New poll shows Romney highly unpopular

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Mitt Romney has "thousands" of die-hard followers... in a country of 300 million

The Washington Post has an article up about die-hard Romney superfans. This is my favorite part:

“We are in the thousands,” said Judi Rustin, 61, the poet in Arizona. “And we all bleed red Romney blood.”

Thousands. Ooh scary. Read the rest of this post...

Video: Seriously, don't tick off the cat

I'm not quite sure I would call this video "funny." It's short. But wow. Do any cat-people out there have any idea as to what happened?

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GOP Sen. Rubio proposes making Latinos some "other" class of legal non-citizens

Sounds like Rubio wants to make Latinos 3/5ths of an American. From a NYT editorial:

Mr. Rubio's idea to make it palatable to his party is to offer them legalization without citizenship. "You can legalize someone's status," he says, "without placing them on a path toward citizenship." He warns that if Dream Act youths became citizens, they could -- horrors -- someday sponsor family members to enter legally. This idea is nothing more than some newly invented third-class status -- not illegal, but not American.

It's the Dream Act without the dream and should be dismissed out of hand....The only Dream Act worth passing is simple. It tells high schoolers who want to make something of themselves, for the good of the country, to go ahead. Join the military or go to college and take your place as full-fledged citizens in the only country you know. That Republicans reject this shows how far they have strayed from American ideals of assimilation and welcome.

We call that "guest workers." And it's a lovely way to solidify a permanent underclass in this country for Latinos. What is he thinking?  (He's thinking he wants to be vice president in a political party that doesn't like Latinos who aren't Cuban.)

Only Marco Rubio could turn the Dream Act into the Ream Act. Read the rest of this post...

The Founding Fathers loved health care mandates

In light of the Supreme Court hearing arguments this week about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate, it seems appropriate to revisit a New England Journal of Medicine article from January concerning the mandate's legality.

The article, like others that cite precedent for the individual mandate, first considers Wickard v. Filburn and Gonzalez v. Raich, the 1942 and 2005 rulings that uphold Congress' authority to regulate an individual's commercial activity if their action (or inaction) has an effect on the market as a whole. Such citations are often countered by conservatives who maintain that, no matter what legal precedent exists today, the Founding Fathers would never have dreamed of such a tyrannical interpretation of the Constitution and would have considered any form of a mandate an affront to freedom, liberty, justice, and all other things green and good in our country.

But is that really the case?

The article goes on to cite three laws, passed in 1790, 1792 and 1798 respectively, that provide for mandates not unlike the one being considered by the Supreme Court this week. Einer Elhauge, the author, writes:

[In] 1790, the first Congress, which was packed with framers, required all ship owners to provide medical insurance for seamen; in 1798, Congress also required seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. In 1792, Congress enacted a law mandating that all able-bodied citizens obtain a firearm. This history negates any claim that forcing the purchase of insurance or other products is unprecedented or contrary to any possible intention of the framers.

PolitiFact dug deeper into Elhauge's claims and found evidence that mandates were approved by Congressmen who had also signed the Constitution; refuting the assertion that the laws passed despite framers' objections:

There was no roll call for the House and Senate bills requiring health care for seamen. But on the proposal mandating the purchase of a musket, firelock or rifle as part of the larger bill to establish a uniform militia, 10 of the 14 framers whose votes were recorded endorsed the measure.

Not only did mandates pass muster with the Framers in Congress, they were signed into law by George Washington and John Adams. Those who say that the Founding Fathers would object to any governmental regulation of the free market should double-check their history. They won't like what they find. Read the rest of this post...

Facebook users go nuts on guy they think is George Zimmerman - it's really a MoJo reporter

As part of a "Million Hoodies" project to show solidarity with slain Florida teen Trayvon Martin, people around the Web have been posting pictures of themselves wearing hoodies (Martin was wearing one the night he died).  Well, it seems that Mother Jones reporter Adam Weinstein posted a picture of himself in a hoodie to a Facebook page where others are posting such pics, and the readers have become convinced that he's really George Zimmerman, the man who shot Martin. This is a typical comment:

I wanna murder you

I did find this comment interesting however:

With all of this hate showing him, what good are we really showing? Does showing him hatred really make us any different then what he did?

All this over a photo?

Mother Jones' Weinstein (l) and Zimmerman (r)

Weinstein was forced to post a note to Facebook to stop the hate:

Hey folks, that's not George Zimmerman -- that's me. I'm a reporter who's been covering Trayvon's killing for awhile, and I donned that hoodie last Friday to go on Geraldo's radio show and tell him that blaming the hoodie for what happened to Trayvon is crap. Check it out for yourself.

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U.S. pays families of Afghan massacre victims $50,000 for each slain relative

I offer this to square the circle on the Kandahar massacre story. With this information, you're up to date.

