Category: Politics

I Have Mixed Emotions About This………

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I think that Texas Governor Rick Perry is a truly evil person, he has presided over the dubious executions, as well as the obstruction of the investigations of these questionable executions.

Additionally, I think that his handling of Texas retirement funds have been clearly corrupt.

I also get the fact that they got Al Capone for tax evasion.

But I have mixed emotions about the abuse of power allegations against Rick Perry:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) was indicted on felony charges Friday by a grand jury in Austin for allegedly abusing his veto power to force the resignation of a Democratic prosecutor.

The grand jury indicted the 2016 presidential hopeful on two felony counts – coercion of public official and abuse of official capacity, according to The Associated Press

Perry, 64, must turn himself in to the Travis County Jail, where he will be booked, fingerprinted and have his mug shot taken, according to KVUE-TV.

The charges stem from an ethics complaint filed last year by Texans for Public Justice, a left-leaning government watchdog group, claimed that Perry abused his official powers by threatening to veto money for public corruption prosecutors in the state in order to pressure a local district attorney to resign.

The public integrity unit is housed in the Travis County district attorney’s office. Perry called for the resignation of District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg after she was arrested and pled guilty in April 2013 to drunken driving.

Lehmberg, a Democrat, did not resign. Perry eventually made his veto threat a reality. The special prosecutor on the case worked to show evidence that Perry’s threat to veto $7.5 million over two years was unlawful.

I do not think that Governor Goodhair is on the side of the angels. 

Travis County is both one of the few strongly Democratic counties in Texas, and because the capitol, Austin, is located in Travis County, it also runs the state public integrity division.

Were Lehmberg to resign, it is clear that Perry would replace her with a political crony who would do their level best to ignore the ethical cesspool that is Texas politics.

On the political or social merits, it is clearly a good thing that Rick Perry is looking at some time in the hoosegow, but I am a bit dubious as to the underlying legal theory:  It seems to me that a governor’s veto should be accorded a wide amount of respect, even if the governor in question should not be accorded any respect.

House GOPer: Obama Impeachment Talk Is A ‘Trap’

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Actually, he looks less like an alien than John Boehner’s “tan”

In the House, Representative Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) is warning his fellow party members that all the impeachment talk is a ploy from Obama and the Democrats:

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) last week said that Democrats are “desperate” for House Republicans to impeach President Obama, but warned the GOP against falling into such a “trap.”

“Believe me, let’s make one thing perfectly clear. The only people who want impeachment more than the right wing of the Republican Party is the entire Democrat Party,” Mulvaney said in an interview with WQSC 1340, according to audio obtained by Buzzfeed.

The congressman said that Democrats are using calls for impeachment to distract from other issues and raise money.

“They’re desperate for impeachment. They would love to be able to talk about impeachment and immigration between now and the November elections, instead of talking about jobs, and the economy, and health care,” he said. “They are desperate to change the dialogue, which is exactly why you heard the president starting to talk about his amnesty cause he’s begging to be impeached.”

This is completely unfair.

There are no Democrats who would attempt to extract political benefit from ……… Attempt to use impeachment ……… Sorry, I just cannot keep a straight face.

Of course this is what they are doing!  

The Republicans are being played for fools, and the Democratic politicians and consultants who are “condemning” the Teabaggers for calling for impeachment are the players doing this.

It’s all they can do not to drool in public over the prospect.  (Well, Mark Penn is drooling a bit, but he always does)

Schadenfreude, We Haz It!!!!!

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Head bigot at the rabidly homophobic group Texas Values, Jonathan Saenz appears to have a personal reason for his animus against other people’s happiness, his wife left him for another woman:

Mere months before Jonathan Saenz became president of the anti-gay group Texas Values, his wife left him for another woman, according to Hays County district court records obtained by Lone Star Q.

The revelation could help explain Saenz’s seemingly abrupt transformation from socially conservative lobbyist to homophobic firebrand.

Saenz, a devout Catholic, has been a right-wing operative in Texas for many years — working on abortion and religious liberty cases as a staff attorney for the Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute as far back as 2005.

However, it wasn’t until recently that Saenz emerged as one of the state’s best-known — and most extreme — anti-LGBT voices.

Court records indicate that Saenz’s ex-wife, Corrine Morris Rodriguez Saenz, is a member of the LGBT community who was dating another woman when she filed for divorce from Saenz in August 2011.

In early 2012, with their divorce still pending, Saenz would take the helm of Texas Values after the organization spun off from the Liberty Legal Institute, where he’d risen to chief lobbyist.

