Hullabaloo

Monday, January 14, 2013

 
Passing the baton to George P


by digby

They just keep coming...

George P. Bush has raised a whopping $1.3 million in less than two months – with a financial boost from the family and the Bush political network – to launch his first race for statewide office in Texas. Top contributors included father Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, and uncle George W. Bush, the former president. Each gave $50,000 to the younger Bush’s fledgling political campaign. Uncles, cousins and long-time family financial also sent checks. Bush has indicated he’s looking at a race for Texas land commissioner in 2014, but has not ruled out the possibility of running for attorney general or even governor depending on the circumstances. The robust financial showing in his first weeks of fundraising indicates that the Bush network is very much alive and ready to help bankroll the next generation of the nation’s best-known Republican political family.

Governor? Well, he's 36 so he's getting ready to make his move. And despite his famous name I'm going to guess they want to sell him as the first Hispanic governor/president.
Which would be the perfect sequel to Bush Junior the Wasp Cowboy.


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digby 1/14/2013 04:30:00 PM

 
Investing in renewables creates more jobs than exporting coal

by David Atkins

Another piece of evidence that we don't have to choose between economic growth and responsible action on climate change:

Per dollar invested, efficiency and renewables generate many more jobs than fossil fuels.

Modern coal terminals are highly mechanized facilities, with towering, ten-story cranes pivoting massive arms above coal storage piles 60 feet high. At the ends of these arms, huge rotary shovels bigger than a house dig up the dusty coal and deposit it onto conveyor belts that snake away to bulk carriers three to four football fields long. Few workers are needed to operate these gargantuan “stacker/reclaimers.”

A currently proposed installation near Seattle provides a good example of the phenomenon:

As estimated in official project documents, the Gateway Pacific Terminal would support only 257 steady jobs, including office workers, at full build-out. That’s just one new job for every $2.6 million invested, assuming the terminal can indeed be built for its advertised price. If you include “induced jobs” that may be added in maritime and railroad industries, the total increases to 430. But extra expenditures would occur in these areas, say for necessary railroad upgrades, so figure about one new job created per $2 million spent...[I]nvesting the same $665 million in energy efficiency or renewables would create twice as many jobs at minimum. In solar manufacturing, for example, figure several hundred more jobs than at the coal terminal. For solar-installation and energy-efficiency companies, add at least another thousand...

The savings in energy costs that steadily accrue after these clean-energy projects are completed can be recycled through organizations to create even more jobs, setting up a multiplier effect that stimulates greater prosperity. Such investments also lessen dependence on fickle foreign sources of fossil fuels, whose costs can skyrocket if supply lines are threatened.

Then, too, these are jobs in construction, maintenance, building supplies and finance that will be difficult, if not impossible, to ship overseas. The wages and salaries earned will largely be spent in local communities, enhancing local economies.

The only reasons not to engage in an Apollo Program for clean energy is the corrupting influence of Big Fossil Fuel lobbying, and an ideological group of anti-spending advocates paralyzing the entire political process. Given that we are a nation desperately in need of both good jobs and immediate action on climate, the failure to take these steps is political and moral malfeasance of the highest order.


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thereisnospoon 1/14/2013 03:00:00 PM

 
The R's need a nap

by digby


So I hear Republicans are threatening to impeach President Obama if he tries to enact any kind of gun control via executive order:

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) is threatening to file articles of impeachment against President Barack Obama if he moves to change gun regulations through executive order.

“I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment,” Stockman said.

In a statement, Stockman didn’t hold back, saying Obama is launching an “attack on the very founding principles of this republic.”

“The President’s actions are an existential threat to this nation,” Stockman said in a statement. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms is what has kept this nation free and secure for over 200 years. The very purpose of the Second Amendment is to stop the government from disallowing people the means to defend themselves against tyranny. Any proposal to abuse executive power and infringe upon gun rights must be repelled with the stiffest legislative force possible.”

I think someone should get Congressman Stockman a bottle and send him to bed. The chances of the President enacting gun policy via executive order is nil. I'm not sure what Biden was talking about but I'm fairly sure it will never happen.

But if it did, and the congress decided to impeach the president over it, I'm going to guess that the country would find such action just a little bit over the top. Here are the new Pew Poll findings on guns:

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digby 1/14/2013 01:30:00 PM

 
We just disagree

by digby

This kind of analysis is why I love Ed Kilgore. He discusses the latest GangofNoLabels bipartisan conceits, this one led by Joe Manchin and Jon Huntsman, in which they predictably conclude that the only challenge is for Washington Pols to come together and get along so they can get under the hood and "solve our problems."

[I]t would be nice if partisans did not treat their differences as equivalent to the divisions that produced the Thirty Years War. But there are a few, well, problems with this abstract ideology of problem-solving.

One of the most obvious is the false-equivalency meme, the idea that all partisans are equally culpable for gridlock in Washington and thus must in equal measures abandon party discipline to “solve problems.” It’s understandable that any bipartisan group would accept as a point of departure this fiction, but it’s still fiction. One party is dominated by people who believe in a fixed, eternal set of principles and policies that are required of anyone expressing fidelity to the Constitution, to American traditions, and (for many) God Almighty. And the other is an unwieldy coalition of people who believe in all sorts of things, but is generally innocent of the conviction that its party platform came down from Mount Sinai or Mount Vernon on stone tablets.

But put that aside for a moment, if you can. The other problem is the conviction that reconciliation of the two parties’ points of view is simple if politicians agree to compromise.

At the moment, the impasse that is creating crisis after crisis in the fiscal management of the country is that Republicans contend the only real problem we have is the proliferation of domestic spending, mainly in “entitlements.” Congressional Republicans are largely unwilling to identify specific “reforms” that must be initiated to “solve” this problem—in part because they have selectively championed unrestrained entitlement spending (i.e., for Medicare) when it was to their electoral advantage. To the extent a Democratic position can be identified, it is that we have a short-term economic problem that militates against deep short-term spending reductions, and a long-term fiscal problem that must be addressed with a combination of economic growth, restraints in both domestic and defense spending, a reform of a tax system that is insufficient to pay for the government Americans consistently profess to want. Democrats, moreover, typically believe the key to domestic spending restraint involves reductions in heath care cost inflation that require more, not less, government intervention of a type that Republicans have denounced in terms usually reserved for the great totalitarian movements of the twentieth century.

A fiscal compromise between these two points of view that just “splits the differences”—i.e., the type that can be produced by Washington pols cutting deals across party lines—will not only be messy and offensive to ideologues and the two parties’ “bases” and interest groups, but will also be incoherent and internally self-cancelling to a degree that it may not solve any problem other than the most recent impasse in Congress.

Thank you. Unfortunately this seems to be the only approved alternative to the equally fatuous John McCain method:

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’”

Solving these impasses really isn't a matter of just "knocking some heads together" or coming up with a compromise that will "please no one but which everyone can live with." And that's assuming they have even identified the right problem in the first place (which I would argue they have not.) But as Kilgore rightly points out, even then the majority of the two parties disagree on how to fix it.

