deterrent against racial and gender discrimination in compensation.

So, rather than face public shaming, the hope is that having the data at their fingertips may prompt employers to police themselves. Evidently, there is precedent for that:

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff remarked on Thursday’s call that U.S. corporations have already spent millions of dollars on human resources consultants; business leaders could find out if they’re contributing to pay inequality at the touch of a button. At the urging of two top-ranking female employees in 2014, Salesforce leadership audited its compensation data and found that it was paying women less. The company spent $3 million last year to raise its female employees’ salaries to the levels of their male counterparts. “We will be judged on whether we made the world a more equitable place for all,” Benioff said. “Just push that button.”

Obama’s latest assault on white-male privilege will not be subject to congressional approval. Tyranny, tyranny, I tell you. Time to man up, arm up, pocket Constitution up, and find a remote Cabela’s store to occupy.

Because you need this more than you’ve ever needed it before

by digby

That is a rare baby Malayan Tapir calf:

Though they are most closely related to horses and rhinos, tapirs are similar in build to pigs, but significantly larger. Malayan tapirs have a large, barrel shaped body ideal for crashing through dense forest vegetation. Their noses and upper lips are extended to form a long prehensile snout similar to a stubby version of an elephant’s trunk. Malayan tapirs are the largest of the four tapir species. They stand more than 3-feet-tall and can stretch from between 6 to 8-feet-long. On average they weigh between 700 and 900 pounds. They are also excellent swimmers and spend much of their time in water. They can even use their flexible noses as snorkels!

As adults, Malayan tapirs have a distinctive color pattern that some people say resembles an Oreo cookie, with black front and back parts separated by a white or gray midsection. This provides excellent camouflage that breaks up the tapir’s outline in the shadows of the forest. By contrast, young tapirs have color patterns that more resemble brown watermelons with spots and stripes which help them blend into the dappled sunlight and leaf shadows of the forest and protect them from predators.

Malayan tapirs are the only tapir native to Asia. Once found throughout Southeast Asia, they now inhabit only the rainforests of the Indochinese peninsula and Sumatra. With a wild population of less than 2,000 individuals they are classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) due to habitat loss and hunting.

Now have a drink and enjoy this:

Political thrill ride

by digby

Peter Beinert makes an observation I’ve touched on a few times myself over these past few months: the increasingly dangerous conflation of terrorism with immigration:

You can learn a lot from the words politicians use, and even more from the words they don’t. At last night’s Republican debate, candidates and moderators mentioned “immigration” 27 times. No surprise there. It may the single biggest issue in the GOP race. The word “Mexican,” however, wasn’t mentioned once, even though in recent years Mexicans have constituted America’s largest immigrant group. Neither did anyone mention “Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese or El Salvadoran,” the other most common nationalities of recent immigrants. “Latino” was never mentioned. Neither was “Asian.” “Hispanic” was mentioned once.

“Muslim,” by contrast, was mentioned 15 times, often preceded by the adjective “radical.” The word “Islam” was cited nine times. “ISIS” came up a whopping 45 times.

This is partly because the candidates were asked about events in the Middle East. But it’s also because they repeatedly turned questions about immigration into questions about Muslims and ISIS. A Mexican American businesswoman asked Ben Carson, “If America does not seem like a welcoming place for immigrant entrepreneurs, will the American economy suffer?” Carson replied that, “We have to be intelligent about the way that we form our immigration policies, and that’s one of the reasons that I have called on us to declare war on the Islamic State because we need to reorient our immigration policies and our visa policies for people who are coming into this country because there are many people out there who want to destroy us.”

Megyn Kelly asked Marco Rubio about the problem of undocumented immigrants. He responded that, “I’m going to tell you exactly how we’re going to deal with it when I am president. Number one, we’re going to keep ISIS out of America.”

It’s been like this at every GOP debate. On December 15, Donald Trump declared that, “People are pouring across the southern border. I will build a wall … As far as other people like in the migration, where they’re going, tens of thousands of people having cell phones with ISIS flags on them? I don’t think so.” On January 14, moderator Maria Bartiromo asked Rubio why he cosponsored a Senate bill that would have distributed 10 million new green cards. He responded that, “The issue is a dramatically different issue than it was 24 months ago. Twenty-four months ago, 36 months ago, you did not have a group of radical crazies named ISIS … The entire system of legal immigration must now be reexamined for security first and foremost.”

