Matt Yglesias gets shrill. And real.

We’ve heard a lot of bullshit these past several years about Social Security, so as an antitoxin, here’s Matt Yglesias:

The Powers That Be hate Social Security and always will because it’s a program whose entire purpose is to pay people money not to work. That’s not a perverse consequence of Social Security. It’s not a contentious partisan claim about Social Security. It’s not a dubious interpretation of what Social Security is all about. That’s the point. It’s to give people money so they can retire with dignity. “Retire” being a fancy word for “not working.” You’re never ever going to persuade business leaders to stop agitating for cuts in a program that has this feature. Business leaders want people to work! At a minimum, if people are hoping to not work, business leaders are going to want people to save (i.e., loan funds to business leaders) in order to achieve that purpose. Taxing people who are working in order to pay money so that people can enjoy retired life in peace is the antithesis of everything business elites want out of public policy.

And guess what we haven’t done during this era of changing projections? We haven’t cut Social Security benefits. We haven’t raised the age at which people become eligible for Medicare. We’ve done things to reduce budget deficits, in other words, but we haven’t really acted to make it tougher for people to retire. But people don’t like to say they want to make it hard for people to retire so instead they talk about “the deficit,” and they’re not going to stop.

The Powers that Be have had their way for way too long. I think it’s time that the rest of America slapped them and told them to shut their whore mouths.

 

Oh, now he’s troubled. Jackass.

Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner: “As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation.”

Why now, Jim? Didn’t bother you 12 years ago. Didn’t bother you all through the Bush administration. If you had the sense God gave a billy goat and/or were awake in eighth-grade civics, not only wouldn’t you have written the Patriot Act, you’d have opposed it with all your resources and at the top of your lungs, you sorry sack of slime. Lots of very smart people, plus me, told you at the time that this was a wrong call and that it would, inevitably, be misused to justify flat-out crimes. You ignored us. Well, screw you. I hope the government scooped up all your calls and I desperately hope that evidence of a serious crime lies therein. You bent the Bill of Rights over your desk and raped it. The rest of your life in prison is too good for you.

 

Their insane world is now our world. And we’d better deal with it.

Like it, dislike it (as I do), but you can’t deny it, and to his credit, neither does Michael Tomasky:

I think the notion of impeachment is industrial-strength insane. There is utterly no proof that the President Obama even knew anything directly about the shifting Benghazi responses, let alone did something about them (yes, folks; under the Constitution, the President must do something). And as for the Internal Revenue Service story, from what we now know, those transgressions were committed by IRS staffers in Cincinnati who have never been closer to Obama than their television sets. … [T]he idea that Obama has any direct culpability in either of these matters is, given what we know today, utter madness. Okay?

But this is my point: utter madness is what today’s Republicans do. You can present to me every logical argument you desire. Benghazi at the end of the day was a terrible tragedy in which mistakes, bad mistakes, were certainly made, and in which confusion and the CYA reflex led to some bad information going out to the public initially, but none of this remotely rises to the level of high crime. The IRS cock-up was just that, a mistake by a regional office. I get all this, and I agree with you.

But what we think doesn’t matter. I can assure you that already in the Pavlovian swamps of the nutso right, the glands are swelling. Theirs is a different planet from the one you and I inhabit. …

At this point some of you may be protesting: but at least Clinton did commit a crime, however lame a crime it was. Obama has done no such thing. Again, in reality-land, no, he hasn’t. In their land, however, he has committed a string of them; he just hasn’t been caught yet. And that’s what Darrell Issa and his committee are there to unearth. Besides, he need commit no conventional crime. A high crime or misdemeanor is whatever the House majority decides it is. Remember, in January 1998, impeachment talk started before Clinton [allegedly] had perjured himself. …

Okay, but surely, you say, if facts don’t matter, then public opinion does? Think again, my friend. In 1998, support for impeachment of Bill Clinton was rarely above 30 percent. Here’s a little sampling of surveys from August and September of that year, during the heat of battle—the release of Clinton’s grand-jury testimony and of the Starr Report. Levels of support for impeachment were 26 percent, 25, 18, 27, 17, and so on. There was one poll where it hit 40 percent, but most were far lower. And remember, in political terms, 40 is the butt end of a massive landslide. The public hated the idea.

Did that stop anyone? No. And it won’t stop them now. They do their base’s bidding, not America’s. How many times do you need to see them do this before you accept that it is the reality? And now there’s an added element. They want to gin up turnout among their base for next year’s elections. And if they gin it up enough, and the Democratic base stays home, they could end up holding the House and taking the Senate. And if they have both houses, meaning that the vote in the House would not be certain to hit a Senate dead-end, well, look out.

I hope the White House knows this. I hope they understand, I hope the President himself understands, that the fever has not broken and will not break. … If my worst fears are never realized—well, good, obviously. But it will only be because they couldn’t identify even a flimsy pretext on which to proceed. Never put the most extreme behavior past them. It is who they are, and it is what they do.

It’s not just the White House that needs to understand this. It’s every American who thinks a majority of batshit-crazy Republicans in both houses of Congress would be a bad idea. Here’s why. A lot of Democrats and independents, butthurt over what was or was not in the Affordable Care Act or else just plain lazy, stayed home and didn’t vote in 2010. As a direct consequence of that little fit of temper and/or laziness, the lunatics are running the U.S. House asylum as well as turning my state of North Carolina into Mississippi with (for now) more teeth.

Look, never mind that Benghazi was a bad and tragic mistake and not a political/criminal conspiracy (except the part where it might have been a Republican conspiracy). And never mind that whatever a bunch of IRS functionaries in Cincinnati might have done, the IRS did much worse to liberal groups under Bush and the Republicans never said a word. These people are not rational. They’re not even sane. If they take the Senate next year, I’m even more confident than Tomasky that they will find some pretext, any pretext, on which to base multiple articles of impeachment. They will fling as much feces against the wall as they can, knowing that in a GOP-held Senate, at least some of it likely will stick. And the strong likelihood that either an incumbent President Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton running as the Democratic nominee in 2016 would drink their blood for it will not matter in the slightest.

Tradition Projection, plus a footnote

Berkeley economist Brad DeLong includes in his blog a valuable daily feature, “Liveblogging World War II.” This is the installment from May 8, 1943 — two years to the day before the war in Europe ended — written by the Nazis’ propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. The level of projection is mind-boggling, as if Goebbels had consumed magic mushrooms, but it’s also a reminder that there’s a boatload of projection, differing only in scale but not in type, in today’s political dialogue, and that, no, both sides don’t do it.

The War and the Jews

The naivete, not to mention ignorance, with which certain European circles see the Jewish Question in the fourth year of this gigantic struggle is astonishing. They cannot or will not see that this war is a war of the Jewish race and its subject people against Western culture and civilization. Everything that we Germans and Europeans, defenders of the principle of a moral world order, hold dear is at risk. The above-mentioned circles are too inclined to see the Jewish Question as a humanitarian issue. They make their judgments on the feelings of the moment rather than on the knowledge and insight resulting from clear and calm reason.

It is clear that if during this war we show the least weakening of our determination to resolve the Jewish Question, the result will be the gravest danger to our people and Reich and all of Europe.

Jewry wanted this war. Whether one looks to the plutocratic or the bolshevist side of the enemy camp, one sees Jews standing in the foreground as instigators, rabble-rousers and slave drivers. They organize the enemy’s war economy and encourage plans to exterminate and destroy the Axis powers. England and the USA recruit from among them bloodthirsty and vengeful agitators and political lunatics, and they are the source of the terror commissars of the GPU. They are the mortar that holds the enemy coalition together.

In the National Socialist Reich, they see a power that resists their drive for world domination both militarily and intellectually. That explains their rage and deep hatred. Do not think that the Old Testament tirades of their newspapers and radio are merely political propaganda. They would carry it all out to the letter, should they have the opportunity.

Our state’s security requires that we take whatever measures seem necessary to protect the German community from their threat. That leads to some difficult decisions, but they are unavoidable if we are to deal with the threat. This war is a racial war. The Jews started it and they direct it. Their goal to destroy and exterminate our people. We are the only force standing between Jewry and world domination. If the Axis powers lose the war in Europe, no power on earth could save Europe from the Jewish-Bolshevist flood.

It may seem surprising that such a small minority possesses such great power and is such a deadly danger. But it is so. International Jewry uses certain criminal methods to gain world domination that are not evident to uneducated nations. The same is true in private life. The Jews do not enjoy economic success because they are more intelligent than non-Jews, but rather because they follow a different moral code. They attempt to conceal their methods for as long as possible, until it is too late for the affected nation to defend itself. Then it takes a revolution to dislodge them. We know how difficult and tiresome that is.

