Fox News squirm

Fox News squirm

by digby

Can't you just feel the anchors at Fox clenching their teeth to prevent themselves from screaming "shut up, shut up you cheese-eating surrender monkeys!!!"

After the Paris mayor threatened to sue Fox News on Tuesday over the network's recent bogus reports on Muslim "no-go zones" in the city, the network responded that the mayor's comments were "misplaced."

"We empathize with the citizens of France as they go through a healing process and return to everyday life. However, we find the Mayor’s comments regarding a lawsuit misplaced," Fox News Executive Vice President Michael Clemente said in a Tuesday statement, according to Mediaite.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo slammed Fox's "prejudiced" coverage of the city in an appearance on CNN.

"When we're insulted, and when we've had an image, then I think we'll have to sue," Hidalgo said. "I think we'll have to go to court, in order to have these words removed."

Following the attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo, terror expert Steven Emerson claimed on Fox News that there are Muslim "no-go zones" in Europe "where non-Muslims just simply don't go in."

On Saturday, Fox News issued several on-air corrections for statements made by Emerson on the network and apologized for his comments.

I find it amazing that Fox apologized for those comments and I have to assume this was done at the behest of the management for reasons that have little to do with journalistic integrity. After all, if they cared about that all they would ever do is apologize. Somebody thought it was a very important mistake.

But whatever it is, it's clearly making them very uncomfortable.

But if there's one thing we've learned over the past couple of weeks it's that the Free Speech requires that we defend to the death the right of the cheese eaters to tweak Fox News:

Mockery is a national weapon in France, so when an American cable news channel raised false alarms about rampant lawlessness in some Paris neighborhoods — proclaiming them “no-go zones” for non-Muslims, avoided even by the police — a popular French television show rebutted the claims the way it best knew how: with satire, spoofs and a campaign of exaggeration and sarcasm.

The show, “Le Petit Journal,” is a French version of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” — irreverent and reliant on mock correspondents who showcase the foibles of the high and mighty.

Usually “Le Petit Journal” reserves its venom for French politicians and the local news media. But in the days after the terrorist attacks in Paris that left 17 dead, including 12 people at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, it set its sights on a trans-Atlantic target, America’s Fox News, after the channel claimed that swaths of England and France were ruled according to Shariah.

A Twitter user poked fun at Fox News, posting that the checkered cloth coverings of jam jars showed that even homemade preserves “have to wear hijab.”  

“They did this on a weekend when all France and Paris was in a state of shock,” said Yann Barthès, 40, who has hosted the show since it began in 2004. “I cried.” But, he said, it was also “irritating, so we chose humor to campaign against Fox News.”

“It’s important for the French audience to know about this. They don’t really know Fox News, and they think it’s an enormous channel, very American, with announcers with big voices and blonde women who look like Barbies.”

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We are all mass murderers now

We are all mass murderers now

by digby

.... as long as this exists in our name:

During his 14 years as governor, [Rick] Perry presided over the executions of a record 279 inmates, according to figures compiled by the state’s Department of Criminal Justice. Perry, who handed over the reins of power to fellow Republican Greg Abbott today, has touted his support for the death penalty as evidence of his toughness on crime, but his execution record also tells a far less flattering story.

Opponents of the death penalty have zeroed in on two key factors in campaigning for its abolition: the growing number of death row inmates who have later been proven innocent, and deeply embedded racial biases in the meting out of death sentences. Texas is an illustrative case.

Take the question of innocence. Since 1973, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 150 death row inmates have been exonerated and, with one exception, subsequently released from prison. (One inmate died of cancer before he was cleared.) Since Perry became governor in December 2000, five of those exonerations have occurred in his state.

Let's drop the pretense that the US is "exceptionally" civilized, ok? This is horrifying. Any nation that would take a chance that it might execute innocent people for crimes they didn't commit, particularly in this ritualized fashion, is not particularly civilized. Yes, we're better than Saudi Arabia. Bully for us.


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Smokin' 'em outta their caves

Smokin' 'em outta their caves

by digby

It looks as though the Democrats are getting clever. The ads make themselves:

Senate Democrats are pressing amendments to legislation that would approve the Keystone XL pipeline, arguing their proposals would "actually make it an American jobs bill."

"We have some suggestions on how to make the bill better and actually make it an American jobs bill. If Republicans oppose us they will be making it crystal clear to Americans that they are on the side of narrow special interests rather than on the side of America's middle class," said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate.

"If Republicans vote against these amendments none of them can say it's an American jobs bill," Schumer added.

Schumer along with Democratic Sens. Ed Markey (Mass.) and Al Franken (Minn.) urged Republicans to vote for the amendments that will be considered on Tuesday afternoon.

Markey's measure would ban the export of all oil shipped through the Canada-to-Texas pipeline, while Franken's would require that American steel be used to build the pipeline.

The Republicans voted against both of them.

Yes, it was a stunt. But that's the kind of stunt a smart minority does. As I said, the ads make themselves.


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The Jeb and Mitt club

The Jeb and Mitt club

by digby

If the donor class has its way and nominates one of their two fair haired boys, Mitt or Jeb, it's going to be a free-for-all for the Democrats. Hillary Clinton is far from above reproach and may be filthy rich from books and speeches these days, but the GOP establishment's greedy private sector graft that directly hurts average people is populist gold by comparison:

After attending his second meeting as a board member for InnoVida, a Miami-based company that marketed prefabricated housing materials for use in disaster zones and other places in need, Jeb Bush had some follow-up questions.

“Fine board meeting,” Bush wrote in an e-mail to the chief financial officer before requesting details about the company’s liability insurance and politely nudging him that cash-flow data “would be appreciated.”

Bush wouldn’t get his answers until a week after his September 2009 e-mail, and then only in part — the CFO provided him with an “unaudited” financial spreadsheet and said no insurance details were immediately available.

If Bush was troubled by the response, it didn’t prompt him to pull away from InnoVida. He remained on the board for an additional year, leaving after a fellow board member started to unravel the widespread fraud that eventually led to the firm’s demise and the criminal convictions of two top executives.

Previously unreported court documents suggest that Bush was more involved with the company than has been publicly known — and that he deepened his role even as others associated with Inno­Vida grew concerned about its financial practices.

Documents show that the company listed Bush in internal records as a “key manager” who had been given options to buy 250,000 shares of stock and later stood to make more money looking for partners to build factories overseas.

Bush aides say he broke from InnoVida and voluntarily repaid consulting fees as soon as questions arose, and there is no evidence that he knew of the fraud that led to the criminal conviction of the company’s chief executive, Claudio Osorio, in 2013.

