Author: Tom Sullivan

Big donor just wants to serve Man
by Tom Sullivan

We’re not exactly envious of the state of Oklahoma where Charlie Pierce ends his regular peek into the Laboratories of Democracy. Let’s just say there’s some serious experimentin’ he’s missed going on in the Tarheel State. A major donor Republican donor earlier this week put a fountain pen to his temple and told North Carolina’s GOP legislators that if he doesn’t get the tax and spending cuts he wants, their $25,000 donation gets it:

Raleigh businessman Bob Luddy, who chairs the board of the conservative Civitas Institute think tank and is an influential financial supporter of conservative candidates, emailed a sharp critique of the House budget to House Republicans, who are in the majority.

Luddy complained that the budget advancing to a major vote on Thursday does not include new tax cuts and extends tax breaks for specific industries. He called the spending plan too “liberal” and said he’s decided to withold his planned, annual donation to the House Republicans’ campaign committee.

Posting on the Civitas web site, Luddy wrote:

I had planned to donate $25,000 this year to the House Republican Caucus to help re-elect a conservative super-majority.

Unfortunately, after seeing the $1.3 billion in additional spending and no across the board tax relief in the proposed house budget I had to reconsider.

Today, I decided to give the $25,000 intended for the House Caucus to Americans for Prosperity NC to fight the Liberal House spending plan.

It’s not as if Luddy phoned in an order for legislation drafted to his specifications the way Michael Eisenga did in Wisconsin. That wealthy donor recruited a state lawmaker to write a bill that would lower his child support payments. No, Luddy, who owns a $300 million heating and ventilation company and chairs a chain of charter schools, was slightly more subtle.

“Special interests” really get under this deluxe, extra-special donor’s skin, the Raleigh News and Observer reported:

He added that his own involvement isn’t based on self-interest. “I don’t want anything from them except good government,” he said. “You won’t see me advocate for anything beyond better education, lower taxes and good government.”

Luddy the Benevolent just wants To Serve Man.

Calling Luddy’s maneuver “borderline illegal,” the Charlotte Observer’s editorial board wrote:

It’s no secret that money has always talked loudly in politics. But thanks to rollbacks in campaign finance laws, along with the Supreme Court’s ill-advised Citizens United ruling, wealth has as big of an influence as ever – regardless of party. Luddy’s outburst this week is a reflection of how emboldened big donors have become.

No kidding.

Jebbie finds a message
by Tom Sullivan

They’re scientists. They know stuff. Of course, they’re elitists.

In all the earned media Jeb Bush got with his complaint about climate science the other day, nobody noticed…. Well, first, his statement via Think Progress (emphasis mine):

In comments reported by CNN on Wednesday, the potential 2016 presidential candidate called the science of human-caused climate change “convoluted,” and questioned the degree to which carbon emissions are responsible.

“For the people to say the science is decided on this is really arrogant, to be honest with you,” he reportedly said. “It’s this intellectual arrogance that now you can’t have a conversation about it, even.”

I’m loathe to call Bush’s statement brilliant, or to suggest that he planned it — it was probably just reflex — but that really is a clever bit of wedge politics. It plays to a carefully cultivated anti-intellectual sentiment among GOP base voters. You don’t have to be Richard Hofstadter to figure it out. What the left sees as pandering to anti-science sentiment on the right (or to oil interests) is really the politics of resentment. Also carefully cultivated. Us vs. Them. Real Americans vs. snooty intellectuals. Or the ever-popular city vs. county (deployed frequently around these parts).

And like Pavlov’s dog, the left rose to the bait. (Okay, a bit of mixed metaphor there.) Think Progress went all “just the facts, ma’am”:

Of the climate scientists who actively publish research, 97 percent agree that humans cause climate change. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which draws on the knowledge of almost 800 climate experts across the globe — says it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities are the main cause of atmospheric and ocean warming since the 1950s.

CNN reported:

The Democratic National Committee was quick to respond to Bush’s comments Wednesday night.

“Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that human activity has led to climate change. Ninety-seven percent. But Jeb Bush thinks they’re wrong. Who’s being intellectually arrogant now?” said Holly Shulman, DNC spokeswoman, in a written statement.

#Fail. Not only did they prove Jeb Bush’s point, they helped him disseminate it.

And his point was? Bush was responding to a quote from President Obama’s commencement speech earlier in the day at the Coast Guard Academy. Obama said, “Climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security … it will impact how our military defends our country.” Which is already true. But truth was not Bush’s point. Truthiness was. And the truthiness is, smartypants lefty intellectuals look down their noses at Real Americans who disagree with them. His Mr. Rogers-ish meta message was, “I like you just the way you are. They disrespect you because you don’t think like them.”

The left did exactly what it was supposed to. It responded with facts. Bush? Bush was on message.

Doubling down on double standards
by Tom Sullivan

There’s a double standard in this country when dealing with crime. Cue Claude Rains.

Charles M. Blow this morning explores the media double standard in reporting on crime committed by whites and blacks. Last Sunday’s gunfight in Waco, TX was between “bikers” or “outlaw motorcycle gangs.” Those terms, Blow writes, evoke the American romance of the Old West and the open road:

While those words may be accurate, they lack the pathological markings of those used to describe protesters in places like Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore. President Obama and the mayor of Baltimore were quick to use the loaded label “thugs” for the violent rioters there. That the authorities have not used that word to describe the far worse violence in Waco makes the contrast all the more glaring.

Blow continues,

Does the violence in Waco say something universal about white culture or Hispanic culture? Even the question sounds ridiculous — and yet we don’t hesitate to ask such questions around black violence, and to answer it, in the affirmative. And invariably, the single-mother, absent-father trope is dragged out.

Bikers? I thought they said bankers. Word spread this week that six of the world’s largest banks would pay fines of $5.8 billion in pocket change to the Department of Justice for currency-rigging, and five would plead guilty to felony charges. No one goes to jail. The banks say thank you — “thankyou” 600 times — and get back to the business of crime.

How many corrupt, white bankers were raised by single-mothers or had absent-fathers? We don’t ask. In Ferguson or Baltimore, thugs commit crimes. In the white-collar world, crimes commit themselves.

Charlie Pierce at Esquire Politics:

This is altogether remarkable. Here we have a staggering series of crimes that did very real damage to thousands of people all over the world. Here we have a staggering series of crimes, but not a single identifiable criminal. Who rigged the markets? The bank buildings? A shadowy cabal of ledgers? Motorcycle gangs made up of quarterly reports? This is the only area of criminal justice where law-enforcement actively avoids identifying anyone as a criminal.

Let us face facts. Within these institutions, there have to be hundreds of people who were involved in some way with a scam this large. There were people who supervised those hundreds of people, and people who supervised them. Somewhere, in that mass of criminal activity, I’m willing to bet something substantial that a human being committed an actual crime.

None will face punishment. Matt Taibbi yesterday speculated how that might work if they ever did:

I think eventually what's going to happen is banks are going to pay the unemployed to do criminal jail sentences for guilty executives.— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) May 20, 2015

As Taibbi found out, that’s how it works in China right now. Can you say freedom ? Sure, I knew you could.

“It’s business as usual, and it stinks,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote of the bank settlement in an email:

“The big banks have been caught red-handed conspiring to manipulate financial markets, and several have even admitted in court that they’re felons — but not a single trader is being held individually accountable, and regulators are stumbling over themselves to exempt the banks from the legally required consequences of their criminal behavior,” Warren said. “That’s not accountability for Wall Street.”

Wall Streeters had better pray to their gods (or to themselves?) that Elizabeth Warren never gets offered a job as U.S. Attorney General.

