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“Bankruptcy Joe” Biden? Really?

by Gaius Publius

As many readers know, I’m watching the Biden phenomenon (the “Biden bulge” in media attention) with interest. Part of this attention is driven by the Biden camp, but the media is playing its role by playing up the “Joe Biden, regular guy” angle, crossed with “Joe Biden, heartbroken father,” in a way that stamps his tentative entry into the Democratic primary with the Mainstream Media Seal of Approval. Heartbroken father he certainly is. “Regular guy” he’s not, as you’ll see shortly.

Yet if there’s critical big-media reporting on Biden — CBS, (MS)NBC, CNN, New York Times, etc. — I can’t find it. Even Stephen Colbert has blessed Biden in a way I can neither rewatch nor link to.

For his part, Biden’s playing coy, partly because he needs more than media blessing — he needs major insider blessing — before he can announce. In addition, Biden needs:

• Hillary Clinton to falter, either publicly or privately
• Bernie Sanders to fail to pick up Clinton supporters if she exits

About the first, Clinton faltering, several things could cause that. Clinton could lose the support she now enjoys among insiders who will never endorse Sanders. That loss of endorsement could occur publicly (she could stagger in the polls or in the first four or five races) or privately (a reason “she can’t win,” true or not, might spread among Democratic insiders, a reason that would not be shared with the public).

About the second, Sanders remaining unacceptable in Clinton’s absence, Biden needs to look “better than Clinton” to some Sanders- and Warren-supporting voters so that he can present himself to everyone as the acceptable “mainstream” alternative to Clinton. (Definition: Mainstream alternative means “someone who will keep the insider game going, making changes only at the margins, while appearing to be a populist.”)

One aspect of the insider game, for example, is high-speed Wall Street trading. It’s a license to print money, to steal from the trading floor. No “acceptable to insiders” candidate would offer to ban or tax that operation. Another is the racket called “student debt,” a license to steal huge amounts from college students and their parents. No “acceptable to insiders” candidate will do anything but offer forgiveness at the margins, as Obama has recently done.

This piece is about Joe Biden and the insider-protected student debt racket. (If you wish, you can help Sanders here; adjust the split any way you like at the link.)

Joe Biden and the Student Debt Crisis

As I write, the total student debt burden in the U.S. is $1.2 trillion. For comparison, total credit card debt in the U.S. is expected to be “just shy of $900 billion” by the end of 2015. How did total student debt get so large? Joe Biden helped.

Before Biden was rebranded as the kindly, well-liked Vice President, he was a long-serving senator from Delaware, the “senator from MBNA” as he was often called for a number of very good reasons. Delaware is the state that attracted a great many credit card company headquarters by offering little in the way of usury laws — limits to interest rates that banks could charge their customers. As a result, one of Delaware’s most important industries is those who profit from debt-creation.

Being in the consumer debt business, especially student debt and credit card debt, is a license to print money, and protecting that lucrative source of money is the job of Delaware senators like Biden, just as protecting Boeing’s access to government money via the Export-Import Bank is the job of senators like Washington’s Patty Murray, the so-called “senators from Boeing.”

Joe Biden is, and has been for years, a friend and enabler of his state’s debt industry. How much a friend? International Business Times (my emphasis throughout):

Joe Biden Backed Bills To Make It Harder For Americans To Reduce Their Student Debt

Jennifer Ryan did not love the idea of taking on debt, but she figured she was investing in her future. Eager to further her teaching career, she took out loans to gain certification and later pursued an advanced degree. But her studies came at a massive cost, leaving her confronting $192,000 in student loan debt.

“It’s overwhelming,” Ryan told International Business Times of her debts. “I can’t pay it back on the schedule the lenders have demanded.”

In the past, debtors in her position could have used bankruptcy court to shield them from some of their creditors. But a provision slipped into federal law in 2005 effectively bars most Americans from accessing bankruptcy protections for their private student loans.

In recent months, Democrats have touted legislation to roll back that law, as Americans now face more than $1.2 trillion in total outstanding debt from their government and private student loans. The bill is a crucial component of the party’s pro-middle-class economic message heading into 2016. Yet one of the lawmakers most responsible for limiting the legal options of Ryan and students like her is the man who some Democrats hope will be their party’s standard-bearer in 2016: Vice President Joe Biden.

