Month: January 2016

They don’t really care about taxes, folks

by digby

Reihan Salam made a belated but useful observation this morning on a very lively Face the Nation after Trump went on an extended tirade about well … everything:

SALAM: Well, the genius of — the genius of Ted Cruz is also the fact that if you look at the Republican Party, if you’re looking at the elite side, fundamentally you have these libertarian instincts. And what Donald Trump has demonstrated is that this libertarianism does not run very deep with actual Republican voters. Not very deep at all. So what Ted Cruz has done, and you see this actually in his fundraising, what he’s done is he’s managed to get some of that kind of libertarian, business class, Wall Street Republican support, while also getting that kind of populist, national support, a bit of that, and that also means that you get small donors, as well as big donors.

Trump, however, to me, what he’s done, whether or not he wins, I have no idea, honestly. But whether or not he wins, he’s demonstrated that that libertarianism, you know, cutting top rates, cutting tax — gains taxes, all of this stuff doesn’t actually matter to real life Republican voters. Forty percent of Republican voters say that they want upper income taxpayers to pay higher taxes. Whoever do you see in a Republican primary come out and say, you know what, I’m going to leave the top rate alone and I’m going to focus on middle class tax cuts. Something like that.

Marco Rubio has flirted with this idea — Without really pursuing it as aggressively as he might have because he, too, has that straddle. He has to keep both sides of the party happy. But I think what Trump is demonstrating is that there’s this whole other lane for Republicans to pursue. This populist, nationalist lane that is very potent.

And now listen to the chorus of liberals exclaiming that this proves once more that the guys with confederate flags on their trucks need health care too. But Salam only gets it half right. The truth is that these people don’t care about taxes for the rich — or themselves either, at least not in the abstract. They are not motivated by economic arguments unless the argument is that the government is taking their money and giving it to black people or immigrants or spending it on foreigners.

Salam is right that there’s a whole “lane” for the populist, nationalist candidate to run in. Trump’s taking up almost the whole thing right now, but there have been recent iterations of this such as Pat Buchanan who we used to know was playing to stone cold racism. Even Perot who was supposed to have been above all this was playing to this crowd when he talked incessantly about NAFTA being a “giant sucking sound” of jobs to Mexico. He may have been making a legitimate economic argument about trade but he had a good many of his followers at “sucking” and “Mexico”.

And these candidates don’t have to run on lower tax rates for the middle class. All they have to do is promise to stick it to the “others” whether it’s by denying benefits or a path to citizenship, deportation, abusive policing, long prison sentences, legalizing discrimination or war and more war. If lowering taxes will help accomplish those goals, these voters are all for it. But the taxes themselves are a means to an end.

That’s what is animating the Trump voters — which, at this point, makes up over half the Republican Party if you count Cruz’s nutcase talk radio followers and Carson’s kooky Armageddonist social conservatives. And as long as the Democratic party agrees to include all those undeserving free-loaders in their party, even if they promise to lower middle class taxes to zero, these Trump folks won’t be joining up.

They are being screwed economically, for sure.  But most of them care a lot more about people of color and foreigners challenging their status bruising their pride.  Money isn’t everything.

.

You cannot make this stuff up   

by digby

Oops

GRESHAM, Ore. (KOIN 6) — A man practicing his open carry right was robbed of the gun he was openly carrying.

William Coleman III was robbed of his Walter- brand P22 [sic] just after 2:00 a.m. October 4 in Gresham by a young man who asked him for it — and flashed his own weapon as persuasion.

Coleman, 21, was talking to his cousin in the 17200 block of NE Glisan St., after purchasing the handgun earlier that day, when a young man asked him for a cigarette, police said.

The man then asked about the gun, pulled a gun from his own waistband and said “”I like your gun. Give it to me.”

Coleman handed over the gun and the man fled on foot.

Both of these people were lucky as was the cousin who could have been killed if someone decided to be a hero or a psycho. You just don’t know.

Take a look at this chart. I know we are an exceptionally, super-exceptional country and all but this is outrageous. And this does not come from an act of God or some “natural right” to be armed to the teeth with deadly weapons:

I wrote about the gun proliferation zealots erroneous narrtive about Switzerland for Salon a while back. Let’s just say it’s a whole different kind of “gun culture”.

