Hullabaloo

Saturday, January 12, 2013

 
No need for geniuses

by digby
I didn't know Aaron Swartz personally, but I certainly knew of him, through friends and acquaintances and, of course, his work. It's immeasurably sad to see someone so brilliant and so young choose to end his own life.

I'm not sure anyone is capable of figuring out all the elements that go into making such a final decision. But I'm pretty sure that one of the main ones was the fact that he was being pursued with single-minded, Javert-like obsession by the US Justice department over an alleged crime that hurt no one and which was not even being pursued by the alleged victim.

If you're unfamiliar with what they were doing, this will fill you in on the details. I suspect it was this that animated their idée fixe, more than anything:

...the feds found someone with enough "hacking" activity under their belt that they feel comfortable turning the defendant into an "example."

That's how they roll. As we've seen with RIAA, the Manning case and Wikileaks, the government seems to be overreacting to "computer crime" much like the authorities in the Salem Witch trials overreacted to some hysterical teen-age behavior. One can only assume that they fear the penetration of their "secrets" as something akin to being possessed by the devil. But the fact is that we are supposed to be a democracy in which the government works for us, not the commercial enterprises and national security apparatus that apparently has the government obsessively chasing citizens who have the talent and the ideals to expose their crimes and shortcomings.

This is a very ugly, very shameful episode. I hope the US Attorney who decided that this was a worthwhile pursuit sleeps well tonight. It's not as if the world needs idealistic geniuses, right?


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digby 1/12/2013 11:11:00 AM

 
The magic coin

by digby

Chris Hayes explains:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Also too Paul Krugman on Bill Moyers:

It's hard for me imagine the president or the Democrats having the nerve to do this, but it's possible they'll have no choice. The Republicans are so nuts they may demand things that the Democrats literally cannot deliver.

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digby 1/12/2013 09:02:00 AM

 
Dishonestly and ignorantly switching the culprit from guns to games

by David Atkins

The dishonest stupidity. It burns.

The $60 billion industry is facing intense political pressure from an unlikely alliance of critics who say that violent imagery in video games has contributed to a culture of violence. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with industry executives on Friday to discuss the concerns, highlighting the issue’s prominence.

No clear link has emerged between the Connecticut rampage and the gunman Adam Lanza’s interest in video games. Even so, the industry’s detractors want to see a federal study on the impact of violent gaming, as well as cigarette-style warning labels and other measures to curb the games’ graphic imagery.

“Connecticut has changed things,” Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Virginia Republican and a frequent critic of what he terms the shocking violence of games, said in an interview. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, but we’re going to do something.”

Gun laws have been the Obama administration’s central focus in considering responses to the shootings. But a violent media culture is being scrutinized, too, alongside mental health laws and policies.

“The stool has three legs, and this is one of them,” Mr. Wolf said of violent video games.

Mr. Wolf seems quite confident in this assessment, displaying all the usual brash arrogance of the science-denying Republican Party, together with a healthy dose of get-of-my-lawn ignorance to boot. The science, of course, is pretty clear that video games don't cause violence:

But it turns out that the data just doesn’t support this connection. Looking at the world’s 10 largest video game markets yields no evident, statistical correlation between video game consumption and gun-related killings.

It’s true that Americans spend billions of dollars on video games every year and that the United States has the highest firearm murder rate in the developed world. But other countries where video games are popular have much lower firearm-related murder rates. In fact, countries where video game consumption is highest tend to be some of the safest countries in the world, likely a product of the fact that developed or rich countries, where consumers can afford expensive games, have on average much less violent crime...

Again, with only 10 datapoints, it’s not a perfect comparison. But it’s hard to ignore that this data actually suggests a slight downward shift in violence as video game consumption increases...

So, what have we learned? That video game consumption, based on international data, does not seem to correlate at all with an increase in gun violence. That countries where video games are popular also tend to be some of the world’s safest (probably because these countries are stable and developed, not because they have video games). And we also have learned, once again, that America’s rate of firearm-related homicides is extremely high for the developed world.

Science and statistics. Imagine that. But Chris Christie amps up the silliness:

“I don’t let games like Call of Duty in my house,” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said this week on MSNBC. “You cannot tell me that a kid sitting in a basement for hours playing Call of Duty and killing people over and over and over again does not desensitize that child to the real-life effects of violence.”

Says a blustering ignoramus who has probably never played a first-person shooter in his life. His gut says so, so it must be true.

People who don't play video games usually do not understand them. They're today's billiards in River City, a newfangled thing that a bunch of mostly younger people do that many older people fear and do not understand, and thus becomes the easy target of fear-peddling Harold Hill con artists.

So allow me to explain: video games are a tension release, often played by people who take pleasure in meting out justice in a virtual world because the real world is severely lacking in justice. They're cathartic and can do wonders to reduce violent tendencies in people like myself with a strong sense of moral justice. The virtual violence is usually nearly comical in its extremism, but enemies (if they're human at all) tend to expressly nameless and stock, often faceless characters. Too much personalization of the enemies would trigger empathy in the player, making it more difficult to enjoy the game. It's the same reason that the Storm Troopers in Star Wars all look the same and are utterly dehumanized. It's much easier to feel OK about the death of millions on the Death Star if we don't think too hard about the families of the millions killed on board with a single pull of the hero's X-Wing trigger. But that doesn't mean that people who watch Star Wars are any likelier to commit acts of mass terrorism.

I myself am a deeply empathetic person. I once ran over a small animal in my car at night and remained upset about it for hours. The mere sight of blood makes me feel faint. The notion of ever killing or hurting a living creature, much less a human being, is horrifying to me.

But that doesn't mean I haven't killed tens of thousands virtually since I was a child playing the original Doom--the same poorly pixelated game that caused an epidemic of ignorant freakouts from misguided parents when it was released back in 1993. I've virtually mowed down tens of thousands of creatures human, alien, animal, supernatural and machine using swords, spells, guns and fists in Doom, Heretic, Half Life, Unreal, Halo, Call of Duty, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, Painkiller, Tomb Raider, Far Cry, Planetside, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Dead Space, Star Wars, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Soulcalibur and far too many others to count. I have many friends who are also passionate gamers and wouldn't dream of hurting a fly in the real world, horrified by killing animals for mere sport, and devastated by hurting another human being.

Do some sociopaths also play games? Certainly. Both Breivik in Norway and the Columbine kids were players. But so are millions of children and adults around the world. That's correlation, not causation. The Newtown and Aurora killers both were fans of World of Warcraft, a role-playing fantasy game with over 10 million players worldwide, no aiming or arcade elements, and so dissimilar from first-person shooters like Call of Duty as to be risible. It would be like blaming "violent movies" for violence because two killers liked watching Lord of the Rings, while two others liked watching Pulp Fiction. It's the sort of embarrassing comment only someone who doesn't watch movies would make.

Back in reality land, there are two common denominators in recent mass gun violence: 1) guns, obviously, and 2) mental illness.

On the mental illness front, we have Ronald Reagan's cuts and the refusal to fund a real mental health program to thank for that. The lack of treatment for the mentally ill is a direct result of Republican policies.

And on the gun front, we obviously have Republican policies that continue to put tools of easy, violent death in the hands of just about anyone who wants them. But there can be little doubt that the same people who so adamantly deny the scientific reality of climate change would love to displace the blame for gun violence away from guns and toward video games, a convenient theory for which there truly is no credible evidence. It certainly feeds into social and parenting hysteria while deflecting attention from guns and cuts to mental health services.

But as with deficit hysteria, it would be nice if there weren't so many Democrats like Hillary Clinton and remorselessly-kills-animals-with-guns-for-no-reason-but-won't-let-his-kids-play-Halo Paul Begala to help them do their dirty work.




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thereisnospoon 1/12/2013 07:30:00 AM

Friday, January 11, 2013

 
DOD fools

by digby

One of the more common conversation stoppers in the gun debate is when an anti-gun control person stops you in your tracks to condescendingly explain that unless you are a firearms expert you have no standing to argue about whether or not guns should be easily available. Using the term "assault weapon" is particularly offensive and shows that you should never be listened to on this subject because you'd have to be a fool not to know that such a thing doesn't even exist.