Nevertheless, Bush’s involvement with InnoVida, which he joined as a $15,000-a-month consultant in 2007 after completing two terms as governor of Florida, provides insight into his approach as a businessman and illustrates how his corporate ties could affect his presidential aspirations.

That's probably the tip of the iceberg. And we already know about Mitt's 100 million dollar "401K" and that he refused to show his tax returns in every election he's run. Those questions aren't going away either. I guess they can dredge up Clinton's cattle futures trades from 1979, but the amount of money involved was a joke.

Clinton has long been a friend to Wall Street having been part of the Democratic Party of the DLC years when the shift to the Big Money Boyz was embraced as an important "new direction." (And with the tsunami of 1% money flooding the political system these days I'll guess that all the Democrats would take a similar approach, unfortunately. Obama certainly did.)But for all her Wall Street friendliness, she hasn't been mucking around with the stuff Mitt and Jeb have been mucking around with and I think it's going to be fun to watch the fireworks when they try to go after each other.



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QOTD: Enlightenment edition

QOTD: Enlightenment edition

by digby


By Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian:

We may have to retrieve the Enlightenment, as much as religion, from its fundamentalists. If Enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”, then this “task”, and “obligation” as Kant defined it, is never fulfilled; it has to be continually renewed by every generation in ever-changing social and political conditions. The advocacy of more violence and wars in the face of recurrent failure meets the definition of fanaticism rather than reason. The task for those who cherish freedom is to reimagine it – through an ethos of criticism combined with compassion and ceaseless self-awareness – in our own irreversibly mixed and highly unequal societies and the larger interdependent world. Only then can we capably defend freedom from its true enemies.

This is the best piece I've read in the wake of Charlie Hebdo. I despair of the fact that instead of emerging for our self-imposed immaturity we are diving back in and wallowing in it. Read the whole thing.

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"She hears the voices no one else hears" by @Gaius_Publius

"She hears the voices no one else hears"

by Gaius Publius

I wanted to point out this nice Mike Lux piece, at Huffington Post and elsewhere, because it makes an important point. It's also an obvious point, but the obvious often goes unnoticed. The buzz and eager interest in an Elizabeth Warren presidency is not about Warren herself. It's about what she offers at this historical moment.

Lux (my emphasis):

It seems like just about everyone these days is talking about Elizabeth Warren. I saw Jay Leno- not a very political guy or especially progressive- the other day on Bill Maher's show, talking about how shocked he was that Elizabeth Warren was only 18 months younger than Hillary because of how vital and energetic she seemed.

A focus group of swing voters, who traditionally don't follow politics very closely, in Colorado a couple of weeks back were disdainful of the politicians they had heard of like Jeb Bush and Hillary who were likely running for president, but loved what they were hearing about Elizabeth Warren.

The Sunday Doonesbury this weekend was a plea to "run, Lizzie, run" because "she hears the voices no one else hears". The Washington Post print addition on Sunday had a front page article whose headline asked "What does Elizabeth Warren want?"

Why is a first-term Senator in the minority party, a wonky college professor who had never held elective office before 2013, a woman who insists to everyone who asks that she is not running for president, striking such a chord in American politics right now? ... I think the chord she strikes has at least as much to do with the moment we are in as to who she is. I think most Americans in both parties have come to believe that government is too bought off by big money special interests to care about them anymore.

That is so refreshing to voters and activists alike, and it is turning Elizabeth into an icon that people respond to. ... She calls "Charge!" on a nomination fight for a position that no one has ever heard of, or a legislative fight that they weren't even aware of, and people answer the call because they trust her- they know in their hearts that she is fighting for them.

That "nomination fight" was over Wall Street insider Antonio Weiss for under-secretary of Treasury, and was covered in a number of venues, including here.

Lux goes on to detail the history of the Warren phenomenon, and lists her implied economic agenda. It's a good read and well worth your time. But I want to return to the headline quote from Doonesbury:

"She hears the voices no one else hears."

No one but us voters, that is, red-striped or blue; the many; the ignored. What does this tell us? That we need to be finding more Elizabeth Warrens, not just the one; and we need to be doing it now — just in case the first is not available.

GP


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TP-ing the SOTU by @BloggersRUs

TP-ing the SOTU

by Tom Sullivan

The T-party will again provide its own response to President Obama's State of the Union address tonight, Rachel Maddow reports. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa will give the official Republican response. She may be about the only member of the Senate to the right of Sen. Ted Cruz, Maddow observed. Just not right enough.

The T-party response will come from the same smirking freshman congressman, Rep. Curt Clawson of Florida, who, in a subcommittee hearing last July, mistook two senior American officials from the State Department and from Commerce for Indian nationals. Guess why:

"I'm familiar with your country; I love your country," the freshman congressman said. "Anything I can do to make the relationship with India better, I'm willing and enthusiastic about doing so."

"Just as your capital is welcome here to produce good-paying jobs in the U.S., I'd like our capital to be welcome there," he added. "I ask cooperation and commitment and priority from your government in so doing. Can I have that?"

"I think your question is to the Indian government," Nisha Biswal said. "We certainly share your sentiment, and we certainly will advocate that on behalf of the U.S." Working for the State Department, Biswal is a diplomat. Can you tell?

Clawson won his seat in a special election to replace Rep. Trey Radel, who resigned after a conviction for cocaine possession.

If we're in luck, Clawson will display the same smug, false confidence again. As Maddow said, tonight's SOTU should be fun.

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Progress (MLK Day 2015) by @Batocchio9

Progress (MLK Day 2015)
by Batocchio

Near the end of the film Selma, Martin Luther King (played by David Oyelowo) notes in a speech how racism has been used to turn poor whites against blacks. (This isn't a film review, but I thought some segments were superb while other elements were problematic.) The full speech the film references makes for an interesting (and timely) read. Here's the relevant section:

Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote. In focusing the attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland. Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.

Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. That is what was known as the Populist Movement. The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.

To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.

If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.

Thus, the threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and the white masses resulted in the establishment of a segregated society. They segregated southern money from the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; they segregated southern churches from Christianity; they segregated southern minds from honest thinking; and they segregated the Negro from everything. That’s what happened when the Negro and white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society: a society of justice where none would pray upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away; a society of brotherhood where every man would respect the dignity and worth of human personality.

