Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It’s the guns, stupid

by digby

Via TPM:

Conservative columnist George Will said Sunday that the Aurora, Colo. shootings have little to do with the nation’s gun laws, describing it as the product of an isolated, deranged individual.

“That’s what the problem is – an individual’s twisted mind,” he said on ABC’s “This Week” roundable. “There is a human itch in the modern age to commit sociology as soon as this happens and to piggy-back various political agendas on a tragedy. And I just think we ought to resist that. … There are deranged people in the world.”

Mass murder is as natural as the sun coming up in the morning and there’s nothing anyone can do about it:

Since 1982, there have been at least 36 mass murders* carried out with firearms across the United States. We have mapped them below, including details on the shooter’s identity, the date of the event, and the number of victims injured and killed. We do not consider the map comprehensive (and there are countless incidents of deadly gun violence in America, of course). We used the following criteria to identify incidents of mass murder:

• The killings were carried out by a lone shooter (except in the case of the Columbine massacre, which involved two shooters).
• The shootings happened during a single incident and in a public place (except possibly in the case of a deer hunter in Wisconsin who killed his victims after a trespassing dispute).
• The shooter took the lives of at least four people (an FBI crime classification report identifies an individual as a mass murderer—as opposed to a spree killer or a serial killer—if he kills four or more people in a single incident, and typically in a single location).
• If the shooter died or was hurt from injuries sustained during the incident, he is included in the victim count.

Click over to see the map.

Let’s just say that there have not been 36 mass murders in that period not committed with firearms. So I think there’s at least some correlation. Yes, murders have always happened and mass murder is a feature of human kind. But there’s something very new about what we’re experiencing now:

Although gun proponents are correct when they contend that firearms are not to blame for the behavior of mass killers, guns do make their attacks far bloodier. The availability of high-powered, rapid-fire weapons is surely a large part of the reason why the death tolls in mass murders have been so large in the recent past. Three-quarters of the deadliest mass murders in the United States have occurred since 1980, most of which involved firearms as the exclusive or primary weapon.

It would have been nearly impossible for the Tucson gunman to kill and wound so many with a knife or his own hands. In addition to the greater lethality of the firearm, guns also distance the attacker psychologically from his victims. It is possible that the shooter may not have been emotionally able to kill a young girl had he had any physical contact with her. But with a gun, he could dispassionately shoot down innocent strangers, along with his primary target, as if they were moving objects in a video game.

Notwithstanding the worn-out slogan that “guns don’t kill, people do,” guns do make it easier for people to commit murder. And semi-automatic guns, like the Tucson assailant’s out-of-the-box spanking-new Glock, make it easier to commit mass murder.

I guess we’re just supposed to accept this as an inevitable result of “progress.” But it’s sick. Blithely defending the idea that some kid can legally get a hold of automatic weapons that can take down 75 people in a quick spray is about the most irresponsible thing I’ve ever heard. George Will is a bit of a psychopath himself, I’m afraid.

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One born every minute

by digby

If you wanted proof that some people have completely lost their common sense:

Fire officials said 21 people at an event hosted by motivational speaker Tony Robbins suffered burns while walking across hot coals and three of the injured were treated at hospitals.

The injuries took place during the first day Thursday of a four-day event at the San Jose Convention Center hosted by Robbins called “Unleash the Power Within.” Most of those hurt had second and third degree burns, said San Jose Fire Department Capt. Reggie Williams.

Walking across hot coals on lanes measuring 10 feet long and heated to between 1,200 to 2,000 degrees provides attendees an opportunity to “understand that there is absolutely nothing you can’t overcome,” according to the motivational speaker’s website.
[…]
“I just heard these screams of agony,” he told The Associated Press. “People were in pain. It sounded like people were being tortured.”

Participant Sahar Madani told KTVU-TV that attendees were warned that they might get burns or blisters.

“The intention of the event is to get your focus and your attention away from that and look into the power within yourself and focus on just walking on the fire,” she told the station.

Right. Just don’t focus on the 3rd degree burns on the bottom of your feet.

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If you build it, they will use it

by digby

In this case it’s a global anti-terrorist machine that has taken on a life of its own:

In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.

The growing American involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation of antidrug efforts in Central America, according to documents, Congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon.

In both regions, American officials are responding to fears that crackdowns in more direct staging points for smuggling — like Mexico and Spain — have prompted traffickers to move into smaller and weakly governed states, further corrupting and destabilizing them.

