The Truth Vigilante

Why Naomi Wolf's Response to my Critique Is Largely Unresponsive

2011-12-02T12:36:00.001-08:00

Naomi Wolf responded to my criticism of her recent work on the Occupy crack-downs today, here.

Hate to belabor this*, but I have a few comments about her response which you can read here.

*No I don't. I suffer from this sometimes debilitating illness.

Naomi Wolf’s ‘Shocking Truth’ About the ‘Occupy Crackdowns’ Is Anything But True

2011-11-26T15:00:00.001-08:00

There has been a flurry of speculation surrounding various reports suggesting that a “coordinated,” nationwide crack-down on the Occupy Movement is underway. The problem with these stories lies in the fact that the word “coordinated” is too vague to offer any analytic value.

The difference between local officials talking to each other — or federal law enforcement agencies advising them on what they see as “best practices” for evicting local occupations — and some unseen hand directing, incentivizing or coercing municipalities to do so when they would not otherwise be so inclined is not a minor one. It’s not a matter of semantics or a distinction without difference. As I wrote recently, “if federal authorities were ordering cities to crack down on their local occupations in a concerted effort to wipe out a movement that has spread like wildfire across the country, that would indeed be a huge, and hugely troubling story. In the United States, policing protests is a local matter, and law enforcement agencies must remain accountable for their actions to local officials. Local government’s autonomy in this regard is an important principle.”

But there has not been a single report offered by any media outlet suggesting that anyone – federal officials or police organizations – is directing or in any way exerting pressure on cities to crack down on their occupations. Instead, there have been a lot of dark ruminations that such an effort is underway – notably by Naomi Wolf in an error-filled blog-post and a somewhat bizarre column for The Guardian in which Wolf takes an enormous leap away from any known facts to suggest that Congress is ordering cities to smash the Occupy Movement in order to preserve their own economic privilege.

Before digging into Wolf’s claims, let’s review what has actually been reported.

1. Five major occupations were evicted in different cities in a span of less than a week. Although they didn’t follow the same pattern, there were similarities in the tactics employed by these different municipalities.

2. A police membership organization called the Police Executive Research Forum, PERF, organized two conference calls between local law enforcement officials to share information on OWS, including, presumably, how best to evict them.

3. The US Conference of Mayors organized two conference calls between various city officials to discuss the same issues.

4. The Examiner, quoting an anonymous source in the Justice Department, reported that DHS and the FBI were sharing information and advice with local law enforcement agencies. But the source stated quite clearly that “while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement.”

5. Chris Hayes reported that a lobbying firm had offered a plan to the American Bankers Association to vilify and marginalize the Occupy Movement. The ABA insisted that it hadn’t acted on the proposal.

6. DHS vehicles were reportedly spotted near at least one eviction.

Among the “advice” reportedly disseminated by DHS was that cities should demonize their occupations by highlighting health and safety violations, and evict them without warning in the dead of night. As a supporter of the Occupy Movement and a civil libertarian, I find that offensive and inappropriate – DHS should be worried about terrorism, not political dissent.

But missing here is any suggestion that cities are being compelled to crack down on their Occupations in any way – mayors of all of the municipalities that evicted camps in recent weeks had made it very clear that they were going to do so. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan held three press conferences urging people to leave Frank Ogawa Plaza and promising that they would be removed by force if they didn’t comply. Local officials have an agenda, but it is not a hidden agenda, and thus not a particularly shocking story.

I don’t find it in the least bit surprising that law enforcement officials communicate with each other, and such communication is in no way an assault on local communities’ autonomy. Every day professionals dealing with similar issues get on conference calls, send messages to list-servs or otherwise talk shop – it’s just part of our “interconnected world.”

Having established a baseline of reality, let’s turn to Wolf’s claims.

Here’s how she opens her blog-post:

Now is the time to get cops on board with the OWS movement — especially now that Alternet has broken the story that municipal police are being pushed around by a shadowy private policing consultancy affiliated with DHS. If you study any closing society decent people get handed monstrous orders and are forced to comply, and right now municipal police are being forced to comply with brutal orders from this corporate police consultancy, by economic pressure.

AlterNet has “broken” no such story – nobody has. We have asked Wolf to retract this claim, but as of this writing, it still remains on her site several days later.

PERF is not “shadowy” – they are quite happy to talk to the media and recently sent a spokesperson to appear on Democracy, Now! PERF is a membership organization without any actual police powers. It can’t “order” anybody to do anything and has no means to apply “economic pressure.” Its only “affiliation” with DHS is that PERF’s Executive Director, Chuck Wexler, also sits on a DHS “advisory board” (along with a dozen police chiefs, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton).

PERF organizes conference calls among police officials to discuss areas of common concern. Last year, it held a conference call among police chiefs who were worried that Arizona’s harsh immigration law, SB 1070, would drive a wedge between law enforcement agencies and the immigrant communities they are supposed to protect and serve. Fox “News” ran a story at the time alleging that PERF was some sort of far-left police organization and therefore illegitimate. Now we’re getting a similar story from progressives, which is discouraging.

Having basically invented a tale of arm-twisting at the national level – of a “shadowy” police organization affiliated with DHS issuing “brutal orders” to hapless mayors – Wolf then leaps even further afield with her Guardian column, in which she adds the dark accusation that Congress is involved, and is ordering this national crackdown to preserve a grift from which law-makers are profiting. The headline of the piece is “The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy,” but there is nothing truthful about what follows.

Here, we should pause to add another credible report to our factual baseline. CBS recently ran a report showing that members of Congress were using information that wasn’t available to the public to make tidy profits on the stock market. It’s insider-trading when ordinary citizens do it, but a loophole in the law makes it perfectly legal – if wholly corrupt on its face – for legislators to engage in the exact same practices.

This is extremely troubling, but wholly unrelated to Occupy Wall Street unless one engages in the kind of intellectual contortionism Wolf attempts. Indeed, the Guardianpiece borders on incoherence as it is, in the literal sense, a series of non-sequiturs – unrelated claims that simply do not follow one another.

She opens by recounting some of the more outrageous examples of police violence in recent weeks. Then she adds, “just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened.” Did we have the picture or were we asking a lot of questions? Either way, what follows should address this in some way. But it doesn’t:

The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that “New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers” covering protests.

This is a disturbing story pertaining specifically to New York. It's a non-sequitur here.

Wolf then offers some more tales of protesters facing police violence. She then cites Chris Hayes’ report as some sort of evidence that these crackdowns weren’t the result of local decisions.

Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors’, city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

This is just sad. The memo Hayes unearthed was drafted on November 24, more than a week after the evictions of camps in Zuccotti Park, Oakland, Denver, Salt Lake City and Portland. There was no “message coordination” of any kind – it was a proposal that was reportedly rejected. It wasn’t produced by or sent to any organ of government – it was a memo by scummy lobbyists looking for a pay-check from the banking lobby.

Wolf then continues to throw everything she can get her hands on at the wall in the hope that something sticks…

I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act….

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

I have probably interviewed 50-75 participants in the Occupy Movement, at multiple camps in the Bay Area, and heard all sorts of proposals and “demands” for healing our economy. But I have never heard any Occupier call for “draft[ing] laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.”

This seems to be the heart of her argument – Congress critters have a nice little rip-off going, they feel threatened by the Occupy Movement’s efforts to bring greater transparency to government, and as a result, they are “ordering” a nation-wide crack-down. But this central claim is based on emails she supposedly got from readers that seem pretty divergent from what the rest of us are hearing.

Wolf has that problem covered, however. Because even if the Occupiers don’t know that this is high on their list of demands, the police informants who have infiltrated the movement are able to discern their agenda even before the protesters have come up with it…

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists’ privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process… [is] two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

Convenient!

Wolf then offers a classic example of trying to shoe-horn reality into a theory with no factual basis. She set out to write a column indicting Congress for a nationwide crack-down that hasn’t actually been unearthed and, in order to do so, she needs to hopelessly muddle the chain of command…

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, “we are going after these scruffy hippies”. Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women’s wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

DHS is a cabinet-level executive branch agency. It does not “report” to Homeland Security Chair Peter King in some kind of chain-of-command – in fact, it doesn’t “report” to Congress at all except for a handful of official reports required by law. King can hold hearings and call DHS officials to testify before his committee, but he has nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of the agency.

The allegation is that DHS offered local cities advise on evicting their local camps. I don’t know what she means by “freelance” in this context, but that is the kind of action, like thousands of actions DHS initiates each and every day, that wouldn’t require any sort of high-level sign-off. DHS was created in part to facilitate greater communication and intelligence-sharing between federal and local law enforcement agencies – advising local authorities is one of its defining roles.

But it’s the next paragraph that actually makes one’s head hurt…

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

Got that? That DHS took part in those conference calls (a claim that confuses two separate stories, as it hasn’t been alleged that DHS had anything to do with the calls organized by the US Conference of Mayors) shows that “Congressional overseers with the blessing of the White House” told DHS to “authorize” mayors to order their police to crack-down.

This is little more than gibberish – policing protesters is a local matter and no mayor in the country requires federal “authorization” of any kind, by any agency, to order their cops to evict an occupation.

Wolf wraps up with a feverish flourish…

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

When you don’t “connect” wholly disparate “dots,” what you get is far less dramatic. Mayors in a handful of cities, responding to local political pressures, decided to break up their local occupations — decisions that were announced to the press well in advance — and were advised as to how best to do so.

One doesn’t have to like that fact to recognize that it’s hardly shocking, and anything but a sinister assault on local communities’ autonomy.

This is what the meeting's about

2011-11-03T21:29:00.000-07:00

It's about a proposal by Councilmember Nadel:

Recommendation: Conduct a Public Hearing, Discussion Regarding Activities Of "Occupy Oakland" At Frank H. Ogawa Plaza And Other Areas Of The City, Including Without Limitation, Demonstrations, Assembly, Overnight Stays, Encampment And City Protocols, And Policies And Possible Action Including The Following Proposed Resolution: 1) Resolution Supporting The Occupy Wall Street Protest Movement, Declaring That City Continues To Unequivocally Embrace The First Amendment To The United States Constitution And The City's Duty To Uphold The People's Right To Peaceful Assembly And Urging Mayor Jean Quan To Collaborate With Occupy Oakland To Develop Measures And Procedures To Ensure Safety Of The Protestors, Their Supporters, City Employees And The Greater Public

My Advice to an Inspiring Writer

2011-10-20T12:47:00.000-07:00

I get email:

I understand you're extremely busy person, but I wanted to know if you have any advice for an inspiring writer. How is the best way to have my writing published either in a magazine or journal? I am an admirer of the written word was told write well by people at my job and by professors while I was in graduate school. I have many ideas and want to share them on a larger forum.

Something tells me I don't have the next Taibbi here, but here's my advice:

Write, write, write, and then write some more. Also, rewrite. And read stuff aloud to make sure it's smooth.

When you have something you like, and you think it's really polished, then submit, submit, submit -- send it everywhere. When you're not well known, most of your submissions will be ignored.

But don't give up. Submit to places that won't pay. The idea is to get some stuff published so that you can establish yourself. My first piece was published by Common Dreams.

Also, when sending notes to editors, make sure there are no errors. You're an "aspiring" writer, not an "inspiring" writer (although you may be inspiring too).

Hope that helps.

Abusing the Laffer Curve

2011-09-15T15:49:00.000-07:00

If you can get a lot of people to repeat the same specious claim often enough, it effectively becomes “true.” Here’s an example. The Right can’t admit that their tax cuts will bust the budget and still claim to be good fiscal stewards. So, instead, they try to dazzle us with magical thinking: cutting taxes, they say, actually brings more money into the government’s coffers! See, they don’t want to slash and burn popular government programs—their tax cuts will raise more cash to fund ’em!

In 2007, Time magazine’s Justin Fox sampled some Republican opinions on this interesting dynamic and concluded, “If there’s one thing that Republican politicians agree on, it’s that slashing taxes brings the government more money.”

“You cut taxes, and the tax revenues increase,” President Bush said in a speech last year. Keeping taxes low, Vice President Dick Cheney explained in a recent interview, “does produce more revenue for the Federal Government.” Presidential candidate John McCain declared in March that “tax cuts . . . as we all know, increase revenues.” His rival Rudy Giuliani couldn’t agree more. “I know that reducing taxes produces more revenues,” he intones in a new TV ad.

The spin is premised on an egregious distortion of “Laffer’s curve,” the conservative media’s favorite economic theorem. The idea, first scribbled on a cocktail napkin by economist George Laffer (at least, according to lore), is pretty simple. It holds that you can raise income taxes to a degree, but when the top tax rate exceeds a certain point, people will go to such extraordinary lengths to avoid paying the piper that the government will actually end up collecting less revenue.

The thing about Laffer’s curve is that it makes perfect sense in theory, but it completely defies reason in practice, at least in the context of modern America. Most economists agree with Laffer’s argument that there is a point of revenue “maximization,” after which hiking rates will lead to fewer tax dollars coming in. If you were to tax income at a rate of 100 percent, it wouldn’t make much sense for anyone to go to work—at least not on the books.

