Author: Tom Sullivan

Charlatans and cranks
by Tom Sullivan

Paul Krugman this morning
smacks down three of the right’s preeminent purveyors of supply-side voodoo. The column is sure to leave them fuming.

“Charlatans and cranks,” Krugman suggests, invoking a phrase used by former George W. Bush chief economic adviser, Greg Mankiw. The occasion was Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s appearance at a New York dinner featuring supply-siders Art Laffer (of the eponymous curve), CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, and Stephen Moore, chief economist of the Heritage Foundation. Making obeisance before the high priests of bunk – like questioning climate change, evolution, and the current president’s American bona fides – has become a “right” of passage for Republican presidential contenders.

Reality takes a holiday. Ideology takes precedence. Because, to riff on a song, it’s all about that base. But we’ll come back to Krugman later.

The New York Times also reports this morning on something I’ve mentioned before. The University of North Carolina’s Republican-appointed Board of Governors is closing several academic enters on its campuses dedicated to studying poverty, climate, and social change. It couldn’t also be about ideology, could it? The Times writes:

“It’s clearly not about cost-saving; it’s about political philosophy and the right-wing takeover of North Carolina state government,” said Chris Fitzsimon, director of NC Policy Watch, a liberal group. “And this is one of the biggest remaining pieces that they’re trying to exert their control over.”

A lot like
Wisconsin that way. The UNC Center for Civil Rights is also a target:

Steven B. Long, a member of the advisory group and a former Civitas board member, said that the center had engaged in “inappropriate” activism. He also criticized it for filing costly lawsuits against local governments.

Local governments are also being targeted by a state legislature that frowns upon those who refuse to meekly submit.

Gene Nichols, director of the UNC Poverty Center recommended for closure, responded in print this week:

I have been repeatedly informed, even officially, that my opinion pieces have “caused great ire and dismay” among state officials and that, unless I stopped publishing in The News & Observer, “external forces might combine in the months ahead” to force my dismissal. Today those threats are brought to fruition. The Board of Governors’ tedious, expensive and supremely dishonest review process yields the result it sought all along – closing the Poverty Center. This charade, and the censorship it triggers, demeans the board, the university, academic freedom and the Constitution. It’s also mildly ironic that the university now abolishes the center for the same work that led it to give me the Thomas Jefferson Award a year ago.

The Poverty Center runs on an annual budget of about $120,000. None comes from the state. Grant funding has been secured through 2016. These private dollars will now be returned. UNC will have fewer resources, not more. Two terrific young lawyers will lose their jobs. Student education, employment and publication opportunities will be constricted. Most importantly, North Carolina’s understanding of the challenges of poverty will be weakened. These are significant costs to pay for politicians’ thin skin.

Scott Walker would feel right at home in Art Pope’s North Carolina. So would Kansas Republican, Gov. Sam Brownback, whose aggressive tax cuts cheered by national Republicans have driven his state into a deep fiscal crisis. North Carolina’s Republican Gov. Pat McCrory isn’t quite there yet, but he’s working hard on it.

Back to Krugman. He concludes:

So what does it say about the current state of the G.O.P. that discussion of economic policy is now monopolized by people who have been wrong about everything, have learned nothing from the experience, and can’t even get their numbers straight?

The answer, I’d suggest, runs deeper than economic doctrine. Across the board, the modern American right seems to have abandoned the idea that there is an objective reality out there, even if it’s not what your prejudices say should be happening. What are you going to believe, right-wing doctrine or your own lying eyes? These days, the doctrine wins.

And hands down.

Dominating the battle space
by Tom Sullivan

Citizens United … yadda, yadda, yadda … we’re a plutocracy.

It seems our plutocrats want to buy America’s elections and, increasingly, we’re willing to let them. Their efforts — like Jeb Bush’s — to dominate the political donations battle space may be succeeding. Analyzing the results of “the most expensive midterm election in history,” costing a whopping $3.77 billion, the Center for Responsive Politics’s Russ Choma finds that fewer donors are choosing to participate. That is, fewer donors are giving more:

Every area of traditional campaign finance saw a decline in the number of donors. Despite the increased cost of this election, the records that a number of races set in terms of overall cost and a huge focus on fundraising, there were just 434,256 identifiable individual donors to candidates in the 2014 election. That’s 107,000 fewer than there were in the 2010 election.

The number of individuals giving money to national party committees also declined — although this was not the first time that happened.

Even when it came to outside spending groups, there were fewer donors. In 2010, there were 57,405 individual donors to outside spending groups (including 527s) who gave a total of $104.6 million, or roughly $1,800 apiece. In 2014, there were 53,725 donors to outside groups, whose average donation was $8,011. That’s an increase in the size of the average donation of almost 445 percent.

