Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Remembering Pat Tillman

by David Atkins

Every Memorial Day, this is at the top of my mind:

I still want an answer to who murdered Pat Tillman. His fellow soldiers deserve an answer. The country deserves an answer. And the people who turned his death into a propaganda opportunity should be seriously punished for disgracing and dishonoring this nation’s military.

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“Progressive thinking is a miasma arising from a cauldron of toxic ideas”

by digby

Throughout this long lazy week-end, I’ve been having some fun sharing some of the right wing hysteria one runs across on the innertubes these days. Here’s the last one, a review of United in Hate:The Left’s Romance with Tryanny and Terror:

…Glazov documents, with extensive footnoted excerpts, the Left’s romance with dictators from Hitler, to Stalin, to Castro, to Mao, to the North Vietnamese commununists, to the Sandanistas, showing that this romance is the strongest at the height of the terror unleashed by each regime and falls off when the terror is abated. The new darlings of the Left are the barbaric jihadists of radical Islam that he shows has elements of western-style tyranny borrowed from Hitler and Stalin and mixed with religious texts advocating Islamic supremacy and death to the infidel and to the Jews.

Just like religious folk, the believer espouses a faith, but his is a secular one. He too searches for personal redemption–but of an earthly variety. The progressive faith, therefore, is a secular religion. And this is why socialism’s dynamic constitute a muted carbon copy of Judeo-Christian imagery. Socialism’s secular utopian vision includes a fall from an ideal collective brotherhood, followed by a journey through a valley of oppression and injustice, and then ultimately a road toward redemption.

Later in the book, he shows how this redemption is built on the blood of those killed for the sake of the new society and calls up a suicidal longing in true believers on the Left. He also points out the parallels between the socialist utopia and that of the reign of Islam. In other words, profound insights into the old Leftist phrase of having to break a few eggs if you want to make an omelet–so what you purge society of the intellectuals and the bourgeois, and those who refuse to sink their individuality into the collective. Glazov writes:

“In rejecting his own society, the believer spurns the values of democracy and individual freedom, which are anathema to him, since he has miserably failed to cope with both the challenges they pose and the possibilities they offer. Tortured by his personal alientation, which is accompanied by feelings of self-loathing, the believer craves a fairy-tale world where no individuality exists, and where human estrangement is thus impossible. The believer fantasizes about how his own individuality and self will be submerged within the collective whole.”

These assertions come relatively early in the book and some might have a hard time accepting them at first, because they so go against the grain of progressive thinking that’s like a miasma arising from a cauldron of toxic ideas. But he provides the proof, over and over again, from diaries, from writings of prominent leftists who turned a blind eye to the Stalinist purges etc. etc. and romanticized the blue pajamas that obliterated sexual distinctions and individuality at the height of China’s cultural revolution. He even makes a convincing case for why the burka holds such allure for western feminists.

Yes, sluts love burkas, everyone knows that.

I have never been able to understand how it’s possible that the slutty, homo, hippie secularists of the left are in league with the most uptight religious fundamentalists on the planet. I guess I’ll have to read this book to find out. I’m sure I’ll either end up joining the swashbuckling individualists on the right who march to their own drummers instead of following the crowd or committing suicide because of my own alienation and self-loathing. I’ll let you know.

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Statistic ‘o the day

by digby

From America’s shooting gallery:

More Arizonans were killed by guns in 2009 than in motor-vehicle incidents, evidence of the need for stricter gun laws, according to a report released last week.

The report, by the Violence Policy Center, said Arizona was one of 10 states where firearm deaths outstripped traffic deaths in 2009, the most recent year for which numbers were available.

An Arizona politician explained that this is apples and oranges because cars aren’t used in self-defense. One might point out that guns aren’t useful for anything other than killing, but I guess that would be un-American.

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Koch foots the bill for the “grassroots”

by digby

Lee Fang at the Republic Report writes:

David Koch, co-owner of the Koch Industries petrochemical, manufacturing and commodity speculation fortune, hasn’t been shy about supporting Governor Scott Walker (R-WI), whose controversial union-busting agenda has forced a recall election this summer. Earlier this year, Koch told the Palm Beach Post: “We’re helping him, as we should. We’ve gotten pretty good at this over the years. We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.”