With Saenz as president, Texas Values has led the charge against not only same-sex marriage, but also passage of LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinances in San Antonio and Houston. In fighting the ordinances, Saenz has often repeated the debunked right-wing myth that sexual predators would use the laws to prey on women and children in bathrooms.

All this while going through a “War of the Roses” style brutal divorce.

Seriously, are there any professional conservatives out there who aren’t complete nutjobs?

H/t Raw Story.

I Know that Some People are Offended, but I Approve

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In a a primary in Arizona, one candidate has invoked Trayvon Martin in describing another candidate’s support for stand your ground:

An Arizona candidate for Congress has sent out a mailer displaying the image of Trayvon Martin to attack her opponent’s record as a state lawmaker.

 Mary Rose Wilcox used the mailer to slam her opponent, Ruben Gallego, in the Democratic primary for Arizona’s 7th Congressional District in Phoenix, according to The Arizona Republic, which posted a copy of it.

 “America doesn’t need more Trayvon Martin tragedies,” the mailer reads, underneath a portrait of Martin in a hoodie. On the next page it lists Gallego’s support for “Stand Your Ground” legislation and what it describes as his B+ record from the National Rifle Association.

More of this, please.

If we ever want to push against against the NRA and other ammosexuals, we must extract a political price on people who find capitulating to 2nd amendment extremist, and the best place to do this is in the primaries.

It is is a good thing for supporting the NRA is turned into a liability at the primary level.

It’s the first step to standing up to the ammosexuals.

To quote former Reagan staffer James Baker,  “F%$# ’em, the won’t vote for us anyway.”

And the Bombs Drop in Iraq

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To quote Michael Corleone, “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.”

We are now bombing targets in Iraq, any guess as to when we start seeing special forces, CIA paramilitaries, and mercenaries private military contractors end up involved in ground combat?

U.S. warplanes bombed Islamist fighters marching on Iraq’s Kurdish capital on Friday after President Barack Obama said Washington must act to prevent “genocide”.

Islamic State fighters, who have beheaded and crucified captives in their drive to eradicate unbelievers, have advanced to within a half hour’s drive of Arbil, capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region and a hub for U.S. oil companies.

They have also seized control of Iraq’s biggest dam, Kurdish authorities confirmed on Friday, which could allow them to flood cities and cut off vital water and electricity supplies.

The Pentagon said two F/A-18 aircraft from an aircraft carrier in the Gulf had dropped laser-guided 500-pound bombs on the fighters’ artillery and other airstrikes had targeted motar positions and an Islamic State convoy.

Obama authorised the first U.S. air strikes on Iraq since he pulled all troops out in 2011, arguing action was needed to halt the Islamist advance, protect Americans and safeguard hundreds of thousands of Christians and members of other religious minorities who have fled for their lives.

And Maliki remains Iraqi PM, and almost as much of a problem as ISIS, remains determined to stay in power:

Maliki, a Shi’ite Islamist accused by foes of fuelling the Sunni revolt by running an authoritarian sectarian state, has refused to step aside to break a stalemate since elections in April, defying pressure from Washington and Tehran.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a reclusive 84-year-old scholar whose word is law for millions of Shi’ites in Iraq and beyond, has repeatedly pushed for politicians to break the deadlock and reunify the country. His weekly sermon on Friday, read out by an aide, was his clearest call for Maliki to go.

Though he did not mention Maliki by name, he said those who cling to posts were making a “grave mistake”.

The fact that al-Sistani pretty much told Maliki to resign is telling.

He has studiously kept out of Iraqi politics, but even he has had enough of Nouri al-Maliki.

This is a Classic Case of Regulatory Capture

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After the public outrage over the NYPD choking a man to death for allegedly selling single cigarettes, the Civilian Complaint Review Board wants to have fewer investigations:

With New York in an uproar over the death of Eric Garner after police put him in a chokehold, the new chairman of the group that handles public grievances about the NYPD floated the idea yesterday that his agency should stop listening to people who complain about police stops.

“I’m not sure stop-and-frisk is still appropriate for this agency,” Richard Emery, the head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board said at his first board meeting. “So many other people are working on it.”
NYCLU Associate Legal Director Chris Dunn—who last month accused the board, then in its sixth month without a chairman, of being “on life support”—strongly disagreed.

“There’s no way this agency can walk away from stop-and-frisk,” Dunn said. “There are more interactions around stop-and-frisk than any other interaction in the police department….I’m just telling you: When you as the incoming chair of the CCRB say something like ‘We should get out of the business of stop-and-frisk,’ that is sending the wrong signal.