Note the phrase “private student loans” in the next-to-last paragraph above. To understand why that’s important, you have to understand how the whole plunder operation works. Of the $1.2 trillion student debt, most is backed by the government in one form or another. That is, issuers of that debt have a guarantee from the government that if a loan goes bad, the government will make them whole with taxpayer money.

Thus, for lenders in the government-guaranteed loan program, there’s no way to lose money. In fact, the incentives make them issue as many student loans as they can, to as many people as they can, for any educational program under the sun — even, or especially, for programs at for-profit mills like Corinthian Colleges, Inc., where students almost never graduate with a degree.

It’s a racket all around, but especially at places like a Corinthian “campus.” As I wrote earlier, the plan at a place like that is simple:

Offer the least education you can get away with …
To the greatest number of students you can enroll …
Carrying the greatest debt burden you can saddle them with …
Then hope they drop out.

The faster students drop out (leave without a degree), the more classroom space is left for the next batch of debt-saddled enrollees.

But the predation isn’t limited to places like Corinthian. The whole system is a racket, which accounts for what’s shown in the chart at the top. Because of the highly profitable nature of the student loan program in general (loans earn interest until they are paid regardless of graduation or post-grad jobs), and because of the government guarantees and the number of loans issued, college tuition is encouraged to rise, which further encourages loan amounts to rise, which further increases profit from interest payments, in a near-endless cycle.

In fact, no one loses in this trillion-dollar operation but the students. Far too many students leave college with:

• Sometimes a degree, sometimes not
• Debt often as high as Jennifer Ryan’s in the example above ($192,000)
• Little hope of discharging that debt with a service- or retail-sector job (iPhone sales, Starbucks coffee-puller, all the cool jobs in this left-behind economy)
• Interest payments for the rest of their working lives, or most of it

It’s a predatory racket, and the government is part of it, in fact, its chief enabler.

“Private” Student Debt and Joe Biden

Not all student debt is government-guaranteed. Some students make the mistake of going directly to a private lender for education loans, bypassing the government-guaranteed system. Of the $1.2 trillion in total student debt, about $150 billion is private debt — at-risk debt, from the standpoint of the issuer, since if the borrower (the student) could discharge that debt via bankruptcy, the lender would lose the principal of the loan. No government guarantee as a backstop against failure to pay.

For lenders of private education loans, that was a problem that needed solving. Which is where Joe Biden comes in. Biden helped close the bankruptcy loophole in 2005 by making sure borrowers couldn’t discharge their private student debt via bankruptcy court. IBD again:

As a senator from Delaware — a corporate tax haven where the financial industry is one of the state’s largest employers — Biden was one of the key proponents of the 2005 legislation that is now bearing down on students like Ryan. That bill effectively prevents the $150 billion worth of private student debt from being discharged, rescheduled or renegotiated as other debt can be in bankruptcy court.

Joe Biden, senator from MBNA, served the money that kept him in office. Here’s Howie, writing in 2007, about that 2005 law:

One of the most hated pieces of legislation to come out of the heinous Bush Regime was the 2005 Bankruptcy Bill, a law put together by the credit card industry and pushed primarily by corrupt members of Congress– on both sides of the aisle– who get gigantic payoffs from these same companies. The bill poisoned progressives against bought-off reactionary Democrats like Joe Biden (D-DE) and Al Wynn (D-MD).

Back to IBD:

Biden’s efforts in 2005 were no anomaly. Though the vice president has long portrayed himself as a champion of the struggling middle class — a man who famously commutes on Amtrak and mixes enthusiastically with blue-collar workers — the Delaware lawmaker has played a consistent and pivotal role in the financial industry’s four-decade campaign to make it harder for students to shield themselves and their families from creditors, according to an IBT review of bankruptcy legislation going back to the 1970s.

Biden’s political fortunes rose in tandem with the financial industry’s. At 29, he won the first of seven elections to the U.S. Senate, rising to chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, which vets bankruptcy legislation. On that committee, Biden helped lenders make it more difficult for Americans to reduce debt through bankruptcy — a trend that experts say encouraged banks to loan more freely with less fear that courts could erase their customers’ repayment obligations. At the same time, with more debtors barred from bankruptcy protections, the average American’s debt load went up by two-thirds over the last 40 years. Today, there is more than $10,000 of personal debt for every person in the country, as compared to roughly $6,000 in the early 1970s.

