Month: April 2016

Today’s must read

by digby

Adam Serwer has written a fantastic, fascinating long form piece about the most famous black confederate soldier. Let’s just say that it’s highly unlikely slaves were signing up for the rebel cause:

The Secret History Of The Photo At The Center Of The Black Confederate Myth 

A 160-year-old tintype depicting Andrew Chandler and his slave Silas, both in Confederate uniform, has long been used as evidence that slaves willingly fought against the army that aimed to free them. Following the national backlash against Confederate iconography, Silas’s descendants seek to debunk this once and for all.

The so-called Southern Heritage movement loves to claim that there were many black confederate soldier which is supposed to prove that the war wasn’t about slavery. But the truth is that most of these “soldiers” were slaves forced into serving as their owners servants and bodyguards. And because their masters still held their families back home it wasn’t exactly easy for them to desert.

There’s no end to the excuses for slavery.  And the fact that people still spend so much time and energy trying to find ways to evade the fact that their vaunted heritage was built on that institution tells you that we haven’t really dealt with it yet.

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The mark of Trump

by digby

Chris Christie’s getting hit with his association with “Mr Trump”:

A new anti-Donald Trump ad campaign launched Friday imagines New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie crying for help as he stands next to the Republican presidential candidate he endorsed.

In one billboard, Christie flanks Trump in a widely mocked photo of the governor looking positively morose after his endorsement of the billionaire. A thought bubble with “HELP” floats over Christie’s head.

Bridges Over Politics for New Jersey, the group behind the ads across Christie’s state, are urging the governor to condemn Trump’s rhetoric, which the group says is hateful, sexist, and racist.

“We’ve seen, over the past few months, this growth of sexist, racist, hateful rhetoric,” Aaron Keyak, the group’s founder, told TPM. “This isn’t within the bounds of regular public discourse. We don’t want this to become the new normal.”

Keyak said Bridges is focusing on Christie because he “used to be a responsible Republican.” He also said the group is prepared to continue the campaign “well into” next year, but would pull the ads “tomorrow” if Christie were to “forcefully and consistently” denounce Trump’s rhetoric.

Yeah, that’ll happen.

And I just have to point out that Christie has never been a “responsible Republican.” He’s always been a bullying jackass, just like Trump.  He’s just a little bit savvier about how he goes about it.

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Can they deny him?

by digby

According to the polling, they’re going to have to give in to Trump. And because he’s having a tantrum over it, he’ll take credit for making sure it happens:

More than six in 10 Republican voters believe that, if no GOP presidential candidate wins a majority of delegates before the convention, the one with the most votes should be the party’s nominee, according to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

That’s compared with 33 percent of Republicans who say the nominee instead should be the candidate whom convention delegates think would be the party’s best standard-bearer.

I just don’t see how they get around this. People don’t understand that this is like sudden-death overtime and the game begins again under different rules if someone doesn’t win on the first ballot.

But what are the going to do?

The lesson will be that having tantrums, complaining about unfairness, holding your breath until you turn blue, threatening violence if you don’t get your way — that’s how we’ll make America great again!

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Legislating conformity
by Tom Sullivan

Because conservatives have trouble coping with ambiguity….

North Carolina continues to receive fallout and national opprobrium for its legislative freakout over transgender rights. Americans celebrate personal freedom and people going their own way, don’t we, unless it involves gender and sex? I have already written about how North Carolina’s #HB2 is a Trojan Horse for a crackdown on workers’ rights. But some coffee urn jokes this week about bathrooms and people’s chosen “lifetyles” got under my skin.

Just as despite everyday observation, the Earth is not flat, neither are sex and gender binary. What laws like North Carolina’s HB2 demand is legally enforced conformity to a binary standard in a world built upon natural variance.