As public policy, this makes little sense. Obviously, the United States should take care not to admit jihadist terrorists. But since would-be terrorists constitute a miniscule percentage of newcomers to the United States, drastically reducing legal immigration—or not granting the undocumented citizenship—in order to prevent ISIS members from entering America is like using a sledgehammer to squash a fly. It’s the equivalent of declaring that because terrorists could put a bomb in a cargo bin, the U.S. will slash its import of foreign goods.

But politically, it serves a purpose. By putting ISIS at the center of their immigration rhetoric, Republican candidates make immigration seem more threatening and less ambiguous. It’s one thing to depict immigrants as people who depress wages and crowd schools. It’s another to depict them as potential killers. That utterly dehumanizes them.

They are ginning up hysteria for cynical purposes and it may very well end up with violence and authoritarian policies should they be able to take power. If you did not know reality, you would think that an invading army of ruthless Mexican jihadis was rampaging through every town in America. Obviously, this is not true. Indeed, if there’s any real danger in America it’s from all-American lunatics with guns, which these people shrug off like it’s an act of nature.

The fear these people profess to feel about ISIS and immigrants is completely irrational — and frankly, from the ecstatic crowds at Donald Trump rallies, they seem to be getting off on it. It’s politics as thrill ride. They’re enjoying it.

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Some people need to get over themselves

by digby

So Michael Bloomberg is considering a run for president but it’s obvious he will miss Iowa. And Iowans don’t like it one bit:

As former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg reportedly eyes a late entrance into the 2016 race as an Independent, many Iowa voters bristled at the thought of a candidate jumping in well after much of their political relevance has passed.

“It doesn’t seem fair, does it? These people have been working for months and months,” Karen Fowser said nodding towards the Marco Rubio rally she’d just attended. Her husband Bob agreed: “You get to know a person.”
[…]

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Lynn Frank said. ”It’s too late, we don’t need any more, we’ve got people to pick from.”

“It’s unfair, these candidates have done a lot of legwork,” Ann Halt said. If Bloomberg were to run, it’d be well “past Iowa… so he’s only speaking to maybe the large states.”

Right. I don’t care about Bloomberg and hope fervently he doesn’t get into the race. But as someone who lives in the most populous state in the union and has never cast a presidential primary vote that mattered, this Iowa self-importance is annoying. I’m sure they’re very nice people. But they aren’t America. If someone got in to the race late and made a run for it without their imprimatur our democracy would survive just fine.

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Generous to a fault

by digby

Last night Marco Rubio said that the United States is the most generous nation on earth toward immigrants. He’s been saying that for a while but it’s not exactly true:

In per capita [immigration] rates,the United States placed 19th out of 24 countries. That means that the United States received fewer immigrants per capita in 2012-13 compared with several European countries, New Zealand, Australia and Canada.

Here’s a sample of our generosity:

The exchange between two federal immigration agents and an undocumented mother quickly gets ugly. As a grainy, dizzying minute-long video shows, two pairs of hands reach into the front side of a car where a seated female driver pushes against one uniformed federal immigration agent. In the next scene, the woman’s hands are held down against the window as she’s dragged out of her car. The last scene shows her held to the ground, handcuffed by two officials.

The exclusive video, which was provided to the Spanish-language news program Al Punto, depicts an undocumented immigrant being arrested by federal immigration officials in front of her children. Two of the three children, ages 13 and 16, were also handcuffed, then later released to their grandmother. According to Al Punto, immigration agents were looking for the woman’s partner, who may have been involved in trafficking undocumented immigrants, though she insisted that she didn’t have a close relationship with the man.

The interaction caught on video offers insight into why immigrants often fear coming into contact with law enforcement officers, and particularly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents.

In the first weeks of the new year, after the Obama administration authorized deportation raids primarily targeting women and children who fled Central American countries, this fear has been intensified. Immigrants say they’re afraid to leave their homes or answer knocks on their door. Many are terrified of going outside. They don’t want to encounter ICE officials who will send them back to Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador.

They have reason to be worried. In those countries, gangs control entire neighborhoods, leading many of the people who get deported back to hide in their homes. Some deportees have ended up dead. In particular, El Salvador has recently become so dangerous that the Peace Corps suspended its program because of the “ongoing security environment.”

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President Obama needs to rein in these federal agents.

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ICYWW about the ratings race

by digby

Who won the ratings race between the Trump Show and the GOP debates?

