Month: June 2016

What’s fair is fair
by Tom Sullivan

Dick DeVos, Jr. residence on Michigan’s Lake Macatawa.

Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) of Milwaukee plans to introduce a bill this week requiring drug testing for anyone claiming large tax deductions in a given year. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wants to require drug screenings for those receiving public assistance? Fine, says Moore.

Think Progress:

Her “Top 1% Accountability Act” would require anyone claiming itemized tax deductions of over $150,000 in a given year to submit a clean drug test. If a filer doesn’t submit a clean test within three months of filing, he won’t be able to take advantage of tax deductions like the mortgage interest deduction or health insurance tax breaks. Instead he would have to make use of the standard deduction.

A spokesman for Moore told Atlantic, “We don’t drug test wealthy CEOs who receive federal subsidies for their private jets, nor do we force judges or public officials to prove their sobriety to earn their paychecks. Attaching special demands to government aid exclusively targets our country’s most vulnerable individuals and families.” Alana Semuels writes:

The number of government tests and requirements for poor people receiving government aid has grown in recent years. Utah in 2012 passed a law requiring drug testing for recipients for Temporary Aid to Needy Families, Alabama passed a similar law in 2014, and Arkansas followed in 2015. Other states, including Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Kansas require drug testing if “reasonable suspicion” exists.

These drug tests target people with almost no income who, in the case of states such as Arkansas, receive as little as $204 a month. And the drug tests hardly ever turn up positive. In 2014 Governor Rick Snyder signed a law in Michigan implementing a pilot program to drug test welfare recipients in three counties; none of the people in the pilot program have tested positive for drugs.

You have to wonder how Amway’s Dick DeVos, Jr. would react if Rick Snyder demanded he send in a urine sample with his Michigan state taxes. Or in Wisconsin, trickle-down zealot and free market pamphleteer John Menard, Jr., or bathroom fixture magnate Herbert Kohler, Jr. Do you think the billionaires might give Scott Walker angry phone calls? (Any clue here that these Jr. bootstrap billionaires — like a certain Republican candidate for president — inherited their money?)

Image from Menard’s home improvement online training.

Criminalizing poverty

Moore said in a statement:

As a strong advocate for social programs aimed at combating poverty, it deeply offends me that there is such a deep stigma surrounding those who depend on government benefits, especially as a former welfare recipient. Sadly, Republicans across the country continue to implement discriminatory policies that criminalize the less fortunate and perpetuate false narratives about the most vulnerable among us. These laws serve only one purpose: stoking the most extreme sentiments and misguided notions of the conservative movement.

So this proposal should appeal to them. Think of all the waste, fraud, and abuse to be stopped by cracking down on deadbeat itemizers. Think Progress continues:

Moore also thinks that while there is no evidence that drug testing welfare recipients saves states any money, drug tests for wealthy taxpayers could be different. “We would save a lot of money on this,” she said. “When you add up all of the tax expenditures, all the money we give really wealthy people, it really rivals the amount we spend on Defense, Social Security, Medicare.” The mortgage interest deduction, which overwhelmingly benefits people making more than $100,000, alone cost $70 billion in 2013, or 0.4 percent of GDP.

Her bill will also help illuminate this very fact: that so much is spent on tax expenditures, not just on direct aid programs like welfare and food stamps. “We think it’s important to engage in some transparency and accountability around tax deductions,” she said.

Because drug testing the Poors is all about transparency, isn’t it?

“A beautiful, beautiful sight”

by digby

This is not normal, people. He’s a sociopath:

“If we had people with the bullets going in the opposite direction — right smack between the eyes of this maniac,” Trump said, pointing in a gun gesture to his forehead. “If some of those wonderful people had guns strapped right here, right to their waist or right to their ankle, and this son of a bitch comes out and starts shooting, and one of the people in that room happened to have it and goes boom, boom, you know what? That would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks, that would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight.”

I am sick to my stomach.

Trump’s such a big macho man. Why does he even need Secret Service protection? He should just have his gun at the ready and shoot any would-be assassin right between the eyes.

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The crazy is overwhelming


by digby

Every once in a while I delve into comment sections as a sort of purifying ritual. They are more toxic right now than they’ve ever been and I’ve been doing this a long time so I know. The conspiracy mongering is overwhelming. I think it must be social media reinforcing stupidity.