King describes an old con: sell bigotry, and deliver more aristocracy (or plutocracy, or some other form of entrenched power). The moneyed, white conservatives making the pitch and their poorer marks were primarily in the Democratic Party until the 1960s, but then with Nixon's Southern strategy, the parties realigned and these constituencies became Republican (perhaps the most famous figure being Strom Thurmond). Almost every Republican presidential nominee since Nixon has employed some version of the Southern strategy and sold bigotry to acquire power (sometimes successfully). Another key lie has been that the New Deal was a horrible failure, but Reaganomics have been a stunning success for all Americans and not just a select few as intended. (Conservative economic policies arrive with different names, including supply-side economics, but can also simply be called business as usual, especially when it comes to bipartisan Wall Street corruption.) Economic conservatism and social conservatism don't always coexist, but they fit together easily, and the latter characteristically serves the former.

The film Selma depicts disturbing incidents in the past, but it's also troubling for contemporary audiences aware of new and ongoing efforts to suppress the vote, almost entirely coming from conservative and/or Republican organizations, and almost entirely targeting the poor, minorities, and other likely Democratic constituencies. (The issue of voting rights remains a major difference between the parties.) The Shelby County v. Holder (2013) decision is probably the most alarming and unconscionable move yet. It's disconcerting to see how past progress is being steadily and deliberately eroded.

All this brought to mind Chris Rock's interview late last year with Frank Rich (whose questions and comments are in bold). Here's the exchange I found most striking:

When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

Right. It’s ridiculous.

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

It’s about white people adjusting to a new reality?

Owning their actions. Not even their actions. The actions of your dad. Yeah, it’s unfair that you can get judged by something you didn’t do, but it’s also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn’t work for.

Meanwhile, returning to King, later in the same speech, he said:

And so I plead with you this afternoon as we go ahead: remain committed to nonviolence. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding. We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.

It's hard to disagree with that, and it remains a worthy cause, but it's also important to note that an entire industry exists to undermine such friendship and understanding. It's not a surprise that many of the same entities that deny climate change, oppose corporate oversight, push for lower taxes on the wealthy and oppose raising the minimum wage also support voting suppression. Some prominent conservatives have, without irony, argued that the the rich should get more votes and people who doesn't pay income tax shouldn't get to vote (never mind all the other taxes they pay). Likewise, other conservatives have praised old systems that reserved voting for property owners (they're usually politic enough to drop the "white man" requirement).

Just as progress isn't won without a fight, sadly, some people will seek to undo it, and progress can be reversed without sustained effort to support it.

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Magical orcas

Magical orcas

by digby

I love living so near the beach that I often get to see marine mammals in the wild cavorting and playing. I once saw a couple of young sea lions body surfing all the way to the shore like a couple of kids.

But this is really special:

People have turned the phrase "save the whales" into a joke about hippies.  But who cares: Save the damned whaes.  They're amazing.


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Good pope, bad pope

Good pope, bad pope

by digby

Pope Francis is quite a politician. This article says that he's angering conservatives with talk about curbing climate change, which for reasons that still elude me is really upsetting to those people. One hopes that he can at least persuade some of his flock to follow his lead on this. It's vital.

But never fear, he gave the wingnuts something really tasty too:

Pope Francis, after a visit to the largest Catholic nation in Asia, says Catholics may have a moral responsibility to limit the number of their children and need not reproduce "like rabbits.''

But the pope also reaffirmed the church's ban on artificial means of birth control and said Catholics should practice "responsible parenting."

For those of you who don't speak wingnut, that means no hanky-panky except for procreation purposes. Here, I'll let Rick Santorum explain it to you:

One of the things I will talk about that no President has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, “Well, that’s okay. Contraception’s okay.”

It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, they are supposed to be for purposes that are, yes, conjugal, but also [inaudible], but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen. We take any part of that out, we diminish the act. And if you can take one part out that’s not for purposes of procreation, that’s not one of the reasons, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women, so why can’t you take other parts of that out? And all of a sudden, it becomes deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure. And that’s certainly a part of it—and it’s an important part of it, don’t get me wrong—but there’s a lot of things we do for pleasure, and this is special, and it needs to be seen as special.

Again, I know most Presidents don’t talk about those things, and maybe people don’t want us to talk about those things, but I think it’s important that you are who you are. I’m not running for preacher. I’m not running for pastor, but these are important public policy issues. These how profound impact on the health of our society.

And if that bad, bad woman tempts her man into doing it for her selfish pleasure and she gets pregnant, well, that's the way it goes.

The one thing you cannot have is sex "deconstructed to the point where it's simply pleasure." So no birth control for you.

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Why they fear more people voting

Why they fear more people voting

by digby

h/t to @SeanMcElwee

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Cranking up the crazy, Jindal style

Cranking up the crazy, Jindal style

by digby

I don't know if he's misinformed or lying but this is the kind of lunacy that we are going to be seeing more of. It's obvious that terrorism fear-mongering is back on the menu:

LONDON — In a foreign policy speech delivered Monday in London, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said that in the West, "non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of Sharia law as they can without regard for the laws of the democratic countries which provided them a new home."

The Republican governor added that "it is startling to think that any country would allow, even unofficially, for a so-called 'no-go zone'."

Jindal remarks came during an address to the Henry Jackson Society in a committee room at the U.K.'s House of Commons with several British members of parliament attending.
[...]
In his speech, Jindal warned attendees that he was going to say things that would not be deemed politically correct. "So brace yourselves," he said, noting that he had no interest in defaming any religion, but "dealing with reality and facts."

"And the fact is that radical Islamists do not believe in freedom or common decency nor are they willing to accommodate them in any way and anywhere," he said.

Jindal is traveling through Europe on a 10-day economic development mission that could also bolster his foreign policy credentials as he considers a possible presidential campaign.

"We spent several days here, had the chance to meet with several elected leaders and what you hear from them, for example, these so-called no-go zones," he told NBC News in an interview. "I think it's a mistake for any country to allow the development of areas within their country, whether it's neighborhoods or other areas, where the same laws, the same values, the same rules, simply don't apply."

This is utter nonsense. There are no "no-go" zones where officials have just given up sovereignty and where the laws and rules of the state don't apply. But you have to love the chutzpah of this moron prefacing all his lies and misstatements by saying he "dealing with reality and facts". These are "reality and facts" that even Fox News has disowned and apologized for:

If Fox News anchors hadn’t gotten the message before, they will now: The network isn’t going to sanction loose and utterly unsupported chatter about Muslim “no-go zones” in Europe. In its programming last night, Fox News issued two corrections on the matter, one of which acknowledged that “we have made some regrettable errors on air regarding the Muslim population in Europe, particularly with regard to England and France.” That came from Julie Banderas during the Saturday night program “Fox Report.”

She continued: “To be clear, there is no formal designation of these zones in either country and no credible information to support the assertion there are specific areas in these countries that exclude individuals based solely on their religion.”