This isn’t the first time the CCRB has appeared to try to back away from stop-and-frisk issues. In May, Dunn confronted board members about a leaked memo that seemed to suggest that frisks conducted when cops issue a summons can’t be subject to review by the board.

Any civilian police review board must have not just an adversarial role with the police department, but it must have an adversarial mindset, because no organization can be trusted to police itself.

If the Police do not hate a civilian review board, then that civilian review board is simply not doing its job.

The sentiments expressed by Richard Emery are literally those of a petty bureaucrat in a police state.

Another Reason to Vote Against Andrew Cuomo

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As I have noted before, Zephyr Teachout is challenging Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic Party primary for governor of New York.

What I did not know was that her running mate, Tim Wu, aka the father of net neutrality:

Tim Wu, an academic known for his work on net neutrality, is campaigning to become the Democratic nominee for the lieutenant governor of New York.

 He’s an unlikely politician. Cerebral, soft spoken, and willing to speak freely, conversation with Wu is a far cry from the stilted, shrill dialogue that makes up most of our modern political discourse.

 As next month’s primary election approaches, Wu faces a lawsuit aimed at unseating his candidacy, along with the candidacy of his running mate Zephyr Teachout.

 Robert Duffy, the current lieutenant governor of the state, is not seeking another term, pitting Wu against a fellow non-incumbent for the nomination. Teachout hopes to become the Democratic nominee for governor.

This is all kinds of awesome.

Of Course Obama Expresses Confidence in John Brennan

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Because Barack Obama has made it quite clear that spying on Congress and shilling for torturers is no big deal:

President Obama said on Friday that he has “full confidence” in John Brennan, the director of the C.I.A., despite Mr. Brennan’s admission this week that his agency improperly searched the computers of the congressional committee that is preparing to release a report on the use of torture in the fight against terror.

………

Asked about the upcoming release of a report that documents American interrogation techniques, Mr. Obama said the C.I.A. exercised “very poor judgment” in its handling of the report. But he said that Mr. Brennan had apologized for the incident to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“I have full confidence in John Brennan,” Mr. Obama said, noting an inspector general’s conclusions about the C.I.A. spying on the committee. “It’s clear from the I.G. report that some very poor judgment was shown in how that was handled. Keep in mind that John Brennan was the one who called for the I.G. report.”

Let us be clear: The CIA did not exercise, “poor judgement,” people exercised poor judgement.

People spied on Congress.

People broke cyber crime laws.

People showed contempt for the Constitutional separation of powers.

People, in this case John Brennan specifically, went on the Sunday shows and explicitly lied about this.

People were responsible, and people should be fired, prosecuted, etc. over all of this.

Barack Obama Just Admitting to Covering Up Crimes Against Humanity, Which is a Crime Against Humanity

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Barack Obama has blithely stated that, “We tortured some folks,” but continues to insist that there will not be any sort of accountability for this:

In startlingly blunt phrasing, President Obama on Friday acknowledged the CIA’s use of brutal interrogation tactics in the years after the Sept. 11 attack, even as he defended the agency’s top spy, who is a veteran of the era.

 “We tortured some folks,” Obama said to reporters during a news conference Friday. “We did some things that were contrary to our values.”

 ………

 He sought to put the interrogation program in context, recalling Americans’ fear after the Sept. 11 attacks and the “enormous pressure” on law enforcement to prevent more attacks.

 “You know, it is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had,” Obama said. “And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.”

No, they weren’t patriots, they were “Good Germans”.

He also further makes it clear that not only will there be no prosecution of torturers, there won’t even be a real investigation of who gave the orders.

As Richard Nixon’s head in a jar might attest to, sometimes it’s the cover up that constitutes a crime, and Obama has thrown his lot in with the coverup.

Whoever performed, authorized, or ordered torture, at a very minimum, should be stripped of their security clearances and fired.  (I would argue that the same should apply to those who did not report torture through the chain of command)

He was forced to make this statement, since the Senate report on this reveals that the torture was more common and more brutal than was reported to Congress of the public, as well as the fact that it never produced meaningful actionable intelligence.

It is also important to note that many of the people tortured were guilty of nothing, and had just been swept up in a panic driven dragnet and bounty program.

Finally, it should be noted that torture comes home.  National guardsman who observe or participate in torture, and then come home to work in civilian law enforcement, are more likely to engage in torture themselves.