Evidently, they are paying for transportation and meals for people to come to Wisconsin to help Scott Walker.

Fang reminds us of the Koch’s previous generosity in funding the “grassroots” Tea Party:

Here’s a video I shot of Koch providing dozens of free buses for anti-health reform protesters back in 2009:

They did this back in 1993 too.

I don’t know, it seems to me that this would be a good story for some mainstream newspaper, but I guess they figure this is just standard operating procedure. except, of course, the left doesn’t have anyone funding its “grassroots” operations. Too bad for us, I guess.

The good news is that the LA Times finally picked up the big Lee Fang expose from 10 days ago about the 55 million in previously unknown Koch expenditures in the last election. Of course, they published it on a holiday. Wouldn’t want everyone to see it or anything.

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Arlington West

by digby

Here in the very heart of hateful godless liberalism, every Sunday Veterans for Peace creates what is known as Arlington West at Santa Monica Beach:

Each Sunday from sunrise to sunset, a temporary memorial appears next to the world-famous pier at Santa Monica, California. This memorial, known as Arlington West, a project of Veterans For Peace, offers visitors a graceful, visually and emotionally powerful, place for reflection.

Arlington West Mission Statement

In accordance with the Veterans For Peace Statement of Purpose, the Arlington West Mission Statement is to remember the fallen and wounded to provide a place to grieve to acknowledge the human cost of war to encourage dialogue among people with varied points of view to educate the public about the needs of those returning from war.

Visiting Arlington West

To take in the full expanse of crosses, one stands breathless at the enormity of what one sees. Each cross, carefully positioned in the sand with a uniformity appropriate a memorial for this purpose, represents all American military personnel who’ve lost their lives in the US war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Upon deeper reflection, Arlington West also powerfully represents the path our country has embarked upon.

When one visits the Arlington West Memorial at Santa Monica, one will see mementos placed on some of the crosses, many with fresh cut flowers. Arlington West also represents those who’ve lost their loved one or close friend.

In celebration of their lives, family and close friends of the fallen write their own heartfelt words and dedicate these to their loved one. A gold star is placed by us on dedications made by those who are family. Those dedications made by a friend or those who served along side an individual, will have a silver star placed on their dedication.

Veterans For Peace and dedicated volunteers of Arlington West are careful stewards of these dedications and currently maintain an archive of over 1600 such mementos. Mementos are added to those that may already have an existing dedication made to an individual. We also maintain a log of these dedications, making it easier to see if an individual has ever been visited before.

A Sea of Crosses

As one stands looking out over the sea of crosses, one will notice a swath of red crosses standing among the white ones. As the numbers of American lives lost increases daily, one red cross is representative of 10 military personnel each.

For those who’ve lost their lives within the week past are flag draped coffins with blue crosses positioned in front of each of these. The cross was chosen for its simplicity, not for its religious connotation.

The “wall” of names has been replaced with pillars positioned where the public can review the frequently updated list of fallen American military personnel since day one of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The list contains the name, age, rank, branch of service, unit assigned to, date and place of the circumstance of death, as well as their hometown and state.

Here’s this year’s statement:

This Memorial Day we will once again remember and reflect upon all Americans who’ve lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. To date, the United States has sacrificed (officially acknowledged) 4,486 of its military personnel in its war and occupation of Iraq, not counting those lost to the war and occupation of Afghanistan.

We will also reflect upon and remember all US military personnel who’ve committed suicide, often times due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We reflect upon the inadequate and all too often total absence of help our military personnel are faced with both in and out of military service and of the insistence of the US military to over rely on perscription drugs as a form of treatment.

Rather than address the root cause of the high rate of suicide among military personnel – that being military conditioning to accept the carnage and violence of war as acceptable and healthy to defend the American Way Of Life – the military’s response is to sedate them with psytropic medications and simply re-deploy them into combat.