And this is a real disagreement, not just some tantrum by a bunch of spoiled citizens who can't be trusted to understand what's good for them. Many of the politicians these Very Serious People find so reprehensible are just responding to their constituents' legitimate wishes. I know that's inconvenient, but it happens to be the democratic process. Sorry.

But I think what Kilgore identifies here as the real problem is important: that this alleged "split-the-difference" form of centrist compromise doesn't split the difference at all. It's a forthright position of its own. He quotes Manchin and Huntsman to make the point:

"We need to attempt those things and to seek solutions now from the system and the leaders we already have. Businesses are not hiring, and investors are not investing as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Washington. Too many would-be workers are not working. The coming generations are being doomed to a worse standard of living than previous generations."

Kilgore writes:

This, folks, is an ideological statement, not a statement of pragmatic abandonment of ideology. Our principal economic problem, it is asserted, is “uncertainty.” If that is true, then any long-term set of fiscal and economic policies is desirable.

But what if liberals are right and the real problem with the economy is a dearth of aggregate demand? What if conservatives are right and the real problem is the perpetuation of the twentieth-century welfare state and regulation of “job-creators?” Compromises that pull in opposite directions on the basic diagnosis of what is wrong with the economy—particularly the preferred Beltway Fiscal Hawk “consensus” of adopting both sharp spending reductions and tax increases—are very likely to damage and reverse our fragile economic recovery more than all the “uncertainty” in the world.

And yet, isn't that what we are in the process of doing? I'll just put this chart up again:

And we have every reason to fear they are going to slash spending even more in the next round. (Even the Democrats' best case has more tax hikes and spending cuts.) In other words, Manchin and Huntsman may not be able to bring together a new GangofNoLabels --- but they don't really need to. So far, they are getting exactly what they want.  And when this plan fails to revive the economy, the Republicans will rush to blame the tax increases and the Democrats will rush to blame the spending cuts and the Village pundits will insist that these same Centrist Goldilocks "grown-ups"  offer up more of the same. And the wealthy will do fine, as they always do, while the middle class and the poor will be squeezed even more than they already are.

I believe the Republicans are dead wrong on almost everything.  I loathe the idea of allowing their agenda to pass.  If they had won the election I would hope (futilely, I'm sure) that the Democrats would fight them with everything they had, within the boundaries of responsible governance (i.e raising the debt ceiling.) And I am not surprised that the Republicans are fighting dirty.  It's in their nature.  But it's important to understand that this centrist mush is just making things worse. 

If we have to have this fight, let's have it.  And let the people hold those who do it accountable for what happens. This insistence on a consensus or grand bargain is hurting the country not helping it.

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digby 1/14/2013 12:30:00 PM

 
Headline 'O the Day (so far)

by digby

You have to love it:

GOP looks for ways to stop the rape comments

Note they aren't trying to persuade their members that rape is not a victimless crime or that some women do not "rape easy." They just want these candidates to be more sensitive.

And who are they turning to for advice about rhetoric? Why, the very sensitive "pro-life" movement:

[A] training program [has] already being launched by an anti-abortion group — the Susan B. Anthony list — to keep candidates and lawmakers from continually making the same kind of comments that may have helped ruin Republicans’ chances of winning the Senate.

Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser said the lawmakers are falling for a trap set by proponents of abortion rights who want to focus the debate on extremes such as rape instead of other abortions.

“It’s a tactic to [force pro-life lawmakers to] talk about this rather than the 98 percent of abortions because they know that they lose it,” Dannenfelser said.

That's right. They need to get back to being decent and sensitive toward women --- by calling them baby killers or morons.

See? That's how you talk about the issue with sensitivity.

The truth is that the rape and birth control comments revealed a little bit too much about the conservative position on abortion. It's not about the fetus, no matter how much they want it to be. It's about women and sex and their desire to control it. They consider an unwanted pregnancy a punishment that must be borne by women who refuse to "take responsibility" for being ... sexual.

They don't want their politicians talking about this because it's deeply offensive to almost everyone and resulted in their losing some important elections. We've always known they were out of the mainstream but they'd been very clever about keeping the focus on the fetus and not the woman. Now the cat's out of the bag and they are desperate to put it back in. The problem is that their base is clueless and has been told that everyone agrees with their medieval belief system. It's not going to be that easy.


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digby 1/14/2013 10:30:00 AM

 
Cyber cop warriors and paranoia

by digby

I was on Virtually Speaking last night with my friend Marcy Wheeler. I was down with a cold and less informed of the details than she (as one would expect) so spent as much of the hour as I could get away with   letting her educate me and the audience about the Aaron Swartz case and other assorted DOJ misdeeds. It was a very interesting hour to say the least.

This morning she has a post up with one of the aspects of the case I did not know:

The public story of Aaron Swartz’ now-tragic two year fight with the Federal government usually starts with his July 19, 2011 arrest.

But that’s not when he was first arrested for accessing a closet at MIT in which he had a netbook downloading huge quantities of scholarly journals. He was first arrested on January 6, 2011 by MIT and Cambridge, MA cops.

According to a suppression motion in his case, however two days before Aaron was arrested, the Secret Service took over the investigation.

On the morning of January 4, 2011, at approximately 8:00 am, MIT personnel located the netbook being used for the downloads and decided to leave it in place and institute a packet capture of the network traffic to and from the netbook.4 Timeline at 6. This was accomplished using the laptop of Dave Newman, MIT Senior Network Engineer, which was connected to the netbook and intercepted the communications coming to and from it. Id. Later that day, beginning at 11:00 am, the Secret Service assumed control of the investigation. [my emphasis]

In fact, in one of the most recent developments in discovery in Aaron’s case, the government belatedly turned over an email showing Secret Service agent Michael Pickett offering to take possession of the hardware seized from Aaron “anytime after it has been processed for prints or whenever you [Assistant US Attorney Stephen Heymann] feel it is appropriate.” Another newly disclosed document shows the Pickett accompanied the local cops as they moved the hardware they had seized from Aaron around.

Odd, don't you think? Read the whole thing for Marcy's informed speculation.

My general view of this is that the government is paranoid about cyber-crime and sees it as having an almost mystical power to threaten ... everything. The way the cyber-cops talk about it sounds as close to Alex Jones conspiracy mongering as you get from government officials (aside from the neocon terror types.)  I don't know if the Swartz indictment had anything to do with Wikileaks, but because of this paranoia I have to assume it fell into the same threat matrix because Swartz was political and he was a hacker and he hung out at MIT, all of which have been factors in that investigation.

This case was handled by one of the DOJs cyber crime gurus, which means he is a guy who "knows things nobody else knows" and is probably allowed a great deal of latitude about deciding what constitutes a cyber threat (whether to big business or national security.)  I expect that there are few real geeks in the bureaucracy and that the brass gives these specialists more rope than they should. And when people with a particular ax to grind have a lot of rope it's not uncommon for them to become just a teeny bit obsessive. (See: all of Western literature)

Anyway, Marcy has some theories about all that that are quite interesting. I can't help but believe there's more to this as well.  At the very least, it's fairly clear that he wasn't just being dogged for his alleged JSTOR crime. Whether it was a case of corporate America generally demanding that their "property" be protected (even as they rampantly steal  from others with impunity) or it's a more nefarious abuse of the national security powers, this case was  an over-the-top prosecution that shouldn't have happened. And I think we all know that it isn't the only one.