Aaron Blake sums up at “The Fix”:

-A nearly 20 percent decline in total donors to candidates in just four years

-A more than 6 percent decline in donors to outside groups, even as these outside groups are multiplying thanks to the court rulings

Perhaps America’s common folk are beginning to cry uncle (Pennybags).

The Koch brothers. Of course, the Koch brothers. But they’re ideologues, zealots, holy warriors armed with golden pens, and not your typical greedheads. There are plenty more of the latter in the Midas cult, drunk on their own wealth and, not content to enjoy it privately or to give it away in service to mankind. They need to dominate the rest of us the way they dominate business rivals. Their watches could buy “a six-pack of Rolexes,” etc.

At what point do plutocrats calculate that they’ve reached a point of diminishing returns in spending money to avoid the costs of maintaining a decent society, and/or to suck dry the national treasury to increase their own? Might they then retire from politics and focus on more traditional, sybaritic pleasures?

Maybe not. Power is quite the aphrodisiac.

If it continues, it is a trend that seems destined to break democracy itself. Well, you break it, you bought it, Pennybags. How much will that cost you?

Dishing on federalism
by Tom Sullivan

The T-party’s creative interpretations of the constitution and federalism leave us with some amusing, if paranoid, legislative efforts. (I originally mistyped feralism, which also kinda works in this case.) Eric Stern gave some examples from Montana yesterday at Salon. Here are a few:

1) Prepare for National Ammunition shortage (SB 122). When Obama comes to get our guns and bullets, Montana will be ready. This bill cites the “serious risk” that America might run out of ammunition and exempts Montana’s ammo manufacturers from paying any taxes at all, as an incentive to produce more bullets so we can survive the Obama gun rapture. Its author, Matt Rosendale, was an unsuccessful congressional candidate in 2014 whose campaign ads featured him shooting drones out of the air with a rifle.

2) Establish Armed Militias in Every Town (SB 130). Even if we have enough bullets, Montana could still be in grave danger from the federal government. This bill would protect citizens by creating local paramilitary groups across the state, known as “home guards,” and would allow sheriffs to mobilize these troops for whatever reason they so choose, without the governor’s consent. This concept is supported enthusiastically by militia groups whose members enjoy stockpiling firearms but sometimes go to prison.

3) Require that nipples and areolae be fully concealed; prohibit “simulated genitalia” (HB 365). Our state already has a general law against indecent exposure but Montana’s social conservatives feel it isn’t enough. The new proposal lists body parts. Specifically, it would prohibit “exposing the anus, areola or nipple with anything less than a fully opaque covering.” Better yet, it would forbid the wearing of “any costume or covering that gives the appearance of, or simulates, the genitals, nipple or areola.” So much for my Halloween idea.

Somewhere I have a photo I shot a couple of years back of this sign outside the Radio Shack in the Bitterroot Valley town of Hamilton, Montana:

The tinfoil hats are free to every visitor.

Also striking, Eric Stern is Deputy Secretary of State in Montana. People in the legislature may have lost their minds, but a few in the capitol, at least, haven’t lost their sense of humor.

The politics of resentment
by Tom Sullivan

At Salon, Jim Newell suggests that although Gov. Scott Walker holds a front-runnerish status in the GOP’s 2016 presidential field that may not last, he is still a credible candidate. “Notwithstanding the concern that he has the charisma of a nightstand,” Newell adds.

But he cautions critics to avoid attacking Walker for his lack of a college degree. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean gave Newell the opening by questioning Walker’s academic credentials on Thursday’s “Morning Joe.” That exchange did not go so well for the former DNC chair, making him look in Newell’s estimation like a “snooty liberal snob jerk.”

It’s not a particularly trenchant observation, but the fact that the iconically liberal Vermonter took a swing at Walker’s education and whiffed ought to discourage others on the left from having a go at it. Democrats have enough ground to make up among the white, working class without compounding the problem by sneering at the non-degreed.

Leave attacking people’s education to Walker. He’s a professional. His plan to slash $300 million from the University of Wisconsin’s budget is playing to his base:

But to his critics, Mr. Walker, in both his proposed cuts and in the discussion that arose over the Wisconsin Idea, is trying to capitalize on a view that is popular among many conservatives: that state universities have become elite bastions of liberal academics that do not prepare students for work and are a burden on taxpayers.

“This is a budget that serves Scott Walker for president, and it doesn’t serve Wisconsin,” said Jon Erpenbach, a Democratic state senator. “He’s trying to appeal to the most conservative of conservatives, the Republican voters in early-polling states. And there’s 5.5 million people back home saying, ‘Wait a minute.’ ”

The politics of resentment is an art as fine as winemaking on the right. Liberals don’t do it well and shouldn’t try.