When I was a child, an aunt, uncle and cousins lived next door to a family of albinos. To a kid, they appeared pretty odd. Weird even. But after a few visits and a few neighborhood cookouts, they were just the O’Shaughnessys (not their real name). Both different and the same. They weren’t sequestered in a remote neighborhood of the city, told they had to use a special restroom, or treated as potential criminals. At least, not by us. And albinism is far rarer (1 in 20,000) than the kind of sex and sexual identity variances North Carolina just tried to make disappear through legislation. Disappearing what makes us uncomfortable has become a thing here. The legislature already decreed that the sea level is not rising.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet: Act 1. Scene V

Probably the most jarring and cruel introduction to a world beyond male and female was a radio program one Saturday about intersex children, about one in 2,000. (I don’t wish to conflate intersex with transgender persons, simply to illustrate that sex and gender are more fluid than most people prefer to believe.) This Slate story from 2004 gives the gist of it. Step too far outside established lines and you’ve become a “disorder” (emphasis mine):

Approximately 10 times a year in Houston, at the birth of a certain type of baby, a special crisis team at Texas Children’s Hospital springs into action. Assembled in 2001, the unusual team includes a psychologist, urologist, geneticist, endocrinologist, and ethicist. Its mission: to counsel parents of infants sometimes referred to as “intersex” babies—that is, babies of indeterminate physical gender.

That such a team exists—and that it often counsels deferring surgery for infants who are otherwise healthy—reflects a radical new thinking among doctors about gender identity and outside efforts to shape it. Instead of surgically “fixing” such children to make them (visually, at least) either male or female, a handful of U.S. specialists now argue that such infants should be left alone and eventually be allowed to choose their gender identity. The approach challenges decades of conventional wisdom about what to do with infants whose genitalia don’t conform to the “norm.” Until very recently, such children were automatically altered with surgery, often with tragic consequences.

I was horrified. I’d never heard of such a thing. When I was growing up, we weren’t meant to.

“There are a lot of activists that describe infant surgery in one word – mutilation,” explains clinical psychologist and sex therapist Dr Tiger Devore. He was born intersex. From the BBC documentary:

“Those babies are hidden from general society – and that was my experience of growing up.”

“I always had to keep it a big secret. I could not tell anybody I was having surgery down there, which we’re not supposed to talk about.”

Aileen Schast, a clinical psychologist who counsels families at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says: “It can be very confusing and isolating for families and what worries me the most is an early feeling of shame starts to develop, as this has to do with genitalia, and we don’t talk about that.

“Everyone is dying to find out what the baby is and how do you say we don’t really know yet.

“I had one parent tell me she almost wished her child had cancer because at least people have heard of it, so when she needed support she could say this is what my child has and people would know what it meant.”

These are hardly lifestyle choices, despite social prejudices. The last few decades have been rather appalling in many ways. One way they have not is in growing acceptance of people who for whatever reasons do not conform to to common norms. North Carolina and other states want to shove people who do not conform to a binary framing of sex and gender of back into the shadows. That’s not going to happen any more than they can stop the sea from rising by signing legislation saying it isn’t.

The Bundys in court


by digby

I know these people are clownish at this point but I have a bad feeling about where all this is going:

The arraignment of Ammon and Ryan Bundy grew tense, according to the Associated Press Friday as both brothers scoffed when asked to enter pleas in a case regarding their involvement in the 2014 Nevada, Bundy Ranch standoff.

Brian Cavalier, Blaine Cooper and Ryan Payne also refused to offer pleas at the arraignment after, according to the Associated Press the defendants asked the court to read the charges against them verbatim, which took more than 90 minutes.

“I will not be entering a plea today,” Cavalier said, according to the AP. The news outlet reported that instead Cavalier pulled out a small copy of the Constitution and gave it to federal prosecutors.

Ultimately, the judge offered a “not guilty” plea for the Bundys and the co-defendents.

According to the Associated Press, the scene in the court room was chaotic at times as 12 court marshals oversaw disruptions coming from the crowd in support of the defendants. Outside the courtroom, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the Bundys had a cadre of support including state lawmaker Michele Fiore, a conservative who helped negotiate the end of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge standoff in Oregon, a standoff the defendants in the Nevada case also have ties to.

“We really need to get these patriots released,” Fiore told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “We want to make sure our patriots know we stand with them.”

Recall that this is Michelle Fiore:

She’s the blond in the middle.

Maybe this freakshow will just fade away, but people who are following it aren’t so sanguine.