The other news recently — other than radio silence from both the British and American press on the multiple eyewitness accounts opposed to the "lone gunman" thesis — is the weekend payments by the U.S. military to the victims of the slaughter and their families.

The Boston Globe puts it this way (my emphasis):

The families of 16 [sic] Afghan villagers killed this month in a massacre blamed on a US soldier [sic] were given $50,000 by the United States for each of their slain relatives, Afghan and US officials said.

The payments were made Saturday by US military officers at the office of the governor of Kandahar Province, where the killings took place. Those wounded in the violence were each given $11,000, said Haji Agha Lalai, a member of the Kandahar provincial council.

Haji Jan Agha, who lost cousins in the killings, said he and other relatives of the deceased were invited to the governor’s office by foreign and Afghan officials, according to the Reuters news agency. “They said this money is an assistance from Obama,’’ Agha was quoted as saying.

Lalai also described the payments as “assistance’’ to the wounded and the families of the dead, not as any kind of traditional compensation that would absolve the accused of responsibility for the crimes.

Interesting parsing. This Guardian story, which covers the payments near the end of the article, characterizes the U.S. as seeking "to appease Afghans by providing assistance".

About the number of victims, the Globe adds in the same piece:

Bales, who was flown out of Afghanistan soon after the killings, was formally charged on Friday with 17 [sic] counts of murder and six counts of assault and attempted murder. He is being held at a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

According to Afghan and US officials, Bales walked off his small combat outpost in a rural area of Kandahar in the early hours of March 11 and shot and stabbed at least 16 [sic] people to death. ... Neither Afghan nor US officials have explained the discrepancy between the official Afghan government death toll of 16 and the 17 counts of murder that Bales was charged with by the US military.

Two things to note: First, that story syncs up with Marcy Wheeler's work, which we discussed here. Second, the Globe has both U.S. and Afghan "officials" holding to the "lone gunman" story, which we first discussed here.

Let's see if it sticks — not the "lone gunman" story; the media's failure to report the eyewitness accounts. So far, the silence makes my ears hurt.

UPDATES:

1. Even Al-Jazeera is walking the "alleged lone gunman" line with no report of the Afghan commission finding that I could locate. Here's their latest — note the parsing. Not a whitewash exactly, but no offsetting reporting either. Try a search of their site yourself; see if you get different results. Silence is all I hear.

2. And then there's this.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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Ask Landmark Theaters to show "Question One," about Maine marriage campaign, nationwide

Landmark Theatres is the largest art house theater chain in the US. And there's a serious proposal before the company to show the documentary "Question One" in its cinemas nationwide. We'd like your help in letting Landmark know that there's genuine interest in seeing this film.

Question One is the story of the campaign to repeal/save marriage equality in Maine back in 2009. Produced and directed by gay film maker Joe Fox and his co-producer/director James Nubile, the movie takes the approach of following both campaigns, the good and bad (as it were), from behind the scenes, up until election night. I saw it last fall and thought it was really well done, in addition to quite damning of the religious right. Now, we've teamed up with Joe F. and James to ask Landmark to show the movie. Given all the intensity around marriage equality across the country, the timing couldn't be better.

What's most interesting about the documentary is that even though it's "fair" - both sides get to tell their story - the anti-gay campaign does a bang-up job of indicting themselves by the end of the film. Their campaign manager, Mark Mutty (who works for the Catholic Diocese of Maine), makes it clear that they lied to the people of Maine in order to take away our civil rights. And the mastermind behind the lies was Frank Schubert, who did the same thing on Prop. 8 (won by telling voters the lie that we were coming after their children) - and, no doubt, will again. The admissions are damning. And that's one good reason for anyone who is interested in the quest for marriage equality to see this film.

So here's how you can help:
1. Email Landmark Theatres: Q1Landmark@gmail.com

All you need to do is send a quick email to Landmark, telling them you'd like them to show "Question One," the documentary about the marriage equality battle in Maine, in their theaters, and that of course you'll go the show and tell your friends about it. Use this email address: Q1Landmark@gmail.com The film's directors will then hand deliver the emails to a Landmark executive. If you want, put your home town in the subject line of the email, so that the geographic diversity of interest is clear on its face just by looking at the subject lines.

2. Tweet this post.
3. Share this post on Facebook.

There's some great commentary on "Question 1" from Bill Nemitz of the Portland Press Herald:

[Mutty] insists that the central campaign theme for “Yes on 1” – that same-sex marriage, if not repealed, would be required teaching throughout Maine’s public schools – was “hyperbole” and “not a completely accurate statement and we all know it isn’t.”

Yes, the Bishop's aide actually admit that their central message was a lie.

We aren't surprised that the other side lies. It's just stunning to see it in their own words. And, it's critical for our straight allies to know this, too. Just this we learned that the National Organization for Marriage, NOM, is trying to incite a race war in order to win the fight on marriage equality. Again, not surprising to us. But, it's clearly captured the attention of the traditional media.