The hot air hisses out of the balloon when politicians and pundits use the theory to advocate tax cuts in the United States, which is among the more lightly taxed countries in the developed world. The fallacy is simple: top personal and business tax rates have decreased for years, and there’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest that we’re anywhere close to being above Laffer’s curve today. And if you’re below the curve when you cut taxes, you’re not going to generate that surge of new income.

For his Time article, Justin Fox followed up with a survey of what people who understand basic math were saying about this bit of conservative spin:

If there’s one thing that economists agree on, it’s that these claims are false. We’re not talking just ivory-tower lefties. Virtually every economics Ph.D. who has worked in a prominent role in the Bush Administration acknowledges that the tax cuts enacted during the past six years have not paid for themselves—and were never intended to. Harvard professor Greg Mankiw, chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005, even devotes a section of his best-selling economics textbook to debunking the claim that tax cuts increase revenues.

Andrew Samwick, now at Dartmouth, was the chief economist on Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers during that period. But in 2007, after Bush had claimed yet again that it’s “a fact that our tax cuts have fueled robust economic growth and record revenues,” Samwick responded with a plea to the Bush administration to stop making that claim. In an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal, he wrote, “You are smart people. . . . You know that the tax cuts have not fueled record revenues. You know what it takes to establish causality. You know that the first order effect of cutting taxes is to lower tax revenues."

Yet pointing out that simple truth is anathema in conservative circles. In 2007, Megan McCardle, then an up-and-coming libertarian writer with the Atlantic Monthly, wrote about the editorial higher-ups of an unnamed “conservative publication” spiking a book review she’d written because she hadn’t toed the party line. “Even while otherwise expressing my vast displeasure with the (liberal) economic notions of the book I was reviewing,” she wrote, the editors killed the piece “because I said that the Laffer Curve didn’t apply at American levels of taxation.” She added, “This isn’t me looking for an alternative explanation for the spiking of a bad review: the literary editor accepted it, edited it, and then three hours later told me it couldn’t be published because it violated their editorial line on taxation.”

USA Today Lies with Statistics; Falsely Claims Public Employee Pay is Higher than in Private Sector

2011-02-28T19:37:00.000-08:00

Forget about whether you're liberal or conservative, pro-union or anti. A simple question: in either the public or the private sector, would you not expect a college grad who has worked his or her job for 4 years to be paid significantly more than someone with a high school diploma who's had his or her gig for 2 years?

And if the college grad were in fact paid more, would that be unfair somehow? Would it be cause for jealousy and resentment? Apparently, USA Today thinks so.

The tabloid lies with statistics through the first 7 paragraphs of this 8-paragraph "analysis." Here's the lede:

Wisconsin is one of 41 states where public employees earn higher average pay and benefits than private workers in the same state, a USA TODAY analysis finds. Still, the compensation of Wisconsin's government workers ranks below the national average for public employees and has increased only slightly since 2000.

Graphs 3 and 4:

The analysis of government data found that public employee compensation has grown faster than the earnings of private workers since 2000. Primary cause: the rising value of benefits.

They could have mentioned that 37 percent of public workers belong to a union, versus 7 percent in the private sector, but that's just a quibble.

Wisconsin is typical. State, city and school district workers earned an average of $50,774 in wages and benefits in 2009, about $1,800 more than in the private sector. The state ranked 33rd in public employee compensation among the states and Washington, D.C. It had ranked 20th in 2000.

And very careful readers only get a dose of reality -- a limited one -- in the final graph:

Economist Jeffrey Keefe of the liberal Economic Policy Institute says the analysis is misleading because it doesn't reflect factors such as education that result in higher pay for public employees.

That's right, their analysis just compared average wages, and didn't adjust for different job requirements, age, education or experience. It's not misleading, it's entirely meaningless. Unless, of course, you think that high school grad with less experience should be paid the same.

As I wrote last year, Public sector workers have, on average, more experience and higher levels of education than their counterparts in the private sector (they are twice as likely to have a college degree). Economist John Schmitt found that when one controls for those factors -- comparing apples to apples --state and local employees earn almost 4 percent less than their brethren in corporate America. (Even accounting for their greater benefits, state and local employees still make less in total compensation than they would doing the same work in the private sector.)

The thing that I find so egregious about this is that the reporter, Dennis Cauchon, spoke with an economist who told him this, but didn't include any of the numbers I cite above. This is how people are being mislead to believe that public workers are the new welfare queens.

Here's an email for corrections and clarifications: accuracy@usatoday.com, and here's an editorial feedback form. If you're sick of this kind of distortion passing itself off as unbiased journalism, let 'em know.

Only the Wealthiest Favor Stripping Workers' Collective Bargaining Rights

2011-02-25T15:12:00.000-08:00

A poll conducted by Gallup earlier this week found that Americans opposed stripping public employees' of their right to negotiate with their employers by a margin of 2 to 1. It got a lot of play (as did Fox News reversing the results and reporting that 61 percent of the public favored the GOP's union-busting).

Today, Greg Sargent dug into the poll's internals, and came up with something worth noting:

It turns out that the only income group that favors Governor Scott Walker's proposal to roll back public employee bargaining rights are those who make over $90,000.

As you know, Gallup released a poll earlier this week finding that 61 percent of Americans oppose Walker's plan, versus only 33 percent who are in favor. It turns out Gallup has crosstabs which give us an income breakdown of that finding, which the firm sent my way:

* Among those who make less than $24,000 annually, 74 percent oppose the proposal, versus only 14 percent who favor it.

* Among those who make $24,000 to $59,000, 63 percent oppose the proposal, versus only 33 percent who favor it.

* Among those who make $60,000 to $89,000, 53 percent oppose the proposal, versus only 41 percent who favor it.

* Among those who make $90,000 and up, 50 percent favor the proposal, versus 47 percent who oppose it.

This makes perfect sense for several reasons. Higher income workers have greater job security, better retirement and health benefits and their wages have been rising while most Americans' have not. In other words, they already have what a union secures for working people beneath them on the food chain.

Also, within that group are a good number of investors and, as I wrote yesterday, only through collective bargaining can workers end up with a free market wage. Without it, they end up being paid below what the market would bear and the difference gets pocketed by investors. As such, union-busting is a weapon of class warfare from above.

Having said that, the top income bracket in Gallup's cross-tabs only broke for the proposal 50-47.

Vatican: Priests Have Been Raping Nuns to Avoid Hookers with HIV

2011-02-24T15:34:00.000-08:00

Let us take a moment to recall Pope Benedict's view of what caused the Holocaust:

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a reductive vision of the person and his destiny.

It was a ballsy statement coming from a man who was once a member of the Hitler Youth and now leads the Catholic Church, but the argument is not uncommon. 'What is morality to a Godless atheist?' is a common refrain among 'radical clerics' of every faith.

Anyhoo ...

The Catholic Church in Rome made the extraordinary admission yesterday that it is aware priests from at least 23 countries have been sexually abusing nuns.

Most of the abuse has occurred in Africa, where priests vowed to celibacy, who previously sought out prostitutes, have preyed on nuns to avoid contracting the Aids virus.

Confidential Vatican reports obtained by the National Catholic Reporter, a weekly magazine in the US, have revealed that members of the Catholic clergy have been exploiting their financial and spiritual authority to gain sexual favours from nuns, particularly those from the Third World who are more likely to be culturally conditioned to be subservient to men.

The reports, some of which are recent and some of which have been in circulation for at least seven years, said that such priests had demanded sex in exchange for favours, such as certification to work in a given diocese.

In extreme instances, the priests had made nuns pregnant and then encouraged them to have abortions.

I don't get how they could be so sleazily predatory without the moral relativism.

The Craziest Wingnut in America Wants to Criminalize Unauthorized Vaginal Bleeding

2011-02-23T16:42:00.000-08:00

With the rise of the Tea Partiers, there's intense competition for the title of Craziest Wingnut Holding Public Office.

But Georgia state rep. Bobby Franklin, R-Marietta, has to be considered the top contender. He was the one who proposed a law that would require rape and sexual assault victims -- but not the victims of any other crimes -- to be called "accusers" unless there was a conviction in their cases.

Then Franklin introduced a bill that would do away with drivers' licenses, arguing that they “are a throw back to oppressive times.” As CBS reported:

In his bill, Franklin states, "free people have a common law and constitutional right to travel on the roads and highways that are provided by their government for that purpose. Licensing of drivers cannot be required of free people, because taking on the restrictions of a license requires the surrender of an inalienable right."

(More details on both measures here.)

Now Lindsay Beyerstein brings us word of Franklin's latest:

A Georgia Representative has introduced a bill to investigate all unsupervised miscarriages as crime scenes. Don't believe me? Here's the relevant language from HB 1, downloadable from legislature's website:

When a spontaneous fetal death required to be reported by this Code section occurs without medical attendance at or immediately after the delivery or when inquiry is required by Article 2 of Chapter 16 of Title 45, the ‘Georgia Death Investigation Act,’ the proper investigating official shall investigate the cause of fetal death and shall prepare and file the report within 30 days[...]

Beyerstein adds that the bill "is radical even by the standards of people who think fertilized ova are people." That's an understatement -- according to MoJo, "Both miscarriages and abortions would be potentially punishable by death."

One has to conclude that Bobby Franklin doesn't need a challenger so much as a decent shrink.

Cross-posted at AlterNet and Dirty Hippies.

Note to Tea-Baggers: Public Workers Aren't Demanding Anything from the "Taxpayers"

2011-02-22T16:39:00.000-08:00

A common refrain from people wishing to destroy public employees' unions is that their workers are 'demanding more from the tax-payers.' It's a testament to how confused the Right is about the role of government.

Public employees are not demanding anything from "the taxpayer." They are workers demanding fair wages from their bosses.

We live in a democracy, and tax-payers get to participate by voting. If, for example, one doesn't like our public education system, one can vote for a representative who shares his or her view on the subject.

However, a sizable majority of Americans do want a decent public school system. It's a democracy, so we'll have public schools. That's the end of the role of the tax-payer in this story.

Now, our schools need to hire teachers, and those teachers are workers, and our school system is their employer. They're not making any demands on the tax-payer -- the tax-payers role was deciding to have public education in the first place. And the same can be said of garbage collection, law enforcement or anything else the public sector does.

Blast from the Past: George Bush Bragged About Diplomatic Success With Blood-Stained Libyan Despot Muammar Gaddafi

2011-02-21T15:25:00.000-08:00

I think you really have to give the right some credit for sheer Chutzpah. Just 7 short years after George W. Bush normalized relations with the Libyan regime, over the strong opposition of Barack Obama, some conservatives actually have the nerve to revise that very recent history and claim the reverse to be true (causing even Debbie Schussel, of all people, to cry 'foul').

Anyway, I dug this bit out of Bush's 2004 State of the Union speech:

Because of American leadership and resolve, the world is changing for the better. Last month, the leader of Libya voluntarily pledged to disclose and dismantle all of his regime's weapons of mass destruction programs, including a uranium enrichment project for nuclear weapons. Colonel Qadhafi correctly judged that his country would be better off, and far more secure, without weapons of mass murder. Nine months of intense negotiations involving the United States and Great Britain succeeded with Libya, while 12 years of diplomacy with Iraq did not. And one reason is clear: For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible -- and no one can now doubt the word of America.

Yup, diplomacy was great with the eminently-reasonable colonel Gaddafi, but didn't result in Saddam Hussein handing over the weapons that he had destroyed a decade earlier.

And ever since that time, "no one can doubt the word of America."

Details from the State Department's background notes -- and you might note that all of this happened prior to January of 2009:

The U.S. terminated the applicability of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act to Libya and President Bush signed an Executive Order on September 20, 2004 terminating the national emergency with respect to Libya and ending IEEPA-based economic sanctions. This action had the effect of unblocking assets blocked under the Executive Order sanctions. Restrictions on cargo aviation and third-party code-sharing have been lifted, as have restrictions on passenger aviation. Certain export controls remain in place.

U.S. diplomatic personnel reopened the U.S. Interest Section in Tripoli on February 8, 2004. The mission was upgraded to a U.S. Liaison Office on June 28, 2004, and to a full embassy on May 31, 2006. The establishment in 2005 of an American School in Tripoli demonstrates the increased presence of Americans in Libya, and the continuing normalization of bilateral relations. Libya re-established its diplomatic presence in Washington with the opening of an Interest Section on July 8, 2004, which was subsequently upgraded to a Liaison Office in December 2004 and to a full embassy on May 31, 2006.

Correction: It's a Ginned-Up "Crisis," but Scott Walker Isn't Entirely to Blame for Wisconsin's Budget Gap

2011-02-20T11:12:00.000-08:00

It's been widely reported that Scott Walker inherited a $120 million budget surplus, and then promptly created a budget deficit in order to break the backs of Wisconsin's public employees' unions. On Friday, I quoted Ezra Klein of the Washington Postexplaining that Walker had " signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit."