Trump’s first time voters crawling through broken glass. Sad!

by digby

Here’s a fascinating piece by Anna M. Tinsley at the Star-Telegram about the Trump phenomenon:

Marie Leffingwell got fed up.

She’s been voting for years, but the 50-year-old had never cast a primary ballot until this year. She thinks President Barack Obama has been driving America into the ditch for the last eight years and she didn’t like what she was hearing from most of the candidates.

So she voted in the Texas primary for Donald Trump — the voice of angry, disenfranchised voters nationwide who are turning out in droves to demand change.

“I’m now interested,” said Leffingwell, 50, of Georgetown, a small-business owner. “It has taken the past eight years of watching the country I love be destroyed.”

She is among the many thousands of voters showing up in mass at polls nationwide, as they did in Texas and are expected to do this week in New York, casting primary ballots for the first time in this extraordinarily unusual election year.

Some worry about the future of the country. Others are frustrated, anxious, even downright mad.

The Trump phenomenon is driving a significant amount of the participation among first time voters — both those who love and hate him are turning out to vote. Brandon Rottinghaus, associate political science professor at the University of Houston

“The Trump phenomenon is driving a significant amount of the participation among first-time voters — both those who love and hate him are turning out to vote,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, an associate political science professor at the University of Houston.

Trump has taken credit for propelling many — particularly the “millions and millions of people [who] have come to the Republican Party over the last little while” — to the polls.

Some Texas first-timers say yes, they did turn out to vote for the former reality TV star and New York businessman.

Others say they headed to the polls to vote for anybody but him.

“I, like a lot of people, didn’t take his candidacy serious as first,” said Dalton Goodier, 26, an admission counselor at TCU and first-time primary voter who cast his ballot for Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich. “As it grew in legitimacy, I started to pay attention to his message and at some point, it reached a tipping point.

“I thought if this person is very serious about doing some of these things he’s talking about, I felt it was my obligation and my responsibility to vote and make my voice heard.”
[…]
“I would crawl through broken glass to vote for Mr. Trump,” she said. “If his name isn’t on the ballot, I will write his name on there. If they try to put someone else on the ballot, I’m still going to write in Donald Trump’s name. I think there’s a lot of people who will do that.”

She said she’s tired of the verbal attacks she and other Trump supporters receive from the media and other Republicans, which likely is why a number of Texans who voted for Trump are staying quiet right now.

“Now a lot of people don’t want to talk about it,” Leffingwell said. “I believe they are afraid.”

A 34-year-old Fort Worth man who identified himself only as Drake said he was a first-time primary voter who also supported Trump.

He headed to the polls this year because he was “tired of career politicians and PC” to give Trump his vote because “we need a president with a backbone.”

“Trump presents questions and ideas other politicians are too afraid to tackle,” Drake said. “Just based on that alone, I will give Trump a chance.”

Trump was part of the reason Zach Taylor, 23, of San Angelo voted for the first time in the Texas primary this year.

“We have the opportunity to stop a man like him,” said Taylor, an administrative assistant at a San Angelo body shop who voted for Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.

“Sanders is the antithesis of the hate-filled Donald Trump and that’s why I was motivated enough to do my part and vote.”

Sean Commons, 24, of Fort Worth said he was going to cast his first primary vote this year whether or not Trump was on the ballot.

Commons decided to back Ted Cruz, who he believes will “bring us back to what this country was made on.”

“For the majority of his life, he’s been concerned about two things: himself and money,” he said. “A lot of people think that’s going to change on a dime. That’s not the case.

“But he struck a chord with a large base and he knows what kind of grip he’s got on a large number of people,” Commons said. “I wish he would channel this into something more constructive. It’s a circus right now.”

Democratic pull
Trump also wasn’t a factor in Anna Schiller’s decision to become a first-time primary voter this year at age 40.

I decided that if I am going to complain about politics, I also need to become a part of the process. Anna Schiller, 40, of Dallas, a real estate agent who who became a U.S. citizen in 1993

The Dallas real estate agent, who is originally from Iran but became a U.S. citizen in 1993, realized she had a duty to vote.

“I decided that if I am going to complain about politics, I also need to become a part of the process,” she said.

So she cast her first ballot for Bernie Sanders, who she said appears to be “the ‘least’ corrupt of the choices.”