We constantly hear news that anti-Semitism is increasing in enemy nations. The charges being made against the Jews are the same ones that were made here. Anti-Semitism in enemy nations is not the result of anti-Semitic propaganda, since Jewry fights that strongly. In the Soviet Union, it receives the death penalty. Jewry does all it can to oppose anti-Semitism. The word Jew itself, for example, is hardly to be found in the otherwise so talkative English and USA newspapers, not to mention the Bolshevist press. Still, anti-Jewish attitudes are growing among the enemy public. This is an entirely natural reaction to the Jewish danger on the part of the affected peoples. In the long run, it does the Jews no good to plead in parliament and the newspapers for tougher laws against anti-Semitism, or to haul out the highest secular and spiritual dignitaries, among them naturally the Archbishop of Canterbury, to say a good word for the poor innocent persecuted Jews. They did that in Germany before 1933 too, but the National Socialist revolution took place nonetheless.

None of the Führer’s prophetic words has come so inevitably true as his prediction that if Jewry succeeded in provoking a second world war, the result would be not the destruction of the Aryan race, but rather the wiping out of the Jewish race. This process is of vast importance, and will have unforeseeable consequences that will require time. But it can no longer be halted. It must only be guided in the right direction. One must also be sure to strike the weapon of public deception from Jewry’s hands, which it is desperately using to save its skin. One can already see that in the face of approaching catastrophe the Jews are shrinking into the background. They send their pet Goy to the fore. It will not be long before they will not want to do it any longer, and wash their hands in innocence.

As one has to grant, we have some experience in these matters, and are taking action to be sure they do not succeed. The Jews will have to answer for their countless crimes against the happiness and peace of mankind, and one day the whole world will give them the penalty that they are suffering today in Germany. We speak without resentment. The time is too grave to spin naive plans of revenge. This is a world problem of the first order that can be solved by the present generation, and must be solved by them. Sentimental considerations have no part here. We see Jewry as the embodiment of a general world decline. Either we will break this danger, or the peoples of the world will break under it.

No one should say that winners are boastful. At present, we are the victors only in our own nation. Our victory at home, however, drew upon us the diabolic hatred of World Jewry, whose advance members the Jews still with us see themselves as. They want to see the Axis powers defeated, for that is the only way for them to regain their old privileges. It makes sense for us to secure our rear so that we can continue the battle before us with full energy and enthusiasm.

When dealing with the Jews there are only two choices: to surrender to them or to fight them. We have chosen the latter. As our enemy attacks without mercy, so do we. The future will prove who is right. Developments to far, however, seem to be more in our favor than the enemy’s. Opposition to the Jews, not friendship with them, is growing around the world. We are convinced that at the end of the war, Jewry will face a humanity that fully understands the Jewish Question.

Recently a leading London newspaper, which is wholly under Jewish control, printed an article that wondered at the alarming increase in anti-Semitism. It received many letters in response, and had to admit that only a tiny percentage took the Jewish side. The pro-Semitic letters, though the newspaper did not say this, probably were written by the Jews themselves. The others made the strongest attacks on Jewry, and the readership forced the paper to print some of them. They included all the insults one could hope for. This anti-Semitism is not racially grounded, and its roots are not at all clear, but one may still establish with some satisfaction that healthy popular instincts are beginning to manifest themselves even in enemy nations, Things are not much different in the United States. One of the letters encouraged the newspaper to send reporters to streetcars and trains. There they would hear numerous opinions about the Jews that deserved more than ironic dismissal.

That is the way it normally begins. The Jews in England are reacting in the usual ways. First they look injured and unjustly persecuted. In the synagogues, the rabbis encourage people to be more careful in public, and to avoid provocative behavior. Then they rent a few respected, but buyable leaders from society, business or religious life to make their case. Their well-paid job is to condemn anti-Semitism as a cultural disgrace that is the result of enemy propaganda. They call for stronger laws against it. The poor Jews whine in public about everything they have done for the country, what wonderful and patriotic citizens they have always been and will continue to be, the important offices they hold, etc. The innocent citizen is persuaded by a flood of words that he must have been mistaken in always seeing Jews behind all major political or economic crimes. Soon they find some high church leader who is ready to condemn anti-Semitism as anti-Christian. By the end, not the Jews, but their enemies are responsible for every national misfortune. Then the game starts all over again.

One has to grant that extraordinarily clever tactics are being used, and that it takes some intelligence or sound instincts to see behind the Jewish facade. But here, too, the jug carries water until it breaks. International Jewry’s attack on the culture and moral order of the world is cleverly concealed, but not cleverly enough so that it cannot be seen through. One must keep at their heels, and give them no rest when they begin to tire. They are virtuosos at the art of transformation. They can appear in a thousand forms, yet are always the same. If one has caught them, they claim injured innocence and send their guard of pity on ahead to beg for mercy. But if one extends them even a finger of pity, they chop the whole hand off. They must therefore be kept in the fear of the Lord.

We know that they hate us from the depths of their souls. We take pleasure in their hatred. There is nothing that they would not do to us if they had the power. We cannot therefore give them even the slightest bit of power. More than that, it is our duty to tell the world of their nature and their depravity. We must again and again prove their sick role in beginning and carry on this war. We must attack them incessantly, accuse them without pity of the crimes of which they are guilty, until the nations begin to wake up. That may take a long time, but it is worth it. We are dealing with the most dangerous enemy that ever threatened the life, freedom, and dignity of humanity. There can be no mercy. We have pity only for the countless millions of our own people and those of other European nations who will be given over to the hate and destructive will of this devilish race if we become weak and give up the battle. Those Philistines who today are so eager to protect the Jews would be their first victims.

We must all keep alert. We must be on guard against the insidious cleverness of the international world enemy. In the depths of his soul, he realizes that this war that he so frivolously began, expecting it to be the last step to world domination, has instead become a war for his racial existence. He desperately seeks to stop the inevitable march of events. It will do him no good. We will keep at him. In the end, the Führer’s prophecy about World Jewry in 1939, which they laughed at then, will come true.

The Jews laughed in Germany too when they first saw us. They are not laughing any longer. They chose to wage war against us. But that war is turning against them. When they planned a war to totally destroy the German nation, they signed their own death warrant.

Here, too, world history will be the world court.

A footnote: My Uncle Frank, who, as a 19-year-old Army lieutenant in Germany, witnessed some of the camps and attended some of the Nuremberg trials, lies in hospital this morning after removal yesterday of what the pathologist called a “big, ugly” Stage III tumor. He’s an atheist — probably not the only one who experienced what he did — but I’m sure his family would appreciate your prayers.

Stop the presses. Actually, just blow their servers up.

So Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen of Politico, whose whole brand is that they are, in Jay Rosen’s multi-layered construction, “savvy,” are shocked, shocked to find out that the parents of some of the kids killed at Newtown are trying to lobby in something approaching sophisticated fashion.

Memo to these disingenuous twerps: The offense here isn’t that some families with education, money and sophistication are lobbying for something they want. The crime is that they have to do it to even be heard and still don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting what they want.

I could vent. Really, I could. But I’ve had not nearly enough sleep for way too many days now, so I’m gonna outsource my rage to Charlie Pierce, who never disappoints:

You know what, you two privileged, Drudge-whoring twerps? Fk you. The grief these people feel is unimaginable, and it is theirs to feel, and it is theirs to use in any way they see fit. And if that happens to discomfit some of the greasy sublets who return your phone calls every day, that’s too goddamn bad. They’re not subtle? You miserable pair of lightweights, you know what else isn’t subtle? Autopsy photos of first-graders missing half their faces because it’s so goddamn easy in this country for lunatics to arm themselves.

That about covers it, I think.

Quote of the day, is our children learning edition; or, measure everything and don’t do anything you can’t measure

From Kay at Balloon Juice, with emphasis in the original except where noted:

Michelle Rhee came to Ohio and lobbied my state legislature on her last national tour. She was treated like a celebrity. No one questioned any of her claims, which is unsurprising if you actually live in this state because all of her reforms involve union busting, pension looting and shifting public money to private operators(emphasis added). She’s a Right wing ideologue’s dream come true. They bought it because they believed it before she walked onto the floor that day.

The school reform industry response to the Atlanta cheating scandal was to call for better test security. As usual, the reform industry spokespeople are missing the larger point, the bigger picture. The truth is they based their reforms on high profile “turn arounds” in Atlanta and (especially) DC. If the scores in these places where they ran their experiments were bullshit, they “reformed” the US education system based on bullshit. They’re supposedly “data-driven” and most of them are billionaires. I shouldn’t have to point this out.