Prosecution, and public shaming, are essential to stopping this.

Fabulous!

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The Uganda constitutional court has ruled their Kill the Gays (lite) bill unconstitutional:

Gay rights campaigners in Uganda and around the world are celebrating a decision by the country’s constitutional court to strike down a widely condemned anti-gay law on a legal technicality.

Activists in the courtroom cheered after a panel of five judges ruled on Friday that the speaker of parliament acted illegally when she allowed a vote on the measure despite at least three objections that not enough MPs were in attendance.

“The speaker was obliged to ensure that there was quorum,” the court said in its ruling. “We come to the conclusion that she acted illegally.”

While celebrating the ruling, activists warned that homosexuality remained a criminal offence in the east African country under colonial-era laws.

While much of the blame for this rests on the politicians of Uganda, who are, after all, human beings with their own capability of agency, but I really do think that we should be investigating members of “The Family” in the United States for conspiracy to commit genocide.  (Click the link, the Family is a scary bunch of people)

It’s nice that Uganda cannot throw people convicted of “aggravated homosexuality” into jail for life, but it would be nicer still if they were to repeal the colonial-era laws.

Fascism is Back in Europe

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In the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of Fascism had as its philosophical basis the idea that liberal democracy had failed.

Well, the current President of Hungary, Viktor Orban, is making exactly same argument:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he wants to abandon liberal democracy in favor of an “illiberal state,” citing Russia and Turkey as examples.

The global financial crisis in 2008 showed that “liberal democratic states can’t remain globally competitive,” Orban said on July 26 at a retreat of ethnic Hungarian leaders in Baile Tusnad, Romania.

“I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” Orban said, according to the video of his speech on the government’s website. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of “successful” nations, “none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies.”

Orban, who was re-elected in April for a second consecutive four-year term, has clashed with the EU as he amassed more power than any of his predecessors since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, replacing the heads of independent institutions including the courts with allies, tightening control over media and changing election rules to help him retain a constitutional majority in Parliament.

………

Orban, who has fueled employment with public works projects, said this weekend that he wants to replace welfare societies with a “workfare” state. He has earlier said more centralized control was needed to confront multinational companies such as banks and energy firms, to escape from “debt slavery,” and to protect Hungarians from becoming a “colony” of the EU.

Orban said his “illiberal democracy” won’t deny the “fundamental values” of liberalism, such as “freedom.”

Am I the only one who think that Hungary in 2014 is looking a lot like Italy in 1924.

Not good.

When juxtaposed with the ECB working too hard at fighting imaginary inflation, though not to the extremes taken the German central bank in the 1930s, it’s not tough to imagine Europe at war again before I die.

If Mario Cuomo were Dead, He’d Be Spinning in His Grave

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I am not a big fan of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. (See my post F%$# Andrew Cuomo)

Well, in addition to his fervent retreat from anything resembling economic liberalism, unless it is of the Neoliberal variety, we now know that he’s a corrupt hypocrite.

In the small change category, we have the fact that while he was a “crusading” Attorney General, his primary adviser for mortgage fraud by the banksters was a lobbyist for the mortgage banksters:

In early 2007, when he was New York State attorney general, Andrew Cuomo brought on a longtime confidant as a consultant on mortgage industry investigations, a move that has gone undisclosed until now.

The friend was Howard Glaser and he had another job at the same time: consultant and lobbyist for the very industry Cuomo was investigating.

 Glaser, who went on to become a top state official in Cuomo’s gubernatorial administration, was operating a lucrative consulting firm, the Glaser Group, with a host of mortgage industry clients.

 Later that year, Glaser provided insights on Cuomo’s investigations to industry players on a conference call hosted by an investment bank.

 Cuomo’s office ended up giving immunity to one of Glaser’s clients a year into his term as attorney general.

 In the end, experts say, the mortgage investigations Cuomo touted as “wide-ranging” came to little, even as he held one of the country’s most powerful prosecutorial positions through the financial crisis and its aftermath.

(emphasis mine)

Not surprising, though the story of how the denial of a Freedom of Information Act accidentally let the cat out of the bag to Pro Publica is prize.

The bigger story is how Cuomo set up an anti-corruption commission, and then shut it down when it began to point in his diriection:

With Albany rocked by a seemingly endless barrage of scandals and arrests, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo set up a high-powered commission last summer to root out corruption in state politics. It was barely two months old when its investigators, hunting for violations of campaign-finance laws, issued a subpoena to a media-buying firm that had placed millions of dollars’ worth of advertisements for the New York State Democratic Party.

 The investigators did not realize that the firm, Buying Time, also counted Mr. Cuomo among its clients, having bought the airtime for his campaign when he ran for governor in 2010.

 Word that the subpoena had been served quickly reached Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aide, Lawrence S. Schwartz. He called one of the commission’s three co-chairs, William J. Fitzpatrick, the district attorney in Syracuse.

 “This is wrong,” Mr. Schwartz said, according to Mr. Fitzpatrick, whose account was corroborated by three other people told about the call at the time. He said the firm worked for the governor, and issued a simple directive:

 “Pull it back.”

 The subpoena was swiftly withdrawn. The panel’s chief investigator explained why in an email to the two other co-chairs later that afternoon.

 “They apparently produced ads for the governor,” she wrote.

 The pulled-back subpoena was the most flagrant example of how the commission, established with great ceremony by Mr. Cuomo in July 2013, was hobbled almost from the outset by demands from the governor’s office.

 ………

 While the governor now maintains he had every right to monitor and direct the work of a commission he had created, many commissioners and investigators saw the demands as politically motivated interference that hamstrung an undertaking that the governor had publicly vowed would be independent.

 ………

 But a three-month examination by The New York Times found that the governor’s office deeply compromised the panel’s work, objecting whenever the commission focused on groups with ties to Mr. Cuomo or on issues that might reflect poorly on him.

 Ultimately, Mr. Cuomo abruptly disbanded the commission halfway through what he had indicated would be an 18-month life. And now, as the Democratic governor seeks a second term in November, federal prosecutors are investigating the roles of Mr. Cuomo and his aides in the panel’s shutdown and are pursuing its unfinished business.

 ………

 Mr. Cuomo said early on that the commission would be “totally independent” and free to pursue wrongdoing anywhere in state government, including in his own office. “Anything they want to look at, they can look at — me, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the comptroller, any senator, any assemblyman,” he said last August.

 In a 13-page statement responding to The Times’s questions, Mr. Cuomo’s office defended its handling of the commission. It said the commission was created by and reported to the governor, and therefore he could not be accused of interfering with it.

 While he allowed the commission the independence to investigate whatever it wanted, the governor’s office said, it would have been a conflict for a panel he created to investigate his own administration.

That last bit is, dare I say it, Nixonian in its phrasing.

Read the whole article, it’s pretty long, and you cannot help but come away with the impression that Cuomo quashed an investigation because it came too close to him and his.

Rather unsurprisingly, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York has expressed similar concerns:

Federal prosecutors investigating Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s shutdown of an anticorruption commission have subpoenaed the assistant to its former executive director to testify before a grand jury in Manhattan, suggesting that the criminal inquiry has moved to a new stage, people briefed on the matter said on Thursday.

Federal agents served the subpoena on the assistant, Heather Green, on Wednesday morning, appearing at her doorstep before 7 a.m., the people said. Ms. Green, who is not believed to be a target of the inquiry, worked as an executive assistant to the anticorruption panel’s former executive director, Regina Calcaterra, until Mr. Cuomo announced he was disbanding the panel, known as the Moreland Commission, on March 29.

The subpoena, according to two people who have seen it or been briefed on its contents, asked for documents and correspondence, including any communications with Mr. Cuomo and his senior aides. It also directed Ms. Green to appear July 28 to testify before a grand jury in Manhattan, the people said.

Separately, Mylan L. Denerstein, counsel to the governor, has agreed to be interviewed in early August by federal prosecutors about her involvement with the panel, one of the people said.

Mr. Cuomo created the Moreland Commission in July 2013, saying he wanted to root out corruption and reform state laws that for decades have enabled it. But he abruptly shuttered the panel in March after striking a deal with legislative leaders that netted only modest reforms.

The governor said at the time that in exchange for terminating the panel’s work, he had won tougher laws on bribery and corruption and improved enforcement of election law. But the action angered Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. Mr. Bharara appeared on a radio show days later and, in an unusual move, sharply criticized Mr. Cuomo’s decision, saying his actions made it appear as though the governor had bargained away corruption cases as part of a political deal.

(emphasis mine)

Cuomo’s opponent in the Democratic primary, Zephyr Teachout (her birth name, her parents are very bad people) has gone from demanding answers to calling for his resignation.

Political realities being what they are, Ms. Teachout has no chance of winning, and Cuomo is likely to win the general by at least 20 points, we will almost certainly see 4 more years of his conservative f%$#ery, but I think that he is now officially out of the running for President 2016, and hopefully forever.

