Curb Stomping

Holy crap. A Republican in KY literally curb-stomped a woman protester.



Holy Crap.

I'm sure there's examples of Democrats doing the same thing, though, right? Cuz there's anger on both sides... right?

GOP Blows Up the Deficit

From the GOP's Pledge to America: "We offer a plan to stop out-of-control spending and reduce the size of the government."

You can read their unimpeachable methodology here.

GOP's Pledge With America

One more data point in the "GOP isn't even trying with minorities anymore" theme that I documented previously here.  Check out this collage of all the photos in the newly released Pledge With America, and see who is missing:

That's right.  One black woman out of hundreds of whites.  It's Southern Strategy all the way for the GOP.

Southern Strategy, Alive and Well

From The Hill:

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have requested a hearing to investigate alleged racial bias within the Department of Justice, according to a letter sent Friday to committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

The request came in relation to a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party that was first prosecuted as a civil action in January 2009, then dismissed for two of the three defendants the following May. An injunction was issued for the last defendant.

House Judiciary Republicans also moved for further investigation on Thursday, urging President Obama in a letter to direct Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor for the case.

Remember, two of the last three RNC Chairmen admitted to using the Southern Strategy. The current RNC Chairman has said the GOP has been pursuing the strategy for "the last 40-plus years." Looks like it's sticking around.

Also, keep in mind that the New Black Panther story is completely made up.  So sayeth honest conservatives.

GOP on the Side of BP, AGAIN

After the Barton appology to BP for Obama jawboning them into paying claims rather than dividends, we thought they had learned their lesson.

But now we find that the GOP has been blocking the extension of subpoena power to the commission investigating Deepwater Horizon and offshore drilling. Once again, they act to protect BP. Despicable.

Mitt on START

Kaplan has a comprehensive takedown of Mitt Romney's critique on the new START treaty.

Senator Lugar(R) went to town on him as well.  Here's a quick quote:

Governor Mitt Romney's hyperbolic attack on the New START Treaty in the July 6 edition of The Washington Post repeats discredited objections and appears unaware of arms control history and context. In advancing these arguments, he rejects the Treaty's unequivocal endorsement by the Defense Department led by Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also distances himself from prominent Republican national security leaders, including Jim Schlesinger, Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft, who have backed the Treaty after thoughtful analysis.

Rough.

Student Loan Reform

Upon request, I've just spent 15 minutes trying to look into competing CBO scores for the Student Loan Reform that was passed in the HCR reconciliation package, following the assertion that after making the scoring process more "fair" the reform actually ended up costing us money.  It turns out, of course, that this once again provides an example of the right wing simply lying to their poor, trusting voters.

Of course, with all of these large bills, there has been an open and gradual revision process, generating CBO scores all along the way.  After all, now that a Democrat is in the White House everyone cares about CBO scores and actually, you know, paying for things.  Go figure.  In this case, the CBO originally scored the reform at saving $62 billion over 10 years.  After some revisions were made to make the score better conform with reality, the figure was revised to $40 billion in savings.  This is where the dishonesty starts.

I wont link to them, but here's the relevant part of the story my friend saw:

Moreover, the debate on savings has overshadowed the fact that the planned reforms still add to the deficit. As the CBO explains,

“Whereas on average over the 2010-2020 period a representative loan issues in the direct loan program has a negative subsidy rate of 9 percent under FCRA (meaning that it reduces the deficit), the same loan has a positive subsidy rate of 12 percent on a fair value basis.”

So while the reform may reduce the deficit compared to the current broken system of a private-public hybrid, that is not the same thing as saying it will actually end up in the black.

How stupid does this author think we are?  Of course the student loan program costs the government money! We're not trying to run a profit on educating our future generations!  The government is not a business!  The question is not whether the entire program will be in the black, the question is whether the reform that just passed made things better or worse.  The answer?  On every front, it made things better - more loans will be given, more Americans will be educated, and the whole thing will end up saving us tens of billions of dollars over the status quo ante.  "The reforms still add to the deficit."  No they don't, you twit.  The Program adds to the deficit.  The Reforms reduce the deficit.

I guess this author might not have been intentionally dishonest.  The "Are they Stupid or Dishonest" question is an evergreen topic.

Datamining Snopes

Mr. Bell runs the numbers:

After eight years in the White House (with Snopes.com around all that time), George W. Bush has been the subject of 47 internet rumors. After less than two years in office, Barack Obama has been the subject of 87, or nearly twice as many.