Hire an independent prosecutor like they did in Atlanta. Let’s find out. In the meantime, get a different opinion on “school reform.” Stop relying on the billionaires who backed this, the politicians who swallowed it without question, the hundreds of lobby shops who now exist because of it and the celebrities who promote it to evaluate it. They’re biased, they’re all in, they believe they are the “best and the brightest” and the top-tier analysts and executives are making a lot of money. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Well, disaster for ordinary taxpayers. For the grifters (and, remember, grifters are gonna grift), not so much.

I was right, bitches; or, A Dominionist theocracy is coming to a legislature near you, so GET DRESSED.

Back when Michelle Goldberg’s book “Kingdom Coming,” about the rise of Christian Nationalism in America, was published, I reviewed it for the News & Record and the blog I then wrote for the paper, The Lex Files. As you can see from the comments, as well as from this site, I took a lot of grief for stating, on the basis of my own reporting on the subject and my familiarity with some of Goldberg’s original sources, that there were significant numbers of people in America who wished to turn this country from a secular, constitutional democratic republic to a Dominionist theocracy; that is, a country where the law is based strictly on the Christian Bible.

Impossible, they said.

(You’ll also note that they accused me of saying all evangelical Christians want this. Rather, I said a certain subset of evangelical Christians adhered to that ideology. I didn’t believe all of them did then, I don’t believe that all of them do now, and I said so at the time specifically, not least because Goldberg herself was very careful to draw that distinction.)

Well, as it happens, down in Salisbury, the Rowan County commissioners want to be able to pray to Jesus in their official capacities, and so a bill, House Joint Resolution 494, has been introduced in the N.C. legislature that would allow that and much more besides.

This bill claims that the First Amendment’s ban on government making law “respecting an establishment of religion” applies only to the federal government, not the states, because in the minds of the (blessedly few) 11 sponsors signing on so far, the Fourteenth Amendment, whose equal protection  clause extends the protection of federal law to every citizen of the country, never happened.

It’s tempting to call these people batshit crazy and let it go at that. Tempting though that approach is, however, it lets them off too lightly. This is an attempt to turn one state among 50 in a constitutionally established secular democratic republic into a Dominionist theocracy in violation of the very Constitution the legislators have sworn an oath to uphold. They should be impeached and removed from office. Unfortunately, we don’t impeach legislators in North Carolina because we can’t. The best we could hope for would be for the House to vote to expel the offending members. But it won’t, because whether they’re ready to admit it or not, a majority of the N.C. House, or very close to a majority, thinks this is a great idea.

It would never stand up in court, I’d like to think. But “never” is a long time, and the Dominionists are playing the long game. They must be called out and they must be stopped, if for no other reason that Jesus had very specific notions about where one ought to do one’s praying and it would be a shame if our fellow North Carolinians went to hell for disregarding that directive.

(edited to remove duplicate grad)

The Atlanta schools and crimes against children

Defendants reported to the Fulton County Jail today for booking on charges of racketeering, theft and making false statements. And because I’m deeply immersed in a management course this semester, I guess I have been led inevitably to wonder: Did the test-score scandal now unfolding in the Atlanta Public Schools (and, according to Atlanta Journal-Constitution data analysis, likely going on in other large school systems as well) result from public schools trying to perform too much like a business — or not enough?

My sense is that under the No Child Left Behind Act (which was never funded at anywhere near the levels the Bush administration assured Sen. Edward Kennedy it would be; without that assurance, Kennedy and other Democrats would never have supported the act), test scores, which used to be used as only one tool in assessing students’ academic progress, became an actual proxy for learning. Legislators convinced themselves that they were buying learning by buying test scores, and so that’s what they paid for. And the Atlanta Public Schools, at least, decided to supply what its customer had said it wanted.

This was not a victimless crime. In one case, a child who changed schools was found to be unable to read. His counselor eagerly awaited his test scores, assuming they’d be low enough for the child to be given special help catching up. Instead, when the scores arrived, they showed not just scores too high for help, but scores classifying the child as gifted.

Did teachers and administrators break the law to do what they were trying to do? So they stand accused. Did they misuse money for personal gain in the process? So they stand accused. Did they lie to officials in the process? So they stand accused.

Is this different from what happened when nonbank mortgage lenders, security ratings agencies and investment banks blew up the economy in 2008? Only in that in the Atlanta Public Schools case, dozens of people stand accused.

An imagination beyond one’s tribe

Quote of the day, from Sir Charles at Cogitamus:

I have been a liberal for a long time as have many of the people I’ve known.  And let me assure you, it wasn’t because back in 1980 or 1984 or 1988 all of the cool kids were doing the liberal thing and supporting food stamps.  It was because I — like most people who hung in there during the Reagan years — had the moral imagination to consider what life might have been like if I lost the lottery and was born poor.  It was because a study of history led me to understand how tenuous the climb to middle class status had been for so many people and how much the government giving people a hand up had meant to vast swaths of society.  I was a white male middle class kid, but I understood that the world was bigger than my tribe, a spirit that continues to animate most people on the left.  I did not grow up in an ideological household.  … [My parents] were both very devoted to overall notions of fairness.  (Neither has voted for a Republican since 1976 — I take some of the credit.)  I took that overall spirit of fairness and constructed a political view that struck me as consistent with it — a kind of Rawlsian view of the world long before I ever heard of John Rawls.

Emphasis added, because the concepts included therein are so critically important for a society to function.

“Moral imagination” is just another word for empathy. Without it, we are nothing more or less than sociopaths, we have way too many of those already and we are making more by the day.

The notion of life as lottery is something many conservatives and so-called libertarians find risible. But when you compare social mobility in the U.S. with that of other wealthy Western countries, you find something interesting and disturbing: Only the U.K. has less social mobility than we do.* Parents’ wealth is the biggest single predictor of offspring’s financial success. I suppose it was only coincidence that I learned today that Gov. Pat McCrory’s proposed budget would ax the state’s inheritance tax completely.

History does indeed show that a lot of people are middle-class today only because their ancestors who were not fought to be. The labor movement of the ’30s, the right of women to vote, the civil-rights movement, and perhaps most importantly the desegregation of K-12 schools and higher education in the face of bitter resistance, all played a part in helping to increase the size of the middle class. And it’s no coincidence that all these efforts are under attack today, or that those attacks are funded by a very small number of very wealthy people who think the Constitution mandates a plutocracy. I suppose it is only coincidence, then, that the same gov I mentioned a graf ago is attacking teaching the liberal arts (such as, oh, say, history) in the UNC system.

Yes, by hook and by crook, the gov and the thugs who fund him seem bent on keeping the proles proles and turning more non-proles into proles. Sir Charles suggests above that they do not understand that the world is bigger than their tribe. I think the problem is bigger than that. I think they understand and actively seek to screw everyone who is not part of their tribe, because this hypothesis is the simplest explanation for what is otherwise a set of decisions difficult to justify on grounds of fairness, practicality or public good.

Evidence to the contrary is welcome, but I’m not holding my breath.

*Corak, Miles. 2006. “Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults? Lessons from a Cross Country Comparison of Generational Earnings Mobility.” Research on Economic Inequality, 13 no. 1: 143-188.

Lynndie England did not die for our sins, but we know who should

I miss a lot of good stuff while school’s in session, but this was worth not leaving behind:

A United Nations investigator has demanded that the US publish classified documents regarding the CIA’s human rights violations under former President George W. Bush, with hopes that the documents will lead to the prosecution of public officials.

Documents about the CIA’s program of rendition and secret detention of suspected terrorists have remained classified, even though President Obama’s administration has publicly condemned the use of these “enhanced interrogation techniques”. The US has not prosecuted any of its agents for human rights violations.

UN investigator Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, said that the classified documents protect the names of individuals who are responsible for serious human rights violations.

“Despite this clear repudiation of the unlawful actions carried out by the Bush-era CIA, many of the facts remain classified, and no public official has so far been brought to justice in the United States,”Emmerson said in a report to the UN Human Rights Council, according to Reuters.

Kept in secret prisons around the world, the CIA’s detainees were subjected to torture including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and various other interrogation techniques that violate human rights. The detainees were often subjected to clandestine transfers to secret prisons known as CIA ‘black sites’.

“There is now credible evidence to show that CIA ‘black sites’ were located on the territory of Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania and Thailand, and that the officials of at least 49 other states allowed their airspace or airports to be used for rendition flights,” Emmerson said, describing how suspected terrorists were often detained without being charged for any crimes, receiving extradition procedures or having access to lawyers.

Emmerson has urged the US to prosecute any public official who was involved in setting up the CIA “black sites” at which human rights or legal violations occurred. Even though the Obama administration has condemned those who promoted the use of such facilities for inhumane procedures, the administration has taken no steps to punish any of its public officials. Attorney General Eric Holder has said that the Justice Department would not take legal actions against those who “acted in good faith” and followed the guidelines provided by the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush era.