The duplicity of the anti-LGBT industry needs to be exposed. The true story of how dirty they are in the way they handle these anti-gay campaigns - a story told in their own words - needs to be seen by as many people as possible. And, getting "Question One" into Landmark's theaters in 21 cities would be a major step in the right direction. You can watch the six minute trailer here.

More from Nemitz:

New York City-based filmmakers Joe Fox and James Nubile were allowed in with their cameras by both sides – giving the documentarians, and now us, a strikingly unvarnished view of what went on behind the scenes during those oh-so-divisive days two years ago.

Help us get this critical documentary shown at Landmark's theaters across the country. Send an email to Q1Landmark@gmail.com, and tell Landmark that you think they should show "Question One" in their theaters, and if you'd like to explain why you think it's important for Landmark to show the documentary, that would certainly be welcome. But even a short note letting Landmark know that you and your friends woulde go see the film if they showed it, would be very helpful. Joe and James will then hand deliver your emails to a Landmark executive.

Share on Twitter:

Send a Tweet to Landmark urging them to show "Question One" in their theaters: @LandmarkLTC
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Thanks so much. JOHN Read the rest of this post...

Overwhelming majority of Americans want out of Afghanistan

Who exactly are the people who still support the war in Afghanistan? There is no winning there though it's been that way for years. At this point the only people supporting it are the defense contractors and senior brass who get to play live war games. Spending precious tax dollars on an un-winnable war was a bad idea before and it's only worse now. The time to declare victory and move on is long gone, so let's just move on at this point.

Support for the war in Afghanistan is slipping fast, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released Monday. More than two-thirds of those surveyed, 69 percent, think the United States should no longer be fighting, a 16 percent jump from just four months ago.

A similar number, 68 percent, say the war effort is going either "very badly" or "somewhat badly," a big increase from 42 percent in the last poll in November.

Nearly half of Americans think the timetable for pulling U.S troops out of Afghanistan should be moved up. Forty-four percent say U.S. forces should leave before the Obama administration's planned withdrawal by the end of 2014, while 33 percent say the U.S. should stick to the current schedule. Seventeen percent say the U.S. should stay "as long as it takes"; 3 percent say the troops should come home now.

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Kandahar massacre update—Global Post interviews Afghan witnesses

As you know, we've been following the Afghan shooter spree story (also here) — and recently wrote:

1. Will it get near-term media traction? Let's see if the British independent press picks it up, or some prime American source. These are critical hours for the story in the U.S.; the fruit is still unripe, still vulnerable to the frosty stare of the next missing news-blonde.

2. In the U.S. what will be the response? At some point there will be a trial. That in itself could rekindle awareness. After all, if one or more people had gone on a midnight killing spree of 16 women and children in Kansas, we'd be inundated with it, drowning in it.

3. In Afghanistan, this could change the political equation. Yes, we're talking about maybe exiting the war. But there's now more on the table for honor-focused tribal leaders than just our leaving.

■ The U.S.–DoD side of the story (point 2 above) is being ably followed by Marcy Wheeler — including the difference in the number of victims claimed, and the implications of that discrepancy. Do check that out, especially her speculations near the end of the post. (And see also this, then this to get her long-range projections for this story's arc. I'm guessing she's right.)

The rest of this looks at the media side (point 1) — including differences between the villagers accounts of the number of shooters and the U.S. military's account — and also at the Afghan side (point 3).

■ The media side of the story is fairly quiet. However, there's this fascinating article from the Global Post, headquartered in Boston, which casts doubt on the stories of the Afghan witnesses.

But read on; they did a lot of original reporting, including their own interviews with eyewitnesses, and turned up some great results (my emphases and some reparagraphing):

Conflicting reports from eyewitnesses, US officials and local leaders show, if anything, how little is known for certain about what happened in the early morning hours of March 11, when Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly massacred 16 Afghan civilians [amended by the U.S. to 17], including nine women and children. ...

“ISAF is looking into all the witnesses accounts who are deemed credible and we will investigate that,” Lt. Brian Badura said. Credible is the key word. Most of the “witnesses” so far interviewed are from the villages, or are family or friends of the victims. But very few actually saw the shooting unfold.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who summoned several villagers to Kabul to get their side of the story, has ardently supported their claims. GlobalPost, however, interviewed the same people in Kandahar before they flew to meet Karzai, and found that either they didn’t see the shooting or that they couldn’t recall key details.

[For example,] Habibullah, a 28-year-old farmer who saw parts of the massacre unfold, was one of those who met Karzai. He told GlobalPost he saw several soldiers in his compound when his father was shot. But he also admits he can’t remember everything that happened. “My mind is too confused,” he said. ...

