Daily Kos

At the always-wonderful The Baffler, Andrew J. Bacevich writes—The Bourne Identity:

A hundred years ago, Randolph Bourne was a hot property—an intellectual wunderkind who was taking the American intellectual scene by storm. Bourne was the complete package: brilliant, charismatic, filled with social energy, and exquisitely attuned to the moment. Bourne’s essays appeared in leading periodicals like The Atlantic, The Dial, and The New Republic back when magazines set the American political and cultural agenda. Admirers considered him a visionary, an exponent of a humane new cosmopolitanism. True freedom and real democracy, he believed and exemplified, implied a spirit of tolerance, generosity, and creativity consummated in what he called “the beloved community.”

Barely two years after writing these words, Bourne became persona non grata. His offense involved not personal scandal—no violence, fraud, embezzlement, or sexual shenanigans—but something much, much worse: when the climate of opinion abruptly shifted, he refused to follow. They zigged, he zagged. While other members of the New York intelligentsia were swooning at the prospect of waging a war to end all wars that would make the world safe for democracy, Bourne dared to dissent. For this, they shut him out of virtually all the journals in which he had been publishing, and all respectable outlets generally.

A year after his ostracism, Randolph Bourne was dead at thirty-two, felled by the terrible influenza pandemic of 1918. That his premature passing cut short a career so full of promise must remain an eternal cause of regret. That in the brief time allotted him Bourne courageously stuck to his principles should elicit gratitude. In the intervening century, his critique of Woodrow Wilson’s war has acquired greater salience. At Cineplexes and in pulp fiction, the derring-do of Jason Bourne may entertain, but it’s the insights of the all-but forgotten Randolph, the prophet without a Hollywood deal, that remind us who we once were and aspired to become.

Crucial among those insights is the imperative of distinguishing between country and state. To Bourne, the former is benign, the latter anything but. Country, in Bourne’s lexicon, is nearly synonymous with civilization. It implies a way of life, based on shared language, customs, and culture. The modern state, by contrast, is a “repository of force.” It exists for one purpose alone: to impose its will. Toward that end, the state engages in a never-ending quest for power, conducted chiefly at the country’s expense—taxing, policing, stoking rumors of war. The country flourishes in an environment that permits and even encourages nonconformity. The state seeks compliance, deference, and regimentation. [...]

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—Frameshop: Allen's Political Klanbition:

The sordid story of the George Allen's activist racism has grown this week to include an article in The Nation featuring a 1996 photograph of Allen posing with the leadership of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC).

The ADL and the SPLC both have extensive posts warning the public that the CCC is a white supremacist hate group.  But in today's world, it is much more revealing to find instances where loud and proud White Supremacists actually mention and praise the same CCC standing like nervous prom dates posing in the photo with Governor George Allen.  So, I decided to try some basic Google searches to see what I could find.

The results took me back to my old friends at Stormfront and to some new friends at KKK.com.

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Tweet of the Day

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On today's Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin rounds up the headlines: Donald Trump - Winning! Greg & David Waldman discuss the Syrian refugee crisis: Hungary closes its gates, Iceland opens its arms. Republicans want Black Lives Matter to shut up. Armando calls in to tell us Greg is wrong. (He’s still determining why.) Armando & David discuss the Kim Davis case. Was Trump ambushed by the Quds and Kurds? Why should Clinton's IT guy take the 5th? The long record of gun control destruction in Virginia. David returns to Dupont, C8, poison laced cigarettes and riverbeds, to get a taste of what it’s like to have government run like a business. Find us on iTunes | Find us on Stitcher | RSS | Donate to support the show!

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High Impact Posts • Top Comments • The Evening Blues

Reposted from Comics by Barbara Morrill Flailing GOP candidate NJ Governor Chris Christie is trying to out-Trump Trump, and so has proposed tracking immigrants like FedEx packages. Christie even fantasized that if elected (yeah, right) he would bring in the head of FedEx Frederick Smith to help him with this problem. Presumably the unobtrusive Big Federal Government of Republican Chris Christie would insert microchips into immigrants so that they don't overstay their visas. Or there's another option, a guy named Adolph something tried it in the 1930s and 40s in Germany to keep track of certain people... "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it." And be big fat jerks.