You know, a fool like this:

Ah, what does the military know about guns anyway?


h/t to @billmon1


digby 1/11/2013 06:00:00 PM

 
Backing up the president in case he decides not to panic

by digby

Greg Sargent reports that Democrats are taking some steps to ensure that the President can take some unorthodox steps to deal with the debt ceiling if it becomes necessary:

In a move that will significantly ratchet up the brinksmanship around the debt ceiling, the four members of the Senate Democratic leadership are privately telling the White House that they will give Obama full support if he opts for a unilateral solution to the debt ceiling crisis, a senior Senate Democratic leadership aide tells me.

The four Democratic leaders — Senators Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin and Patty Murray — have privately reached agreement that continued GOP intransigence on the debt ceiling means the White House needs the space to pursue options for raising it that don’t involve Congress, and that the White House needs to know that Dems will support whatever it decides to do.
[...]
The White House has said it doesn’t believe the 14th amendment option is legal, and has refused to engage on the question of whether it sees the coin as a viable option, saying only that there is “no Plan B” and that the onus is on Congress to raise the debt limit.

The aide tells me, however, that top Senate Democrats see the 14th amendment option as far preferable politically to the coin. “Of the available options, the coin, on its face, is politically much worse than the others,” he said. “Whatever the legal arguments for and against it, the imagery will be difficult to combat. What better symbol of out-of-control government spending could you have than a trillion dollar coin?”

I understand that, but instead of just accepting it they could try to educate the public about the subject instead of just throwing up their hands and saying "it looks bad." These Democrats underestimate the ability of the public to comprehend something like this. Unfortunately, one of the problems with these seemingly never-ending "cliff" negotiations is that the Democrats seem to have decided that their best negotiating position is to repeatedly scream "the sky is falling" as loudly as loudly as possible --- and that means that solutions beyond capitulation (like going over the cliff or the platinum coin) are only talked about on the fringe and the general public never gets what's really going on.

It might very well work out fine, (after the usual dramatic kabuki pageant.) But it's also not unlikely that the Dems will panic as they usually do and start giving away the store once we get close to the deadline. That's been the pattern so far, even if the right wing is so idiotic that they refuse to take them up on their offer. Someday, they might just wise up.

If I were a betting person, I'd bet they won't and we'll have yet another delaying mechanism. Until the Democrats decide to pull the plug on this nonsense with something like the coin or the 14th Amendment, I can't see any reason why the Republicans would change. They like these showdowns. Makes 'em feel powerful.

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digby 1/11/2013 04:30:00 PM

 
It's only the biggest issue facing humanity. No worries.

by David Atkins

Dave Roberts has yet another timely reminder about just how high are the stakes of climate change:

So in the name of getting our bearings, let’s review a few things we know.

We know we’ve raised global average temperatures around 0.8 degrees C so far. We know that 2 degrees C is where most scientists predict catastrophic and irreversible impacts. And we know that we are currently on a trajectory that will push temperatures up 4 degrees or more by the end of the century.

We know we’ve raised global average temperatures around 0.8 degrees C so far. We know that 2 degrees C is where most scientists predict catastrophic and irreversible impacts. And we know that we are currently on a trajectory that will push temperatures up 4 degrees or more by the end of the century...

Warming to 4 degrees would also lead to “an increase of about 150 percent in acidity of the ocean,” leading to levels of acidity “unparalleled in Earth’s history...”

It will also “likely lead to a sea-level rise of 0.5 to 1 meter, and possibly more, by 2100, with several meters more to be realized in the coming centuries.” That rise won’t be spread evenly, even within regions and countries — regions close to the equator will see even higher seas.

There are also indications that it would “significantly exacerbate existing water scarcity in many regions, particularly northern and eastern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, while additional countries in Africa would be newly confronted with water scarcity on a national scale due to population growth.”

After mentions of increasing extreme weather events, major loss of crop yields and dramatic reduction in biodiversity (read: millions of species going extinct), he concludes:

All this will add up to “large-scale displacement of populations and have adverse consequences for human security and economic and trade systems.” Given the uncertainties and long-tail risks involved, “there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.” There’s a small but non-trivial chance of advanced civilization breaking down entirely.

Now ponder the fact that some scenarios show us going up to 6 degrees by the end of the century, a level of devastation we have not studied and barely know how to conceive. Ponder the fact that somewhere along the line, though we don’t know exactly where, enough self-reinforcing feedback loops will be running to make climate change unstoppable and irreversible for centuries to come. That would mean handing our grandchildren and their grandchildren not only a burned, chaotic, denuded world, but a world that is inexorably more inhospitable with every passing decade.

Take all that in, sit with it for a while, and then tell me what it could mean to be an “alarmist” in this context. What level of alarm is adequate?

And yet the Very Serious People spend their days desperately worrying about whether billionaires have enough tax cuts to give a few more people minimum wage jobs, which genetic tribe of desert nomads should control some scrap of desert somewhere, and how best to overcome silly liberal resistance to burning all that glorious carbon in the Canadian tar sands so we can "add jobs" without driving up that pesky deficit.

Pitiful. As a general rule, the more seriously a pundit is taken by the traditional press in America, the more frivolous are the issues and positions they care about.


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thereisnospoon 1/11/2013 03:00:00 PM

 
Deja Vu all over again, California style

by digby

So, the Golden State is recovering. Huzzah:

California has been Exhibit A for the fiscal upheaval that has rocked states throughout the recession. Year after year, California officials reported bigger and bigger deficits and sought to respond with spending cuts that left the state reeling.

So it was something of a moment when a jaunty Gov. Jerry Brown strode before cameras here on Thursday to present his budget for 2013-14.

“The deficit is gone,” Mr. Brown proclaimed, standing in front of an array of that-was-then and this-is-now charts that illustrated what he said were dramatic changes in California’s fortunes.

“For the next four years we are talking about a balanced budget,” he said. “We are talking about living within our means. This is new. This is a breakthrough.”

Mr. Brown was not just talking about a balanced budget. He projected that the state would begin posting surpluses starting next year, leading to a projected surplus of $21.5 million by 2014, a dramatic turnaround from the deficit of $26 billion — billion, not million — he faced when he was elected in 2010.

The governor said California’s finances were strong enough that he wanted to put aside a $1 billion reserve fund to guard against future downturns, and included in the budget sharp increases in aid to public schools and the state university system, both targets of big spending cutbacks.

There may be some glitches, having to do with Federal cutbacks, that could set this rosy outlook back, but the assumption is that California did all the right things by heavily cutting back on desperately needed services and imposing some small tax increases and now we are on the road to recovery.

And Democrats in the state legislature, some of whom voted for these draconian cuts on the logic that they were a necessary, temporary measure, would like to restore them now.

Well ...

Democrats now control two-thirds of the Assembly and Senate, and some of them have talked about restoring at least some of the social service cuts, like dental care for the poor, that were imposed to bring the state to this point, Mr. Brown said he understood the impulse to repair broken social services, but he warned against returning to a boom-and-bust pattern of spending during the good years, only to later struggle through debt.

“We have to live within the means we have; otherwise we get to that situation where you get red ink and you go back to cuts,” he said. “I want to avoid the booms and the bust, the borrow and the spend, where we make the promise and then we take back.”

Mr. Brown, who has always presented himself as something of a moderate in his party, suggested that in the months ahead, he would be an enforcer.

“It’s very hard to say no,” Mr. Brown said. “And that basically is going to be my job.”

Ok. So, what we have is a typical Democratic chump who sees his "legacy" as being the wonderful leader who left a surplus when he left office. We've seen that movie before. It came out only a little over a decade ago. And what's the plot? The Democrats preside over the creation of a recovery and surplus and burnish their "fiscally responsible" bonafides by cutting vital programs and emphasizing "saving" their surplus rather than restoring those services. The Republicans then ride into power on the promise that they would hand out hundred dollar bills like candy in the form of tax cuts. ("It's yer Muneeeeee!) And the next thing you know we're back in deficit and it's time to start cutting even more. The Republicans usually let the Democrats do this dirty work because well ... cuts are unpopular. Tax cuts aren't.