That increase — and its attendant interest payments — have generated huge profits for a financial industry that delivered more than $1.9 million of campaign contributions to Biden over his career, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

This is “retail” politics, as in “retail sales” — things bought and sold. People like Joe Biden sell their services to the very wealthy — in Biden’s case, to the consumer debt industry and their CEOs — for almost $2 million in “campaign contributions,” and they in turn become even wealthier, all at the expense of people like you and me.

See why I say Joe Biden’s no “regular guy” or friend of working women and men? He’s in fact the opposite. He worked for the people who prey on them. He’s the reason so many of them are as deep in debt as they are. Biden helped keep them in debt.

Yet if Clinton falters, the party may turn to him. If so, he will turn to “Bernie Sanders Democrats” for their blessing. Will they remember enough about Biden to withhold it (like his role in putting Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court)? It’s an interesting question.

Will “Bernie Sanders Democrats” Be Taken in by “Bankruptcy Joe” Biden?

It would be incredibly ironic, wouldn’t it, if the very people savaged by the industry Biden served — the consumer and student debt industry — were to fall for Biden’s “man of the people” shtick and turn to him as the acceptable mainstream alternative to Hillary Clinton.

Clinton has a “friend of money” tag on her, one she’s trying (I think) to get rid of. Biden should wear that tag as well, on his forehead, despite the public media blessing he gets from (I shudder to recall it) people like Stephen Colbert, who really should know better.

“Bankruptcy Joe” Biden, has a ring to it. Maybe someone should tell Colbert about this stuff. He may want to “correct the record” with an interview do-over.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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Corrupt cops and their pretend cop friends


by digby

Can you believe this?

Supervisors at the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office were ordered to falsify a reserve deputy’s training records, giving him credit for field training he never took and firearms certifications he should not have received, sources told the Tulsa World.

At least three of reserve deputy Robert Bates’ supervisors were transferred after refusing to sign off on his state-required training, multiple sources speaking on condition of anonymity told the World.

Bates, 73, is accused of second-degree manslaughter in the shooting death of Eric Harris during an undercover operation on April 2.

The sources’ claims are corroborated by records, including a statement by Bates after the shooting, that he was certified as an advanced reserve deputy in 2007.

An attorney for Harris’ family also raised questions about the authenticity of Bates’ training records.

Additionally, Sheriff Stanley Glanz told a Tulsa radio station this week that Bates had been certified to use three weapons, including a revolver he fired at Harris. However, Glanz said the Sheriff’s Office has not been able to find the paperwork on those certifications.

The sheriff’s deputy that certified Bates has moved on to work for the Secret Service, Glanz said during the radio interview.

“We can’t find the records that she supposedly turned in,” Glanz said. “So we are going to talk to her to find out if for sure he’s been qualified with those (weapons).”

Undersheriff Tim Albin was unavailable for comment Wednesday but in an earlier interview, Albin said he was unaware of any concerns expressed by supervisors about Bates’ training.

But here’s the thing: any Oklahoman is allowed to carry a loaded firearm after completing an 8 hour certification course. So unless he didn’t even have that much training, he’s no worse than thousands of civilians walking the streets who might have pulled out their guns and drilled somebody. But surprisingly, compared to a number of other states Oklahoma is actually fairly restrictive with their open carry law. They don’t let people carry them in bars. Yet.

Still, if this is true, they really went out of their way to let this particular guy slide. With lethal results.

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The Beck diagnosis

by digby

Far be it from me to question the “medical” diagnosis here, but let’s just say it’s fair to wonder if the jury’s actually still out on what ails Beck:

Glenn Beck revealed on his network The Blaze on Monday that he has been battling a series of health problems that have left doctors baffled.

The conservative media personality said the problems started when he was on Fox News and became so severe that the crew worked out hand signals to indicate when to take the camera off of him.

“We didn’t know at the time what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands or feet or arms and legs would feel like someone had just crushed them or set them on fire or pushed broken glass into my feet,” Beck said. “I can’t tell you how many nights my wife would sit in the light, looking at the bottom of my feet to make sure that there really wasn’t any glass in it.”

At times crying, Beck explained how he has visited various doctors who were unable to figure out what was wrong.

He’s also experienced sleep problems, which at first allowed him to function with just two to four hours of shut-eye per night.

“Quite honestly this isn’t a symptom that you look to fix,” Beck said. “If you have a ton to do, you’re like, ‘I don’t need sleep this is great.'”

