Daily Kos

Simon Maloy:

New York Times columnist David Brooks was once an enthusiastic backer of George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq. He’d write columns for the Weekly Standard – the official journal of bankrupt neoconservative thought – glorifying Bush for his steely-eyed determination and tartly mocking the pansy liberals and other anti-war types who opposed Bush’s righteous exercise in nation-building and freedom-spreading. “History will allow clear judgments about which leaders and which institutions were up to the challenge posed by Saddam,” Brooks prophesied in the March 2003 column, “and which were not.”

That prediction didn’t quite pan out. Yes, the Iraq war ended up being a disaster, but contrary to Brooks’ assurance, the “clear judgments” about who was right and who was wrong about Iraq are still pending, as evidenced by the fact that so many people who got it so terribly wrong haven’t faced any real consequences.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Appalachia's Last Chance to Show It Doesn't Have an Obama Problem:

I've written quite a bit about over the last few months about voting patterns in Appalachia.  Beginning with Super Tuesday and then the Potomac primary, the pattern became clear: many counties of Appalachia have voted by margins of over 2 to 1, and sometimes even 9 to 1 for Hillary Clinton.  It's inescapable that race is playing a factor in some voting everywhere, but that it's a much greater factor in Appalachia than anywhere else in America.  Only in Appalachia has Hillary Clinton won huge margins.  As I've written before, Obama does not appear to have a problem with white voters.  However, Appalachia has a problem with Obama.

Last week, before the West Virginia primary, I enlisted the help of Kossack Meng Bomin to make maps that showed the counties where Obama and Clinton have posted big wins.  Obama has posted big wins in overwhelmingly white counties in places across the country.  Clinton has done well in many places.  But her biggest margins, outside of Arkansas and a few counties in Western New York, have almost all been in the counties of Appalachia.  

As was obvious to anyone who was looking at the results of the previous primaries, Clinton coasted to a huge win in West Virginia.  She will again win huge tonight in Kentucky, because, as Markos showed, voters in Kentucky long ago made up their minds.  Some will portray it as evidence that Obama has a problem with white voters.  It won't be.  Rather, it will be further evidence that Appalachia has a problem with Obama.

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Tweet of the Day

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On today's Kagro in the Morning show, we kicked off with a recap of the Pinterest fiasco. Greg Dworkin walked us through his always-excellent APR, with news on Hillary &the 2016 field, David Brooks being terrible, Luis Lang quitting the Gop, and KY-GOV results. Biker menace spreads to Applebee's! Twin Peaks HQ shocked at the clientele attracted by its rogue franchise! Joan McCarter on the looming deadlines on NSA reform, the bin Laden "treasure trove" that has appeared all of a sudden, the  awful "bad intel" dodge, a new TPP-related shell game that pays for "trade adjustment assistance" out of Medicare money, and how Idaho saved kids & defeated Sharia!

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High Impact Posts • Top Comments • The Evening Blues

This is the horror:

Iraqi security forces attempting to retake control of the western city of Ramadi were routed in heavy fighting Sunday, the worst defeat for Iraq’s central government since Islamic State militants stormed across the country last June.

And this is the stupidity:

In a replay of last year’s military debacle, elite units abandoned their U.S.-provided equipment to Islamic State fighters and fled the area, leaving several hundred soldiers surrounded in the last government-held enclave in the city.

The elite units are not stupid, they're running for their lives. What's stupid is that the United States continues to send arms to fight the bad guys despite the continuing pattern of the arms ending up in the hands of the bad guys. For these particular bad guys, it's been essential to their success. As McClatchy's Roy Gutman and Mousab Alhamadee so accurately described it:

an Islamic caliphate armed with US weapons

That description came in August. It has only gotten worse, since. The United States sends arms to fight the bad guys, and the arms end up in the hands of the bad guys. And despite all the many lost years of training Iraqi government troops, military experts say the bad guys are better trained. Of course, the continuing success of the bad guys while using American-made arms will only renew and increase calls for more American-made arms to be sent. And maybe some American troops, too. The thing about endless war is that it never ends.

Michigan has found a way to make up for some of its budget shortfall after cutting corporate taxes to the bone—just tax people who smoke and drink more! Chad Livengood reports:

Revenue from so-called sin taxes on tobacco, beer, wine and liquor totaled $290.5 million in the 2014 fiscal year, more than twice the $137.6 million net income taxes paid by Michigan businesses after receiving $768.8 million in refunds from tax credits, a Detroit News analysis of tax data shows.

Since Gov. Rick Snyder and lawmakers delivered sweeping tax relief for businesses in 2011, net business income taxes dropped 90 percent, depleting the state's main operating fund of $1.33 billion, according to state revenue data.

GOP Gov. Snyder and his Republicans (who control both chambers) sure did "deliver." So much so that the data show tax receipts from business had dropped from accounting for 21 percent of the state's general fund to producing just two percent of it over the past decade.