But without names and details about the involvement of US officials at CIA black sites, the government is maintaining a level of secrecy and “perpetuating impunity for the public officials implicated in these crimes,” Emmerson said.  A Senate committee led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) previously investigated the CIA’s interrogation program and may have had complete access to classified information about it.

Emmerson has called for this information to be published “without delay, and to the fullest extent possible.”

He ain’t the only one. I spent long years here during the reign of Bush the Lesser, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, Yoo, and my freshman hall counselor, Jim Haynes, calling for the people responsible for ordering torture and other crimes against humanity (including the unilateral military invasion of Iraq, a country with which we were not legally at war, in violation of both ratified treaties and U.S. statutes) to be investigated, indicted, tried where appropriate and punished as needed. In the case of torture or other crimes against humanity that result in the death of another human being, the punishment is execution. And I’ve been a tough-on-crime conservative my whole life.

And I’ve been consistent. I called for Obama’s impeachment barely more than a year after his inauguration when it became clear that he intended to target U.S. citizens for extrajudicial assassination,  an intent on which he has acted successfully since.

A war criminal is a war criminal. A murderer under international laws of human rights is a murderer under international laws of human rights. The Constitution makes our legal priorities plain: It itself and our ratified treaties, which define these crimes, constitute the Supreme Law of the Land. So hang ‘em all, and let God sort ‘em out.

But that’s only where it should start. If we deserve to be called free and self-governing people, we also need to look in the mirror and figure out how and why we let these crimes happen — because many, if not most, could have been prevented if we as a body politic had taken our responsibilities as citizens seriously. Instead, we knew of torture at least six months before the 2004 election and did nothing. The New York Times knew about warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens in criminal violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act a year before the 2004 election and held its story. When Democrats retook Congress in 2006, Speaker-apparent Nancy Pelosi took impeachment “off the table,” and the voters let them do it. And President Obama and Attorney General Holder have repeated their desire to “look forward, not back,” and the voters have let them do THAT, too.

Imagine the people of Germany, circa 1946, claiming that intent and ask yourself how we would have responded. And we had conquered them by force and yet wanted to rehabilitate West Germany as a bulwark against communism. How much easier should it have been, how much less should we have needed to worry about the tender sensibilities of the Washington establishment and its courtiers in the press, than it was to punish individual Germans while keeping Germany on our side?

The UN is by no means a perfect organization. But the U.S. is by no means a perfect country. Let us follow the facts and the law — which, remember, we willingly signed and ratified — wherever they lead us, and let us act as the law obliges us to act. If you want an omelette, you need to break a few eggs. In this case, incontrovertibly, if we want to restore our own honor as a free and self-governing people, we need to break a few necks.

March 7 study break, “NC Medicaid IS NOT BROKEN” edition

h/t: Fec

Disclosure: Jeff Shaw of the N.C. Justice Center is a classmate in my current grad program. Further disclosure: He is not a bullshitter.

Study break, 2016 presidential campaign edition:

Quote of the day, from Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns & Money:

Jeb Bush flip-flopping on immigration, now saying he doesn’t support a path toward citizenship for undocumented Americans, is a sign that leading Republicans can be serious about winning the 2016 Republican nomination or they can be serious about winning the general election, but they can’t be serious about both.

Granted, that’s a theory, or even just a hypothesis. But does it comport with the known facts? Yes. Does it explain current events? Yes. Was Bush’s action predictable in light of Loomis’s observation? Hell, it was inevitable.

Driftglass summarizes “Hubris” for you because I had to study

This is just a taste. And I am grateful to him for the service (which was live-tweeted, thus the weird diction/syntax in places; also, I did a quick search-and-replace on some of the more vapors-inducing participial adjectives):

• Remember David Brooks’ column calling people who opposed Wolfowitz antisemitic? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember David Brooks’ columns mocking Liberals who opposed Iraq war as deluded Bush-deranged posers? No? That’s the firetrucking problem
• Remember David Brooks calling people cynical assholes who objected to Dubya’s flightsuit tango? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when the collaborators at the NYT gave a firetrucking weekly column to Bloody Bill Kristol? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when David Brooks leveraged his Liberal bashing tripe into a column-for-life at the NYT? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember Steve Gilliard? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when the wingnutosphere went nuts trying to discredit every alarming report out of Iraq? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when palette-trucks of shrink- wrapped taxpayer cash just firetrucking vanished into Iraq? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when everything that is now settled history was America-hating surrender-monkey treason? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when a gay hooker Conservative “reporter” w/ a fake name sat 100 ft away from Dubya for 2 yrs? No? That’s the firetrucking problem
• Remember when Halliburton made $$ selling American soldiers in Iraq toilet water? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when the GOP made “[Forget] Reality” into American national policy? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when Phil Donahue got fired for telling the truth and Conservatives got promoted for lying? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember how the Cheney clans got really, really rich sending kids off to die for their lies? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when 60 million Americans re-elected these deficit-creating war criminals? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember the incompetent children of GOP campaign contributors were put in charge of governing Iraq? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when Fox News told soldiers rolling into battle to look into the camera and say “Fox Rocks!” No? That’s the firetrucking problem.

You know, I stack this list up against the whining from Politico reporters that I mentioned below, and I think perhaps I should call Mike Allen or Jim Vandehei at Politico and tell them, “There are better ways you could be spending your time, and some pseudonymous blogger in flyover country has just handed you a double fistful of them for free, so pack a lunch and get busy.“

That, also, is the polite version. Too. Here’s kind of what I really feel like saying.

Love women? Then make sure the law protects them.

But don’t take my word for it. Take my mom’s (from her Facebook page):

We’ve come a long way, baby… or have we?

Last night Jerry Hancock [my stepdad -- Lex] and I watched the movie based on Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. Jerry had never seen it and I hadn’t seen it since it came out in 1956. the show has some of the most beautiful music ever written for Broadway.

But when we got to the final scene — which is supposed to be sad and touching and romantic — we nearly jumped out of our chairs. Julie, the heroine, who had been beaten and emotionally abused and abandoned by her deadbeat husband whom she still loves desperately, says dreamily to her 15-year-old daughter, who has just been slapped by this same jerk: “Sometimes you can be hit by someone and never even feel the pain.” OMG. The thing is, when I saw this in 1956, I — like millions of other women at that time — thought the scene was beautiful, poignant, and romantic. But about 25 years after that, I was hit by the person I loved most in the world, and that changed me forever. Let me be clear: You DO feel the pain. Last night I wanted to throw a brick at the TV. 

I used to love the old torch songs — you know, Edith Piaf, Billie Holliday, etc. — singing about the man I love who beat me and left me… I even sang some of them myself in shows: “My Man,”  ”St. Louis Blues” … But now when I hear them I hear dangerous co-dependency and criminal domestic violence.

The reason this is important to all of you out there in FB land is that your Congresscritters have failed to re-authorize the Violence Against Women Act, even though: “From its passage in 1994 through 2010, the act helped cut the rate of domestic violence nationwide by 67 percent. It also helped establish a National Domestic Violence hotline, which until last week was responding to over 22,000 calls per month. The act also mandated that victims, no matter their income levels, would not be forced to bear the expense of their own rape exams; strengthened federal penalties for repeat sex offenders; helped communities develop dedicated law enforcement and prosecution units for domestic violence; and helped train more than 500,000 police officers, prosecutors, attorneys and judges each year in domestic violence law and counseling.”

Why in heaven’s name, you might ask, would Republicans in the House not want to support legislation that clearly does so much good? Well, here’s why:

“Although the Senate passed a bipartisan version in 2012, it included language for protection of same-sex partners, immigrants regardless of their status, and Native Americans. Some Republicans in the House objected to the new language, preferring to limit protections to only certain groups of women. In short, Congress seeks to establish a means test to receive treatment for rape.”

So, Julie, I’m telling my 7 granddaughters to “hit” the Congresscritters who chose not to re-authorize this bill by calling them to account and booting them out of office. Let’s see if they feel that pain.

Two quick thoughts on Aaron Swartz: Lambert Strether’s and mine

Strether, via Rick Perlstein at The Nation:  ”Our society should be selecting for the Aaron Swartz’s [sic] of this world. Instead, generous and ethical behavior, especially when combined with technical brilliance, turns out to be maladaptive, indeed lethal. If Swartz had been Wall Street’s youngest investment banker, he would be alive today.”

Mine: A nation that cannot find places for its Aaron Swartzes is a nation in decline. A nation that persecutes its Aaron Swartzes has turned its face from God and deserves whatever disaster befalls it.

(More on  Swartz by Strether here and here; by Lawrence Lessig here.)