As for Trump, Schiller said the only impact he’s had on her has been “pure entertainment value.”

“Donald Trump is a master at branding and media manipulation,” she said. “He knows how to work an audience and the camera, as he should. … He is treating this like a reality show and it ‘sells.’”

Cole Harper, 18, a senior at Paschal High School in Fort Worth, also headed to the polls for the first time this primary election.

But his vote was reserved for Democrat Hillary Clinton.

“There’s a lot of hate in the election,” he said. “I think she’s one of the candidates who can unify the country. She has a lot of experience and I agree with most of her policies.

“Keeping in mind that Donald Trump will probably be the Republican nominee, I will vote for her again,” Harper said. “Donald Trump has a message I feel is hateful, attacking different minority groups and other groups in the nation. I don’t feel it’s right.”

Ryan Dixon, 18, a senior at Colleyville Heritage High School, said he voted for the first time in Texas’ primary this year to do his civic duty.

DIxon said he chose Rubio because Trump “is a little too outrageous for my liking” and Cruz “is too right-wing.”

Trump has definitely made the election more interesting to watch with how outrageous he’s been in the debates. Ryan Dixon, 18, a Colleyville high school senior who voted in his first primary this year for Marco Rubio

Even though Rubio is no longer in the race, Dixon said, he will still vote in November.

And he will keep an eye on political developments till then.

“Trump has definitely made the election more interesting to watch with how outrageous he’s been in the debates,” Dixon said. “He definitely makes it more interesting to follow.”

Aaron Sanchez said there was no way he was going to miss voting in this year’s Texas primary election.

For years, Sanchez — who was born in Juarez, Mexico, and has lived in Fort Worth since he was 5 — cried on Election Night.

He saw so many people voting and was sad he couldn’t do the same until he formally became a citizen.

That happened last year, making this year’s primary the first election when he could vote.

“It was bittersweet,” Sanchez, 30, said of proudly heading to the polls for this year’s primary. “I was filled with excitement. But when I showed up to vote, … there were no lines, no one else was there.

“It didn’t seem to be that big of a deal,” said Sanchez, who voted for Sanders. “I guess I was hoping to see a line of people waiting to have their voices heard.”

For some reason the writer goes on to compared this race to 1980, with some odd analogy to Reagan and the Iranian hostage crisis which I didn’t find convincing. But the comments were great.

Those were all Texans, by the way.  Trump lost it to Cruz.

Just for fun:

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Heller on Trump

by digby

Well, not literally. But it says it all:

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” — Joseph Heller, Catch-22

h/t to Bette Midler 

Ted Cruz pivots to the middle

by digby

Major development:

In a Mother Jones story earlier this week, it was revealed that Cruz defended a state ban on the sale of dildos as Texas’s solicitor general.

“There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship,” a brief co-authored by Cruz read.

Cruz, asked by WABC radio host Curtis Sliwa if he would ban “the sale of sexual toys, dildos, or anything that sexually stimulates you,” answered that he would not.

“Look, of course not, it’s a ridiculous question, and of course not,” Cruz told Sliwa on Friday. “What people do in their own private time with themselves is their own business and it’s none of government’s business.”

He’s been conflicted on this for some time:

Ted Cruz thinks people don’t have a right to “stimulate their genitals.” I was his college roommate. This would be a new belief of his.

— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) April 13, 2016

Cokie’s Law: Beyond the Beltway
by Tom Sullivan

Digby long ago dubbed it Cokie’s Law after newswoman/commentator Cokie Roberts: “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s out there.” That’s all the justification the press needs to keep reporting a falsehood until “unsubstantiated gossip masquerading as news” becomes something “everyone knows.” But the press is late to the game. This has been the M.O. of the right regarding voting for decades.

Cokie’s Law is the essential justification for big gummint haters requiring voters to present state-issued identity cards before they can exercise formal power in this country. Because “everyone knows” voter fraud is a problem. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s out there. I’ve been writing about this technique for some time:

Gaming election results through precision gerrymandering and repressive voting laws aimed at the poor and minorities is political Viagra® for the flagging demographic potency of the Republican base. Voter data matching exercises are not meant to uncover crimes, punish criminals, or even amass credible evidence. They are the pretext for a party suffering a lack of electoral confidence to throw smoke bombs into newsrooms and yell, “Voter fraud!” By the time the smoke clears and no evidence is found — again — of a “massive” problem, all viewers remember is that they saw smoke and heard cries of fraud. And where there’s smoke there must be a fire, right?