GOP legislators are in a real bind now, after voters rebuffed an effort to raise more revenue through sales and gas tax revenue. But don't worry, the sin-tax trend shows no signs of abating in Michigan.

Taxes from the Michigan Business Tax and Corporate Income Tax are projected to total $244 million this year, while beer, liquor, wine and tobacco taxes will total about $280 million, according to Senate Fiscal Agency data.

For the 2016 fiscal year budget, which lawmakers are debating, sin taxes are projected to top $278 million, while business taxes will net $159 million after more than $800 million in tax credits, recent tax data show.

Doug Elmendorf, the man who led the Congressional Budget Office when the Affordable Care Act was being written, says now that when the CBO was scoring the proposed legislation for its budget impact, it was the "common understanding" that every state would be eligible for subsides. That's one more official contradiction to the argument forwarded in King v. Burwell, in which the challengers posit that Congress used the subsidies to try to force every state to set up an exchange.

"It was a common understanding on the Hill, again on both sides of the Hill, on both sides of the aisle, in late 2009 and early 2010, that subsidies would be available through the federal exchange as well as through state exchanges," Elmendorf said in an interview at the Peterson Foundation fiscal summit.

"And I'm confident in saying that because CBO’s analysis always worked under the view that subsidies would be available under the federal exchange."

Despite all the scrutiny of his office’s cost projections, he said, the assumption of subsidies being available on both types of exchanges was never questioned, he said.

"Our analysis was subject to a lot of very intense scrutiny and a lot of questions, and my colleagues and I could remember no occasion on which anybody asked why we were expecting subsidies to be paid in all states regardless of whether they established their exchanges or not," he said.

"And if people had not had this common understanding about what the law was going to do at that time, I'm sure we would have had a lot of questions about that aspect of our estimates."

Other than a bunch of Republican lawmakers who snapped out of their apparent subsidy amnesia and filed a brief with the court saying of course they meant to withhold subsidies from their constituents, there is no credible source to back up the plaintiffs' claim in King. Kind of like how the actual plaintiffs aren't all that credible.

It's not hard to imagine Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas not giving a fig for the actual evidence of congressional intent here, or the fact that this continues to be the flimsiest of challenges to the law. They've proven time and again that they care far more about advancing their hard-right political agenda than, you know, acting like the highest court in the land. Once again, it's down to Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy to think about things like the institutional integrity of the court.

In the wake of Jeb Bush's whiplash-producing reversal last week, the U.S. media is engaged in a feeding frenzy over who would have supported the Iraq war "knowing what we know now." For his part, former Colorado Senator and might-have-been President of the United States Gary Hart is disgusted both with the current circle-jerk and Jeb Bush's contortionist act to steer clear of his brother's war. But when Bush spokesman Tim Miller said he was "going to count Gary Hart criticizing Governor Bush's judgment as a win," Jeb's team walked into yet another trap. After all, Hart was right about Iraq, then and now.

To be sure, Harts criticism of "The Decider" and his brother was pointed and personal:

"I'm trying to avoid being categorical about a whole family. But the Bushes do not demonstrate analytical minds. They demonstrate visceral minds. The father I knew and liked a lot. The sons respond to events and respond to stimuli, and they are not analytical thinkers. And that comes out in their rhetoric or lack thereof and their thought process and how they look at complex issues. Governor Bush, half his mind is how to protect his brother. The other half is, How do I answer without alienating two-thirds of the Republican Party?"

As he explained to the Huffington Post on Monday, Senator Hart was more than skeptical of the Iraq project from the beginning:

"I have to say, not being privy to intelligence briefings as others were, I probably had the benefit of objectivity. That is to say, I wasn't being misled by intelligence briefings by the administration or anyone else. But it didn't pass the smell test. And, to be honest with you, I didn't trust the people promoting the war in Iraq. I knew many of them and thought they had a different agenda. They had in mind to use Iraq as an American political and military base in the Middle East and reach out from there to impose peace on the region. It was a grand scheme, but many bridges too far."

But while Republican presidential contenders and their conservative amen corner scramble to rewrite the history of the Iraq catastrophe, Hart's position has been unchanged.

Continue reading below.

Campers at popular Refugio State Beach in California were alarmed by noxious fumes and notified authorities, who discovered a 105,000 gallon oil leak:

After flowing from the pipeline, crude pooled in a culvert before spilling into the Pacific, where it created a four-mile-long sheen extending about 50 yards into the water. Officials said winds could send the oil another four miles south toward Isla Vista.

The pipeline, built in 1991 and designed to carry about 150,000 barrels of oil per day, is owned by Houston-based Plains All American Pipeline, which said in a statement that it shut down the pipe. The culvert was also blocked to prevent more oil from flowing into the ocean, the company said.