Charlie Pierce, as he so often does, catches the big picture here: Criminal prosecution is the primary means by which powerful government and business interests combine to quash uprising, even of the intellectual variety. Viewed in that sense, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz (for whose removal you can sign a petition here) didn’t screw up and neither did the criminal-justice system. No, they did exactly what they were supposed to do, even though, by any sane measure, ther only two legitimate targets left in this country for the Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act are the Roman Catholic Church and Goldman Sachs.

And if even half the wingnuts screaming that the government is coming for all their guns realized that this is the real way the government is coming after them, we’d have fewer mass shootings in particular and a safer, saner country in general.

On today’s Connecticut massacre; or, PARTS of the Constitution are a suicide pact

Commenter Kurt Weldon at Pierce’s place:

When the Patriot Act was thumbing its nose at the First Amendment, we were told “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” And yet, when the Second Amendment is discussed, the Constitution is very much a suicide pact. The First Amendment is phrased as an absolute. We treat [it] as conditional. The Second is phrased conditionally. We treat it as an absolute.

Words matter, and history’s greatest clusterflocks are, to a one, tagged with the shattered remains of people who believed otherwise, the destruction not distinguishing in many cases between the merely ignorant and the guilty as sin. Are we really going to continue to treat as rational actors the kinds of public figures who argue, in effect, that if we give each kindergartner her own Glock, this crap won’t ever happen again?

However, lest I be accused of looking at the world only through shit-colored glasses, let me pass on, via commenter Patrick Myers on the same thread linked above, an observation — and, perhaps, instructions for you if you’re wondering what to tell your kids about what happened today — from Fred Rogers. Yeah, that Fred Rogers:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.

Among those helpers today were cops, firefighters and public school teachers — the same cops, firefighters and public school teachers the Republican Party and its sponsors, the Koch Brothers and ALEC, have been demonizing so loudly and publicly for so long. Bad as today was, but for some of those teachers it could have been far worse.

My aunt is a retired public school teacher in Connecticut. Her older daughter’s husband is one today.

No, I don’t believe in banning individual gun ownership. But I also don’t believe for a goddamn second that the American people currently constitute a well-regulated militia, and anyone who claims otherwise, including a majority of the current Supreme Court, apparently, is batshit insane. I believe in the Constitution, but I have never signed a suicide pact and I don’t know another soul in America who has. Maybe I just need to get out more.

Sen. John McCain gets something right. Seriously.

McCain is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is expected to approve on Thursday a 6,000-page report on the Bush administration’s torture program. And McCain wants that report made public. His reasoning is that we didn’t get any useful information out of the torture program, in particular not any information that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. To me, that’s threading the needle a little too finely; the damn thing should be public because it’s about torture, hello? It should be made public because it’s about crimes committed by our government, not because of the utility, or lack thereof, of those crimes. But McCain, who hasn’t done much right lately, is, to his credit, on the right side of both morality and history on this one. I just hope his committee colleagues agree with him.

Brian Moynihan can say only one thing to keep himself out of prison, and it’s a lie.

This one’s for my friends and family in Charlotte.

Brian Moynihan is the CEO of Bank of America. Last May, unbeknownst to most of us, he was deposed by lawyers for insurance companies suing Bank of America and Countrywide, the “mortgage” company that BofA acquired. The insurance companies lost a metric shit-ton of money because Countrywide spent years originating a boatload of mortgages to anyone with a pulse, mortgages that were doomed to fail, and then packaged and sold them as AAA-grade bonds, which were even more attractive investments at the time because MBIA and other prominent companies had insured them.

When BofA acquired Countrywide, for no small amount of money despite the company’s obvious worthlessness at that point, Moynihan famously promised to make good on all his company’s new acquisition’s misdeeds, a promise that, if kept, could render BofA so much more insolvent that even the government wouldn’t be able to ignore it any longer. And I haven’t kept close track, so this may all be over and done with, but Moynihan also may have legal problems with BofA stockholders who have claimed they weren’t fully informed of  Countrywide’s problems at the time of the acquisition, as securities law requires.

Anyway, this little Q&A between MBIA lawyers and Moynihan  runs on to 223 pages, and if we are to take its protagonist at his word — a dangerous thing to do, as we shall see in a moment — then he not only has no business serving as the CEO of anything more important than watching moss grow, he also desperately needs full-time dementia care. (And having had friends and relatives with Alizheimer’s, I don’t throw that metaphor out  lightly.)

Moynihan essentially had three choices in answering these questions. He could tell the truth and, in all likelihood, admit under oath to securities fraud, conspiracy and a host of other crimes. Or he could lie and say these things did not happen on his watch when they manifestly did, and face perjury charges. Or he could say he didn’t recall. (I suppose he had a fourth possibility, taking the Fifth Amendment, but a quick scan suggests he either didn’t do that or else did it very obliquely.)

Well, to absolutely no one’s surprise, Brian the Job Creator chose Door No. 3. At the moment, if you Google the phrase “great amnesiacs of history” in quotes, you get no hits. I suspect that’s about to change, as Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone comments:

If you’re a court junkie, or have the misfortune (as some of us poor reporters do) of being forced professionally to spend a lot of time reading legal documents, the just-released Moynihan deposition in MBIA v. Bank of America, Countrywide, and a Buttload of Other Shameless Mortgage Fraudsters will go down as one of the great Nixonian-stonewalling efforts ever, and one of the more entertaining reads of the year.

In this long-awaited interrogation – Bank of America has been fighting to keep Moynihan from being deposed in this case for some time – Moynihan does a full Star Trek special, boldly going where no deponent has ever gone before, breaking out the “I don’t recall” line more often and perhaps more ridiculously than was previously thought possible. Moynihan seems to remember his own name, and perhaps his current job title, but beyond that, he’ll have to get back to you. …

Taibbi’s account alone is both hilarious and outrageous. Now that the semester is over, I can’t wait to read the actual deposition. (Hey, it’s how I roll.)

In the deposition, attorney Peter Calamari of Quinn Emmanuel, representing MBIA, attempts to ask Moynihan a series of questions about what exactly Bank of America knew about Countrywide’s operations at various points in time.

Early on, he asks Moynihan if he remembers the B of A audit committee discussing Countrywide. Moynihan says he “doesn’t recall any specific discussion of it.”

He’s asked again: In the broadest conceivable sense, do you recall ever attending an audit committee meeting where the word Countrywide or any aspect of the Countrywide transaction was ever discussed? Moynihan: I don’t recall.

Calamari counters: It’s a multi-billion dollar acquisition, was it not?

Moynihan: Yes, it was.

[Q:] Well, isn’t that the kind of thing you would talk about?

Moynihan: not necessarily . . .

This goes on and on for a while, with the Bank of America CEO continually insisting he doesn’t remember ever talking about Countrywide at these meetings, that you’d have to “get the minutes.” Incredulous, Calamari, a little sarcastically, finally asks Moynihan if he would say he has a good memory.

“I would – I could remember things, yes,” Moynihan deadpans. “I have a good memory.”

Calamari presses on, eventually asking him about the state of Countrywide when Moynihan became the CEO, leading to the following remarkable exchange, in which the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world claims not to know anything about the most significant acquisition in the bank’s history (emphasis mine):

Q: By January 1st, 2010, when you became the CEO of Bank Of America, CFC – and  I’m using the initials CFC, Countrywide Financial Corporation – itself was no longer engaged in any revenue-producing activities; is that right?

Moynihan: I wouldn’t be the best person to ask about that because I don’t know.

There are no sound effects in the transcript, but you can almost hear an audible gasp at this response. Calamari presses Moynihan on his answer.

“Sir,” he says, “you were CEO of Bank Of America in January, 2010, but you don’t know what Countrywide Financial Corporation was doing at that time?”

In an impressive display of balls, Moynihan essentially replies that Bank of America is a big company, and it’s unrealistic to ask the CEO to know about all of its parts, even the ones that are multi-billion-dollar suckholes about which the firm has been engaged in nearly constant litigation from the moment it acquired the company.

“We have several thousand legal entities,” is how Moynihan puts it. “Exactly what subsidiary took place [sic] is not what you do as the CEO. That is [sic] other people’s jobs to make sure.”

The exasperated MBIA lawyer tries again: If it’s true that Moynihan somehow managed to not know anything about the bank’s most important and most problematic subsidiary when he became CEO, well, did he ever make an effort to correct that ignorance?  ”Do you ever come to learn what CFC was doing?” is how the question is posed.

“I’m not sure that I recall exactly what CFC was doing versus other parts,” Moynihan sagely concludes.

The deposition rolls on like this for 223 agonizing pages. The entire time, the Bank of America CEO presents himself as a Being There-esque cipher who was placed in charge of a Too-Big-To-Fail global banking giant by some kind of historical accident beyond his control, and appears to know little to nothing at all about the business he is running.

