Author: Tom Sullivan

Another responsible shooting
by Tom Sullivan

A 13-year-old teen attending a soccer tournament in Raleigh, NC died in his hotel room, in his bed Friday night:

Nathan Andrew Clark was staying in the Comfort Suites hotel while he participated in the Capital Area Soccer League tournament.

At approximately 11 p.m., a woman who was in the room with him called 911, saying that she “had no idea” what happened to the teen, only that he was bleeding profusely from a bump on the back of his head.

Clark was pronounced dead at the scene.

Police quickly determined that Clark had been shot, and located Randall Louis Vater, who was in a nearby room and in possession of firearms. They said that Vater accidentally discharged his weapon, and that the round traveled through the wall and into Clark’s room, where it fatally struck him.

Vater has a long history with law enforcement, having served time in prison on charges ranging from violating a restraining order to communicating threats to hit-and-run. He was in police custody as recently as October 25, according to Department of Public Safety records.

Police charged Vater with “involuntary manslaughter and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.”

Nothing left to say.

A cold Civil War
by Tom Sullivan

In a sort-of chance encounter last night, we ended up having dinner in a small town with the pastor of a non denominational church.

He said he had decided it was not his job to change people. But he felt it was his duty to educate people that the world is changing around them and that it is their challenge to come to terms with it. One of the subtexts to the conversation was the political culture clash between conservative country dwellers and more left-leaning city dwellers. (Red America and Blue America, if you will.)

It seems his small town is becoming increasingly modern. It sits just on the edge of an area flush with tech jobs that sees 50,000 new residents each year. Another of those “21st century communities” is planned, bringing thousands of tech workers to the once sleepy, southern town. If projections are correct, the town will double in size. Rich developers will get richer and locals will make money. All well and good until prices skyrocket.

Conservative natives are restless.

In-migration sets up a kind of cold Civil War between newcomers and families with local roots. New growth tends to overwhelm the local culture and folkways. For conservatives already threatened by demographic changes and immigration, in-migration can be just as threatening. They’re all for development until the Ausländers they invited actually move in with their foreign ways and foreign politics.

Sure, we wanted their business. But we didn’t want them, you know, in our business.

We see the same dynamic where we live, only our in-migration is driven more by tourism and retirement. Newcomers arrive from the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Left Coast bringing their money and yankee political sensibilities with them. And their interest in local politics. The resentments are palpable enough that conservative politicians look for ways to exploit city-county animus. It’s their go-to political strategy.

This clip by comedian Hari Kondabolu has it just about right. Be careful what you ask for.

“I don’t get all the anti-immigrant sentiment in this country. Because this is a country that says this is the greatest country in the world. We’re the best. We’re number one. Then we get upset when people actually show up. But when you advertise something … sometimes people buy it. That’s how it works.” – Indian-American comedian Hari Kondabolu

What’s your land doing under our toll road?

by Tom Sullivan

Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream? Sadly, there’s no hooker with a heart of gold to melt the cold hearts of corporate raiders stripping America for parts. (Where’s Julia Roberts when you really need her?) But some people are, however, finally seeing the vultures for who they really are. Take the Trans-Texas Corridor, for example [emphasis mine]:

The TTC, a proposed 4,000-mile toll road, rail and utility project, died a death of a thousand cuts in 2010. First proposed as a much-needed infrastructure investment, the well-intentioned project grew into a monstrosity of politically connected contractors, private property concerns and conspiracy theories. The biggest blow to TTC was statewide opposition to granting Spanish-owned developer Cintra a 50-year, multibillion-dollar deal to control and collect tolls on a concrete corridor bisecting the very heart of Texas. The plan even proposed turning over to Cintra land seized by eminent domain, where the company could franchize roadside amenities like hotels and rest stops to supplement its collected fees.

This degree of private control over infrastructure raised the spectre of a highway built more to benefit contractors than Texas communities. The toll road could bypass towns and exits could be designed to feed contractor-owned fast food joints instead of local restaurants.

Kelo v. City of New London. How quickly we forget.

Now, I’m sure you could find Texans in 2003 who missed the joke in asking what our oil was doing under Iraq’s sand. It feels a little different, doesn’t it, when a foreign conglomerate asks Texans what their land is doing under its proposed toll road?

