P.M. Headlines

(CBS News): "Hasan Rowhani, moderate cleric, pulls off Iranian election win"

(Boston Herald): "Clinton to attend rally for Markey in Worcester"

(The Daily News): "Texas Gov. Rick Perry Signs 'Merry Christmas bill' into law"

(New York Times): "Fears of national ID with immigration bill"

(The Daily Beast): "The Supreme Court gets in right, naturally"

Behind the Ad: Rep. Markey uses Obama

By Richard K. Barry

(Another installment in our extensive "Behind the Ad" series.)

Who: The Ed Markey(D) Senate campaign

Where: Massachusetts

What's going on: With the special Senate election in Massachusetts about a week and a half away, both campaigns are bringing out their best stuff. In Ed Markey's case it's an ad featuring President Obama.

The Hill:

The 30-second ad features clips from a speech Obama gave at a Boston campaign rally for Markey earlier this week, in which he praises Markey's commitment to the middle class and touts his support for gun control measures.

"I've gotta have folks with me who care as passionately about these things as I do. That's who Ed Markey is. I need Ed Markey in the United States Senate," he says in the ad. 

Massachusetts is a blue state, but strange things happen there from time to time, so Markey is taking no chances. Obama beat Romney by a whopping 23 points in November.

His GOP opponent, Gabriel Gomez, is running hard with his military record in the final days.

For the record, Charlie Cook is now saying that Markey is solidifying his lead. Two weeks ago he said that the race was a toss up, now he is moving it back to "Lean Democratic."

 

(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

Supply side dogma

By Frank Moraes

I came upon two excellent articles yesterday that attack supply side economic dogma. But before I get to that, I want to run through a small thought experiment using my friend Will. He has built a company from the ground up, Dirt Cheap Computers. Basically, it is him (along with me at times) and he builds and repairs computers and networks. Will's tax rate really doesn't affect how much he works. He would certainly like to keep more of the money he earns but if the government lowered his tax rate, Will wouldn't start working more because he was suddenly making more per hour. A primary reason for this is that like most small business owners, Will is already working as much as he can. He is constrained by the number of people around who want to do business with him. He can just announce that he's going to work 10 more hours per week, but they won't be paid hours. He needs customers.

What this shows is that business profits depend upon demand and not supply. Will has tried supplying a cheaper and cheaper service and what he's learned is that it doesn't really bring in many more customers. But conservatives in the economic policy debate don't seem to understand this basic fact that all small business owners understand. It is like they got their economic education fromField of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come." Well, that just isn't true. If people have no expendable income, they will not go to Disney Land. After 30 years of supply side economics—the idea that giving the rich more money will cause economic expansion—I am amazed that we continue to discuss it. Supply side economics is a lie. It doesn't work.

Read more »

Fertile ground

By Mustang Bobby

From TPM:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), a longtime immigration reform advocate, said Friday that because immigrants are “more fertile” they are a crucial source of labor for the United States.

“Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans,” Bush said at a Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, as quoted by the Washington Post. “Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity.”

Not only is “the smarter Bush” on the wrong side of immigration debate for the right-wing nutsery, his inartful “fertile” comment makes it sound like he’s encouraging people to come here and have babies. Great from the pro-life point of view, but not exactly tactful. And again, it shows an unhealthy obsession with other peoples’ sexual activities.

Besides, this goes straight to the blooper reel.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

A.M. Headlines

(FiveThirtyEight): "Polls show chemical weapons affect public view on Syria"

(Gail Collins - NYT): "The other side of the story" 

(Houston Chronicle): "Gomez leans on military past on Mass. Senate race"

(The Guardian): "Iran presidential election: second round forecast after late flurry at polls"

(Politico): "Paul Ryan explains GOP's 2012 loses"

Big whoop

By Carl

OK, I mean, it’s nice that this highly intrusive program has paid dividends. That’s great that we can get some bang for our bucks.

No pun intended.