That there have been thousands (upwards of 1 million or more by some statistics) of innocent people who’ve lost their lives in the violence of the invasion and occupation is without question. As Veterans For Peace, we also acknowledge there are innocent people on the receiving end of our benevolent bombings that did not live to experience the liberty and freedom we brought with them.

As Veterans For Peace and at Arlington West, we acknowledge we are not worth more; they are not worth less. They, too, shall be remembered over this year’s Memorial Day observations. As Leah Bolger, National President of Veterans For Peace, aply states:

On this Memorial Day, Veterans For Peace asks you to mourn not only for Americans killed in battle, but also for those killed by Americans in battle. We ask you to be willing to accept the fact that these war deaths did not have to happen—that they are actually in vain. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died in American wars of aggression. That is a tragedy and is a truth that must be accepted and for which we must take responsibility.

Weather permitting, we will set up the memorial beginning on Saturday, May 26th at 8am with a candle light vigil placed at the base of each marker at dusk on Sunday. Take down of the memorial will commence of Monday, May 28th around 3pm. The public is welcome to volunteer for set up and or take down. Please introduce yourself at the information table for guidance on procedures and protocols observed within the memorial and its artifacts.

(Note: Leah Bolger spent 20 years on active duty in the U.S. Navy and retired in 2000 at the rank of Commander. She is currently a full-time peace activist and serves as the National President of Veterans For Peace.)

I hear complaints that this memorial is unpatriotic because it is affiliated with a group that opposes these wars. We don’t seem able to discuss these things with any complexity or nuance anymore. But I walk by it frequently on Sundays and I always see a few people sitting quietly by the crosses, perhaps even a family member or a friend of the fallen. And they don’t seem to be upset. In fact, I’ve never known anyone who isn’t moved by the sight of it:

And every time I go by there I’m always struck by how much bigger it’s gotten since the last time:

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The skewing effect of Republican extremism, healthcare edition

by David Atkins

NPR had a great report a few days ago on the presidential candidates’ “evolution” on healthcare and the individual mandate. To make a long story short, the two men were not altogether different in their approach to the healthcare problem. Whether through pragmatism or ideology, both sought to base a solution on the current private system. Then-candidate Obama was against the mandate before he was for it, because he felt that a mandate would be an imposition on those who could least afford it. Then-governor Romney liked the mandate to buy private insurance as a market-based solution that would eliminate the healthcare “free rider” problem (one of the reasons the Heritage Foundation proposed the plan as the alternative to the Clinton plan in 1993.)

President Obama felt that promoting such a conservative plan in order to at least address pre-existing condition denials and bend the healthcare cost curve would lead to acceptance and goodwill in Washington across the board. Romney believed that improving people’s lives through a market-based approach would make him a conservative darling.

Regardless of the actual benefits and drawbacks of the specific policies involved or whether any form of single-payer healthcare had a prayer of passing in Congress (both which are other, multiple-book-length topics), the politics of the situation are instructive. Both men’s best laid plans were thrown far off course by one thing and one alone: the radical extremist shift of the Republican Party, which suddenly opposed the Heritage mandate plan as the pinnacle of socialism, and portrayed Mitt Romney has only just slightly right-of-socialist.

As the NPR story says:

Health care has become one of the starkest contrasts between President Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign. And that’s surprising, given that once upon a time they both came up with similar plans to fix the system.

Stuart Altman, a professor of health policy at Brandeis University, says the two men once occupied the same political space on health care.

“I would define Obama as a moderate liberal and Romney as a moderate conservative. … Both of them came to the same conclusion,” he says. They decided what was needed was a system “built as much as possible on the existing health insurance system.”

Both men embraced what was considered to be mainstream health care policy thinking: maintain the employer-provided system but get everyone covered through an individual mandate — a requirement to buy insurance.

Romney went first. In 2006, as Massachusetts’ governor, he talked about the state’s mandate in decidedly nonideological terms: “We’re going to say, folks, if you can afford health care, then gosh, you’d better go get it; otherwise, you’re just passing on your expenses to someone else. That’s not Republican; that’s not Democratic; that’s not libertarian; that’s just wrong.”