The aggressive response by the United States is also a sign of how greater attention and resources have turned to efforts to fight drugs as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down.

“We see Africa as the new frontier in terms of counterterrorism and counternarcotics issues,” said Jeffrey P. Breeden, the chief of the D.E.A.’s Europe, Asia and Africa section. “It’s a place that we need to get ahead of — we’re already behind the curve in some ways, and we need to catch up.”

Hey, we’re geared up for a GWOT. Be a shame to waste it.

Why anyone thinks we should spend even one penny trying to interdict cocaine going into Europe is beyond me. Don’t they have their own forces to do that sort of thing? “Counternarcotics” issues are stupid anyway, but involving the DEA in Africa just because they have a lot of toys they’d like to use is lunacy.

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Winning the future

by digby

Your depressing read of the morning is this series in the LA Times about the population explosion:

How many children to have is an intensely personal matter, often a source of family debate. But the decisions made by Ramjee, Mamta and others their age will have repercussions far beyond their own families and villages.

They are members of the largest generation in history — more than 3 billion people worldwide under the age of 25. About 1.2 billion of them are adolescents just entering their reproductive years.

If they choose, collectively, to have smaller families than their elders did, the world’s population — now 7 billion — will continue to grow, but more slowly.

According to United Nations projections, the number will rise to 9.3 billion by 2050 — the equivalent of adding another India and China to the world.

That’s an optimistic scenario, one that assumes the worldwide average birthrate, now 2.5 children per woman, will decline to 2.1.

If birthrates stay where they are, the population is expected to reach 11 billion by midcentury — akin to adding three Chinas.

Under either forecast, scientists say, living conditions are likely to be bleak for much of humanity. Water, food and arable land will be more scarce, cities more crowded and hunger more widespread.

On a planet with 11 billion people, however, all those problems will be worse.

The outcome hinges on the cumulative decisions of hundreds of millions of young people around the globe.

The relentless growth in population might seem paradoxical given that the world’s average birthrate has been slowly falling for decades. Humanity’s numbers continue to climb because of what scientists call population momentum.

So many people are now in their prime reproductive years — the result of unchecked fertility in decades past, coupled with reduced child mortality — that even modest rates of childbearing yield huge increases.

“We’re still adding more than 70 million people to the planet every year — which we have been doing since the 1970s,” said John Bongaarts, a leading demographer and vice president of the nonprofit Population Council in New York. “We’re still in the steep part of the curve.”

Think of population growth as a speeding train. When the engineer applies the brakes, the train doesn’t stop immediately. Momentum propels it forward a considerable distance before it finally comes to a halt.

U.N. demographers once believed the train would stop around 2075. Now they say world population will continue growing into the next century.

In India, a country of 1.2 billion people, women have an average of 2.5 children each, and the birthrate is projected to fall to 2.1 by 2030. At that point, parents will merely be replacing themselves.

But even then, India’s population will continue to grow because of momentum. It is on track to surpass China’s and is not expected to peak until 2060, at 1.7 billion people.

Momentum isn’t the only factor in population growth. In some of the poorest parts of the world, fertility rates remain high, driven by tradition, religion, the inferior status of women and limited access to contraception.

Population will rise most rapidly in places least able to handle it: developing nations where hunger, political instability and environmental degradation are already pervasive.

The African continent is expected to double in population by the middle of this century, adding 1 billion people despite the ravages of AIDS and malnutrition.

Even under optimistic assumptions, the toll on people and the planet will be severe.

Today, about 1 in 8 people in the world lives in a slum. By midcentury, with the population at more than 9 billion, the ratio would be 1 in 3, assuming poverty and migration to cities continue at their current rates.

Now nearly 1 billion people are chronically hungry, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and at least 8 million die every year of hunger-related illnesses.

By midcentury, there will be at least 2 billion more mouths to feed, and no one can say where the food will come from.

It’s not just that the population will be larger. It’s that hundreds of millions of newly affluent people, mostly in Asia, will want to add dairy products and grain-fed beef and pork to their diets.

To meet the projected demand, the world’s farmers will have to double their crop production, according to calculations by a team of scientists led by David Tilman, a University of Minnesota expert on global agriculture.

William G. Lesher, a former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said the brightest minds in the field haven’t figured out the solution.