There is a point where we have to wonder if there wouldn’t have been any other way of getting around to stopping terror attacks that this program netted. Couple that with the fact that it also failed to net the Boston Marathon bombers, as well as any number of terror-like attacks (the recent Ricin mailings come to mind, as well as the assault on the Sikh temple massacre last year) puts a bit of a damper on General Alexander’s boasts:

In a robust defense of the phone program, General Alexander said that it had been critical in helping to prevent “dozens of terrorist attacks” both in the United States and abroad and that the intelligence community was considering declassifying examples to better explain the program. He did not clarify whether the records used in such investigations would have been available through individual subpoenas without the database. He also later walked back the assertion slightly, saying the phone log database was used in conjunction with other programs.

In his testimony, General Alexander said he had “grave concerns” about how Mr. Snowden had access to such a wide range of top-secret information, from the details of a secret program called Prism to speed the government’s search of Internet materials to a presidential document on cyberstrategy. He said the entire intelligence community was looking at the security of its networks — something other government officials vowed to do after the WikiLeaks disclosures three years ago.

Under the Prism program, the N.S.A. collects information from American Internet companies like Google without individual court orders if the request is targeted at noncitizens abroad. That program derives from a 2008 surveillance law that was openly debated in Congress.

Oh. Well. I see now. The program doesn’t track terrorists per se. Only brown-skinned ones. Well, that’s much better. We white people are free to bomb marathons, abortion clinics, and murder Arabic and Arabic-looking folks to our hearts content.

Terrorism is terrorism, whether it’s 19 Saudis flying planes into buildings, a couple of lunatics with rifles picking off passersby, or the NRA threatening your daughter with rape if you don’t buy her a gun. Period. It’s only security theater to think that only Muslims mean us harm.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

A.M. Headlines

(ThinkProgress): "Four states pushing through last-minute abortion restrictions before lawmakers break for summer"

(Politicker): "Judges reject objection to Christie decision on U.S. Senate special election; say governor acted properly"

(Politico): "Santorum: Why Romney didn't win"


(New York Times): "Syria has used chemical arms on rebels, US and allies find"

(The Guardian): "Russia dismisses US claim of Syrian chemical weapons use"


(The Week): "Yes, Iran's presidential election matters"

Turkey's protests and Erdogan's authoritarianism: The view from the southeast

By Ali Ezzatyar

Ali Ezzatyar is a lawyer and executive director of the Berkeley Program on Entrepreneurship and Democracy in the Middle East. He is a frequent contributor to The Reaction.

The dust does not seem to be settling at all on protests in Turkey this week. All the while, talk of an "increasingly authoritarian government" and the erosion of democracy has had a particularly ironic resonance for one portion of Turkey’s population: the Kurds. Making up 25 percent of the country and historically estranged from Turkish society, the view from the southeast is one that could benefit outside observers as they try to make sense of transpirings in Istanbul and beyond.

The notion that Turkey is becoming increasingly authoritarian under Erdogan only makes sense if your chronology is a few years long. It is true that, using his democratic mandate, Erdogan has been aggressive in the implementation of his agenda over the last few years with very little effort in the way of consensus building. But in the context of 50 years of Turkish history, the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) represents a step forward both economically and democratically as the rest of the world defines those terms.

The line between a brand of "Kemalist" secularism and democracy is blurred by a large part of last week's bona fide protesters, who likened their Turkish government to that of other deposed dictatorships in the Middle East. The importance of that form of secularism is espoused especially by supporters of Ataturk's Republican People’s Party (CHP), which held a monopoly on power and information in Turkey for most of its history. It is an ultra-secularism that is better described as the separation of church and society, not the separation of church and state, in addition to extreme Turkish nationalism. While the protests do target legitimate shortcomings in the Erdogan government, such as curbs on personal freedom, they are not defined by them. Rather, they are defined by the shift away from a traditional Turkish way of existence, which is uncomfortable for many. The allegations being lobbed against the AKP and Erdogan existed the day they took power.

The Kurdish example helps contextualize the protesters' allegations a bit. Since the founding of the Turkish Republic 90 years ago, Turkey has ceremonially excluded the participation of its openly Kurdish citizens from any aspect of civil society. Dozens of Kurdish parties have been banned from the "democratic" process and elected members of parliament have been jailed for treason for merely speaking Kurdish in parliament. Thousands of Kurdish journalists have been jailed and tortured by successive Turkish governments for writing in Kurdish or on Kurdish issues, with more Kurdish journalists in jail today in Turkey than journalists imprisoned in all of China or Iran. The list of injustices like this against Kurds is long.