.

I needed a gun for Christmas, not a stupid helmet!


by Spocko


After Christmas on Vulcan I would call my best friend and ask him what presents he got. We could compare notes and then meet up to play with our toys or to show them off. (Because Christmas is so much better if you got cooler toys than your friends.)

If this year we were playing war, I needed a big gun like, the Johnny Seven O.M.A. – One Man Army Gun – Topper Toys 1964

The best selling boys toy of 1964! Seven guns in one, which included: Grenade Launcher, Anti-Tank Rocket Launcher, Anti Bunker Missile Launcher, Armor Piercing Shell, Rifle fires 10 Bullets, Slide Bolt Action Machine Gun, Detachable Cap Pistol which fires shells. Detachable Stock & built in Bi-Pod. Over 3 feet long!

Description from Time Warp Toys

“You’ve won with Johnny Seven, the one man army gun!”

As you can see from this commercial, we were training to become the leaders of squads of commandos in World War II, so we wanted needed armor piercing shells and anti-tank rocket launcher to take out the Nazi tanks and save the world.

Later, during the cold war, we were training to become spies. Spies were cool. You worked alone, your gun needed to be concealed, you brought it out at the last minute to take out the bad guys. We also did covert ops with hidden communication methods, which was cool.  In our fantasy world nobody knew we were a spy, until we saved the day from the commies.

 “You might think I’m an ordinary guy, but in the sinister world of counter espionage I’m known as Agent Zero M”

 I mean seriously, a helmet?  For Christ’s sake, you might as well put a big “kick me” sign on the kids back. Also, what is the play value of a helmet? Zero. They just sit there and protect you, they don’t let you be the hero.

In fantasy world you don’t need protective gear because the bad guys shots always miss, you are never taken off guard and your shots never hit innocents.


As I grew up I learned the difference between reality and fantasy. I learned logic, and the problems with making decisions based on emotion instead of reason, and how my human half didn’t want to listen to reason.

I learned about statistics and media hype and how facts can be ignored with a good emotional story or clever tag line.

But the little boy in me missed the gun action fantasy. I missed comparing whose toy gun was bigger or stealthier . I especially missed being the hero and taking out bad guys with my perfect shots. Eventually I found other action adventures, others ways to be the hero and other ways to protect myself and my family.


But not everyone wants to let go of their fantasies, so they transform entire states into their castle, where their rights, skills and decision making power are perfect and overrule other’s rights.

In this fantasy world showing off a big gun intimidates the bad guys. In this fantasy world a hidden gun gives them a license to kill.

Media hype of mass shootings is used to ignore boring statics of thousands of negligent and accidental shootings.

Occupied agin’
by Tom Sullivan

We’ll get to why in a minute, but them Bundy boys and their guns are once again occupying some godforsaken patch of federal land. Supporters declared that the press refuses to cover their lonely, heroic stand against federal tyranny hours from the nearest news outlet. (The AP, Washington Post, ABC News, the New York Daily News, the Guardian , Die Zeit and others have reported the story.) Twitter posts are under the hashtag #burnsoregon .

From the AP:

BURNS, Ore. (AP) — A peaceful protest Saturday in support of an eastern Oregon ranching family facing jail time for arson was followed shortly afterward by an occupation of a building at a national wildlife refuge.

Ammon Bundy, the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a standoff with the government over grazing rights, told The Oregonian (http://is.gd/bK7d4E ) that he and two of his brothers were among a group of dozens of people occupying the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

From the Oregonian:

Update at 9:15 p.m.: Statement from Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward: “After the peaceful rally was completed today, a group of outside militants drove to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, where they seized and occupied the refuge headquarters. A collective effort from multiple agencies is currently working on a solution. For the time being please stay away from that area. More information will be provided as it becomes available. Please maintain a peaceful and united front and allow us to work through this situation.”