Anyway, here’s an example for you in case you don’t subject yourselves to the nonsense that gullible fools believe in this country:

The remarkable speed and coordination with which a muslim terrorist attack has been converted into a homophobic “mass shooting” for which Christians and Republicans are responsible suggests that this was planned by the presidential palace (let’s call it what it is now) and the Crown Princess’s headquarters in Brooklyn. It is, as one of their founding fathers (Stalin) used to say, “no coincidence” that before the bodies were identified and removed, the Obammunist apparatus of vigils and hashtags and demonstrations and orations at the Tonys swung into action for gun confiscation and already-written plans and legislation were trotted out for “reasonable regulation” of constitutional rights and a return to the preventive detention, general warrants and bills of attainder that we fought wars to get rid of. There can be no doubt that 2016 may be the last free election as we know them in the United States, and that keeping this regime in power will result in full-blown dictatorship and a police state by the end of 2017.

So vote for the man who wants to build a wall, surveil and deport millions, ban immigration on the basis of religion, torture suspects, kill their families, empower the police with the means to do “whatever is necessary” to keep order.

Because otherwise we will have a police state.

*And no it isn’t just the right that is going there. There are conspiracy theories on all sides. But only one group has a leader who is the nominee for president of the United States.

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He loves the gay hating pastors

by digby

Trump has been unctuously proclaiming his love for “the gays” all week in the wake of Orlando using them as props for his Muslim bigotry. But he’s as ignorant about the LGBT community as he is about Islam. Check this out:

But a photo posted to Twitter on Thursday night showed the presumptive Republican nominee with someone decidedly opposed to LGBT rights.

Robert Jeffress, a pastor from Dallas known for his anti-LGBT sentiment, shared a photo in which he posed with Trump at the candidate’s rally at Gilley’s, the city’s famous honky-tonk.

“Honored to pray for my friend, @realDonaldTrump, at tonight’s Dallas rally,” Jeffress tweeted, along with a photo in which they both held their thumbs up. Trump retweeted the image on Friday. 

The First Baptist Church pastor in February 2015 was quoted as saying the gay rights movement “will pave the way for that future world dictator, the Antichrist, to persecute and martyr Christians without any repercussions whatsoever.”

Jeffress last month celebrated his state’s leaders’ decision to refuse to comply with President Barack Obama’s directive to create more accessibility for transgender students in public schools, saying “it’s time for an all-out rebellion against this absolute tyranny of the Obama administration.”..

After the Supreme Court last summer ruled same-sex marriage legal, Jeffress said he believed “our culture will get increasingly darker,” adding that the decision was “ultimately irrelevant.”

“The Judge of all of the universe has already issued His decision: marriage should be reserved for one man and one woman. And there is no appealing that verdict,” he responded.

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by digby

 Dan Balz:

When the electorate is divided into different population groups, it’s even clearer how much trouble Trump has created for himself. Trump’s base during the primaries was among white, working-class voters. But it’s become apparent that his real base is among white men. Among white men without a college degree, he’s actually in positive territory. Among white women without a college degree, he’s not. 

Overlooked perhaps is Clinton’s image deficit among whites, particularly among white men. Just 23 percent of white men view her favorably, compared with 75 percent unfavorable. But she counters with strongly positive numbers among nonwhites, who are 2 to 1 positive about her.

Needless to say, this is being interpreted by plenty of people as a sign that Clinton is horribly unlikable.  And that’s true. 75% of white men don’t like her. And they, after all, are the only one who really count, amirite?

Never let it be said that it has anything at all to do with sexism among these white men though. Because it doesn’t. Just because people of color and women have a more positive view of Clinton doesn’t mean she’s not unlikable. They just don’t understand the issues. I mean, if you take all of those women and racial and ethnic minorities out of the equation, her unfavorables would match Trump’s.

Maybe that’s one of the things Trump can do to make America great again. Put the right people back in charge. Like when police could beat protesters without all that silly civil rights folderol. When you could just round up people who “look Mexican” and drop them in the Sonoran desert. And women and blacks couldn’t vote. You know,  the good old days.

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“Right here in Israel, Muslims don’t just get to come into Israel without some clearance,” Huckabee, who endorsed Trump for president, said in an interview with an Israeli radio station that aired Thursday, which was first reported by Jewish Insider. “In fact, I am not sure that they are allowed to immigrate here at all. So it’s not unusual — when everybody acts like ‘Oh what Trump has said is so amazing,’ it’s not that amazing in Israel. You don’t have open borders to Muslims here. “

Thought you were pretty foxy, didn’t you?
by Tom Sullivan

Wicked Witch of the West: You cursed brat! Look what you’ve
done! I’m melting! melting! Oh, what a world! What a world!