Clean-up is underway, but no timeline has been announced. The state beach campground was at capacity for a busy holiday weekend, but all campers have been forced to pack up and leave.

This isn't the first oil spill in the area:

The Santa Barbara Channel was the site of a massive oil spill in 1969 that left the coast darkened with oil, killed thousands of birds and galvanized the environmental movement.

An effort to permanently ban off-shore oil drilling in state waters off Santa Barbara failed in the state Assembly last August.

See video of the 4-mile-wide oil spill here.

When only 4.6 percent of your state thinks you're doing an "excellent job," you can pretty much do anything, which is exactly what GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal is doing.

After Louisiana lawmakers watched Indiana explode following passage of its so-called "religious freedom" bill, they decided to take a different path Tuesday, benching their own version of the legislation. The bill would have prohibited the state from punishing anyone who refused to serve LGBT Americans based on their religious beliefs about marriage. But Jindal, who desperately needs the support of social conservatives for a "likely" presidential bid, swooped in to keep the political grenade in play, reports Brian Slodysko:

Hours after the bill was rejected, Jindal issued an executive order aimed at doing the same thing as the bill, only on a smaller scale limited to the executive branch.

"What we are seeing today in America is an all-out assault on religious liberty," said Jindal, who called the executive order the "next best thing" to signing the bill.

The order would be effective several months beyond his administration's end unless Louisiana's next governor rescinds it, Jindal said.

Critics of Jindal's action say it is largely a toothless political ploy. Here's Stephen Perry of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau:

Perry, a former chief of staff to one of the state's previous Republican governors, said case law and even the state constitution limit the governor's ability to rule by fiat. "No Executive Order of a governor may create substantive law, even in an emergency situation," he said in a statement.

Still, good on Jindal for not only governing on principle, but also walking through a door that no sane politician would ever even open. Can't imagine how his job approval ratings sunk a full 10 points lower than President Obama's in a red state like Louisiana.

President Obama added another strong speech Wednesday to his growing collection about a subject he and other presidential candidates barely mentioned during the 2012 election campaign: climate change. Speaking in New London, Connecticut, to the 218 graduates of the Coast Guard Academy and their families and friends, the president warned:

Here at the Academy, climate change—understanding the science and the consequences—is part of the curriculum, and rightly so, because it will affect everything that you do in your careers. Some of you have already served in Alaska and aboard icebreakers, and you know the effects. As America’s Maritime Guardian, you’ve pledged to remain always ready— Semper Paratus—ready for all threats. And climate change is one of those most severe threats.

And this is not just a problem for countries on the coasts, or for certain regions of the world. Climate change will impact every country on the planet. No nation is immune. So I’m here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security. And make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country. And so we need to act—and we need to act now.

After all, isn’t that the true hallmark of leadership? When you’re on deck, standing your watch, you stay vigilant. You plan for every contingency. And if you see storm clouds gathering, or dangerous shoals ahead, you don't sit back and do nothing. You take action—to protect your ship, to keep your crew safe. Anything less is negligence. It is a dereliction of duty. And so, too, with climate change. Denying it, or refusing to deal with it endangers our national security. It undermines the readiness of our forces.

The president presented a long and familiar litany of the damage climate change will do and is already doing around the world. That includes impacts to military bases, particularly ports, extreme weather, droughts leading to shortages of food and water, forced migration and geopolitical conflicts that contribute to extremism like that of Boko Haram in Nigeria. "All of which," he said, "is why the Pentagon calls climate change a 'threat multiplier.'"  

Obama also detailed some of the good things the administration has been doing about climate change, or trying to do in the face of stubborn, malignant opposition. That includes new emissions controls on power plants, mandating more efficient vehicles and housing, constant discussion of climate change in diplomatic meetings and expansion of renewable energy sources. He also spoke to advances in the efficiency of Coast Guard vessels and use of solar and wind at military bases, the use of biofuels with the "green fleet," and repeatedly, the cadets role in dealing with climate change.

He spoke of how tough are the politics of adopting farsighted climate change policies. Without naming names, he challenged the foes of those policies by pointing out how their opposition undermines military preparedness: "Denying it, or refusing to deal with it endangers our national security. It undermines the readiness of our forces."

More on the commencement speech is below the fold.

While there are certainly foreign policy issues that will be more difficult for Hillary Clinton to answer, she dispensed quickly with the Iraq question when she addressed reporters Tuesday.

"I've been very clear that I made a mistake, plain and simple and I have written about it in my book, talked about it in the past," she continued, according to MSNBC video of her response. 

Knowing what we know now, would you have invaded Iraq? Clinton says she would have voted differently as a senator. But it's the question that foiled Jeb Bush for all of last week and then tripped up Marco Rubio over the weekend (as if he hadn't had all week to prep for it).