Read more »

World leaders should tape this to their walls

By Carl

A Haaretz op-ed opines that Israel should follow Nelson Mandela's lead in trying to come to grips with the Palestinian question:

The first and clearest lesson one can learn from Mandela is that peace is only achievable if the putative peacemakers believe in it. "One cannot be prepared for something while secretly believing it will not happen," Mandela once said. Does Israel's current leadership truly believe in peace? Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett are on record as saying that they don't. Netanyahu maintains that he does, though I can't help looking for the fingers crossed behind his back whenever he says it.

Peace is both an abstract concept – "a winner is a dreamer who never gives up," according to Mandela – and a very finite calculation of profit and loss. Peace means making compromises – and Mandela came perilously close to losing his base of support among South Africa's blacks in compromising to the extent that he did. He was prepared to take significant risks in the interest of peace. Are Israel's leaders prepared to do likewise?

Mandela was able to take risks and make compromises because he believed in what he was doing and he had a clear vision of the South Africa that could emerge. Addressing the court at the conclusion of his trial for treason in 1964, he said: "I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

And there it is: one has to wonder what the Israeli leadership really wants. Hegemony? Over a billion Muslims, most of whom could care less whether Israel lives or dies, and a minority of whom want to destroy that nation?

Mandela did take risks, but then he was willing to lose it all, even after his release from prison, even after his ascendancy to president. He had courage, which Mandela defines as not the absence of fear but the strength to overcome it. It seems odd to me that a nation whose people have courage in boatloads can't bring themselves to use that courage to create a niche for themselves that doesn't involve the constant vigilance of armed forces.

Read more »

Dianne Feinstein is a traitor

By Frank Moraes

It's hard to know what to think about Edward Snowden, the young man who leaked NSA information to the Guardian and the Washington Post. On the surface, it is all good and he looks like a hero. But I will admit that the story seems a little weird and so I will wait for more information. What can't be questioned is that the documents leaked should have been leaked. The American public have a right to know about this stuff.

We've come a long way from where we started in this matter. It used to be that the government didn't want newspapers to print troop movements. Now, the government doesn't want newspapers to print that there is even a war. The dust up over Snowden's revelations makes no sense. On the one hand we hear that he is a traitor who put American lives in danger. And on the other hand we hear that we already knew this was going on. This, of course, is what we heard about Bradley Manning, "This doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know—and it's dangerous!"

Last night, The Hill reported that my very own United States Senator Dianne Feinstein thinks that Snowden is a traitor. On the most basic level, this is absurd. Just as I won't say that he is a hero, she can't know he is a traitor. But in her tiny mind he's a traitor because he broke the law. She said, "He violated the oath, he violated the law. It's treason." Let's just step back and think about it for a moment. Ever since the Nuremberg Trials, we have supposedly know that there are some orders—some laws—that should not be followed. My question for Ms. Feinstein is, "If the law said you should kill 6 million Jews, would you?"

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is typical of our elected officials. I think of this as the 5-year-old approach to justice: it is always wrong to lie; it is alwayswrong to fight; it is always wrong to break the law. Of course, Feinstein is all for complexity when it comes to defending her authoritarian approach to the surveillance state. Why do we need it? She'll tell you it is because it saves lives. But she can't show you the lives that it saved. Because that might cost lives. I'm serious! She says that she'd be all for accountability, "Here's the rub: the instances where this has produced good—has disrupted plots, prevented terrorist attacks, is all classified, that's what's so hard about this."

Actually, it isn't hard at all. As Scalia said, "I'll bet you, if you conducted a lot of unreasonable searches and seizures, you'd get more convictions too." The question is not whether having a member of the NSA follow each of us everywhere we go wouldn't make us safer in the sense of fewer terrorist attacks. The question is whether the trade off is worth it. Clearly, Feinstein thinks the current actions of the NSA are worth it. I think they aren't. I think it is worth talking about. Without Snowden we couldn't even do that. Even with him it looks like we can't.