“We’re going to have to produce more food in the next 40 years than we have the last 10,000,” he said. “Some people say we’ll just add more land or more water. But we’re not going to do much of either.”

Gosh, I sure hope that global warming thing doesn’t pan out.

Enjoy your day …

Bill McKibben issues a dire warning about climate change

David Atkins

Bill McKibben delivers the goods on the latest climate change math at Rolling Stone:

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the “largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.” The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world’s nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn’t even attend. It was “a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago,” the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls “once thronged by multitudes.” Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I’ve spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn’t yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

Read the whole article for the gruesome truth. And yet it barely registers as an issue in the presidential election.

Sometimes I wish there truly were posthumous punishment for the world’s greedy and evil people.

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The singing candidates

by digby

So, someone noticed that the Mitt “response” to the Obama “American the beautiful” ad was a little bit odd:

Viewed from a tactical standpoint, I was surprised that the Romney camp used Mr Obama’s performance. I could see why Mr Obama featured Mr Romney in his commercial; the Republican’s warbling suggested a lack of harmony between his rhetoric and his record in government and the private equity business. But unlike Mr Romney, Mr Obama sang quite well, raising the question of why the opposition would show him off to his advantage, even in this limited sense.

One of the better answers I have found comes from a well-known supporter of Mr Romney – Suzy Welch, former editor in chief of the Harvard Business Review, and wife of Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. In an appearance on CNN with her husband, Mrs Welch suggested that Mr Obama’s personal style and choice of musical material define him as a member of a “different America”. I would imagine this is why Mr Romney’s campaign included the snippet of Mr Obama singing “Let’s Stay Together” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. They hoped it would convey his otherness.

“It’s the difference between the songs that they’re singing,” Mrs Welch said. “Mitt Romney didn’t exactly do a beautiful job on that song, but think about what he’s singing, OK? I mean it’s that patriotic song and he goes all the way through it. Then you’ve got the very cool Barack Obama singing Al Green. That is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?”

Putting aside the question of what this kind of thinking means for America (I’ll stick to the singular), I think it spells trouble for Mr Romney’s strategic effort because you have to be really old – or, I guess, spend a lot of time with someone really old – to hear “Let’s Stay Together” and think of it as a symbol of a “different America”.

Al Green’s song topped the US pop charts more than four decades ago, in 1972, meaning people who bought the record as children are eligible for membership in the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons).

The song – a paean to monogamy, whether times “are good or bad, happy or sad” – is so middle-of-the-road it has become part of that canon of 1960s and 1970s hits that are frequently performed on popular television shows such as America’s Got Talent and American Idol. It was a sign of the times that after Mr Obama sang “Let’s Stay Together” at the Apollo, he received a tongue-in-cheek invitation to reprise the song with Mr Green on American Idol.>

What’s funny about this is that the author obtusely insists that the “two Americas” she’s talking about is generational rather than racial. I think most of us understand very well what she meant by that.

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The GOP’s big secret:funding a non-extremist or two

by digby

This is interesting:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee paid for an ad that attacks the Republican budget in Congress last month — and appears to have spent quite a lot doing it.

At the time, NRSC officials did not comment on the commercial run by the Montana Republican Party on behalf of Rep. Denny Rehberg, who is challenging Democratic Sen. Jon Tester.

The spot, with an initial cost of $200,000, could only have been funded by large transfers from the NRSC, since the the Montana GOP did not have enough cash on its own. The latest federal campaign filings show that the national team transferred $540,000 to the local party — $315,000 on June 19, the day before the ad started to run, then $45,000 on June 21 and $180,000 on June 25.

While the Montana Party is free to spend the money it gets from Washington how it wants, it’s clear that the big shots in D.C. knew of the message in the ad, at least after the fact, and the spot continued to run.

And it’s quite a message for Republicans to be delivering. The ad notes that “Rehberg refused to support a Republican budget plan that could harm the Medicare program so many of Montana’s seniors rely on,” referring to Rehberg’s opposition to the budget of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the chairman of the House Budget Committee.

It’s interesting because the Democrats do this all the time, of course. They actually spend more money on right wing Dems than liberals and make no bones about it. But the Republicans are ashamed of any moderation and go to great lengths to hide it. Their base gets very riled up. Here’s an example:

Massachusetts Tea Party activists are not happy with their state’s Republican establishment.