Politifact did an analysis of this issue which shows that Walker in fact inherited a manageable, long-term budget gap and then spun it as an imminent crisis that must be addressed this year.

The reports stem from a a Jan. 31, 2011 memo prepared by Robert Lang, the director of the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, that was picked up by the Associated Press and a number of other outlets. It does state that Wisconsin was on course for a surplus this year, which the media reported that in good faith. The issue is what Politifact refers to as the memo's "fine print."

[It] outlines $258 million in unpaid bills or expected shortfalls in programs such as Medicaid services for the needy ($174 million alone), the public defender’s office and corrections. Additionally, the state owes Minnesota $58.7 million under a discontinued tax reciprocity deal.
The result, by our math and Lang’s, is the $137 million shortfall.

None of this changes the fact that Walker dishonestly portrayed his union-busting bill as a budget fix. The provision stripping state workers' right to negotiate for better benefits wouldn't take effect until their existing contracts expire, meaning that it would have zero impact on the state's bottom line in the immediate future. The savings from shifting more pension and health-care costs onto workers -- which the unions have already agreed to -- would amount to just $30 million. Finally, an uncontroversial provision in the bill would restructure the state's outstanding debt, saving $160 million -- more than enough to close the gap this year.
Politifact adds:

To be sure, the projected shortfall is a modest one by the standards of the last decade, which saw a $600 million repair bill one year as the economy and national tax collections slumped.

Walker's Own Statement Proves that His Assault on Public Employees Has Nothing to do with Wisconsin's Budget Shortfall

2011-02-20T11:10:00.000-08:00

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has a long history trying to break public sector unions. But last week, as the Milwaukee Business Times reported, he insisted that "his bill was strictly based on the need to cut the budget and was not based on any political agenda." Indeed, the bill was introduced by the governor as an "emergency measure... needed to balance the state budget and give government the tools to manage during economic crisis."

But a close reading of the governor's own press release announcing the measure shows just how misleading that claim really is.

Here's the problem, according to Walker's release:

The state of Wisconsin is facing an immediate deficit of $137 million for the current fiscal year which ends July 1. In addition, bill collectors are waiting to collect over $225 million for a prior raid of the Patients’ Compensation Fund.

There is a $137 million shortfall for this year. Regarding the Patients' Compensation Fund, Politifact reports that "a court ruling is pending in that matter, so the money might not have to be transferred until next budget year."

But here are three important points from the governor's release that show quite clearly that this bill has nothing at all to do with closing Wisconsin's budget gap in the near-term -- as an emergency measure that wasn't even subject to public debate.

1. "The budget repair will also restructure the state debt, lowering the state’s interest rate, saving the state $165 million." That's right, restructuring the state's outstanding debt yields more savings than the projected shortfall, and nobody is objecting to that provision.

2. "It will require state employees to pay about 5.8% toward their pension (about the private sector national average) and about 12% of their healthcare benefits (about half the private sector national average). These changes will help the state save $30 million in the last three months of the current fiscal year." Yes, those give-backs would yield less than 20 percent of what the debt restructuring would bring in. And, as I mentioned earlier, the public employees' unions offered to make those concessions in exchange for losing the provision that would bar them from negotiating their benefits package in the future, and the GOP flatly refused the offer.

3. The collective bargaining provision wouldn't kick in until after the current contracts expire, meaning that the measure would yield exactly zero savings in the current budget.

Random Lengths News' Paul Rosenberg caught this, and adds that Walker is also sitting on an "unused cache of $73 million" in the state's economic development fund -- "more than twice what’s being sought from public sector workers.”

Samuel Smith at Scholars and Rogues has much more detail.

Joe Klein: Either Clueless About the Wisconsin Uprising or Simply Shilling for the Union-Busters

2011-02-19T13:11:00.000-08:00

Time's Joe Klein has written an offensively dishonest column attacking Wisconsin's public employees. Every paragraph is packed with the kind of knee-jerk contempt for working people that's become endemic in our mainstream discourse -- it's truly eye-opening.

Allow me to begin where Klein proves that he is either wildly ignorant of what's actually at stake in this fight, or is willfully misleading his readers. (I don't pretend to know which.)

... it seems to me that Governor Scott Walker's basic requests are modest ones--asking public employees to contribute more to their pension and health care plans, though still far less than most private sector employees do. He is also trying to limit the unions' abilities to negotiate work rules--and this is crucial when it comes to the more efficient operation of government in a difficult time.

If you have been led to believe that this is what the battle is about, please check out my piece on AlterNet's front page. Walker's "basic requests" include seizing control of the state's Medicaid funding, stripping state workers of the right to negotiate the details of their benefits package and capping the wages they can gain in negotiations. He offered this bill only after being informed that he didn't have the power to simply decertify the unions outright.

Klein, had he done his homework, would know not only that the state's public employees' unions had already made concessions, but that they're also willing to make more. As State senator Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton -- one of the Dem law-makers who fled the state to block a vote on the bill -- put it, "In the end, what's going to happen is the public employees are going to pay on their pension and pay on their health care. We all know that, they all know that. They're OK with that. The one thing the public employees do not understand is why (Walker) is going after unions."

And it's important to understand that whether or not it's his intent, Joe Klein is serving as a scribe for Scott Walker. When the Governor tried this same mendacious line, Josh Marshall called him out like this:

Gov. Walker is on TV now discussing the situation in the state and everything he's talking about is givebacks from the state's public sector unions. But what he doesn't seem to be saying anything about is ending collective bargaining rights. Which is what the fight is actually about. He won't be candid about the entire battle is about. Just not honest.

"Just not honest" is what one might expect from a far-right lawmaker trying to bust a union. But what, exactly, is "liberal" columnist Joe Klein's excuse?

That's the truly egregious bit, but also note how Klein leads:

Revolutions everywhere--in the middle east, in the middle west. But there is a difference: in the middle east, the protesters are marching for democracy; in the middle west, they're protesting against it. I mean, Isn't it, well, a bit ironic that the protesters in Madison, blocking the state senate chamber, are chanting "Freedom, Democracy, Union" while trying to prevent a vote? Isn't it ironic that the Democratic Senators have fled the democratic process?

A bedrock principle of our democracy is the right to assemble and petition government for redress -- precisely the liberties that Walker's bill would undermine. And, no, it's not "ironic" that a legislative minority uses the rules of procedure to block legislation -- it's SOP in any legislature in the world.

Isn't it interesting that some of those who--rightly--protest the assorted Republican efforts to stymie majority rule in the U.S. Senate are celebrating the Democratic efforts to stymie the same in the Wisconsin Senate?

It's only "interesting" if you're a dense, lazy columnist. In the real world, nobody objected to the idea that Senate Republicans might filibuster. We criticized the abuse of the filibuster -- the fact that 60 votes were suddenly needed to pass even uncontroversial legislation. Klein knows it was unprecedented, and that it virtually shut down the chamber at times.

An election was held in Wisconsin last November. The Republicans won. In a democracy, there are consequences to elections and no one, not even the public employees unions, are exempt from that.

Democracy rests on two principles: majority rule and the protection of minority rights. Also, only 25.9 percent of registered Wisconsin voters cast ballots for Scott Walker last year, compared with 23.1 percent who favored Tom Barrett. Yes, the right loves claiming that a low-turnout midterm election provided some obvious mandate, but only someone with weak critical thinking skills would simply buy that claim.

Finally, consider how Klein pictures the labor movement in general:

Public employees unions are an interesting hybrid. Industrial unions are organized against the might and greed of ownership. Public employees unions are organized against the might and greed...of the public?

Unions, whether public or private, are organized for the interests of their members. It's not about being a bulwark against anything -- collective bargaining simply creates a level playing field between workers and capital. Absent that relative parity, our labor markets are rife with failures.

Protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square Show Solidarity with Wisconsin Workers' Uprising

2011-02-19T12:05:00.000-08:00

They say a picture's worth a thousand words...

Thanks to Zach Farley for the pic.

During the past 3 months, we've seen mass protests against varied injustices in Albania, Algeria, Bahrain, Bolivia, Britain, Djibouti, Egypt, Greece, Haiti, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Syria, Thailand, Tunisia, Wisconsin and Yemen.

Did I forget any?

9 Things You Need to Know About the Uprising in Wisconsin

2011-02-18T13:17:00.000-08:00

What's happening in Wisconsin is not complicated. At the beginning of this year, the state was on course to end 2011 with a budget surplus of $120 million dollars. As Ezra Klein explained, newly elected GOP Governor Scott Walker then " signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit."

Walker then used the deficit he created as a premise to assault his state's public employees using a law cooked up by a right-wing advocacy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC likes to fly beneath the radar, but I described the organization in a 2005 article as "the connective tissue that links state legislators with right-wing think tanks, leading anti-tax activists and corporate money."

This has nothing to do with the state's fiscal picture, and everything to do with destroying the last bastion of unionism in the American economy: public employees.

As Addie Stan writes on AlterNet's front page today:

Walker is carrying out the wishes of his corporate master, David Koch, who calls the tune these days for Wisconsin Republicans. Walker is just one among many Wisconsin Republicans supported by Koch Industries -- run by David Koch and his brother, Charles -- and Americans For Prosperity, the astroturf group founded and funded by David Koch. The Koch brothers are hell-bent on destroying the labor movement once and for all.

Consider:

Last year, more working people belonged to a union in the public sector (7.9 million) than in the private (7.4 million), despite the fact that corporate America employs five times the number of wage-earners.
37 percent of government workers belong to a union, compared with just 7 percent of private-sector employees.
Whether in the public or private sector, union workers earn, on average, 20 percent more than their non-unionized counterparts. They also have richer retirement and health benefits -- the “union compensation premium” rises to almost 30 percent when you include those bennies.

That workers can still negotiate from a position of strength somewhere in the US is simply unacceptable to the right, and that's what this is about.

As you might expect, the tool they're using is a pack full of lies and distortions about public employees. Here are some answers to those falsehoods:

Public sector workers have, on average, more experience and higher levels of education than their counterparts in the private sector (they are twice as likely to have a college degree).
When you adjust for those factors, they make, on average, 4 percent less than their private-sector counterparts.
Like any group of workers with a high union density, they have better benefits, on average. But even including those benefits, state and local employees still make less in total compensation than they would doing the same work in the private sector.
Public employees' pensions account for just 6 percent of state budgets.
In 2007, the average pension for a public sector worker was $22,000. Not exactly caviar dreams.
Many public employees are not eligible for Social Security -- those pensions, and whatever they can put away on their own, is all that they'll have in their golden years.

(Unless otherwise indicated, you can find links to the data for all of the above, in my piece, "Right-Wingers Using Public Employees as 21st-Century Welfare Queens.")

The Right has made great political progress getting Americans to ask the question: "How come that guy’s getting what I don’t have?" It’s the crux of the politics of grievance. Progressives need to get Americans to ask a different question: "What’s keeping me from getting what that guy has?" At least part of the answer is the Right’s decades-long assault on private sector workers’ ability to organize, and the latest battle is being waged in Wisconsin.

Woman Targeted in FBI Raid on "Anonymous" Hackers' Group Tells her Tale

2011-02-11T14:08:00.001-08:00

The FBI is apparently quite serious about prosecuting the hackers' group known only as Anonymous for a string of attacks it launched on companies that severed ties with Wikileaks.

Gawker has an interview with a 19 year-old California woman who was the target of one of the FBI's raids.

In it, we learn that:

* The FBI thinks Anonymous is a traditional, hierarchical enterprise, and are trying, perhaps futilely, to "cut the head off the snake."

* They have the idea that the group's members all have Guy Fawkes masks in their closets.

* It's not a good idea to call your little sister a revolutionary, because you never know when the FBI will raid your house at 6 am and take it seriously.

* Her father's really pissed.

Well worth the read, which is here.

The Gipper Goes to CPAC

2011-02-10T18:40:00.000-08:00

Here is a giant cake in the shape of a bust of Ronald Reagan. It's at CPAC!

And note the spelling of the word "Berlin" on the little Berlin Wall that accents this monstrosity.

Married GOPer Talked "Family Values" While Trying to Hook Up on Craig's List

2011-02-09T14:51:00.000-08:00

It's almost axiomatic that the more frequently a social conservative talks a about promoting "family values," the more likely he or she is to stray from those values, and the only question is whether they're just having a plain old vanilla affair with a member of the opposite sex or go for diapers, auto-asphyxiation in wet-suits or raw-dogging male prostitutes while high on meth.

Sadly, at least as far as our Schadenfreude needs go, the taste's of the latest (alleged) member of this club run pretty vanilla.

Gawker:

Rep. Christopher Lee is a married Republican congressman serving the 26th District of New York. But when he trolls Craigslist's "Women Seeking Men" forum, he's Christopher Lee, "divorced" "lobbyist" and "fit fun classy guy." One object of his flirtation told us her story.