Look! Up in the sky!

by Tom Sullivan

Commercial drones. Those GoPro-equipped gadgets for hobbyists, news crews, professional photographers, and drunk, off-duty, intelligence employees. Maybe even for Amazon package deliveries. (In your fever dreams, maybe.) The FAA announced proposed rules governing their use on Sunday:

The U.S. aviation regulator proposed rules on Sunday for commercial drone flights that would lift some restrictions but would still bar activities such as the delivery of packages and inspection of pipelines that have been eyed by companies as a potentially breakthrough use of the technology.

The long-awaited draft rules from the Federal Aviation Administration would require unmanned aircraft pilots to obtain special pilot certificates, stay away from bystanders and fly only during the day. They limit flying speed to 100 miles per hour (160 kph) and the altitude to 500 feet (152 meters) above ground level.

Just a tentative toe in the water, a camel’s nose under the tent. But it’s an announcement that will send eager technophiles rushing to buy the latest in remote-control spy-ware, and encourage what NPR reported last night could be a $2 billion commercial drone sector. These rules also are meant to prepare the public for further expansion of the program and assuage privacy concerns, etc., etc.

Drone testing and approval has been in the pipeline since at least late 2013:

The FAA has already permitted approximately 300 “public organizations” to fly drones, said FAA spokesperson Alison Duquette in an interview with Common Dreams. This includes drones used by law enforcement and Customs and Border Enforcement for the purpose of aerial surveillance.

Duquette said she would not disclose the numbers of drones in U.S. airspace armed with military grade weapons or spying capabilities.

Excuse me? But worry not, officials said Sunday:

“Today’s proposed rule is the next step in integrating unmanned aircraft systems into our nation’s airspace.” FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said in a conference call with reporters. “We are doing everything that we can to safely integrate these aircraft while ensuring that America remains the leader in aviation safety and technology.”

[snip]

“From entertainment, to energy, to agriculture there are a host of industries interested in using UAS to improve their business,” Anthony Foxx, secretary of the Transportation Department said. “But for us at U.S. DOT the first threshold always is and must be keeping the American people safe as we move to integrate these new types of aircraft into our skies.”

Yes, but. Lest you think — as yesterday’s reports suggest — we’re just talking about hobbyists, Eyewitness News, or even the police flying plastic toys in commercial airspace, there’s a little more to it (from February 2012):

“We’re going to bring aircraft back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and we’re going to train in the [continental U.S.],” said Steve Pennington, the Air Force’s director of ranges, bases and airspace, and executive director of the Defense Department’s FAA policy board. “So the challenge is how to fly in nonsegregated airspace.”

The Pentagon too has been working with the FAA to open up U.S. airspace to its fleet of big-boy toys, nearly 7,500 combat drones (also from February 2012):

The vast majority of the military’s drones are small — similar to hobby aircraft. The FAA is working on proposed rules for integrating these drones, which are being eyed by law enforcement and private business to provide aerial surveillance. The FAA expects to release the proposal on small drones this spring.

But the Pentagon is concerned about flying hundreds of larger drones, including Global Hawks as well as MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers, both made by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. in Poway.

And last week Congress approved legislation that requires the FAA to have a plan to integrate drones of all kinds into national airspace on a wide scale by 2015.

The Department of Homeland Security announced its intention to double its fleet of Predators in late 2012. If Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Atomics have their way, there could be 30,000 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
in U.S. airspace by 2020.

Maybe like me, you first remember the phrase “unmanned aerial vehicles” from George W. Bush’s scaremongering, Cincinnati speech about Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and WMDs in October 2002. Back then, we were supposed to soil ourselves and go to war over the prospect of military UAVs in our skies. Ah, but we were young and foolish then.

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s a Predator!

(h/t Barry Summers)

Is it something in the water?
by Tom Sullivan

Is there something in London’s water? From the Not Gonna Happen Here Dept.:

The Conservative party needs to break its dependence on millionaires, the former Tory chancellor Ken Clarke has told the Observer, amid a growing furore over the tax affairs of the party’s donors.

After a week of some of the most intense fighting between the parties in recent years, Clarke said the Conservatives would be strengthened by loosening the hold of rich men on their financial survival.

He called on David Cameron to cap political donations and increase state funding of political parties to put an end to damaging scandals and rows. The Conservatives have been rocked in the past week by a potentially toxic combination of allegations of tax evasion by clients of the HSBC bank, whose chairman, Lord Green, became a Tory minister; tax avoidance by party donors; and leaked details of the secretive black and white fundraising ball.