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Does ACORN ring a bell?

Based on creating the public perception of a problem for which there is scant evidence other than “it’s out there,” Republicans have erected barrier after barrier to voting for groups who tend to support their opponents. Case in point, Arizona, where get-out-the-vote organizers have for years offered to take sealed ballots to polling stations for voters:

In the sprawling urban jungle that is Phoenix, the state’s major population center, many poorer voters without a car struggle to get to the polls and are grateful for the help. For some down-ballot races – when teachers and parents are out lobbying for a bond or special tax to help local schools, say – it’s common for voters to place their completed ballots in a box on their street and for an organizer to pick up and deliver them.

Now, however, this perfectly routine practice has been branded “ballot harvesting” and outlawed under a draconian new voting law passed by Arizona’s Republican-dominated state legislature last month.

House Bill (HB) 2023 wasn’t in force for the 22 March primary but it will be, barring a court injunction, for November’s general election. Anyone caught helping a voter deliver an absentee ballot, with certain exceptions for the infirm, could now face a $150,000 fine and up to a year in prison.

The reason? According to the bill’s sponsors, it is to stamp out the possibility of fraud or voter coercion. “People show up with boxes and boxes of ballots that they have collected somehow,” said Arizona party official Tim Sifert. “The chain of custody is very suspicious. It’s rife with opportunity for mischief.”

Yet the Republicans have been unable to produce a single proven instance of actual fraud – raising the wide-spread suspicion that the real motive is to suppress turnout in a state with a long and inglorious history of voter suppression and, in particular, to suppress the votes of Latinos, African Americans and Native Americans, all of whom lean Democrat.

“There’s no proof of voter fraud in ballot collection,” charged Stacey Morley, a lobbyist for the Arizona Education Association, who argued against HB 2023 at a state house election committee hearing in January. “None of the witnesses who came forward for the other side had seen anything themselves. It was all, ‘I know a guy … ’ I mean, seriously?”

Yes, seriously. Because, ya know, it’s out there.

The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton and Sanders presidential campaigns have filed a lawsuit against the state of Arizona alleging systematic suppression of minority votes via HB 2023 and other tactics:

The Democrats cite the long lines from last month’s presidential preference election as emblematic of voter disenfranchisement in Maricopa County. But their complaints, outlined in a lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Phoenix, don’t stop there. They argue Arizona’s disparate treatment of provisional ballots, as well as a recently passed law that bars people from returning another voter’s mail-in ballot, are further examples of other election practices that disenfranchise voters, especially minorities.

“Republicans are using every tool, every legal loophole and every fear tactic they can think of to take aim at voting rights wherever they can,” Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.

Ari Berman has been dogged on reporting voter suppression. This week he reported on Eddie Holloway of Milwaukee who presented three forms of government-issued ID (according to in 2013 lawsuit) and was still unable to obtain an acceptable photo ID to vote:

He brought his expired Illinois photo ID, birth certificate, and Social Security card to get a photo ID for voting, but the DMV in Milwaukee rejected his application because the name on his birth certificate read “Eddie Junior Holloway,” the result of a clerical error when it was issued.

Holloway, who worked as a cook in Illinois but is now unemployed and disabled, living with his family in Milwaukee, got a ride downtown to the Vital Records System to try to fix his birth certificate. Vital Records said it would cost between $400 and $600, which Holloway could not afford.

Charlie Pierce addressed the matter on Thursday, writing:

The Wisconsin law is functioning exactly the way it was designed to function. The purpose of these laws is not to ban certain people from voting; that would be illegal, even now that John Roberts has declared the Day Of Jubilee. The purpose is to make voting so difficult that people go broke, give up trying, or both.

When is the meme going to catch hold that these laws are a massive con perpetrated against democracy itself by people who have no use for it unless it serves the “right” people? That should be out there too.