It's a scam, but one that Democrats must be in on. (There's no other way to explain why they keep doing it.) I'm guessing they have mistakenly bought into the notion that being remembered as being "fiscally responsible" is a good thing. Unfortunately, nobody really cares about that. And even more importantly, no matter what he does, the conservatives will make sure that he's remembered as a tax 'n spend liberal. Democrats may not understand the power of that charge to the Republicans, but the Republicans certainly do. They are not going to sit still and allow him to take credit for something they feel entitled to take credit for even if they never actually do it.

Like I said: scam.

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digby 1/11/2013 01:30:00 PM

 
Who do they really think are the tyrants?

by digby

Ed Kilgore asks an important question every "second amendment remedy" believer should have to answer: who decides?

Who gets to decide when “it’s necessary”—when the police officer patrolling one’s neighborhood or the neighbors at the local Guard armory become not objects of respect but targets? James Yeager? Kevin Williamson? Wayne LaPierre? You or me? Certainly the normal mechanisms of the legal or political systems—you know, the systems that have produced and enforced the “tyranny” of Obamacare or the “injustice” of “confiscatory” taxes cannot be trusted to protect any right of revolution, can they? So apparently it’s up to heavily armed, seething-with-rage individuals and groups to figure out when “it’s necessary” to start shooting cops and members of the armed forces, and presumably advocates or beneficiaries of “tyranny.”

This is the fundamental problem not only with Second Amendment absolutists but with the Tea Party Movement’s “constitutional conservative” stand that there is a permanent—perhaps even divinely instituted and eternal—scheme for self-government that electoral majorities and legislative deliberations and court decisions cannot be allowed to modify. When those are dismissed as “tyrannical,” who gets to decide when “it’s necessary” to take extralegal action? Add in the hard (but still respectable) Right’s taste for military and revolutionary metaphors and the tendency to treat fellow-citizens as enemies of every fundamental liberty, and you’ve got a dangerous playground for the James Yeagers of the world.

I'm going to guess here that I won't have a vote. In fact, I'm going to guess that the majority of the country won't have a vote. It will be decided based upon some zealot's perception that the government has become tyrannical because it won't do everything the zealots insist it must do. Others would be neutral or take the opposite view. Democracy is how civilized nations deal with these impasses, not insurrection.

So, let's be clear about what these folks are really talking about. They're not advocating insurrection. They're advocating civil war.

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digby 1/11/2013 12:00:00 PM

 
"Legitimate" nutballs

by digby

He's a doctor?

Rep. Phil Gingrey, an ob-gyn and chairman of the GOP Doctors Caucus, explained to the audience at the Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast Thursday in Smyrna, Ga., that Akin wasn’t far off on the science when he said rape victims rarely get pregnant because their bodies have “ways of shutting that whole thing down.”

“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true,” Gingrey said, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. “We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he?”

“But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak,” Gingrey continued. “And yet the media took that and tore it apart.”

Gingrey also defended Akin’s theory that women who claim to be rape victims are often lying about it.

“‘Look, in a legitimate rape situation’ — and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape,” Gingrey said. “I don’t find anything so horrible about that.”

Gingrey also addressed the campaign season comments by GOP senate nominee Richard Mourdock in Indiana, who said that pregancy from rape “is something that God intended.”

“Mourdock basically said ‘Look, if there is conception in the aftermath of a rape, that’s still a child, and it’s a child of God, essentially,” Gingrey is quoted as saying Thursday.

I'm at the point where I'm going to need to know my doctor's political beliefs before I hire him. There are just too many wingnut doctors in Congress spouting ridiculous views for me to take for granted that the medical profession isn't filled with them.

Aside from the absurd "shutting the whole thing down" premise, (in which he shows a frightening ignorance for a medical doctor)he reveals the underlying assumption: women are lying when they say they've been raped. And they lie not just when they "get themselves" pregnant, they lie about rape all the time. In fact, people like Gingrey tend not to believe rape even possible (except, of course, when it's a racial affair.)

This is one of those rare misogynist intersections where you can see quite clearly that the issue is female sexuality and (the rare and unique) power it has over men. The stupid birth control "slut" argument of the last campaign did the same thing.

Gingrey is a misogynist, patriarchal OB-GYN. Yikes ....


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digby 1/11/2013 10:30:00 AM

 
Yet another city seeks to allow police to use torture devices

by digby

San Francisco:

No-taser advocates’ struggle to defeat SFPD’s push for tasers was audible throughout 14 2012 Police Commission meetings, a Nov. 14 Mental Health Board hearing, and the Dec. 6 Board of Supervisors Public Safety Committee hearing, where ACLU attorney Micaela Davis presented the letter to Supervisors Eric Mar, Christina Olague, David Campos and John Avalos.

Unanimous citizen comment at the Dec. 6 Public Safety Committee hearing aligned perfectly with ACLU’s stance.

“San Francisco doesn’t want tasers! San Francisco doesn’t need tasers!” said first presenter, Lisa Marie Alatorre. Instead of setting “a national precedent,” Suhr promotes “a new, shiny, lethal weapon to use on people in mental health crisis.”

Alatorre introduced well-coordinated public commenters highlighting national and state “lawsuits and respected studies” exposing the “harms of trigger-happy police officers who rely on excessive force instead of decent, culturally-competent de-escalation tactics that could have saved lives.”

Public commenters proceeded one by one to address the five central issues raised in the letter: costs, injury and death risks, disproportionate impacts on mentally ill people and people of color, and police misuse and abuse.

There is good evidence on all those issues that tasers are counterproductive.

Nobody ever makes the argument that shooting citizens full of electricity is a form of torture. The fact that it doesn't usually take more than a few seconds of its extreme pain to get compliance doesn't alter the fact that it is torture. It proves it.

h/t to GP



digby 1/11/2013 08:59:00 AM

 
The wages of austerity

by David Atkins

The social chaos and extremist rightwing backlash in Greece is getting worse:

Greek police have stepped up efforts to catch illegal immigrants in recent months, launching a new operation to check the papers of people who look foreign. But tourists have also been picked up in the sweeps - and at least two have been badly beaten.

When Korean backpacker Hyun Young Jung was stopped by a tall scruffy looking man speaking Greek on the street in central Athens he thought it might be some kind of scam, so he dismissed the man politely and continued on his way.

A few moments later he was stopped again, this time by a man in uniform who asked for his documents. But as a hardened traveller he was cautious.

Greece was the 16th stop in his two-year-long round-the-world trip and he'd often been warned about people dressing in fake uniforms to extract money from backpackers, so while he handed over his passport he also asked the man to show him his police ID.

Instead, Jung says, he received a punch in the face...

Jung says that outside the station the uniformed officer, without any kind of warning, turned on him again, hitting him in the face.

"There were members of the public who saw what happened, like the man who works in the shop opposite the police station, but they were too afraid to help me," he says.

Inside the police station, Jung says he was attacked a third time in the stairwell where there were no people or cameras.

"I can understand them asking me for ID and I even understand that there may have been a case to justify them hitting me in the first instance. But why did they continue beating me after I was handcuffed?" he asks...

And some visitors to Greece have been detained despite having shown police their passports.

Last summer, a Nigerian-born American, Christian Ukwuorji, visited Greece on a family holiday with his wife and three children.

When police stopped him in central Athens he showed them his US passport, but they handcuffed him anyway and took him to the central police station.

They gave no reason for holding him, but after a few hours in custody Ukwuorji says he was so badly beaten that he passed out. He woke up in hospital...

In May last year a visiting academic from India, Dr Shailendra Kumar Rai was arrested outside the Athens University of Economics and Business, where he was working as a visiting lecturer.

He had popped out for lunch, and forgotten to take his passport with him.

"The police thought I was Pakistani and since they didn't speak English they couldn't understand me when I tried to explain that I am from India," he says.

When passing students saw their lecturer being held by police and lined up against a wall with a group of immigrants they were horrified and rushed inside to tell his colleagues.

Despite protests from university staff who insisted they could vouch for him, the police handcuffed him and marched him down to the police station.

The police are now mostly in league with the fascist Golden Dawn party, and conspire to terrorize and intimidate anyone who doesn't look "Greek."

While we can tut tut and shake our heads, it's crucial to note that this isn't happening in a vacuum. These are the wages of austerity little different from the fate of immiserated Germany after World War I. When a proud and previously prosperous people are suddenly thrown into extreme poverty and their safety net destroyed, nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-"other" sentiment is the inevitable result. One would think the Germans of all people would recognize this pattern.

