Category: Hypocrisy

Why Snowden Going Through Channels was Never a Real Options

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NPR looks at what happened to other people who attempted to complain about agency misconduct, and it ain’t pretty:  Harassment, bogus charges, and systematic vilification, specifically the cases of Bill Binney and Thomas Drake.

I think that the quote describes just how effective the inspectors general are about such things:

“Perhaps it’s the case that we could’ve shown, we could’ve explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do,” [NSA Inspector General George] Ellard said.

 We he is refer”Perhaps it’s the case that we could’ve shown, we could’ve explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do,” Ellard said.

If you listen to the interview, you realize that he’s not talking the Inspector General’s office, he’s talking about the NSA.

The IG, and the whole whistle blowing apparatus are completely captured, and have not the slightest interest in addressing any potential issues.

His goal is talking Edward Snowden and other potential whistle-blowers out of actually blowing the whistle.

Also, it as it is noted in in the report, the new “protections” for intelligence operatives does not apply to contractors, and almost all new hires of the intelligence agencies are contractors.

How convenient.

In Which a Pundit Gets it Completely F%$#ing Wrong

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Over at The Atlantic they are wringing their hands because gay rights groups are now balking at religious exemptions embedded in gay rights legislation because of the Hobby Lobby decision:

In the Hobby Lobby decision handed down last month, the Supreme Court was asked to strike a balance between women’s rights and religious freedom. But the major conflict that has erupted in the wake of that decision has been between religious freedom and gay rights. The resulting controversy has split gay-rights and faith groups on the left, with wide-ranging political fallout that some now fear could hurt both causes.

One chapter of the controversy is set to close on Monday, when President Obama plans to sign a long-awaited executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against gays and lesbians, according to a White House official. But the debate that began over that order’s provisions for religious nonprofits has spilled over into a broader conflict. Many prominent gay-rights groups have now withdrawn their support from a top legislative priority, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, over the religious exemption it contains.

It’s not a bad thing, this response is essential to good governance.

As I have noted before, “My dear, religion is like a penis. It’s a perfectly fine thing for one to have and take pride in, but when one takes it out and waves it in my face we have a problem.” 

Civil rights should not be conditioned to kowtowing to those who use religion for self-aggrandizement or as an excuse to show hostility.

Religion is a private matter, and not a matter of public morality, nor should it ever be.

On a more pragmatic level, these religious carve outs create an impetus for more carve outs, so now we have a nurse suing a birth control clinic because they would not hire her because she would refuse to prescribe to birth control.

This is insanity, and it needs to stop.

They Will Destroy this Man

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The Miami Herald has discovered that a Navy nurse has refused to force feed the Guantanamo detainees:

In the first known rebellion against Guantánamo’s force-feeding policy, a Navy medical officer recently refused to continue managing tube-feedings of prison hunger strikers and was reassigned to “alternative duties.”

 A prison camp spokesman, Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, would not provide precise details but said Monday night that the episode had “no impact to medical support operations at the base.”

 “There was a recent instance of a medical provider not willing to carry out the enteral feeding of a detainee,” he said in an email. “The matter is in the hands of the individual’s leadership.”

 Word of the refusal reached the outside world last week in a call from prisoner Abu Wael Dhiab to attorney Cori Crider of the London-based legal defense group Reprieve. Dhiab, a hunger striker, described how a nurse in the Navy medical corps abruptly refused to “force-feed us” sometime before the Fourth of July — and disappeared from detention center duty.

(emphasis mine)

Needless to say, not only is this guy’s career over, you can be sure that the his command, and perhaps JAG Corps will go after him like the US Attorney went after Aaron Swartz, notwithstanding the declarations to the contrary made later in the article.

Guantanamo is an ethical black hole, our own little Abu Ghraib, our own little Gulag, and under those circumstances, they cannot allow people to assert a conscience objection, because would short circuit the cognitive dissonance that allows the facility to function..

Quote of the Day

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Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a longlimbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”

Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could.

—Joseph Heller

H/t Atrios.

Who Says That Irony is Dead?

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Microsoft filed a lawsuit to seize domains from No-IP.com. Their reason?