At a meeting for the Leicester/Holden/Paxton/Rutland Tea Party group, grassroots leaders accused the Massachusetts GOP of being “too moderate” and “too elite,” according to a report from GoLocalWorcester.

The state’s GOP leaders are a bunch of “country club Republicans,” said Jim McGrath, co-chairman of the LPRH Tea Party. Amongst other concerns, McGrath expressed concern that they hadn’t done enough for state representative races.

Another local conservative activist, Dana George Reed, characterized the party in an interview with the local Worcester website as “moderate to liberal,” which, of course, is a derogatory statement in the right-wing activist world.

So, assuming that the “center” is in that sweet spot where the two parties meet, I think you can see why it keeps moving rightward. While the Republicans do it with reluctance and distance themselves from any activity that shows the need to moderate in order to get elected, the Democrats celebrate their “moderation” and even identify themselves with it. Over time it inches to the right and the Democrats willingly own it.

For instance, here’s what’s considered so “moderate” that the Republicans have to hide their involvement in it:

“Rehberg refused to support a Republican budget plan that could harm the Medicare program so many of Montana’s seniors rely on.

You cannot refuse to support Paul Ryan’s dystopian budget and still be considered mainstream in the GOP. There used to be room for non-Randian extremists, but no more. And what that means is that when the inevitably agree to some “bargain” it will be much further right that we can imagine. And the whole village will extoll it for its moderation.

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Citizen Storm Troopers

by digby

So tell me. If the theatre was full of armed people, could they have fought this off? Or should we all be required to dress like this when we go out in the street?

I can’t help but be reminded of another situation where people did fight back and the carnage was substantial anyway:

The North Hollywood shootout was an armed confrontation between two heavily-armed and armored bank robbers, Larry Eugene Phillips, Jr. and Emil Matasareanu, and patrol and SWAT officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California on February 28, 1997. It happened when responding patrol officers engaged Phillips and Matasareanu leaving the robbed bank. Seventeen officers and civilians sustained injuries before both robbers were killed. Phillips and Matasareanu had robbed several banks prior to their attempt in North Hollywood and were notorious for their heavy armament, which included automatic rifles.

United States patrol officers at the time were typically armed with a 9mm or .40 caliber pistol on their person, with a 12-gauge shotgun available in their cars. Phillips and Matasareanu carried fully automatic rifles and wore body armor. Since most handgun calibers cannot penetrate body armor, patrol officers had a significant disadvantage until SWAT arrived with equivalent firepower; they also appropriated several semi-automatic rifles from a nearby firearms dealer to help even the odds. The incident sparked debate on the appropriate firepower for patrol officers to have available in similar situations in the future.

350 trained, armed cops were on the scene at one time. The confrontation lasted an hour. Is it really reasonable to believe that arming regular citizens with pistols is the answer to dealing with situations like this?

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One man’s loophole is another man’s job creatin’

As a member of the “Gang of Six,” Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho has emerged as something of a hero among advocates of bipartisanship, one of three conservative Republicans working with three Democrats to cut the deficit by closing loopholes that allow businesses and households to avoid paying taxes.

Yet earlier this year, the senator made sure that a $3 billion loophole — protecting “black liquor,” an alcoholic sludge used as fuel in timber mills and factories — remained open in the negotiations over the highway bill that President Obama signed this month. Many budget experts criticize the loophole as a tax dodge because it allows the sludge to qualify for an energy subsidy created to wean the country off imported oil for vehicles, which black liquor does not do.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers casually point to closing loopholes as the answer to much that ails the country. Negotiations to avoid automatic military spending cuts in January, to enact sweeping deficit reduction and to lower corporate and personal income tax rates all hinge on closing unidentified loopholes.

But the back-room actions on black liquor point to just how difficult it will be to lower the budget deficit through painless changes in the tax code. Even for a self-proclaimed deficit hawk like Mr. Crapo, one man’s loophole can be another’s vital constituent interest.

An Idaho company “feared losing the write-offs could affect employment decisions,” said Lindsay Nothern, a spokesman for Mr. Crapo.

There will always be a good reason for the loopholes, no matter how low you make the rates. This is the currency of local politics. If they agree to this nonsense just be aware that what they are really doing is cutting spending and lowering revenue, period. And that is nonsensical if the point is to cut the deficit.

It makes perfect sense, however, if you are trying to drown government in the bathtub.

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