The Commentariat -- August 15, 2014
Internal links, photo removed.
... Matt Berman of the National Journal: "President Obama announced 'progress' in the American military's targeted operations in Iraq in a press statement Thursday from Martha's Vineyard, Mass. That said, the United States will continue airstrikes 'to protect our people and facilities in Iraq.' On Wednesday night, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told reporters that a humanitarian operation to send in U.S. ground troops to help escort thousands of Yazidi Iraqis off Mount Sinjar was 'far less likely now' because of seemingly successful airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops." ...
... The Guardian story, by Spencer Ackerman, is here. ...
... Rod Nordland of the New York Times: "Yazidi leaders and emergency relief officials on Thursday strongly disputed American claims that the siege of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq had been broken and that the crisis was effectively over, saying that tens of thousands of Yazidis remained on the mountain in desperate conditions."
Dustin Volz of the National Journal: "The FBI unintentionally spied on the communications data of some Americans who were not targets of investigations because of typographical errors, according to a government watchdog."
Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico: "Nearly 70,000 people in the Central Valley's Kern County have gotten health care coverage this year because of Obamacare. But their congressman, new House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, faces no danger of those newly insured kicking him out of office for voting dozens of times to repeal the law. It's a sharp disconnect, one that is taking place not just in McCarthy's deep-red Bakersfield district but in many other Republican districts throughout the country ahead of the 2014 midterm elections: Constituents benefiting from Obamacare coverage aren't turning against the politicians who want to repeal it." ...
... CW: I wonder if the reason ACA beneficiaries aren't opposing Congressional Republicans is that they know -- even if they don't much follow the news -- that radical House bills never become law. Or, alternatively, they've heard about the do-nothing Congress. Some may be in tune enough to realize that President Obama would veto any anti-ObamaCare bill that made it through Congress (which it could, with a GOP majority in the Senate). But Obama is a short-timer, & these blase voters (or non-voters) would do well to think of their futures.
Paul Krugman: Europeans listened to deficit hawks -- the "too-muchers" -- & as a result are in a "forever slump."
Beyond the Beltway
CW: Perhaps the optimal response to protests against use of excessive force (in this case, shooting a person to death) is not a massive display of excessive force. ...
... John Schwartz, et al., of the New York Times: "Capt. Ronald S. Johnson, the highway patrol official appointed by the governor to take over the response, immediately signaled a change in approach. Captain Johnson told reporters he had ordered troopers to remove their tear-gas masks, and in the early evening he accompanied several groups of protesters through the streets, clasping hands, listening to stories and marching alongside them. On Thursday night, the armored vehicles and police cars were gone, and the atmosphere was celebratory. A street barricaded on previous nights was filled with slow-moving cars blasting their horns.
Wesley Lowery, et al., of the Washington Post: "... the heavy riot armor, the SWAT trucks with sniper posts and the gas masks were gone from the streets of Ferguson Thursday night, and Johnson marched with the crowd, eliciting cheers from the protesters. Johnson vowed to not blockade the streets, to set up a media staging center, and to ensure that residents' rights to assemble and protest were not infringed upon." ...
... CW: This is pretty interesting, because yesterday afternoon, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson gave a news conference in which he said protesters would be allowed on the sidewalks only, & the streets would be blocked off with cones. (This sounds on the face of it like a plan to pick off protesters who would, quite naturally, step into the street.) Either the state was keeping that jackass out of the loop even yesterday when we were hearing Ferguson authorities were receiving advice from federal & state experts on crowd management, or Jackson was ignoring their advice. ...
... Jack Jenkins of Think Progress: "A group of local clergy and religious faithful took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri on Thursday evening, joining a mass of peaceful protestors.... Sporting clerical collars and brandishing signs inscribed with slogans such as 'We are praying with our feet' and &'End police brutality,' pastors and priests filed in with hundreds of other Ferguson residents to decry the killing of Michael Brown." ...
... Top Cop Politicizes Ferguson Demonstrations. Mario Trujillo of the Hill: "The executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police criticized President Obama Thursday for his remarks about law enforcement in Ferguson, Mo. 'I would contend that discussing police tactics from Martha's Vineyard is not helpful to ultimately calming the situation,' director Jim Pasco said in an interview with The Hill.... The officer involved in the Ferguson shooting is a member of the Fraternal Order of Police and is being represented by one of its lawyers. His name has not been released to the public." CW: How is criticizing President Obama for calling for "calm & peace" helping the shooter? Partisan remarks like this are intended to fuel the fire, not restore calm & peace. Just fucking stupid. ...
... David Lieb & Jim Salter of the AP: "Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon says the Missouri State Highway Patrol will take over the supervision of security in the St. Louis suburb that's been the scene of violent protests since a police officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager. Nixon made the announcement at a news conference Thursday. Nixon says security will be overseen by Capt. Ron Johnson of the Highway Patrol. Johnson, who is black, said he grew up in the community and 'it means a lot to me personally that we break this cycle of violence.'" ...
