Month: April 2016

On what streets do they live?
by Tom Sullivan

David Crosby and Graham Nash play Occupy Wall Street on Nov. 8, 2011,.
By David Shankbone (Own work) [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

“Why doesn’t somebody do something?” has become something of a joke question in my house. It’s one of those questions we ask when exasperated over whatever daily outrage comes over the radio, TV, or Web. After hearing the question one too many times, it finally dawned on me that I was somebody. Look at the trouble that’s gotten me into.

A variant of that question is “Why don’t they do something?” That’s an even bigger joke line here, mostly because it evokes that old song from David Crosby. The now-standard rejoinder is, “Who are They? And on what streets do They live?” Maybe we can ask them.

Many people find it easier to just bay at the social media moon. There’s a lot of that going on regarding the process of the presidential primaries, and serious discussion about changing it too from organizers who might have shot at affecting change. Martin Longman believes how it works in practice is “you have to get involved.” Longman writes:

Maybe it’s my background as an organizer, but I want a system built by organizers rather than people who just write checks or show up once every two years for however long it takes them to cast a single vote.

And I don’t think this system disfavors outsiders if the outsiders are good (and early) organizers. I do think it disfavors anyone who thinks they can take over an entire power structure without winning over a substantial part of that power structure to their side, but that’s part of what organizing is all about. Without that kind of organizing, you’re relying on magic, and I don’t believe in magicians.

If our system is really profoundly broken, it’s largely because one side of it has abandoned reason and is now actively working to break it. But it’s also because, even though we will always have elites and elites will always run the government no matter who wins an election, our elites have been doing a terrible job in recent years.

It makes no sense to try to devise a system where politically disorganized and uncommitted people will run our federal government just so we can say that The Establishment has been pushed out. What we need is a better Establishment. Personally, I’ve seen advances in this respect on the left and in the media since I started blogging eleven years ago, but it’s hard to notice when the right has basically put on a suicide vest and is constantly threatening to blow the whole thing up.

You can support candidates working to build a better government at Blue America.

Longman’s experience aligns pretty closely both with my experience and my time frame. Now having a modicum of success after a dozen years. A lot of that is just showing up consistently. Best part is I stopped feeling like political roadkill even when I get run over. But to add to Longman’s observations, what kills advances more than opposition is lack of staying power.

An ultramarathoner I once knew was asked how he got into running such long distances. He said it was because he wasn’t that fast, so he just kept running longer and longer races until he found distances at which he could win. Movement conservatives learned that long before I did.

Friday Night Soother: Free Chilly

by digby

Wild orcas needed help — so people plunged into the freezing waters of the Sea of Okhotsk in far east Russia.

Trapped by ice blocks in shallow water, four orcas, including one calf, were stranded on stones just a few yards from the shore.

The massive effort of rescuers, who pushed ice blocks aside and tried to show the stranded orcas a path to safety, was caught on video.

The frightened orcas could be heard crying as their rescuers gently moved them toward the right path.

They all made it.

A little moment of diversion

by digby

Colbert sends up the Australian apology:

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Justice RINO

by digby

There is no room for even the slightest deviation from conservative dogma or you are drummed out of the movement. They are actually playing the refs here, warning Justice Roberts that he’d better not open his trap about giving that commie Merrick Garland an up or down vote. He’s already skating on thin ice.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Thursday accused the Supreme Court’s conservative Chief Justice John Roberts of being the “tip of the spear in playing politics,” arguing the high court “deserves to be swept up into the political process.”

Abbott was weighing on the current refusal by Senate Republicans to consider President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, according to the Houston Chronicle.

“Chief Justice John Roberts knowingly, clearly and unabashedly re-wrote Obamacare twice. What we are seeing is nothing more than naked politics being played by the United States Supreme Court,” Abbott said during a press event at the Heritage Foundation.

Abbott is not the only Republican to blame Roberts, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush and has a conservative voting record, for making the Supreme Court the political hot potato that it’s considered now.

Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) warned Roberts against publicly commenting on the current nomination fight. Roberts so far has stayed mum, but days before Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, he decried how political the Senate’s confirmation process had become. Grassley later said Roberts was “part of the problem.”

No good deed goes unpunished in wingnutland. Roberts is as conservative as it gets and he’s trying to preserve the court’s credibility for future conseervatism. It’s not good enough.

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No reason to carry a loaded gun

by digby

Apparently at least 60 kids under 18 have accidentally killed themselves and or other people already this year. It’s a horror story. Here’s the latest.

A 2-year-old Indiana boy fatally shot himself Wednesday evening after discovering a gun in his mother’s purse, authorities said.

The boy retrieved the gun when his mother “momentarily stepped away,” leaving her purse on the kitchen counter, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department said in a news release.