They wanted him in jail:

Mr. Swartz's lawyer, Elliot Peters, first discussed a possible plea bargain with Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann last fall. In an interview Sunday, he said he was told at the time that Mr. Swartz would need to plead guilty to every count, and the government would insist on prison time.

Mr. Peters said he spoke to Mr. Heymann again last Wednesday in another attempt to find a compromise. The prosecutor, he said, didn't budge.

Mr. Heymann didn't reply to requests for comment Sunday.

With the government's position hardening, Mr. Swartz realized that he would have to face a costly, painful and public trial, his girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, said in an interview Sunday. The case was draining his money, and he would need to ask for help financing his defense; two of his friends had recently been subpoenaed in the case. Both situations distressed him, she said.

"It was too hard for him to ask for the help and make that part of his life go public," she said. "One of the things he felt most difficult to fathom was asking people for money."

On Friday, Mr. Swartz was dead.

Note that he was facing up to 50 years in prison for this non-crime. To put that in perspective, Think Progress put together a handy list of crimes for which a person would be charged substantially less:

Manslaughter: Federal law provides that someone who kills another human being “[u]pon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion” faces a maximum of 10 years in prison if subject to federal jurisdiction. The lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter carries a maximum sentence of only six years.

Bank Robbery: A person who “by force and violence, or by intimidation” robs a bank faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. If the criminal “assaults any person, or puts in jeopardy the life of any person by the use of a dangerous weapon or device,” this sentence is upped to a maximum of 25 years.

Selling Child Pornography: The maximum prison sentence for a first-time offender who “knowingly sells or possesses with intent to sell” child pornography in interstate commerce is 20 years. Significantly, the only way to produce child porn is to sexually molest a child, which means that such a criminal is literally profiting off of child rape or sexual abuse.

Knowingly Spreading AIDS: A person who “after testing positive for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and receiving actual notice of that fact, knowingly donates or sells, or knowingly attempts to donate or sell, blood, semen, tissues, organs, or other bodily fluids for use by another, except as determined necessary for medical research or testing” faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Selling Slaves: Under federal law, a person who willfully sells another person “into any condition of involuntary servitude” faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, although the penalty can be much higher if the slaver’s actions involve kidnapping, sexual abuse or an attempt to kill.

Genocidal Eugenics: A person who “imposes measures intended to prevent births” within a particular racial, ethnic or religious group or who “subjects the group to conditions of life that are intended to cause the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part” faces a maximum prison term of 20 years, provided their actions did not result in a death.

Helping al-Qaeda Develop A Nuclear Weapon: A person who “willfully participates in or knowingly provides material support or resources . . . to a nuclear weapons program or other weapons of mass destruction program of a foreign terrorist power, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be imprisoned for not more than 20 years.”

Violence At International Airports: Someone who uses a weapon to “perform[] an act of violence against a person at an airport serving international civil aviation that causes or is likely to cause serious bodily injury” faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years if their actions do not result in a death.

Threatening The President: A person who threatens to kill the President, the President-elect, the Vice President or the Vice President-elect faces a maximum prison term of 5 years.

Assaulting A Supreme Court Justice: Assaults against very senior government officials, including Members of Congress, cabinet secretaries or Supreme Court justices are punished by a maximum prison sentence of just one year. If the assault “involved the use of a dangerous weapon, or personal injury results,” the maximum prison term is 10 years.

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digby 1/14/2013 09:00:00 AM

 
Held hostage by Hastert: a minority of one chamber threatens the whole country

by David Atkins

In a move that will surprise absolutely no one, Republicans are making serious threats to default on spending they already racked up in order to force devastating cuts onto a nation that resoundingly rejected their message of austerity for the middle class.

With the Obama Administration openly refusing the 14th Amendment and platinum coin choices, it becomes a game of chicken. It's a game the Obama Administration has shown itself unwilling to play. Given the Administration's history, it's probable that it will seek a Grand Bargain on spending cuts despite its protestations to the contrary.

But more interesting that second-guessing that Administration's true intentions is taking stock of the perversity of the situation. It's not just that Republicans are threatening to take the entire nation off an economic cliff if they don't get their way. It's not just that the gerrymandered House is refusing to play ball with the White House and the Senate. Nor is it just that a party that dramatically lost a big election is refusing to abide by the results of that election.

It's that a minority of a single chamber of the government is holding the country hostage. If John Boehner brings to the floor raising the debt ceiling while simply funding most of the programs cut by the sequester, a majority of House would vote for it: nearly all the Democrats, and enough Republicans either sane or more threatened from the left than from the right. But having violated the Hastert rule over the fiscal cliff, it would be nearly political suicide to do it again on the sequester where the rabid right wing feels it holds all the cards.

So what is threatening to send the country toppling into default is purely John Boehner's ambitions to remain the Speaker, and an arcane "rule" that makes an already sclerotic government completely inoperable. A slim majority just of the House Republican caucus--a minority in the House overall--is holding the entire country hostage not through the regular Constitutional checks and balances, but through yet another abuse of yet another arcane voluntary rule that almost no one who isn't a political obsessive knows about.

The need to enact major reforms to the American legislative system has never been more clear.


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thereisnospoon 1/14/2013 07:30:00 AM

Sunday, January 13, 2013

 
Treading water for decades

by digby

Not that anyone should worry, mind you:

Wages have fallen to a record low as a share of America’s gross domestic product. Until 1975, wages nearly always accounted for more than 50 percent of the nation’s G.D.P., but last year wages fell to a record low of 43.5 percent. Since 2001, when the wage share was 49 percent, there has been a steep slide.

“We went almost a century where the labor share was pretty stable and we shared prosperity,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “What we’re seeing now is very disquieting.” For the great bulk of workers, labor’s shrinking share is even worse than the statistics show, when one considers that a sizable — and growing — chunk of overall wages goes to the top 1 percent: senior corporate executives, Wall Street professionals, Hollywood stars, pop singers and professional athletes. The share of wages going to the top 1 percent climbed to 12.9 percent in 2010, from 7.3 percent in 1979.

Some economists say it is wrong to look at just wages because other aspects of employee compensation, notably health costs, have risen. But overall employee compensation — including health and retirement benefits — has also slipped badly, falling to its lowest share of national income in more than 50 years while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share over that time.
[...]
From 1973 to 2011, worker productivity grew 80 percent, while median hourly compensation, after inflation, grew by just one-eighth that amount, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. And since 2000, productivity has risen 23 percent while real hourly pay has essentially stagnated.

Meanwhile, it’s been a lost economic decade for many households. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, median income for working-age households (headed by someone under age 65) slid 12.4 percent from 2000 to 2011, to $55,640. During that time the American economy grew more than 18 percent.