There’s something happening, eh?
by Tom Sullivan

While Texas Sen. Ted Cruz went “full Ted Cruz” and Texas bikers went to guns, I missed the tremors coming out of Canada’s version of Cruz’s petrostate. Canada’s Globe and Mail once called it Saudi Alberta, where, Russell Cobb writes for the New York Times, the Progressive Conservative Party had been in power longer than he’d been alive [emphasis mine]:

Then came the “Alberta Spring,” the May elections in which the Progressive Conservatives were swept from power by the left-leaning New Democrats. In the run-up to the vote Rachel Notley, the New Democrats’ leader, argued that Alberta’s oil belonged to the people, not to the foreign corporations that do most of the exploration and extraction in the oil sands. She called for a review of the province’s current royalty regime, as well as a 2 percent increase in corporate taxes. It’s hard to imagine mainstream Texas Democrats making that case, let alone sweeping the state elections, and yet that’s precisely what happened in Alberta.

But campaign rhetoric is one thing. It’s another for the new premier to fundamentally challenge the backbone of the provincial economy. Especially when one poll suggests that voters threw out the old bums more than voted in new ones.

Notley is already negotiating with oil industry over just what the royalty review will mean, and what the NDP platform meant when it criticized conservatives for “neglecting our opportunity to invest in value-added processing and refining – investment that would create more jobs in Alberta instead of exporting them to Texas.” Hmmm.

Still, Cobb writes, “To my ears, attuned as they are to the sacred American concept of private property, the idea that ordinary people own natural resources sounds, well, kind of socialist.” As Sen. Bernie Sanders might say, what’s wrong with that? As oil interests here in the States lobby for oil and gas drilling off the East Coast (with the Obama administration’s support), just who owns the Commons, makes the decisions about and profits from the Commons is something that here in the States we are overdue to review.

How many dead people can’t vote?
by Tom Sullivan

Turning the dead people voting meme on its head, Daniel McGraw crunched some numbers on a Politico napkin to take a swag at how many voters will die off before the 2016 presidential election:

“I’ve never seen anyone doing any studies on how many dead people can’t vote,” laughs William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in demographic studies. “I’ve seen studies on how many dead people do vote. The old Daley Administration in Chicago was very good at that.”

Maybe soon it will be Republican zombies headed down to the DMV (Dead Men Voting) office to obtain their photo IDs. It turns out that mortality rates are more of a problem for Republicans than for Democrats. (And for Texans last weekend.) It’s not called the Grand Old Party for nothing:

By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, I calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. President Barack Obama’s voters, of course, will have died too—about 2.3 million of the 66 million who voted for the president won’t make it to 2016 either. That leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats.

Next come the caveats, of course, and there are lots of them: where those voters live, whether they are in swing states or not, turnout rates, etc. But adding in 6 million new youth registrations (recent exit polls put the split at about 65-35 D-to-R) puts Republicans at a nearly 2.5 million voter disadvantage going into 2016, McGraw estimates. Ruy Teixeira wrote last fall, “By the 2016 election, Millennials should be about 36 percent of eligible voters and roughly a third of actual voters.”

But to borrow a phrase, don’t be too proud of this demographical terror you’ve calculated. Counting young voters and getting them to turn out are two different things. Their staying home in 2010 (as in other mid-term elections) contributed to the Republican wave election that handed over so many state legislatures to GOP control. They stayed home again in 2014. Democrats got hammered, and not in a fun way.

Omission accomplished
by Tom Sullivan

Since elections that gave the GOP control of North Carolina’s legislature (2010) and governor’s mansion (2012), creating jobs hasn’t exactly been Job One. But keeping theirs has. That has meant election changes from soup to nuts, or rather, from gerrymandering to photo identity cards. The cherry on top? Voter registrations state agencies must offer clients by the National Voter Registration Act dropping by 50 percent since Gov. Pat McCrory took office. Plus regular voter fraud snipe hunts designed to generate public support for even more election “reforms.”