The Demon Sheep Lady? Seriously?

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No, Really, Carly paid to make this ad

Carly Fiorina is looking at running for President:

Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in California in 2010, is diving back into electoral politics.

For now, her work is focused on pushing back against Democrats’ claim of a Republican-led “war on women” in the 2014 midterms. But her recent moves in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire have convinced some she’s eyeing a bigger prize come 2016.

Fiorina slipped into the Granite State last week to promote her new political group, dubbed UP for “Unlocking Potential.” Its mission is to engage women with new messages and combat the gaping gender gap that’s hobbling Republicans in races up and down the ballot. In addition to headlining a breakfast last Thursday for more than 200 GOP activists in the business and political spheres, Fiorina attended a GOP gala the night before honoring Joe McQuaid, the conservative publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader, the state’s largest and most influential newspaper.

Jim Merrill, a top adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 New Hampshire campaign, is interpreting the largely under-the-radar moves as a sign of someone that’s at least pondering a White House bid.

“I thought of it as a testing-the-waters exercise and she got a great response,” Merrill says. “It was very clear to me she’s someone taking the temperature of New Hampshire.”

It wasn’t Fiorina’s first trip to New Hampshire this year, either. She was the keynote speaker at the Northeastern Republican Leadership Conference in Nashua in March, when she declared, “The highest calling of leadership and of our nation is to change the order of things. It is time.”

Carly Fiorina, who came to prominence as a senior executive responsible for sales at Lucent, where she was touted as a success, but it all imploded into a morass of shady accounting and fraud shortly after she left.

Then became CEO at HP, where her purchase of Compaq (and DEC, which had been purchased by Compaq) turned out to be largely a disaster, and when she was fired, employees at multiple locations of HP spontaneously singing “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead.”

Finally, we have her “Demon Sheep” Senate campaign. (See the attached vid)

Damn!  The Republicans have a wicked thin bench for 2016!

A Couple of Interesting Perspectives on the War in Gaza

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First comes the Yorkshire Ranter, who looks at the conflict, and draws some conclusions and their effects.

First is the explanation of why Hamas is using such an ineffective weapon system in their rockets, which cause damage only by happenstance.

The Ranter (IMNSHO correctly) explains that the rocket fire is suppressive fire, not firing for effect:

You could imagine that this is the physical expression of a sort of generalised venting of rage – randomly tossing ineffective bangs over the wall. But you’d be wrong both in the sense that it trivialises the rocketry’s effect on Israelis, and that it denies Palestinians’ agency and competence.

 It’s too easy to point to the fact that they very, very rarely kill anyone and argue that in fact they are a bit puny and the Israelis should just man up and show some stiff upper lip rather than calling in artillery on the nearest school for the disabled. I have myself given in to the temptation before. The point isn’t destruction so much as suppression, the effect created by the fact of being under fire. And what they want to suppress is essentially the Israeli economy.

 Remember that GDP is a flow concept – loaves out of a bakery, cars off a production line – not a stock concept like Scrooge McDuck’s treasure. Israeli GDP in 2013 was $286.8bn at purchasing power parity. We can usefully think of this as $32.6 million GDP per hour. While an air warning RED is in force, it is a good guess that economic activity is basically zero. Not quite, of course, the electricity is on, the phone network is up, and the government sector is more than busy. But as a rule, if you’re in an air raid shelter you’re not at work or doing much else than worrying. The Iron Dome close-in weapons system is a major commitment of complicated technology, a diversion of social resources, so the cost of air defence has to be offset against that. And the warning system, which MIT’s Ted Postol credits with protecting the population much more than Iron Dome, does so at the cost of putting more people under warning for longer.

 So, you can see why they would go for range first. During this wave of conflict, the percentage of Israeli territory under warning has been as high as 75%, or $24.6m of foregone GDP per hour. A tiny commitment of additional materials per rocket provides a much bigger effect. Also, range requires “bigger” but not “better”, at least until the structural integrity constraints of the rocket are reached. A rocket is a container of propellant, so increasing its volume doesn’t require a proportionately greater quantity of materials. Another important reason to go bigger first is that it makes it possible to launch from anywhere in the Gaza Strip.

It should be noted in war, much of the weapons firing is suppressive fire, and as a suppressive weapon, the rockets are very effective, particularly since they are so cheap.

Rather than being an incoherent expression of rage, it is actually a relatively sophisticated, and rather effective, tactic.

His second, and far more troubling observation has to do with the rather non controversial conclusion that conflict and violence has the effect of radicalizing both societies.

