Sixty-four percent of likely voters surveyed after Obama’s June 15 announcement said they agreed with the policy, while 30 percent said they disagreed. Independents backed the decision by better than a two-to-one margin.
“At first I was really against it, but after sitting down and thinking about it, a lot of kids here are good kids,” Loretta Price, 65, a retiree and undecided independent voter from Ocala, Florida, said in a follow-up interview. “I think it was the right thing to do.”
It’s hard to believe sometimes, but when leaders lead on issues it often forces people to “sit down and think about it”. Certainly not the haters or the hardcore ideological opponents who will never vote for them anyway. But others, the people who aren’t quite sure, often find leadership to be a helpful guide.
It’s a simple formula that goes back a long way. I’m surprised more politicians don’t use it.
This is among the worst taser incidents I’ve ever chronicled:
They keep saying this woman is “mentally disturbed” but she sounds perfectly sane to me, both in the video of the incident and this interview. Obviously, I don’t have a full picture of her mental status, but from what I saw the diagnosis seems to be based upon the idea that she kept replying to the police tasering her and demanding that she “stop”, by screaming “you stop” and then accusing them of meting out punishment and enjoying hurting women. Under the circumstances, that hardly seems delusional.
But then police states often develop this definition of mental illness, don’t they? Anyone who questions the authorities is automatically suspect and must be insane. After all, in America, anyone who doesn’t automatically accede to a policeman’s orders or questions the officer’s right to do anything he chooses immediately subjects themselves to electro shock and possible electrocution. What sane person would assert their rights under those circumstances? Unfortunately many Americans don’t understand this because they’ve been taught all that silly stuff about freedom and the constitution in school.
Unsurprisingly, the officer who held her down by putting his hand over her face as she was on her back hogtied in the back of a squad car while they tasered her turned out to be a violent wife abuser. Two weeks later the police were called to his residence, but they didn’t taser him or even arrest him for some reason. I guess he was polite about it.
The Supreme Court turned down the police officer’s appeal in the 9th circuit decision, which makes me feel a tiny bit more confident that the Court will end up either banning or severely proscribing the use of tasers at some point. It’s hard for me to imagine any American constitutional scholar of any school ruling that it’s ok for police to repeatedly electro-shock people who are in restraints. But I’ve been wrong before.
And that, from the DCCC perspective is supposed to be the best of all possible worlds, a race in which it doesn’t matter who wins and they needn’t spend a penny or offer the least bit of support. Whoever wins will have a D after his name and that’s all that counts. We have been told over and over again that this is their only concern, that they don’t give a damn about ideology, it’s purely a numbers game.
So why in the hell are they endorsing Jared Huffman before it’s known whether or not he’s facing another Democrat? Barring total incompetence as an excuse (which I honestly doubt, they’re watching California like a hawk) the only possible reasons they would do this is because they are putting their thumbs on the scale to try to get Solomon to concede before all the votes have been counted or they are interfering in the vote counting by either talking on back channels or trying to influence Democratic election officials, which is shocking and illegal.
We know that if Solomon wins it will be an uphill battle for him to beat Huffman in the fall. And we also know that the powers that be would much prefer to have Huffman in the congress because they simply don’t believe that the left wing of the Democratic Party should have representation. We make their lives more difficult and embarrass them by complaining when they sell out the interests of working families or otherwise betray the values they purport to hold. They much prefer it if they can triangulate against us as outsiders than have to deal with people who are willing to leverage their power on the inside. I get that. They like Huffman, he’s more their kind of guy, a nice “San Francisco liberal”.
But what I don’t get is why they would care so much about that at this moment when they’ve got plutocrats spending billions on behalf of Republicans all over the country. Isn’t this just a little bit petty and parochial in light of what’s really going on? Why waste the energy?
In a way, it’s clarifying. Up until now they’ve only worked behind the scenes as individuals to ensure that Blue Dogs and New Dems are nominated in primaries. Now we see them interfering in a race in a deep blue district between a standard California liberal and a Progressive Movement leader. No matter what, they would always prefer the most conservative Democratic candidate available. Good to know.