In a blog post, Richard Domingues, assistant general counsel for the Microsoft digital crimes unit, said Microsoft pursued the seizure for No-IP’s role “in creating, controlling, and assisting in infecting millions of computers with malicious software—harming Microsoft, its customers and the public at large.” He added: “We’re taking No-IP to task as the owner of infrastructure frequently exploited by cybercriminals to infect innocent victims with the Bladeabindi (NJrat) and Jenxcus (NJw0rm) family of malware.”

(emphasis mine)

To quote the great Anna Russell, “I’m Not Making This Up, You Know.”

Seriously, “Zero Day” Microsoft, the creater of of Windows™, is complaining about someone being the “Owner of infrastructure frequently exploited by cybercriminals to infect innocent victims?”

Really?

The irony here is stunning.

Finally, Someone Says IT to a Neocon

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Thats Gonna Leave a Mark

Katrina Vanden, editor-in-chief of The Nation finally calls out the Neocons as cowards when she tells Bill Kristol join the Iraqi army:

“For example, the president should go to Congress if he’s going to take military action in Iraq,” she explained. “There’s no military solution to Iraq, and I have to say, sitting next to Bill Kristol, man — I mean, the architects of catastrophe that have cost this country trillions of dollars, thousands of lives — there should be accountability.”

 “If there are no regrets for the failed assumptions that have grievously wounded this nation — I don’t know what happened to our politics and media accountability, but we need it, Bill,” she continued. “Because this country should not go back to war. We don’t need armchair warriors, and if you feel so strongly, you should, with all due respect, enlist in the Iraqi Army.”

(emphasis mine)

This needs to be said, repeatedly.

The Neocons have spent decades accusing anyone who does not support their stupid military adventures of cowardice.

Calling out them as armchair warriors who send other people’s children to die is an essential part of our public discourse.

I Think that Obama Just Called al-Maliki’s Bluff

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Kerry just announced that there will be no airstrikes without a national unity government in Iraq:

US Secretary of State John Kerry has ruled out airstrikes against the rapidly advancing Islamist State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) unless Baghdad forms a more inclusive government, upping the political pressure on Nouri al-Maliki to work with the Sunnis and Kurds, or step aside as prime minister.

“It would be a complete and total act of irresponsibility for the president to just order a few strikes,” Kerry told CBS News on Tuesday. “But there’s no government, there’s no backup, there’s no military – there’s nothing there that provides the capacity for success.”

“The president reserves the right to use force as he does anywhere in the world, if it is necessary,” Kerry said. “But he wants to do so … with knowledge that there’s a government in place that can actually follow through and guarantee that what the United States is working toward can actually be achieved.”

But Prime Minister al-Maliki, a Shiite, rejected calls on Wednesday for a national unity government with Sunnis and Kurds, saying such a step would amount to a coup. Maliki’s State of Law alliance won the most seats in parliamentary elections last April, but fell short of the majority needed to form a government without help from rival parties.

I’m not sure if this is good news, or bad news.

It’s clear that Nouri al-Maliki is the source of most of the problems in Iraq, but our meddling in Iraqi affairs implies that we are getting back in.

It looks like when Obama is desperately trying to get back into the war that he called “stupid” in 2003.

Who says that Irony is dead?

Another Right Wing Hypocrite

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Robert Heinlein, whose life was defined by his US Navy pension, 2/3 of active duty pay, when he was medically retired for TB.

He was in the Navy because his family was politically connected, and got him into the US Naval Academy at Annapolis:

  1. So: Robert Heinlein, that great hero of libertarian culture, was the complete creation of the invisible welfare state.
  2. The invisible welfare state is like white privilege: its whole power comes from the fact it is not talked about. Not seen as welfare.
  3. To understand the American right, we have to understand the process of forgetting that allowed Heinlein to suppress memory of pension.

(Read the rest)

This is Ayn Rand, who had lung cancer from her smoking, going on Medicare all over again.

Libertarians are wrong, and they are hypocrites.

One cannot prove this, but it ‘is’ in the same sense that Mount Everest ‘is’, or that Alma Cogan ‘isn’t’.*

*From The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

You Cannot Make this Sh%$ Up

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Oliver “Arms for Hostages” North is criticizing the Obama administration for paying a ransom:

As the right’s outrage over Bowe Bergdahl’s release grew, Chris Hayes joked, “We should definitely get Oliver North to weigh on this one, for maximum absurdity.”