Later in the evening, Jeanine Pirro, host of “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” presented her own correction for the centerpiece of Fox News’s “no-go zone” week. On her Jan. 10 program, Pirro welcomed terrorism analyst Steve Emerson to speak about these zones, which Emerson described this way: “They’re sort of amorphous, they’re not contiguous necessarily, but they’re sort of safe havens. And they’re places where the governments, like France, Britain, Sweden, Germany — they don’t exercise any sovereignty so you basically have zones where Sharia courts are set up, where Muslim density is very intense, where police don’t go in.” Though Emerson claimed that this phenomenon plagued Europe very broadly, he zeroed in on Birmingham, England: “There are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” he said. (A separate no-go-zone correction was issued by”Fox & Friends” on Saturday morning.)

In her correction, Pirro laid responsibility for the bad information on Emerson, and on her failure to correct him: “Last week on this program,” said Pirro, “a guest made a serious factual error that we wrongly let stand unchallenged and uncorrected. The guest asserted that the city of Birmingham, England, is totally Muslim and that it is a place where non-Muslims don’t go . Both are incorrect.” She went on to provide 2011 census data noting that 22 percent of the city’s population self-identifies as Muslim and that there’s no evidence of the whole no-go thing.

Not bad, though a review of the offending segment reveals that Pirro’s errors extend beyond just the failure to challenge Emerson. She gave the impression that she was rooting for these falsehoods. “This is metastasizing into a simple takeover,” she said at one point of the Muslim presence in Europe.

The Emerson-Pirro exchange mushroomed into a big problem for Fox News. Not only did the usual media-watchdog suspects hammer the network for trading in nonsense, the British prime minister did as well. “When I heard this, frankly, I choked on my porridge and I thought it must be April Fools’ Day,” said David Cameron, who finished with this rip against Emerson: “This guy’s clearly a complete idiot.”

Even before Emerson embarrassed Fox News on an international level, the network was pushing the no-go myth. On Jan. 7, three days before Emerson’s assertions, Fox News host Sean Hannity said this: “It seems if you watch in recent years, it’s not just France but all of Europe, there’s been a major influx, immigration, people from Muslim countries. They’ve even — and they’ve not assimilated, they’ve separated,” said Hannity. “They have no-go zones. If you’re non-Muslim, you’re not allowed. Not police, not even fire department if there’s a fire. Sharia courts have been allowed to be established. Prayer rugs in just about every hotel.”

Here's Punditfact:

Sometimes a claim is so egregious that a prime minister chokes on his porridge.

So infuriating that international backlash spurs a sassy hashtag and leads the speaker to apologize profusely the very next day.

So wrong that even though it’s already been widely debunked, people are still asking that we give it the PunditFact treatment.

Such is the case with a comment about Birmingham, England, by news pundit Steve Emerson, who appeared as a guest Jan. 10, 2015, on Fox News’ Justice with Judge Jeanine.

Host Jeanine Pirro introduced Emerson as founder of The Investigative Project on Terrorism for a segment about "no-go" zones for non-Muslims in Europe. Emerson said the zones exist in France and throughout the rest of Europe as "safe havens" for Muslims ruled by Sharia courts and not a country’s own laws.

"In Britain, it’s not just no-go zones," Emerson said. "There are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in. And parts of London, there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn't dress according to Muslim, religious Muslim attire."

Western Europe is just not dealing with the situation, he said.

Western Europe, meanwhile, did not seem amused by his comment. And make no mistake, the claim is wrong.

The city of Birmingham, situated north and west of London, has more than 1 million residents. There are more whites and Christians than any other ethnicity or religion, we found.

According to a report of the 2011 UK Census by the Birmingham City Council, 46 percent of residents said they were Christian and 22 percent, or 234,111 people, identified as Muslim.

No doubt, Islam is a growing and popular faith in Birmingham, up 7.5 percentage points from 2001 to 2011. Three Birmingham wards, Heath, Bordesley Green and Sparkbrook, had Muslim populations that exceeded half of the population, all ranging from 70 percent to about 77 percent.

Not that this gives any credence to Emerson’s claim about the city of Birmingham as a whole. This does not amount to the city "being totally Muslim."

Emerson apologized on his website and on the BBC, among other forums, for his remarks. He attributed his statement about Birmingham to sloppy fact-checking. (No kidding.) Here is the apology:

I have clearly made a terrible error for which I am deeply sorry. My comments about Birmingham were totally in error. And I am issuing this apology and correction for having made this comment about the beautiful city of Birmingham. I do not intend to justify or mitigate my mistake by stating that I had relied on other sources because I should have been much more careful. There was no excuse for making this mistake and I owe an apology to every resident of Birmingham. I am not going to make any excuses. I made an inexcusable error. And I am obligated to openly acknowledge that mistake. I wish to apologize for all residents of that great city of Birmingham.

Steve Emerson

PS. I am making (a) donation to Birmingham Children's Hospital.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who really did say the remark caused him to choke on his porridge, called Emerson a "complete idiot."

"He started with an apology," Cameron said. "That's not a bad start. But what he should do is look at Birmingham and see what a fantastic example it is bringing people together of different faiths and different backgrounds and building a world-class brilliant city with a great and strong economy."

Birmingham is about 20% Muslim.

This is the kind of hysteria we managed not to stoke to much after 9/11. When someone like Jindal just ignores the facts even when Fox News apologizes and retreats, it's easy to see where this is headed.

Update: Here's Allen West complaining that a meeting of American Muslims to denounce ISIS and islamophobia is "incendiary" at a time like this.  He didn't hold up the Charlie-Hebdo cover but I'm sure he would have done it without the slightest sense of irony:

Update II: @AndyWitney noted the fact that we have some Americans who believe in "no-go zones" right here at home. Cliven Bundy comes to mind ... he and his friends fought off federal agents with firearms.

But that's completely different, of course. Because Muslims.
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The Martin Luther King speech everyone ignores

The Martin Luther King speech everyone ignores

by digby


I'm going to guess this speech by the right wing appropriators of Martin Luther King's legacy isn't one to which they sign on. He gave it in April 1967. He was killed almost exactly a year later.

Here's an excerpt from Beyond Vietnam: a time to break silence:

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

Somehow, I don't think the South Carolina Tea Party folks would agree with that.

Read the whole speech today. It's as radical as it gets.


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The super-rich won't be happy until they have it all

The super-rich won't be happy until they have it all

by digby

And people wonder why the world feels so unstable right now:

Billionaires and politicians gathering in Switzerland this week will come under pressure to tackle rising inequality after a study found that – on current trends – by next year, 1% of the world’s population will own more wealth than the other 99%.