The austerity crowd isn't just temporarily destroying economies. They're toying with entire cultures, failing to learn lessons that should have been permanently etched into the world's memory over 70 years ago.


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thereisnospoon 1/11/2013 07:30:00 AM

Thursday, January 10, 2013

 
Feeling persecuted even before it happens

by digby

Fergawdsakes. Think Progress reported yesterday that one of the pastors slated to speak at the inaugural had made some homophobic comments back in the 90s. There was a little chatter, but there was not even a real kerfuffle, much less a major scandal. But a mere 24 hours after the little piece a Think Progress went up, the past pre-emptively withdrew saying:

I am honored to be invited by the President to give the benediction at the upcoming inaugural on January 21. Though the President and I do not agree on every issue, we have fashioned a friendship around common goals and ideals, most notably, ending slavery in all its forms.

Due to a message of mine that has surfaced from 15-20 years ago, it is likely that my participation, and the prayer I would offer, will be dwarfed by those seeking to make their agenda the focal point of the inauguration. Clearly, speaking on this issue has not been in the range of my priorities in the past fifteen years. Instead, my aim has been to call people to ultimate significance as we make much of Jesus Christ.

Neither I, nor our team, feel it best serves the core message and goals we are seeking to accomplish to be in a fight on an issue not of our choosing, thus I respectfully withdraw my acceptance of the President’s invitation. I will continue to pray regularly for the President, and urge the nation to do so. I will most certainly pray for him on Inauguration Day.

So, he withdrew voluntarily once the information about his older comments came to light. He crawls up on his cross and whines a little bit but as far as I know there were no petitions, no protests, no nothing. He assumed there would be and decided he didn't want to deal with it so he took his ball and went home.

So far, it all makes sense. He's probably not the right guy to be speaking at a big Democratic event and he knows it. So what in the hell is this all about?

A chorus of right-wing leaders Thursday decried the withdrawal of Pastor Louie Giglio from President Obama’s second inauguration ceremony, suggesting a left-wing conspiracy to force him off of the program.

There are a bunch of idiotic quotes,including some from such luminaries as Eric Erickson and Kristen Powers, all of whom apparently believe this poor man was forced out of the celebration despite the fact that he clearly says he quit in order to avoid a fight.

But this one takes the cake:

“The bully bigots at Big Gay win huge victory for fascistic intolerance.” [Bryan Fischer, American Family Association radio host]

That's this Bryan Fischer:

American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer yesterday on Focal Point defended his close ally Scott Lively, downplaying his work shaping Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill and advocating for the imprisonment of gay people as simply giving “talks supporting natural marriage.” But Fischer, who shares Lively’s views on criminalizing LGBT status and blaming gays for the Holocaust, asserted that Lively “did the same kind of stuff over there that we do every day on Focal Point.” Fischer said the left seeks to “exterminate pro-family voices” and “want us to be destroyed,” which is interesting because the bill in Uganda makes the “promotion homosexuality” a crime.

No hobgoblins in that little mind.


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digby 1/10/2013 06:00:00 PM

 
QOTD: Dana Perino

by digby

On the debt ceiling:

PERINO: This is the analogy that I like. If you were to go home and found that there had been a sewage blockage in your basement, you don't raise the ceiling of the basement, you pump out the sewage. [Fox News, Hannity, 1/8/2013]

I'm sure she's a very nice person.


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digby 1/10/2013 04:30:00 PM

 
Military wannabe fools who don't know we have an Air Force

by David Atkins

Stephen Colbert highlighted a group of militant "Patriots" creating a walled, armed and fortified "utopia" in Idaho last night:

Here it is direct from their website:

The Citadel is evolving as a planned community where residents are bound together by:

Patriotism
Pride in American Exceptionalism
Our proud history of Liberty as defined by our Founding Fathers, and
Physical preparedness to survive and prevail in the face of natural catastrophes — such as Hurricanes Sandy or Katrina — or man-made catastrophes such as a power grid failure or economic collapse.

The Citadel is not your typical planned community where the developer's objective is selling cookie-cutter homes at the highest possible profit-margin.

The Citadel is not profit-driven. The Citadel is Liberty-driven: specifically Thomas Jefferson's Rightful Liberty.

Marxists, Socialists, Liberals and Establishment Republicans will likely find that life in our community is incompatible with their existing ideology and preferred lifestyles.

DESCRIPTION: The Citadel Community will house between 3,500 and 7,000 patriotic American families who agree that being prepared for the emergencies of life and being proficient with the American icon of Liberty — the Rifle — are prudent measures. There will be no HOA. There will be no recycling police and no local ordinance enforcers from City Hall.

Now, there are only two reasons to engage in this lifestyle: prepping for apocalyptic doomsday, and prepping for military invasion.

For the doomsday scenario, living together in a planned community with well over 5,000 other armed John Galt wannabes is not a great survival strategy unless there is ample farming and animal husbandry available, and nearly everyone engages in food production. If there ever were a "power grid failure," nuclear holocaust or some such dramatic event, help would certainly go to areas of high population first. That's how it worked during Katrina, Sandy and nearly every other natural disaster of significance. If there are disruptions in the supply chain, Denver will get help before Boise, Boise will get help before Coeur D'Alene, and Coeur D'Alene will get help long before any far-off area these people pick out. And yes, no matter how self-reliant they thought they were, they would need help within months if not weeks.

Moreover, geography alone would likely prevent them from needing to use their assault rifles. No teeming hordes of scary people of color are going to use precious fuel to drive up to their Nowhereville enclave in Idaho in any case. Assault rifles aren't useful for hunting, which actually would be a useful skill.

The other scenario, of course, involves armed resistance against a tyrannical government or force of invasion. The same scenario hypothesized by my local Ventura Republican city councilman Neal Andrews in opposition to a resolution advocating better gun control measures after I specifically mocked both of these reasons for assault rifle ownership in public comment:

Andrews said he couldn't support anything that removed power from people to protect themselves against a "rogue government or invading army." In the past, Andrews has seen "evil under a veil of authority," he said.

Andrews and the fools planning "The Citadel" have evidently never heard of the United States Air Force and its bomb-dropping capacity. I'm sure neither the Chinese military nor a hypothetical tyrannical U.S. military cares a whit whether the citizens of The Citadel can hit a man-sized target at 100 meters. That's what unmanned aircraft are for.

If a military force bothered at all with a few thousand nutcases in the middle of nowhere (as unlikely a proposition as an invading Communist army caring about whether it controls some rural high school in Colorado), it would simply drop a few bombs on the "planned community", reduce it to rubble, torch the farms and livestock, block the roads, and simply allow whoever remained to starve and freeze to death in the woods clutching their arsenal of inedible assault weapons.

Freedom!


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thereisnospoon 1/10/2013 03:00:00 PM

 
"I'm not letting anybody take my guns! If it goes one inch further, I'm going to start killing people."

by digby

If only the left wasn't trying to bring down the state:

David at C&L; reports:

In a video posted to YouTube and Facebook on Wednesday, Tactical Response CEO James Yeager went ballistic over reports that the president could take executive action with minor gun control measures after the mass shooting of 20 school children in Connecticut last month. After the Drudge Report likened Obama to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin on Wednesday, pro-gun conservatives expressed outrage over the idea that the White House could act without Congress. "Vice President [Joe] Biden is asking the president to bypass Congress and use executive privilege, executive order to ban assault rifles and to impose stricter gun control," Yeager explained in his video message. "Fuck that." "I'm telling you that if that happens, it's going to spark a civil war, and I'll be glad to fire the first shot. I'm not putting up with it. You shouldn't put up with it. And I need all you patriots to start thinking about what you're going to do, load your damn mags, make sure your rifle's clean, pack a backpack with some food in it and get ready to fight." The CEO concluded: "I'm not fucking putting up with this. I'm not letting my country be ruled by a dictator. I'm not letting anybody take my guns! If it goes one inch further, I'm going to start killing people."

Right winger: check Gun nut: check CEO: check It's not quite as unhinged as Alex Jones on Piers Morgan the other night, but close... *And there's some interesting internet gossip about this fellow as well.

But please, let's make sure that guys like him have easy access to guns. it can only make us safer.