However, doctors told him he hadn’t had any REM sleep in about a decade. And soon, other problems appeared, including what he called “time collapse,” or the inability to remember if he had met someone just a week ago or years earlier.

Beck said he suffered in ways he publicly revealed at the time, including macular dystrophy and vocal chord problems, as well as some had not, such as seizures that would strike while flying and in times of exertion.

“Most afternoons my hands will start to shake or my hands and feet begin to curl up and I become in a fetal position,” Beck said. “When it gets real bad my friends just kind of try to uncurl me.”

In New York about 18 months ago, Beck went through a battery of tests, including one for traumatic brain injury.

“I did so poorly on this test the doctors shared the results with my wife and didn’t focus on them with me. I never wanted to see the results,” Beck said. “I knew I was functioning at about the bottom 10 percent. I knew when I couldn’t figure out simple math problems or remember a series of words I was in real trouble.”

Beck said doctors told him he may be unable to function in five or 10 years.

“It has baffled some of the best doctors in the world,” Beck said. “It has frightened me and my family as we didn’t know what was happening.”

At one point, Beck looked into the possibility that he was being poisoned.

Beck said he moved from New York to Dallas because he believed the better climate might help. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he also moved near Carrick Brain Centers, a brain rehabilitation center that specializes in experimental therapies that are not covered by insurance.

There Beck was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder and adrenal fatigue, among other things. He said these conditions are being treated with diet, lifestyle changes and hormones.

Beck said his faith has played a major role in his recovery.

“My doctors told me that it was my faith in God that was powering me through all this, that I shouldn’t be standing,” Beck said, adding that the move from New York to Dallas may have saved his life.

I’m happy for him that he feels better. Whatever works is my motto. But let’s just say it’s an unusual therapy. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the man who created it:

Dr. Frederick Robert “Ted” Carrick, DC, PhD, (born: 26 February 1952) is a Canadian-American Chiropractic Neurologist who is considered the father of modern chiropractic neurology.

He is best known for assisting Sidney Crosby and Alexandre Pato as well as being the founder of Carrick Brain Centers.

In the spring of 1986, Carrick was asked to establish the chiropractic neurology diplomat certification program by the American Chiropractic Association.

Carrick returned to clinical practice in 2012. He joined the clinical faculty of Life University’s LIFE Functional Neurology Center. He left the LIFE Functional Neurology Center in the Spring of 2013.

In the summer of 2013, Carrick became Chief of Functional Neurology at the Carrick Brain Centers

ABC News did a story on Carrick’s practice a few months ago:

Most of Carrick’s patients are referred to him by doctors, but his results are often dismissed as a placebo effect, meaning the patients feel better because they believe in his cure. But the doctor denies that’s the case.

“If it was placebo, we’re doing a pretty darn good job of it,” he said. “What we do is that we do things other people do. We don’t do anything that is really original in our work. We just combine things that other people have done in a different fashion.”
[…]
There are plenty of skeptics who say Carrick’s methods do not pass scientific muster, and yet Carrick said he has months-long waiting lists with people desperate to see him for treatment. When he treats Hubbard, he walks her through an exercise where he has her close her eyes and try to relax.

“I look very, very carefully and what’s happening with her eyes, with her heads, the degree that her pupils are open or closed, and then her ability to track,” Carrick said. “We find that if we do a certain motion, and we get a different tracking, this is going to have a good probability of working.”

I’m not sure what any of that has to do with Beck’s problem of “adrenal fatigue” or whatever but if it helped him more power to him. On the other hand … there’s always been a lot of money to be made in snake oil. And when it comes to Beck there’s an Occam’s Razor diagnosis that makes just as much sense: mental illness.

It’s fascinating to look back and realize that at the time when Beck was King of the Tea Party, he was going through all of this. I think the implications of that for both Beck and the Tea Party are fascinating, don’t you?

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The Scott Walker paradox

by digby

So here’s a little unexpected news out of Wisconsin. This piece in Huffington Post sets the table with this recap of events of the last few years. The liberal protesters — described as aging hippies are shell-shocked by the overwhelming public support for Scott Walker’s neanderthal policies. (It seems people really, really don’t like teachers):

They have been coming to the Capitol to sing every day for an hour since 2011, when Gov. Scott Walker (R) caused an uproar by signing controversial anti-union legislation, Act 10, into law. The law took collective bargaining rights away from government workers, required concessions on wages, benefits and pensions, and defanged state worker unions by ending automatic withdrawal of dues from public employee paychecks.