In the end, Moynihan even doubles back on his “we’ll pay for the things Countrywide did” quote. Asked if he said that to a Bloomberg reporter, Moynihan says he doesn’t remember that either, though he guesses the reporter got it right.

Well, he’s asked, assuming he did say it, does the quote accurately reflect Moynihan’s opinion?

“It is what it is,” Moynihan says philosophically.

There’s nothing surprising about any of this – it’s natural that a Bank of America executive would do everything he could to deny responsibility for Countrywide’s messes. But that doesn’t mean it’s not funny. By about the thirtieth “I don’t recall,” I was laughing out loud.

It’s also more than a little infuriating. In the pre-crash years, Countrywide was the biggest, loudest, most obvious fraud in a marketplace full of them …

One of the biggest indictments you can level against U.S. news media is that U.S. financiers were engaging in this level of world-historical theft, fraud and conspiracy right out in the open for a decade and more, and yet no one of consequence has done any hard time for it.

If we are to take Moynihan at his word, the only way you could have been more delusional and out of touch than he was to have believed on election night that Mitt Romney was going to win big. But as the deposition makes clear, taking Brian Moynihan at his word  would make a box of rocks look like a Davidson valedictorian.

I’ve looked at clods from both sides, now …

Pretty much every single professional journalist in Washington, and a lot of regular Americans, think there are virtues to be had in balance, moderation and centrism. Perhaps as an extension of that belief — for it certainly is not on the basis of even moderately complicated economics, or, for that matter, mathematics — they believe that both the rich and the poor must give something up to address the nation’s budget issues.

(I refuse to call them budget problems, let alone crises; they are issues in the way that we say that sociopaths have issues in that they are the perfectly predictable, and pretty well predicted, results of predictably sociopathic decisions made by known sociopaths.)

So a lot of people who either ought to know better, or who do know better but stand to profit from pretending otherwise, are out there arguing that we need to screw the rich a tiny bit and the middle class and poor a lot to “fix” the deficit (which is fixing itself pretty nicely at the moment, plunging dramatically as a percentage of GDP, but never mind that) and that if both sides are angry, as they are about the nonexistent Simpson-Bowles “report,”  then we must be doing the right thing. The problem, of course, is that not all anger is justified, valid, moral or even sane, as Charlie Pierce reminds us:

Can we please have an honest assessment of credibility here? If billionaires are angry because they might have to chip in some boutonniere money on April 15, and a middle-class family is angry because their 82-year old grandmother with Alzheimer’s is lying in her own filth in a substandard nursing home because of Medicare “reforms,” are we honestly saying that the anger of both sides is equally justified? Has anyone even asked that question?

To the best of my knowledge, no one in the DC media has asked this question, and my friend Doug Clark at the N&R, who’s usually much more sensible, doesn’t seem to be concerned with it, and, hey, I’ve got a blog, so I thought I’d raise it here.

I am not Pamela C. Marsh

… and it’s a damn good thing for some high-ranking Florida Republicans that I am not. For Pamela C. Marsh is the United States Attorney for the Northern Judicial District of Florida. And were I she, I would have begun convening a grand jury in Tallahassee this morning before my second cup of coffee:

A new Florida law that contributed to long voter lines and caused some to abandon voting altogether was intentionally designed by Florida GOP staff and consultants to inhibit Democratic voters, former GOP officials and current GOP consultants have told The Palm Beach Post.

Republican leaders said in proposing the law that it was meant to save money and fight voter fraud. But a former GOP chairman and former Gov. Charlie Crist, both of whom have been ousted from the party, now say that fraud concerns were advanced only as subterfuge for the law’s main purpose: GOP victory.

Former Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer says he attended various meetings, beginning in 2009, at which party staffers and consultants pushed for reductions in early voting days and hours.

“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told The Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only. … ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’ ” Greer said he was told by those staffers and consultants.

“They never came in to see me and tell me we had a (voter) fraud issue,” Greer said. “It’s all a marketing ploy.”

Greer is now under indictment, accused of stealing $200,000 from the party through a phony campaign fundraising operation. He, in turn, has sued the party, saying GOP leaders knew what he was doing and voiced no objection.

“Jim Greer has been accused of criminal acts against this organization and anything he says has to be considered in that light,” says Brian Burgess, Florida GOP spokesman since September.

But Greer’s statements about the motivations for the party’s legislative efforts, implemented by a GOP-majority House and Senate in Tallahassee in 2011, are backed by Crist — also now on the outs with the party — and two veteran GOP campaign consultants.

Wayne Bertsch, who handles local and legislative races for Republicans, said he knew targeting Democrats was the goal.

“In the races I was involved in in 2008, when we started seeing the increase of turnout and the turnout operations that the Democrats were doing in early voting, it certainly sent a chill down our spines. And in 2008, it didn’t have the impact that we were afraid of. It got close, but it wasn’t the impact that they had this election cycle,” Bertsch said, referring to the fact that Democrats picked up seven legislative seats in Florida in 2012 despite the early voting limitations.

Another GOP consultant, who did not want to be named, also confirmed that influential consultants to the Republican Party of Florida were intent on beating back Democratic turnout in early voting after 2008.

In 2008 Democrats, especially African-Americans, turned out in unprecedented numbers for President Barack Obama, many of them casting ballots during 14 early voting days. In Palm Beach County, 61.2 percent of all early voting ballots were cast by Democrats that year, compared with 18.7 percent by Republicans.

(Memo to the Florida Republicans: Jim Greer might well be willing to say anything at all to keep his own butt of prison, assuming the charges against him are legitimate, which is by no means certain at this point. But your main beef with Charlie Crist seems to be that he’s not batshit enough for you. IANAL, but I think you’re gonna need more than that to impeach his testimony when you cross-examine him. And not only does Wayne Bertsch not appear to have an ax to grind, he appears to be writing off a lot of future business by coming forward.)

What would be at issue in this grand jury investigation? Well, its formal title would be Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 13, subsections 241 and 242 of the United States Code:

UNITED STATES CODE
TITLE 18 – CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE
PART I – CRIMES
CHAPTER 13 – CIVIL RIGHTS

§ 241. Conspiracy against rights

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any inhabitant of any State, Territory, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; or

If two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured -

They shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results, they shall be subject to imprisonment for any term of years or for life.
§ 242. Deprivation of rights under color of law

Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any inhabitant of any State, Territory, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such inhabitant being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined not more than $1,000 or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if bodily injury results shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results shall be subject to imprisonment for any term of years or for life.

Within my lifetime, people of all races and creeds have died in the United States seeking, or trying to protect, the right to vote, and these smart-ass Republican white boys think it’s all a goddamn game. Of course, to them it is all a game. And it will stay that way until they spend a year or 10 in prison and cough up five-figure fines and six-figure legal fees.

As I’ve said before, the evidence strongly suggests that the death penalty is not a deterrent to homicide, even though the likelihood of being caught and punished is pretty high, because homicide is a crime frequently committed in the heat of the moment. But this? This is planned, rational, willful, intentional and cold-blooded. And that is exactly the kind of behavior that harsh penalties combined with the likelihood of being caught and punished will deter.

So were I Pamela C. Marsh, U.S. Attorney for the Northern Judicial District of Florida, I would not wait around for my worthless boss, Eric Holder, to get his thumbs out of his rear end and give me the OK or shoot an email to the Civil Rights Division. I’d do my job prosecuting conspiracies against civil rights in northern Florida and dare Holder, an African American, and his boss, the president, also an African American, to do anything about it. Holder might; after all, Karl Rove did something very similar and was never charged. But my guess is that once that investigation started, even Holder wouldn’t be idiotic enough to try to stop it. And the U.S. would be a tiny step farther down the still-very-long road toward the equal protection under the law that we wrote into the Constitution a century and a half ago.

Spain dances with the devil, and the newspaper El País’s CEO leads

If you’ve followed the European economy much, you probably know the following things:

• Spain has been particularly hard hit by the 2008 crash and its aftermath, with official unemployment at 25% and youth unemployment at 52%.
• Spain’s problems were almost all caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. Before that, the country was running a surplus.
• Nonetheless, the EC (read: German bankers who don’t want their bonds to take it in the teeth) are forcing austerity measures onto Spain that are making a horrific situation worse.

And here’s something you might not know: A newspaper editor who once helped fight off a military coup against a fragile new democracy is now a newspaper CEO who has joined the rapine:

“When you look at it from here, it doesn’t seem like there’s a crisis on,” observed one of the striking El País journalists I spoke to later that evening, gesturing at Madrid’s central shopping district, lights and logos glistening in the rain. But he said it wearily – he was above the cut-off age of 50, specifically earmarked by El País chief executive Juan Luis Cebrián as too old to be needed. A week before the high profile general strike, the newspaper’s employees were on strike over the “ere,” a kind of mass lay-off with next to no severance pay that had been enabled by the new labor reforms. El País will sack 139 journalists from a workforce of 450, a plan implemented by a chief executive who, they despaired, had once been a brave, campaigning editor, using his newspaper to fight the attempted military coup in 1981 with passion and integrity, and helping to establish a new pluralistic, democratic ethos in a febrile country still feeling its way into the light after 40 years of dictatorship.