Ahead of this week’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in the ski resort of Davos, the anti-poverty charity Oxfam said it would use its high-profile role at the gathering to demand urgent action to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

The charity’s research, published on Monday, shows that the share of the world’s wealth owned by the best-off 1% has increased from 44% in 2009 to 48% in 2014, while the least well-off 80% currently own just 5.5%.

Oxfam added that on current trends the richest 1% would own more than 50% of the world’s wealth by 2016.

Unfortunately, far too many of the 99% in Western democracies would rather attribute their troubles to those who are below them on the social and economic ladder. It seems to be a common characteristic of human nature. And it plays right into the hands of those who are so greedy that they have to have every last penny they can lay their hands on.

Oxfam made headlines at Davos last year with a study showing that the 85 richest people on the planet have the same wealth as the poorest 50% (3.5 billion people). The charity said this year that the comparison was now even more stark, with just 80 people owning the same amount of wealth as more than 3.5 billion people, down from 388 in 2010.

That is sickening. And morally incomprehensible.

Check out this BBC documentary about the Super rich if you want to see just how deluded they are about their "contribution" to society. It's worth a couple of hours if you have the time:

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Now why would they do this?

Now why would they do this?

by digby

Arkansas, 2015:

By pointing out this sign I'm the real racist.

During his speech at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition convention yesterday, conservative entertainer and YouTube celebrity “Wild Bill” Finley claimed ownership of slain Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

“How appropriate that we are here right at the Martin Luther King holiday,” he began. “Martin Luther King had a dream, and it was a good one — a day when skin color wouldn’t matter anymore. A time when character would be more important than skin color.”

“But when we look at what’s going on in America today, it’s pretty easy to see that Dr. King’s dream got hijacked,” Finley continued. “I believe racism in this country would’ve died out a long time ago, except that some people figured out that racism can be very profitable — both financially and politically.”


“And now, those who are most vocal about Martin Luther King being their hero seem to be the most race-driven people in America. The left have mastered the art of turning every issue into a skin-color issue, character be damned,” he said.

“Manufacturing racism for political purposes is a big business in the USA, and manufactured racism has been used to hurt the Tea Party from Day 1. There’s no doubt in my mind that if Martin Luther King Jr. was alive today the liberal left would spit in his face because he would be such a threat to their political agendas.”

“We are the people,” Finley said, “who practice Dr. King’s dream. It is the Tea Party where people are not judged by the color of their skin, and it’s Tea Party Americans who believe that character still counts.”

“So today, I am officially announcing that the Tea Party is taking Martin Luther King away from the liberal left,” he said. “And to you race-baiting promoters of division and hatred, you’re not getting him back until you renounce your shameful skin-color politics and start practicing the politics of character.”

Update: Texas celebrates Confederate heroes day today as well.

Jamelle Bouie explains the history of this bizarre pairing, here.


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Quite Simply, a Masterpiece by tristero

Quite Simply, a Masterpiece 

by tristero

Sally Satel, an oft-published scholar at the august American Enterprise Institute, has written a masterpiece for the NY Times this morning entitled Will the F.D.A. Kill Off E-Cigs? I strongly suggest reading the entire thing. It's not long, but oh, how brilliantly written. Consider the truly dazzling first sentence:

ELECTRONIC cigarettes, battery-powered devices that convert a solution of nicotine and other chemicals into a vapor that can be inhaled, or “vaped,” have the potential to wean a vast number of smokers off cigarettes.

What an elegant structure! It's got a clause within a clause terminated by soft, fuzzy positive words - "potential," "wean" - and a grandiose, hopeful final phrase: "vast number off cigarettes!" The sentence is so complex that many a reader may not notice that Satel openly admits she has zero evidence that so much as a single smoker has - let alone will - trade in her Marlboros for vaping.

While clearly influenced by Bill Kristol's sloppiness, still,  it takes no small amount of courage on Satel's part to present her failure to locate facts in support of her opinion in the lede of an op-ed for the New York Times. But she's only getting started. Graf 2, start of sentence 1:

The problem is, not enough smokers are switching to e-cigarettes, despite their relative safety...  

She is so right. Vaping is undoubtedly relatively safe. As in relative to going for a nice long swim in a river filled with starving piranhas. Or relative to jaywalking on the San Diego Freeway. Or relative to rectal feeding. Indeed, the list of behaviors that are more dangerous relative to vaping are truly endless. And never you mind that an added flavor ingredient in e-cigs can cause a condition called popcorn lung, "an irreversible disease which scars the lung and makes it impossible to breathe properly." That's just "barraging" us with unpleasant facts, as Satel's next sentence makes clear.

One of my favorite parts of this extraordinary essay is her suggested health labeling for e-cig packages:

 "While more research is needed, it is likely that e-cigarettes meeting F.D.A. interim safety guidelines are much safer than smoking.”

Here, with just 20 words, Satel set a new standard for industry-sponsored disinformation. Because translated into normal English, her proposed label actually says:

"No one has any idea whatsoever how deadly e-cigarettes can be for people dumb enough to use them. But the tobacco industry has paid handsomely to bypass FDA regulations while innocent animals get tortured to find out. What we do know, however, is that real cigarettes will kill you with more efficiency."

Satel will have to work mightily to top this effort. And no worries: I'm sure she's being compensated well-enough to try.


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The courts: Targets of opportunity by @BloggersRUs

The courts: Targets of opportunity

by Tom Sullivan

An acquaintance asked Saturday what happens if the Supreme Court rules this summer to lift gay marriage bans across the country. It seems unlikely the Roberts court will overturn rulings in 36 states, he said. He worried that, since so many of the shifts on gay marriage across the country originated in the courts, that the right will not simply use the decision to energize their base in 2016, but to further colonize and control the courts. In fact that has already been occurring, according to Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies:

Today, special interests are spending record amounts of money on court elections in the 38 states that elect justices to the bench. As a Facing South/Institute for Southern Studies report showed, more than $3 million poured into races for North Carolina's higher courts in 2014, the first election since state lawmakers -- with the help of millionaire donor and political operative Art Pope -- eliminated North Carolina's judicial public financing program.

The controversy over Big Money's attempted takeover of the courts is now coming to a head. Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing Williams-Yulee vs. The Florida Bar, a case involving a challenge to Florida's law barring judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign contributions.

A constellation of groups have filed an amicus brief calling on the Supreme Court to uphold Florida's ban as a necessary measure to protect the integrity of state courts. As Bert Brandenburg of the court watchdog group Justice at Stake said in a statement unveiling the brief, "Our courts are different from the other two branches of government. If money influences what a legislator or a governor does, it reeks. But if campaign money influences a decision in the courtroom, it violates the Constitution." 