Three years later, a once-proud progressive and organized labor community in this state that roared to life in response to Act 10 has been punched in the mouth so many times it has lost count. The original protests birthed the effort to oust Walker from office, but Walker won the 2012 recall election decisively. And just this week, the state Supreme Court upheld the anti-union law. The legislature is controlled by the GOP, and looks likely to stay that way. National progressive groups, which poured millions of dollars into the failed recall effort, are hesitant to spend more in Wisconsin now.

There was talk during the protests of a new generation of progressive and union activists. But now, Act 10 is generally viewed as a success. Charles Franklin, the state’s top public pollster, at Marquette University, described Walker’s labor reforms as “a grand slam” because of the way the public embraced them. The scope and finality of Walker’s victory over labor and the left has been breathtaking.

“It’s hard to fathom,” said Joe Kiriaki, the executive director at the Kenosha Education Association, the third-largest teachers union in the state and the biggest to have its certification stripped in the wake of Act 10. “Folks are pretty disheartened by it all.”

It’s a gloomy time for Wisconsin Democrats. And Walker, one would think, would be poised for a convincing win this fall that would launch him with a head of steam into the 2016 presidential election process next year.

Guess what? He may very well lose. The polls are all favoring his Democratic challenger.

His campaign is going after the Democratic nominee for being a big money outsourcer — which is confusing the hell out of the Republicans and making the Big Money Boys very nervous. He’s boxed in.

I can’t get a good sense from reading about this race exactly why Walker is so unpopular even as his slash and burn policies have gone over very well. Maybe it’s just him. Which is understandable. He’s not the most likeable guy in the world. Whatever happens, the aging hippies of Wisconsin shouldn’t get too excited. They are backing a business Democrat who will probably not be able to turn back Walkers agenda, even if she wants to, which is debatable. But it will feel good to beat that jerk — at least for a moment. And we would all probably be spared the prospect of a Walker for President campaign which is bound to rank right up there with Pawlenty juggernaut for sheer excitement.

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Leader of the Fox Gang



by digby

This new book about Roger Ailes sounds like it’s going to give him some major heartburn. This excerpt is particularly telling:

Ailes said that if he were president, he would solve the immigration problem by sitting the president of Mexico down and giving him a stern talking-to: “Your country is corrupt. You can now only take thirty percent of what the people earn instead of seventy percent. If you don’t do that, I’ll send the CIA down there to kill you.”

He had been careful to moderate his immigration position in public. “If I’m going to risk my life to run over the fence to get into America, I want to win. I think Fox News will articulate that,” he told The New Republic a few months earlier. But Ailes told [Philipstown, NY supervisor Richard] Shea that as president he would send Navy SEAL trainees to the border as part of a certification program: “I would make it a requirement that you would have to personally kill an illegal immigrant coming into the country. They would have to bring home a dead body.” [The Loudest Voice in the Room, pg 392]

People have made the comparison between the conservative movement and the Mafia or criminal gangs like the Crips and the Bloods before but I always thought it was a little bit silly. I was wrong.

There are lots of other, similar excerpts at the link. How about this one:

About a year after the attacks, Bill Clinton went for lunch at News Corp with Murdoch and his top executives. Murdoch’s communications chief, Gary Ginsberg, who was a former lawyer in the Clinton White House and a key Murdoch emissary to powerful Democrats, brokered the meeting. Talk turned to Ground Zero and plans for reconstruction. The executives around the room offered ideas. When it was Ailes’s turn, the conversation halted. “Roger said this insane thing,” one person in the room recalled. “He was talking about rebuilding the towers and he said, ‘We should fill the last ten floors with Muslims so they never do it again.” [The Loudest Voice in the Room, pg 264-265]

He’s as kooky as Donald Trump.

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Where the sadists fit right in

by digby

Jonathan Schwarz brings us the kind of modern immigrant tale a right winger can love:

Imagine you were Iraqi and had the right personality to join Saddam’s military in 1985, just before it engaged in actual genocide against other Iraqis, and rise through the ranks for 18 years until, by the time the U.S. invaded in 2003, you were a lieutenant colonel.

But then suddenly you’re transplanted to America. Where would someone with your background and personality end up on the political spectrum here?