“The grieving mother is cooperating with detectives and after detectives questioned her she was later released,” the release stated. “This incident is being investigated as a death investigation.”

Police who responded to the home Wednesday night found that the 2-year-old had suffered a single gunshot wound and was unresponsive. The boy was taken to a local hospital, but died from the shooting.

It was, police said, an “unfortunate tragedy.”

This is not just an unfortunate tragedy. It’s negligent homicide:

Negligent homicide is a criminal charge brought against people who, through criminal negligence, allow others to die.

Negligent homicide is a lesser included offense to first and second degree murder, in the sense that someone guilty of this offense can expect a more lenient sentence, often with imprisonment time comparable to manslaughter. U.S. states all define negligent homicide by statute. In some, the offense includes the killing of another while driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Examples include the crash of Aeroperu Flight 603 near Lima, Peru. The accident was caused by a piece of duct tape that was accidentally left over the static ports (on the bottom side of the fuselage) after cleaning the aircraft, which led to the crash. Employee Eleuterio Chacaliaza left the tape on by accident and was charged with negligent homicide.

If leaving a piece of duct tape on an airplane that crashed is negligent homicide leaving a loaded gun around a 2 year old certainly is. There’s just no excuse for it.

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Of course Trump blamed the victim

by digby

Who would expect anything else? Heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson was convicted of raping a woman named Desiree Washington in a notorious case back in the 90s.  Mother Jones reported a few months back that Trump floated a plan to keep him out of jail by having him pay the victim.

Now there’s this from Buzzfeed:

“You have a young woman that was in his hotel room late in the evening at her own will,” Trump said in an NBC Nightly News video package obtained by BuzzFeed News through the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive. “You have a young woman seen dancing for the beauty contest—dancing with a big smile on her face, looked happy as can be.” 

“It’s my opinion that to a large extent, Mike Tyson was railroaded in this case,” Trump also said in the package, which aired on Feb. 21, 1992.

Still, he does represent a small faction of sane Republicans and this comment will undoubtedly speak to them:

See, I am a fundamental believer in ideas. If you don’t have ideas, you got nothing. And frankly, my Republican Party doesn’t like ideas. They want to be negative against things.
Now we got – we’ve had a few who have been idea people. We had Reagan. Okay, Saint Ron. We had Kemp, he was an idea guy. We had, you know, I’d say Paul. Paul is driven mostly by ideas, Paul Ryan. He likes ideas. But you talk about most of them, most of them – the party is kind of a knee jerk against. Maybe that’s how they were created. I don’t know. 

That’s quite an indictment and he’s right.  It used to be an article of faith that the Republican Party was the party of ideas and it was the moribund philosophy of the left that was creaking along with nothing left to offer. But that’s been over for a long time, going back to when Kasich was in the leadership and Newt Gingrich was burning down the House. You would at least think think he would have noticed when he was employed at Fox News that “ideas” weren’t exactly motivating the right anymore.

But lest anyone gets the idea that Kasich has any innovative new ideas, his litany of policy prescriptions could have come directly from the Poppy Bush campaign. He’ll eliminate some federal agencies like the Commerce Department and move Medicare to “coordinated care.” He defends his massive tax cuts by evoking stale Wall Street blather about “certainty” being the magic elixir that will stimulate growth.  And he has the nerve to claim that the budget analysts who call his tax cuts a budget buster are innumerate hacks despite insisting he’s going to win the nomination even though he was mathematically eliminated some time ago so.

And there were times when one was immediately reminded that John Kasich can sometimes give Donald Trump a run for his billions in the bragging department:

And if you look at Ohio, you know, we have so many ideas, new ideas, newfangled ideas in Ohio it’s unbelievable, and they’re paying off. It’s the same thing I did when I was here, whether it was reforming the Pentagon or fixing the budget.

His subsequent ramble about the primaries, the convention, the party and politics is so disjointed you wonder if he’s so sleep deprived from campaigning that he can’t think straight. It seems to be part of his “common sense, regular guy” persona but it ends up sounding downright daft.  It’s not quite as bizarre as Trump’s frightening stream of consciousness babble but it’s closer than any allegedly sensible moderate should be.

But one thing does come through in all of it: Kasich truly believes that if either Trump or Cruz are nominated the party is going to be wiped out in November at all levels. And he thinks that its best hope of avoiding that is the grassroots party officials who are being selected as delegates who he trusts to make a sensible decision and choose him.  Unfortunately, Kasich doesn’t seem to have met the Tea Party or the conservative movement stalwarts who have taken over the party in the last few years. You’d think the Governor of Ohio would be a little bit more in touch but there’s something about Kasich that’s frozen from an earlier time. He obviously is engaged in contemporary politics but his rhetoric and attitudes are right out of the 80s.

The other headline that came out of this interview was his answer to the question of whether the District of Columbia should have the vote. The sensible moderate, compassionate conservative said no:

ARMAO:  What about voting rights in Congress, voting representatives?