My concern primarily has to do with the effect on Israeli society:

Here’s the point on the Israeli side. Palestinian rocket range and the vote for the Israeli extreme-right are strongly correlated; each ward to come under threat reports an increase of between 2 and 6 percentage points in the extreme-right vote (being the 95% confidence intervals). 

Something that has occurred during this conflict, which I have not observed before, is the hightened level of violence by Israeli Jews against Israeli Arab violence, including the lynching of Mohammed Abu Khdeir (burnt alive) simply for being Arab.

There is an element in Palestinian society that believes that they can eventually make the Israelis break, and I fear than they can eventually make the Israelis snap, and they go the route of Slobodan Milošević.

This worry leads directly to a commentary by noted Atheist Sam Harris, who maintains that Israel has the moral high ground in this conflict, even while he objects both to a religious based state, and religion in general, as an absurdity.

Basically, he engages in a thought experiment, where he tries to imagine what each side would do should they have the such overwhelming power that there would be no limits to their actions, and then he realizes that Israel is already in this position:

The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time, based on Koranic prophesy, when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say “O Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of the Palestinians. [Note: Yes, I know that not every Palestinian supports Hamas, but enough do to have brought them to power. Hamas is not a fringe group.]

The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews. 

And this gets to the heart of the moral difference between Israel and her enemies. And this is something I discussed in The End of Faith. To see this moral difference, you have to ask what each side would do if they had the power to do it. 

What would the Jews do to the Palestinians if they could do anything they wanted? Well, we know the answer to that question, because they can do more or less anything they want. The Israeli army could kill everyone in Gaza tomorrow. So what does that mean? Well, it means that, when they drop a bomb on a beach and kill four Palestinian children, as happened last week, this is almost certainly an accident. They’re not targeting children. They could target as many children as they want. Every time a Palestinian child dies, Israel edges ever closer to becoming an international pariah. So the Israelis take great pains not to kill children and other noncombatants.  [Note: The word “so” in the previous sentence was regrettable and misleading. I didn’t mean to suggest that safeguarding its reputation abroad would be the only (or even primary) reason for Israel to avoid killing children. However, the point stands: Even if you want to attribute the basest motives to Israel, it is clearly in her self-interest not to kill Palestinian children.]

Now, is it possible that some Israeli soldiers go berserk under pressure and wind up shooting into crowds of rock-throwing children? Of course. You will always find some soldiers acting this way in the middle of a war. But we know that this isn’t the general intent of Israel. We know the Israelis do not want to kill non-combatants, because they could kill as many as they want, and they’re not doing it. 

What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen. There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. And again, the charter of their government in Gaza explicitly tells us that they want to annihilate the Jews—not just in Israel but everywhere. [Note: Again, I realize that not all Palestinians support Hamas. Nor am I discounting the degree to which the occupation, along with collateral damage suffered in war, has fueled Palestinian rage. But Palestinian terrorism (and Muslim anti-Semitism) is what has made peaceful coexistence thus far impossible.]

This from a guy who, “I don’t think Israel should exist as a Jewish state. I think it is obscene, irrational and unjustifiable to have a state organized around a religion.”

I do differ with Mr. Harris a bit.

Specifically,. I do not think that it is self evident that the Palestinian leadership sees a Middle East without Jews as their perfect outcome.  Populist movements frequently having its leaders paying lip service to ideologies as a matter of convenience. (See Nelson Mandela and his affiliation with the South African Communist Party, and compare it to his behavior when he actually became President of South Africa)

So, the future proclivities of a Palestinian state are to my mind far more unknown than Sam Harris, though I am not hugely optimistic:  I believe that under the current environment, the chance that any Palestinian peace maker would suffer the same fate as Michael Collins is pretty high.

This is F%$#ing Brilliant!

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(Click for Slideshow)





Heh!

A couple in North Carolina has come up with a unique counter protest to the Talibaptist abortion criminalization crowd:

……… One Raleigh, N.C., couple—Grayson Haver Currin, a writer for Pitchfork and music editor at Indy Week, and his wife Tina, a copywriter and creative strategist—has been protesting alongside pro-lifers at a clinic in Cary, N.C., every Saturday morning since March. But their signs take a different approach.