In the wake of my posts about liberalism and human nature, many commentators from Greenwald to Stoller to lesser lights have accused me of being a warmongering imperialist and apologist for America’s wars of choice. But their misguided attacks completely miss the gist of the points I have been trying to make and grossly mischaracterize my views while demonstrating the critics’ own limited imagination of the capacity of human civilization.
I have been trying to explain for some time now that the world needs a new model of human organization if it is to survive. The current one is failing badly.
Consider just one pressing example: climate change. David Roberts at Grist puts it clearly in his TED Talk: if the nations of the world don’t get together to do something about climate change and fast, humanity is screwed.
The notion that an ever-increasing number of nation-states can develop nuclear weapons uninterrupted without engaging in full nuclear war at some point over the next century is similarly delusional. If climate change doesn’t decimate or destroy this species over the next two centuries, nuclear winter almost certainly will. And that’s just assuming the actions of nation-state actors, ignoring the very real possibility of non-state actors taking possession of these weapons.
The notion that the nuclear-armed nation-states of the world will simply adapt to peak oil without resorting to a third world war is improbable at best.
The notion that the world’s governments will somehow adapt with mutually effective treaties and internal domestic laws to deal with the increasing power of multinational corporations is delusional. In a world of global labor arbitrage wherein the top multinational corporations collude to buy off governments, the only competition that occurs is between governments themselves to sell themselves to the Fortune 100 in exchange for “investment.” That is why austerity is so powerful in Europe and the American government is so easily bought. Global corporate power is beyond the power of any individual nation-state to stop, even networked by (toothless) treaties.
I could mention many other examples ranging from environmental challenges to human rights issues. We have, in short, reached a point at which global challenges have breached the limitations of current political structures to control them.
Many on the left would like to pretend that these problems can be resolved through more diplomacy, or that the nation-states themselves can create a patchwork of domestic laws to adequately tackle these problems. They would like to pretend that people are basically good, ignoring millennia of constant warfare and greed throughout global human history amply demonstrating otherwise. They would like to believe that the nation-state is the pinnacle of human political organization, and that if nation-states would simply leave one another alone, setting up trade barriers and reducing military spending, the world would see lasting peace and prosperity. It’s not surprising, but it’s wishful thinking and not helpful in solving the real structural challenges the world faces.
Human history is in many ways the story of the power of civilization and complexification to mitigate the worst tendencies of human nature while expanding universal rights and unlocking the secrets of the universe. Reversals are commonplace, perhaps even cyclical in nature. But the overall trend is clear. Increasingly large and complex societies collaborate to solve increasingly large problems while creating better quality of life and guaranteeing increasing protections for their citizens through the process of government of consensus and consent, enforced by mutually-agreed-upon mechanisms. It’s how tribes grew into villages, how villages grew into city-states, city-states became kingdoms, and kingdoms became empires. It’s how empires fell of their own weight, how dark ages grew into feudalism, feudalism centralized into nation-states, and how nation-states gradually adopted democratic reforms through fits, starts and revolutions.
There is no reason to believe that that process of societal complexification has ended with our current global political structures. In fact, there is every reason to believe that without a metamorphosis of some kind toward greater complexity and universality, humanity itself stands at the precipice of its own destruction.
Within hours of the towers falling, I was on the phone with a friend in Finland who was weeping, “How could this happen?” I replied,”This is all the fault of the Bush administration. They weren’t paying attention.” For years, even confirmed liberals were saying I was hysterical, that no one could have predicted, blah, blah, blah.
Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks.
And thousands of Americans died. Then tens if not hundreds of thousands of Afghanis and Iraqis died from further Bush/Republican incompetence. And anyone who thinks that the fallout from Bush’s 9/11, Afghan, and Iraq fiascos is over has no idea what is going on in the hearts and minds of the relatives of the people Bush – and in their minds, all of America – killed. And because 9/11 is far from over, and because someone halfway competent needs to be in charge, this country cannot afford another modern Republican president. It’s too dangerous.
Romney – who is exactly the same as Bush but without Junior’s rapier wit, work ethic or keen, probing mind- must be defeated.
I love it when a politician just lets it all hang out and says what he really believes:
During the Q&A portion of the event, [Senate candidate]Hovde expressed his support for lowering the corporate tax rate, tackling the country’s spending problems and lowering the national debt.