Having rigged most everything else, Republicans were already mucking about with the courts in North Carolina last summer in a way not seen in any other state:

After passing laws imposing new conditions on abortions and elections, taking away teacher tenure and providing vouchers for private school tuition, Republican state legislators have seen those policies stymied in state and federal courtrooms.

So they have passed another law, this one making those kinds of lawsuits less likely to succeed when filed in state court. Beginning in September [2014], all constitutional challenges to laws will be heard by three-judge trial court panels appointed by the chief justice of the state Supreme Court.

To help ensure passage, GOP lawmakers inserted the provision into four different bills.

Conservative Christian and political leaders seem already to have conceded the legal fight on marriage equality. Per comments at Huffington Post, they plan instead to "shore up the theology around holy matrimony, and fight to defend their religious liberty rights to oppose same-sex marriage." Still, far be it from the right wing to shun using the animus in its base over hot-button social issue to rally its voters at election time. That's expected if SCOTUS strikes down remaining gay marriage bans.

But the right also has a knack for blindsiding political opponents legislatively. For example, North Carolina's 2013 "motorcycle abortion" bill, and the voting restrictions legislation that ballooned overnight from 17 to 57 pages. And since we've seen quite a lot of that here in North Carolina, the question about control of the courts prompts one to ask how the GOP might use the SCOTUS ruling to further consolidate power there. Frankly, I don't know, but it is worth considering now and keeping a watchful eye on later.

Anticipating unfavorable demographic shifts, in 2008 the GOP began investing heavily in the Redistricting Majority Project, or REDMAP, to gain control of state legislatures, and thus, once-a-decade redistricting in 2010:

"The rationale was straightforward," reads the memo. "Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn. Drawing new district lines in states with the most redistricting activity presented the opportunity to solidify conservative policymaking at the state level and maintain a Republican stronghold in the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade."

Democrats got caught napping (or at least underfunded). It led to the largest GOP majorities we've seen in Congress for decades. Furthermore, GOP-controlled state legislatures implemented a raft of voting changes in states across the country to erect roadblocks to voting that, on balance, would hurt Democrats more than Republican voters: voter identity cards, shortening or eliminating early voting, voting roll purges, etc.

In North Carolina and elsewhere, new Republican policies seem designed to blow holes in municipal budgets, especially in large cities where the big blocks of Democratic voters are. They are cutting state taxes, pushing costs down to the cities, limiting local taxing authority, and privatizing public services to cut into cities' revenue streams. In short, either driving cities into insolvency or leaving them no choice but to raise taxes and/or cut popular services. It's the next phase of Defund the Left. And since the tax cuts and privatization are big, wet kisses for corporate sponsors, the strategy is a twofer.

In a few years, Republicans will run on Democrats' "mismanagement" of city governments in fiscal crisis, counting on voters to have forgotten who engineered the crises. Here, they could either dissolve city governments or, elsewhere, take them over through emergency manager acts, as happened to Detroit. As is still happening in Detroit.

Republicans and their backers are playing the long game and they're playing to win. They use losses as opportunities to further expand their influence. They've been very methodical. They've anticipated and planned to win the future much as the left has not.

The comments I heard Saturday about the future of the courts made me wonder what we might need to watch out for next.

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A little sunshine burns the suits

A little sunshine burns the suits

by digby

Think Progress reports:

After leaked emails in the Sony hack showed unequal pay between male and female actors, Charlize Theron insisted she get the same pay as her male co-star Chris Hemsworth for “The Huntsman.” 

She succeeded, netting a $10 million increase that puts her on par with Hemsworth.

The hacked emails unearthed significant pay gaps between male and female stars. For their work in the movie “American Hustle,” male actors Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, and the director David O. Russell all got 9 percent of back-end profits, while Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence, the movie’s two female leads, were each getting 7 percent. (Lawrence was originally going to get 5 percent but her pay had been raised.) At the time, Adams had been nominated for four Academy Awards, more than Renner and Cooper combined, and Lawrence had won one while also starring in the smash hit The Hunger Games. Perhaps worse, in the email exchange Sony Pictures Chairman Amy Pascal responded to the critique that the pay was unequal: “there is truth there.”

A pay gap was even revealed between staff at the studios themselves. Among 6,000 employees at Sony, just one of the 17 who made $1 million or more was a woman. And while Michael De Luca and Hannah Minghella have the same job as co-presidents of production at Columbia Pictures, De Luca makes nearly $1 million more.

I am not in favor of hacking, needless to say. But this revelation is important. It's been an open secret in Hollywood for years but this may have made it impossible to pretend that it wasn't so.

And on what planet can it possibly be true that Chris Hemsworth is worth 10 million dollars more than Charlize Theron? It's ridiculous.

(I actually can't believe anyone is worth that kind of money but that's a different subject ... )

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Analyzing the threat

Analyzing the threat

by digby


The quality of discourse on Fox News:

The terrorist takeover of Alaska is particularly surprising. Who knew?

h/t @billmon1

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Sunday Funny: "Shake it off" edition

Sunday Funny: "Shake it off" edition

by digby

Love this:

And I think this is a great PR stunt by a police department. It's ok for police officers to make fun of themselves. The more people see cops as human beings and the more cops act like human beings the better understanding we'll have.

And by the way, the next time the NYPD gets its feelings hurt because the mayor doesn't back their every move they should shake it off.

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"A more aggressive form of terrorism"? Really?

"A more aggressive form of terrorism"

by digby


Leon Panetta just said on Fareed Zakaria that we should all run for our lives because the terrorists are coming. Well, not exactly. He said that while it's true that we have raised our intelligence capabilities since 9/11 and unlike in Europe, Muslims in America are able to assimilate, we're still in grave danger:

Foreign nationals are still allowed to come back into our country and there are thousands of these nationals that are overseas in Syria and Iraq and yemen. I think it still represents a serious danger to the United States. I don't think we can take anything for granted. I think we are dealing with a much more aggressive form of terrorism coming at us from different directions and the United States ought to continue to remain very vigilant in going after this kind of terrorism.

Shooting up an office building is more aggressive that flying planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? Really? That's ridiculous and yet I hear all these intelligence people saying this.

The whole discussion is around certain lone wolves or sleeper cells finding their way into the country to launch attacks like Charlie Hebdo. I agree that would be awful. All such violence is awful. And lord knows we don't need any more mass shootings in America. We have plenty already.

Yes, I know the intention is different than our homegrown massacres, but so what? Nobody in their right minds can believe that such acts will result in Muslim extremists taking over the country. It's a violent political act designed to frighten a people into making bad decisions, whether it's a misguided war or accepting authoritarianism or perpetrating immoral acts like torture which they can use to recruit more extremists. They cannot destroy us so they do these things to provoke us into destroying ourselves. It's a cliche but it happens to be true. If we don't panic they don't get what they want.