Chris, of course, was kidding. But we were reminded a day later that in this farcical political environment, it’s awfully difficult to joke about things that are likely to be real.

Newsmax host and former Republican congressman J.D. Hayworth added his voice today to the growing right-wing outrage over the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in a prisoner exchange with the Taliban, and what better person to discuss the situation with than Oliver North!

North demanded that the media ask the Obama administration if there was “a ransom, a fiscal, financial, money transaction,” with the Taliban as part of the deal. “Was there a ransom paid? Did the government of the United States, either directly or indirectly, finance a terrorist organization?”

Oliver North, helping push the political world closer to “maximum absurdity,” also took his concerns to Fox News’ Sean Hannity last night.

………

But even putting that aside, in what universe does Oliver North enter this debate with a straight face?

I realize that it’s become impolite in some circles to point out scandals that rocked Ronaldus Magnus’ White House, but the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iranians in order to secure the release of American prisoners, then used the money to illegally finance a war in Central America. Reagan himself assured the American public that the allegations weren’t true, and those assurances turned out to be the opposite of the truth.

Un dirty-word believable.

The Onion has become completely redundant.

Lean In, My Ass!

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Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, is due to speak at Harvard.

Harvard is also landlord at Hilton DoubleTree Suites, where management is engaged in an aggressive anti-union drive.

The union asked Sandberg to host a “Lean In”, she turned them down:

With Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg coming to town next week, a group of housekeepers, nightclub servers, and other employees of a Boston hotel are trying to turn her now-famous campaign for empowering women in their favor as they move toward forming a union.

 Unite Here Local 26, which is organizing workers at the Hilton DoubleTree Suites hotel near the Charles River, said it wanted to enlist Sandberg’s help after facing resistance from Hilton and receiving no encouragement from Harvard University, which owns the property where the hotel is located.

 So, the union decided, why not appeal to the author of the bestseller “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead”?

 Organizers asked Sandberg to meet with the hotel’s female workers. They started an online petition calling for her to become involved in their cause. And they created leaflets depicting the book’s cover, with faces of housekeepers replacing Sandberg’s, and a message that reads, “Sheryl Sandberg, will you lean in with the women of Harvard’s hotel?”

 The Facebook chief operating officer, who is scheduled to deliver a Class Day address at Harvard Wednesday, has sent word she does not have time to host a “Lean In circle” with the hotel employees. Undeterred, the workers are planning to hand out the leaflets during Sandberg’s speech in Harvard Yard.

(Emphasis Mine)

Note that a “Lean In Circle” would probably take less time than the inevitable parties and meetups that are a part of her speaking gig.

I guess that “leaning in” means being born to well to do parents, going to Harvard, becoming an acolyte of Lawrence Summers, etc.

When a commitment to “equality” is juxtaposed with an indifference to labor organizing rights, there is no commitment to equality, which is why, “Sandberg has been criticized for creating a movement aimed at financially well-off women.”

So Not Shocked

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The claims by people like Art Laffer, and organizations like ALEC, that “pro business” policies produce an improving economy are not only wrong, but actually counter to the data which shows that the tax-cutting, rich fellating policies that they endorse actually make economic performance worse:

Conservative economic pundits just love to justify “business-friendly” policies to state governments as keys to job growth, which after all is the whole ballgame in economic policy-making.

As Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin has now shown, the problem is that pro-business policies don’t really contribute to economic growth. They just make the rich richer, which is not the same thing at all.

The index measures 15 state policy “variables,” such as top marginal income tax rates, property taxes, public employees per capita, state minimum wage, right-to-work law, and whether there’s an estate tax. You can guess what a state has to do to rank high in all these factors and therefore shine in the index–low taxes, small government, anti-union policies, no estate tax are virtual requirements.

But does a high ALEC ranking translate into high growth? That’s the question Chinn asked. He started by measuring private nonfarm job growth in four states–California, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Minnesota–dating to January 2011, when all four got new governors. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Sam Brownback of Kansas were extremely ALEC-friendly, Jerry Brown of California and Mark Dayton of Minnesota were not.