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digby 1/10/2013 01:30:00 PM

 
Progressive Talk

by digby

If you're tired of the stale fare served up by fake progressives on TV take a look at this interview with Adam Green, head of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Netroots activist extraordinaire:

Adam Green talked about the work of his Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and the organization’s agenda for the 113th Congress.*He also outlined what progressives would like to see from President Obama in his second term, and he responded to telephone calls and electronic communications.*Topics included tax rates, Social Security and Medicare, jobs in the oil and gas industry, AIG’s potential lawsuit against the U.S. government, and President Obama’s negotiation skills.

And then read this piece about Bob Borosage who runs Campaign for America's Future, who the right wing portrays as the left's Grover Norquist. (I'm sure Bob would be thrilled to have that kind of clout among the unruly Democrats, but I'm afraid we just don't operate that way.)

There are a lot of ideas and a ton of energy out here on the left side of the dial. It's not batshit insane so it doesn't get the quite the attention that the right does. (And many of the Villagers are still living in the 70s, running from hippies instead of right wingnuts who want to overthrow the government.) But it's out there, organizing and slowly but surely making some progress. I've always thought that ne of the most important keys to success is perseverance, and Borosage and Green are good examples of people who have it.

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digby 1/10/2013 12:00:00 PM

 
In order to be free we must become a totalitarian police state

by digby

That's basically the message of the gun nuts. And sadly, people are listening:

It wasn’t just students who returned to school this week after their holiday break. In school districts around the country, extra police officers are being deployed to provide a sense of security while policymakers weigh legislation in response to the massacre in Newtown, Conn.—proposals that could make police in schools an increased and permanent fixture in kids’ lives.

Politicians’ response to the deadly attack unleashed on Sandy Hook Elementary in December has been swift. This week, Vice President Joe Biden convened meetings for a White House task force to address gun access and mental health issues, and has promised to deliver a legislative proposal to the president by month’s end.

But several proposals swirling in the mix would double down on a trend of militarizing public schools. The National Rifle Association suggested putting armed guards in “every single school,” and more than one lawmaker has voiced support for such a plan. Days after the shooting, California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer introduced the Save Our Schools Act, which would authorize governors to use federal funds to call on the National Guard to secure school campuses. Boxer has also called for a $20 million increase from the $30 million already spent annually on school security measures like metal detectors and security cameras.

These proposals have been met with alarm by school communities in places like Los Angeles, where students are already too familiar with police. “We need a dramatic shift in how our schools operate,” said Manuel Criollo, the director of organizing at the Los Angeles-based Labor Community Strategy Center. “But safety is not equated with having more police in our schools or police as the primary response [to violence.]”

But this is how we defend ourselves against tyranny, right? Wait ... what?

One of the true flaws of the surveillance/police state apparatus so far is that it didn't properly indoctrinate the citizens early enough to submit unquestioningly. This will be very helpful. That it's done in the name of liberty and the Bill of Rights makes it all the more deliciously ironic.


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digby 1/10/2013 10:30:00 AM

 
The one economic problem nobody seems to give a damn about

by digby

It remains one of the strangest and saddest aspects of our current economic debates that nobody seems to care all that much about our still painfully high unemployment. And it's probably a lot higher than we know:

In December, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted just 1.5 million "99ers," the smallest number in any month since 2010. The fourth quarter of last year also saw the lowest average number of 99ers in two years. But it's not clear that more of the very long-term unemployed are finding jobs.

"That decline is likely not due to an improving labor market, because it just hasn't improved much over the last two years," Heidi Shierholz of the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute said in an interview. "A lot of the decline in the unemployment rate we've seen is just due to people dropping out of the labor market."

The people counted as unemployed for 99 weeks or more have been actively looking for work, or they wouldn't be considered part of the workforce at all. One thing that may have kept so many people searching for so long is federal unemployment insurance, which from late 2009 through 2011 combined with state benefits to provide as many as 99 weeks of compensation. People are required to search for work -- in other words, to remain attached to the workforce -- as a condition of receiving benefits.

But the duration of benefits is shorter than before. In February 2012, Congress set in motion a gradual reduction of the maximum duration to 79 weeks in June, then to 73 weeks by September. As of December, the jobless in only nine states qualified for the full complement of benefits.

Jesse Rothstein, an associate professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, found in a 2011 research paper that the recent regimen of extended benefits did indeed keep people from giving up their job search as quickly as they otherwise might have. Rothstein and Shierholz said the dwindling long-term benefits might help explain why there were fewer 99ers at the end of last year, though it's hard to be sure.

"I've been surprised at how little anybody's paying attention -- not just to the 99ers, but also the 79ers in the past year," Rothstein said. (The term "99ers" has most commonly been a nickname for people who used up 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, though the estimate of how many people out of work for 99 weeks is not based on the insurance rolls.)


"There are still a lot of people who haven't found work, and it's reasonable to guess it's not because they're shirking, but because the labor market is still pretty terrible," Rothstein said. "I wonder how they're getting along."

Yeah. I do too. But apparently nobody else does. Hey, I'm old enough to remember when 7.8% unemployment was considered catastrophic and the whole government lurched into gear to bring it down. I guess it's the new normal now. Oh, 7.8% plus all those who've just dropped out of the labor force.

Meanwhile, we're still on the austerity train determined to "fix" our problems by making them worse. I'm sure that's going to end well.

I should note that the extension of UI under the "fiscal cliff" deal was the one true accomplishment. (The tax hikes would have happened anyway.) I'm not sure what it would have done to the economy to cut millions off of all cash support, but the scale of human misery certainly would have been large.

On the other hand, I'm fairly sure that both Democrats and Republicans have bought into the notion that this group of long term unemployed are just lazy slackers who refuse to look for work so they think cutting them off is a good way to motivate them. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. According to the article, people keep looking for work as long as they get benefits. It's when they get cut off that they stop.(Also too: 7.8 percent unemployment!)

So, once again, our leaders are attempting to solve a problem by doing the thing that actually makes it worse.


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digby 1/10/2013 09:00:00 AM

 
No, America is not a conservative country. But we do have a racism problem.

by David Atkins

In case you haven't heard, France is embroiled in a big battle over gay marriage right now, with the fate of the law uncertain. Yes, many states in America are now to the left of largely secular, "socialist" France on this issue.

What is there to make of this? Simply the following: most of the U.S. is actually mostly on a par with Europe and Japan on most major social issues. We complain about some of our civil liberties protections being eroded, which is true--but the protections we are upset about are largely nonexistent in Europe, where the surveillance state is largely the norm. The U.S. is nearly alone in allowing direct birthright citizenship. Homeschooling and certain religions are banned in Germany. The hijab is banned in France.

Instead, what we see in the U.S. is three things: first, the lack of direct experience of domestic warfare that allows for an unchecked militarism untempered by the sobering experiences of Europe and Asia.

Second, the moneyed corruption of a winner-take-all system without publicly funded elections that creates economically conservative laws in spite of a fundamentally progressive populous. Americans want a stronger safety net and higher taxes on the wealthy. That we don't get them is more a product of the corruption of government than of our relative conservatism as a people.

But the biggest problem is the most controversial one, and I'm sure I'll get a lot of flack for saying it. We have a racism problem in this country, mostly localized to the South, but also prevalent in other rural, sparsely populated areas as well.

The United States has a unique relationship to race because of our history of slavery. After World War II, the nation was well on track to create social democracies and safety nets on par with other civilized nations. The one dirty secret, however, was the fact that minorities were not allowed in on the game.

When the Civil Rights era of the late 60s finally began to put an end to the de facto segregation and benefit differences, a huge segment of white America society began to freak out at government using their tax money to help people of color (and, to a lesser extent, women who wouldn't be dominated by men.) We're still living through--and barely crawling out of--the repercussions of that.

But that doesn't mean that America is a conservative country. If you took resentment of racial minorities off the table, Americans would be mostly as progressive as other nations. But racial resentments complexify and skew every political debate.

Most important, though, is the fact that there is no "conservative" or "liberal" America. There is rural/exurban white America, and then there's everyone else. If it were up to non-urban whites, Mitt Romney would have won nearly every state in the union.

On the other hand, if you had simply removed every state from the Old Confederacy and Mormon Triangle from the union beginning in 1930, American public policy would look pretty much on par with the rest of the civilized world.