On the morning of Friday, January 14, a single 34-year-old woman put an ad in the "Women for Men" section of Craigslist personals. "Will someone prove to me not all CL men look like toads?" she asked, inviting "financially & emotionally secure" men to reply.
...
By email, Lee identified himself as a 39-year-old divorced lobbyist and sent a PG picture to the woman from the ad. (In fact, Lee is married and has one son with his wife. He's also 46.)

None of this would even be of interest, of course, except for the fact that, as Maureen O'Connor notes, the Rep's "support for 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' and vote to reject federal abortion funding suggests a certain comfort with publicly scrutinizing others' sex lives."

Anyway, the Congressman says his email account must have been hacked, to which Occam replied, 'maybe, but I'm guessing that you just got busted trawling for some strange on Craigslist.'

Update: Lee, via twitter: "I am announcing that I have resigned my seat in Congress effective immediately.” Surprising -- did nobody tell him that It's OK If You're a Republican?

Ron Paul Invites Neo-Confederate to Testify About Federal Reserve Before Congress

2011-02-09T13:20:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul has long dodged allegations that he (or at least his staffers) has connections to white supremacists. (I have expressed some reason to be skeptical about this notion, but at the very least he's extremely careless in terms of whom he chooses to associate with.)

Anyway, that makes this little exchange, flagged by Oliver Willis, all the more interesting:

The ranking Democrat on a House panel overseeing the Federal Reserve on Wednesday accused a witness invited by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) of being affiliated with a “hate group.”

The first meeting of the House Financial Services Committee’s subcommittee on domestic monetary policy had a tense moment when Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) questioned the background of Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo.

Clay went after DiLorenzo, an economic professor at Loyola University invited to testify by Paul, for his connections with the League of the South, which has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “neo-Confederate” group. The league identifies DiLorenzo as an “affiliated scholar” of its League of the South Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History.

“After reviewing your work and the so-called message you employ, I still do not understand you being invited to testify today on the unemployment situation,” Clay said. “But I do know that I have no questions for you.”

Oliver adds some background:

The League of the South is a neo-Confederate group that advocates for a second Southern secession and a society dominated by “European Americans.” The league believes the “godly” nation it wants to form should be run by an “Anglo-Celtic” (read: white) elite that would establish a Christian theocratic state and politically dominate blacks and other minorities. Originally founded by a group that included many Southern university professors, the group lost its Ph.D.s as it became more explicitly racist. The league denounces the federal government and northern and coastal states as part of “the Empire,” a materialist and anti-religious society.

Maybe the GOP should re-brand itself as the Confederate Party.

Hackers Reveal BofA's Strategy Against Wikileaks: Disinformation, Intimidation and Sabotage

2011-02-09T12:34:00.000-08:00

Bank of America has long insisted that it's not sweating the exposure of its internal operations that Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange promised in interviews last year, an exposure that just might bring the financial giant to its knees (or not -- nobody on the outside knows what Wikileaks is holding).

But internal emails from a cyber-security firm paint a very different picture. BofA officials were sufficiently worried about the potential revelations to have a law-firm it retained develop a plan to discredit and disrupt Wikileaks through a variety of nefarious means.

The emails, from HBGary Federal, were made public after the company obtained the names of several members of the hackers' group known as Anonymous, and the latter retaliated. (One should not mess with hackers, at least if one doesn't want his or her dirty laundry aired in public.)

The story, which reads like a cheap cyber-thriller, comes to us from Tech Herald, via Digby. It begins with Assange's November 29 claim that Wikileaks would "take down" a major bank. On November 30, BofA officials held a late-night conference call trying to figure out "how to get the jump on WikiLeaks." They set up a meeting with the law firm of Hunton and Williams, which asked the data security firms to come up with a plan. Here are some bits from Tech Herald's write-up

The proposal starts with an overview of WikiLeaks, including some history and employee statistics. From there it moves into a profile of Julian Assange and an organizational chart. The chart lists several people, including volunteers and actual staff.

One of those listed as a volunteer, Salon.com columnist, Glenn Greenwald, was singled out by the proposal. Greenwald, previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York, has been a vocal supporter of Bradley Manning, who is alleged to have given diplomatic cables and other government information to WikiLeaks. He has yet to be charged in the matter.

Greenwald became a household name in December when he reported on the “inhumane conditions” of Bradley Manning’s confinement at the Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia. Since that report, Greenwald has reported on WikiLeaks and Manning several times.

“Glenn was critical in the Amazon to OVH transition,” the proposal says, referencing the hosting switch WikiLeaks was forced to make after political pressure caused Amazon to drop their domain.

[Earlier drafts of the proposal and an email from Aaron Barr used the word "attacked" over "disrupted" when discussing the level of support.]

“Despite the publicity, WikiLeaks is NOT in a healthy position right now,” an early draft of the proposal noted. “Their weakness [sic] are causing great stress in the organization which can be capitalized on.”

Some of the things mentioned as potential proactive tactics include feeding the fuel between the feuding groups, disinformation, creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization, and submitting fake documents to WikiLeaks and then calling out the error.

“Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed to not be secure they are done. Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward.”

Digby added that "one part [of the scheme] certainly worked: the media lemmings all ran toward the shiny object without even considering the effect on their own profession and its alleged mission to expose the truth."

I would wonder if the "professional pressure" they planned to exert on supporters was brought to bear on some of the most powerful journalists in the country who seemed to be offended by the very idea that governments and wealthy institutions should have their lies exposed to the public, but sadly, I doubt it. Those people clearly behaved instinctively, siding with the powerful with whom they identify. The governing elites have nothing to fear from the mainstream press.

More here from Marcy Wheeler.

Fox News Crew Severely Beaten by Mubarak's Thugs in Cairo

2011-02-03T12:54:00.000-08:00

Deadline.com reports:

FOX News Channel's veteran foreign correspondent Greg Palkot and his camerman Olaf Wiig have suffered severe injuries in Cairo while covering the unrest in the Egypt capital. Palkot was badly beaten and Wiig has a possible broken jaw after attacked by pro-Hosni Mubarak supporters yesterday. Both were hospitalized overnight.

Fox, out of concern for their crew's safety, didn't report the incident until their crew was released from the hospital.

Deadline.com also notes that Wiig was taken hostage for two weeks in the Gaza strip in 2007.

We'll see if the right-wingers who shamelessly delighted in the pummeling of CNN's Anderson Cooper express more sympathy for a Fox news crew.

Here's video:

Jimmy Carter Target of Malicious Lawsuit for Authoring Palestine: Peace not Apartheid

2011-02-02T10:44:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Carter has long been the target of what MJ Rosenberg calls "the Status Quo Lobby" (he's right to deny them the "pro-Israel" label).

Now an enterprising attorney has filed a class-action suit against the former president -- and publisher Simon and Shuster -- that can only be seen as an ideologically-driven nuisance lawsuit.

From Tablet:

Yesterday, a class action (download here) was filed in Manhattan federal court accusing Jimmy Carter and Simon & Schuster of consumer fraud for the former president’s 2006 book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. It alleges that the author and publisher marketed the book as a totally factual account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in part based on the credibility of a former president and key character in the history, but that the book actually contains “demonstrable falsehoods, omissions, and knowing misrepresentations designed to promote Carter’s agenda of anti-Israel propaganda.”

Simon & Schuster, the case alleges, has refused to issue corrections despite “irrefutable proof” that key reporting in the book, which is extremely unpopular with many pro-Israel groups, does not tell the truth about events such as the 1949 and 1967 ceasefires and the 2000 negotiations at Camp David. (The book was controversial when it was published in part because of the title’s deployment of the a-word, which has since become a much more accepted part of the discourse.)

Tablet's Marc Tracy indulges in some understatement when he writes, "the allegations in the suit remind me most of the debate you and your family likely have every year at Seder. It’s a legitimate debate, but probably not one most successfully or productively litigated in court."

In the heated debate over the Israel-Palestine conflict, there are two wholly separate sets of "facts" at play -- Jenin was or wasn't a massacre; the Palestinians walked away from a great offer at Camp David, or they didn't; either one or the other side has refused to negotiate in good faith -- and the gap between those narratives often drives intense animosity between the two camps.

I can only conclude that the attorneys in this case have embraced the Status Quo Lobby's narratives so completely that they believe they are, in fact, objective truths that can be litigated in an American court. In other words, they believe their own side's spin -- and, let's be honest, both sides do it -- is God's own wisdom.

Back when the controversy about his book first hit, Carter told the Associated Press, "I have been called a liar, I have been called an anti-Semite [and] I have been called a bigot. I have been called a plagiarist. I have been called a coward. Those kind of accusations, they concern me, but they don't detract from the fact the book is accurate and is needed." He added, "Not one of the critics of my book has contradicted any of the basic premises -- that is the horrible persecution and oppression of the Palestinian people and secondly that the formula for finding peace in the Middle East already exists."

The vilification of the former president is ironic. Rabbi Michael Lerner, one of the few voices in the Jewish community who supported Carter, called him "the best friend the Jews ever had as president of the United States."

Carter does not claim that Israel is an apartheid state. What he does claim is that the West Bank will be a de facto apartheid situation if the current dynamics represented by the construction of the wall, by the passage of discriminatory legislation and by the inclusion of racists in the leadership -- most recently that of pro-ethnic cleansing Israeli Cabinet member Avigdor Lieberman -- continue. The only way to avoid Israel turning into an apartheid state is a genuine peace accord.

Obviously, if the plaintiffs were to prevail, it'd set a horrible precedent. Publishers would have every reason to avoid offering controversial content for fear of litigation, and the chilling effect on our discourse would be significant.

But that's the point -- to muzzle criticism of the Israeli government's policies -- to make such discussion appear beyond the pale.

Wing-Nuts: Children of Undocumented Immigrants Can't Be Prosecuted for Crimes

2011-02-01T15:55:00.000-08:00

It's fun to take what passes for an "argument" on the far right to its logical conclusion. The exercise tends to show just how fallacious their claims really are.

Consider efforts to strip citizenship from the children of undocumented immigrants. You may like it, or you may hate it, but a simple objective truth is that the principle is not only enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, it's also a "super-precedent" -- a legal doctrine that has been tested and affirmed in a long series of Supreme Court cases.

The text of the Amendment, ratified in 1868, is straightforward: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

So how do the legislation's sponsors get around that? As Valeria Fernández reports, "the authors of the Arizona bills contend that undocumented immigrants are not 'subject to the jurisdiction' of this country, so their children cannot automatically become citizens."

Now, "subject to the jurisdiction of" is there for a simple reason: the children of foreign diplomatic staff are not granted automatic citizenship.

But saying that the children of undocumented immigrants are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States is a wildly ludicrous proposition. Let's define the word "jurisdiction":

–noun
1. the right, power, or authority to administer justice by hearing and determining controversies.

2. power; authority; control: He has jurisdiction over all American soldiers in the area.

3. the extent or range of judicial, law enforcement, or other authority: This case comes under the jurisdiction of the local police.

4. the territory over which authority is exercised: All islands to the northwest are his jurisdiction.

Now, I won't pretend to fully understand the legal "argument" of those pushing these measures, but as far as I can tell, they're saying that because these humans didn't have their paperwork in order they are not 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the U.S.

But "jurisdiction" means, clearly, having legal authority over a geographic area.

So, taken to its logical conclusion, what they're saying is that children born to unauthorized immigrants are not subject to the laws of the United States. Which means they can't be prosecuted for crimes, including, of course, immigration offenses.

Be Very Afraid!

2011-02-01T14:08:00.000-08:00

The WaPo tells me that "lawmakers want more security on northern border" -- you know, because we're no pissing away enough cash militarizing the Southern one.

They're scared for good reason:

A new government report says that less than 1 percent of the 4,000-mile U.S.-Canada border is considered under the operational control of U.S. border officials.

Seriously, folks, Al Qaeda could smuggle across some Poutine of Mass Destruction. Could happen.

Shocking-but-True: I Will Now Defend the Media

2011-02-01T10:04:00.000-08:00

Steve Benen is a guy who's generally right, but I think he's off target with this one:

Four federal district courts have heard challenges testing the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Two judges concluded the law is legally permissible, two came to the opposite conclusion.

He then takes a look at how the media reported these decisions and concludes:

The coverage discrepancy is overwhelming. One of the two pro-reform rulings didn't even make the Washington Post's A section at all. In literally every instance, the Republican-friendly rulings generated more coverage, with better placement, and longer stories than the rulings preferred by Democrats.A court upholding a law passed by Congress is simply not as big of a story as a court overturning a law passed by the legislature.

The problem here is that a court upholding a law passed by Congress is simply not as significant a story as a court overturning a law passed by the legislature. The courts are supposed to defer to Congress in any close call. It's called judicial restraint.

Man bites dog is legitimately a bigger story than dog bites man, and I think that, rather than the typical bias towards Republican ideas, is what's going on here.

Wingnuts Propose Mandate for Gun Ownership; End Up Supporting Health-Care Reform

2011-02-01T09:44:00.000-08:00

Taegan Goddard's on wingnut watch:

"Five South Dakota lawmakers have introduced legislation that would require any adult 21 or older to buy a firearm "sufficient to provide for their ordinary self-defense," the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reports.