Even more telling is the relative accuracy of those stories. For Bush, 20 rumors, or 43%, are true. Only 17, or 36%, are false. The remainder are of mixed veracity (4), undetermined (4), or unclassifiable (2).

In contrast, for Obama only 8 of the 87 rumors, or 9%, are true, and a whopping 59, or 68%, are whoppers. There are 17 of mixed veracity and 3 undetermined.

Interesting, eh?  Not surprising, but interesting.

Reagan the Anti-White Racist

Here's how Reagan went about picking Supreme Court nominees:

In the course of our discussion with Reagan the first time we were talking about the candidates . . . we had talked about Scalia. Reagan had asked me whether Scalia was of Italian extraction. I think he used the word 'extraction,' and I said, 'Yes, he's of Italian extraction.' Reagan said, 'That's the man I want to nominate, so I want to meet him.' We brought Scalia in. . . . The president met Scalia, and he offered Scalia the job right on the spot, in about 15 minutes, very little ceremony here. Scalia accepted on the spot. He was delighted. That was it. . . .

I think [Reagan] felt that it would be great to put an Italian American on the Supreme Court. He had all the usual American instincts: 'We don't have an Italian American on the court, so we ought to have one.' He really felt good about doing that. It wasn't principle so much as that kind of emotional commitment.

What an affirmative action loving, anti-white racist.

Epistemic Closure: Bruce Bartlett

There's been a raging debate on the right side of the blogosphere since Health Care Reform passed, started by reformers within the conservative movement, about the intellectual insulation the movement has cultivated. The term being used is Epistemic Closure, which is interesting in itself.  Epistemic refers to Epistomology - the field concerned with understanding how we know things to be true - and Closure is a mathematical and logical concept that's a little harder to explain.  For example, a Sphere is Closed under the operations performable by an ant.  He can crawl any way he likes, for as long as he likes, and he will never leave the Sphere.  In terms of this conservative debate, the analogous problem is that within the Sphere of Orthodox Conservative Thought, there is no series of moves that can lead to an unorthodox conclusion.  Or, put another way, "boy, movement conservatives sure live in their own world, don't they?"  (More examples of this are available by clicking the "Alternative Reality" label at the bottom of the post, or here and here)

Bruce Bartlett, who I'm sure has been a liberal plant since he was in Reagan's Oval Office or Bush's Treasury department, has the following to say on conservative Epistemic Closure:

What it seems to mean in terms of the current discussion is that conservatives live in a cocoon or echo chamber in which they only read conservative magazines like National Review and the Weekly Standard, only listen to conservative talk radio, only watch Fox News and only visit conservative web sites. It's a closed loop in which any opinions or facts that conflict with the conservative worldview are either avoided, ignored or automatically dismissed on the grounds that they must be liberal or come from liberals.

I believe this view of how conservatives think is correct and want to pass along the moment when I first realized it in 2004.

Earlier that year, journalist Ron Suskind had published The Price of Loyalty based on extensive interviews with former George W. Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. This book made many charges about the insularity of the Bush White House, the president's unwillingness to listen to any opinions that didn't confirm those he already had and others that have been confirmed by subsequent reportage.

I liked Ron's book and wrote a favorable column about it leading him to call me. We hit it off and would chat every once in a while afterwards. Basically, we were both trying to figure out the same things: What makes Bush tick? Where does he get his information? Why is he always so sure of himself? Is he capable of admitting error?

Then one day in mid-October I got a call from a woman at the New York Times Magazine saying she was fact-checking an article by Suskind that mentions me. I didn't think too much about it and confirmed that I had indeed said the things I was quoted as saying. What the fact-checker neglected to tell me is the context in which I was quoted or the extent. I learned this a few days later when the Suskind article went out on the wire.

I had been scheduled to do a radio show in Detroit on Wednesday about something or other and was asked if the subject could be changed. I asked what they wanted to talk about. They told me that they wished to discuss the big article about me in the New York Times Magazine. In fact, they said, the first two words in the article were my name and the first several paragraphs essentially quoted me verbatim.

I didn't see the article itself until Saturday night when the Times posted it online. Here are the first three paragraphs:

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .

''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''

The reason I bring all this up is because of what happened subsequently, which relates to the question of epistemic closure. A few days after the article appeared I was at some big conservative event in Washington. I assumed that my conservative friends would give me a lot of crap for what I said. But in fact no one said anything to me--and not in that embarrassed/averting-one's-eyes sort of way. They appeared to know nothing about it.

After about half an hour I decided to start asking people what they thought of the article. Every single one gave me the same identical answer: I don't read the New York Times. Moreover, the answers were all delivered in a tone that suggested I was either stupid for asking or that I thought they were stupid for thinking they read the Times.

I suppose this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. After all, the people I was questioning weren't activists from the heartland, but people who worked on Capitol Hill, at federal agencies, in think tanks and so on. They represented the intelligentsia of the conservative movement. Even if they felt they had no need for the information content of the nation's best newspaper, one would have thought they would at least need to know what their enemies were thinking.

This was the first time I really understood what is now being called epistemic closure. In the years since, it appears to have gotten much worse.

What was the deal with Reagan hiring so many closet liberals?

GOP Alternative Budget - Tax Cuts for the Rich and (Almost) No Safety Net

Ryan's Budget - the GOP alternative - is an atrocious, Randian document. If you believe that the market allocates income morally by definition, then I guess this sort of thing makes sense, but some of us remember the history of revolutions on this planet.

Here's the nonpartisan takedown of Ryan's response to his budget problems:

We are quite disappointed that, in responding to our analysis of his budget plan, Rep. Paul Ryan accuses the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities of “partisan demagoguery” as well as “factual errors and misleading statements.” Quite the contrary, we applied the same rigorous analytical process to Rep. Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future that we do to every issue we study. We worked for more than a month on our analysis, and we believe that, if anything, we bent over backwards to make sure we were fair to the Congressman and his plan. Frankly, based on the attack on our analysis that Rep. Ryan issued yesterday, we took his plan far more seriously than he took our analysis of it.

Rep. Ryan accuses us of partisanship, but we relied on the best nonpartisan sources available. The Tax Policy Center, on whose revenue estimates we relied heavily, is a highly respected, nonpartisan institution whose codirector, Rosanne Altshuler, was senior economist for President George W. Bush’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform in 2005. Our other key sources of information included the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration. Rep. Ryan says that we made errors and misleading statements, but it is he — not we — who has done so. He ignores what we wrote and accuses us of writing things that we did not. In fact, he even selectively deletes words from a sentence that he quotes from one of our earlier reports to change the clear meaning of what we wrote. He also inaccurately represents some important aspects of CBO’s analysis of his plan.

As outlined below, we examined every one of Rep. Ryan’s complaints about our work, and not a single one withstands scrutiny.

It's all great. They nail him.

Critical Reading Exercise

So, there's a little brouhaha regarding Nancy Pelosi and the veracity of the CIA's claims about its briefings to Congress. Perhaps you've noticed.

Republicans seem to think Panetta slammed Pelosi today, but let's do a little critical reading exercise here, shall we?

Message from the Director: Turning Down the Volume
There is a long tradition in Washington of making political hay out of our business. It predates my service with this great institution, and it will be around long after I'm gone. But the political debates about interrogation reached a new decibel level yesterday when the CIA was accused of misleading Congress.

Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing "the enhanced techniques that had been employed." Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.

My advice--indeed, my direction--to you is straightforward: ignore the noise and stay focused on your mission. We have too much work to do to be distracted from our job of protecting this country.

We are an Agency of high integrity, professionalism, and dedication. Our task is to tell it like it is--even if that's not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it.

Did he actually deny that the CIA had mislead Pelosi? No.

How is this America's Problem?

The Uighurs at Gitmo are not terrorists. Even the Bush Administration found them not to be enemy combatants. And yet the consequences of their wrongful detention at Gitmo isn't America's problem, according to the beautiful mind of Newt Gingrich:

"WALLACE: Well, let me get -- let's take one example, the Chinese Uighurs, Chinese Muslims...

GINGRICH: Right.

WALLACE: ... who were arrested in Afghanistan, brought to this country. The Pentagon says they're not enemy combatants. At least one federal judge has said they're not a threat. But if they go back to China, they're going to be prosecuted.

GINGRICH: Why is that our problem? I mean, why -- what -- if the -- if the -- what -- what is it -- why are we protecting these guys? Why does it become an American problem?

WALLACE: So what, send them to China and...