When a group of troublemaking Americans, at least some of them suspiciously ethnic looking, showed up at a Donald Trump event with a banner reading "TRUMP: Make America Racist Again," Donald Trump's security guard leaped into action to prevent this travesty of free speech from sullying a perfectly lovely Trumpian shindig.

A Trump security guard took offense at this sign of insolence and ripped the banner away from them. One of the protesters then chased the guard and grabbed him, at which point the guard turned around and clocked the guy. From the New York Times: "The Trump campaign said that the security team member on Thursday was 'jumped from behind' and that the campaign would 'likely be pressing charges.'"

You might at one point have presumed that having a candidate's security team repeatedly rough up protesters, reporters and the like would raise a few questions, but punching a protester outright will probably boost him another few points in the polls. Say what you want about the Republican base, but they're simple people who know what they like.

Conservative school board members in Jefferson County, Colorado, tried to revamp the district's AP History curriculum so that it didn't "encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law." That meant changing the way Jefferson County schools taught about historical figures like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Outraged students and teachers claimed the move was censorship and it prompted students and teachers to walk out.

Jefferson County Clerk Faye Griffin have announced enough signatures have been gathered to put the recall vote for school board members Ken Witt, Julie Williams and John Newkirk on the November ballot, a move that could save the county $500,000 in taxpayer dollars for a special election.

While many in Colorado celebrated the announcement, Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams said the county may be forced to pay for a special election after all:

Secretary of State Wayne Williams sent a letter to Jefferson county’s clerk on Thursday warning her to have a contingency plan.

Williams said, “You will need near-optimal circumstances to place both recall and coordinated (statewide) content on the same ballot and meet the ballot-mailing deadline for the (November) election.”

In the meantime, conservative supporters and organizations are already pumping thousands of dollars into television ads in support of the conservative school board members.

Congress gave the NSA until the end of November to keep up its bulk collection of U.S. cellphone metadata records in the USA Freedom Act, passed earlier this year, but one of two legal challenges to the program might bring it to an end before that deadline. Two separate courts are hearing two separate cases, and while one doesn't seem to see the necessity of ending the program immediately, the other wants it stopped ASAP. The DC District Court judge would like to end the program now.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon said he has no intention of allowing the Obama administration to use legal maneuvering to "run out the clock" on a lawsuit challenging the USA Patriot Act. Leon ruled in 2013 that the mass collection of phone records is likely unconstitutional, but the government successfully appealed that decision by challenging whether the plaintiffs in the case could prove their phone records were among those swept up by the secret program.

The lawsuit was filed by conservative lawyer Larry Klayman and Charles Strange, the father of a cryptologist technician killed in 2011 when his helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. Both are customers of Verizon Wireless, but Klayman could only prove in court that the NSA had collected records from a related company, Verizon Business Network Services.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last week reversed Leon's earlier ruling, sending the case back to the lower court to determine whether the government must divulge whether Klayman's cell records had really been collected.

Leon instructed Klayman to do two things to get the case in front of him as soon as possible so that he can end the program before it expires at the end of November: asking the appeals court to expedite sending it back to the district court and amending his complaint by adding a plaintiff who is a customer of Verizon Business Network Services—the only provider known to be participating in the dragnet data collection scheme. (If it's a bit odd to see a federal judge telling a complainant exactly how to pursue a case before him to win, Leon isn't necessarily your average judge. Consider his strange Obamacare ruling this week.)

Leon could be hoping to beat the second court considering the program to the punch of ending it, but he probably doesn't have to worry. The ACLU returned Wednesday to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, which previously found the program illegal in May, asking it to halt the program now and to force the NSA to quarantine the data collected since June 1. They didn't have a particularly good reception, with the judges expression concern that "as Circuit Judge Robert Sack put it, halting the program would 'short-circuit' a process already under way," and asking why the ACLU doesn't just "declare victory and withdraw?"

A third case is pending before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. No matter what happens, the Justice Department is going to have to spend the next several months defending a program that has been declared illegal, that the Congress tacitly deemed illegal when they ended it and replaced it with a new program, and which is still ongoing.