For all their amateur data-sleuthing, what the state’s voter fraud vigilantes lack in quality, they make up for in quantity. Yet documenting non-anecdotal cases of fraud has proven difficult. Finding real victims of the voting restrictions they advocate, less so, as the Institute for Southern Studies found:

Jerome Roberts and his daughter Diana battled nearly unbelievable odds to become U.S. citizens. And one of the first things they wanted to do after becoming naturalized was to cast votes in North Carolina’s 2014 elections.

In the 1990s, they had fled their native Liberia during the West African country’s deadly civil wars, which claimed the lives of both of Jerome’s parents. After living in a U.N. refugee camp in Ghana for several years, the family was moved in 2000 by the U.S. government to a resettlement in Charlotte, where Jerome has worked as a service technician for the city for eight years.

They were excited about voting as full citizens in their first general election in November 2014. And then?

On the morning of the elections, Jerome picked Diana up from high school, where she was an 18-year-old in her last semester, and they headed to their precinct at Druid Hills Academy. When they arrived, however, they discovered that Diana — despite being a naturalized citizen, and a registered voter since September — had been flagged as a potential non-citizen by state election officials. According to state law, only naturalized citizens can vote.

Diana was apparently on a list of 1,454 names the N.C. State Board of Elections gave to local election officials shortly before the 2014 elections, identifying registered voters whose “citizenship status was in question.” More than 300 names had been sent to Mecklenburg County.

According to Jerome and Diana, their voting experience went downhill from there. A poll worker told them to wait while precinct officials “called downtown” to address Diana’s citizenship status. They waited more than two hours, to no avail. In the meantime, Jerome — unfamiliar with the voting process — asked the same poll worker for help understanding his ballot; according to Jerome, she became impatient and dismissive, saying, “We can’t help you.”

In the end, Jerome cast a ballot, but Diana, frustrated and tired, did not. Asked if she planned to try again next election, she said no. Jerome added, “Is this how people vote in this country? Because these are the things that make people not want to vote.”

As President George W. Bush once said of his administration’s custom-designed fiasco, “Mission accomplished.”

It takes a criminal mind
by Tom Sullivan

After signing the credit card draft, the customer asked for his carbons back. (That tells you how long ago this was.) The waiter (moi) must have gotten a puzzled look on his face.

“Nobody ever asked you that before?” the customer asked.

Nope.

The customer explained that dumpster-diving thieves would steal carbons to get credit card numbers.

“Huh? That never would have occurred to me,” I said.

“That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind,” the man said.

Which brings us to this piece in the New York Times. It seems Republican PACs are making a concerted effort to “inhabit the liberal role” on social media and dupe lefties into sharing anti-Hillary Clinton memes. Bill McKibben (350.org), the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and others have fallen prey to the tactic:

For months now, America Rising has sent out a steady stream of posts on social media attacking Mrs. Clinton, some of them specifically designed to be spotted, and shared, by liberals. The posts highlight critiques of her connections to Wall Street and the Clinton Foundation and feature images of Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, interspersed with cartoon characters and pictures of Kevin Spacey, who plays the villain in “House of Cards.” And as they are read and shared, an anti-Clinton narrative is reinforced.

America Rising is not the only conservative group attacking Mrs. Clinton from the left. Another is American Crossroads, the group started by Karl Rove, which has been sending out its own digital content, including one ad using a speech Ms. Warren gave at the New Populism Conference in Washington last May.

The Times continues, “Conservative strategists and operatives say they are simply filling a vacuum on the far left …” Out of the goodness of their hearts.

Ken Goldstein, a professor specializing in political advertising at the University of San Francisco, explains that this effort shows Republican strategists are “thinking a couple steps ahead.” Steven Law, president of American Crossroads, says the goal is to erode support for the Democrats’ presumptive 2016 presidential candidate among base voters:

“It can diminish enthusiasm for Hillary among the base over time,” he said. “And if you diminish enthusiasm, lukewarm support can translate into lackluster fund-raising and perhaps diminished turnout down the road.”

If Hillary Clinton wasn’t their target, it would be someone else. If it wasn’t Karl Rove’s stealing opponents’ campaign letterhead, it would be another scam. Somewhere they must have a handbook for this shit.