GINGRICH: Send them to China. If a third country wants to receive them, send them to a third country. But setting this precedent that if you get picked up by Americans -- I mean, the Somalian who was recently brought here who's a pirate -- I mean, if you get picked up by the Americans, you show up in the United States, a lawyer files an amicus brief on your behalf for free, a year later you have citizenship because, after all, how can we not give you citizenship since you're now here, and in between our taxpayers pay for you -- this is, I think -- verges on insanity."

This verges on insanity, just not the way Gingrich meant.

And we wonder why the rest of the world grew to hate America during the Bush years.

Pentagon Agency Called it Torture in 2002

Wow.  This is a bombshell.

The military agency that helped to devise harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."

"The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel," says the document, an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. Parts of the attachment, obtained in full by The Washington Post, were quoted in a Senate report on harsh interrogation released this week.

That's damning.  Once again, we have evidence that the Bush Administration knew what they were doing was illegal and produced unreliable information.  If you know that these techniques will produce unreliable information, and you then suggest using these techniques to discover a link between 9/11 and Iraq after the invasion, then what you are doing is using torture to procure false confessions.  You are no better than the North Koreans, or any of the other torturers history has seen.  

Evidence mounts for prosecutions.

Gingrich the Obama Negation Machine

Here's Newt Gingrich, lying furiously:

You have Obama nominating Judge Hamilton, who said in her ruling that saying the words Jesus Christ in a prayer is a sign of inappropriate behavior, but saying Allah would be OK. You'll find most Republican senators voting against a judge who is confused about whether you can say Jesus Christ in a prayer, particularly one who is pro-Muslim being able to say Allah.

Tomasky does an excellent job documenting what actually happened:

Naturally, it's all a lie, but as I said, even I was shocked at how rancidly despicable a lie it was.

It's a great read.

It seems like Newt has taken this whole "bright lines between the parties" thing a little too much to heart.  He seems to be nothing more than a universal Obama-Negation machine.  If Obama is for it, Newt is against it, even if he was for it just 3 years ago.  His political persona has devolved into one of unthinking, reflexive opposition to a President that is governing with a substantial electoral and public approval mandate.  

I guess someone's gotta do it, huh?  It might as well be someone that will never run for President.

RedState Checkin

Here's an interestingly dumb story from Redstate:

LATimes: Obama’s New Muslim Appointment is Hope… for Egyptians?

I will begin this right at the top by saying that I don’t care a whit if the appointment of any American official brings hope to Egyptians. After all, an American official should be concerned with America’s interests not Egypt’s.

...

However, apparently the L.A. Times thinks that it is germane to U.S. interests that Egyptians are “rejoicing” that President Obama has appointed a female American Muslim to his administration. In, “Muslim woman’s appointment as Obama advisor draws cautious optimism” from April 22, Noha El-Hennawy is reporting from Cairo that Egyptians are happy with Obama’s purported outreach to Muslims.

Oh yes, I agree with Red State!  In a war against a decentralized, stateless enemy who relies on radicalizing Muslim youths to fill their ranks, there's absolutely no point in America making those Muslim youth's feel better about America.  Indeed, as RedState tells us, how Muslim youths feel about America isn't "germane to U.S. interests."

What a bunch of toolbags.

Beck Loves Vampires and Militias... and McVeigh?

If you've been watching Glenn Beck, then you know he's obsessed with Vampires sucking the blood of the innocent, by which he means the horrible atrocity that is a Government financed by tax revenue.  It's violent commentary - literally blood soaked.  If you think he's just weird enough to make it all up on his own, you can be forgiven, but it turns out to have a more storied pedigree:

There you see Operation Vampire Killer, where this rhetoric got it start.  It's proudly displayed next to the Militiaman's Handbook at a militia convention.  See if this sounds familiar:

We in America, Officers and private citizens alike, are fortunate that at this moment in our history we can still LAWFULLY EXTERMINATE these parasitic Global Blood Suckers by placing numerous "STAKES" made of words, paper, pen, and hard work through their hardened hearts.

[…]

Very soon, if we do not stop these world government proponents, and install in places of leadership honorable men and women, all military, national guardsmen and officers of the law will be used as the "enforcement arm" to guarantee a full complement of "volunteers" for these imperialists' "peaceful" socialist global society.

Beck talks about driving stakes through the hearts of the government vampires all the time.