The bill would give people six months to acquire a firearm -- "suitable to their temperament, physical capacity, and preference" -- after turning 21.

Rep. Hal Wick (R) "is sponsoring the bill and knows it will be killed. But he said he is introducing it to prove a point that the federal health care reform mandate passed last year is unconstitutional."

These people are so confused.

As I wrote last week, what they're proposing was in fact the law of the land in the early days of the republic.

In 1792, none other than George Washington signed the Uniform Militia Act, a law requiring every white male citizen to purchase a whole basket of items – “a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein” – from private companies.

Many of the Founders served in the 2nd Congress, yet no Constitutional issues were raised at the time.

Conservatives have dismissed the relevance of that law to the current health-care debate because it was passed under the auspices of the Constitution's militia clauses, not, like the ACA, under the Commerce Clause.

So along comes these yahoos to show, yet again, that they haven't the slightest grasp of either American history or what the Constitution does and does not permit the government to do. Because either mandating that citizens buy a gun is irrelevant to today's debate as it doesn't fall under the Commerce Clause, or, if the opposite is true, it discredits their whole argument against the insurance reforms.

How Not To Say Dumb Things About Egypt

2011-02-01T09:10:00.000-08:00

Sarthanapalos' Guide on How Not to Say Stupid Stuff About Egypt (ht: Angry Black Lady) is all worthwhile, but I'd be happy if the pundits wrapped their respective heads around just this one item:

The Muslim Brotherhood is not on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list. It renounced violence in the 1970s and has no active militia.

Of course people like Frank Gaffney and Pam Geller are going to freak out at the prospect of scary Mooslims exerting some influence over their own societies. Fish swim, birds fly, and unhinged Islamophobes vilify Islam with false, or stunningly simplistic narratives.

But it is dismaying just how prone the media are to accept these arguments -- the pump of paranoia is well primed. It's not surprising, mind you, just dismaying.

On CNN yesterday, Anderson Cooper (I think) actually asked Fareed Zacharia whether Egypt may be following the course of the Iranian Revolution.

Neocon Zombies Never Die

2011-01-31T10:51:00.000-08:00

Paul Campos at LGM:

Obama invites Elliot Abrams and Robert Kagan to the White House

To discuss what “we” should do about “our” Egypt problem.

The good folks at Commentary are in ecstasy.

These lunatics can never fuck up the world enough to make the denizens of the Beltway stop taking them seriously.

The AP's Mendacious Jihad Against Social Security Continues

2011-01-31T10:38:00.000-08:00

Following last week's wildly dishonest editorial-passing-as-a-news-story from the Associated Press, we get this, courtesy of Dean Baker:

A headline of an AP article (featured on Yahoo's website) told readers that: "Social Security posting $600B deficit over 10 years." Actually, the Social Security program is projected to run a surplus in every year of the next decade, adding more than $1.3 trillion to its trust fund, as people with access to the Social Security Trustees Report know.

The story was written by Stephen Olhemacher, who penned last week's op-ed. He's also a repeat offender when it comes to carrying water for the Corporate Right, as I noted over the weekend.

This is simple: the "deficit" described by the AP represents the difference between the tax revenues that will be collected over the next decade and the dollars that will be paid out in benefits over that period.

What they're not including is the interest that will be earned on $2.5 trillion in T-Bills sitting in the Social Security Trust Fund (which came in at 5.1 percent in 2008, and 4.8 percent in 2009). That interest means that the fund will continue to grow for years after current benefit payments exceed current tax receipts -- it's projected to reach $4.2 trillion in a decade.

You've got to be pretty dishonest to omit (or underplay) that in your reporting, but that now appears to be a pattern with Ohlemacher and the AP.

GOPer: Mubarak's Our Bastard

2011-01-29T18:21:00.000-08:00

It was inevitable that those democracy-loving neocons would turn into the most cynical of realists the second democracy-promotion broke out in an allied country led by an authoritarian regime, and they certainly haven't disappointed.

This latest example, via Think Progress, is ... unhelpful, to say the least:

Now, yet another high-profile Republican is disparaging the protest movement and openly siding with Egypt’s dictator. In a statement posted on his website last night, GOP Conference Chair Rep. Thaddeus McCotter wrote that “the Egyptian demonstrations are not the equivalent of Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution” and that “America must stand with her ally Egypt to preserve an imperfect government capable of reform.” He even went as far as to say that “freedom’s radicalized enemies are subverting Egypt” with the demonstrations ...

Worth 1,000 Words

2011-01-29T15:15:00.000-08:00

An Arabic-speaking friend translates the text: "From this day there is no government -- I am the government."

Update: And yet another Arabic-speaker tells me that based on the comments left at the site that originally posted the pic, this may not have been taken in Egypt. Oh well -- it's a good picture either way.

HT: Ali Gharib via email.

Finally, a Judge Promises an Independent Investigation into the Crimes of 9/11

2011-01-29T14:41:00.000-08:00

Yes, I tricked you into reading about Latin America:

SANTIAGO, Chile - Chilean judicial officials vowed Thursday to investigate the death of President Salvador Allende for the first time, 37 years after the socialist leader was found shot through the head with a machine-gun during a withering attack on the presidential palace.

Allende died during the Sept. 11, 1973, coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who governed as a dictator until March 11, 1990, and died in 2006. Authorities have never before opened a criminal probe of Allende's death, which many believe to have been a suicide.

Chile's truth commission reported in 1991 that the Pinochet dictatorship killed 3,797 people. Most of those cases have been investigated, leading to human rights trials for some 600 military figures and a small number of civilian collaborators. About 150 have been convicted, including feared secret police chief Miguel Contreras, now imprisoned for dozens of crimes against humanity.

But 726 deaths were never investigated, including Allende's.

Beatriz Pedrals, a prosecutor in the appellate court in Santiago, said she decided to probe all the cases arising from the truth commission report that were never prosecuted.

I think we're the only country obsessed with looking forward and not back -- we're certainly prone to letting the powerful off the hook for human rights abuses.

AP's Wildly Dishonest "Report" on Social Security Was Penned by a Repeat Offender

2011-01-29T14:11:00.000-08:00

Here's Monica Potts over at Tapped:

Associate Press reporter Stephen Ohlemacher has a dour piece about Social Security. I'll leave it to AlterNet's Joshua Holland to describe what's wrong with the piece, but I just wanted to point out that Ohlemacher is the same reporter who wrote an awful piece in April about how so many Americans don'tpay taxes. That piece was so problematic because, though it asserted that a two-child family with a mortgage making less than the median income was unlikely to pay any taxes, it ignored the fact that a great deal of that came from temporary tax breaks that were part of the stimulus. At the time, I didn't think there was a particular bias Ohlemacher had, just a bias as to who he talks to.

Update: I realize now that I wrote about that awful report as well.

Wake Me Up When the Next Civil War Begins

2011-01-29T13:09:00.000-08:00

The pace at which the Tea Parties' armchair Constitutional scholars are introducing blatantly un-Constitutional legislation is quite impressive.

Here's Ian Millhiser over at Think Progress with a run-down of what should be called Virginia's 'We Never Fought a Civil War Over This Crap Act':

In response to the landmark Affordable Care Act, numerous right-wing state lawmakers have introduced unconstitutional bills attempting to nullify this federal law. Earlier this week, however, the Virginia House of Delegates went even further, passing a sweeping nullification bill that directly conflicts with numerous Supreme Court decisions:

All goods produced or manufactured, whether commercially or privately, within the boundaries of the Commonwealth that are held, maintained, or retained within the boundaries of the Commonwealth shall not be deemed to have traveled in interstate commerce and shall not be subject to federal law, federal regulation, or the authority of the Congress of the United States under its constitutional power to regulate commerce.

It is all but certain that the Supreme Court will uphold the Affordable Care Act under its existing precedents, but this specific question has yet to reach the justices themselves. The Virginia House’s attempt to prevent the federal government from regulating locally produced goods, by contrast, is a direct assault on the judiciary. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that Congress does not simply have the power to regulate commerce that crosses state lines, it also has the power to regulate wholly intrastate matters that “substantially affect interstate commerce.”

The Virginia Legislature has pulled this stunt before. In 1956, Virginia lawmakers objected to a different Supreme Court decision — Brown v. Board of Education. Rather than acknowledging that they are bound by the Constitution, however, these lawmakers instead enacted a “resolution of interposition” claiming that they were “duty bound” to defy the Supreme Court

Will the Northern states be forced to once again invade and occupy Virginia and the other handful of states now rebelling against subsidized health-care?

PS: If you missed it, check out my column from last week, "Republicans Say Everything the Dems Pass Is Unconstitutional -- Even Policies They've Championed for Decades"

U.S. Has Greater Inequality than Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen

2011-01-29T12:33:00.000-08:00

That's according to a post over at Naked Capitalism (which you should book-mark or add to your RSS feed if you haven't already):

Egyptian, Tunisian and Yemeni protesters all say that inequality is one of the main reasons they’re protesting.

However, the U.S. actually has much greater inequality than in any of those countries.

Specifically, the “Gini Coefficient” – the figure economists use to measure inequality – is higher in the U.S.

[Click for larger image]

Gini Coefficients are like golf – the lower the score, the better (i.e. the more equality).

According to the CIA World Fact Book, the U.S. is ranked as the 42nd most unequal country in the world, with a Gini Coefficient of 45.

In contrast:

Tunisia is ranked the 62nd most unequal country, with a Gini Coefficient of 40.
Yemen is ranked 76th most unequal, with a Gini Coefficient of 37.7.
And Egypt is ranked as the 90th most unequal country, with a Gini Coefficient of around 34.4.

Note to Sarah Palin: Your Miraculous Free-Market Donuts Wouldn't Exist Without Public Dollars

2011-01-29T12:13:00.000-08:00

Here's Benen, with the recap of Palin's 'WTF' moment:

You know what we need is 'a spudnut moment.' And here's where I'm going with this, Greta.... Well, the spudnut shop in Richland, Washington -- it's a bakery, it's a little coffee shop that's so successful, 60-some years, generation to generation, a family-owned business not looking for government to bail them out and to make their decisions for them. It's just hard-working, patriotic Americans in this shop.

"We need more spudnut moments in America. And I wish that President Obama would understand, in that heartland of America, what it is that really results in the solutions that we need to get this economy back on the right track. It's a shop like that.

And here comes reality to mug the Alaska Quitbull, courtesy of one of Digby's readers:

Palin's quirky invocation of the "Spudnut Shop" here in Richland Washington as an example of American "can-doism" is far more ironic than you and most of your readers likely realize.

The fact is, the town of Richland was literally built by the federal government as a part of the Manhattan Project. All of the houses that surround the Spudnut shop were built by the Army. To this day, the only employer in Richland of any consequence is the Department of Energy and the contractors that work on DoE contracts at the Hanford site, just north of Richland. As a result, virtually all of the Spudnut shop's customers are paid by tax dollars. Those that aren't are retirees, drawing government pensions and social security.

Were it not for government spending, the Spudnut shop would be bankrupt in a week.

And one of Andrew Sullivan's readers weighs in as well:

The Spudnut shop Palin speaks of is half a mile from my house in Richland, WA and it's really good (the secret is potato flour in the batter). She may not realize that the federal government buys most of those doughnuts: the annual budget for cleanup of the nearby Hanford Nuclear Reservation is more than $2 billion, employing about 11,000 workers, and spudnuts are the pastry of choice at meetings there.

Yes, those public sector workers getting laid off left and right buy donuts, as well as other goods and services that keep private firms like Spudnuts in potato flour.

Another Wingnut Constitutional Scholar Screws the Pooch

2011-01-28T15:02:00.000-08:00

As I argue over at AlterNet today, "Conservatives have come to use the Constitution as a crutch, avoiding debates on the merits of various proposals by asserting, with a broad wave of the hand, that whatever the policy in question may be, it's all illegitimate."

Here's a fine example, courtesy of Think Progress:

In an interview with Streetsblog Capitol Hill, one radical conservative has declared yet another common public good to be unconstitutional: bike paths. In an interview about federal transporation issues, Streetsblog asked Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) about supporting legislation that would support things like bike trails. Hunter responded by saying that he doesn’t “think biking should fall under the federal purview of what the transportation committee is there for. If a state wants to do it, or local municipality, they can do whatever they want to. But no, because you have us mandating bike paths, you don’t want either.”

And the punchline:

STREETSBLOG: But you’re OK with mandating highways?
HUNTER: Absolutely, yeah. Because that’s in the constitution. I don’t see riding a bike the same as driving a car or flying an airplane.

No, I don't even have a clue what he's talking about, but that's OK because the Constitution!

Charles Krauthammer's Wacky Small Government Delusions

2011-01-28T12:27:00.000-08:00

The Hammer sums up the prevailing-but-utterly-false conventional wisdom of the Right:

The November election sent a clear message to Washington: less government, less debt, less spending.