I brought this up the other day but it's worth repeating. We have had a more recent attack than 9/11 which resembles the Charlie Hebdo massacre: the Boston Bombing. It was perpetrated by a couple of misfit Muslim extremist brothers who had been radicalized by who knows what and they decided to launch an attack on civilians.  In some ways it was even more horrible that Charlie Hebdo because it targeted an apolitical event. But despite some overreach by the authorities in shutting down the whole city for a short period, in the main we kept our wits about us and did not immediately start talking about giving the government more power or cracking down on Muslim populations.  Indeed, we were remarkably mature about the whole thing. Today the surviving bomber is on trial in Boston.

But this attack in Europe seems to have gotten everyone's juices flowing again and we have Panetta et al on TV blathering on about a "unique" threat even though it's not unique at all and we deal with nuts shooting up the place all the time. I guess we're just ready to get our blood up again...

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Clout

Clout

by digby

This piece by Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post will be read by a lot of Villagers. And I have no doubt they will begin in earnest to form a critique of Warren as a Ted Cruz bomb thrower. (If they haven't already.) As I wrote in this piece in Salon a couple of weeks ago: let 'em. It can only help the ball team.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has an explanation for the singular nature of her power.

“I’ll always be an outsider. That’s how I understand the world,” the Massachusetts Democrat said in an interview. “There’s a real benefit to being clear about this. I know why I’m here. I think about this every morning before I open my eyes, and I’m still thinking about it every night when I go to sleep.”

Being the target of that kind of focus can be an excruciating experience — the freshest case in point being investment banker Antonio Weiss, whom President Obama put forward last year as his nominee for Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance.

Initially seen as a highly credentialed and noncontroversial pick for a low-profile post, Weiss found himself up against a storm of opposition, led by Warren, who said he was yet another example of Wall Street cronyism within the Obama administration.

On Monday, Weiss wrote a letter to the president asking that his name be taken out of consideration.

The tussle sent yet another signal, maybe the clearest yet, of how Warren intends to wield her growing clout. It showed that she and her brand of populism are forces to be reckoned with — not only by Obama and his team, but also by the Democrats’ likely 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“It’s not about Antonio Weiss personally,” said Simon Johnson, an outspoken Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and former International Monetary Fund chief economist who admires Warren and shares her views. “What it’s really about is the presidential election.”

No small amount of speculation has centered on whether Warren herself will run for the White House in 2016. She insists that she will not. But her advisers and longtime allies say that she intends to keep the pressure on Clinton, to make sure the former secretary of state pays more than lip service to the issues that matter to Warren.

She is training her heat vision not on the Oval Office, but two doors down the hall on the Cabinet Room. Warren wants to make sure that Wall Street-aligned figures who have shaped the Clinton and Obama brand of economic policy for the past quarter-century, going back to former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, are not the only ones at the oval mahogany table.

It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

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Losing our collective nerve by @BloggersRUs

Losing our collective nerve

by Tom Sullivan

Besides suffering Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the decade saw (IIRC) parents bringing the kiddies to the mall on Saturday to be photographed and fingerprinted. Maybe bringing dental impressions to help identify their bodies. We called these "child safe" programs. In the 1950s, it was commies hiding in the woodpile. By the 1980s, it was child abducters hiding behind every tree. Heaven forfend that little Johnny or Janie should walk or ride a bike to school or to the playground without a hypervigilant parent for a bodyguard. Well, somebody is finally trying to beak the spell:

On a recent Saturday afternoon, a 10-year old Maryland boy named Rafi and his 6-year old sister, Dvora, walked home by themselves from a playground about a mile away from their suburban house. They made it about halfway home when the police picked them up. You’ve heard these stories before, about what happens when kids in paranoid, hyperprotective America go to and from playgrounds alone. I bet you can guess the sequence of events preceding and after: Someone saw the kids walking without an adult and called the police. The police tracked down the kids and drove them home. The hitch this time is, when the police got there, they discovered that they were meddling with the wrong family.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv explicitly ally themselves with the “free range” parenting movement, which believes that children have to take calculated risks in order to learn to be self-reliant. Their kids usually even carry a card that says: “I am not lost. I am a free-range kid,” although they didn’t happen to have it that day. They had carefully prepared their kids for that walk, letting them go first just around the block, then to a library a little farther away, and then the full mile. When the police came to the door, they did not present as hassled overworked parents who leave their children alone at a playground by necessity, or laissez-faire parents who let their children roam wherever, but as an ideological counterpoint to all that’s wrong with child-rearing in America today. If we are lucky, the Meitivs will end up on every morning talk show and help convince American parents that it’s perfectly OK to let children walk without an adult to the neighborhood playground.

There's video here.

For a culture that once boasted of rugged individualism and John Wayne, we've become awfully skittish in the last half century. Nothing like defeating the Axis, staring down the Russians, and landing a man on the moon to build a nation's confidence. Nothing like Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Beirut Marine barracks bombing to shake it. By the mid-1980s, Americans were in full moral panic mode over Satanic ritual abuse and alien abductions. After September 11, we'd become a nation of bedwetters convinced that bearded men with long, curved knives are coming to kill us all in our beds. We're packing heat and opening fire on anything that goes bump in the night either at home or abroad.

Lenore Skenazy found herself declared “America’s worst mom” by multiple news outlets after writing about letting her 9-year-old ride the New York subway alone. America is having a "hysterical moment," she writes:

That weekend I started my Free-Range Kids blog to explain my philosophy. Obviously, I love safety: My kid wears a helmet, got strapped into a car seats, always wears his seat belt. But I don’t believe kids need a security detail every time they leave the house. When society thinks they do — and turns that fear into law — loving, rational parents get arrested.

Just checking Mapquest, my parents would have been arrested in two states on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. As a child living in a major city in the early 1960s, I and my classmates walked to a grade school about half a mile away in sun, rain, and snow. (Few families had more than one car anyway.) In a smaller, southern city, I occasionally rode a bike to school 3.5 miles away. The horror.

We as a country would be lot less dangerous to ourselves and to the world if we actually accepted the risks we used to before losing our collective nerve.

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Isolationist? I don't think so.

Isolationist?  I don't think so.

by digby

For those who are under the impression that people who call themselves Tea Partiers don't have hawkish views, I think this is a fairly good indication that they actually do:





Not that they are the only ones, obviously.  But I think people should be a little bit skeptical of their alleged devotion to isolationism.