This dovetails nicely with the reading McVeigh did before committing his heinous act of terrorism:

Mr. McVeigh's reading, which he pressed on his sister, Jennifer, among others, also included Spotlight, the newsletter of the anti-semitic Liberty Lobby, Patriot Report, a far-right Christian identity newsletter that would later declare the Oklahoma bombing a plot by "the real hate groups," namely the F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, to crack down on armed paramilitary groups, and a strange document titled "Operation Vampire Killer 2000."

Written by Jack McLamb, a former Phoenix police sergeant, it seeks to enlist police and military personnel against "the ongoing, elitist covert operation which has been installed in the American system with great stealth and cunning." It continues, "They, the globalists, have stated that the date of termination of the American way of life is the year 2000."

When the nuts amongst their followers take this rhetoric to its unavoidable conclusion, people like Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh and O'Reilly will scream bloody murder at the merest hint that they have some blame in the matter.  But clearly, they have created the climate for this violence.  They must take some responsibility.

RightWing Thinks US Military is Omnipotent

That's right, nothing is too difficult for those amazing men and women from the United States Armed Services!  RedState had this crazy stuff to say about what Obama should have done with the pirates:

On Friday, April 10, as the standoff reached the end of its third day, I called on President Obama to take action to free the American hostage from his Somali captors. I outlined three possible operational tactics that could be used to do so; number 1 was the following:

http://www.redstate.com/diaries/redhot/#post-2394

(1) 2 helos, 2 snipers each: pop the [pirates] in their heads, then drop a rescue swimmer to escort the hostage up to one of the choppers. This works best if the hostage is aware of what is happening and can help without getting in the way — say, by hopping overboard as the gunships near, to divert attention and get out of the line of fire.

(This was written before the USS Bainbridge tethered the life raft to its stern, an action which eliminated the need for helicopters.)

Really?  Apparently, there's no concern that four separate snipers would be able to put a single round each into the heads of the pirates from a moving helicopter.  Apparently, they could accomplish this simultaneously and without the pirates knowing they're coming (easy when approaching by helo), maintaining surprise so as to protect the hostage.  All of this is not only possible, it's so likely to succeed that the President was some kind of spineless weakling for not jumping at the opportunity to give the order.

Interestingly, even in this expert-level marksmanship competition featuring shots from helo, they're still using fully automatic weapons and they're lucky to put the rounds within 5 feet of their target.  I'm sure hitting an 8inch target is just a walk in the park for our military.

RedState Thinks Armed Forces Command Themselves?

Obama gave the order for violent escalation last Friday, and today everything was in place for the operation to go forward.

A senior US official tells me that President Barack Obama approved a recommendation by Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen to dispatch special forces to the US scene on Friday.

These special forces were authorized to take action "in extremis" against the Somali pirates holding Maersk Captain Richard Phillips, 53, hostage on a motorized lifeboat off the coast of Somalia.

A senior official tells me that when the fourth Somali pirate was on the Bainbridge ship, Phillips moved to side of the lifeboat to relieve himself.

At that point, U.S. special forces saw their opportunity and took other three pirates out.

Captain Phillips is now safe aboard a U.S. vessel.

It's "going to make a great movie," a U.S. official adds.

RedState is having none of it:

In the end, Captain Phillips wasn’t saved by the President, but by his own courageous plunge and the deadly professionalism of our men with guns. The President, you see, was saved by the Captain.

They spin a story of the President paralyzed with fear, unable to contemplate that most horrible option of using force.  Then, when the deed is done all they can muster is "Obama doesn't deserve credit!"  

Once again, this is an utter failure of expectations management by the GOP.  They have to learn that Obama is playing long ball here, and that by trying to react with maximum indignation within every newscycle they end up looking like craven, waffling idiots, unable to craft any sort of coherent message and clearly uninterested in the task of governing.

Will this sort of frantic attack on every front eventually result in Obama's approval ratings falling, or will it serve to help keep the GOP isolated to the Talk Radio extremes?  We'll see.

American Exceptionalism

Sigh. Obama is the man.

This is the sane view of American Exceptionalism: that America holds a special place in history as the first great Democracy, and further for fighting for people's freedoms across the world.  Finally, as an American, I think it's particularly great.  This view is in stark contrast to Rush Limbaugh's definition, which I am not making up: that America is the exception!  That the rules that apply to other countries to not apply to us!  Anything less is blaming America first!

What astounding arrogance in these Talk-Radio Republicans.