But that’s not what the article in the Houston Chronicle is really about. It’s about net neutrality and another kind of toll road. Here come the free marketeers again, for whom “competition” is just another gimmicky buzzword used to dazzle the rubes:

These companies also want to prohibit cities from building their own online freeways that could compete with private cyber toll roads. Texans didn’t tolerate a toll road system that would have discouraged cities from building competing public roads and shut out Cintra. But roads can be more obvious than wires.

Nineteen states – including Texas – already have succumbed to telecom lobbying and erected restrictive legal roadblocks that prevent communities from building and running their own broadband networks. In fact, San Antonio sits atop a publicly owned, superfast fiber optic network, but state law prohibits the city from selling access. It is as if the city built a road, but it could be traveled only by city-owned vehicles and everyone else was forced to take a private toll road.

With the limited options in broadband carriers there’s “more monopoly than market.” Yet both of Texas’ free-enterprizin’ senators, Cruz and Cornyn, and Governor Goodhair (Don’t you miss Molly?) back the telecoms and oppose net neutrality.

BTW: Cintra is the same firm North Carolina just signed a 50-year contract with – at Senator-elect Thom Tillis’ urging – to build toll lanes north of Charlotte. Two other Cintra toll projects in San Antonio and Indiana failed recently, potentially leaving taxpayers holding the bag. But who’s counting?

Hannity will have a conniption
by Tom Sullivan

That right-wing bugaboo, political correctness, can actually enhance creativity, says Dr. Jack Goncalo, associate professor of organizational behaviors at Cornell. He took hundreds of test subjects, broke them into small groups, and asked some at random to be “politically correct” or “polite.”

All were then asked to spend 10 minutes brainstorming business ideas. Creativity was measured by counting the number of ideas generated and by coding them for novelty.

Contrary to the widely held notion that being politically correct has a generally stifling effect, the results showed that a politically correct norm actually boosted the creative output of mixed-sex groups …

Although political correctness has often been associated with lowered expectations and a censor of behavior, the new culture actually provides a foundation upon which demographically heterogeneous work groups can freely exchange creative ideas, Goncalo said.

Setting boundaries and norms for behavior reduces uncertainty and made men and women more comfortable sharing creative ideas. The effects were reversed in same-sex groups where behavioral expectations are presumably more defined. The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman writes that PC norms apply peer pressure to prevent people from behaving badly who otherwise might:

Mainly, it’s not that there are things you can’t say. It’s that there are things you can’t say without the risk that people who previously lacked a voice might use their own freedom of speech to object.

To something Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity might say, to pick two at random. And they we can’t have that:

Whether a given norm is too restrictive is up for debate, but there’s little sense in the idea that modern culture is uniquely objectionable simply because there are some things people feel they shouldn’t say, because that’s how norms work. The only alternative to living by norms, to adapt Goncalo’s point, would be total social anarchy – which I’m assuming isn’t a prospect your average conservative PC-fighter would relish.

And it’s increasingly widely recognized that an anarchical approach isn’t much use when it comes to creativity, which thrives on constraints. “Blue-sky thinking”, with its total lack of limits, provides nothing to push against and nowhere to get a grip; worse, it leaves people more vulnerable to all sorts of psychological phenomena – like groupthink or bigotry or taking certain ideas more seriously because they’re repeated more frequently – that get in the way of actual good ideas.

Good, profitable ideas, one presumes. Only commies hate those, right?

The Other is marrying

by Tom Sullivan

It seems marriage equality is still on the move, scoring victories Wednesday in Kansas and South Carolina:

Gay marriage advocates won another two victories on Wednesday as the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Kansas to become the 33rd U.S. state where same-sex couples can wed and a federal judge struck down South Carolina’s ban.

The high court declined a request from Kansas officials to block U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Crabtree’s Nov. 4 ruling that struck down the state’s gay marriage ban as a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

And, by the way, a hearing on marriage equality Wednesday in Mississippi. From Aaron Sarver at Campaign for Southern Equality just last night:

After 6 hours in federal court today, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton W. Reeves concluded the hearing in Campaign for Southern Equality v. Bryant by stating he would rule “as soon as possible” in the case.

We’re hopeful that a ruling striking down Mississippi’s ban on same-sex marriage will indeed come soon.