A tip of the hat to Steve Benen, who provided this reality-check with a bit of help from the folks at Gallup:

Last week, Gallup asked respondents to say whether they "favor or oppose cutting government spending" in a variety of areas. A majority opposed cuts to everything -- literally, everything -- except foreign aid. A 52% majority even opposed cuts to funding for the arts. A whopping 67% opposes cuts to education -- which happens to be one of the main targets for congressional Republicans.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, 58 percent of eligible voters simply sat out the mid-terms entirely. So "the message" most voters sent is that they didn't trust the two major parties to solve any of the problems facing the nation, which is quite perceptive of them.

And that "mandate" that Krauthammer and his brethren take as a given is based on the votes of 21.6 percent of the eligible population who went for the GOP in 2010. Contrast that with 18.6 percent of those eligible to vote who "sent a message to Washington" favoring the Dems.

So, among the 41.6 percent who got off their butts and went to the polls, the GOP's spread was 3 percentage points: 21.6 to 18.6 percent.

New Column on the Republicans' Unpopular Health Care Mandate

2011-01-28T10:43:00.000-08:00

I have a piece over at AlterNet looking at the health-care mandate.

That Republicans are relentlessly attacking the constitutionality of what had long been one of their signature ideas for reforming the health-care system -- the individual mandate requiring people to buy insurance or pay a penalty – is a testament to just how far down the rabbit-hole our discourse has gone.

Check it out here.

Oops, That Was Fast

2011-01-27T13:25:00.000-08:00

In the wake of Cablegate, the United States government has drafted a memo detailing strategies to prevent information from being leaked.

I know this, because the memo has been leaked.

HT: Barton Gellman via Twitter.

The Associated Press Packs a Bunch of Lies About Social Security into a News Report

2011-01-27T12:22:00.000-08:00

The insidious ways that conservative narratives bleed into our mainstream economic discourse as objective truths is a dominant theme in my book, and this story by the Associated Press's Stephen Ohlemacher -- ostensibly a piece of reporting rather than opinion -- is one of the most egregious examples I've encountered.

Check out the lede:

Sick and getting sicker, Social Security will run at a deficit this year and keep on running in the red until its trust funds are drained by about 2037, congressional budget experts said Wednesday in bleaker-than-previous estimates.

Is it "sick"? Social Security has $2.5 trillion in T-Bills sitting in a trust fund, is financed through 2037 and if nothing were to change it would still be able to pay out higher benefits than it does today, indefinitely.

Is it getting sicker? Well, the 2000 Social Security Trustees's report (PDF) projected that the trust fund would run out in ... 2037. But the 1997 report (PDF) expected the trust fund to be depleted by 2029 -- 8 years earlier than currently projected. So in that sense, it's "healthier" today than it was 13 years ago.

More from the AP's thinly veiled editorial:

The massive retirement program has been suffering from the effects of the struggling economy for several years. It first went into deficit last year but had been projected to post surpluses for a few more years before permanently slipping into the red in 2016.

This year alone, Social Security will pay out $45 billion more in retirement, disability and survivors' benefits than it collects in payroll taxes, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said.

OK, this is just incredibly dishonest. Let me explain why.

When he says the program is "in the red" what he's talking about is that current tax revenues being paid into the system have fallen below current benefit payments. Which should be unsurprising with wages stagnating and an unemployment rate of 9.4 percent.

But what's unsaid is that the Social Security's revenues aren't limited to current tax receipts, thanks to the interest earned on those T-Bills in the trust fund. They earned 5.1 percent in 2008, and 4.8 percent in 2009.

When you include that earned interest, as any honest reporter must do, the program has not "gone into the red," and -- if we define "going into the red" as total annual outlays exceeding total income, including interest income -- it won't until at least 2018, according to the Trustees' latest report (PDF).

Yes, the Trust Fund grew last year, is growing this year, and will continue to grow for several more years, until it reaches a projected $4.2 trillion dollars.

Back to the AP misinforming the public:

That figure nearly triples - to $130 billion - when the new one-year cut in payroll taxes is included.

Congress has promised to replenish any lost revenue from the tax cut, but that's hardly good news, either, adding to the federal budget deficit. In another sobering estimate, the congressional office said government red ink this year will increase to $1.5 trillion, the most in U.S. history.

Could any ordinary citizen reading that possibly know that, by law, Social Security's financing is separate from the rest of the federal budget, and that the program has not added a single penny to the deficit?

These are two wholly separate issues -- there's Social Security's financing, which has been in surplus since 1983, and then there's the federal budget, which is in deficit because of the downturn, tax breaks showered on the wealthy and trillions in war spending. (Note: unlike the Social Security program, we don't have a War Trust Fund with its own dedicated revenue stream.)

The AP then turns the program's greatest strength into a weakness. Behold the sleight-of-hand:

Social Security has built up a $2.5 trillion surplus since the retirement program was last overhauled in the 1980s. Benefits will be safe until that money runs out. That is projected to happen in 2037 - unless Congress acts in the meantime.

No, Congress could raise taxes to cover the shortfall anytime -- nothing need be done in "the meantime."

But more to the point, this narrative ignores the fact that the Trust Fund had a specific purpose: to ease the glut of baby-boomers entering the system. As I wrote in September, it "was a far-sighted act of governance."

At the time, the oldest boomers were 37 years old, and the youngest were just 19. In 2037, when the fund is projected to be tapped out, the oldest baby boomers still kicking will be 91 and the youngest will be 73 years old. Not to be morbid, but given that the life expectancy of Americans is 78.1 years today, that means that the “glut” of baby-boomers receiving benefits will be receding in the nation’s rearview mirror. In other words, the trust fund will have done exactly what it was intended to do.

This point never seems to wind up in the conversation.

But it gets even worse, as Ohlemacher advances perhaps the most dishonest spin in the entire debate -- that the trust fund is not a huge pile of T-Bills, but just "IOUs" -- that the funds have been "borrowed" by the government.

The $2.5 trillion surplus, however, has been borrowed over the years by the federal government and spent on other programs. In return, the Treasury Department has issued bonds to Social Security, guaranteeing repayment, with interest.

Again, this conflates two wholly separate issues. Let's run it down.

The national debt is (approximately) $14 trillion. None of that debt is a result of Social Security, which is fully funded and has run surpluses for years.

The federal government issued $14 trillion in T-bills to cover its budget shortfalls -- that's the national debt. It exchanged those $14 trillion in T-bills for cash (which it spent on programs other than Social Security).

It must pay back that cash, with interest, as those T-bills are redeemed. So, yes, it borrowed money -- it borrows money by issuing Treasury Bills, which are held by individuals, institutions and governments.

One of those institutions happens to be the Social Security Administration -- $2.5 trillion of those T-Bills were exchanged for cash paid into Social Security by workers (and the interest is earned). Which is good, as it's a safe investment for the surpluses that have been generated. They couldn't just stick those trillions under a mattress.

But those T-Bills could just as easily have been exchanged for cash from China, or from private pension funds -- there would be no difference at all.

That would have happened if there had never been a Social Security program in the United States. The $14 trillion in debt would be exactly the same -- it doesn't matter who holds the T-Bills.

All of the above is why the deficit has nothing to do with SS -- they are two completely separate issues being conflated by the "entitlement crisis" crowd. And no "neutral" reporter should ever write a story that simply carries their water for them.

Asian-American Pol Criticizes Limbaugh's Racism, Gets Rewarded with Racist Death Threat

2011-01-26T16:36:00.000-08:00

Look, there's nothing wrong with right-wing maniacs spewing hyperbole about how liberals are a cancer eating away at the body politique from within, and it's downright uncivil for you to suggest otherwise.

Oppressive, even.

SF Examiner:

An apparent Rush Limbaugh fan faxed death threats to state Sen. Leland Yee on Wednesday morning, according to the senator’s spokesman.

The threats to the San Francisco Democrat came more than a week after Yee asked Limbaugh for an apology for “mocking the Chinese language” and the country’s president on his popular conservative talk radio program, spokesman Adam Keigwin said.

Here, via sfist, is the sweet little note he received, in all it's glory:

Consider, too, just how stupid one has to be to fax a fucking death threat to a politician.

Kucinich Sues Over Brutal Attack by Errant Olive Pit

2011-01-26T12:58:00.001-08:00

I love Dennis as much as the next guy, but readily concede that he is a bit of an odd duck.

Gawker:

Congressman Dennis Kucinich bought a sandwich from the Longworth House Office Building cafeteria in April 2008, and bit into it only to find an unpitted olive that cracked a tooth. This month, he sued the cafeteria for selling "dangerous" sandwiches.The complaint is pretty bare-boned: It claims that in April 2008, Kucinich purchased a "sandwich wrap" from the Longworth Cafeteria with an errant olive pit lurking within, and tragedy ensued.

.... He's suing Restaurant Associates and three other companies involved in running and supplying the cafeteria for $150,000, claiming negligence and breach of implied warranty.

Americans (Including Some Who Might Surprise You) Are Losing Faith in All Major Institutions

2011-01-26T12:45:00.000-08:00

At first blush, this seems like one of those opinion polls quantifying the obvious, but it's actually more interesting than getting confirmation of what we already knew.

Americans have grown less trusting of business in the past year, bucking a global trend of rising confidence in companies, governments and other institutions, according to data to be presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Just 46 per cent of Americans last year said they trusted business, down eight points from 2009, according to research by Edelman, a communications consultancy, which will be presented on Wednesday. Global trust in business was up two points to 56 per cent, by contrast...

This left the US public more sceptical about business than people in Germany or France, both of which saw big rebounds in trust in the corporate sector.
The US also showed increasing mistrust of government, non-governmental organisations and the media, leaving it as the only country polled to see an across-the-board fall in trust.

Again, there's nothing surprising about these findings. An inherent distrust of government is part of the American creed, we lionize business in a way that the citizens of other advanced countries do not, and especially since the 1980s, the corporate right has relentlessly emphasized that "free enterprise" is good and government is the problem.
That's led to our having one of the least regulated economies. Business being what it is, that in turn means our companies are freer to create negative externalities, and they do -- just look at the mortgage mess.
And because our public sector doesn't provide an effective check on private enterprise, people tend to blame all of the institutions that shape our society, and with good reason.
So what's so surprising about these results? The sample. This was a poll that posed these questions to "5,000 educated, wealthy and “well-informed” individuals in 23 countries." In other words, the American elite jas also lost faith in our major institutions. And as Yves Smith (who caught this item) put it over at Naked Capital, "If the people who are likely to be beneficiaries of the status quo aren’t too happy with it, imagine what the average Joe thinks."

Home Prices Are Dropping Again as the Markets Head Toward a Devastating "Double-Dip"

2011-01-26T12:35:00.000-08:00

I have a quick column at AlterNet today looking at the state of the housing market. Short version: not good.

A taste:

According to analysts, the housing markets have taken a downward turn after rebounding during the first months of 2009. Home prices took a sharp hit in November, and have now declined for 4 straight months.

The American housing market now appears to be heading towards a painful “double dip.”The Case-Shiller index of housing values in 20 metropolitan areas -- the highly respected index that predicted the collapse of the housing bubble years before it crashed -- now stands just 3 percent higher than the trough set in April of 2009, and according to Standard and Poor's, the data suggest that “a double-dip could be confirmed before Spring.” It's already here for many cities.

Read the whole thing here.

We Face a Deep Crisis but the Word "Foreclosure" Didn't Appear in Obama's State of the Union Address

2011-01-26T08:46:00.000-08:00

The word "foreclosure" -- and other words related to the housing crisis -- appeared neither in the president's speech, nor in the responses offered up by the GOP and the Very Silly Party (which you can read here).

Of course, pundits griping about how little attention was paid to their favorite issues during the annual SOTU pageant has long been a dull sport. This isn't like that. I'm not complaining about the president saying the wrong things about some domestic policy or ignoring the plight of the people of Tajikistan or wherever.

No, I'm talking about ignoring one of the most painful economic issues facing the country during the worst downturn we've suffered in 70 years. And the context here is that this was billed as a speech that would focus heavily on the economy, articulating a coherent narrative for getting out of the sinkhole.

For his part, Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, the GOP's boy-wonder wonk, was supposed to be giving a "serious" response to that proposal.

And the thing about this crisis is that the worst is yet to come. Because of a lull in foreclosures forced on the banks by the revelation of their fraudulent robo-signings, 250,000 of them that should have been completed last year were effectively shifted to 2011, which is now projected to be a record year for American families losing their homes. That's right, this year's going to be even grimmer than 2009, the current record-holder.

After a period of recovery last year, home values are declining again -- they have for 4 straight months -- in a "double-dip" in the market. That means that more homes are heading under water. And now we're seeing banks walk away from those properties because it's not worth it for them to sell, which is just adding more stress to already vulnerable communities.

All of this is threatening to drag the whole economy down into a double-dip recession. That none of our leaders, spanning the ideological spectrum, felt it worthy of comment, but did think it necessary to prattle on about deficits and earmarks and national greatness, is really telling. It certainly speaks to why more people identify themselves as independents these days than as fans of either of the major parties.