Reaction is coming in swiftly to The Self-Immolation of the Republican Party by Matthew Continetti, editor of the Washington Free Beacon, son-in-law of the ever-incorrect Bill Kristol, and author of “The Persecution of Sarah Palin.” Continetti would like to nominate the Republican Party for a Darwin Award for nominating Donald Trump for president. As the party melts down, Continetti writes:

It’s a joke. All of it: his candidacy, the apparatus of propaganda and grift surrounding it, the failures of governance and education and culture that have brought us to this place. What disturbs me most is the prospect that Donald Trump is what a very large number of Republican voters want: not a wonk, not an orator, not a statesman, not even a leader, really, if by leader you mean someone who persuades and inspires and manages a team to pursue a common good. They just want a man who vents their anger at targets above and below their status.

Of course, Continetti is venting his anger at targets above and below his, the kind of thing, he writes, “one expects of teenagers, artists, bloggers, pajama boys—immature, peevish, radical, self-destructive behavior.” The lack of self-awareness among Continetti and his peers is as stunning as it is predictable. Just last summer, Jonathan Chait reminds readers, Continetti was accusing John McCain staffers of revealing “disparaging material” about 2008 know-nothing VP-candidate Sarah Palin. As though that was not Palin’s métier.

In Trump, Republicans of Continetti’s station have had a kind of Road to Damascus experience. Methodist light has shown down on them. Chait writes:

Trump’s candidacy has given them the chance to debate the merits of an ignorant demagogue, rather than defend him reflexively. Many of them have decided that a president who knows things about public policy, and does not indulge conspiracy theories from email chains, has a certain charm. They have even come to view the dissent against such a candidate as an act of nobility, rather than traitorous currying of favor with the elite liberal media.

Martin Longman at Political Animal does not expected members of the Always Wrong Caucus to accept any blame for what they themselves have done to their party:

Continetti blames “failures of governance and education and culture” for bringing us to this place, when he would be better off looking at a family portrait. We have to go back to Warren Harding to find a comparable example of failed governance to the latter Bush administration, and the GOP turned into a grift machine under the watchful eye of the Bush family. As for education, has anyone treated it as more of a business opportunity than Jeb Bush? There’s a cultural rot here, but there are actual people to blame for it, and it’s not the recipients of catapulted propaganda.

Look in the mirror, friends. The T-party was all fun and war games until someone put the party’s eye out. Rush Limbaugh’s Monday-through-Friday Three Hours Hate fed red meat and dog whistles to the base for decades until the well-fed base got muscular enough to turn on its handlers and refuse to come when called. Hannity, O’Reilly, Beck, Savage, Breitbart. McConnell, Boehner, Gingrich, Ryan, etc. Thought you were pretty foxy, didn’t you?

Friday night soother

by digby

Here’s a little joey for you. Enjoey!

Now go put a shrimp on the bar-b, crack a nice frosty Fosters and make a toast to our Australian friends for their civilized gun policies.

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Reprise: Shut down the pump

by digby

Apparently, the only gun violence right wingers care about is that perpetrated by a Muslim extremist. And civil libertarians are concerned about the right of innocent people who’ve been cleared as terrorist suspects by the FBI to walk into a store and buy a gun unimpeded.

I frankly don’t care what the reason someone buys a gun and shoots up a bunch of innocent people is. This epidemic of gun violence has a many motivations as incidents and one is no more dangerous than any other. And I also don’t care if innocent people have trouble buying a gun.  Sorry, I just don’t think gun ownership is intrinsic to freedom. It makes no sense to me. Privacy, speech, movement, assembly all of that absolutely. The right to own a machine that’s made for nothing but killing? Not so much. Whatever the rationale might have been operative during revolutionary war times has long since become anachronistic. In the event of another revolution, a bunch of bozos with AR-15s aren’t going to save us.

If innocent people have to go through hoops to buy a gun it just isn’t the end of the world. If they are not allowed to buy semi-automatic weapons at all? Good. Nobody needs one of those for any reason, not even hunting feral pigs which I understand is one of the reasons people say they “need” these weapons. Sorry, not a compelling reason.