Answer: Fox’s debate. But it was the second lowest rated debate of the season. So Trump is certain to take credit for hurting the channel’s total viewership.

Fox News Channel’s Trump-less debate had 12.5 million viewers between 9 and 11 p.m. Eastern, according to Nielsen.

By comparison, two of the cable channels that showed parts of Trump’s event, CNN and MSNBC, had about 2.7 million viewers combined.

So Trump’s rivals clearly came out ahead in the raw ratings.

The most recent GOP debate, televised two weeks ago on the harder-to-find Fox Business Network, had 11 million viewers.

So Thursday’s debate was bigger — but not by much. The other five GOP debates of the cycle have averaged 13.5 million to 25 million.

That’s why Trump can claim victory.

He will claim it of course no matter what the numbers are. And surely Fox has to be disappointed. But what this really may mean is that people are getting sick of the whole show. There’s not much new happening in any of these debates with or without Trump. The format doesn’t really enlighten and after a while it’s just kind of boring. The ratings have been so high so far that probably everyone who might be interested in seeing the candidates have already seen them.

And I think Trump may be about to enter overkill territory too. His stump speech is stale and he hasn’t added anything exciting to it in a while. He’s got good instincts about these things so I’d guess he’s thinking about changing it up.

If I had to guess I’d say he’s looking at a new “law and order” push of some sort. BUt who knows? The way he’s been going on about Cruz being Canadian, maybe he’s going to propose to build his wall around the whole country and put up a blockade along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Would that really be surpising?

The debate of the seven dwarves

by digby

I wrote about the silly debate last night for Salon today:

“I’m a maniac, everyone on this stage is stupid, fat and ugly. And Ben, you’re a terrible surgeon. Now that we’ve gotten the Donald Trump portion out of the way…”

“I kinda miss Donald Trump. He was always a little teddy bear to me. We always had such a loving relationship… Everyone else was in the witness protection program when I went after him.”

Read on about Christ Christie’s trip back to the 12th century and Rand Paul’s libertarian principles.

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The Zika virus, our changing planet & climate mobilization

by Gaius Publius

This piece is about a new virus with no known cure, which originated in the heat and humidity of Central and South America, is spread by mosquitoes, and is moving north as the planet inexorably warms. But this is also about something much more important. The Zika virus is just one instance of which there are dozens — and soon, of which there will be hundreds — all posing sudden and deadly threats to the seven billion people living together on this planet. [UPDATE: The origin of the virus is thought to be either Africa, Asia or French Polynesia, from where it migrated elsewhere, including Central and South America. My thanks for the emailed correction.]

Will the Zika virus takes us all down? Highly unlikely. But one of these days there will be a virus like this, a bacteria, a toxin, that could. We’ve already created a gene that makes bacteria resistant to the “last resort” antibiotic. We are destabilizing life on this planet at a ferocious and accelerating rate. The reason we’re doing it is greed, of course, the greed of a small handful of women and men. But one of the major tools of that destabilization is rapidly and permanently changing climate.

First, a taste of the Zika story. Then, a tool that can stop that tool (click to go there now).

Zika virus foreshadows dystopian climate future

Bill McKibben writes at The Guardian:

The Zika virus foreshadows our dystopian climate future

The mosquito-borne disease shows that pushing the limits of the planet’s ecology has become dangerous in novel ways

I’ve spent much of my life chronicling the ongoing tragedies stemming from global warming: the floods and droughts and storms, the failed harvests and forced migrations. But no single item on the list seems any more horrible than the emerging news from South America about the newly prominent Zika disease.

Spread by mosquitoes whose range inexorably expands as the climate warms, Zika causes mild flu-like symptoms. But pregnant women bitten by the wrong mosquito are liable to give birth to babies with shrunken heads. Brazil last year recorded 4,000 cases of this “microcephaly”. As of today, authorities in Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, El Salvador and Venezuela were urging women to avoid getting pregnant….

McKibben notes, “Eventually, of course, the disease will reach these shores – at least 10 Americans have come back from overseas with the infection, and one microcephalic baby has already been born in Hawaii to a mother exposed in Brazil early in her pregnancy.” We’ll likely survive the invasion, since our resources are so great, but many of the poor will not, since most people with the infection have no symptoms. (Watch the video at the link for more.)