KASICH:  Probably not. I don’t know. I’d have to, I mean, to me, that’s just, I just don’t see that we really need that, okay?  I don’t know. I don’t think so. 

ARMAO:  But you realize though that people in D.C. pay taxes, go to war and they have no vote in Congress.

KASICH:  Yeah. 

ARMAO:  How is that– 

KASICH:  Well look, I am not – I don’t – I am not, because you know what, what it really gets down to if you want to be honest is because they know that’s just more votes in the Democratic Party. 

Those would be mostly African American Democratic votes. What’s that stale old saying about a gaffe being when a politician accidentally tells the truth?

To his credit Kasich has not joined Trump’s wall and mass deportation party.  But whether he knows it or not (and I expect he knows it very well) he has evoked the major conservative movement motivation for opposing immigration and supporting vote suppression: the likelihood that American racial minorities and immigrants will become Democrats after being treated like dirt by white conservatives.

Ann Coulter, author of “Adios America” makes the point explicitly. She not only claims that any path to citizenship for undocumented workers and their kids is a nefarious plot to create more Democrats, she claims that’s the design of all immigration for the past 50 years:

Half a century ago, Democrats looked at the country and realized they were never going to convince Americans to agree with them. But they noticed that people in most other countries of the world already agreed with them. The solution was obvious.  

So in 1965 — 50 years ago this week — Sen. Ted Kennedy passed an immigration law that has brought 59 million foreigners to our shores, who happen to vote 8-2 for the Democrats.

Republicans should be sweeping the country, but they aren’t, because of Kennedy’s immigration law. Without post-1965 immigrants bloc-voting for the Democrats, Obama never would have been elected president, and Romney would have won a bigger landslide against him in 2012 than Reagan did against Carter in 1980.

This isn’t a guess; it’s a provable fact. Obama beat Romney by less than 5 million votes in a presidential election in which about 125 million votes were cast. More than 30 million of Obama’s votes came from people who arrived under Teddy Kennedy’s immigration law; fewer than 10 million of Romney’s did.  

The 1965 act brought in the poorest of the poor from around the globe. Non-English-speaking peasants from wildly backward cultures could be counted on to be dependent on government assistance for generations to come. 

It’s not hard to see why she loves Trump so much.

John Kasich doesn’t believe that. But he reflexively says he’s fine with denying people the vote if he thinks they might become Democrats. So for all his insistence that he’s a sensible moderate, his inner Ann Coulter slipped out there. (And if you look at his record in Ohio his inner Ann Coulter comes out quite a bit, in more ways than one.)

Nobody is quite sure why Kasich is still plugging along in this race and this interview didn’t clear it up. Some people believe that really he’s running for Vice President and others think he’s just being a good #neverTrump soldier. If you take him at this word he really believes that he’ll prevail at he convention when all good stolid GOP activists and officials realize that he’s the only prudent and judicious choice. He’s noticed that his party hasn’t got any ideas but not that it’s gone batshit crazy all the way down to the grassroots.

Boaty McBoatface and our sinking democracy
by Tom Sullivan

Last month I brought you the tale of the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council’s online poll for naming a new research vessel:

The NERC announced the online voting contest to name the nearly $300 million boat to be launched in 2019 recently, and the leading vote-getter so far is the simple but silly “Boaty McBoatface.”

Uri Friedman of the Atlantic considers the outcome and what it says about democracy:

The boat, which is really a ship, acquired new significance this week, when a British official suggested he wouldn’t respect the results of an online government poll in which more than 124,000 people voted to christen the country’s new $300-million research vessel “Boaty McBoatface.” The name received three times more votes than the runner-up entry. The people of the Internet had spoken emphatically, and they’d spoken like a five-year-old.

Journalist Ross Clark observed,
“Our leaders, of course, love democracy—until it comes up with an answer different to the one they were expecting.” Friedman asks, “Is democracy a lie?” before citing research suggesting it is, sort of:

In their new book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels gather an array of recent social-science research to challenge what they call the “folk theory” of democracy—the popular conception that “what the majority wants becomes government policy.” Abraham Lincoln’s vision of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” may be rousing, they write, but it’s not realistic. Most voters have neither the time nor inclination to pay close attention to politics. They support parties and candidates based not on specific policy issues or coherent ideological reasoning, but rather on their social identities, partisan loyalties, and immediate circumstances—things like their race or religious affiliations, the political party they’ve backed since childhood, and the state of the economy at the time of the election.

Boaty McBoatfacites are in Monty Python fashion thumbing their noses at pomposity, as Nell Frizell wrote in the Guardian. “Nothing makes my lips twitch for a knob joke or silly name like a group of middle-aged professionals trying to be inspiring, profound or historic.” But the hue and cry over the conduct of presidential primaries in this country has more to say about the “folk theory” of democracy than Boaty McBoatface.