This is absurd.

The story was dramatic: a man in a maroon pickup truck opened fire at a Millis police officer, sending the officer's cruiser slamming into a tree. The car burst into flames; shots were exchanged; schools were shut down as investigators combed the area for what they believed was an armed and dangerous suspect.

The problem? It was not true, according to Millis police.

At a press conference Thursday, Millis police Sgt. William Dwyer said the incident had been fabricated. The patrolman, a 24-year-old part time officer, made up the account, Dwyer said.

As you will see from the photo above and the news video below, local police, in full military-style gear, with roads blocked and assault weapons drawn, took over the town after the officer fabricated the story about being shot at by someone.

What's doubly wild is that he actually claimed it was a white man who shot at him, but conservatives online immediately began blaming the Black Lives Matter movement and asking why President Obama was so silent about the attack.

There's something very Nixonian about Scott Walker, but I've been having a hard time pinning down exactly what it is. Then Jeb Lund at The Guardian totally nailed it.

Walker’s political record basically involves refusing to tell anyone what his plans are and then doing something politically craven: he first campaigned on fixing Wisconsin’s budget, then once elected decided that it was public-sector unions’ fault and used a short-term crisis as an excuse to gut them; he evaded discussion about potential anti-union “right-to-work” legislation by calling it a distraction, then signed a right-to-work bill; he ducked questions about legislating more abortion restrictions, then signed a 20-week abortion ban.

And that doesn’t even get into the hail of convictions and indictments in his administration and the campaign finance investigation that suddenly stopped thanks to Wisconsin Supreme Court justices who received donations from many of the same groups being investigated. Walker was always going to have trouble with the scrutiny of a national campaign, outside those justices’ reach and outside the demographics of an overwhelmingly white state whose racial divisions he heightened with the help of a sycophantic right-wing media.

It's the unique combination of political craveness and duplicity combined with a corruption so deep you can't find its bottom. That's what makes him the rebirth of Richard Nixon. If we were still in a war in Iraq, Scott Walker would be campaigning on a secret plan to end it while at the same time plotting how he would escalate it once elected. He's totally that guy. Except that, and this is one of the strangest things I've ever typed, he doesn't have Nixon's political charisma.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Late Night Snark: 14 Months 'Til Election Day Edition

"The State Department just released another batch of Hillary’s e-mails from when she was Secretary of State. In the e-mails, Hillary asked an aide what time “The Good Wife” was on, how to charge her iPad, and how to get wi-fi. Hillary sounds less like the Secretary of State and more like my mom at a hotel."
---Jimmy Fallon

America's Colbert drought ends Tuesday!

"At a press conference yesterday, Donald Trump kicked out a Latino reporter but the man returned a few minutes later. Yeah, so already Trump's deportation plan isn't working."
---Conan O'Brien

“Guys like [Trump] are very empowering to broke, hateful assholes.”
---Marc Maron on Real Time

"All the new polls indicate that Donald Trump is getting more popular every day. Apparently his inspiring riches-to-riches story is really resonating with everyday Americans. Right now members of the Republican National Committee are essentially the scientists in a movie realizing their creation has escaped from the lab."
---Jimmy Kimmel

Only two members of Congress are trained scientists: Bill Foster and Jerry McNerney. They’re from the same party---guess which one? I’ll give you a hint: not the one that believes Noah’s Ark is settled science.
---Bill Maher

And four years ago…

"Rick Perry becomes the Republican front-runner. Of course they're letting him run in front. He's the one with the gun."
---Stephen Colbert

I love the smell of holiday weekends in the evening. Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

Update: The Adam Levine tweet in tonight's poll is actually a few years old. So consider it a 'better late than never' option. C&J regrets the error.

Republicans continue to like what they see in The Donald, as his favorability ratings move in a very positive direction. Gallup finds Trump's image improving 16 points over the last two weeks—the biggest jump of any GOP candidate, though Ben Carson still has the highest favorability in the field (51 points to Trump's 32).

And then there's the movement among the GOP "moderates," like Bush (-6) and Kasich (-12).