I suppose one could say that this means that our struggle is deeply American, has always been with us and will always be with us. That's true in one sense. But in another very real sense, it also means that there is not and has never really been one America. There has been an uneasy peace between two Americas since the nation's founding, a peace in which one side and then the other has alternately found itself more in power.

Nixonland was very successful in returning the Lost Cause to glory, and allowing that other America to hold sway with a drawl, a twang and a cowboy swagger for some 50 years. But now the tide is turning--perhaps permanently--in the other direction. That's a good thing.

But under no circumstances has it ever been fair to say that America is a "conservative" country. Certain parts of it are, in certain very ugly ways for very ugly reasons. And those parts have been allowed to have undue sway for far too long, aided and abetted by a political system that is all too easily bought and corrupted by the interests of the militant and the wealthy.


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thereisnospoon 1/10/2013 07:30:00 AM

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

 
Your Daily Grayson

by digby


It's good to have him back:

digby 1/09/2013 07:30:00 PM

 
Makers and Takers Redux

by digby

Just because they lost, doesn't mean they don't believe it. From our friends at CNBC:

Income inequality has been on the rise for three decades in the United States, according to the Congressional Budget Office, with the gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" currently at its widest point since 1967.

But as Democrats and Republicans wrangle over fiscal "fairness" and taxation, some experts argue that income inequality is not such a bad thing. They even go as far as saying that America's economy functions on the basis of it.

The debate on income inequality has featured heavily in U.S. politics. Prominent Republican and former runner for the GOP's presidential nomination, Rick Santorum said last February that income inequality was part of the fabric of American society, and long should it be so.

"There is income inequality in America. There always has been and hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be," Santorum said during a speech to the Detroit Economic Club. "Why? Because people rise to different levels of success based on what they contribute to society and to the marketplace, and that's as it should be," he added.

"We should celebrate like we do in the small towns all across America. You celebrate success. Why? Because in their greatness and innovation, yes - they created wealth, but they created wealth for everybody else. And that's a good thing, not something to be condemned in America," he said...

Thomas Garrett, assistant vice president at the St. Louis Federal Reserve, wrote in 2010 that income inequality in the U.S. was "not so bad."

"Although many people consider income inequality a social ill, it is important to understand that income inequality has many economic benefits and is the result of - and not a detriment to – a well-functioning economy," Garrett wrote, insisting that U.S. Census statistics "exaggerate the degree of income inequality."

One problem, in particular, he said, was that the "statistics do not include the non-cash resources received by lower-income households [such as the tens of billions of dollars in subsidies for housing, food and medical care] and the tax payments made by wealthier households to fund these transfers."

Income inequality, he adds, is "a by-product of a functioning capitalist society" and the wealthiest had more, because they were more productive, Garrett affirmed.

He is not alone. Edward Conard, a former partner at asset management firm Bain Capital argued that inequality was actually good for economic growth. In his book,"Unintended Consequences: Everything You've Been Told about the Economy is Wrong," Conard said that concentrating wealth in a skilled investor class helps fuel U.S. innovation, a tenet of the "American Dream".

Well, I'm sure it's pretty to think so. If you're a vulture capitalist.


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digby 1/09/2013 06:00:00 PM

 
QOTD: Honest Abe

by digby

He's talking about the power of persuasion:

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

I don't think anyone believes this anymore --- we are told that our government structure means that it doesn't matter much what any statesman or leader believes or says and that a president has very little power to persuade.

But I still disagree. I think the real power of any leader lies in his ability to mold public sentiment and that it's obvious that presidents do this all the time, for better or worse. But unless you actually look at what they're saying and judge public sentiment by criteria that go beyond the latest polling numbers, you'll never see it. And you wind up with a view of how the world works based solely on transactional politics --- which is an extremely one-dimensional way to see it.


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digby 1/09/2013 04:30:00 PM

 
Equating deficits and climate is stupid

by David Atkins

Tom Friedman has a column today equating progressive resistance to deficit reduction to conservative resistance to carbon reduction. It's a tempting parallel for a climate-aware centrist pundit to make. I myself even brought up a certain parallelism between the two issues a couple of days ago in the sense that American democracy is ill-equipped to handle long-term problems.

But there are a few enormous differences between the two. Pundits like Friedman claim that progressives don't want to do anything about the deficit because interest rates are low at the moment, so the deficit "problem" won't rear its head for quite a while. In this way we are compared to conservatives who refuse to act on climate change.

But that's not the actual reason most progressives oppose short-term austerity. The big differences between the two issues are:

1) Unlike runaway greenhouse effects, deficits will mostly decline naturally with economic growth. The biggest cause of the major debt-to-GDP ratio increase since 2007 is not surprisingly the Great Recession. Most of that problem will disappear with a robust, demand-driven recovery. Yes, there are certain problems to solve as the population ages, but those are almost entirely due to rising healthcare costs that are best controlled with a universal single-payer system. In the case of deficits, the "problem" really will mostly resolve itself by doing nothing. Not so with climate, which will spin out of control if nothing is done.

2) From a political point of view, progressives don't deny the deficit exists. We simply contend it's not the crisis others are claiming, and that the "solutions" of the conservative crowd aren't solutions at all. Conservatives who refuse to act on climate change don't admit the problem but refuse to act because it's a long-term problem: they are science deniers who refuse to acknowledge the existence of the problem in the first place. Further, the dire projections of Chicago-school economists are simply not as reliable as the dire projections of climate scientists.

3) Unlike the climate crisis, the deficit isn't a force of nature but a political balance sheet issue can never be "solved." As the experience of the Clinton presidency demonstrated, deficit problems solved by Democrats can easily be recreated by Republicans who pass tax cuts for the wealthy and conduct illegal foreign wars. Weaning the nation off of carbon is a far more permanent thing.

4) The proposed "solutions" to cutting the deficit won't work. Cutting Medicare, Social Security and other programs important to the poor and middle class will simply increase economic insecurity and drive down demand, leading to double dip recessions and increased deficits. As Europe's austerity-mad failures have shown, the touted "solution" to the deficit "problem" only makes it worse. Eliminating carbon emissions, on the other hand, is the straightforward solution to the climate crisis.

Attempting to equate deficit reduction and climate change mitigation is yet another attempt by centrist pundits to place the stock market and governmental balance sheet juggling on a par with the forces of nature. They aren't. Markets and government investments are man-made, with malleable sets of rules. Nature isn't so forgiving.


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thereisnospoon 1/09/2013 03:29:00 PM

 
Cutting hours to make a point

by digby


This is a shame:

A Taco Bell employee in Guthrie, Okla., is speaking out after the fast-food franchise cut her hours to avoid costs associated with Obamacare, reports News9.

For Johnna Davis, a single mother of three who saw her hours fall in December to 28 hours a week, the change not only means a smaller paycheck. It also strips her of the right to receive health benefits from Taco Bell, a right that would have kicked in under Obamacare in 2014 had the franchise continued to give Davis a full-time schedule of hours.

Owners of fast-food franchises across the nation are blind-siding hourly employees by cutting their weekly hours -- and, in turn, their paychecks -- to dodge Obamacare costs.

In fairness, she might be eligible for subsidies and (if she lived in a state with something other than cretins running it) she might very well qualify for Medicaid. She should be able to get health insurance on her own if everything worked right.

But none of that will make up for the fact that she just lost a third of her income. And since they obviously don't know yet how much their insurance costs will end up being, they using human beings to make a political point. Her bosses are clearly conservatives.

It's going to take a while before all this is sorted out. It's going to be a very tumultuous period in the workplace and the health care business.

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digby 1/09/2013 02:00:00 PM

 
Negotiating do-si-doh

by digby

Here's a good piece by Noam Scheiber on the ramifications of the "fiscal cliff" negotiations:

The problem is what happens when, having crafted a favorable backdrop to the negotiation, it comes time for him to close the deal. And this is where the just-completed "cliff" episode is still disconcerting. Because it turns out Obama made a critical if underappreciated mistake in the final hours of the back and forth: sending Joe Biden to haggle with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell once McConnell's talks with his Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid, had broken down.