But surely, this must mean we simply have to cut "entitlements" right? Because people are living so much longer and all? Sure, they've just been financially treading water for decades and lost much of whatever measly amount of wealth they'd managed to set aside in the epic housing and stock market crashes of 2008 --- but that doesn't mean they don't need to put even more skin in the game, right?

I think there might be a patch left on the back of their feet.


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digby 1/13/2013 05:30:00 PM

 
"It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach."

by digby

Chris Hayes featured a very nice tribute to his friend Aaron Swartz this morning in his "you should know" segment:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I think this is particularly important for major TV analysts to remark upon:

You should also know that at the time of his death Aaron was being prosecuted by the federal government and threatened with up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for the crime of — and I’m not exaggerating here — downloading too many free articles from the online database of scholarly work JSTOR. Aaron had allegedly used a simple computer script to use MIT’s network to massively download academic articles from the database that he himself had legitimate access to, almost 5 million in all, with the intent, prosecutors alleged, of making them freely available. You should know that despite JSTOR declining to press charges or pursue prosecution, federal prosecutors dropped a staggering 13 count felony indictment on Aaron for his alleged actions. In a statement about his death Aaron’s family and partner wrote:

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”

You should know his death is a good reason to revisit the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the law under which he was prosecuted, since it is far too broad, and to take a hard look at Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, whose office prosecuted Aaron with such recklessly disproportionate vigor, and who is reportedly considering a run for governor.

That's just for starters. There is a huge discussion to be had about the government's almost mystical paranoia about its secrets being exposed in this brave new world of the internet and its willingness to use the full force of its power to prosecute citizens on trumped up charges to serve as "examples" for others. This is supposed to be a democratic, free society.  The behavior exhibited toward Swartz is more akin to something we might have seen in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.  There's is also a badly needed discussion about the government's willingness to intercede heavily on behalf of business interests while simultaneously allowing business to go unpunished for their crimes. That's always been true to some extent but we've reached a point at which they aren't even hiding it.

It doesn't make this loss any easier to take, but it does focus the mind once again on just how vulnerable we all are to these powerful forces --- and it makes me appreciate the courage of people like Aaron Swartz who are willing to take them on. His death doesn't make that any less awe inspiring.

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digby 1/13/2013 04:00:00 PM

 
The debt sequester mash up

by digby

Krugman says that he gets phone calls:

The White House insists that it is absolutely, positively not going to cave or indeed even negotiate over the debt ceiling — that it rejected the coin option as a gesture of strength, as a way to put the onus for avoiding default entirely on the GOP.

Truth or famous last words? I guess we’ll find out.

I'm sure the White House believes this and it's possible they will stare down the GOP this time on the debt ceiling and the GOP will back down. But after all that's come before the GOP has every reason to believe it will be the White House that blinks. We all do. It's almost impossible for me to believe that they will allow Armageddon (for real, this time, honest) to happen on their watch.

But as I wrote earlier, the truth is they're being very cute about all this and I don't think this is the play at all. It's not a coincidence that the sequester can was kicked down the road to ripen right after the debt ceiling. It means that while we are all watching the debt-ceiling showdown at the OK Corral, it's entirely possible the real negotiation will be happening on the separate sequester track. And that's unlikely to end well for the people. These wingnuts are hungry --- they feel they got robbed in the last go-round and they believe they were promised some major spending cuts in the next one.

It's a good thing for the country if the White House is able to stop this ongoing debt ceiling hostage situation. And maybe the Republicans want to stop it too, who knows? For all we know, Biden and McConnell prayed at the portraits of Tip 'n Ronnie and worked it all out in advance. Certainly it can't have entirely escaped the GOP leadership that they are playing with fire. But my read on the House crackpots is that they really want to make the President cry Uncle after that last one. Whether they have the nerve to cause an economic earthquake in order to do that is another question but I honestly don't know that they care whether anyone "blames" them. Their voters will support their actions.

So, if I had to guess, they'll be given some major inducements in the sequester to try to make sure that doesn't happen. I also suspect they would have to be things that will make the left side of aisle scream with pain.  But would that even be enough?



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digby 1/13/2013 02:00:00 PM

 
Headline 'O the Day

by digby

...from FoxNation:

No Liberals Allowed: Group To Build ‘Live And Let Live’ Community

I'm fairly sure they actually think that makes sense.

*I wrote about this big idea a while back.


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digby 1/13/2013 12:00:00 PM

 
Dispatch from the LOD*

by digby

Golly, what a great idea:

Hopes for overhauling the federal tax system are fading in Washington, but in some state capitals, tax reform experiments - some far-reaching - are fast taking shape.

Across the U.S. South and Midwest, Republicans have consolidated control of state legislatures and governorships, giving them the power to test long-debated tax ideas.

Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, for instance, called on Thursday for ending the state's income tax and corporate taxes, with sales taxes compensating for lost revenue.

A similar plan is being pushed by Republicans in North Carolina. Kansas, which cut its income tax significantly last year, may trim further. Oklahoma, which tried to cut income taxes last year, is expected to try again.

"When it comes to getting pro-growth tax reform done this year, the only real opportunities are at the state level," said Patrick Gleason, director of state affairs for Americans for Tax Reform, the Washington-based anti-tax lobbying group headed by small-government conservative activist Grover Norquist.

His group and other conservative pressure organizations, such as Americans for Prosperity, have targeted state capitals for tax reform campaigns.

Cutting income taxes and shifting the overall tax burden to consumption through higher sales taxes is a long-standing goal of some tax theorists. Critics argue that approach is regressive and unfairly burdens the middle class and the poor, who spend more of their earnings on items subject to sales tax.

Nicholas Johnson, a state tax expert with the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, gave the chances of sweeping tax changes taking hold a low probability.

Still, he said he worried the efforts in the states could move the tax discussion in a direction harmful to middle- and low-income taxpayers and make balancing state budgets harder.

"Even if this is too radical, if it makes other radical schemes seem more reasonable, that's worrisome," he said.

Funny how that works.

This is what I hate about our governmental scheme. It makes it possible for the reactionaries to spread out and regroup in 50 different places when their scams lose momentum in Washington. And yes, I know that it can work to advance progressive causes as well, but I'm guessing the right has about a five to one advantage at pressing their agenda on a state level than the left.

One thing you have to give them credit for: no matter what they pull, it serves their higher purpose. After all, they are going to get rid of a tax that poor and middle class people are not terribly burdened with and replace it with one they will see every time they buy their necessities. I have a sneaking suspicion that isn't going to endear them to government. Even if it blows back on some GOP politicians in the short run, in the long run it will reinforce the notion that government sucks.

Funny how that works too.

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digby 1/13/2013 10:30:00 AM

 
Waiting for the right moment

by digby

So Rahm is touting gun control now:

In 2009 while serving as Obama’s chief of staff, Emanuel reportedly told Eric Holder to “shut the f--k up” after the attorney general suggested reinstating the assault weapons ban — which expired in 2004. Emanuel’s profanity-laced frustration with Holder was detailed in Daniel Klaidman’s book, “Kill or Capture.”

Gun-safety groups and political scientists say Emanuel has always had an interest in pushing appropriate gun restrictions. But Emanuel also knows timing is everything in politics, the experts say.