What voters fail to understand is that primaries do not work like general elections. That they fail to grasp this is not proof that primaries are corrupt, undemocratic, or unfair. But it is an opportunity to consider how democracy works in practice as opposed to in folk theory, if in fact it does work.

Brad Friedman interviewed John Opdycke, President of OpenPrimaries.org and writes:

Opdycke explains why shutting non-party affiliated voters out of the process is of particular concern in primaries that are run with tax-payer funding and resources. But, he explains, the problem is larger than that. “This is a very serious question. Who does the political process belong to? Does the process itself belong to the people, or does it belong to the political parties? Right now, our democracy belongs lock, stock and barrel to the political parties, from top to bottom. And that is a very big problem and it is beginning to come to light.”

[…]

While recognizing that political parties are private organizations with a First Amendment right to organize as they see fit, Opdycke explains how the result blocks people from the process and makes it nearly impossible to change the system. “They control the political process. They control the boards of elections. They control how redistricting is done. They control the primaries. They control voter registration. They control every aspect. They even control the Presidential debates. And we Americans, we’ve participated in that. We have in some ways ceded our power to these political organizations and I think the time has come to take that back. Not abolish political parties, but simply return them to an appropriate place.”

Opdycke overstates in saying our democracy “belongs to” the political parties. Still, the major parties (private organizations) have become such a part of how government functions in the states that taxpayers are subsidizing what is essentially formal polling of party members for the purpose of their selecting general election candidates. Primaries are not public elections in the proper sense and are not similarly final. But here are two fair critiques of the system I see:

1) taxpayers should not be subsidizing private organizations polling their memberships (Opydyke), or if they do…
2) the polling (primaries) should be open to the non-party members who are footing the bill through their taxes.

Complaints about the parties’ internal processes by nonmembers is chaff that obscures those issues. But there is a flip side to Opydyke’s characterization of parties’ influence.

A lot of us are not joiners. We prefer to stand alone. But recognize, that choice has a downside. In the political arena, the two major parties are like rival unions. People who join are voters too. They have not ceded their power to them. They exercise it through them, finding strength in numbers. As a nonmember (independent) you are free to schedule a meeting with the boss to negotiate the terms of your employment and see where that gets you. But that is where independent voters stand. Unorganized. Alone. Nonmembers complaining that they have no voice in selecting the union president or in strike votes, and that they don’t like how the union conducts its voting is a bit cheeky. Unless they are actually subsidizing the unions’ elections
as independent voters subsidize the Republicans’ and Democrats’ primaries.

That GOP outreach is really working out

by digby

538’s Andrew R. Lewis, Paul A. Djupe and Jacob Neiheisel took a look at attitudes toward minority groups in the GOP primary and the results are … unsurprising:

Many of Donald Trump’s supporters are intolerant — racist, sexist and xenophobic. Indeed, some high-profile work has highlighted Trump’s populism and his appeal to less-educated authoritarians — a potent witch’s brew challenging democratic norms. And other analyses have focused on the specific targets of Trump supporters’ anti-democratic attitudes – especially, but not solely, Muslims, immigrants and black Americans.

Attention to the treatment of these minority groups is certainly warranted and important, but focusing only on Trump overlooks a crucial point: These are not the only groups that many people dislike, and intolerance is not concentrated among Trump supporters.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in France, Trump called for a (temporary) ban on Muslims’ entering the United States. Republican exit polls asked about this proposal and found that support for Trump’s position was widespread (over 60 percent) among participants in Republican nomination contests so far.

This too:

And this:

Pew Research Center found that 17 percent of Trump supporters said diversity makes America worse, a higher share than among either Cruz or John Kasich’s backers. Pew also found that 69 percent of Trump voters agreed that immigrants are a burden on the country.

An ABC News/Washington Post survey showed that among respondents who said that white Americans are losing out because of preferential treatment for Latinos and blacks, 43 percent backed Trump — higher than the 34 percent of Republican respondents who supported Trump overall.

Trump also performs well among those who dislike African-Americans and evaluate whites at higher levels than minorities.

These attitudes are Republican mainstream now. There are some Kasich voters out there who are a little bit more tolerant but we know by the vote totals how much clout they have in the party.

But Democrats are intolerant too. Check out who they hate in comparison to the Republicans:

Nearly as many Trump voters dislike undocumented immigrants as much as the KKK. The KKK. That outreach to the emerging demographics is going swimmingly.

Apparently, for Democrats, picking their least liked group wasn’t a tough choice. The KKK was number one for the vast majority. But Republicans had trouble choosing. There are so many people they hate, after all. Who can choose just one? And note that Ted Cruz voters had a particularly hard time. There are a lot of enemies on that list.

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