………

Indeed, when Chinn mapped the ALEC rankings for all 50 states against their economic growth, he found that, if anything, a higher index score correlates with a worse economic performance. That won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the ALEC follies over time: The Iowa Policy Project found the same negative correlation in 2012.

Of course, much like Trotskyites, conservative Chicago School-type economists, and rich parasites, are impervious to the facts, so it is unlikely that this will translate into actual policy.

H/t Kevin Drum.

Not Dredd Scott Bad, but Maybe Plessy v. Ferguson Bad

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In a 5-4 vote the Supreme Court just ratified sectarian prayer at government meetings:

A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that legislative bodies such as city councils can begin their meetings with prayer, even if it plainly favors a specific religion.

The court ruled 5 to 4 that Christian prayers said before meetings of an Upstate New York town council did not violate the constitutional prohibition against government establishment of religion; the justices cited history and tradition.

“Ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this Nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond the authority of government,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court’s conservative majority.

The ruling reflected a Supreme Court that has become more lenient on how government may accommodate religion in civic life without crossing the line into an endorsement of a particular faith. All nine justices endorsed the concept of legislative prayer, with the four dissenters agreeing that the public forum “need not become a religion-free zone,” in the words of Justice Elena Kagan.

But there was sharp disagreement after that, and the majority ruling could encourage public bodies to give more leeway to religious expression in their ceremonial prayers and less deference to the objections of religious minorities.

The court’s five conservatives said legislative prayers need not be stripped of references to a specific religion — the prayers at issue often invoked Jesus Christ and the resurrection — and said those given the opportunity to pray before legislative meetings should be “unfettered” by what government officials find appropriate.

It is stupid, petty, small minded, and bigoted ruling.

I’m disappointed, but not particularly surprised.

I will say the fact that the bigotry-deaf Kennedy is now the “moderate vote” on the court.

Chaos is Job Won!*

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What a surprise. After a decades long assault from the right wing, and an increasingly hostile judiciary, the bigots have managed to re-segregate our public schools:

For decades, federal desegregation orders were the potent tool that broke the back of Jim Crow education in the South, helping transform the region’s educational systems into the most integrated in the country.

 Federal judges, often facing down death threats and violence, blanketed Southern states with hundreds of court orders that set out specific plans and timetables to ensure the elimination of racial segregation. Federal agencies then aggressively used the authority of the courts to monitor hostile school systems, wielding the power of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to strip federal dollars from districts that refused to desegregate.

 The pace of the change wrought by the federal courts was breathtaking. In 1963, about 1 percent of black children in the South attended school with white children. By the early 1970s, the South had been remade — fully 90 percent of black children attended desegregated schools. Court orders proved most successful in the South, but were also used in an attempt to combat de facto segregation in schools across the country, from New York to Michigan to Arizona.

 Today, this once-powerful force is in considerable disarray.

 A ProPublica examination shows that officials in scores of school districts do not know the status of their desegregation orders, have never read them, or erroneously believe that orders have been ended. In many cases, orders have gone unmonitored, sometimes for decades, by the federal agencies charged with enforcing them.

 At the height of the country’s integration efforts, there were some 750 school districts across the country known to be under desegregation orders.

 Today, court orders remain active in more than 300 districts. In some cases, that’s because judges have determined that schools have not met their mandate to eliminate all vestiges of segregation.

 But some federal courts don’t even know how many desegregation orders still exist on their dockets. With increasing frequency, federal judges are releasing districts from court oversight even where segregation prevails, at times taking the lack of action in cases as evidence that the problems have been resolved.

 ………

 Since the 1990s, the Supreme Court has sharply curtailed the power of parents to challenge racial inequities in schools. Districts not under court orders are largely prohibited from considering race to balance schools. And parents in these districts must show that school officials are intentionally discriminating when they make decisions that adversely affect black and Latino students.

 And so, as desegregation orders are ignored, forgotten or lifted, black parents are losing the ability to effectively challenge school inequality.

 Over the course of months, ProPublica has compiled the nation’s most comprehensive and accurate data on active desegregation orders. We used legal databases, academic studies and contacted more than 160 school districts across the country.

This is not an accident.

Between the Republican Party’s embrace of segregation for political success, and the Democratic Party’s cowardly unwillingness to enforce the law to placate people who will never for then, we are back to separate and unequal.