From my after-the-fact discussions with Democratic aides in the House and Senate leadership, it’s clear that Reid had a plan for resolving the cliff and considered the breakdown of his talks with McConnell very much a part of it. By involving Biden, Obama undercut Reid and signaled that he wanted a deal so badly he was unwilling to leave anything to chance, even when the odds overwhelmingly favored him. It suggested that even if Obama plays his cards exceedingly well in the run-up to the debt-limit showdown, he could still come away with a worse deal than he deserves because of his willingness to make concessions in the closing moments.

Here’s what happened near the end of the cliff talks, as I understand it.

Read on for the details.

I have to suspect at this point that this is not entirely a function of "bad negotiating." It looks an awful lot like a subtle way to achieve desired policy outcomes which may be opposed by the president's own party. The need to make a deal at all costs has become the negotiating strategy. And it conveniently means that all the demagogueing about the consequences of not making a deal will get more and more shrill as the negotiations go on and the Republicans will always take it to the very edge --- at which point it becomes "necessary" to make a less than optimal deal than what might have been possible without all the hand wringing and rending of garments. And I hate to say it, but after several of these so-called hostage situations, it's looking to me as if the Republican leaders are partners in a little square dance, not adversaries.

In other words, it serves both parties' technocratic goal of austerity in the guise of "reform" to milk every contrived fiscal crisis to its last drop and then be "forced" to make a "compromise" that didn't have to be made. Perhaps that's cynical, but we've seen this dance enough times now to at least be skeptical.


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digby 1/09/2013 12:00:00 PM

 
Happy birthday tricky Dick

by digby

It's the 100th birthday of the most notorious modern Republican of them all. Kathy Geier reminded me of this memorable tribute from none other than Hunter S Thompson:

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

And his legacy lives on today. This piece from 2005 called "Nixon's babies" explains why the modern GOP, for all its hard core conservatism in contrast to Nixon's more liberal (by today's standards) agenda is still far more Nixon's creation than Ronald Reagan's:

The modern Republicans, from their earliest incarnation in the 60's, starting with still active operatives like Morton Blackwell and Karl Rove to the next generation of Abramoff, Norquist and Reed, have always operated as dirty tricksters, and corrupt power brokers. The modern Republican Party is not, and never has been, the party of Ronald Reagan, not really. It's the party of Richard Nixon.

Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist came together as a power in the College Republicans during the Reagan years. Blackwell, Rove, Atwater, and many others powerful operatives and strategists had cut their teeth there, as well, but these guys came in at the beginning of the heady Reagan years and they were fueled by the belief that they were on the permanent winning side of history. The triumverate of Norquist, Abramoff and Reed is legendary --- and they are all implicated in the burgeoning Jack Abramoff/Tom DeLay scandal.

They have come to represent the three most important wings of the modern conservative movement --- the Christian Right (Reed), the movement ideologues (Norquist) and the big money boys (Abramoff.) They are the Republican party. And they are all corrupt.

Reed is a total phony. I had long assumed, as most people probably did, that he came up through the Christian Right, a conservative Christian who got into politics through religion. He sure does look the part, doesn't he? This, of course, is not true. He wasn't "born again" until 1983, long after he had committed himself to Republican politics and proved himself to be a ruthless, unprincipled operative. He helped to create the Christian Coalition, it didn't create him. In fact, the Christian Right doesn't really exist independently of the Party, it is a wholly owned subsidiary, consciously created and nurtured as a Republican voting block.
(Morton Blackwell famously gave the Moral Majority its name.) Ralph Reed is now entering electoral politics himself, making the big move. He's probably the most dangerous Republican in America.

Norquist, as most people know is a great admirer of Stalin's tactics. He's quoted as saying to Reed back in the College Republican days:

[Stalin] was running the personnel department while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. Trotsky got an ice ax through his skull, while Stalin became head of the Soviet Union. He understood that personnel is policy.

To that end, Norquist more than anyone else has ensured through carefully constructed alliances that movement ideologues like himself peppered the Republican power structure to the extent that over time, they have come to define it. This is why people like John Bolton, who has no more business being a diplomat than does the Rude Pundit, have become mainstream Republicans, even though they are clearly radical. He has made sure that Republicans are interdependent on each other through money and influence and that the money and influence flow through him and his allies.

Norquist is the truest of true believers, but he understands the importance of certain other inducements to keep people in line. Tom DeLay and Norquist created the K Street project and it's been a rousing success. Abramoff and DeLay were the guys who offered those needed inducements when true belief and solidarity weren't enough. Delay wielded the hammer and Abramoff (among others) offered the goodies. This is how they hold the GOP majority together. Ask Nick Smith how that works.

It's not surprising that Abramoff is the weak link in this. He was the front man back in the college republican days, but he doesn't seem to have been a real strategist in the way that Reed, with his ruthless single mindedness was or Norquist with his long term Soviet style political vision. In fact, the strangest thing about Abramoff is his almost decade long movie producing career that resulted in only two movies being made --- Dolph Lundgren's "Red Scorpion" and "Red Scorpion II" --- both of which were co-produced by his brother, a successful show business attorney. This is an odd chapter in Abramoff's life. It's hard to know why he was unable to parlay himself a real career in Hollywood, except to wonder if maybe Hollywood, for all its faults, just isn't as easily bought off as his pals in the conservative movement. After all, these kind of perks are just standard in the Entertainment industry and can't buy you much of anything at all (from Foer's article in TNR):

Over time, Abramoff's media management grew more sophisticated, and he dispensed largesse across conservative journalism. His junkets didn't just comprise meetings and site visits, they also included plenty of recreation time. Trips to the Choctaw Reservation, for instance, featured gambling at the Silver Star resort and rounds on a lush new golf course. Clint Bolick recalls, "I left the trip early, because it seemed to be so much about golf and gambling, activities I'm not much into." As an artful Washington schmoozer, Abramoff would go even further that. One former Washington Times staffer told me that Abramoff's practice invited his family to watch the circus and a Bruce Springsteen concert from its box at the MCI Center. (By my count, six Washington Times editors and writers attended Abramoff trips.)


Abramoff came back to Washington when his pals came to power in 1994. They suddenly had it all; their triumphant public leader, Newt Gingrich, was even considering a run for the presidency in 1996. (The ever humble Newt was quoted as saying, "Am I going to have to get into this thing?") This was the time to put into place their plans for a permanent Republican establishment ("personnel is policy"), with the power of big money behind them. The problem is that Abramoff got greedy, and so did his little college republican friends. Both Norquist and Reed have been named in the various scandals, right along with Delay. Everybody seems to be hold their breath waiting to see if this thing takes down The Hammer, but the undercurrent of excitement is really whether it will render Norquist, Reed and others impotent over time as the scandal unfolds. It's possible. These guys have always had the problem of hubris and premature triumpalism. They operate on a very emotional level that is a weakness. And they are, of course, incredibly greedy.

He left his mark in so many ways. Happy birthday tricky Dick. Your legacy is alive and well.





digby 1/09/2013 10:30:00 AM

 
Gunning for Mitch

by digby

Well, just a shot across the bow, so far:

A conservative advocacy group is targeting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell with a series of online ads in his home state for helping to negotiate the fiscal cliff deal.

“It’s a statement we’re making and I suspect there will be more statements that are going to be coming out,” said Brent Bozell, president of ForAmerica, which is pushing the ads. “It is a statement to make it emphatically clear that what the minority leader did was 100 percent unacceptable. Conservatives are going to hold him responsible for this.”

The ads read, “Mitch McConnell: Whose side are you on?” with the image of a morose McConnell wedged between pictures of a smiling Vice President Joe Biden and smirking President Barack Obama.
[...]
McConnell is up for reelection in 2014 and is hoping to fend off a conservative primary challenger.
[...]
“When Republicans agree to do what they did agree to do, then they are just as much tax-and-spend Democrats as Democrats are,” Bozell said.

“Do I have any confidence that Republicans will stand by [McConnell’s] statements a couple of days ago that the talk about tax increases are over? None,” Bozell said. “It is a fluid situation. There are some serious battles coming up. I’m not writing off anything. If Republicans find their mojo and rediscovered their soul and try to do the right thing, we’ll support them, but they just can’t count on us anymore.”

Who knows if this is serious? But McConnell could very well end up with a Tea Party challenger. Remember now Senator Rand Paul's primary election night speech?

I have a message. A message from the Tea Party. A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We've come to take our government back.