Cebrián, who takes home 13m euros a year, told his striking journalists “we can’t keep living so well.”

For those of you keeping score at home, at the current exchange rate of $1.2975 to the euro, that’s close to $17 million. So if Cebrián could satisfy himself with making a ton of money instead of a shit-ton of money, he could pay the laid-off workers an average of more than $86,300 a year and still have $5 million left over for himself.

We can’t keep living so well?

WE?

¿Quién, hijo de puta, es este de quien hablas “nosotros”? Who, you son of a bitch, is this “we” of whom you speak?

 

A short explanation of why Samuel Alito is too farking stupid to be on the Supreme Court

He doesn’t understand the difference between creating speech and buying an audience:

Alito said the real issue is whether free speech rights “should be limited to certain preferred corporations, namely those media organizations.” And with the proliferation of the Internet and social media, the line is getting more blurry between individuals and media, he said.

Give Sam credit: No conservative has ever gone broke bashing the media, particularly in front of audiences like the Federalist Society. Nonetheless, I’ll try to help Sam out here.

My local newspaper or USA Today or the Huffington Post or whoever does not have a monopoly on free-speech rights. Nowhere in this dimension are free speeech rights “limited to certain preferred corporations, namely those media organizations.” Any corporation except for certain tax-exempt ones can create a website, buy or rent hosting, and endorse or attack any candidate it chooses, just as media organizations do. (And if the tax-exempt corporations decide they want to, then they should just give up their tax exemptions and go buck-wild. Yeah, Roman Catholic church, I’m looking at you.)

What Alito’s vote in the Citizens United case made it possible for corporations to do, and what “media organizations” as he defined them do NOT do, is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the creation and dissemination of advertising for or against candidates. (It also made it possible for corporations to try to tell their employees how to vote; fortunately, most Americans still don’t negotiate with terrorists.) That’s a pretty simple and very obvious distinction, not to mention a clear and present danger to continuing our form of representative government.

OK, I take it back. Maybe Alito isn’t stupid. Maybe he just thinks you and I are.

Memo to Mitt and the GOP

I honestly don’t know who’s going to win the presidential election on Tuesday. The New York Times’s much-praised and much maligned Nate Silver gives Obama something like an 80 percent chance, but as Silver himself will tell you, that’s probability only and the other  20 percent — i.e., Romney’s chances — is not trivial.

But I think that the Republicans think they know who’s going to win on Tuesday, and they’re acting like they’re pretty sure it’s not their guy. Consider:

• Florida Gov. Rick Scott — who, in a nation governed by the rule of law, would have gone to prison for defrauding the government during his previous life as CEO of a for-profit health concern — has tried as hard as he can to limit and harass early voting in Florida. I’m sure the fact that early voters there — as in most of the rest of the country — are predominantly Democratic has nothing to do with it.
• Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, who already has gotten in trouble with the federal courts over his messing around with voting, has imposed new rules that essentially require the voter to act as his own elections official or else his vote won’t count. Voting rights activists sued last name night, claiming that Husted’s action violates a previous court order, statements by Husted’s own attorneys and Ohio state law as well. Were I the judge in the previous case, I’d have had his ass in jail on a 6-month contempt-of-court sentence before the sun set today, because this is exactly the kind of behavior that contempt-of-court citations — and impeachments — were created to address.

And that’s just government. Here in the Republican-exalted private sector, things are even peachier for representative democracy:

WASHINGTON — The Mitt Romney campaign and its business allies are driving home a final message unlike one we’ve seen in past presidential campaigns: Vote Romney, or you’re fired.

The pressure on workers in swing states to toe the GOP line hasn’t been restricted to any particular industry. Corporate apparel makers in Ohio, truck stop attendants in Ohio and Virginia, casino employees in Nevada, construction workers in Florida, gift-card purveyors in Colorado and Florida, car-parts makers in Michigan, software technicians in Florida and Colorado, coal miners in Ohio, dock manufacturers in Wisconsin, frozen-food packers in Michigan, resort staff in Florida, Virginia and Nevada, and people all over the country who work — or used to work — for Koch Industries or another Koch-owned company have all been given notice by their boss that an Obama victory could lead to layoffs or otherwise harm the company and its workers.

Even workers who’d already been laid off by the Kochs were mailed letters urging them to vote Republican or else “suffer the consequences” of Obama policies that would harm the company.

Romney himself urged conservative business leaders this June to “make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections.”

Before the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision, it would have been illegal for a boss to tell an employee that “their job and their future” was on the ballot on Election Day. But the court now considers such electoral pressure an expression of free speech.

A few observations and opinions:

As I said earlier, this is not the behavior of a party that expects to win on the merits.

More particularly, if you have to engage in conspiracy to deny American voters their civil rights — which carries up to 10 years and a $10,000 fine, Rick Scott and Jon Husted — you’re not only acting like you don’t expect to win, you’re acting like you don’t want to be an American anymore. Well, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, because keeping legal voters from voting is about as un-American as it gets.

Americans let the GOP steal the election in 2000, and by a large majority, they think we got the worst president in modern times out of that deal. I doubt they’ll be so willing to let it happen again, particularly when, as is the case this time, it’s so blatant and out in the open.

And finally, for the moron CEOs who are threatening their employees if they don’t vote for Romney — despite the fact that under Obama they’ve posted record profits, amassed record cash reserves, watched the Dow double since this president took office, avoided any punishment for blowing up the whole economy in 2008 AND enjoyed the lowest top marginal income tax rates and corporate income tax rates since the Korean freakin’ War and the greatest income inequality since the days of Jay and Daisy — here’s our response to you:

• We already had the feudalism-vs.-democracy argument. In 1776. Your side lost. Get the hell over it.
• The U.S. abolished peonage a long time ago. Get the hell over it.
• WE ARE AMERICANS. WE DO NOT NEGOTIATE WITH TERRORISTS.

Hallefreakinlujah in Happy Valley

Maybe, just maybe, we’re going to see something we haven’t seen in America in a long time – institutional justice as well as personal punishment:

Graham B. Spanier, the former president of Penn State, was charged Thursday with helping to cover up the child abuse allegations involving Jerry Sandusky that have roiled the university and its famed football program over the past year.

During a news conference, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Linda Kelly, said Spanier faced five charges: perjury, obstruction of justice, endangering the welfare of children, criminal conspiracy and failure to report suspected child abuse. She also said that two other former university officials — Gary Schultz, the former university vice president, and Tim Curley, the former athletic director — would face the same five charges.

Schultz and Curley were already scheduled to stand trial in January on charges of perjury and failing to report child sexual abuse. Kelly specifically mentioned incidents in 1998 and 2001 when Spanier, Schultz and Curley spoke about allegations that Sandusky had abused boys on campus but did not take measures to stop him.

See, Justice Department? That wasn’t so hard. If a state attorney general can do it, how ’bout the feds go after the child-molesting priests and their enabling bishops and Pope? You know, seek … um, what’s it called again? Oh, yeah, justice.

Republicans and rape; or, zygote fetishization

The recent comments on rape from a long list of Republicans including Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin, along with the fact that the GOP’s national platform has opposed safe, legal abortion since 1980, have brought “social issues” to the fore in a national election that ordinarily would have been almost entirely about the economy. (Not arguing that it should have been almost entirely about the economy — I’d've loved some discussion of global warming, Afghanistan and using drones for extrajudicial assassination, to name just three topics — just that it ordinarily would have been.)

I won’t rehash the moral arguments about abortion, but I will offer this quasi-theological observation: The people who argue that their faith dictates that a woman who is raped and becomes pregnant must carry her rapist’s baby to term are not worshiping God, or any god. Rather, they are fetishizing a zygote. Their “culture of life” has become the idolatry of a cargo cult. It is nothing that Jesus would recognize as God’s love here on Earth.

With her gracious permission and without additional comment, I offer this take from my mother’s cousin Edith Hay Harris of Houston, Texas* Durham, NC:

My two cents: I was a volunteer for Greenville (SC) Rape Crisis Council for 8 or so years, some time back. I don’t think anyone can imagine what these women and girls endured. I think a lot of people don’t realize victims come in all ages and from all walks of life. I still remember a woman with a husband and children who became pregnant from the rape and had to have the baby; a 68 yr old grandmother who was nearly beaten to death by her attacker who put her grandson’s training pants over her face while he raped her; and a 12 year old who was impregnated by a homeless man. In the last case, we took her to Atlanta for an abortion, since no one in Greenville was providing that service then, and United Way dropped us from their funding for doing so. So, yes, I still feel that rage so many years later. I think these Republicans actually have contempt for women and need to control them. Sort of reminds me of the Taliban.