The editorial board of the New York Times fought back against racialized fear-mongering from the right on Friday, criticizing the way Republicans have characterized the Black Lives Matter movement. According to the Times:

The Republican Party and its acolytes in the news media are trying to demonize the protest movement that has sprung up in response to the all-too-common police killings of unarmed African-Americans across the country.

The intent of the campaign—evident in comments by politicians like Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky—is to cast the phrase "Black Lives Matter" as an inflammatory or even hateful anti-white expression that has no legitimate place in a civil rights campaign.

The editorial is a response to the attacks in recent weeks, in which Haley, Walker, and Paul, along with fellow Republican politicians Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, and Mike Huckabee, have spoken out against Black Lives Matter, essentially blaming the movement for racism in America. I've written about Paul, Cruz, and Haley, and the others are unfortunately employing the same painful narratives.

On Wednesday Scott Walker posted an article on conservative blog Hot Air, blaming Black Lives Matter and President Obama for racial tension.

"In the last six years under President Obama, we’ve seen a rise in anti-police rhetoric. Instead of hope and change, we’ve seen racial tensions worsen and a tendency to use law enforcement as a scapegoat. This kind of attitude has created a culture in which we all too often see demonstrations and chants where people describe police as 'pigs' and call for them to be 'fried like bacon.'"

This inflammatory and disgusting rhetoric has real consequences for the safety of officers who put their lives on the line for us […]

We need to change the tone in America from chants and rallies that fixate on racial division."

Christie also alluded to Obama and Black Lives Matter on Wednesday, associating the two with the (completely unrelated) recent death of a sheriff's deputy in Texas. Christie stated that Obama "needs to be standing up and saying to everyone in society . . . no matter your background or ethnicity, no matter what, that people in law enforcement deserve to be treated with respect." And Mike Huckabee recently stated that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be "appalled" by the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Times editorial takes particular issue with Huckabee's assertion, as you can read below.  

Reposted from Comics by Barbara Morrill

Click to enlarge.

Last week’s stock market turmoil here and in China threw the financial infotainment shows into a tizzy. If only they covered the financial drama unfolding in regular homes across the country with the same level of enthusiasm.

Gas and oil prices are really low right now. In a sane world, this would be a good time to raise the gas tax and plug the long-neglected gaps in infrastructure funding. But things are not sane, and low gas prices are only seen as an opportunity to go back to the SUV excesses of the 90’s.

At Politico Magazine, Jack Shafer declares Rick Perry's campaign dead. He makes some pretty good points.

His presidential campaign, experiencing fundraising shortfalls, has stopped paying its staff, and they're fleeing. Perry's Iowa campaign co-chairs have exited to the Donald Trump and Rick Santorum campaigns, and his New Hampshire political director has defected to John Kasich. He has basically written off the New Hampshire primary, planning no future visits to the state, a sneaky way of conceding defeat five months out from that election. Thanks to the low, single-digit numbers he has recorded in the national polls, he remains relegated him to the under-watched undercard presidential debates, amplifying the stench of death that cloaks his campaign.

Perry does, however, enjoy leader status on one important tally—CNN’s "Political Prophesy" site. It gives his campaign a 50 percent chance of being the first GOP campaign to end or suspend. For a frame of reference, his closest competitors in this sweepstakes, Chris Christie and Rick Santorum, each have a 9 percent chance of being the first to drop out.

It's got to be at least a little bit discouraging to have your staff leave you for—of all people's—Rick Santorum's campaign. There's still a little life there, though, in Perry's Super PAC, proving that there's a millionaire or two out there for any ridiculous Republican candidate. At the moment, it's sitting on $17 million to do something with, though getting Perry the nomination won't be it.

Perry, however, cluelessly and gamely marches on. When Donald Trump lobbed one of his off-hand barbs at him earlier this week, claiming that Perry had gone "down the tubes" for attacking him and "now he's getting out of the race," Perry rejoined as only he could:

"You know a broken clock is right once a day. […] The bottom line is I'm still here, I'm still workin'. We need to be talking about solutions and not just rhetoric out there.

Ah, Rick. It's not going to be the same without you. A tad less ridiculous, maybe, but not the same.