As [Muhanned al-Kusairy] ascended to the 19th floor of a downtown building on a Baghdad-hot afternoon, his hands trembled, his face flushed, and his stomach, he remarked, felt as if it were “filled with mice, not butterflies.” He was heading to see a man he had come to idolize since moving to Arizona three years ago, a man who he hoped would fulfill his American dream. 

“Mr. Sheriff!” Muhanned exclaimed. “It’s a huge honor to meet you.” 

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose hard-line approaches to illegal immigration have drawn nationwide attention, embraced the fawning Iraqi immigrant. “Tell me about yourself,” he said… 

“My dream is to be a deputy sheriff,” he told Arpaio. “I want to work for you…Ever since I arrived here, I’ve wanted to wear a uniform with the American flag on it.”… 

He and his family must wait two more years to become citizens — “it feels like two centuries” — but that has not dissuaded him from trying to be what he deems American. He covers his bald pate with a black Stetson, sports a stars-and-stripes sticker on the tailgate of his Tahoe, listens to country star Alan Jackson’s greatest hits and spouts off on politics when wedged in traffic on I-17. 

“We have too many illegals here,” he said soon after picking me up from the airport last month. It was three days before his meeting with Arpaio. He went on to rail about how many immigrants receive state-funded health care and food stamps. “And they don’t pay taxes,” he groused. “They’re stealing from both my pockets.”… 

“I came legally, and I pay my fair share in taxes,” he said. A few miles later, he returned to the topic. “I wish I was in charge of the Department of State. Anyone who doesn’t love the United States, I’d deport him to Mexico.”… 

Muhanned has spent more than 40 hours in evening classes, learning how to use a two-way radio, process detainees and conduct a traffic stop. He is moving on to intermediate-level instruction this summer — “They will teach me to use a Taser!” — and he hopes to earn his certification to carry a sidearm and a posse badge by the end of the year….
He is unmoved by criticism that the squad of 3,500 civilians, some of whom are armed, has not been properly screened or trained. “Don’t believe everything you read in the media,” Muhanned said. 

“We,” he told me, referring to the United States in the first person, “should have sent the sheriff to Iraq in 2003 instead of Paul Bremer,” the White House envoy who ran the initial U.S. occupation. “We needed someone tough like him.”

As this shows, no one’s political perspective has much to do with ideas or the structure of their country’s government or history or whatever. It’s just about their personality.

I always thought it would be a good thing to allow Iraqis to come to the United States since we did such a job on their country. But I never imagined we’d invite Saddam’s henchmen. It’s not as if we haven’t met our sadistic psycho quota already.

As Jonathan says, these people are in every society, including ours and they’re pretty much the same everywhere:

The important thing is just that someone is in charge and telling him what to do, and that this includes hurting other people while wearing a costume.

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Dispatch from Gilead: criminalizing miscarriage

by digby

Like a lot of reproductive rights advocates, I’ve often been accused of being hysterical about the anti-abortion right’s agenda. I’m often told that there is no desire to deny women their agency and that we really should lighten up. When we point out that the logical end point of the anti-abortion zealots’ arguments for conferring “personhood” from the moment of conception is to criminalize miscarriage, we’re told that we are being ridiculous and that we need to calm down.

Not so ridiculous:

If a woman in Virginia has a miscarriage, they must report it within 24 hours to the police or risk going to jail for a full year. At least, that’s what would have happened if a bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) had become law.
And yet, the Virginia Republican Party wants to make Obenshain into the state’s top prosecutor. This weekend, Virginia Republicans selected Obenshain as their nominee to replace tea party stalwart Ken Cuccinelli (R) as the state’s attorney general.

Under Obenshain’s bill, which was introduced in 2009,

When a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion, the mother or someone acting on her behalf shall, within 24 hours, report the fetal death, location of the remains, and identity of the mother to the local or state police or sheriff’s department of the city or county where the fetal death occurred. No one shall remove, destroy, or otherwise dispose of any remains without the express authorization of law-enforcement officials or the medical examiner. Any person violating the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

That means they could face up to one year in prison. But don’t worry your pretty little heads about it girls, they probably won’t use it except on the really “bad” girls who deserve it.

Meanwhile, did you know that this is already on the books in Virginia?

Even without Obenshain’s bill, Virginia law already treats many miscarriages as potential crimes. Under existing Virginia law, “[w]hen a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion or when inquiry or investigation by a medical examiner is required, the medical examiner shall investigate the cause of fetal death and shall complete and sign the medical certification portion of the fetal death report within twenty-four hours after being notified of a fetal death.”