*Oops. Cousin Elsie lives in Houston, not Edith. I knew this.

U.S. Journalism Fail

The fall of the mainstream media has had many causes, but speaking as someone who spent a quarter-century working in it, I think few have been more damaging than the adherence to narratives that were either no longer operative or never true in the first place. And nowhere has this adherence been more in evidence than in how the MSM, your so-called liberal media, has behaved toward the Republican Party. Yes, journalists tend toward the middle of the political spectrum (there are almost no true leftists anymore), but 45 years of working the refs has had such an all-encompassing  effect that no one is mentioning the elephant defecating in the room. Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog summarizes:

But the press had a story. It’s a great, multi-threaded story, really, even though nobody in the press thinks it is. It’s a story the press could have been telling us for years, but never wanted to bother: the story of a major American political party going absolutely stark raving mad, while having the power and persuasive ability to potentially take the country with it. It’s a party that flirted with nominating barking lunatics such as Donald Trump, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum before settling on a guy who was able to mollify supporters of those lunatics by faking (or imbibing) madness himself, by being a pathological liar, and by spending millions of dollars — because this party is crazy about the rich, and has persuaded much of the country to want to coddle the rich even after the rich nearly destroyed the world.

The party lurches from superstitious belief to superstitious belief (in the phoniness of climate change, in the existence of massive Democratic voter fraud, in the imminence of sharia law in the U.S., in the socialist/Muslim leanings of the centrist Christian in the White House, and so on). The rich guy at its head flirted with some of those beliefs and gave aid and comfort to firm believers in them.

If the party were a celebrity or a historical figure, it would be Charlie Sheen or Caligula, and everyone would want to tell the story. But nobody wants to tell this story. Nobody wants to write that the GOP is insane. Nobody wants to write that a great country can’t survive with crazy zillionaires selling conspiracy theories to angry white people via 24/7 media, just so they can get somewhat lower tax rates.

The story is there, guys. It wasn’t good enough for you, I guess.

Or, as Driftglass puts it:

And yet the MSM continues to prop up the rotting carcass of the GOP like the corpse in ”Weekend at Bernie’s”, and waltz it lovingly across the national stage year after year after year, protecting it as ferociously as they would their own children even as it goes raving mad, putrefies and crumbles to reek and maggots in their arms.

If a guy commits a crime and you help him, you’re guilty of a crime yourself — aiding and abetting, at the least. So when you aid and abet the journey to insanity of one of the country’s two major parties, and perhaps the entire country along with it, what does that make you?

Learning from the (not-so-ancient) Greeks

Thereisnospoon (@DavidOAtkins), writing at Digby’s Hullabaloo:

It turns that when you throw a proud people who have lived a relatively decent lifestyle with modest provisions for the middle class into the desperate grinder of austerity economics, fascist movements start to develop. That’s pretty much how it happened in Germany in the first place, which is why the the rest of the world learned from its Post-WWI mistake to implement the Marshall Plan after the Second War. When people start to lose everything, it’s easy to blame immigrants and the dispossessed. Those people start to become scapegoats for the sorts of scoundrels who use jingoistic xenophobia for career advancement in the guise of patriotism.

It’s no surprise that the ascendance of the far right in the United States tracks alongside the erosion of the middle class. Fortunately, America has been spared the full force of austerity. So far.

But the rise of a Golden Dawn [Greece's fascist neo-nazi movement, now polling at 14% there -- Lex] in the U.S. isn’t at all unthinkable. All that need happen is for the Very Serious People to get their way in voucherizing Medicare and Social Security, destroying the safety net, and remaking society in Ayn Rand’s image.

History repeats itself, and sometimes, if it doesn’t feel like you heard it the first time, it shouts.

 

Quotes of the Day, Charlie Pierce’s Comments Section edition

Below this post:

“Too many in this country would rather be [raped] by business than helped by government.” — Barry Friedman

“Those of us who drive on our nation’s roads are well aware that most of us are idiots at best, and greedy, selfish, homicidal morons at worst. At least once a month I now get to see an ambulance (and once a fire engine!) with lights and siren on, have to fight its way through an intersection because cross traffic simply refuses to stop. Stuff as simple as driving depends almost entirely on self-policing, but for too many of us, “self-policing” is what suckers do. There’s a good reason why the modern GOP still commands such a strong following — most of us are scum.” — John Robinson (not this one)

Why tonight’s debate matters; or, Quote of the Day, What the GOP is Good At Edition, cont.

From DougJ at Balloon Juice:

The American right’s real genius lies in [mess]ing things up, then using that [mess]ed-up-ness as the crisis that necessitates the implementation of the right’s policies. I don’t claim that the [mess]ing up of things is always deliberate—they’re incompetent enough to [mess] a lot of things up by accident—but the reaction is very cynical and very carefully thought out.

DougJ considers what the GOP is up to in this instance analogous to the Reichstag fire. But if you’re going to go Godwin, given how clear Romney/Ryan have been about their plans for government spending right up until Romney shape-shifted into Moderate Mitt during the first presidential debate, a better example than the Reichstag fire might be the Nazi blitzkrieg  of Poland. And Jon Chait at New York magazine believes the Romney campaign/would-be administration plans just such an assault on the American social-welfare structure. In a piece titled “November 7,” to which DougJ also links, Chait writes:

Let’s first imagine that, on January 20, Romney takes the oath of office. Of the many secret post-victory plans floating around in the inner circles of the campaigns, the least secret is Romney’s intention to implement Paul Ryan’s budget. The Ryan budget has come to be almost synonymous with the Republican Party agenda, and Romney has embraced it with only slight variations. It would repeal Obamacare, cut income-tax rates, turn Medicare for people under 55 years old into subsidized private insurance, increase defense spending, and cut domestic spending, with especially large cuts for Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs targeted to the very poor.

Few voters understand just how rapidly Romney could achieve this, rewriting the American social compact in one swift stroke. Ryan’s plan has never attracted Democratic support, but it is not designed for bipartisanship. Ryan deliberately built it to circumvent a Senate filibuster, stocking the plan with budget legislation that is allowed, under Senate “budget reconciliation” procedures, to pass with a simple majority. Republicans have been planning the mechanics of the vote for many months, and Republican insiders expect Romney to use reconciliation to pass the bill. Republicans would still need to control 50 votes in the Senate (Ryan, as vice-president, would cast the tiebreaking vote), but if Romney wins the presidency, he’ll likely precipitate a partywide tail wind that would extend to the GOP’s Senate slate.

One might suppose that at least a handful of Republicans might blanch at the prospect of reshaping the entire face of government unilaterally. But Ryan’s careful organizing of the party agenda has all taken place with this vote as the end point, and with the clear goal of sidestepping any such objection. When Republicans won control of Congress during the 2010 elections, Ryan successfully lobbied the party to take a vote on his budget plan the following April. The plan stood no chance of passage (given Obama’s certain veto) and exposed dozens of vulnerable House members to withering attacks over its unpopular provisions. So why hold a vote carrying huge potential risk and no chance of immediate success? So Ryan could get the party on record supporting his plan, depriving quiet dissidents of any future excuse to defect should the real vote come in 2013.

And if this were only a policy difference, that would be one thing. But the fact of the matter is that if these planned changes happen, a nontrivial number of America’s most vulnerable citizens — the very old, the very young, the chronically ill, those most hampered and hammered by the past four years of insufficient-bordering-on-indifferent action on unemployment – will die prematurely. That’s not hyperbole. That’s not an idle prediction. It is, rather, an absolutely foreseeable consequence of cutting social services, particularly Medicaid, in a time of great need and want. And if you don’t care about that, you’re a sociopath, pure and simple.

There are many things at stake in tonight’s debate and this year’s presidential and congressional elections, not the least of which are the fate of the globe’s environment and the fact that both my children  will be of military age before the end of a second Romney term. But for a combination of big and fast, the GOP plan to destroy what remains of the social safety net and give the proceeds to the very wealthy tops the list, and it simply cannot be allowed to happen.

If I ran a cable-news network …

… and an attendee at one of the two major parties’ presidential nominating conventions threw nuts at a black camerawoman who worked for me while saying, “This is how we feed animals,” I would make sure that every single one of my viewers got a look at the faces and names of the offenders. And if that party’s presidential candidate had been running a race-baiting campaign on top of that, I would personally write the script if necessary to make damn good and sure that my anchors and reporters were connecting the dots for people.

Perhaps that’s why I don’t run a cable-news network.