Getting rid of free riders was a moral issue for Romney and many Republicans back then, says Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who helped the Romney and Obama administrations design the individual mandate. Gruber says he could tell that health care overhaul had a particular appeal for Romney — a businessman who specialized in turning around troubled companies…

Just as passing a national health care law was supposed to be the legacy achievement for Obama, Gruber says that back in 2006, as Romney got ready to run for president, the Massachusetts law also looked like a surefire political winner.

“You can understand his thinking, right? He thought, ‘Look, I can run for president by saying I solved this intractable problem by bringing conservative principles to bear — individual responsibility, the health insurance exchange.’ I mean, there was a guy from the freaking Heritage Institute on the stage with Romney at the bill-signing,” Gruber says. “This was a victory for Republican ideals, a victory for using market forces to solve an intractable problem, and I think that Romney probably thought, ‘Isn’t this a great thing I can run on as a Republican?’ … I would have thought so, too.”

As for Obama?

Over time, Obama and Romney have had a mirror-image relationship with the linchpin of their health care laws: Romney was for the mandate before he was against it. Obama was against the mandate before he was for it.

“The irony is even worse than that,” says Altman, the Brandeis professor. “I worked for Obama during the election and he was adamantly opposed to the individual mandate. … I was on his advisory group, and we said, ‘But you know, you really do need an individual mandate to make this all work together.’ He said, ‘I won’t support that because you’re asking, you know, not wealthy people to buy expensive insurance. We’ve got to get the cost down.’ “

During the 2008 Democratic primary, the mandate was the single biggest policy divide between Obama and opponent Hillary Clinton.

In a debate, candidate Obama blasted Clinton’s plan for an individual mandate by citing the experience in Massachusetts.

“Now, Massachusetts has a mandate right now,” he said. “They have exempted 20 percent of the uninsured — because they’ve concluded that that 20 percent can’t afford it. In some cases, there are people who are paying fines and still can’t afford it, so now they’re worse off than they were. They don’t have health insurance and they’re paying a fine.”

What happened? The obvious:

And Romney and Obama have something else in common, Altman says. They were both victims of the same political sea change: The Republican Party got a lot more conservative.

“Obama campaigned that he was going to be a different kind of a president. He was going to get things done; he was going to compromise,” Altman says. “And when he got to Washington, he realized that the Washington that he thought was there wasn’t there anymore. So the movement of the Republicans to the right … hurt Obama and really put Romney in a bind.”

Romney’s bind was apparent in the GOP primaries, when conservatives questioned his ability to attack the president on a plan so similar to his own. But now, with the nomination virtually in hand, Romney is making health care the heart of his argument against the president.

“The president’s plan assumes an endless expansion of government, with rising costs and, of course, with the spread of Obamacare,” Romney says. “I will halt the expansion of government, and I will repeal Obamacare.”

What was once a common bond is now a deep divide.

“I will not go back to the days when insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, or deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men,” Obama says. “We’re not going back there. We’re going forward.”

There is no overlap at all in the two men’s current approaches to health care. If Romney is elected, he’ll work to get rid of the law that was based on his own plan. If the president wins a second term, he will fight to keep what he can.

This, at long last, is honest journalism (even if the lede is buried toward the bottom.) Nothing–absolutely nothing–in American politics makes any sense anymore without addressing the real story: the radical shift of conservatives to the far right, combined with the desire of Democrats to find consensus by tacking to the new, formerly conservative “middle.”

There are forces that underlie that dynamic, of course: they are largely a function of the prioritization of assets over wages in elite policymaking circles. But that secondary level of analysis is perhaps asking too much. At the very least we should expect journalists to make an honest assessment of the rapidly increasing Republican extremism that is turning all of American politics on its head, causing Presidents and Presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle to make self-contradictory fools of themselves in the span of just a few short years.

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You all remember this, right?

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.