That’s almost as chilling as far as I’m concerned. Criminalizing a failure to report miscarriage takes it to a more sinister level, but I don’t know why it’s any of the state’s business at all. It’s an extremely common, natural occurrence after all. Half the time we don’t even know it’s happened. They might as well require reporting of nocturnal emissions or menstrual periods. It’s an extremely inappropriate intrusion on the internal bodily functions of women.

At least as it stands, the only time the state is involved is if they are informed of an “unattended” fetal death, but just having that on the books means that the state can treat miscarriage (and now possibly the practice of medical abortion with oral mifepristone) as something requiring an official investigation. Sure, it probably doesn’t happen very often and is used mostly to gather statistics. But then you inevitably have some patriarchal throwback like Mark Obenshain come along to try to take it to the next level. After all, he was just proposing to give the existing law a little bit more teeth wasn’t he?

And he’s running for Attorney General to replace this guy, so it’s not as if these nuts can’t get elected. Indeed, that neanderthal is so successful he’s now running for Governor.

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More and more drones, coming to a neighborhood near you

by David Atkins

Local Ventura County Republican Assemblymember Jeff Gorell tweeted tonight about this adorable conference coming up on March 26-28 at the Hyatt Westlake in Thousand Oaks:

UAVs- A California Perspective, a Policy Symposium

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) spending is expected to almost double over the next decade, from annual worldwide expenditures of $6.6 billion to $11.4 billion, totaling more than $89 billion over the next ten years.Congress has directed the FAA to create six testing sites and a UAV certification plan by 2015. California is expected to earn one of those test sites.

Learn how you can benefit from the growth of the UAV market.

UAVs are currently in use or under consideration around the world and in U.S. unrestricted airspace for such civil and commercial uses as:

Wildfire Detection and Management
Pollution Monitoring
Event Security
Traffic Monitoring
Disaster Relief
Fisheries Management
Pipeline Monitoring & Oil and Gas Security
Meteorology – Storm Tracking
Remote Aerial Mapping
Transmission Line Inspection

And who is putting on this conference, aside from the drone manufacturers? Well, California’s high-profile Democratic Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom for one, as well as a number of other Democratic legislators including Assemblymember Steven Bradford, newly and narrowly elected Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi and Bell corruption reform advocate and Assemblymember Christina Garcia.

These aren’t bad people. But drones are big business, without even getting into law enforcement or military applications. And they’re not always a bad thing. The World Wildlife Fund recently purchased two unarmed drones to deal with poachers in wildlife preserves:

Conservation group WWF has announced plans to deploy surveillance drones to aid its efforts to protect species in the wild, as the South African government revealed that 82 rhinos had been poached there since the new year.

The green group says that by the end of the year, it will have deployed “eyes in the sky” in one country in Africa or Asia, with a second country following in 2014 as part of a $5m hi-tech push to combat the illegal wildlife trade.

Allan Crawford, project leader for the WWF Google technology project, who had just returned from the Kruger national park where many of South Africa’s rhinos are being killed, told the Guardian: “It’s a very scary prospect for rangers … they could run into very heavily armed gangs of poachers, there’s usually four or five of them, sometimes with dogs. They’ve also got wild animals to contend with – one ranger was recently attacked by a lion. They’re outnumbered, and sometimes poachers have night-vision equipment. There aren’t enough resources to tackle this in South Africa at the moment. This is where the new technologies come in, to help them.”

Drones are already being used by conservationists to monitor wildlife, such as orangutan populations in Sumatra, anti-whaling activists are using them against the Japanese whaling fleet, and a charity in Kenya recently beat its target of raising $35,000 in crowdfunding for a drone to protect rhinos and other wildlife in the country’s Laikipia district. One South African rhino farmer is even planning to put 30 drones in the sky himself. But the way the three key technologies are being used by WWF is “unprecedented”, Crawford said.

A pair of drones will be used in each of the two countries selected, which the group hopes to name within weeks, with plans to ultimately be operational in four sites by 2015, with different terrains. Crawford said the software and drones, which would be operated by rangers or local law enforcement, would “generate a strategic deployment of rangers in the most cost effective way, so they can form a shield between animals and poachers.”

Like most things in life, drones are a mixed bag. They can be used for good or ill. It’s hard to argue that putting this technology in the hands of the World Wildlife Fund to help track down poachers is a bad thing. On the other hand, giving civilian law enforcement boys even more toys to potentially abuse the civilian population isn’t attractive, either.