... The St. Louis Post-Dispatch report is here. The New York Times story is here. ...
... "The Late Show with Jay Nixon." Katie Glueck of Politico: "Sometimes a politician's biggest sin is failing to show up. Gov. Jay Nixon waited five days after a black teen was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, to visit the area.... It doesn't help that Nixon has had a rocky history with the African-American community. The relatively conservative Democrat won 92 percent of the black vote in his 2012 reelection, a state President Barack Obama lost. Still, some black political leaders harbor resentment from the 1990s, when, as state attorney general, Nixon was involved in backing an end to some school desegregation programs."
... Mark Berman of the Washington Post: "Attorney General Eric Holder called on authorities in Ferguson, Mo., to keep the peace 'without relying on unnecessarily extreme displays of force,' emphasizing in a statement Thursday that things have to change in the city. Holder also announced that Missouri officials had on Thursday accepted an offer of 'technical assistance' from the Justice Department aimed at helping these local authorities improve their response to the crowds in suburban St. Louis." ...
... Robert Patrick of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "The American Civil Liberties Union sued St. Louis County and the county police Thursday morning to obtain copies of initial police reports surrounding the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Mike Brown by Ferguson police.... The ACLU lawsuit says that the incident report is an open record under Missouri law, and that the police department's refusal is either a knowing or purposeful violation of the law." ...
... Richard Leiby & Krissah Thompson of the Washington Post: "... across the country, experts say, many police forces have yet to adopt some of the most basic techniques to curb the possibility of police brutality and subsequent unrest. These strategies include having police live in the communities where they enforce the law and building connections with the residents." ...
... Brian Beutler: "... it's worth noting that the right began stoking white resentment over Ferguson well before Obama said anything about it." ...
How Steve King (RXenophobe-Iowa) Says the "N" Word in Public: ... they all appear to be of a single, you know, of a single origin, I should say, a continental origin might be the way to phrase that.
CW: Cumbersome, but oh so politically-correct.
... Alexia Campbell of the National Journal on how police in Ferguson are using intimidation, threats of arrest, and claims of impending violence to keep [journalists] away from covering the news.... It was ... the first time I had ever felt afraid of a police officer." CW: Clearly, Campbell is white. ...
... CW: Yesterday, based on a video of the incident, which I posted, I posited that the police appeared to have purposely targeted an Al Jazeera news crew with tear gas, though I acknowledged that since I couldn't see what was going on outside the frame, this might not have been the case. As it turns out, my supposition was correct. John Cassidy of the New Yorker writes that the crew was a mile from the demonstrators, setting up for a stand-up report. The Al Jazeera reporter Ash-Har Quraishi said, "We had been in contact with police officers who were just feet away from us. We had had discussions with them; we understood this was just as far as we could get.... We didn't think there would be any problems here, so we were very surprised. We were very close to where those canisters were shot from. We yelled ... yelling that we were press. But they continued to fire." ...
... It seems to me that there were clear political & racial components to the police attacks on prominent citizens. The journalists targeted were "Arabs," a black man (Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post) & a "liberal" (Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post -- he was wearing press credentials). The St. Louis alderman Antonio French is black. I don't know about the ministers the police arrested, but there is about a 50-50 chance they were black. And I doubt they were throwing rocks or lobbing Molotov cocktails. These aren't just Constitutional violations; any idiot, any police officer, can see they are human rights violations. ...
... Jordan Sargent of Gawker: "At the same time that the Ferguson Police Department was terrorizing its own citizens [Wednesday] night, something interesting and important happened on cable news: Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson reiterated to Sean Hannity that Michael Brown struggled with his killer inside the cop's vehicle, while at the same time two new eyewitnesses told CNN that they saw no such thing.... At some point, some people somewhere -- a police department or a district attorney's office or a jury -- will decide who was right, and if we know one truth here it's that history is not on the side of the witnesses." ...
... Alec MacGillis of the New Republic: "... what's really driving the spectacle of militarized local police is that spigot of money that was turned on after Sept. 11, 2001, when a federal government abashed to have missed so many warning signs for those devastating attacks acted as if that massive failure could be washed away by sparing not a cent in preventing the next one. A whole industry has sprung up to capitalize on that spigot -- like the company that's been selling mine-resistant BearCats at $280,000 a pop to 100 towns per year. The flow of funds has become so reliable that the Missouri Office of Homeland Security holds regular workshops to advise local agencies on how to get their hands on the dough.... So we have had the absurd spectacles of $100 million in counter-terrorism funds going to South Dakota (pop. 833,000), a BearCat patrolling a pumpkin festival in New Hampshire, and $90,000 spent on bollards and surveillance at the Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres' spring-training facility. And now we have protesters in a St. Louis suburb being confronted with exo-skeletal defenders of the peace who look like they arrived straight from the Maidan or Tahrir Square." ...
... The Libertarian's View. Sen. Rand Paul blames the debacle in Ferguson on Big Government & the "erosion of civil liberties." CW: This time, he might be right. And to his credit, Paul recognizes the underlying racism that motivates the police response (even as he obliquely invokes his Aqua Buddha moment):
Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.... Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention. Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth.
... "It's the Boys, Not Just the Toys." Ed Kilgore: "... let's pay attention to how police are doing their jobs, not just what is in their armories." ...
... Steve M. "Military weaponry makes a bad situation much worse, but the core problem is still police forces that have nothing but contempt for the populations they're supposed to 'protect and serve.' ... If Paul's fellow libertarians get us talking almost exclusively about gear and government, then they'll have successfully diverted the discussion onto their turf, for their ends. We mustn't let that happen." ...
... Benjamin Wallace-Wells of New York: "... over the past two days -- as the police in Ferguson have responded to very angry protests with an alarmingly heavy hand, looking and reacting as if they were not the community's own peace officers but an invading army — something remarkable has happened. The longstanding liberal concerns about police racial hostility has seemed to merge with the longstanding libertarian concerns over police militarization.... Many of the criticisms from the left and the right sound very similar.... It seems possible that the talk about police militarization might function as a convenient rhetorical backdoor, a way for both liberals and conservatives to address the siege mentality that seems to have taken hold in many police departments and the alienation that breeds in communities." ...
... Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "... demonstrations this week over the shooting of Michael Brown..., and the overwhelming law enforcement response that followed have ... many on the right torn between an impulse to see order restored and concern about whether the crackdown is a symptom of a state run amok." ...
... De Nile Is a River that Runs through the "Heartland." Emily Swanson of the Huffington Post: "Sixty-nine percent of Democrats and 49 percent of independents, but only 33 percent of Republicans, said that police in big cities are usually tougher on blacks...." Via Greg Sargent. CW: Let's be clear; the evidence is undeniable that at every step in our criminal justice system -- & as Charles Blow pointed out, even in our school systems -- racial minorities receive unequal, discriminatory treatment. This is not some unquantifiable "impression" upon which people can have differing "opinions"; these are are hard, cold facts. ...
... ** Adam Serwer of msnbc on "the blurred line between law enforcement & combat.... There are those who squawk on television about armed insurrection and tyranny, and those who face the prospect that each day could be the last they will stare down its barrel. Ferguson has reminded us that these are not the same people, and they are not living under the same rules." CW: Serwer does a remarkable job of getting to the heart of the matter. ...
... AND Clickhole holds a "fashion face-off" between the police & the army, a natural reaction "when two of the state's instruments of physical force bust out the exact same look."
Rosalind Helderman & Matt Zapotosky of the Washington Post: "After nearly three weeks of testimony, federal prosecutors wrapped up their corruption case Thursday against former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen. The final prosecution witness, FBI Special Agent David Hulser, described phone records, mansion logs and e-mails that prosecutors hope will help convince jurors that the former first couple conspired to seek the largess of Richmond businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr."
The Market Basket boycott/strike continues. An amazing phenomenon.
Senate Races
AP: "A Hawaii judge on Thursday upheld the timing of a makeup primary election for more than 8,000 voters on the Big Island despite a last-minute challenge from a Senate candidate who said they should have more time to recover from a tropical storm. Circuit Court Judge Greg Nakamura ruled that the election should proceed Friday. The ruling rejects a complaint from U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, who is running in a Democratic primary for U.S. Senate against U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz. Hanabusa says the makeup election doesn't give enough time for voters in two Puna precincts to regain power and road access after the storm hit last week."
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd.
Au revoir, Greggers. Dylan Byers of Politico: "David Gregory will leave NBC News after stepping down as moderator of 'Meet the Press,' he announced Thursday.... As previously reported, NBC News has selected chief White House correspondent and political director Chuck Todd to take over for Gregory. Todd's promotion is expected to be announced as early as Thursday evening."
Cameron Joseph of the Hill: "Democratic Senate candidate Michelle Nunn has nabbed the endorsement of former Georgia Gov. Zell Miller (D), a conservative Democrat who's backed more Republicans than members of his own party in recent years." ...
... CW: Not sure how much of a coup that is:
News Ledes
Guardian: British PM "David Cameron is prepared to supply weapons directly to Kurdish forces fighting jihadists from the Islamic State (Isis) in northern Iraq, in a move that risks drawing Britain back indirectly into the country's conflict."
Reuters: "Dozens of heavy Russian military vehicles massed on Friday near the border with Ukraine, while Ukrainian border guards crossed the frontier to inspect a huge Russian aid convoy." ...
... AFP: "Pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine suffered dramatic setbacks Thursday as top military chiefs quit and Ukraine's forces pummelled their strongholds, cutting off a key rebel-held city from the Russian border.... Ukraine's military said it had completely surrounded Lugansk, cutting all links to the border with Russia, which Kiev believes has been supplying the insurgents with weapons."