Anyway, I figured I might as well post this again at the end of this awful week:

Shut down the pump: a little parable for our time

Here is an interesting story for you to read today:

British doctor John Snow couldn’t convince other doctors and scientists that cholera, a deadly disease, was spread when people drank contaminated water until a mother washed her baby’s diaper in a town well in 1854 and touched off an epidemic that killed 616 people.
[…]
Dr. Snow believed sewage dumped into the river or into cesspools near town wells could contaminate the water supply, leading to a rapid spread of disease.

In August of 1854 Soho, a suburb of London, was hit hard by a terrible outbreak of cholera. Dr. Snows himself lived near Soho, and immediately went to work to prove his theory that contaminated water was the cause of the outbreak.

“Within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera in 10 days,” Dr. Snow wrote “As soon as I became acquainted with the situation and extent of this irruption (sic) of cholera, I suspected some contamination of the water of the much-frequented street-pump in Broad Street.”

Dr. Snow worked around the clock to track down information from hospital and public records on when the outbreak began and whether the victims drank water from the Broad Street pump. Snow suspected that those who lived or worked near the pump were the most likely to use the pump and thus, contract cholera. His pioneering medical research paid off. By using a geographical grid to chart deaths from the outbreak and investigating each case to determine access to the pump water, Snow developed what he considered positive proof the pump was the source of the epidemic… Snow was able to prove that the cholera was not a problem in Soho except among people who were in the habit of drinking water from the Broad Street pump. He also studied samples of water from the pump and found white flecks floating in it, which he believed were the source of contamination.

On 7 September 1854, Snow took his research to the town officials and convinced them to take the handle off the pump, making it impossible to draw water. The officials were reluctant to believe him, but took the handle off as a trial only to find the outbreak of cholera almost immediately trickled to a stop. Little by little, people who had left their homes and businesses in the Broad Street area out of fear of getting cholera began to return.

It took many more years before it was widely accepted that cholera came from the water. (In fact, it took a priest trying to prove that it was God’s will to finally do it!)

But here’s the relevant takeaway: they didn’t need to cure the disease to end the epidemic. What ended it was shutting down the pump.

Here’s another story for you to think about today:

From 1984 to 1996, multiple killings aroused public concern. The 1984 Milperra massacre was a major incident in a series of conflicts between various ‘outlaw motorcycle gangs’. In 1987, the Hoddle Street massacre and the Queen Street massacre took place in Melbourne. In response, several states required the registration of all guns, and restricted the availability of self-loading rifles and shotguns. In the Strathfield massacre in New South Wales, 1991, two were killed with a knife, and five more with a firearm. Tasmania passed a law in 1991 for firearm purchasers to obtain a licence, though enforcement was light. Firearm laws in Tasmania and Queensland remained relatively relaxed for longarms. In 1995, Tasmania had the second lowest rate of homicides per head of population.

The Port Arthur massacre in 1996 transformed gun control legislation in Australia. Thirty five people were killed and 21 wounded when a man with a history of violent and erratic behaviour beginning in early childhood opened fire on shop owners and tourists with two military style semi-automatic rifles. Six weeks after the Dunblane massacre in Scotland, this mass killing at the notorious former convict prison at Port Arthur horrified the Australian public and had powerful political consequences.
The Port Arthur perpetrator said he bought his firearms from a gun dealer without holding the required firearms licence.

Prime Minister John Howard, then newly elected, immediately took the gun law proposals developed from the report of the 1988 National Committee on Violence and forced the states to adopt them under a National Firearms Agreement. This was necessary because the Australian Constitution does not give the Commonwealth power to enact gun laws. The proposals included a ban on all semi-automatic rifles and all semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, and a tightly restrictive system of licensing and ownership controls.

Some discussion of measures to allow owners to undertake modifications to reduce the capacity of magazine-fed shotguns (“crimping”) occurred, but the government refused to permit this.

Surveys showed up to 85% of Australians supported gun control,but some farmers and sporting shooters strongly opposed the new laws.

This did not solve the problem of mental illness or end the primitive capacity of human beings to commit murder and mayhem. Those are huge problems that their society, like all societies, is still grappling with every day. But it did end the epidemic of mass shootings. They have not had even one since then. 

The lesson is this: End the epidemic and then we can — and must — talk about root causes, extremist ideology, mental health facilities and our violent culture. But first things first — shut down the damned pump.

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