“Based on his political record it would suggest that as Obama’s chief of staff, he made a judgment that emanated more from politics than policy,” said Robert Spitzer, the author of “The Politics of Gun Control” and a professor at the State University of New York at Cortland.

In 2009, Spitzer continued, Emanuel was likely more focused on Obama’s primary goal of passing healthcare reform and calculated that there weren’t enough votes to pass gun laws.

“There’s always an element of Emanuel that has his finger” to the political winds, Spitzer said. Now though, Emanuel “has a constituency that would be supportive to gun control.”

That’s the way politicians have to think on topics that are controversial, says Kristin A. Goss, an assistant professor of public policy at Duke University and the author of “Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America.”

“You have to sort of wait for the political stars to align,” Goss said.

And look how beautifully they've finally aligned for him:

Chicago Homicides Outnumber U.S. Troop Killings In Afghanistan

But even that wasn't enough, was it? The mayor of Chicago waited until various madmen mowed down a congresswomen and her constituents, an audience in a darkened movie theater, a church full of worshippers and classrooms full of first graders among literally thousands of other preventable gun deaths before he felt it was a good time to bring up gun control. Until we racked up a huge body count of innocent people, it was best to STFU and elect as many government officials of both parties who would oppose any kind of gun control.

That's what people in the beltway call "pragmatism." I call it immoral.


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digby 1/13/2013 09:00:00 AM

 
The "Hitler passed gun control" myth. Also wrong.

by David Atkins

The NRA and their allies throw out so much bullshit in order to increase sales of guns to their shrinking but deeply paranoid customer base that it's hard to sort fact from fiction, even for careful students of politics and public policy. One of the less intelligent but more prevalent right-wing stories frequently used to attack gun control advocates is that the Nazis also confiscated guns. The idea being that gun control and confiscation is the first step on the road to totalitarian tyranny--conveniently ignoring the fact that every other decent industrialized democracy with gun control in the world has not, in fact, fallen in despotism and the slaughter of millions in recent memory.

So as arguments go, it's foolish and irrelevant. But even I had believed it on the factual merits. But it turns out, like so many monsters dredged from the rightwing swamp, that not even the basis on the argument is true on the merits. Alex Seitz-wald explains:

University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.

The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.

So Hitler actually relaxed gun ownership laws.

Now, it's true that Jews and other minorities were prevented from having access to firearms, no doubt as a way to stop them from fighting back. One of the more disgusting rightwing memes out there, in addition to the if slaves had been armed they wouldn't have been enslaved theory, is that if the Jews had been better armed they could have defended themselves from the Holocaust. The resistance of the fairly well-armed Warsaw Ghetto is often cited. Yeah, about that:

Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.

Proponents of the theory sometimes point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano put it, “those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.” But as the Tablet’s Michael Moynihan points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps.

Bottom line: the Warsaw Ghetto resistance didn't work. It never had a prayer of working. Those who fought back should be celebrated for their bravery, but the example shouldn't be used as a matter for public policy. The denizens of the Warsaw Ghetto faced the worst of the Nazi wrath for their trouble. And the exact same fate would befall any pathetic armed resistance against U.S. armed tanks, air forces and trained military personnel if, heaven forfend, a dictatorship were to arise here. Gun control or lack thereof would make little difference to those in charge--which is why it's critically important to engage the ugly business of political checks and balances to make sure it never happens. One good way to stop the rise of despotic dictatorship would be to stop the austerity train in its tracks, since austerity and economic shock are the single biggest causes of the transformation from democracy to autocracy.

And what about left-wing dictatorship and gun control?

“As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.”

Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous. “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.

He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”

Not unusual. Right wingers are not only morally askew, they're also famously ignorant of science and history.


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thereisnospoon 1/13/2013 07:30:00 AM

Saturday, January 12, 2013

 

Saturday Night at the Movies

A shameless filler piece about movie award season

By Dennis Hartley

The emperor has no clothes…see?

 

Some readers have taken me to task over the years regarding my ambivalence toward the Oscars, the Golden Globes, Independent Spirit, People’s Choice, Healthy Choice, USDA Top Choice, blah blah, woof woof. I don’t normally go out of my way to “cover” any of those events, because…well you know, I’m an artist, man, not some chuckle-headed entertainment reporter (you buying this crap?). I guess I’m one of those silly people who perceive the cinema as an art form, not a competitive sport or a popularity contest. And I’m no conspiracy theorist, but considering over 650 first run theatrical features were released domestically in 2012, why does it seem (once again) that all the awards shows appear to draw their nominees from the same tiresomely over-hyped handful of titles? What is Hollywood…Congress!? Alright, I’ll fess up. The week got away from me, and I don’t have any new films to review, so I’m killing time until next week. (Awkward silence). So…what about that weather we’ve been having? How about those Seahawks?

Anyway, in the wake of the Oscar nominations earlier this week, and what with the Golden Globes coming up this Sunday, I figured this was as good a time as any to at least acknowledge the kickoff of the award season (if a bit grumpily). Of course, the People have already spoken (exactly who are these “people” anyway…no one has ever provided an explanation adequate to my satisfaction). I’m sorry to report that I somehow missed all three of the People’s Choice Awards movie winners (The Hunger Games, Ted and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Shame on me! Bad! Bad critic!). As for the Oscars, per usual, I’m shamefully forced to admit that I haven’t seen the majority of this year’s Best Picture noms. I’ve only seen two (I know, I know…I should have my critic’s license revoked immediately)-Zero Dark Thirty (which I reviewed last week) and Argo (which I didn’t get around to seeing until recently; a decent film, but Wag the Dog did it first and better). What can I say? The Academy has their own little “best of 2012” list, and I have mine…and in this democratized internet age, who’s to judge which list is the more valid?

Of course, I’ll still be watching the Golden Globes this weekend (he says sheepishly, after bloviating for two paragraphs about his haughty disdain for all this bread and circus nonsense). It’s kind of like that old Woody Allen joke about the elderly Jewish women at a restaurant, where one says to the other, “Oh, the food here is terrible!” to which her dining companion empathetically replies “I know! And such small portions!” You see, in my house, yelling at the television is a competitive sport; so I look at this as part of my training for the Oscar telecast. So for those of you who do care about such things, I will leave you with some links to Golden Globe nominees I reviewed in 2012. Erm…enjoy?

Zero Dark Thirty (Nominated for best picture drama, actress, director and screenplay)

The Master (Nominated for best actor, supporting actor and supporting actress drama)

Skyfall (Nominated for best original song)

Hyde Park on Hudson (Nominated for best actor comedy)

Saturday Night at the Movies archives

Dennis Hartley 1/12/2013 06:00:00 PM

 
Good guys 'n bad guys

by digby

Rick Perlstein is now blogging over at The Nation in case you didn't know. And his stuff is as wonderful as ever.