Then, pointing to a reporter in the audience, Hovde said he would love to see the press stop covering sad stories about low-income individuals who can’t get benefits and start covering issues like the deficit more frequently.
“I see a reporter here,” he said. “I just pray that you start writing about these issues. I just pray. Stop always writing about, ‘Oh, the person couldn’t get, you know, their food stamps or this or that.’ You know, I saw something the other day — it’s like, another sob story, and I’m like, ‘But what about what’s happening to the country and the country as a whole?’ That’s going to devastate everybody.”
Yeah, what a bunch of whiners worrying about food when they should be worried about bondholders and their potential profits. It’s Un-American, I tells you. Why it’s downright class war!
(Needless to say, the press is doing the opposite pf what he claims, writing far more fear mongering tales about the deficit boogeyman than individual stories of the depression. But this fellow surely wants all of them stopped.)
Meanwhile, here’s The Kinks. I’m dedicating it to the Wall Street bankers. Nobody sobs harder than they do:
Romney’s “secret plan to balance the budget” tests press objectivity
by David Atkins
Via Greg Sargent at the Plum Line, behold the mendacity of Mitt Romney in an interview with Bob Schieffer of CBS defending his proposed $5 trillion in tax cuts:
SCHIEFFER: You haven’t been bashful about telling us you want to cut taxes. When are you going to tell us where you’re going to get the revenue? Which of the deductions are you going to be willing to eliminate? Which of the tax credits are you going to — when are you going to be able to tell us that?
ROMNEY: Well, we’ll go through that process with Congress as to which of all the different deductions and the exemptions —
SCHIEFFER: But do you have an ideas now, like the home mortgage interest deduction, you know, the various ones?
ROMNEY: Well Simpson Bowles went though a process of saying how they would be able to reach a setting where they had actually under their proposal even more revenue, with lower rates. So, mathematically it’s been proved to be possible: We can have lower rates, as I propose, that creates more growth, and we can limit deductions and exemptions.
A few questions. Is Mitt lying about his intended policies, saying whatever it takes to secure the support of his economic libertarian base and donors while knowing well that his budget has little chance of getting through the Senate? Does he really believe that $5 trillion in tax cuts combined with austerity and eliminating unnamed exemptions will spur economic growth? Or does he know how much damage it will cause, and simply doesn’t care so long as the obscenely wealthy get an even greater share of the pie?
As Sargent says:
Romney went on to pledge, as he has in the past, that under his plan, the wealthy would continue to pay the same share of the tax burden as they do now. “I’m not looking to reduce the burden paid by the wealthiest,” he said. In other words, the disproportionally larger tax cut the wealthy would get from the across-the-board cut in rates he’s proposing would be offset by closing deductions and loopholes the rich currently enjoy. But asked twice by Schieffer how exactly he would do this, Romney refused to say, beyond noting that this has been mathematically proven to be possible. And in his first reply above, he confirmed that the details would be worked out with Congress when he is president — which is to say, not during the campaign.
As you may recall, Romney made big news when he was overheard at a private fundraiser revealing to donors a few of the specific ways he’d pay for his massive tax cuts. Since then, details have been in short supply. And today, Romney seemed to confirm that he sees no need to reveal those details until he becomes president.
The message, in a nutshell: No, the rich won’t make out better than everyone else under my plan. No need to say how this would work in practice. Just trust me!
The Romney 2012 campaign will be a big test for the national news media. Is it possible to stonewall and lie shamelessly throughout an entire presidential election campaign without being called on it in a significantly damaging way? It’s the “secret plan to end the war”, but with $5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich offset by a secret plan to balance the budget.
The Obama campaign has responded:
Mitt Romney has made clear that — for political reasons — he’s not going to disclose how he would pay for his $5 trillion tax cuts. So he’s either secretly raising taxes on a whole segment of the population he won’t disclose, making even more devastating cuts to programs essential to the middle class like education or exploding the deficit by 5 trillion dollars.
Nice. But the Obama campaign shouldn’t have to say that as if it were a partisan attack. It’s an observable fact that should be reported as an uncontroversial truth by an objective press.
What’s good for everything that ails you? Firepower
by digby
What most depressing about this dishonest drivel is the fact that a whole lot of people believe it. In fact, it’s been a huge talking point on the right for a very long time.