“It’s not a mistake,” he said repeatedly.  “I still say it was not a mistake because the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it was governed by a man who had committed atrocities in the past with weapons of mass destruction.”

When Wallace pushed him to say whether he’d call it a mistake, even knowing about the faulty intelligence, he still seemed to say no: “The world is a better place because Saddam Hussein is not there…” he began.

Okay, senator, definitely heading into dicey territory. Do most Americans really think ISIS has been an improvement over Saddam Hussein? Doubtful.

Then he seemed say yes: “I don’t think George Bush would have moved forward on the invasion, and he certainly wouldn’t have gotten Congressional approval.” Wallace missed the chance to say that George W. Bush did not, in fact, admit the invasion was a mistake once he knew the WMD intelligence was faulty.  “There are things we got wrong in Iraq, but the cause is eternally right,” he wrote in his memoir.

Eternally right, in theory. Maybe. Unfortunately, there's nothing theoretical about ISIS or the 31,951 American soldiers wounded in Iraq or the 138,000-plus civilian fatalities there (a number many analysts consider a severe undercount).

Many environmentally related posts appearing at Daily Kos each week don't attract the attention they deserve. To help get more eyeballs, Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue) normally appears twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The most recent Saturday Spotlight can be seen here. More than 22,560 environmentally oriented diaries have been rescued for inclusion in this weekly collection since 2006. Inclusion of a diary in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it.
Dirty Water – The Use of Oil Production Wastewater to Irrigate California Crops—by Robocop: "For two decades farmers in California’s Central Valley have been buying water from the Chevron Kern River oil field, which is currently the 5th largest oil field in the country. The water being purchased is oil production wastewater.  The field is located in the San Joaquin Valley, where oil was discovered in 1899, and covers 10,750 acres.  Since most of the oil has been removed from the field, Chevron has moved to  use 'enhanced production technologies' to extract the remaining oil, such as fracking, acidizing and cyclic steam injection. By some estimates, these production methods use approximately 2.14 million gallons of water every day. After production, this wastewater has nowhere to go. According to Rock Zierman, the chief executive officer of the California Independent Petroleum Association, 'if we’re not able to put the water back, there’s no other viable thing to do with it.'  But in league with corporate agriculture, Chevron has been selling the water to be used for crop irrigation as a 'viable alternative.'"

Why I Would Like To Thank Royal Dutch Shell—by LaFeminista: "Perverse as it may seem. A stark counterpoint to Van Beurden’s speech comes from a 2013 Shell New Lens Scenario planning document which suggests industry talk of lowering global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is just that. Referring to the internationally agreed limit on a global temperature rise of 2C, the document states: 'Both our scenarios and the IEA (International Energy Agency) New Policies scenario (and our base case energy demand and outlook) do not limit emissions to be consistent with the back-calculated 450 parts per million (CO2 in the atmosphere) 2C. We also do not see governments taking the steps now that are consistent with the 2C scenario.' According to one estimate, that Shell statement is tantamount to acknowledging that the world will disastrously vault over the 2C limit. Link this with Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund."

You can find more excerpts from green diaries below the orange spill.

Reposted from Comics by Barbara Morrill Terrible Presidential candidate Jeb Bush has had a very hard time distancing himself from his brother George Jr., the worst President in US history. Okay, maybe he is showing some of them Republican Family Values they're always going on about, but man, Jebby can't seem to get the stink of the Iraq War, (a war which is unpopular with 66% of the public) because he won't deny his dumb bro. Who's the dumb bro now?

The House did something productive this week. Well, semi-productive. They managed to pass a short-term highway funding bill. So that they can come back again in two months and do it all over again.

The U.S. House voted to keep federal money flowing for highways and mass-transit programs for two more months, through the end of July.

Lawmakers voted 387-35 on Tuesday for the short-term measure to give themselves time to negotiate toward a longer extension. The Senate also plans to vote on the measure this week before Congress leaves Washington for a week-long Memorial Day recess. […]

The two-month extension “was not our preferred path forward,” Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster, a Pennsylvania Republican, said on the House floor before the vote. He said he would have preferred to extend the program through at least the end of the year.

“Unfortunately, we were unable to reach an agreement on a seven-month extension, so we are left with a two-month patch,” Shuster said.

The Senate, of course, can ruin all that if Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continues his foot-dragging as the House moves toward leaving for Memorial Day recess midday Thursday. As of Wednesday afternoon, the pending legislation on the floor was Trade Promotion Authority with a fight over process as McConnell tries to prevent Democrats from offering amendments. At the same time, Sen. Rand Paul was conducting an extended speech (not really a "filibuster" as he calls it) to try to prevent McConnell from moving forward with extending the PATRIOT Act's bulk metadata provision. McConnell's ploy has been to play out the clock to the last minute to try to force that vote, leaving the highway funding more or less hanging in the balance.

Not well played, Mr. McConnell.