I particularly enjoyed this piece on the evolution of the NRA --- and the modern conservative movement worldview:

In 1977, [Harlan]Carter’s faction packed the national convention in Cincinnati and effected what one of the ousted officials called a “gentlemanly bloodbath.” Said one of the coup plotters, “People who are interested in conservation can join the Sierra Club. If they’re interested in bird-watching there’s the Audubon Society. But this organization is for people who want to own and shoot guns.” Immediately the announcement went forth: “the National Rifle Association is cutting back on its conservation and wildlife programs to devote most of its energies to fighting gun control.” The next year Jack Anderson followed up: “the most extreme of the extremists have formed a tight little clique which pulls strings inside the organization. They operate with great mystery and secrecy, referring to themselves cryptically as the Federation. Let a timorous official show the slightest weakness, and his name will go down on the Federation’s secret ‘hit list.’ ”

That 1977 coup has been widely written about of late. What most of us don’t know about, however, is Ronald Reagan’s role in laying the ideological groundwork for the historical transformation.

In 1975, after eight years as governor of California, Reagan took a job delivering daily five-minute radio homilies on the issues of the day. By June of that year he was on some 300 stations. And that month, in that frighteningly persuasive Ronald Reagan way, he addressed himself in a three-part series to a new proposal by Attorney General Edward Levy to pass a gun control law specifically targeted at high-crime areas. What follows are never-before-published Reagan quotes from my own research listening to dozens of these broadcasts archived at the Hoover Institution at Stanford for the book I’m working on about the rise of Reagan in the 1970s. They show Reagan bringing the NRA hardline faction’s worldview to the broader public.

“Now, that’s funny,” he said of Levy’s proposal. “It seems to me that the best way to deter murderers and thieves is to arm law-abiding folk and not disarm them…. as news story after news story shows, if the victim is armed, he has a chance—a better chance by far than if he isn’t armed. Nobody knows in fact how many crimes are not committed because criminals know a certain store owner has a gun—and will use it.” So the attorney general of the United States, Reagan said, “should encourage homeowners and business people to purchase them and learn how to use them properly.”

He concluded that first broadcast foreshadowing so much NRA rhetoric to come: “After all, guns don’t make criminals. It’s criminals who make use of guns. They’re the ones who should be punished—not the law-abiding citizen who seeks to defend himself.”

So, despite the fact that Reagan was far less than the perfect wingnut his worshippers believe, in this he was the real thing. He was the first cheerleader for modern American gun culture. And it sounds as if he had quite an influence.

And that makes sense. After all, he came from Hollywood where our great cowboy myth was created. Perlstein shows just how thoroughly the right has absorbed that simplistic message:

Good guys, bad guys, never the twain shall meet—despite all the evidence, which I’m sure was available even then, that the people most likely to be victim of a gun in the home are people who live in that house. Or the moral evidence of the entire history of the human race: that the boundaries between “good people” and “bad people” are permeable, contingent, unknowable; and that policy-making simply can’t proceed from the axiom that one set of rules can exist for the former, and one for the latter.

Conservatives don’t think that way. For them, it’s almost as if “evildoers” glow red, like ET: everyone just knows who they are...

Most of you were here after 9/11 I assume? I think we all know what happened.

Q: Mr. President, I'm sure many Americans are wondering where all this will lead. And you've called upon the country to go back to business and to go back to normal. But you haven't called for any sacrifices from the American people. And I wonder, do you feel that any will be needed? Are you planning to call for any? And do you think that American life will really go back to the way it was on September 10th?

George W. Bush: Well, you know, I think the American people are sacrificing now. I think they're waiting in airport lines longer than they've ever had before. I think that -- I think there's a certain sacrifice when you lose a piece of your soul. And Americans -- I was standing up there at the Pentagon today, and I saw the tears of the families whose lives were lost in the Pentagon. And I said in my talk there that America prays with you. I think there's a sacrifice, there's a certain sense of giving themselves to share their grief with people they'll never, maybe, ever see in their lives.

So America is sacrificing. America -- I think the interesting thing that has happened, and this is so sad an incident, but there are some positive things developed -- that are developing. One is, I believe that many people are reassessing what's important in life. Moms and dads are not only reassessing their marriage and the importance of their marriage, but of the necessity of loving their children like never before. I think that's one of the positives that have come from the evildoers.

The evil ones have sparked an interesting change in America, I think -- a compassion in our country that is overflowing. I know their intended act was to destroy us and make us cowards and make us not want to respond. But quite the opposite has happened -- our nation is united, we are strong, we're compassionate; neighbors care about neighbors.

The story I talked about earlier was one that really touched my heart, about women of cover fearing to leave their homes. And there was such an outpouring of compassion for people within our own country, a recognition that the Islamic faith should stand side by side, hand to hand with the Jewish faith and the Christian faith in our great land. It is such a wonderful example.

You know, I'm asked all the time -- I'll ask myself a question. How do I respond to -- it's an old trick -- how do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I'll tell you how I respond: I'm amazed. I'm amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am -- like most Americans, I just can't believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we've go to do a better job of making our case. We've got to do a better job of explaining to the people in the Middle East, for example, that we don't fight a war against Islam or Muslims. We don't hold any religion accountable. We're fighting evil. And these murderers have hijacked a great religion in order to justify their evil deeds. And we cannot let it stand.

This is the basis of the modern conservative ethos: good guys vs bad guys. White hats vs black hats. The righteous vs "the evil ones". The question is, which side of the line do they think you and I fall on?

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digby 1/12/2013 04:00:00 PM

 
No more bargaining chips

by digby

So that's that:

Stunning news from WaPo's Ezra Klein: The Treasury is ruling out the use of a trillion dollar platinum coin to break the debt ceiling impasse.
Klein writes:

That’s the bottom line of the statement that Anthony Coley, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, gave me today. ”Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” he said.

With this, the White House has now ruled out the two best options for preventing a default in the event that the House GOP refused to life the debt ceiling. The White House has been quite adamant that the other alternative (invoking the 14th Amendment) is not acceptable.

So now the stakes are high, as The White House has refused to negotiate with the GOP on a debt ceiling hike.

What bargaining chips does The White House hold? Unclear.

Not unclear. They now have no bargaining chips and see no good reason to even pretend they have some.

Sooo, either the administration is going to hold on with more steely-eyed grit than they've ever shown before to try to get the Republicans to blink (which considering past negotiations, one could not blame the GOP for scoffing at) or they are eager to engage in more high stakes deficit reduction "negotiations."

Golly, I wonder what's going to happen?

Greg Sargent reported the other day that the Republicans have been hedging on the debt ceiling and that this emboldened the White House to hold fast and make no concessions. I replied:

It sure sounds like Boehner and McConnell are hedging to me too. If they are,then that means any more "offers" from the Democrats to make a "big deal" are offers the Democrats want to make, not ones they have to make.

I'm not sure withdrawing the threat of the coin or the 14th Amendment remedies qualifies as an offer in that context. But since they've thrown away their only bargaining chips before they even started, it's fair to say that anything they agree to from now on should be seen as something they wanted, not something they needed.

But I'm sure that Ruth Marcus and David Gergen will be greatly impressed by their seriousness and maturity and that's really all that matters.