To stop climate change, mobilize

The more I read and listen, and the more climate dithering I watch, the more I think “time’s wingèd chariot” is almost upon us and we have our backs turned to it. If we knew that, in five or ten years, an asteroid visible to our telescopes today were due to crash into the earth, we’d (a) start mobilizing against it immediately, and (b) not listen to the whiners who ask, “But how are we going to pay for it?” Those whiners would be kicked to the curb, especially if they were well-known worshipers at the “Church of the Giant Asteroid”.

Yet here we are, with maybe five to ten years at most to start mobilizing against a world all of us will hate, and … nothing.

It’s an emergency. The response to emergencies to mobilize. And we know how to do that.

So here’s an action you can do while you’re waiting for others put two and two together. Coming to the Iowa Caucus is a “model caucus” hosted by one of the climate mobilization groups, groups that have put two and two together. The purpose of the model caucus is to

support the presidential candidate they believe is best-suited to stop the Bakken Pipeline and lead a full-employment, WWII-scale mobilization to rapidly retire all fossil fuel infrastructure, drive the U.S. economy to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, and restore a safe climate for humanity.

Care to join them? Care to support them? If you’re in Iowa already (caucusing for Bernie Sanders, the most climate-friendly candidate in the field, I hope), you can attend and hear former Senator Tom Harkin and Keystone hero Jane Kleeb speak, and party with others like you. The press release is below.

If you’re not in Iowa, or reading this after the event, you can still help. You’ve put two and two together. You know that the only way to act in an emergency is to marshal all resources and act with all speed — to mobilize. You can help others to see that too. The only way mass mobilization happens is for enough people make a decision to make it happen. That starts with you and your encouragement to everyone you have contact with. Sometimes all it takes for a crowd to act, is for the first person to act. You can be that person in the small crowd you’re part of, your group of friends and associates.

About the Iowa event (my emphasis):

MEDIA ADVISORY
11:30 a.m. CDT, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016
Contact:
Ed Fallon at (515) 238-6404 or FallonForum@gmail.com
Ezra Silk at (860) 916-8964 or Ezra@TheClimateMobilization.org

Iowans to hold Climate Emergency Caucus to push presidential contenders toward WWII-scale climate mobilization

Former Iowa Senator Tom Harkin and “Keystone Killer” Jane Kleeb to Speak

DES MOINES — Hundreds of Iowans will stage a model caucus Friday, Jan. 29 to support the presidential candidate they believe is best-suited to stop the Bakken Pipeline and lead a full-employment, WWII-scale mobilization to rapidly retire all fossil fuel infrastructure, drive the U.S. economy to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, and restore a safe climate for humanity.

The caucus will take place from 7:00 – 8:30 p.m. in the auditorium of Central Campus at 1800 Grand Avenue in Des Moines. Speakers will include Tom Harkin, a U.S. Senator from Iowa from 1985 to 2015, and Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska activist who fired up the national effort to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline and was subsequently dubbed the “Keystone Killer” by Rolling Stone, will speak. The caucus will be hosted by Ed Fallon, the Iowa progressive talk-show host and former state lawmaker who hosted the 2011 Occupy Des Moines People’s Caucus that aired on C-SPAN and received national media attention.

With representatives from all of the Democratic campaigns scheduled to appear, the Climate Emergency Caucus is set to be the strongest intervention into presidential politics yet made by America’s nascent “Climate Emergency Movement,” which calls for WWII-scale emergency action to save civilization from catastrophic climate change and ecological decline. The model caucus has been organized by the national grassroots group The Climate Mobilization, in conjunction with a growing list of sponsors, including Citizens’ Climate Lobby Des Moines, Iowa 350.org, Iowa Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Sierra Club’s Iowa chapter.

Following speeches from Fallon, Kleeb, and the leaders of The Climate Mobilization, model caucus-goers will suggest climate and pipeline planks for their respective political party’s platforms and discuss the presidential candidates’ positions on the Bakken pipeline and climate change. Finally, they will break into preference groups to support the presidential candidate they believe can best lead America through the growing climate emergency. …

Fallon and the growing climate emergency movement expect the caucus will make clear to the presidential candidates and the American public that the time for “carbon gradualism” has expired and the need for emergency action to save civilization has arrived.

More here.

If you’re not yet convinced, no problem. You soon will be (and the rest of us hope that it’s not too late when you are).

But if you are convinced, act. Pledge to support mobilization, then support it. You may think you have just a little reach, but that’s true of us all. We’re only responsible for doing what we can do, but we are responsible for that.

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

GP

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