All this rush of inclusion has a darker counterpoint. JT Eberhard writes at the WWJTDo blog about the reaction to a letter in the local paper:

The Unitarian Universalist church in my hometown of Mountain Home, Arkansas recently published a letter in the local paper letting the community know that they welcome everyone at their church regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation.

The reaction? The church had its windows shot out one night and were left this note:

The Arkansas Times blog has a bit more. Still, a Facebook commenter asked what “True Southerners” meant. “True” is a verbal tick among the hard right, as in “true facts” and “true locals.” Adding “true” distinguishes any manifestation of the wicked, deceitful Other – THEM – from the authentic, trustworthy US. The note-writer, for example, is likely a true Christian.

Long ago, a friend who had served in the army quipped, “Do you know why all American military gear is marked U.S.?”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why?” I asked as he grinned.

“So you know who to shoot: anyone who’s not US.”

[h/t Dave Neiwert]

A gated democracy
by Tom Sullivan

The Worst Voter Turnout in 72 Years the New York Times declares this morning, condemning continued efforts to suppress turnout among poor, minority and younger voters. They don’t even bother to add qualifiers anymore when calling out Republicans for voter suppression.

Sean McElwee at Huffington Post runs down some preliminary analysis of new voting restrictions. Photo ID laws, eliminating same-day registration, and felon disenfranchisement were contributing factors in the low turnout.

More than 600,000 in Texas could not vote this year because they lacked the newly required documents. How many tried and were turned away? The nonpartisan Election Protection Voter help line received over 2,000 calls in Texas, according to the Brennan Center’s director of its Democracy Program, Wendy Weiser. A federal judge had determined that the Texas law was purposely designed to suppress minority votes.

As Ari Berman wrote last week, “Since Republican legislatures across the country implemented new voting restrictions after 2010 and the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, it’s become easier to buy an election and harder to vote in one.”

Speaking of both, AOL is leaving the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), joining other tech firms in the latest exodus [Emphasis mine]:

In the space of two weeks in September, Google, Yahoo, and Yelp announced they had already left or were in the process of leaving ALEC, an exodus that began when Google Chairman Eric Schmidt charged that the group was “just literally lying” about climate change. Facebook also said it was “not likely” to renew its membership with ALEC next year.

Shortly after, Occidental Petroleum, the fourth-largest oil and natural-gas company in the U.S., also said it would separate from ALEC.

And just last week, SAP, a German-based software company with regional offices in the U.S., announced it would “immediately disassociate itself from ALEC.” A company representative for SAP cited ALEC’s conservative stance on climate change as well as its historic positions on gun control and voter rights. Earlier in the year, Microsoft, too, said it would leave ALEC.

On Election Day here in western North Carolina, voters turned out Republican state Rep. Tim Moffitt, an ALEC board member. Statewide, however, another ALEC board member, state Rep. Thom Tills, R-Mecklenburg, got elected to the U.S. Senate. After Republicans gained control of the state legislature, Tillis, Moffitt, and other allies immediately set about implementing an ALEC agenda to voucherize schools, privatize public infrastructure and utilities, weaken cities (blue votes), and of course, to restrict voting.

Because oligarchs worldwide, including those in the world’s most unequal developed country, have never been comfortable sharing power with their lessers. Democracy will never be tolerable until they can make it a gated democracy.

Cutting in on Rush’s action
by Tom Sullivan

Somebody’s got his declining ratings in a wad. Rush Limbaugh is threatening to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee:

The legal threat is the result of DCCC fundraising appeals sent out in the wake of Limbaugh’s on-air comments about a new policy at Ohio State University that instructs students to get verbal consent before having sex. The DCCC highlighted one particular sentence from his commentary — “How many of you guys . . . have learned that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ if you know how to spot it?” — saying it was tantamount to condoning sexual assault.

Limbaugh says the DCCC took the comment out of context and twisted it in its fundraising appeals. “We love opinions, but this crossed a very bright line,” said Limbaugh’s spokesman, Brian Glicklich, in an interview. “They lied about his words. They quoted something specific and out of context, and it is a lie.”

Uh, that’s Limbaugh’s business model, pal. Is Rush suing for defamation or patent infringement?

If you’re not Goliath, fine.

by Tom Sullivan

On Meet the Press Sunday morning, Howard Dean told Chuck Todd what we’ve all been screaming at Democratic candidates: Stand for something.