Meanwhile here in the Colonies, The Man Who Would Be Bush III is looking to lock in Mitt Romney’s network of presidential campaign donors from the “private equity and investment worlds.” It’s a trick Jeb Bush learned from his no-accountability brother, George. Suck all the air out of the GOP candidates’ Green Room room along with the money:

“It’s absolutely a kind of aggressive shock-and-awe strategy to vacuum up as much of the fund-raising network as you possibly can,” said Dirk Van Dongen, the president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and a prolific Romney fund-raiser now helping Bush. “And they’re having a large measure of success.”

On the other side of the pond, however, the conservative Ken Clarke has had the scales fall from his eyes:

“What happens is that the Conservatives attack the Labour party for being ever more dependent on rather unrepresentative leftwing trade union leaders, and the Labour party spends all its time attacking the Conservative party for being dependent on rather unrepresentative wealthy businessmen. In a way both criticisms are true. And the media sends both up.

“The solution is for the party leaders to get together to agree, put on their tin hats and move to a more sensible and ultimately more defensible system.”

As previously noted, Clarke wants to see a cap on political donations. And it’s not just Tories having attacks of common sense:

Announcing that a Labour government would launch an independent investigation into the culture and practices of HMRC [Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs service] with regard to tax avoidance, [Labour leader Ed] Miliband told a Welsh Labour conference in Swansea: “The government’s failure to tackle tax avoidance is no accident. It has turned a blind eye to tax avoidance because it thinks that so long as a few at the top do well, the country succeeds. It thinks that wealth and power fence people off from responsibility. It thinks the rules only apply to everybody else.”

Imagine that.

Could any of this be contagious? Maybe there’s a vaccine they’re not taking in London that Villagers can not take here.

Election integrity but not elected integrity
by Tom Sullivan

It’s a cliche anymore to say that people who get distraught when women they don’t know want an abortion show much less concern for other people’s children once they’re born. But a headline from the inbox yesterday reminds me this is not the only area of public policy where such behavior holds.

One of the state’s GOP websites regularly reproduces in whole press releases from the Voter Integrity Project, North Carolina’s spinoff of True the Vote. This week’s 10-alarm headline? Curbside voting. Did you know that “there is no actual ‘proof’ of disability required” for the disabled or aged to use curbside voting? That you don’t have to show a photo ID at curbside voting? And that George Soros-backed groups will use this “curbside loophole” to help “drive-by voters” circumvent the state’s new voter ID law?

No code-speak there, huh?

But it strikes me that all the alarmism over the integrity of elections by people who devote themselves to undermining public confidence in them dissipates like morning fog once candidates take office. Ensuring only their preferred candidates come to term is what’s important. The integrity of those electeds and the actual legislative process afterwards? Not so much.

People whose only power is at the polls are a threat to democracy. Money wielding unprecedented influence in the halls of government at both the state and national level is much less of a concern.

Climate change gets biblical
by Tom Sullivan

Two stories this morning bookend the ongoing saga of climate change: sea level rise and drought. Biblical plagues almost.

Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell visits the Norfolk naval station to see the impact of sea level rise on naval operations. Large tides and heavy rains already leave some areas underwater. A storm had moved through the area the night before, leaving trucks at the main refueling depot axle-deep in seawater:

“Military readiness is already being impacted by sea-level rise,” says Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, who mentions that with all the flooding, it’s becoming difficult to sell a house in some parts of Norfolk. If the melting of Greenland and West Antarctica continues to accelerate at current rates, scientists say Norfolk could see more than seven feet of sea-level rise by 2100. In 25 years, operations at most of these bases are likely to be severely compromised. Within 50 years, most of them could be goners. If the region gets slammed by a big hurricane, the reckoning could come even sooner.”

Already, employees have a hard time getting to the base when the roads flood. The state of Virginia is in charge of 300 miles of flood-prone roads in the Norfolk area. However, addressing that threat is not a priority for climate deniers in the legislature.

Politicians more focused on the 24-hour news cycle don’t seem to have room in their world for the kind of longer-term planning climate change demands and you’d think their job descriptions would. Republicans once talked openly of the issue as a national security matter, writes Goodell, but that talk “vanished from the party after 2008, when the GOP turned into a subsidiary of Koch Industries.” Perhaps they will pay more attention once the newly passable Arctic Ocean becomes a flash point between the U.S. and Russia.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent …

“We are facing a water situation that hasn’t been seen in California for 1,200 years,” says Marcia Kemper McNutt, editor in chief of the journal Science. The Washington Post’s Darryl Fears examines the coming megadrought researchers from NASA, Cornell and Columbia predict for the American southwest and plains:

The research is newly published, but its findings are not dramatically different from similar studies in the past. Beverly Law, a specialist in global change biology at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, co-authored a study of megadroughts three years ago.