The Guardian’s Jason Wilson (based in Portland) tweeted:

This is as close as I was allowed to get to the armed militia occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge HQ. #burnsoregon pic.twitter.com/DPztu0VsVU— Jason Wilson (@jason_a_w) January 3, 2016

I've seen some reports of up to 150 people out at the Refuge. I saw no evidence of anything like that number. Around a dozen cars parked up.— Jason Wilson (@jason_a_w) January 3, 2016

Now, the reason for the protest was the October arson convictions of local ranchers, Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son Steve:

EUGENE, Ore. – Dwight Lincoln Hammond, Jr., 73, and his son, Steven Dwight Hammond, 46, both residents of Diamond, Oregon in Harney County, were sentenced to five years in prison by Chief U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken for arsons they committed on federal lands.

A jury sitting in Pendleton, Oregon found the Hammonds guilty of the arsons after a two-week trial in June 2012. The trial involved allegations that the Hammonds, owners of Hammond Ranches, Inc., ignited a series of fires on lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), on which the Hammonds had grazing rights leased to them for their cattle operation.

The jury convicted both of the Hammonds of using fire to destroy federal property for a 2001 arson known as the Hardie-Hammond Fire, located in the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Area. Witnesses at trial, including a relative of the Hammonds, testified the arson occurred shortly after Steven Hammond and his hunting party illegally slaughtered several deer on BLM property. Jurors were told that Steven Hammond handed out “Strike Anywhere” matches with instructions that they be lit and dropped on the ground because they were going to “light up the whole country on fire.” One witness testified that he barely escaped the eight to ten foot high flames caused by the arson. The fire consumed 139 acres of public land and destroyed all evidence of the game violations. After committing the arson, Steven Hammond called the BLM office in Burns, Oregon and claimed the fire was started on Hammond property to burn off invasive species and had inadvertently burned onto public lands. Dwight and Steven Hammond told one of their relatives to keep his mouth shut and that nobody needed to know about the fire.

The jury also convicted Steven Hammond of using fire to destroy federal property regarding a 2006 arson known as the Krumbo Butte Fire located in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and Steen Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Area. An August lightning storm started numerous fires and a burn ban was in effect while BLM firefighters fought those fires. Despite the ban, without permission or notification to BLM, Steven Hammond started several “back fires” in an attempt save the ranch’s winter feed. The fires burned onto public land and were seen by BLM firefighters camped nearby. The firefighters took steps to ensure their safety and reported the arsons.

By law, arson on federal land carries a five-year mandatory minimum sentence. When the Hammonds were originally sentenced, they argued that the five-year mandatory minimum terms were unconstitutional and the trial court agreed and imposed sentences well below what the law required based upon the jury’s verdicts. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, upheld the federal law, reasoning that “given the seriousness of arson, a five-year sentence is not grossly disproportionate to the offense.” The court vacated the original, unlawful sentences and ordered that the Hammonds be resentenced “in compliance with the law.” In March 2015, the Supreme Court rejected the Hammonds’ petitions for certiorari. Today, Chief Judge Aiken imposed five year prison terms on each of the Hammonds, with credit for time they already served.

“We all know the devastating effects that are caused by wildfires. Fires intentionally and illegally set on public lands, even those in a remote area, threaten property and residents and endanger firefighters called to battle the blaze” stated Acting U.S. Attorney Billy Williams.

“Congress sought to ensure that anyone who maliciously damages United States’ property by fire will serve at least 5 years in prison. These sentences are intended to be long enough to deter those like the Hammonds who disregard the law and place fire fighters and others in jeopardy.”

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Frank R Papagni, Jr., AnneMarie Sgarlata and Kelly Zusman handled the prosecution of this case.

Ammon Bundy, son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, provided a video manifesto explaining their intentions, and urged on Facebook: “**ALL PATRIOTS ITS TIME TO STAND UP NOT STAND DOWN!!! WE NEED YOUR HELP!!! COME PREPARED.”

Think Progress:

In an ominous sign, one member of the group, Jon Ritzheimer, posted a goodbye video to his family on YouTube today. “I want to die a free man,” Ritzheimer says.

Goodbye videos are vaguely reminiscent of something familiar:

A new video purportedly released by the Islamic State appears to show a jihadist dad saying goodbye to his jihadist sons before driving a car bomb to his death.