You’ve got to do the 50-state strategy again. The president has been brilliant in the 50-state strategy, but not so, the DNC hasn’t been able to pull that back together again for a variety of reasons, not all having to do with the DNC. The biggest problem, Jim Clyburn was the most right person in that lead-up.

It was message. Sure, it was an off year, and we can make all these excuses. But the fact is, we have never been able to, and even through the days of the 50-state strategy and, you know, taking over the House, the Senate, and the president in four years, when I was running the DNC, I could never get the Washington Democrats to stay on message. The Republican message was, “We’re not Obama.” No substance whatsoever. “We’re not Obama.” What was the Democrats’ message? “Oh, well, we’re really not either.” You cannot win if you are afraid…

Where the hell is the Democratic party? You’ve got to stand for something if you want to win.

Todd asked Dean if the party is too focused on women when it’s losing white men. Support among white men has declined from 44% in 2006 to 33% now. Dean replied:

One of the reasons has to do that we’re not on the lunch bucket issues. When we stick to lunch-bucket issues, and opportunity, as you showed the president’s clip, we do fine. You know, white men have been tough for us since the Southern strategy and Richard Nixon … If we lose by 4%, that’s terrific for us. But the erosion among white men has mostly to do with the fact that the economy has not gotten better. These folks have been feeling under big-time stress. And we have got to have a message that has to do with basic economics. It helps us all across the board, but particularly with white men.

It’s a thing, too, that Democratic candidates clean up in the cities and lose big in the counties. A big part of that is cultural. But as Dean says, it is also lack of message discipline (or any message at all). Instead of sticking to lunch bucket issues, liberals often speak wonk to people who don’t speak wonk.

It always struck me as odd how, when we lefties plan a trip to exotic locations abroad, we buy guide books, bone up on the culture, learn to speak a little of the language, get some appreciation for local customs, etc. We just won’t do the same when visiting country cousins out in the red counties. And then we wonder why those people won’t vote with us.

Some on the left would just as soon not bother with them. Yet Dean thought a bi-coastal strategy that forfeited the rural, heartland states to the GOP was foolish, so he hired organizers and sent them out where Democrats feared to tread. (A friend of mine was the first one he hired.) Democrats suddenly began winning out there. It’s time to do that again, but not just in the “flyover states.” We lose big outside the cities, even in many blue states.

But you’ve got to stand for something. The right spent decades, day after day, month after month, year after year — virtually unanswered — using talk radio to teach rural voters to think like conservatives. But if we expect people to start voting like progressives — here’s a crazy idea — it might help if they thought like progressives. Rural Votes has got the idea. They run progressive messaging in small markets where radio ad rates are cheap, and targeted GOTV radio spots (like this one) at election time. In 2008 and 2012, my own group ran a couple thousand “values” spots (like this one) on small AM stations in medium-sized markets. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

It may seem a small a thing compared to the right’s Mighty Wurlitzer, but if you’re not Goliath, fine. Be David.

Underground railroading


by Tom Sullivan

On Friday, we were in Greensboro, NC when the International Civil Rights Center & Museum was open. We’d been meaning to stop in for years. We even managed to get through the tour of the old F. W. Woolworth lunch counter without crying. (OK, barely.) The word unequal kept coming up in the tour. That and the funeral earlier of a black friend had me mulling over how many white people still resent sharing the country with Others they consider unequal.

Demographic shifts are bringing them kicking and screaming to the realization that they must.

Losing power is very personal for people on the right. Both left and right talk about taking “their country” back, but it seems much more personal for conservatives. In their America, it seems, there is no we, just i and me.

One place you hear it is in their rhetoric about voter fraud. It is a very personal affront to them that the power of their votes might be diminished by the Other. Every time someone ineligible casts a fraudulent ballot, they insist, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They have convinced themselves that there are thousands and thousands of invisible felons stealing their votes every election. Passing more restrictive voting laws is a matter of justice and voting integrity, of course. What other motivation could there be for railroading eligible poor, minority, and college-age voters?

The Others they suspect of this heinous activity are people who do not believe as they do nor vote as they do. Voter fraud itself is a code word, the way Lee Atwater used “forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.” It’s “much more abstract,” as Atwater said. The issue is not really whether the invisible “those people” are voting illegally or not. It is that they are voting at all. Sharing in governance, sharing power, is a privilege for deserving, Real Americans, not for the unwashed Irresponsibles. That Others do so legally is just as much an affront. Right now they’re targeting the invisible Others. Restricting voting to Real Americans comes later, I guess.