Update: Krugman




digby 1/12/2013 02:00:00 PM

 
Tasers don't rob people, people rob people

by digby

... and therefore protected by the 2nd Amendment? Because as much as I hate the idea that cops have these things, the idea that it's ok to sell these torture devices to the general public is truly astonishing:

I was at the bus stop on the phone and he walked past me and we looked at each other. Next thing I know there is a taser on my face, on the side of my cheek. He tased me twice on the side of my face and then on my chest yelling give me your phone. The phone dropped and then he started grabbing my purse but I wouldn’t let go. I was screaming and people came out from the neighboring restaurants, shops and he ran down the street. He jumped in a Lexus (I think) SUV and a woman got his license plate number.

I suppose they'll use the the same defense they always do. It was much better for her to be tasered than it was for her to be shot with a gun. Therefore, we should be happy that criminals have tasers.


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digby 1/12/2013 12:30:00 PM

 
No need for geniuses

by digby
I didn't know Aaron Swartz personally, but I certainly knew of him, through friends and acquaintances and, of course, his work. It's immeasurably sad to see someone so brilliant and so young choose to end his own life.

I'm not sure anyone is capable of figuring out all the elements that go into making such a final decision. But I'm pretty sure that one of the main ones was the fact that he was being pursued with single-minded, Javert-like obsession by the US Justice department over an alleged crime that hurt no one and which was not even being pursued by the alleged victim.

If you're unfamiliar with what they were doing, this will fill you in on the details. I suspect it was this that animated their idée fixe, more than anything:

...the feds found someone with enough "hacking" activity under their belt that they feel comfortable turning the defendant into an "example."

That's how they roll. As we've seen with RIAA, the Manning case and Wikileaks, the government seems to be overreacting to "computer crime" much like the authorities in the Salem Witch trials overreacted to some hysterical teen-age behavior. One can only assume that they fear the penetration of their "secrets" as something akin to being possessed by the devil. But the fact is that we are supposed to be a democracy in which the government works for us, not the commercial enterprises and national security apparatus that apparently has the government obsessively chasing citizens who have the talent and the ideals to expose their crimes and shortcomings.

This is a very ugly, very shameful episode. I hope the US Attorney who decided that this was a worthwhile pursuit sleeps well tonight. It's not as if the world needs idealistic geniuses, right?


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digby 1/12/2013 11:11:00 AM

 
The magic coin

by digby

Chris Hayes explains:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Also too Paul Krugman on Bill Moyers:

It's hard for me imagine the president or the Democrats having the nerve to do this, but it's possible they'll have no choice. The Republicans are so nuts they may demand things that the Democrats literally cannot deliver.

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digby 1/12/2013 09:02:00 AM

 
Dishonestly and ignorantly switching the culprit from guns to games

by David Atkins

The dishonest stupidity. It burns.

The $60 billion industry is facing intense political pressure from an unlikely alliance of critics who say that violent imagery in video games has contributed to a culture of violence. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with industry executives on Friday to discuss the concerns, highlighting the issue’s prominence.

No clear link has emerged between the Connecticut rampage and the gunman Adam Lanza’s interest in video games. Even so, the industry’s detractors want to see a federal study on the impact of violent gaming, as well as cigarette-style warning labels and other measures to curb the games’ graphic imagery.

“Connecticut has changed things,” Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Virginia Republican and a frequent critic of what he terms the shocking violence of games, said in an interview. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, but we’re going to do something.”

Gun laws have been the Obama administration’s central focus in considering responses to the shootings. But a violent media culture is being scrutinized, too, alongside mental health laws and policies.

“The stool has three legs, and this is one of them,” Mr. Wolf said of violent video games.

Mr. Wolf seems quite confident in this assessment, displaying all the usual brash arrogance of the science-denying Republican Party, together with a healthy dose of get-off-my-lawn ignorance to boot. The science, of course, is pretty clear that video games don't cause violence:

But it turns out that the data just doesn’t support this connection. Looking at the world’s 10 largest video game markets yields no evident, statistical correlation between video game consumption and gun-related killings.

It’s true that Americans spend billions of dollars on video games every year and that the United States has the highest firearm murder rate in the developed world. But other countries where video games are popular have much lower firearm-related murder rates. In fact, countries where video game consumption is highest tend to be some of the safest countries in the world, likely a product of the fact that developed or rich countries, where consumers can afford expensive games, have on average much less violent crime...

Again, with only 10 datapoints, it’s not a perfect comparison. But it’s hard to ignore that this data actually suggests a slight downward shift in violence as video game consumption increases...

So, what have we learned? That video game consumption, based on international data, does not seem to correlate at all with an increase in gun violence. That countries where video games are popular also tend to be some of the world’s safest (probably because these countries are stable and developed, not because they have video games). And we also have learned, once again, that America’s rate of firearm-related homicides is extremely high for the developed world.

Science and statistics. Imagine that. But Chris Christie amps up the silliness:

“I don’t let games like Call of Duty in my house,” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said this week on MSNBC. “You cannot tell me that a kid sitting in a basement for hours playing Call of Duty and killing people over and over and over again does not desensitize that child to the real-life effects of violence.”

Says a blustering ignoramus who has probably never played a first-person shooter in his life. His gut says so, so it must be true.

People who don't play video games usually do not understand them. They're today's billiards in River City, a newfangled thing that a bunch of mostly younger people do that many older people fear and do not understand, and thus becomes the easy target of fear-peddling Harold Hill con artists.

So allow me to explain: video games are a tension release, often played by people who take pleasure in meting out justice in a virtual world because the real world is severely lacking in justice. They're cathartic and can do wonders to reduce violent tendencies in people like myself with a strong sense of moral justice. The virtual violence is usually nearly comical in its extremism, but enemies (if they're human at all) tend to have expressly nameless and stock, often faceless characters. Too much personalization of the enemies would trigger empathy in the player, making it more difficult to enjoy the game. It's the same reason that the Storm Troopers in Star Wars all look the same and are utterly dehumanized. It's much easier to feel OK about the death of millions on the Death Star if we don't think too hard about the families of the millions killed on board with a single pull of the hero's X-Wing trigger. But that doesn't mean that people who watch Star Wars are any likelier to commit acts of mass terrorism.

I myself am a deeply empathetic person. I once ran over a small animal in my car at night and remained upset about it for hours. The mere sight of blood makes me feel faint. The notion of ever killing or hurting a living creature, much less a human being, is horrifying to me.

But that doesn't mean I haven't killed tens of thousands virtually since I was a child playing the original Doom--the same poorly pixelated game that caused an epidemic of ignorant freakouts from misguided parents when it was released back in 1993. I've virtually mowed down tens of thousands of creatures human, alien, animal, supernatural and machine using swords, spells, guns and fists in Doom, Heretic, Half Life, Unreal, Halo, Call of Duty, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, Painkiller, Tomb Raider, Far Cry, Planetside, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Dead Space, Star Wars, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Soulcalibur and far too many others to count. I have many friends who are also passionate gamers and wouldn't dream of hurting a fly in the real world, horrified by killing animals for mere sport, and devastated by hurting another human being.