It showed that a drought that affected the American West from 2000 to 2004 compared to conditions seen during the medieval megadroughts. But the predicted megadrought this century would be far worse. Law said Thursday’s study confirmed her previous findings.

“We took the climate model . . . and compared” two periods, 2050 to 2099 and 1950 to 1999, she said. “What it showed is this big, red blotch over Southern California. It will really impact megacities, populations and water availability.”

Their study is here.

In anticipation of shortages, corporate players are already gobbling up public water systems. Wet gold, you might call it. Between magnates who want to sell you the water you drink at a tidy profit, frackers who want to tie up public water to drill for oil and gas, and the droughts and coastal flooding caused in part by burning what they extract, you’ve got a perfect storm of a cultural disaster brewing. Or a swirling, economic death spiral. Take your pick.

Goodell writes reassuringly:

The House Armed Services Committee is now chaired by Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, who argued in a 2011 op-ed that prayer is a better response to heat waves and drought than cutting carbon pollution.

Steve Martin tried that as a rainmaking con man in Leap of Faith. Maybe that was Thornberry’s inspiration.

We have met the enemy …
by Tom Sullivan

The shooting deaths in Chapel Hill, NC of three students sparked candlelight vigils last night:

Thousands gathered on the campus of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill on Wednesday night to pay tribute to three local students who were shot to death the night before.

Deah Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her younger sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, were killed on Tuesday evening in the couple’s apartment in a leafy suburb of Chapel Hill.

The hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter trended early on social media as users complained that media coverage of the shootings would have been greater had the shooter been Muslim instead of the victims. Coverage has since picked up from Sydney to London.

In an emotional press conference, the family of the victims called on federal authorities to investigate the “execution style” shootings as a hate crime (video) directed at the three for their faith.

What strikes me are the reports that the alleged shooter had a history of angry confrontation with neighbors and had an obsession with parking and noise. He had a carry permit and displayed his weapon to the victims in a previous encounter. They and other neighbors were afraid of the guy. Enough so that someone previously called a meeting to discuss how to handle him (more video). The faith of these particular neighbors could have been the factor that allowed the alleged shooter to finally vent his rage on them rather than others.

But then there’s this background on the suspect:

Hicks was known for his temper and confrontational behavior. His ex-wife Cynthia Hurley, who divorced Hicks about 17 years ago, said his favorite film was “Falling Down,” in which a disgruntled and unemployed defense industry worker played by Michael Douglas goes on a shooting rampage.

“That always freaked me out,” Hurley told the Associated Press. “He watched it incessantly. He thought it was hilarious. He had no compassion at all.”

After tragedies like this, our first reflex is to ask, why? Mental illness, maybe. Ethnic hatred, maybe. Too many guns, maybe. Those are our default answers. They’re easy. But is there something bigger going on?

To put this violent incident into a larger context for a moment, just glance at the front page of Raw Story this morning. I found these headlines:

Tech mogul John McAfee reveals he now lives in Tennessee and is ‘constantly armed’

Chris Kyle called man who killed him ‘nuts’ just before shooting: attorney

Tennessee man forces ex to carve his name into her skin with box cutter, then rapes her

Indian man paralyzed after Alabama cop body-slams him for walking in wealthy white suburb

Woman miscarries after Georgia cop who didn’t ‘appreciate her tone’ tackles and sits on her: lawsuit

Senseless violence is widespread in this country. Still, notice anything in common about the geography of those stories? What’s that famous saying from Pogo?

Twisted in Tacoma
by Tom Sullivan

You know, in an alternate timeline we might chalk up this kind of attacker to congenital misogyny, inappropriate toilet training, or just being a horrifically twisted excuse for a human being:

Police in Tacoma were searching for a suspect who allegedly attacked a lesbian woman by stabbing her and writing homophobic slurs on her body.

It was late. She was looking for her lost dog.

“He ran up behind me and he said something like why don’t I sound like a boy, that I look like a boy,” she recalled. “And that’s when it started.”

“Are you a dyke?” she said the man asked. “God hates fags.”

Chris told Tacoma police that the man stabbed her in the breast, jaw, left forearm and left thigh with a pocketknife. Police said that the suspect then stripped away her clothes, and wrote “dyke” on her buttocks and back.

But in this timeline, we could just as easily blame the suspect’s religion and ask Congress to authorize airstrikes.

The terrorist is still at large.