In Miami, an assistant United States attorney said many cases there involved what were apparently mistakes by immigrants, not fraud.

In Wisconsin, where prosecutors have lost almost twice as many cases as they won, charges were brought against voters who filled out more than one registration form and felons seemingly unaware that they were barred from voting.

One ex-convict was so unfamiliar with the rules that he provided his prison-issued identification card, stamped “Offender,” when he registered just before voting.

A handful of convictions involved people who voted twice. More than 30 were linked to small vote-buying schemes in which candidates generally in sheriff’s or judge’s races paid voters for their support.

That didn’t stop the “voter fraud” fraudsters. Indeed, they have doubled their efforts and are now in the process of defrauding the voter rolls themselves:

Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) has ordered the state to purge all “non-citizens” from the voting rolls prior to November’s election. But that list compiled by the Scott administration is so riddled with errors that, in Miami-Dade County alone, hundreds of U.S. citizens are being told they are ineligible to vote, ThinkProgress has learned exlusively.

According to data from the Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections obtained by ThinkProgress:

– 1638 people in Miami-Dade County were flagged by the state as “non-citizens” and sent letters informing them that they were ineligible to vote.
– Of that group, 359 people have subsquently provided the county with proof of citizenship.
– Another 26 people were identified as U.S. citizens directly by the county.
– The bulk of the remaining 1200 people have simply not responded yet to a letter sent to them by the Supervisor of Elections.

So, as Think Progress points out, at least 20% of the voters flagged in this purge are actually eligible.

Now keep in mind that the rest may have just not responded with proof yet. There is zero evidence that even if those people are all ineligible that they planned to vote. Certainly, there is no indication that this represents a conspiracy to steal the election — at least not by these people. What is clear is that the state of Florida is kicking eligible voters off its rolls on orders of its Republican Governor who is clearly targeting Democratic voters.

And keep in mind that this is one of the oldest tricks in the books. Here’s Rick Perlstein on the vote suppression effort in 1964, called “Operation Eagle Eye” in which Chief justice John Roberts’ predecessor, William Rehnquist, participated as a young man:

The “vote fraud” fantasies are tinged by deeply right-wing racial and anti-urban panics. I’ve talked to many conservative who seem to consider the idea of mass non-white participation in the duties of citizenship is inherently suspicious. It’s an idea all decent Americans should consider abhorrent. It is also, however, a very old conservative obsession–one that goes back to the beginnings of the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party itself.

Let me show you. Read this report from 1964, running down all the ways how Barry Goldwater’s Republican Party was working overtime to keep minorities from voting. The document can be found in the LBJ Library, where I researched my book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

John M Baley, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, charged today that “under the guise of setting up an apparatus to protect the sanctity of the ballot, the Republicans are actually creating the machinery for a carefully organized campaign to intimidate voters and to frighten members of minority groups from casing their ballots on November 3rd.”‘Let’s get this straight,’ Bailey added, ‘the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confience in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration.”‘But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. It is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place.”‘We intend to see to it that the rights of these people are protected. We will have our people at the polling places–not to frighten or threaten anyone–but to protect the right of any eligible voter to cast a secret ballot without threats or intimidation.’

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QOTD: the candidates are proxies

by digby

“This is the unfortunate reality of Citizens United,” said California Common Cause policy advocate Phillip Ung. “It’s opened up this new era of spending where we have interest groups going after each other and the candidates are being used as proxies.”

Read the story of a California race in which two special business interests are fighting to own a congressional seat.

This could be the wave of the future. At some point we’ll just cut out the middle-man and elect the industry. They’ll assign one of their employees to congress and even pick up the tab, which we’ll call fiscal responsibility. Win-win!

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Committed Canadians, eh?

by digby

Greg Mitchell shares this inspirational vid today:

I’ve been covering the wild nightly Saucepan Revolution protests in Montreal all week, and last night they topped themselves, taking to the streets in vast numbers despite rain and wind—and tornado warnings. Here’s a cool video from last night featuring local band named Arcade Fire on the soundtrack.

And here’s the earlier one that’s been going viral: