;)
The Commentariat -- August 4, 2014
Defunct video removed.
Der Spiegel: "Spiegel has learned from reliable sources that Israeli intelligence eavesdropped on US Secretary of State John Kerry during Middle East peace negotiations. In addition to the Israelis, at least one other intelligence service also listened in as Kerry mediated last year between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states, several intelligence service sources told Spiegel.... During the peak stage of peace talks last year, Kerry spoke regularly with high-ranking negotiating partners in the Middle East. At the time, some of these calls were not made on encrypted equipment.... Intelligence agencies intercepted some of those calls. The government in Jerusalem then used the information obtained in international negotiations aiming to reach a diplomatic solution in the Middle East." ...
... CW Note to Ed Snowden: Everybody does it, even BFFs.
The Economist interviews President Obama on Africa & a wide range of subjects. With audio (that background noise you hear is AF1).
David Edwards of the Raw Story: "Fox News analyst Juan Williams on Sunday confronted the CEO of the Heritage Foundation [Michael Needham] for his role in 'demonizing' President Barack Obama to the point that many all-white tea partiers were calling for impeachment."
... Williams interviews Eric Holder for the Hill: "Holder predicts that Congress will pass his proposed reforms to the criminal justice system, specifically reductions in sentencing, even if Republicans hold majorities in both chambers after November's midterm elections. 'Next year you are likely to see significant accomplishment when it comes to criminal justice reform,' he said."
Paul Krugman: "The Dodd-Frank reform bill ... is working a lot better than anyone listening to the news media would imagine.... All accounts indicate that the [Consumer Protection Financial Bureau] is in fact doing its job, and well -- well enough to inspire continuing fury among bankers and their political allies.... Dodd-Frank ... giv[es] regulators Ordinary Liquidation Authority, also known as resolution authority, so that in the next crisis we can save 'systemically important' banks and other institutions without bailing out the bankers.... Did reform go far enough? No."
Benjamin Goad of the Hill: "Business interests are vowing to fight President Obama's executive order imposing new restrictions on companies who want to do business with the federal government. Obama announced the action this week, ordering up new regulations that would require firms seeking federal contracts to disclose labor law violations and create new compliance advisors at agencies to oversee decisions about which firms get the work."
This piece of crap by Ross Douthat on Obama Rex is getting a good deal of media attention. CW: I could deconstruct it down to teeny little turds, but I won't bother. ...
... Martin Longman of the Washington Monthly dispenses with one aspect of it: Douthat's assumption that he knows what President Obama will do on immigration reform. ...
... CW: One angle that I haven't seen anyone suggest in relation to whatever the President decides to do in regard to immigration relief is this: the POTUS has the constitutional authority to grant reprieves & pardons. I believe he could use that authority to grant reprieves to undocumented residents, & he could place conditions on those reprieves, conditions similar to those in the Senate bill, which Speaker Boehner refuses to bring to the House floor for a vote. I doubt that is what Obama has in mind, but I think it's what he should do. ...
... ** Update. Brian Beutler makes the same point Longman does: "Douthat’s thesis rests on the assumption that aggressive executive action on behalf of certain unauthorized immigrants will by definition be 'an extraordinary abuse of office.... [L]awless, reckless, a leap into the antidemocratic dark.' These are awfully firm conclusions to draw about a policy that hasn't been unveiled yet." And Beutler does mention Obama's "unchecked pardon power," noting the President is unlikely to use it.
... BUT. David Jackson of USA Today: "White House officials are downplaying stories that President Obama is prepared to take executive action on immigration that would allow millions of undocumented people to stay in the United States.' The reports you're seeing are uninformed speculation,' White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Pfeiffer said Obama asked the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to 'present him with recommendations by the end of the summer.' Those agencies have not yet reported back." ...
... Alexander Bolton of the Hill: "CNN anchor Candy Crowley called out Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) Sunday for claiming that illegal immigrants crossing the Rio Grande have committed thousands of homicides. Perry said his constituents in Texas are concerned about 'the 90 percent-plus of individuals who don't get talked about enough that are coming into the United States illegally and committing substantial crimes.' He said that the 203,000 illegal immigrants who have come into Texas since 2008 and booked into Texas county jails have been responsible for over 3,000 homicides and almost 8,000 sexual assaults. Crowley, the host of CNN's 'State of the Union,' called Perry's claim 'wildly off.'' Video via Crooks & Liars:
... PolitiFactTexas (July 17): "... for this declaration to hold water, one would have to assume illegal immigrants committed nearly half of the state's homicides since 2008; we found no such data. This statement is both incorrect and ridiculous. Pants on Fire!" ...
It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby. -- Justice Antonin Scalia, concurrence, Kansas v. Marsh, 2006
... Texas "Justice." Maurice Possley of the Marshall Project, in the Washington Post: "Since [Cameron Todd] Willingham was executed [in Texas] in 2004, officials have continued to defend the account of the informer, Johnny E. Webb, even as a series of scientific experts have discredited the forensic evidence that Willingham might have deliberately set the house fire in which his toddlers were killed. But now new evidence has revived questions about Willingham's guilt: In taped interviews, Webb, who has previously both recanted and affirmed his testimony, gives his first detailed account of how he lied on the witness stand in return for efforts by the former prosecutor, John H. Jackson, to reduce Webb's prison sentence for robbery and to arrange thousands of dollars in support from a wealthy Corsicana rancher. Newly uncovered letters and court files show that Jackson worked diligently to intercede for Webb after his testimony and to coordinate with the rancher, Charles S. Pearce Jr., to keep the mercurial informer in line....
In 2004, [Texas Gov. Rick] Perry refused to temporarily stay Willingham's execution despite the report of a leading forensic expert that sharply disputed the finding of arson by a Texas deputy fire marshal. Perry's administration has also repeatedly undercut the authority of a state Forensic Science Commission, which agreed that the arson finding relied on flawed analysis. Defending his handling of the case in 2009, the governor declared that Willingham 'was a monster.' The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, the members of which were all appointed by Perry, voted in March to deny Willingham a posthumous full pardon.
You are so frozen in fear of your own voters -- so frozen in fear of your own colleagues -- and the nation needs you to be courageous. Only cowards scapegoat children, and only those who are ashamed of themselves do it after hours on a Friday night. -- Rep. Luis Guiterrez (D-Ill.), Friday, to Republicans during House debate of the border bill
Steve LaTourette, a now-retired, long-time Republican Congressman from Ohio & an ally of John Boehner's, has an opinion piece in Politico Magazine knocking the Tea Party in general as "the grifting party" -- who are "lining their pockets" with special interest money & contributions they grift from unwitting dupes -- & Ted Cruz specifically: "Groups like the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and the Tea Party Patriots are run by men and women who have made millions by playing on the fears and anger about the dysfunction in Washington.... Our Founding Fathers set up a system of government that by its very nature excludes the possibility of one party or one ideological wing of one party getting everything it wants. Ted Cruz, who quotes the founders almost every chance he gets, ought to know this." CW: Of course LaTourette also claims that "the governing wing" of the GOP wants to get things done, which is a crock. ...
... CW: If "the governing wing" wanted to "get things done," John Boehner would have made a deal with Nancy Pelosi a long time ago to pass consensus legislation. The argument that he would have lost his speakership is weak; Pelosi could have got Democrats to vote for him as part of the deal. Boehner instead chose to pass dead-in-the-water bills while refusing to allow votes on bills that could pass the House & conform to Senate legislation. He coulda been a statesman. Instead, he's a clown. ...
I want to fund Israel. I also want to make sure our children have a future. -- Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Ok.), before blacking Iron Dome funding last week ...
... Jonathan Chait notes that the cost of the program that was going to ruin our children's future was 0.006 percent of the federal budget. "You could say that Tom Coburn is upholding his party's principles in a courageous and consistent fashion. You could also say he is a dangerous, ideological fanatic. Both those descriptions would be correct.... Republicans continue to cling to an opposition to spending that has paralyzed basic government functions.... Faced with an immovable logjam, the two parties can only move ahead by producing phony savings."
Benghaaazi! Not! Carolyn Lochhead of the San Francisco Chronicle: "The House Intelligence Committee, led by Republicans, has concluded that there was no deliberate wrongdoing by the Obama administration in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, said Rep. Mike Thompson of St. Helena, [Calif.,] the second-ranking Democrat on the committee. The panel voted Thursday to declassify the report, the result of two years of investigation by the committee. U.S. intelligence agencies will have to approve making the report public.... That conflicts with accusations of administration wrongdoing voiced by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista (San Diego County), whose House Government Oversight and Reform Committee has held hearings on the Benghazi attack." Via Greg Sargent.
David Remnick has a long, interesting piece in the New Yorker about Russia & Vladimir Putin's beliefs, methods & imperial ambitions.
Drones! James Barron of the New York Times: "... drones are soaring as never before, deployed by some for fun and others for work as new models come on the market at lower and lower prices. But their proliferation has also resulted in problems.... On Sunday, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat from New York, said the city had turned into the Wild West for drones. He said it was time for new federal rules and urged the F.A.A., which is considering regulations for drones, to issue them by the end of the year. ...
... digby: "Nobody knows where [Texas mass murderer Ronald Lee Haskell] got his guns. But we can assume that Governor Perry figures he had an All American, God given right to have as many as he wanted.... But sure, by all means, let's put every effort into stopping non-existent crime among immigrants and child refugees down at the border. That's what we call conservative 'problem solving.'"
Gubernatorial Race
Marc Caputo of the Miami Herald: "In a nationwide push to fight Republicans who deny the existence of man-made climate change, investor-turned-activist Tom Steyer has founded a Florida political committee, seeded it with $750,000 of his own money, and says he'll spend far more to help Democrat Charlie Crist defeat Gov. Rick Scott."
Beyond the Beltway
David Goodman of the New York Times: "Narcotics officers on Saturday arrested a Staten Island man whose visceral cellphone images of the forceful and ultimately deadly arrest of Eric Garner helped galvanize protests and set off a citywide debate over police practices. The police charged the man, Ramsey Orta, with two counts of criminal possession of a weapon -- a .25-caliber Norton semiautomatic handgun -- that the officers said he had been trying to pass to a teenager on the sidewalk of a drug-prone street only blocks from the spot where officers had the fatal confrontation with Mr. Garner."
News Ledes
New York Times: "Claiming it had achieved most of its objectives and pressured by Western allies to stop causing civilian casualties in Gaza, Israel moved to wind down its operations there on Monday -- either unilaterally or through a new Egyptian-brokered cease-fire announced late in the day."
New York Times: "James S. Brady, the White House press secretary who was wounded in an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan and then became a symbol of the fight for gun control, championing tighter regulations from his wheelchair, died on Monday in Alexandria, Va. He was 73."
New York Times: "A federal judge on Monday rejected as unconstitutional an Alabama law requiring doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. The requirement, adopted by the legislature in 2013, would have forced three of Alabama's five abortion clinics to close, severely restricting access to abortions while not providing significant medical benefits, United States District Judge Myron H. Thompson wrote in a 172-page decision.
Haaretz: "Israel entered day 28 of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza on Monday, after scaling back its offensive over the weekend. The IDF unilaterally declared a 7-hour humanitarian cease-fire late Sunday, which went into effect at 10 A.M. This follows the Israeli security cabinet's decision to no longer attempt to reach a truce agreement through negotiations with Hamas and the Palestinian factions in Gaza. ...
... Here's the State Department statement on Israel's shelling of the U.N. school in Rafah, Gaza.
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Reader Comments (6)
What a coincidence that the man that exposed police brutality is quickly arrested. I guess this is intended as a lesson for the neighborhood that they should not fool with the cops.
The real lesson is that the police are your enemy and the police will cause you harm
.No one will believe that the arrest of Mr.Orta is anything but retaliation. This is a lose, lose for the City and the police and the community.
Was surveillance Mr. Orta assigned by department bosses? Were they told to get him? Of course Mr. Orta should have known he would be a target and not been armed.
Marie's disinclination to deconstruct Ross Doucheboy's latest defamatory debouchment is probably a good reaction, sidestepping a steaming pile of dung on the sidewalk rather than attempting to boot it into the gutter where it belongs, but I, not having that sort of estimable self-control, can't resist a couple of kicks, mainly because this guy is SUCH an asshole. That, and I've put off kicking his ass around the block for a few months now. How does this guy even have a job? Does anyone read this crap before they publish it?
I won't waste your time or mine doing an organ by organ autopsy, 'cause believe me, this fucking thing is DOA, so I'll restrict myself to an overall summary of the intellectual and moral toxins that render most of what Doucheboy spits out the ebola virus of opinionators.
First, we have the premise, a form of counterfactual thinking that assumes the author knows what is about to happen and has written a presumptuous response--as if it has already come to pass--to something that has not yet happened, specifically, the president's possible response to the inaction and moral turpitude of Douchey's Republican avatars in congress. How horrible that the president should respond to a moral crisis when conservatives have instructed him to let immigrants rot, their plan of choice.
But before getting there, he plays the "Impeachment? Who's talking about impeachment?" card. He mentions in passing that perhaps one or two conservatives have been talking impeachment (yeah, for years. And a whole helluva lot more than one or two), but these are largely the invalid murmurings of those who have little to no effect on the conservative mindset. Like Sarah Palin. Scrreeeeech....(sound of brakes being applied to an out of control thought).
So Sarah Palin is some voice in the wilderness? Let's stop right here for a moment because this is one of Doucheboy's little rhetorical tricks. He needs to dispense with the problem that conservatives have, in fact, been talking up impeachment, but he tries to brush it off so he can get to the meat of his argument in which he claims, as all other good little goosestepping wingnuts have been doing, that it's part of Obama's master plan. But this gets to the heart of what he's trying to avoid completely with his "no conservative plan for impeachment".