If they were dressed like Arabs it would be considered an attack on the homeland. #OregonUnderAttack #burnsoregon— Jesse Becker (@JesseRBecker) January 3, 2016

Ammon Akbar, boys!

Please don’t bury me
Down in that cold, cold ground
No, I’d rather have ’em cut me up
And pass me all around”

“Throw my brain in a hurricane
And the blind can have my eyes
And the deaf can take both of my ears
If they don’t mind the size”

– from Please Don’t Bury Me by John Prine

—Dennis Hartley

Your lazy holiday week-end assignment

by digby

Read these two articles. You won’t regret it:

The Sudden But Well-Deserved Fall of Rahm Emanuel by Rick Perlstein:

It’s hard to remember a time when Rahm Emanuel wasn’t a Democratic Party superstar. Go back to 1991, when the thirty-two-year-old took over fund-raising for Bill Clinton. He was soon renowned for making the staff come to work on Sundays, shrieking into the phone to donors things like “Five thousand dollars is an insult! You’re a twenty-five-thousand-dollar person!”—and, not incidentally, helping Clinton afford the blitz of TV commercials that saved him from the Gennifer Flowers scandal, clearing his course to the White House. The legend continued through this past April, when Rahm—in Chicago and D.C., he’s known by that single name—won a second term as the mayor of Chicago in a come-from-behind landslide.

Nine months later, Chicagoans—and Democrats nationally—are suffering buyer’s remorse. Last month, a Cook County judge ordered the release of a shocking dashcam video of a black seventeen-year-old named Laquan McDonald being shot sixteen times by a policeman while he was walking away. Five days later, the officer was charged with murder. The charge came after four hundred days of public inaction, and only hours before the video’s release. Of almost four hundred police shootings of civilians investigated by the city’s Independent Police Review Authority since 2007, only one was found to be unjustified. So the suspicion was overwhelming that the officer would not have faced discipline at all had officials not feared a riot—especially after it was learned that McDonald’s family had been paid five million dollars from city coffers without ever having filed a lawsuit. Mayor Emanuel claims that he never saw the video. Given that he surely would not have been reëlected had any of this come out before the balloting, a recent poll showed that only seventeen per cent of Chicagoans believe him. And a majority of Chicagoans now think he should resign.

For twenty years now, there have been those who say that this emperor never had any clothes on in the first place. Given the speed and intensity of his fall, perhaps it’s time to reconsider their case.

Read on …

The Return of the 1920s By Richard Yeselson

In the wake of the terrorist mass murders in Paris and then San Bernardino, many Republicans and conservatives, already concerned about unauthorized immigrants from Mexico and Central America, have responded by conflating opposition to immigration, anxieties about the porousness of America’s borders, and fear of radical, Muslim-identified terrorists. Most Republican governors (and Democratic Governor Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire) announced that they would refuse to accept refugees from Syria. Republican members of Congress, with the support of 25 percent of the Democratic caucus, passed a bill to “pause” the program. First, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would “consider” closing Muslim mosques in the United States “because some of the ideas and some of the hatred—the absolute hatred—is coming from these areas.” Trump then further suggested that Muslims should be required to have a special ID and promising to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. And now he has proposed that Muslims be temporarily banned from entering the United States, a position that, according to several national polls, enjoys majority support among Republicans and white evangelicals. Liberals, including President Obama, have argued that this reaction is not only nonresponsive and practically absurd, but also, as the president put it, “shameful” and, pointedly, “not American.”

But when Obama speaks of what is “not American,” countless citizens wonder: Who is he to judge what is “not American”? The United States is wracked by a spasm of anti-cosmopolitanism and fear of radical subversion. It is exemplified, for many Americans by the election and presidency of Obama himself: black, yet biracially cosmopolitan, urban, intellectual, raised partly in a Muslim country, and the abandoned son of a Kenyan activist and academic. Millions of conservatives still suspect him of being un-Christian and, literally, not a native-born American qualified to serve as president. That Obama’s election occurred simultaneously with the largest economic contraction since the Great Depression exacerbated these cultural tensions. The current conflict is a continuation of one over the past century in the United States between what the historian Gary Gerstle has called the racial nationalism of blood and ethnic supremacy and a more expansive civic nationalism which promises a common political project of equal rights and respect for all. America has seen expressions of both racial and civic nationalism in its history—both are quintessentially American articulations of political power and hierarchy. Yet these different national projects—one culturally and ethnically homogeneous, the other inclusive of differences, yet seeking to subsume them into a “Party of America”, in political theorist Rogers Smith’s words—both risk canceling out a third strain of American nationalism. They contend with a paradoxically de-nationalized pluralism of countless hyphenated Americans whose sub-communities do not cohere into a generous polity larger than the sum of its parts.