 Two days ago, Tina started the Tumblr Saturday Chores to document their glorious counter-protest technique. Grayson explains how this movement came about:

“There’s no big-box hardware store very close to where we live, so we were driving toward a suburb of Raleigh called Cary, which runs over with strip malls. We were getting supplies for a garden box. We both grew up not too far away, and we’ve seen the clinic in question hundreds of times. But for some reason, on this morning in particular, the protesters got under our skin a little more than normal. I’m full of crazy ideas and jokes, and Tina tells me which rare ones are good. I suggested that we make a sign that said ‘Weird Hobby’ and point at one of the protestors. She loved the idea and vowed that, if they were there when we passed back by, we’d do it.


 ………

 He states that though this is satire, there’s an important message behind the signs.

 “While it’s true that we’re mocking people, we consider the chief value of what we’re doing the solidarity that we demonstrate for the individuals or families that need to use the clinic’s services for whatever reasons they may have,” Grayson says. “Generally, upon arrival, they only encounter hate. We want to offer a rejoinder, however slight. And we also hope to show passersby on the busy thoroughfare that the far religious right need not be the only ones with a voice; those with progressive views have one, too, and we should use it.”

This is so F%$#ing brilliant.

No shouting, no screaming, nothing to make them feel like they are fighting “the man,” you just make them look, and feel, stupid.

I love it!

H/t Crooks and Liars.

Seriously, Republican Judges are Just Phoning it in Now

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In the Hobby Lobby case, we have Justice Alito pulling a religious privilege for corporations out of thing air, but not for blood transfusions or psychology, because the people who oppose medical procedures are, Jehova’s Witnesses and Scientologists,  are icky.

They did the same thing with 150 years of precedent on recess appointments, etc.

Now with the ruling of the DC Court of appeals on Obamacare subsidies, they went off the deep end, and ruled that the subsidies only apply to states that have set up their own exchanges.

2 hours later, the 4th circuit court of appeals ruled the other way.

What’s more in the 4th Circuit’s opinion has an assent that absolutely nails the amazing level of hackitude in the DC Circuit’s opinion:

In fact, Appellants’ reading is not literal; it’s cramped. No case stands for the proposition that literal readings should take place in a vacuum, acontextually, and untethered from other parts of the operative text; indeed, the case law indicates the opposite. National Association of Home Builders v. Defenders of Wildlife, 551 U.S. 644, 666 (2007). So does common sense: If I ask for pizza from Pizza Hut for lunch but clarify that I would be fine with a pizza from Domino’s, and I then specify that I want ham and pepperoni on my pizza from Pizza Hut, my friend who returns from Domino’s with a ham and pepperoni pizza has still complied with a literal construction of my lunch order. That is this case: Congress specified that Exchanges should be established and run by the states, but the contingency provision permits federal officials to act in place of the state when it fails to establish an Exchange. The premium tax credit calculation subprovision later specifies certain conditions regarding state-run Exchanges, but that does not mean that a
literal reading of that provision somehow precludes its applicability to substitute federally-run Exchanges or erases the contingency provision out of the statute.

Seriously, conservative Judges will take any cockamamie fringe idea that some desperate for tenure right law professor, desperate for tenure can scrawl on a bathroom wall, and they are running with it.

They have completely lost it, because, to quote Blazing Saddles, “The Sheriff is a Ni!!!”

For Once, Obama Declines to Split the Baby (Fabulous!)

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After the failure of Congress to pass any LGBT civil rights legislation, Obama has signed an executive order banning it for government contractors.

The surprising bit is that despite entreaties from the religion-as-an-excuse-to-be-a-bigot crowd, the executive order does not grant a religious exemption:

President Obama, resisting calls from several prominent faith leaders, will not include a new exemption for religiously affiliated government contractors when he issues an executive order Monday barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the White House said Friday.

Obama announced last month that he would sign such an order after concluding that Congress was not going to act on a broader measure prohibiting discrimination based on sexual discrimination or gender identity by companies.

Since then, faith leaders have urged him to include an exemption for government contractors with a religious affiliation, such as some social service agencies.

White House officials said Friday that the new executive order would not include such an exception. But Obama will preserve an exemption put in place by former president George W. Bush that allows religiously affiliated contractors to favor employees of a certain religion in making hiring decisions.

Gay rights organizations have criticized that earlier exemption, and they celebrated news Friday that Obama would not be broadening it.

“With the strokes of a pen, the president will have a very real and immediate impact on the lives of millions of LGBT people across the country,” said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group.

I think that one of the consequences of the Hobby Lobby decision is the understanding that accommodation of the Talibaptist crowd is a losing proposition.

I’ve thought this for a while.

People who use religion as a, “Veil under which anger can be legitimatized,” to are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.