No. I don't really think there is either. Who does? But it's like arguing with the umpire or the ref. Pretty much no manager or coach believes he's gonna change a decision in the moment. He, or she, is arguing for the next call. They're arguing to set a tone, to put a thought in the heads of the players, the officials, and the fans, of the illegitimacy of that call and, by so doing, calling into question any future calls.
This is the conservative goal. Impeachment would be nice, but it would cost a lot. Slander is much cheaper and almost as good.
This is what the impeachment drooling is all about. Legitimacy. They really have NOTHING to go on, but by screaming IMPEACHMENT and BENGHAZI and IRS as loudly and as often as they can, accomplishes, without having to do anything, a sense that there is a huge fire underneath all that smoke.
As for Sarah Palin having no influence, that is about as laughable as the idea of Doucheboy on a date with a woman that doesn't end with him rolled up in a ball in his closet and her headed for the door wondering what she could have been thinking. Palin and her teabagging cohort have done more to drag the country into the brambles of vicious wingnut illogic than any political movement in living memory.
Oh, and one more piece of rhetorical shamefulness.
Douchey decides to get dirty by inserting a nasty little aside. He claims that Obama will try to cover his immigration sins by getting some "left-wing John Yoo" to provide the legal underpinnings for his dastardly deeds.
Fuck me, this guy needs a good slap. I've already gone on a lot longer than this asshole deserves, but, this? As Marie indicates, this is one of the bigger pieces of turdishness which together comprise the Douchey whole.
First, there is no left-wing John Yoo. Certainly not working for the White House. That particular brand of amoral, unethical, snaky legalistic vermin is a species peculiar to the right in this country. Not to mention that comparing an attempt to try to help immigrants find a better life with torturing innocent men and women, in some cases, to death, is an especially disgraceful example of the worst sort of underhanded "both sides do it" bullshit.
Finally, I get that this piece is a polemic. Fine. We all have written them. I myself write one every, oh, couple of years or so. And you are allowed to employ certain colorful expressions and characterizations in a polemic ("the Obama apparatus", eg). What you are not allowed to do is lie.
Both Harvard and the New York Times should be ashamed to be connected to such a noxious pretender to intellectual perspicacity.
Now I have to wipe the shit off my shoes.
Them Wingnuts Sure Do Love Punishment.
Oh, not for them, or their own, but for others. Especially blah people. Even if they're innocent, which, no fucking way they are, ever.
At least according to the SCOTUS Dark Lord, from the imperious heights of his basalt tower (no ivory tower for His Holy Darkness....his tower is made from the remnants of cooled lava coming up straight from the nether regions).
So, according to Scalia, not one inmate put to death in this country has ever, ever, ever been innocent. No sirree bob, not a one.
That he has heard of, anyway.
And the fact that the names of those innocents haven't made the front page of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, or the Daily Brimstone is proof positive that none such exist.
Unfortunately for Mr. Autodidact, he's wrong. Dead wrong.
The Innocence Project alone reports that they have assisted in the exoneration of 317 wrongly convicted people including 18 people on death row from 11 states who served a combined 229 years.
The Innocence project was founded in 1992 which means that there had been a number of exonerations of death row inmates that Scalia, had he ever had his head out of his ass, should have heard about.
The reason few of these make the front page has more to do with the right-wing ideology of punishment and sin. If a person is found guilty he or she must have done it. Plus the fact that the majority of those freed are black--non persons to many editors and producers. It doesn't matter that some namby-pamby lefties found them not-guilty because of DNA evidence. That science stuff is a fraud anyway. Jesus wanted them to die. Besides, few newspapers and news organizations care about a (black) person being freed. They care about executions and spectacular guilty findings, but not the chance for life restored.
Another victory for right-wing demagogues like Scalia. I bet he'd pull the switch if he could, and love it.
One further thought about that last comment.
How is it that right-wingers, especially those who go out of their way to profess their love of Jesus and their overt religiosity, tend to be so vicious, hateful, and vindictive?
One would think that the most important values of Christianity must be punishment, pain, hatred, intolerance, and death.
Oh wait. I think those are their core virtues.
More on Steyer from the opposite corner of the contiguous US:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/us/as-oysters-die-climate-policy-goes-on-stum
An exceedingly interesting look at new polling technologies:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/04/1319075/-New-Google-Consumer-Surveys-poll-for-Daily-Kos-gives-Roberts-double-digit-lead-in-Kansas-GOP-primary