It never ceases to amaze me how smart American lefties think they are, and how easily we fall for tactics like these. Not that we’d ever admit to being played for suckers. That would blow our whole “smarter than thou” vibe that already turns off lots of voters — even when opponents are not branding us elitists.

Heads up, people.

“We stand between the power of the state and the individual”
by Tom Sullivan

A lot will be written about Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev’s death sentence this weekend. But not by me. Whenever these cases go to trial, I think about the go-to public defender for mass murderers and perpetrators of other high-profile killings. I think about Judy Clarke:

Clarke is one of America’s fiercest anti-death penalty champions. Besides Tsarnaev, she has represented the likes of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and “Olympic Park Bomber” Eric Rudolph. And despite their high-profile crimes and the public outrage they garnered, Clarke managed to convince the authorities in their respective cases to spare her clients’ lives. Kaczynski was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and Rudolph received four consecutive life terms. Both are living out their days at a federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

In fact, thus far, none of Clarke’s clients has been executed. Not Susan Smith, who in 1994 murdered her two young sons. Not even Jared Lee Loughner, who in 2011 shot and severely injured former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

But Friday’s announcement that a federal jury sentenced Tsarnaev to death signaled that Clarke’s winning streak may be over.

Don’t bet on it.

Vanity Fair  profiled the “deliberately understated” and publicity-shy Clarke in March. She almost never gives interviews, answers questions, or returns reporters’ phone calls. Clarke stands out “even among the exceptionally talented and dedicated community of public defenders across the country who regard Clarke as a hero.” She considers the death penalty “legalized homicide,” and brings fierce intensity to the task of defending the worst, explaining, “The idea is that we stand between the power of the state and the individual.” The word compassion keeps coming up in Mark Bowden’s profile. He writes:

She seeks not forgiveness but understanding. It takes only a small spark of it to decide against sentencing someone to death.

No one should be defined “by the worst moment, or worst day” of his life,” the death penalty opponent has said. But besides that, she has a cause. What’s more,

“I like to fight,” Clarke told the Los Angeles Times in 1990, when, as the federal public defender for San Diego, she took a $50 fine for two misdemeanors related to smuggling aliens across the border all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court—United States v. German Munoz-Flores. In the end she lost the case, but she enjoyed the scrap. “I love the action,” she said. “I like the antagonism. I like the adversarial nature of the business. I love all of that. I think that’s the fun stuff. Especially when it’s over an issue that I think is of significance to all of us, and that’s our freedoms, our individual liberties.”

To her, this devotion to civil liberties is deeply rooted in her conservative upbringing. Clarke bristled in that 1990 interview at being characterized as a liberal. “I don’t know but what my opinions have been the most conservative in the world,” she said. “What does it take to be an absolute supporter of what the Constitution says? That’s hardly liberal. I don’t smoke dope. I don’t snort cocaine. I’m not into drugs. I don’t like drugs. You associate that with a liberal view of a lawyer. I’m not into that. . . . Yes, I’m a defense lawyer, but I think I have very conservative values.”

“I like to fight.” Those of us who work political campaigns can relate. It’s why we do what we do. Our stakes are just not as high.

Clarke and Speedy Rice, her future husband, were the first students I met when I arrived as an undergrad at Furman University. I only knew Judy briefly. But she stood out. When her name popped up during the Unabomber trial, I knew it had to be that Judy Clarke.

Wyoming’s Sergeant Schultz Act
by Tom Sullivan

Wyoming calls it the Data Trespass Bill. But it sounds more like the Sergeant Schultz Act: You will know nothing, see nothing, and hear nothing! Via Charlie Pierce, this mind-bite from Think Progress:

Passed by the Wyoming state government and signed into law by Gov. Matt Mead (R) in March, the law makes it illegal to “collect resource data” from any land outside of city boundaries, whether that land be private, public, or federal. Under to the law, “collect” means to “take a sample of material, acquire, gather, photograph or otherwise preserve information in any form from open land which is submitted or intended to be submitted to any agency of the state or federal government.”