There is no period of American history that so pervasively demonstrated the power of ethno-nationalism to suppress pluralist differences as that following the Russian Revolution, the end of the First World War, and then continuing through much of the 1920s.

Read on …

You won’t regret it!

.

Knowing your place

by digby

I loved this moment …. one of the best of 2015:

Update: Came across this on Facebook. It’s awesome.

Of course, airlines allow people to insist that their fellow passengers be booted from the plane every day because they “feel uncomfortable” flying with them. They aren’t African American these days. They’re Middle Eastern.  Or someone thinks they look “Muslim” even though they are nothing of the kind. Or they pray on takeoff. 

I’d imagine this is only going to get worse.

.

Republican lawmakers probably shouldn’t brag about how they’ve betrayed the right wing …

by digby

Betsy Woodruff has a story up at The Daily Beast about how the conservatives are losing their shirts in legislative battles on the Hill.One after the other, concluding with the Omnibus, they are not getting their way.

It wasn’t always this way. During the 2013 government shutdown, Heritage Action exerted enormous influence to pressure members of Congress against supporting any funding for the Affordable Care Act. And members shivered at the prospect of facing primary challengers who would attack them over low marks on the group’s vote scorecard. But now, much of that fear seems to have abated.

“When Heritage key-votes against a bill now, it is almost guaranteed to get less conservative, and guaranteed to pass both chambers and become law,” said one former Republican House leadership staffer. “They have reverse Midas touch.”

It’s a fascinating story but it doesn’t go into what the reaction is among grassroots conservatives. They are, to say the least, apoplectic. (I wrote about on aspect of it here at Salon.) I don’t think the beltway quite grasps the level of anger. Indeed, they should be asking themselves how much this is contributing to the rise of Trump and Cruz.

Cruz probably isn’t going to leave the GOP. He’s gone rogue, but he’s not going to destroy the party. However, if Trump feels he’s being treated “unfairly” he could cause some real headaches for Republicans.

The party is in crisis. And a lot of it is caused by Republicans promising these people that they will go to Washington and create radical, revolutionary change. It’s bad enough when they fail to do that due to all these inconvenient constitutional requirements. But when they go bragging about how they’ve defanged the right wing — well, lets just say it’s doubtful it will end well.

.

They hate him, they really hate him

by digby

The more you know him the less you can stand him:

On Sunday, our @issue section featured our own annual gubernatorial report card on Christie, as well as the results of a reader survey conducted by the Asbury Park Press, our sister paper, as well as this newspaper. He received little more than Cs and Ds from us on a variety of issues, and he flunked in a few areas for 2015, when he has essentially checked out to run for President.

But from the readers’ perspective, we were generous. More than 1,300 people responded and they found Christie to be a failure across the board, the majority giving him Fs in every policy area. It is a remarkably negative assessment that also reflects recent polling that shows Christie’s approval rates in the state at all-time lows.

Readers’ worst marks were reserved for Christie’s total lack of transparency as governor. From the Bridgegate debacle to his refusal to expose security-detail expenses forced upon taxpayers to fund Christie’s campaigning, the governor is widely and rightly seen as a secretive, devious officeholder with a taste for luxury and a thin skin.

Picture if you will, this message for Trumpie

by digby

Via Crooks and Liars:

John Amato writes:

This broadcast aired on March 4, 1960, but you could hear Serling’s voice giving the same speech on CNN today.

Serling: The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own. And the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is, these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

Does that sound familiar? How ugly and disgusting has it been to see Trump’s message of intolerance, racism, fear and suspicion finding a warm home to a large segment of Republican voters?

.