*H/T Trit on the Stellar Parthenon BBS for that quote.

Not the Onion

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The energy company Kinder Morgan is arguing for putting an oil pipeline through an environmentally sensitive area because oil spills can be good for the economy:

That’s according to a 15,000 page application Kinder Morgan has submitted to the National Energy Board for the Trans Mountain Expansion Project (a document so large that it “stands over two metres tall and fills 37 binders”).

 In a section of the application dedicated to the risks and effects associated with oil tanker traffic and the possibility of oil spills, Kinder Morgan finds that “spills can have both positive and negative effects.” In particular, “spill response and clean-up creates business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions, and clean-up service providers.”

Great googly moogly!

As Charlie Pierce observed, this is on a par with a parent murderer asking for for mercy as an orphan.

The Bunco Wing of the Republican Party

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There is a wing of the Republican party which is dedicated to fleecing some of their not particularly too bright follower.

I discussed this a while back with the case of Linda Chavez and her husband Christopher Gersten, who set up a PAC where 99% of the costs went to overhead (them).

Well, it looks like the Tea Baggers have gotten into the act:

When the Tea Party Patriots threw its support last month behind Matt Bevin, the underdog conservative challenger trying to unseat top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell, President Jenny Beth Martin vowed the group would be “putting our money where our mouth is.”

So far, its super PAC has mustered just $56,000 worth of mailers in Kentucky on Bevin’s behalf — less than half the amount it has paid Martin in consulting fees since July.

The Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, which blew through nearly $2 million on expenses such as fundraising, polling and consultants in the first three months of this year, is not alone in its meager spending on candidates.

A Washington Post analysis found that some of the top national tea party groups engaged in this year’s midterm elections have put just a tiny fraction of their money directly into boosting the candidates they’ve endorsed.

The practice is not unusual in the freewheeling world of big-money political groups, but it runs counter to the ethos of the tea party movement, which sprouted five years ago amid anger on the right over wasteful government spending. And it contrasts with the urgent appeals tea party groups have made to their base of small donors, many of whom repeatedly contribute after being promised that their money will help elect conservative politicians.

Out of the $37.5 million spent so far by the PACs of six major tea party organizations, less than $7 million has been devoted to directly helping candidates, according to the analysis, which was based on campaign finance data provided by the Sunlight Foundation.

I’m not sure why, but when you peruse ads at right wing sites, Worldnet Daily and Glen Beck are among the worst offenders, are chock full of what appears to be transparently deceptive sales pitches.

The Democratic Party establishment lies to its supporters, but they aren’t trying to sell overpriced gold coins and the like.

I’m not sure where there is a cultural difference.  I would think that grifting would cross cultural lines.

Why Does this Psychopath Still Have a License to Practice Psychology?

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James Mitchell, who designed the CIA’s torture program, and who tortured people himself, has a sad over the prospect of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report describing how f%$#evil and twisted he is:

Mitchell insists the torture techniques he developed had produced results, and is dismissive of critics of the CIA program. Photograph: US Department of Defense/AP

 The psychologist regarded as the architect of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program has broken a seven-year silence to defend the use of torture techniques against al-Qaida terror suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

 In an uncompromising and wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, his first public remarks since he was linked to the program in 2007, James Mitchell was dismissive of a Senate intelligence committee report on CIA torture in which he features, and which is currently at the heart of an intense row between legislators and the agency.

 The committee’s report found that the interrogation techniques devised by Mitchell, a retired air force psychologist, were far more brutal than disclosed at the time, and did not yield useful intelligence. These included waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation for days at a time, confinement in a box and being slammed into walls.

 But Mitchell, who was reported to have personally waterboarded accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, remains unrepentant. “The people on the ground did the best they could with the way they understood the law at the time,” he said. “You can’t ask someone to put their life on the line and think and make a decision without the benefit of hindsight and then eviscerate them in the press 10 years later.”

It’s nice to know that your alibi would apply to Nazi war criminals as well.

BTW, he continues to claim that torture worked, but as whistleblower Steve Keinman observes:

Steven Kleinman, an air force colonel who participated in interrogations in Iraq and who is credited with blowing the whistle on abuses taking place there, told the Guardian he did not understand how Mitchell could still believe torture methods that generated false confessions could also produce “reliable, accurate and timely intelligence”.

“Why would anybody think that a model that would produce those outcomes would also be effective in producing the opposite?” Kleinman said.

Charlie Pierce correctly derided him as, “another monster“:

Let us be quite clear. Nobody in the torture chambers — and certainly not Mitchell — was being asked to “put his life on the line.” If you have someone fastened to a plank, and you’re pouring water into his mouth to make him believe he’s drowning, he is in no position to threaten your life. James Mitchell was not in any kind of danger, unless whatever vestigial conscience he had came to life and ate him alive, which I sincerely doubt. There is no excuse for what we did. September 11 is no excuse. It wasn’t a matter of the “people on the ground” not understanding the law. It was a matter of them not caring what the law was because they had a thin legal excuse ginned up for them by pet lawyers in the employ of sociopaths. Mitchell should be facing a tribunal for war crimes, not whining about an unflattering Senate committee report.

He should be sharing a cell with John Yoo, who said that it was OK to crush the testicles of a child to get their parent to talk.

The problem with, “Looking forward, not backward,” as Obama is wont to say is that these people continue to poison our national culture.

Of course, looking backward, and charging the malefactors of the Bush administration would set a precedent that might lead to Obama charged for the excesses of his murder by drone program, but I really don’t care if any of them, from either administration, do some well-deserved time in a deep dark hole.

Haterz Stop Hatin When It’s Them and Theirs

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The lawyer who defended the H8 amendment (Prop 8) in California, has “evolved” now that his daughter has come out:

The lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court in favour of upholding California’s ban on gay marriage learned while he was handling the case that one of his children is gay and now is helping her plan her wedding with another woman.

Attorney Charles Cooper says his view of same-sex marriage is evolving after having argued in court that gay unions could undermine marriages between a man and a woman.

The revelation is an unexpected footnote in the years-long debate over Proposition 8, the California measure struck down by the Supreme Court last year. It is also offers a glimpse, through the eyes of one family, of the country’s rapidly shifting opinions of gay marriage, with most public polls now showing majorities in favour of allowing the unions.

Cooper learned that his stepdaughter Ashley was gay as the Proposition 8 case wound its way through appellate court, according to a forthcoming book about the lengthy legal battle. And with the Supreme Court ruling now behind him, Cooper cast his personal opinion on gay marriage as an evolving process.

“My views evolve on issues of this kind the same way as other people’s do, and how I view this down the road may not be the way I view it now, or how I viewed it ten years ago,” Cooper said in journalist Jo Becker’s book “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality.”

Seriously, how many times has this happened?

They hate, and they want to make sure that the rest of society hates too, and then they discover that a loved one is gay, and they “reevaluate” their position on civil rights.

Seriously, why are conservatives solipsistic assholes?

I think that I just answered my own question.

H/t Joe.My.God.

Barack Obama is Not a Member of the the Reality-Based Community

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The “reality-based” bon mot is, of course from Run Suskind’s description of the hubris and delusions of the Bush administration:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Well, it increasingly appears that Barack Obama comes from a very similar place:

Am I misjudging our time, or have we entered some accelerated cycle of American subversions, and then another cycle of coverups and disinformation that do not quite come off? In less than a year, the Obama administration has mounted four covert coup operations, all variants of the classic Cold War model, all costly of human life, all assuring us the contempt and animosity of many people for years to come.

In chronological order:

* The American-authorized coup in Egypt last July. In the disinformation universe, Washington watched at a distance. Since the coup, dead silence in the face of a blood bath, except for Secretary of State Kerry’s applause for the Egyptian army’s “restoration of democracy.”

• In the war to depose Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the linchpin event is the chemical-weapons attack last Aug. 21. We are invited — required, actually — to believe Assad allowed U.N. inspectors in to determine responsibility for previous gas attacks and then launched another attack near Damascus while the inspectors were settled in their hotel rooms.

* The role of the U.S. and its European allies in financing, fomenting and steering the direction of the Ukraine coup requires little discussion at this point. Rather bizarrely in the face of all we have on record, the Obama people continue to insist Ukraine is nothing more than a case of Russian overreach. As order unravels in the eastern sections of the country, it is important to bear in mind the chronology of events — and from the beginning, not somewhere in the middle.

* In Venezuela, the foreign minister recently read aloud portions of intercepted cable traffic documenting American subterfuge. No, no, no: Nicolás Maduro, successor to the late Hugo Chávez, is just as paranoid as his mentor, and both were merely trying to distract Venezuelans from their economic problems. (Vigilance is always essential when Washington and the hacks marshal the “distraction” thesis.)

Cuba could go on this list, given news of Washington’s operation of a social-media network on Cuban soil via the customary collection of front companies, except that intruding covertly in Cuba is so routine as to be (appallingly) unremarkable.

And Seymour Hersh is all over how Barack Obama attempted to lie us into a Libya-type war:

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons. Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.

Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’

………

A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’

In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ The decision to restrict distribution was made as the joint chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible ground invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the elimination of chemical weapons.

………

In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings.

(emphasis mine)

Once again, what was sold as a strike for a specific purpose is actually being run as a flat out attempt at regime change.

I am not arguing that Barack Obama is simply George W. Bush with a prettier (and smarter) wife. (At least not today)

Rather, I am suggesting that, notwithstanding protestations of “Hope” and “Change”, Barack Obama is a creature of the political and bureaucratic institutions in Washington, and he lacks the inclination, and perhaps the power to challenge them.

This is far more worrying, because it means that it is not the elected officials, who periodically must submit themselves to the will of the voters, but rather the internal bureaucracies of our foreign policy/war making apparatus who are approaching our interests from a viewpoint detached from reality.

This makes our foreign policy missteps over the past decade or so an artifact of an ineluctably dysfunctional culture.

When one looks at history, this is a place occupied by empires just before their death throes.

This will not be pretty.

Welfare Cheat Has a Sad, Threatens Violence

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I am referring to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who is doing his level best to create a violent confrontation with federal authorities after refusing to obey the regulations, and pay the rent, required for maintaining a grazing permit:

Wielding signs and slogans, several hundred demonstrators rallied Monday to support beleaguered Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy after authorities began to seize his cattle from federal land.

 Protesters had responded to an alert that promised: “Range war begins at the Bundy ranch at 9:30 a.m. We’re going to get the job done!”

 Federal officials say Bundy is illegally running cattle in the 600,000-acre Gold Butte area, habitat of the federally protected desert tortoise. A federal judge ruled last year that if Bundy did not remove his cattle, they could be seized by the Bureau of Land Management. That seizure began Saturday.

 Bundy and his supporters remain unbowed.

 “We have hundreds of people here standing behind us,” said Bundy’s daughter Bailey Logue, 22, during a telephone interview Monday from the family ranch, as a rooster crowed in the background. “We’re letting these federal people know that the Bundy family is not the only ones who care what happens to this land.”

 Bundy, 68, has refused to pay BLM grazing fees since 1993, arguing in court filings that his Mormon ancestors worked the land long before the BLM was formed, giving him rights that predate federal involvement. His back fees exceed $300,000, he says. The government puts the tab above $1 million.

 Federal authorities have closed off the Gold Butte area and are rounding up what they call “trespass cattle,” many of which belong to Bundy. By Monday, 134 cattle had been impounded, according to the BLM website.

 “Cattle have been in trespass on public lands in southern Nevada for more than two decades. This is unfair to the thousands of other ranchers who graze livestock in compliance with federal laws and regulations throughout the West,” the BLM said on its website.

 ………

 For years Bundy has insisted that his cattle aren’t going anywhere. He acknowledges that he keeps firearms at his ranch, 90 minutes north of Las Vegas, and has vowed to do “whatever it takes” to defend his animals from seizure.

 ………

 Kirsten Cannon, a spokeswoman for the BLM in southern Nevada, said Bundy “owes the BLM and American taxpayers more than $1 million in grazing fees and trespass fines.”

 “He has been running more than 900 cattle while he only has the authority to graze 150,” she said Monday. “He has also made a number of inflammatory statements, saying that he will do what he needs to do to protect his livestock. When such threats are made, the federal government has the responsibility to protect public safety.”

So in addition to regular federal subsidies available to farmers, he’s also been squatting on federal land, and destroying it through overgrazing, and somehow he’s become a hero for the militia movement, because ……… Freedumb!!!