I guess I can understand why all three of them avoided it. Obama was trying to paint a picture of relentless optimism, and his HAMP program -- which was supposed to keep people in their homes -- has been a miserable failure. Paul Ryan has a plan to drive up the deficit by cutting taxes for the wealthy by more than he'd save privatizing Medicare and slashing Social Security. But it doesn't address the foreclosure crisis -- the GOP has no ideas about that. And Michele Bachmann was too busy explaining how the Founding Fathers killed Hitler and put a man on the moon.

But it's a tragedy nonetheless. We have long been sold on the idea that owning a home is an integral part of the American Dream. We've been told we live in an "ownership society." And yet at a time when a record 2.9 million American homes are in foreclosure, our leaders aren't even talking about it.

PS: On a lighter note, Roy Edroso's take on the evening is a snarky must-read. For very good, and decidedly less fluffy analysis, check out the Institute for Policy Study's blog (for which they should come up with a catchy name already), where IPS' experts weighed in on various aspects of the SOTU.

JP Morgan Profits When Americans Go on Food Stamps, but it Sends the Work to India

2011-01-21T16:32:00.001-08:00

Michael at The Economic Collapse:

JP Morgan is the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United States. JP Morgan has contracted to provide food stamp debit cards in 26 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. JP Morgan is paid for each case that it handles, so that means that the more Americans that go on food stamps, the more profits JP Morgan makes.

He cites ABC News:

JP Morgan is the only one today still operating public-assistance call centers overseas. The company refused to say which states had calls routed to India and which ones had calls stay domestically.

So they wrecked the economy, which sent poverty, joblessness and pain skyrocketing.

Now they get these tax dollars to service the destitute -- in addition to the hundreds of billions in free and easy money (and guarantees) that we threw at them with the bailouts.

And now they're taking that money and spending it on foreign labor.

But, of course, they also spent plenty on lobbying -- the lobbying that got them the deregulation that allowed them to wreck the economy in the first place, as well as those sweet bailouts and the trade agreements that facilitated offshoring jobs serving America's poor.

Got all that?

David Brooks Rewrites History to Claim Joe Lieberman Saved Clinton from Impeachment

2011-01-21T16:01:00.001-08:00

It wasn't long ago that Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sex, but David Brooks, the New York Times' cuddly Upper East Side-appropriate Neocon, offered this bizarre defense of Joe Lieberman:

Long before there was an Obamacare debate or the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal, Lieberman played an important role in saving Bill Clinton from impeachment. As momentum for impeachment was growing, Lieberman gave a crucial speech on the Senate floor that scolded Clinton for his behavior but resolutely opposed removing him from office.

I know opinion columns aren't fact-checked, but Clinton's impeachment was just 12 short years ago. Surely someone at the New York Times recalls those heady days, no?

Even more ridiculous was the response of the Times' public editor to DougJ, who called the paper on its revisionism:

President Clinton was impeached in the House of Representatives, but not in the Senate, where Mr. Lieberman represents the State of Connecticut.

I hope this helps your understanding.

The House impeaches a president, and the Senate tries him (or someday her). That's how it works. The Senate tried Clinton and found him not guilty on February 12, 1999.

Lieberman, whose speech regurgitated every right-wing talking-point on the scandal, didn't "save" Clinton -- he was one of more than 50 senators who voted against convicting the president, and that's it.

Will the Tea Party Congress's Hypocrisy Spark More Anti-Government Violence?

2011-01-21T15:29:00.000-08:00

The Tea Partiers' energy swept some of the dimmest ideologues into power, and now they're set up for a crushing letdown as those legislators confront reality and end up reneging on their murkily defined promise to "take our country back."

The next two years will prove eye-opening to the Tea Partiers for a very simple reason: the government doesn't actually spend our tax dollars on what their leaders have told them it does. Only a tiny fraction of the budget is dedicated to foreign aid or assistance for the "underserving" poor. Not only is a lot of "pork" popular -- local projects of various stripes -- but earmarks make up a tiny fraction of the budget. And after several decades of privatization, there's just not a lot of fat to be cut from discretionary spending programs -- hell, non-security discretion spending only makes up around 15 percent or so of the total.

So there won't be $2.5 trillion in budget cuts forthcoming, and if there were it'd be taken out of Social Security benefits and the like -- and 74 percent of Tea Partiers oppose benefit cuts to reduce the deficit (cuts are for thee, not for me!). All they're going to end up getting are minor cuts that piss off liberals -- National Endowment for the Arts, NPR, that kind of thing. And even those modest cuts probably won't get past the Senate.

Add in the inevitable corruption that seems especially prevalent among people who believe government is the problem, and these Tea Party folks are going to be even more disgruntled than they already are.

Now, I enjoy indulging in a bit of Schadenfreude as much as the next guy as Republican leaders twist themselves up in knots when faced with the question of exactly what programs they want to cut. But we should keep in mind that a lot of very passionate right-wingers -- many heavily armed and deeply infused with anti-Government rhetoric -- are no longer going to feel that they have a vehicle for political participation in the Tea Parties.

And that, I fear, may lead to more violence.

Man Wanted for Alleged Rape of Underage Girl Flees to Iraq, Works as a Contractor on Your Tax Dollars

2011-01-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

Adam Weinstein at MoJo:
The excellent contracting watchdog, Ms. Sparky, drew my attention to this developing story: A Norfolk, Virginia, man was arrested on a military base in Iraq and brought back to the States in police custody this weekend for allegedly raping a "juvenile female," then hiding out in the Middle Eastern nation as a contractor for the US government.
For seven years.
Norfolk police say Daniel Phillips, 46, was wanted in connection for the rape of an underage girl in 2004 and 2005, but when warrants were issued for his arrest, he secured employment as a military contractor in a computer-related position and left for Iraq...

Read the rest at Mother Jones

The Word "Rhetoric" Doesn't Mean What the Pundits Think It Means

2011-01-14T12:52:00.001-08:00

As SEK points out over at Lawyers Guns and Money, it's noteworthy that our punditocracy can spend a week blathering about "violent rhetoric" without defining the term -- indeed, while torturing the definition.

"Rhetoric," contrary to popular belief, does not mean "the words one chooses to use to make a point."

SEK teaches rhetoric, so here's the scoop from a pro:

For [messages] to be rhetorical, as per Aristotle in On Rhetoric, they would need to be intended to persuade. Moreover, they would need to be intended to persuade a particular audience to undertake a particular action. This is the rhetorical triangle:

Note the interconnectedness of the speaker and audience. The general problem with discussing rhetoric in the current media environment is that the particularity of the audience is absent. Anyone can read or watch or listen to anything without regard for their relation to the intended audience and without reference to the action whose commission the rhetor intends...
Pointing out that Keith Olbermann associated Fox News with terrorist organizations foreign and domestic does nothing of the sort because the audience and intended effect of his statements is unclear. How unclear?
If we posit his intended audience is liberals and leftists who believe President Obama is a centrist—which strikes me as a fairly accurate assessment—then we need to ask what the intended effect on that particular audience of associating Fox News with al-Qaeda would be. Keeping in mind that we are currently at war with al-Qaeda, are we to believe that Olbermann is encouraging liberals and leftists to join a military-like organization and wage an Afghanistan-type offensive against Fox News? Given that his audience is composed of people who are, generally speaking, opposed to war, does that make any sense? Or is it more likely that he is simply attempting to create an association of like-with-like in which the likeness is supremely unflattering?

SEK goes on to discuss Sarah Palin's now-infamous target map:

Here the intended audience is those who believe President Obama is a radical leftist and associates itself with the center-right. Unlike the audience of liberals and leftists... this audience is more hawkish and more likely to support of an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment.
I would contend that this is an example of “violent rhetoric” not because it contains crosshairs aimed at “the candidates” who represent “the problem” in need of “solution,” and despite the fact that talking about “solving” human beings has a rather untoward history, but because its violence is a product of whose imaginations are being stoked and how it is being done.
The intended effect of this image is not to encourage the assassination of candidates; however, the pathetic appeal being made to this particular audience is certainly intended to stoke their imaginations in ways related to their ideological belief in an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Certainly, this is of no consequence to partisan shouters, but it's nice to at least get our terminology straight.

GOP Has No Mandate on Health-Care Repeal, Taxes, Spending or Anything Else

2011-01-07T16:39:00.000-08:00

Despite the fact that it was entirely predictable -- one has had plenty of time to prepare oneself for the sanctimony -- the triumphalism coming from the newly ascendant GOP leadership is still stunningly annoying. You can't swing a dead donkey these days without hitting some Tea Partier newcomer to DC saying that the "American people have spoken," or that "the people sent a clear message that they want to do away with Obama-care."

But here's a memo from the real world: according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations*, 21.6 percent of eligible voters cast ballots for the GOP in 2010. Yes, a bit more than a fifth. Contrast that with 18.6 percent of those eligible to vote who "sent a message to Washington" favoring the Dems.

So, among the 41.6 percent who got off their butts and went to the polls, the GOP's spread was 3 percentage points: 21.6 to 18.6 percent.

For reference, Obama won with the support of 32.6 percent of eligible voters in 2008.

Another 1.5 percent cast votes for various third-party and independent candidates, "sending the message" that they didn't think much of either parties. If you add in the 58 percent who just stayed home, then you have the biggest group of Americans by far -- those who didn't think their vote would make a difference either way (that's the most commonly cited reason for not voting).

That tracks with the latest Gallup party ID numbers. Contrary to those in the GOP who boast of having won some sweeping mandate, fewer Americans identify themselves as Republicans than as Democrats today. But the Dems don't have cause to celebrate -- identification with their party is at its lowest point in 22 years and the greatest number of eligible voters say that they're independents (even though most of them aren't really that independent).

But what about those "divisive" health-care reforms? "Today we are taking the first step in fulfilling a key promise to the American people," said Rep. David Dreier, R-California, as he introduced the bill to repeal. Well, Gallup tells us that 54 percent of the American people aren't down with the GOP's "solution" -- pulling the plug on the new law. 46 percent favor it, 40 percent oppose it and 14 percent are flummoxed by the whole issue and don't know what to say.

But that misses a key part of the story about public opinion and health-care reform. Just a week earlier, a CNN/ Opinion Dynamics poll asked a slightly different question -- whether respondents "favored" or "opposed" the law. They got somewhat similar numbers: 50 percent opposed; 43 percent in favor and 7 percent undecided. But here's the really key point: among those who opposed the reforms, a significant number didn't like them because they weren't liberal enough.

Favor 43%
Oppose, too liberal 37%
Oppose, not liberal enough 13%

This is really important to keep in mind when conservatives start blathering on about the "will of the people" -- a majority either favor the Dems' health-care reforms or oppose them because they're too friendly to the insurance companies, leave millions without coverage and don't do enough to get costs under control. That's anything but a mandate for the GOP.

* I used this projected turnout estimate, along with these exit polls to get the 2010 figures. Obviously, not all the votes have been counted yet. Here are the turnout numbers and the exit polls I used for 2008.

Missouri Republican: Street Signs, DMV Tests Should Be In English Because People Hate Spanish

2011-01-07T14:31:00.000-08:00

The GOP's vaunted minority outreach efforts are continuing apace in the new Congress.

TPM:

Missouri House Speaker Steve Tilley wants to end multilingual DMV tests, and state Rep. John Cauthorn agrees: "The average guy on the street hates Spanish, and it is everywhere."
According to Rudi Keller of the Columbia Daily-Tribune Tilley (R-Perryville) said this week that he wants the state to require anyone testing for a Missouri driver's license to pass the test in English. He explained: "How many times do you drive down the road and see the signs in other forms than English? I have been all around the state, and people think it is a common-sense issue and that we should institute it, and we are elected by the people to be their voice, and that is what we intend to do."

¡Ay, caramba! These folks are some serious bigots. Entertainingly, Cauthorn represents Mexico, Missouri.

On a serious note, the English-only crowd proves definitively that hard-liners' claim that they're all fine and good with legal immigration and only have a problem with those who break the law is a big, fat lie. Studies have shown that the group that avails itself of government forms in foreign languages more than any other are older, first-generation legalpermanent residents -- these English-only provisions' primary effect is to inconvenience grandmas and grandpas who ae naturalized citizens or hold valid green cards.

It's also worth pointing out that the comprehensive immigration reform proposals shot down by people like John Cauthorn all required proficiency in English as a pre-requisite for legalization. But they demagogued those proposals as "amnesty," thereby working to maintain a pool of over ten million unauthorized immigrants.

Back to the Future: Obama Taps the "MVP" of Bill Clinton's Economic Team

2011-01-07T13:45:00.001-08:00

Obama has appointed Gene Sperling, whom Bill Clinton called the "MVP" of his economic team, to head the National Economic Council. The news should bring no joy to the hearts of progressives.

The appointment has drawn some controversy because Sperling was paid almost a million dollars working part-time for Goldman Sachs -- he becomes yet another in a long line of advisors with cozy ties to Wall Street.