Regardless, the handwriting on drones is on the wall. Drones are coming, and lots of them in both private and public hands. The question for civil liberties groups is what sort of restrictions can and should be demanded on their use by what groups, and what sort of restrictions are likely to be politically possible.

It will be a long struggle, but a future without domestic surveillance drones–for good and evil–won’t be one of the outcomes.

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Kafka moment ‘o the day

by digby

From Chris Bertram:

The position of the last British detainee at Guantanamo, Shaker Aamer, is in the UK news today. He’s never been charged with anything and was “cleared for release” under the Bush administration. He is in failing health. For protesting about his own treatment and that of others, he is confined to the punishment block. It seems the reason the Aamer can’t be released today is that the US Congress has imposed absurd certification requirements on the US Secretary of Defense, such that Panetta would be personally reponsible for any future criminal actions by the released inmate. One of the reasons why the US Congress has put these obstacles up is because of claims made by the US military about “recidivism”, claims that also get some scrutiny in the report. It would seem that subsequent protests about conditions in the camp, writing a book about it or making a film, are counted as instances of “recidivism”. Astonishing. You can listen to a BBC radio report here (start at 7’ 40”)

This is yet another one of those Catch-22s like the indefinite detention procedures in the recently passed NDAA, in which everyone claims that just because these laws exist it doesn’t mean the executive will have to abide by them. The problem is that the political implications of them not doing so (and in this case legal liability) ensure that virtually any president will abide by it anyway.

This man is innocent.The government has already admitted it. But he’s been tortured and wrongfully imprisoned for years. One can hardly blame him if he harbors some hostility now, even if he didn’t before. It is The Count of Monte Cristo effect: when you do this to someone, there is a possibility they will seek revenge. After all, their lives have been ruined. Therefore, they must never be released lest they go on to commit the crime they were wrongfully accused of committing in the first place.

Now, the tales of “recidivism” are hugely overstated. Thew worst thing most released prisoners have done is express some unhappiness with their incarceration and torture. As Bertram said, that’s considered “recidivism” as well.But the possibility that one released prisoner might actually seek revenge for their mistreatment is always going to be too much for Secretary of Defense or the executive branch to risk personally signing off on going forward. I can’t imagine it happening, frankly. They know what’s been done to these people.

This is the true, practical problem with the president signing the NDAA. (The legal and moral problem has been well established.) Even if one were to assume that all of our leaders going forward will be moral people who would never in a million years abuse their authority or wrongfully imprison someone, you cannot escape the fact that the politics will always mitigate against setting someone free once they’ve been put through this extra-judicial wringer.

Unless the entire “terrorist” legal edifice that was born out of the overreaction to 9/11 is torn down and a humane and transparent system is put in its place, there will remain a very good chance that we will continue to turn otherwise innocent people into enemies by our treatment of them or keep innocent people imprisoned forever. Kafka couldn’t have designed a more byzantine hell.

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Progressive Caucus Recertified

by David Atkins

There was a significant hubbub caused when the California Democratic Party delayed recertifying its Progressive Caucus (of which I am a member, though I wasn’t present to vote on the resolution in question) after it passed a resolution encouraging a primary challenge to Barack Obama.

Much of the progressive blogosphere freaked out about this, claiming that the Party was attempting to quell dissent and expel anyone who stepped out of line. In truth, the delay in recertification at the last CDP executive board meeting in Anaheim took place in order to avoid an ugly and bruising floor fight that might have resulted in the decertification of the aucus, particularly at the hands of angry minority groups (whose constituents still strongly support the President) including the African-American Caucus.

The delay in recertification was the right move at the time, as I have said in the past. It allowed cooler heads to prevail and for rifts to be at least partially mended. And today at the CDP Executive Board meeting in Burlingame, I was proud to be among the board members to vote to recertify the Progressive Caucus in the California Democratic Party.

In any organization particularly on the Left, you’ll mostly find good people usually trying through fits and starts to do the right thing. Processes often get corrupted and bad leaders can do extraordinary damage sometimes, but by and large these are real people in these organizations, giving hundreds of hours of their time for free for a cause. The CDP has been doing a fantastic job of late as one of most progressive and effective Democratic organizations in the country, and the handling of the Progressive Caucus business has been no exception.

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