Being a racist in the South in 1954 may have been de rigueur, but as Atwater said about the N-word being unacceptable by the late 1960s, being racist today is terribly unfashionable. Not even racists want to see themselves as racists.

Racism itself might not be as dead as conservative pundits insist. It has just been driven further underground. Some have so thoroughly convinced themselves that political animus towards the poor and minorities is not racist, that if liberals even raise the subject, it must be liberals who are the racists. I guess it is a kind of progress that people work so hard at painting themselves as anything but.
During early voting here, a Republican electioneer got into my wife’s face and accused her of being a racist for offering sample ballots and Democratic materials to black voters.

In a conversation overheard recently, two conservative men were discussing their dislike for Barack Obama. It wasn’t that he was black, no. They had no problem with a black president even. It was that Obama’s actions as president were so radical, so in your face and overreaching. One got the distinct impression that his doing anything at all made him radical.

So it goes.

Lies we tell ourselves
by Tom Sullivan

America has lost faith with itself.

Grazing on the Net this morning, one story after another pops up where a common thread is the lies we tell ourselves and the ugly truths about ourselves we struggle to hide.

Paul Krugman:

According to conservative dogma, which denounces any regulation of the sacred pursuit of profit, the financial crisis of 2008 — brought on by runaway financial institutions — shouldn’t have been possible. But Republicans chose not to rethink their views even slightly. They invented an imaginary history in which the government was somehow responsible for the irresponsibility of private lenders, while fighting any and all policies that might limit the damage.

Matt Taibbi (on securities fraud at Chase and collusion between the company and the Justice Department to cover it up):

When [Alayne] Fleischmann and her team reviewed random samples of the loans, they found that around 40 percent of them were based on overstated incomes – an astronomically high defect rate for any pool of mortgages; Chase’s normal tolerance for error was five percent. One mortgage in particular that sticks out in Fleischmann’s mind involved a manicurist who claimed to have an annual income of $117,000. Fleischmann figured that even working seven days a week, this woman would have needed to work 488 days a year to make that much. “And that’s with no overhead,” Fleischmann says. “It wasn’t possible.”

But when she and others raised objections to the toxic loans, something odd started happening. The number-crunchers who had been complaining about the loans suddenly began changing their reports. The process she describes is strikingly similar to the way police obtain false confessions: The interrogator verbally abuses the target until he starts producing the desired answers. “What happened,” Fleischmann says, “is the head diligence manager started yelling at his team, berating them, making them do reports over and over, keeping them late at night.” Then the loans started clearing …

“That’s the thing I’m worried about,” she says. “That they make the whole thing disappear. If they do that, the truth will never come out.”

The Guardian, wondering if a Republican-controlled Senate will even release its long-delayed torture report:

Torture is so endemic to the prosecutions undertaken by the US military commissions that the military designed and built a special courtroom just to limit any outside access to unredacted testimony given at the commission: court and legal observers are relegated to “censorship chambers” attached to the courtroom, where they can only view the proceedings behind soundproof glass with a 40-second audio delay.

And just to make certain that no one will hear if the defendants or their lawyers mention torture outright, the military judge and commission’s security officer have a button to unilaterally cut that audio feed when they believe discussion might veer into dangerous territory. When the government can silence the truth about its own crimes in a single click, it’s the very negation of justice.

Frank Schaeffer on the midterm elections:

The Republican Party base is white evangelicals. So it’s no wonder that GOP lies about the country, the economy and the president worked. The folks who base their lives on religious mythology have spent lifetimes being trained to believe lies. On Tuesday they won. Lies won.

I opened an April op-ed on the propagation of the “voter fraud” fiction with this quote from retiring Wisconsin State Senator Dale Schultz, the sole Senate Republican to oppose early voting limits:

“It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics. I am not willing to defend them anymore.”

It’s getting sadder when I’m quoting the Bible in a blog post two days in a row.

God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
2 Thessalonians 2:11-12, KJV

Where’s Samuel L. Jackson when we really need him, my brothers, to save us from the tyranny of evil men?