But I have to concur with Dean Baker's view that while that certainly looks bad, it's not the primary reason to look at the appointment with skepticism. Baker:

The primary issue is that Sperling thought, and may still think, that the policies that laid the basis for the economic collapse were just fine.
Sperling saw nothing wrong with the stock market bubble that laid the basis for the 2001 recession. The economy did not begin to create jobs again until two and a half years after the beginning of this recession and even then it was only due to the growth of the housing bubble. Gene Sperling also saw nothing wrong with the growth of that bubble. Gene Sperling also saw nothing wrong with the financial deregulation of the Clinton years which, by the way, helped make Goldman Sachs lots of money. And, he saw nothing wrong with the over-valued dollar which gave the United States an enormous trade deficit. This trade deficit undermined the bargaining power of manufacturing workers and helped to redistribute income upward.
In short, Sperling has a horrible track record of supporting policies that were bad for the country and good for Wall Street.

To be fair, I think it's important to acknowledge that Clinton did a number of good things with Sperling's advice. In a 2006 review of Sperling's book, The Pro-Growth Progressive, I noted that "Clinton oversaw an eight-year respite from the [long] assault on working families' wages."

Between 1979 and 1993, the top 20 percent of earners saw their incomes increase by 28.4 percent, while the bottom fifth of the income spread saw theirs drop by 13 percent. But under Clinton, "Those in the bottom fifth saw the largest income growth of 22.5 percent." African Americans enjoyed the highest income growth at 33 percent. By the late 1990s, poverty among blacks and Hispanics was at its lowest point in the history of the republic.

Having said that, I also found that "all of the ideas in The Pro-Growth Progressive are confined by Sperling's uncritical belief in the fundamental soundness of America's socio-economic arrangements, a belief that had [me] hurling the book against the wall."

It started with his title -- are we to believe that there are progressives who are instinctively anti-growth? -- and continued as a through narrative to the end of the book.

There's a fundamental disconnect between Sperling's reality and the reality most Americans live. "The Democratic Party should disband," he writes, "if it ever stops being the party that stands by the little guy, leads the fight against racial and economic disadvantage, sticks by working families when times are tough and takes on those with privilege who don't play by the rules." He doesn't grasp that the Democratic Party has evolved to become a party that, at best, can claim to be slightly less beholden to the corporatocracy than the Republicans.
Sperling has accepted most of the prevailing wisdom inculcated in us by the Chamber of Commerce. He believes the New Economy is a natural phenomenon, he talks about the "inevitability of change" while ignoring the fact that the changes we've seen in the American economy have been shaped by a small number of stakeholders. His test of sound policy is the "most pro-growth alternative" test, which "requires examining how progressive policies can be achieved at every step while maximizing economic growth and minimizing negative unintended consequences for the very workers, employers and investors our policies are designed to empower."
The narrative is: What's good for employers and investors is good for workers. But while one group has been all-too-empowered in the New Economy, the other has been widely disempowered. Nowhere in the book are the words "union-busting." For Sperling, job outsourcing comes from a "management that is facing painful competitive solutions," but he doesn't mention that some of the companies shedding the most jobs do so while posting record profits.

You can read he whole thing here -- the book provided a revealing look at the ideology of a key member of Obama's newly reconfigured team.

Wingnut Steve King "Dethroned" from Immigration Subcommittee

2011-01-07T12:54:00.000-08:00

According to The Hill, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, will not continue to serve as the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee's Immigration panel, as was widely anticipated. Instead, Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, announced that California Rep. Elton Gallegly (R) would head the Immigration and Enforcement panel.

Gallegly is a hard-liner just like King, but without the outlandish rhetoric that has made the latter one of the House's premier wingnuts, vying with the likes of Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota, and Louie Gohmert, R-Texas.

The move to replace King as subcommittee chair came as a surprise. It's indicative of the tough corner into which the GOP has painted itself with its rank demagoguery of immigrants. The tea-bagger caucus has to juggle the desires of its activist base -- which takes a much harder line than Republican voters as a whole, never mind the broader electorate -- against the reality that Latinos and Asian-Americans are the fastest growing voting blocks in the United States, and will be for the foreseeable future.

But Frank Sharry, director of America's Voice, an immigration reform group, said in a statement that despite the optics, "the choice actually reveals that the new Republican majority in the House is still bent on pursuing a costly and ineffective mass-deportation approach to immigration policy."

Steve King was dethroned because even the House Republican leadership must realize that comparing immigrants to livestock and suggesting we keep them out with an electric fence is offensive to Latino voters. But, he's simply been demoted from king to prince, and together, with Lamar Smith and Elton Gallegly, will lead the deportation caucus in the House. Until the Republican Party actually changes position on immigration, their ugly faces will still define them.

Cross-posted from the day-job.

The War on Coffee ... er, Terror

2011-01-05T11:00:00.000-08:00

NPR (HT to Liliana Segura):

A pilot's spilled coffee accidentally triggered a hijacking alert and caused a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany, to make an unscheduled stop in Canada.
A Transport Canada report said United Flight 940 was diverted to Toronto late Monday and landed safely at Pearson International Airport. The coffee spill caused distress signals to go out, including code 7500, which means hijacking or unlawful interference.
The report said Canada's defense department was notified, but that with the help of United dispatch staff the flight crew confirmed it to be a communication issue and not a hijacking.
The report on Transport Canada's website said the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration reported that United's corporate office had indicated that the pilot "had inadvertently squawked a 7500 code after spilling coffee on the aircraft's radio equipment, which interfered with the communications equipment.''
"The flight crew had advised that they had communication problems and subsequently reported that they had some navigation problems as well and from there the pilot in the command diverted the flight onto Toronto,'' Maryse Durette, a Transport Canada spokeswoman, said Wednesday.
United spokesman Rahsaan Johnson acknowledged Wednesday that one of three cockpit crew members caused the mishap by spilling a drink.
"It was a beverage. During light turbulence one of the crew members beverages spilled which then caused issues with the airplanes communications equipment,'' Johnson said.

Like any Good American, this makes me feel safe. I am nonetheless glad that they didn't shoot the fucker down.

Justin Bieber, Teen Fansites and the Not-a Mosque-that's-not-at-Ground-Zero

2010-12-30T10:27:00.000-08:00

Salon's Justin Elliott catches a fish:

Mosque foes recently started a boycott of Bieber after he made comments in support of the mosque project in an interview with Tiger Beat, a teen fan magazine, Sullivan told WYNC earlier this month. Now, his eight-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son have been banned from attending Bieber performances.
"I informed them, 'Hey guys, guess what? Justin Bieber spoke out for the ground zero mosque," Sullivan explained to Salon in an interview. "My little girl took down his poster and said she didn't want to have nothing to do with him any more. These are my kids, they're living this thing."

Hey guys, guess what? Tiger Beat magazine doesn't, in fact, make a habit of asking teen popstars about ginned-up wingnut controversies.

Read the whole thing -- worth your while.

Great Titles in Literature, Optimized for the Intertubes

2010-12-30T10:07:00.000-08:00

Like everyone else in online publishing, at AlterNet we obsess about getting content picked up by your searches.

And I can say that this, over at McSweeney's, is just perfect:

GREAT LITERATURE RETITLED TO BOOST WEBSITE TRAFFIC.
BY MIKE LACHER
- - - -
7 Awesome Ways Barnyard Animals Are Like Communism
The 11 Stupidest Things Phonies Do To Ruin The World
8 Surprising Ways West Egg Is Exemplary Of The Hollowness Of The American Dream
6 Shockingly Evil Things The Turn-Of-The-Century Meatpacking Industry Doesn't Want You To Know
5 Insane Ways London Could Become a Dystopia (And How It's Not That Far From Reality)
1 Weird Thing Caddy Smells Like

Did you get 'em all? I didn't.

Are Anti-Miscegenation Laws in Israel's Future?

2010-12-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

Last year, NPR did a report about gangs of anti-miscegenation vigilantes roaming around Israel ostensibly protecting the honor of Jewish maidens:

There is a new enemy for some Israelis: Romance between Jewish women and Arab men, and vigilantes have banded together to fight it. The vigilante groups are walking the streets and towns across Israel. The largest and most notorious is in the Jewish settlements that have sprung up in and around traditionally Arab East Jerusalem. Sheera Frenkel joined one of the groups on patrol.
SHEERA FRENKEL: The small, white hatchback swings into a nearly deserted parking lot and does a quick look around. It's just after 10:00 at night, and the lot is clearly a prime destination for a teenage date night in the settlement of Pisgat Ze'ev. But David, a 31-year-old who lives here, is out for a different kind of prowl.
DAVID: (Through translator) Go down to that parking center. Stop, stop, one minute. That's them over there. Check if there is a Jewish girl in that car over there.
FRENKEL: Every night, David, who asked not to be called by his real name, patrols this and other neighboring Jewish settlements. His mission is to find Arab-Jewish couples and break up their dates.
DAVID: (Through translator) My heart hurts every time I see a Jewish girl with an Arab. It's extremely upsetting. I asked myself: How did we get to this situation? How did we descend to this level? It is a serious step backwards, in our eyes.

But apparently fears of the dusky, hyper-sexualized Muselman polluting Jewish womanhood aren't confined to the fringe. YNET:

The letter issued by leading rabbis' wives urging Jewish women to avoid contact with Arab men was thought up and executed within no more than 48 hours.

"We thought it up the day before yesterday and were already working on it by Tuesday," said the letter's initiator, Anat Gofstein of the Lehava organization. "All the rabbis' wives were incredibly receptive to the idea. I only had to mention the assimilation phenomenon and they all signed."
Talking to Ynet, Gofstein said there was overwhelming agreement among the rabbis' wives when it came to the assimilation issue. "We talked about how close to home this issue is and it was obvious the trend had only grown further," she stated.
Gofstein claimed that assimilation had reached religious girls' high schools and seminaries. "We engage in the girls' rehabilitation after they emerge wounded and battered from the Arab villages," she said.

"We are interested in boosting prevention. The phenomenon must be stopped instead of waiting for the girls to remain in the villages making it harder to pull them out of Arab culture."

Here comes the best part:

One of the rabbis' wives who signed the letter addressed the issue of whether the letter increases antagonism towards religion. "I don't understand what this antagonism you speak of," she told Ynet.

Antagonism? What antagonism?

"Separatism is what sustained the Jewish people throughout time. It's our distinction. We are not out to cause uproar, we are here to raise a very painful issue. And yes, very painful matters need to be discussed openly. Who better to talk to the girls than the rabbis' wives?"

Given the ascendance of the religious right in Israel -- and the increasingly anti-democratic bent of the government -- can old-fashioned anti-miscegenation laws be far behind?

New Poll Offers Sobering News for Bloodthirsty Neocon Maniacs

2010-12-29T12:26:00.001-08:00

Matt Duss flagged this via email:

[Despite having] strong negative feelings and suspicions, Americans are still not in favor of any type of military engagement or intervention with Iran. In fact, the most frequent option Americans recommend to deal with Iran is engaging in diplomatic negotiations (30%, up slightly from 26% in January 2010), followed by economic sanctions (20%).

Only five per cent of respondents would do nothing, claiming that Iran poses no threat to the world.Across the country, 16 per cent of Americans would consent to launching military strikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, and seven per cent would authorize a full-scale invasion of Iran and removing the current government.

Given the Palination of today's GOP, this next bit should come as no surprise:

There are some striking differences when party allegiance is taken into consideration. More than half of Democrats would rely on negotiations and sanctions to deal with Iran (56%), while two-in-five Republicans (40%) would prefer to launch strikes or authorize an invasion. Independents are more likely to choose diplomacy and sanctions (52%) than air strikes or an invasion (19%).

Study: Conservatives Have Over-Developed "Fear Center" in Their "Brains"

2010-12-29T11:44:00.000-08:00

There have been a number of studies looking at the differences between how conservatives and other folks process information -- examining our political divide from a cognitive perspective.

But as we all know, the line between nature and nurture is a fuzzy one...

Political opinions are considered choices, and in Western democracies the right to choose one's opinions -- freedom of conscience -- is considered sacrosanct.

But recent studies suggest that our brains and genes may be a major determining factor in the views we hold.

A study at University College London in the UK has found that conservatives' brains have larger amygdalas than the brains of liberals. Amygdalas are responsible for fear and other "primitive" emotions. At the same time, conservatives' brains were also found to have a smaller anterior cingulate -- the part of the brain responsible for courage and optimism.

If the study is confirmed, it could give us the first medical explanation for why conservatives tend to be more receptive to threats of terrorism, for example, than liberals. And it may help to explain why conservatives like to plan based on the worst-case scenario, while liberals tend towards rosier outlooks.

That was written by Daniel Tencer at Raw Story.

Christmas Tragedy

2010-12-29T09:49:00.000-08:00

Dad flew in from New York and we went up to Napa for a few days. Hit the rental counter, but they were all out of the crappy subcompacts I'd reserved. They only had this cherry-red Mustang convertible left:

So very, very sad.