It is, of course, nonsense.The gun control laws existed before the Nazis and the Nazis simply exempted themselves from the laws. Perhaps Joe the plumber doesn’t know that the Nazis were popular and most of the people who would have had guns would have been on their side. (Plus the SS, the Wehrmacht, and the Luftwaffe were very well armed, as you probably know.) But then neither did Condoleeza Rice who famously said that the US had liberated the Germans from Hitler.
But hey, if only the European Jews had privately owned some airplanes and bombs and tanks and such, they could have fought them all off, I’m sure. We should all start stocking up.
This afternoon the House of Representatives is considering H.R. 2578, a package of public lands bills that contains a provision from Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) giving U.S. Customs and Border Protection authority to shut down any economic or recreational activity within 100 miles of the northern and southern U.S. borders if deemed necessary for securing them.
The section also rolls back more than 30 environmental and public health laws within the 100-mile zone including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Park Service Organic Act that helps protect and preserve national parks (see full list here).
Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) dubbed the provision a “drone zone” bill and explained at a press conference today that:
It essentially will be a national sacrifice zone where our rights, our liberties, and our environment can be sacrificed for the sake of an ideological anti-immigrant, anti-environment agenda. Make no mistake, this isn’t a bill that actually addresses immigration issues.
Uhm, have these people ever heard of places named Seattle, San Diego, El Paso, Laredo, Niagra Falls and hundreds of other towns and cities within a hundred miles of the border? WTF?
It’s always interesting to see these people who hate the federal “nanny” state forcing things like health care “down their throats” but then reveal themselves to be the “daddy” state which seeks to exert central control through police and military power.
But hey, I’m sure we don’t have to worry. As long as everyone within 100 miles of the US border behaves, they have nothing to worry about. They’re only after the bad people, not Real Americans. Nothing to see here …
Blue America chat: help 50 million Americans come out of the closet
by digby
Every once in a while a righteous cause rises to the surface of our political consciousness at the very moment the right politician is ready to lead it. It doesn’t happen very often, but it’s happening right now. That cause is the fight against the national right wing assault on women, and the leader is Darcy Burner, running for congress in the newly drawn WA-01.
A week ago, at the Netroots Nation, Darcy gave a rousing Keynote speech to several thousand attendees. She presented them with a plan for progressive power and asked that women, in particular, empower themselves and inspire those around them to do the same. She reminded the crowd that 1/3 of all adult women will have an abortion in their lifetimes.
Then she asked all the women in the audience who’d had abortions to stand. And they did. One by one at first, and finally all at once, women throughout that huge crowd stood up. That’s not an easy thing to do in this culture, even among friends. The right has made it a dishonorable, solitary act, borne in silence, subject to fear and social stigma.
So Darcy took the next step: she asked all of those who supported those women to stand up. Everyone in the room came to their feet. There was no sustained applause and no celebration, just a simple public acknowledgement of solidarity and sincere support for the women in all of our lives who have made this choice. I’ve never seen anything like that.
To me is the essence of leadership — a candidate for office taking a stand on one of the most contentious issues of our time, reminding the people of what they have in common, empowering those who need to be empowered and asking for solidarity from their friends and neighbors. That’s what Darcy does. That’s why we need her fighting for us in Congress.
Naturally, she is being vilified for it, which I’m sure she expected from the retrograde right wing. But I doubt that she expected it from her so-called progressive primary opponents who are staging a whisper campaign in the district as well, alleging that she led “cheers” for abortion and portraying her as an extremist for illustrating that abortion is not a disgraceful choice made by a small number of irresponsible women but rather a common, everyday part of the lives of our mothers, daughters, friends and wives. The local press is eating it up.
Darcy is a leader on many issues, from the war in Afghanistan to economic fairness. But on this, she has done something that no other Democrat has done — she has attempted to redefine the battle lines on women’s reproductive rights. And until the Democratic Party follows her lead, women’s rights will continue to be whittled away in bits and pieces all over the country until one day we will find that more than 50 million of our people will have been denied the right to decide their own futures, take care of their families and otherwise be full and equal citizens.
If we let them destroy her, it will send a message to all other progressive politicians that they must not challenge the prevailing, cowardly orthodoxy on abortion rights.