Everyone says the Tea Party is dying. But it was never really alive. It was the wingnut zombie reanimated after the ignominious failure of their Dear Leader George W. Bush. They never really go away. And Kentucky is a place where they might just be able to get the job done. Rand Paul won his primary against McConnell's handpicked candidate.


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digby 1/09/2013 09:00:00 AM

 
Chait takes on the centrist debt fetishists

by David Atkins

I admit to having a love/hate relationship with Jonathan Chait. His points of view can be infuriatingly obtuse concern trolling one week, and then brilliantly clarion the next. Here he gets it right:

Gerald Seib has a column in today’s Wall Street Journal about how sad and disappointing it is that the two parties cannot come together and solve problems. (“What's lacking is an attitude among the capital's politicians that, while acknowledging they have different views, they must agree that they need to solve problems despite differences.”) That is the same point of a recent column by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, an editorial in The Economist, and vast swaths of commentary by the most respectable members of the mainstream media. It all runs together, day after day, an endless repetitive drone of elite sentiment.

The drone of right-thinking sentiment has certain distinct qualities. One is that it is, in almost the purest sense of the term, a meme — a way of looking at the world that individuals pass one to one another without a great deal of conscious thought, even though thoughtfulness, or the appearance of thoughtfulness, is one of the qualities the opinion imbues upon its proponents. They don’t engage with alternative analyses. They seem to have no idea that their own ideas even could be contested. They are merely performing the opinion journalism equivalent of wishing passersby a Merry Christmas.

All the analytic work lies instead in the unstated background assumptions — the most important of which is the premise that reducing the long-term budget deficit is the most urgent problem in American politics. Indeed, if you look closely at these columns, they uses phrases like “solve problems” and “reduce the deficit” almost interchangeably.

I consider the long-term deficit a problem worth solving, though I would argue that mass unemployment and, especially, climate change are more urgent problems. I would like to know the case to the contrary, but if there is an argument for elevating the deficit above those priorities, I am not aware of it. Overt argument is not the preferred style of respectable centrist pundits. It is too rude.

And so, when figures like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson are invited on to programs like Meet the Press, they are treated as disinterested wise men rather than political advocates. The host, David Gregory, asks them to hand down rulings on politicians. He does not question their own ideas. (Notably, the Sunday talk shows, a haven of right-thinking, deficit-obsessed centrism, have given over little attention to climate change in the last four years and have not quoted a single climate scientist during the entire span.)

After noting that the Democratic Party has essentially become the deficit-cutting centrist Party while Republicans show little real concern for it, Chait concludes:

Why, then, don’t they say this? Part of the answer is careerist. The elite centrist drone is emitted by people who deem non-partisanship an essential part of their job description. If they concede that one party is advocating their agenda, then you could flip the sentiment around and correctly conclude that they are advocating the agenda of a party; therefore, they would be partisan and have thus forfeited the entire basis of their claim to respectability.

I don’t believe that the centrist drones are so consciously cynical. This is where the dynamic of the meme usefully replaces overt thought. That the two parties must meet in the center and agree on a deficit plan is something that respectable people repeat to each other so often it becomes obviously, uncontroversially true. There is just so much partisanship these days. Whatever happened to the center? The two parties should come together and reduce the deficit. Merry Christmas.

Indeed. Greg Sargent has more:

Self-styled “centrist” columnists have a perennial problem on their hands. They have built reputations by calling for middle-of-the-road solutions to our problems. Yet they can’t acknowledge that Obama and Democrats are the ones who are offering solutions that are genuinely centrist, because that would constitute “taking sides.” This would imperil their “brand,” which rests heavily on transcending partisanship, and on their ongoing insistence that the future depends on following a middle ground between the parties.

These commentators have found several routes around this problem. One is to continually call for a third party without admitting that the solutions they themselves envision any third party advancing have a good deal in common with what Dems are offering. Another is to simply pretend that Obama and Dems have not offered the solutions they have, in fact, offered.

Insofar as deficit-obsessed centrism is a calculated political stance by Democrats to curry Beltway and voter favor, it's a failure. The Very Serious People they're trying to please refuse to call out the wildly irresponsible Republican Party, either because they themselves are in on the safety net shredding con or because maintaining a non-partisan facade is an intrinsic part of their oh-so-serious credibility.

And insofar as it is based on real policy concerns, that too is a fool's errand. Even if one ignores the obvious reality that austerity during a recession and weak recovery is a very bad idea that will actually increase the deficit (particularly when the cost of borrowing is cheap), any Grand Bargain that does manage to reduce the long-term deficit would be undone by the next Republican President who decides that with the "crisis" averted, the rich should be eligible to keep more of their money with another tax break.

The best thing Democrats can do is to ignore all the Sunday shows and all the Very Serious People. The poobahs will never be pleased because their entire shtick depends on calling out both sides as unreasonable. Far better to simply determine the best policy approach and stand tall in defense of it--especially when it widely outperforms the opposite side in the polls.


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thereisnospoon 1/09/2013 07:30:00 AM

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

 
QOTD: Glenn Beck

by digby

On Alex Jones' appearance on CNN last night:

Want to know who the media wants to make the face of the pro-gun argument in America? Look no further than conspiratorial radio host Alex Jones, best known for his 9/11 Truther theories and his love of Charlie Sheen's hernia. Jones is the man behind the petition to deport CNN host Piers Morgan for his views on gun control. Morgan invited Jones onto his show to debate the gun issue yesterday, and not surprisingly, Jones made a fool of himself, giving the left the perfect poster boy for their attempts to paint every logical conservative as an extremist nut job.

Yes, that's the very same person as this one:

"The Archduke Ferdinand moment"

When it comes to making of fool of yourself, I'd say this guy knows what he's talking about.


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digby 1/08/2013 06:00:00 PM

 
What you've been missing: Stewart and Colbert

by digby

This one's personal for Stewart:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

From the time I started writing this blog I've been talking about the fact that Republicans have simply retired the very concept of hypocrisy. But sometimes they demonstrate it in such glorious obviousness that you just have to laugh.

And then ... Colbert:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

I don't think we can allow them to take time off anymore at times like these. We need them.

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digby 1/08/2013 04:30:00 PM

 
Another sign of a broken system

by David Atkins

I mentioned earlier today that AIG's suing the federal government, while offensive on many levels, is actually just the modern capitalism system working as intended, with AIG "innovating" products to meet quarterly expectations, the government stepping in to stabilize a crisis, and then AIG doing corporate duty to maximize shareholder return. If that system is offensive, then perhaps it's time to change the system.

Here's another example of a broken system:

It’s official: 2012 was the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States and the second most extreme in terms of weather events, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) annual “State of the Climate” report released Tuesday.

The average temperature for the entire year was 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit, a full degree warmer than the previous record warmest year, 1998, and 3.2 degrees above the entire 20th century average.

While one degree may not sound like very much in terms of temperature as humans experience on a day-to-day basis, it is actually an enormous increase in the country’s climate history, as NOAA scientists explained in a press conference on their results Tuesday afternoon.

“The difference between the record coldest year and previous record warmest year was four degrees,” said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, during the press conference. “So there’s 117 years of data that were encompassed by four degrees of an average temperature, and now the 2012 value is one degree outside of that envelope. So we’re taking quite a large step above what the period of record has shown for the contiguous U.S.”

So why don't we have the political will to do anything about it? Well, because climate change doesn't really impact immediate corporate profits, so neither industry nor Wall St. seems much inclined to step in. It should theoretically be government's job to step in with far-sighted regulations, but American democracy is specifically designed for politicians to respond to issues that immediately impact citizens within the timeframe leading up to the politicians' re-election. Nothing in American corporate or state governance is designed to resolve problems today that will show up in 50 years. This is also a conservative complaint when it comes to much more easily manageable issue of deficits as well (insofar as deficit hysteria isn't just an excuse to cut discretionary spending), which is why legislators set up ridiculous sequesters to force their own hands. In the case of deficits it's an ephemeral non-problem. Climate change by contrast is a very real problem. But in both cases no one is interested in solving problems that won't show up for decades.

Whether it's AIG suing the American People who saved them, or Congress unable to deal with climate change, the systems are actually working as intended. So maybe it's time to change the systems.


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thereisnospoon 1/08/2013 03:00:00 PM