Note that the article's disclaimer ("they didn’t see the shooting or ... couldn’t recall key details") is belied by this direct testimony from later in the same article:

After the soldier with the walkie-talkie killed her husband, [Massouma] said he lingered in the doorway of her home. “While he stood there, I secretly looked through the curtains and saw at least 20 Americans, with heavy weapons, searching all the rooms in our compound, as well as my bathroom,” she said. ... An Afghan journalist who went to Massouma’s home in the days after the shooting and spoke with one of her sons, aged seven, said the boy told him he looked through the curtains and saw a number of soldiers — although he couldn’t say how many.

Massouma's husband is Mohammad Dawood according to Wheeler, who is attempting to coordinate all these names, lists, and versions.

Do read the rest. It would be easy to dismiss this as a U.S.-based media outlet doing DoD laundry. But the detail is credible, even though (or because) it doesn't support the lede.

So shame, I suppose, for bending (if that's what they did), and kudos for going, asking, and reporting what they heard.

■ On the Afghan side we feared retribution. Well, it's happening. First The Guardian, reporting on an Afghan-on-British forces shooting:

Two British soldiers were killed on Monday when an Afghan soldier turned his gun on them at the gates of a UK military base. The attacker was also killed during an exchange of fire which may have started after security guards stopped a truck as it tried to enter the heavily fortified compound in Helmand's capital Lashkar Gah. ...

Massoud Khan Nourzai, an MP from Helmand, said: "These kinds of attacks have increased lately and maybe they will continue to increase in the future.

"They have increased because of the incidents like the one in Kandahar. If an incident like Kandahar happens, people are not sitting quietly. In every Afghan family they are talking about it and saying they committed a cruel action."

The AP ups that number to three killed in two attacks:

Afghan security forces shot and killed three international troops Monday, one of them an American, in two attacks. They were the latest in a rising number of attacks in which Afghan forces have turned their weapons on their foreign partners.

Causes are given in both papers as the Kandahar massacre, the "burning of Muslim holy books at a U.S. base, and uncertainty about Afghanistan's fate."

Note this from the Guardian article:

Tensions have been running high in Afghanistan because of the burning of Qur'ans by US forces inside an international base, and then the shooting dead of 17 [sic] Afghan civilians in Kandahar province by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales.

So the independent British press is following the DoD line, at least for now — no mention in this story of offsetting witness accounts. The Guardian article closes with a quote supporting Cameron's decision to remain in Afghanistan, so the media "lone gunman" story is a joint trans-Atlantic op, at least in appearance.

There you have it, a three-legged update on the three-legged stool of this story. More as it develops. In the meantime, keep an eye on emptywheel.net for more of her coverage — Wheeler is following aspects not found elsewhere.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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Romney has no idea how insurance works in America

Mitt Romney on Jay Leno's show last night:

“People with pre-existing conditions, as long as they have been insured before, they are going to be able to continue to have insurance,” Mr. Romney said. “If they are 45 years old, and they show up and say, ‘I want insurance because I have heart disease,’ it’s like, ‘Hey guys, we can’t play the game like that.’ You’ve got to get insurance when you are well, and then if you get ill, you are going to be covered.”

You sir, are an idiot.

The only reason people wouldn't have insurance is if they're cheapskates?  Really?

What if you lose your job and thus lose your workplace insurance? You only get COBRA for 18 months, and that's only if you can afford to pay the full premium. What do you do after the 18 months if you're still unemployed? Or what if you're in grad school full time? Only half of schools in America offer insurance. And in any case, it's lousy insurance AND they can and do exclude you for pre-existing conditions.  And when you leave school, what happens - you once again are without insurance (unless you can skate by on your parents' plan, and that's only because of "Obamacare," which Romney wants to repeal).

Or here's another scenario.  What if you move back home, across state lines, to take care of your sick and dying parents?  Unless you're working for a company that offers insurance, you lose your health care and have to start all over again.  And presto!  They can turn you down for pre-existing conditions.  Or what if you decide to change jobs and work for yourself - you can't, because you'll lose your insurance and be subject to pre-existing conditions.  Same thing happens if you try to move to another state for any reason at all.  You lose your coverage.

It's stunning the degree to which Mitt Romney flubbed such a basic question.  It's an answer a rich guy would give, a guy who has zero idea how 99% of Americans actually live.  This was shockingly naive. Read the rest of this post...

UN human rights chief: Syria targeting children

One can only hope that those ordering these attacks are eventually brought to justice. What kind of a coward does this? BBC News:

Syrian authorities are deliberately and systematically targeting children, the United Nations' human rights chief, Navi Pillay, has told the BBC.

She said she was deeply concerned about the fate of hundreds of children being held in detention.

Ms Pillay said President Bashar al-Assad could end the detentions and stop the killing of civilians immediately, simply by issuing an order.

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