Pierce writes:

That last provision is just bizarre. Clearly, it’s meant to punish anyone who submits photographic proof of environmental damage to the responsible federal authorities. It is nullification by a thousand cuts — make it illegal to cooperate with The Government in protecting yourself from being poisoned. The Invisible Hand’s second career as a proctologist is going quite well.

See, ranchers are peeved that groups like the Western Watersheds Project have reported E. coli in Wyoming streams, according to Justin Pidot, an assistant professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. “The theory for most of the ranchers is, ‘You were near my land once, so you must have trespassed.’” Pidot writes:

Anyone with a passing familiarity with our Constitution will recognize that the Wyoming law is unconstitutional. It runs afoul of the supremacy clause because it interferes with the purposes of federal environmental statutes by making it impossible for citizens to collect the information necessary to bring an enforcement lawsuit. The Wyoming law also violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech because it singles out speech about natural resources for burdensome regulation and makes it a crime to engage in a variety of expressive and artistic activities. And finally, it specifically criminalizes public engagement with federal and state agencies and therefore violates another right guaranteed by the First Amendment: the right to petition the government.

Ostensibly, this bill and similar ones are about trespassing. Yet as Pidot observes, the strategy itself is a trespass. As with many other laws targeting women’s rights to voting rights, this is conservatives’ game plan: Find the legal line. Step over it. Dare someone to push them back. If they don’t get pushed back, they’ve established a new normal. Do it on enough fronts at once, and opponents won’t have the resources to push back on all of them. It’s how you erode freedom in freedom’s name. While waving a flag. Clutching your pocket Constitution. Brandishing a gun. And singing Lee Greenwood.

Fact checking gets weaponized
by Tom Sullivan

Move over oppo researcher. Now that fact checking has been “weaponized” (according to Mark Stencel), you may be out of a job:

Weaponizing fact-checks is just one of many ways politicians use and abuse fact-checking. One positive response is that candidates now vet their own messages, prepare background materials, dedicate staff to answering fact-checkers’ questions—and when called out on a particular comment or line of attack, they often adjust what they say going forward. But politicians also often “stand their ground,” after being told their pants are on fire—particularly when it comes to key strategic messages. Mitt Romney’s repeated attacks on President Obama’s international “apology tour” and the Obama campaign’s relentless focus on Romney’s time at Bain Capital were just two examples from the 2012 election where politicians refused to cower to fact-checkers.

“You just decide the fact-checker is wrong,” one Obama adviser I spoke to said.

But most of the time, people in politics do the opposite: They use fact-checks to validate or reinforce their position—and bloody their opponents. That was the case in nearly every reference to fact-checking I found in House and Senate debates and congressional floor speeches from 2013 and 2014. Of 83 statements (57 from Republicans and 26 from Democrats), only three challenged the fact-checkers’ findings. The rest used the fact-checks to label themselves as truth-tellers or their opponents as liars. But, even when using fact checks to attack a political rival, politicians frequently take a swipe at fact checking itself.

If only the facts counted in politics as something more than confirmation bias. I used to call Iraq Whose War Is It Anyway? – Where Everything’s Made Up and the Facts Don’t Matter.

Stencel prepared a report for the American Press Institute on how fact checking has changed politics. But even as they check ads’ political claims, who fact-checks closing zingers such as “A lying politician, just like Obama”? For an audience that largely doesn’t seem to know the difference between fact and opinion, that’s as much of an issue as how many Pinocchios an ad receives.

“When did fact checking and journalism separate?” the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart once asked NBC News’ Tom Brokaw. No journalist deploys fact-checking to greater effect than Stewart, a comedian.

Stewart just did marvelous take-down of Fox News’ pompous, stuffed shirt, Stuart Varney. Nothing like an arsenal of TiVos for fact checking propagandists:

Never did like that Varney guy. Know what I mean, Vern?