And this ...




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He'd think you were jerks #MLK

He'd think you were jerks #MLK

by digby

This crude divide and conquer strategy is bound to fail. African Americans can't be fooled as easily as some other people:

On Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, we must ask how would he feel about: 20 percent African Americans unemployed or underemployed; About giving amnesty and jobs to 11 million illegal aliens with so many jobless Americans; About admitting 30 million more immigrant workers when 17 percent of Hispanic Americans are having trouble finding work; About Americans of all races not seeing a wage increase in 40 years.

Was that Dr. King’s dream?

Yeah, they really care.

I'll just quote this passage from King's "Letter from a Birmingham jail":

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

The right is desperate to appropriate the legacy of Martin Luther King because it's so powerful. He was a giant in American public life and the best they can do in response is lift up some callow movie actor who couldn't tell the difference between reality and fantasy in response. But it won't fly. He was not a conservative. That's just a fact.


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Our close allies the Islamic extremists

Our close allies the Islamic extremists

by digby

Another day another beheading:

Gruesome footage circulating on social media shows Saudi authorities publicly beheading a woman in the holy city of Mecca earlier this week. The execution is the tenth to be carried out in country in the last two weeks; setting 2015 up to be even more bloody than last year, when 87 people were punitively killed by the state.

Rare video of Monday's killing shows the woman, a Burmese resident named as Lalia Bint Abdul Muttablib Basim, screaming while being dragged along the street. Four police officers then hold the woman down before a sword-wielding man slices her head off, using three blows to complete the act.

In the chilling recording, Bashim, who was found guilty in a Saudi Sharia court of sexually abusing and murdering her seven-year-old step-daughter, is heard protesting her innocence until the very end. "I did not kill. I did not kill," she screams repeatedly.

Filming of executions is normally strictly prohibited by Saudi authorities raising speculation that a security official may have covertly videoed the killing.

In a statement released on their official website, the Saudi Ministry of Interior said that the brutally delivered death penalty was warranted due to the "enormity of the crime," and was carried out to "restore security" and "realize justice."

"[The punishment] implements the rulings of God against all those who attack innocents and spill their blood. The government warns all those who are seduced into committing a similar crimes that the rightful punishment is their fate," the statement said.

Saudi Arabia bases its legal system on a strict Wahhabi interpretation of Sharia law that imposes a wide-range of physical punishments for a number of crimes. The death penalty can be given for several offences including, armed robbery, drug-related offences, sorcery, adultery, murder, and rape.

Huh. Another beheading in Saudi Arabia. And yet:



There is nothing wrong with US officials meeting with any and all foreign officials.  It's a good thing to have a dialog. But the American relationship with Saudi Arabia is a very, very close. It's been intertwined for more than 30 years in ways that defy logic, particularly since 9/11 when the majority of the terrorists who took down the World Trade Center were Saudis and practiced the official state religion, a radical form of Islam that everyone agrees is feeding this extremist ideology that's growing in the middle east.

Perhaps it would be useful to take a look at how all this started.  Certainly, it's about oil. Saudi Arabia is where the oil is and huge American and multi-national companies make vast sums of money from it. And plenty of people make the case that the national interest is always best served by making sure we're on the right side of the world's supply of fossil fuels.  (It's another question as to why we don't work harder to get off fossil fuels but I'd guess it has to do with all those vast sums of money.)

But there's more to it. Despite the fact that for political reasons, the CIA and all the cold-warrior hawks had vastly overestimated the Soviet threat for many years, Reagan came into office with his "doctrine" of rolling back Communism first on his agenda:

The problem for Reagan was that his doctrine was expensive and America was exhausted. Still recovering from Vietnam, there was little public support for adventures in the Third World. But Reagan believed that his predecessors' failure to turn back Soviet advances in Angola and Ethiopia and elsewhere in the mid-1970s had only emboldened the Soviet Union. 

To high-level administration officials, it became clear that to roll back the communists would be costly. CIA Director William J. Casey set out to find others to provide arms and money. The possibility of Saudi Arabian assistance dawned on the administration very early on. Not only could they provide the help Reagan wanted, but with the shah of Iran gone, the Saudis could also play a more prominent role as an oil-rich ally in a turbulent region. 

Saudi Arabia had its own reasons for helping America fight the Soviets. First, the United States was instrumental to protecting Saudi oil fields and was a country with which the Saudi leadership wanted to stay on good terms. Second, Saudi Arabia was gravely concerned about the advancing Soviet Union. Riyadh interpreted Moscow's Afghanistan adventure as part of a Soviet-directed campaign to encircle the Arabian Peninsula with radical regimes and subvert the oil-rich monarchies. Soviet involvement in Yemen and Ethiopia bolstered that view. And third, it was awash in petrodollars, and could afford to help. 

So the Reagan administration figured out how to integrate Saudi Arabian global concerns and surplus cash into U.S. foreign policy. In Afghanistan, the kingdom matched U.S. contributions dollar for dollar. Eventually, Washington and Riyadh poured about $3 billion into that broken country. Saudi Arabia also put $32 million into Nicaragua to fund the Contras, a fact that emerged in the Iran-Contra scandal. Saudi Arabia funneled money into Ethiopia's neighbor, Sudan, in order to pressure Ethiopia's pro-Soviet Mengistu government. Saudi Arabia assisted Angola's rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi, in support of U.S. goals, by providing Morocco with money for a UNITA training camp. Yet Saudi Arabia provided more than just funding. The kingdom provided an ideologically compatible partner in the battle against godless communism. In a neat division of labor, America attacked communism and Saudi Arabia targeted godlessness. During his tenure, Reagan regularly rattled off a list of countries of concern: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia and Nicaragua. What few realized was that Saudi Arabia was either directly or indirectly involved in four of these five cases. The close partnership inspired Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, to confide to a journalist in 1981 that "if you knew what we were really doing for America, you wouldn't just give us AWACS, you would give us nuclear weapons."

What's my point?  Only that the world is a complicated place for a variety of reasons and that it's a big mistake for Americans to be so self-righteous about Islam and the middle east.  We have been right in the middle of it all, even to this day remaining close friends and allies with a nation that's at the heart of Islamic extremism.

The tactics by ISIS, many of which are designed to scare the hell out of the populace and force them to conform are no different than Saudi Arabia's.  They are both barbaric throwbacks to an earlier period of human history and it's sickening. But there is absolutely no way the West can continue to wring its proverbial hands over ISIS while having its presidents literally hold hands with Saudi royals and kiss them on the lips. Americans may be too stupid to understand how seriously that undermines all of our protestations of civilized morality but you can be sure the people of the Middle East understand it very well.

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