Do some sociopaths also play games? Certainly. Both Breivik in Norway and the Columbine kids were players. But so are millions of children and adults around the world. That's correlation, not causation. The Newtown and Aurora killers both were fans of World of Warcraft, a role-playing fantasy game with over 10 million players worldwide, no aiming or arcade elements, and so dissimilar from first-person shooters like Call of Duty as to be risible. It would be like blaming "violent movies" for violence because two killers liked watching Lord of the Rings, while two others liked watching Pulp Fiction. It's the sort of embarrassing comment only someone who doesn't watch movies would make.

Back in reality land, there are two common denominators in recent mass gun violence: 1) guns, obviously, and 2) mental illness.

On the mental illness front, we have Ronald Reagan's cuts and the refusal to fund a real mental health program to thank for that. The lack of treatment for the mentally ill is a direct result of Republican policies.

And on the gun front, we obviously have Republican policies that continue to put tools of easy, violent death in the hands of just about anyone who wants them. But there can be little doubt that the same people who so adamantly deny the scientific reality of climate change would love to displace the blame for gun violence away from guns and toward video games, a convenient theory for which there truly is no credible evidence. It certainly feeds into social and parenting hysteria while deflecting attention from guns and cuts to mental health services.

But as with deficit hysteria, it would be nice if there weren't so many Democrats like Hillary Clinton and remorselessly-kills-animals-with-guns-for-no-reason-but-won't-let-his-kids-play-Halo Paul Begala to help them do their dirty work.




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thereisnospoon 1/12/2013 07:30:00 AM

Friday, January 11, 2013

 
DOD fools

by digby

One of the more common conversation stoppers in the gun debate is when an anti-gun control person stops you in your tracks to condescendingly explain that unless you are a firearms expert you have no standing to argue about whether or not guns should be easily available. Using the term "assault weapon" is particularly offensive and shows that you should never be listened to on this subject because you'd have to be a fool not to know that such a thing doesn't even exist.

You know, a fool like this:

Ah, what does the military know about guns anyway?


h/t to @billmon1


digby 1/11/2013 06:00:00 PM

 
Backing up the president in case he decides not to panic

by digby

Greg Sargent reports that Democrats are taking some steps to ensure that the President can take some unorthodox steps to deal with the debt ceiling if it becomes necessary:

In a move that will significantly ratchet up the brinksmanship around the debt ceiling, the four members of the Senate Democratic leadership are privately telling the White House that they will give Obama full support if he opts for a unilateral solution to the debt ceiling crisis, a senior Senate Democratic leadership aide tells me.

The four Democratic leaders — Senators Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin and Patty Murray — have privately reached agreement that continued GOP intransigence on the debt ceiling means the White House needs the space to pursue options for raising it that don’t involve Congress, and that the White House needs to know that Dems will support whatever it decides to do.
[...]
The White House has said it doesn’t believe the 14th amendment option is legal, and has refused to engage on the question of whether it sees the coin as a viable option, saying only that there is “no Plan B” and that the onus is on Congress to raise the debt limit.

The aide tells me, however, that top Senate Democrats see the 14th amendment option as far preferable politically to the coin. “Of the available options, the coin, on its face, is politically much worse than the others,” he said. “Whatever the legal arguments for and against it, the imagery will be difficult to combat. What better symbol of out-of-control government spending could you have than a trillion dollar coin?”

I understand that, but instead of just accepting it they could try to educate the public about the subject instead of just throwing up their hands and saying "it looks bad." These Democrats underestimate the ability of the public to comprehend something like this. Unfortunately, one of the problems with these seemingly never-ending "cliff" negotiations is that the Democrats seem to have decided that their best negotiating position is to repeatedly scream "the sky is falling" as loudly as loudly as possible --- and that means that solutions beyond capitulation (like going over the cliff or the platinum coin) are only talked about on the fringe and the general public never gets what's really going on.

It might very well work out fine, (after the usual dramatic kabuki pageant.) But it's also not unlikely that the Dems will panic as they usually do and start giving away the store once we get close to the deadline. That's been the pattern so far, even if the right wing is so idiotic that they refuse to take them up on their offer. Someday, they might just wise up.

If I were a betting person, I'd bet they won't and we'll have yet another delaying mechanism. Until the Democrats decide to pull the plug on this nonsense with something like the coin or the 14th Amendment, I can't see any reason why the Republicans would change. They like these showdowns. Makes 'em feel powerful.

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digby 1/11/2013 04:30:00 PM

 
It's only the biggest issue facing humanity. No worries.

by David Atkins

Dave Roberts has yet another timely reminder about just how high are the stakes of climate change:

So in the name of getting our bearings, let’s review a few things we know.

We know we’ve raised global average temperatures around 0.8 degrees C so far. We know that 2 degrees C is where most scientists predict catastrophic and irreversible impacts. And we know that we are currently on a trajectory that will push temperatures up 4 degrees or more by the end of the century.

We know we’ve raised global average temperatures around 0.8 degrees C so far. We know that 2 degrees C is where most scientists predict catastrophic and irreversible impacts. And we know that we are currently on a trajectory that will push temperatures up 4 degrees or more by the end of the century...

Warming to 4 degrees would also lead to “an increase of about 150 percent in acidity of the ocean,” leading to levels of acidity “unparalleled in Earth’s history...”

It will also “likely lead to a sea-level rise of 0.5 to 1 meter, and possibly more, by 2100, with several meters more to be realized in the coming centuries.” That rise won’t be spread evenly, even within regions and countries — regions close to the equator will see even higher seas.

There are also indications that it would “significantly exacerbate existing water scarcity in many regions, particularly northern and eastern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, while additional countries in Africa would be newly confronted with water scarcity on a national scale due to population growth.”

After mentions of increasing extreme weather events, major loss of crop yields and dramatic reduction in biodiversity (read: millions of species going extinct), he concludes:

All this will add up to “large-scale displacement of populations and have adverse consequences for human security and economic and trade systems.” Given the uncertainties and long-tail risks involved, “there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.” There’s a small but non-trivial chance of advanced civilization breaking down entirely.

Now ponder the fact that some scenarios show us going up to 6 degrees by the end of the century, a level of devastation we have not studied and barely know how to conceive. Ponder the fact that somewhere along the line, though we don’t know exactly where, enough self-reinforcing feedback loops will be running to make climate change unstoppable and irreversible for centuries to come. That would mean handing our grandchildren and their grandchildren not only a burned, chaotic, denuded world, but a world that is inexorably more inhospitable with every passing decade.

Take all that in, sit with it for a while, and then tell me what it could mean to be an “alarmist” in this context. What level of alarm is adequate?

And yet the Very Serious People spend their days desperately worrying about whether billionaires have enough tax cuts to give a few more people minimum wage jobs, which genetic tribe of desert nomads should control some scrap of desert somewhere, and how best to overcome silly liberal resistance to burning all that glorious carbon in the Canadian tar sands so we can "add jobs" without driving up that pesky deficit.

Pitiful. As a general rule, the more seriously a pundit is taken by the traditional press in America, the more frivolous are the issues and positions they care about.


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thereisnospoon 1/11/2013 03:00:00 PM