Treason is a funny thing. When Feinstein was elected to Congress, she took an oath to uphold the Constitution. As the chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, she has not only allowed the government to infringe on my constitutional rights, she has cheered it on. Who's the real traitor?

Update (11 June 2013 10:03 am)

I just wrote to Feinstein:

I'm displeased you are calling Edward Snowden a traitor. Breaking the law or an oath does not necessarily make one a traitor. All your public comments are doing is poisoning the water so that we can't have a reasonable discussion of this. The truth is that at this point we can't say if Snowden is a hero or a traitor. And you more than anyone ought to understand that. We didn't send you to Washington so you could be a firewall against democracy and open government. Please at least moderate your rhetoric.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.) 

Behind the Ad: The DCCC uses Spanish-language ads to attack Republicans

By Richard K. Barry

Who: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)

Where: Colorado, Texas, Minnesota, Nevada, California, New Mexico, Virginia

What's going on: Last week the House voted against the Dream Act, a bill that would provide conditional permanent residency to certain classes of immigrants.  Now the DCCC is targeting Republicans who were on the wrong side of the legislation with a new Spanish-language radio ad. Those getting the unwanted attention are: Reps. Mike Coffman (Colo.), Blake Farenthold (Texas), John Kline (Minn.), Joe Heck (Nev.), Buck McKeon (Calif.), Gary Miller (Calif.), Erik Paulsen (Minn.), Steve Pearce (N.M.), and Frank Wolf (Va.).

I never paid enough attention in the 3 or 4 years of Spanish I took in school to know what is being said, but it probably has something to do with the fact that Republicans will never get much above 25% of the Hispanic vote until they wake up and smell the café.

One funny thing is the ad is running in some districts that don't have much of a Hispanic vote, so it is clearly meant for a wider audience. 

 

(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

Plan B for Plan B

By Mustang Bobby

After several court battles, the Obama administration and the Department of Health and Human Services has dropped their opposition to imposing age limits on emergency contraception, aka Plan B.

The government’s decision means that any woman or girl will soon be able to walk into a drugstore and buy the pill, Plan B One-Step, without a prescription.

The Justice Department had been fighting to prevent that outcome, but said late Monday afternoon that it would accept its losses in recent court rulings and begin putting into effect a judge’s order to have the Food and Drug Administration certify the drug for nonprescription use. In a letter to Judge Edward R. Korman of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, the administration said it would comply with his demands.

The Justice Department appears to have concluded that it might lose its case with the appeals court and would have to decide whether to appeal to the Supreme Court. That would drastically elevate the debate over the politically delicate issue for Mr. Obama.

I think Booman is on to something: President Obama was really in favor of letting anyone have access to Plan B, but he knew that if he said he supported it, that would galvanize the opposition simply because he’s in favor of it. He also knew that it would infuriate his base among pro-choice voters. But he also knew that if he put up a fight and then gave up after making an adequate attempt, he would have cover on an issue that could have been used against Democrats in the mid-terms. Got it?

It’s exasperating, but that’s how the game is played. The worst part of it is that time, money, and political capital was wasted on a fight that was fixed from the start.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Americans don't care about anything important

By Frank Moraes

Steve Benen provided this graph that shows a fair bit of hypocrisy in how both Democrats and Republicans think about the surveillance state. But Benen is much more of a partisan than I am. His whole point of showing the graph was to push back on the "Democratic hypocrisy" narrative that is forming. He quite correctly noted that the question in 2006 was different than the question in 2013. In 2006, people were asked about an illegal program; in 2013, it is a legal program.

He's reaching, right? We're all very glad that Obama cares enough about the law generally to put a patina of legality on the vile surveillance practices of his administration. It at least provides for the possibility of oversight and maybe even a change of policies if only the American people actually cared about the issue. But the opposite argument could be made. This program is much bigger and it doesn't necessarily involve communication with foreigners.

To my mind, both programs are terrible in their own ways. The Bush program was highly invasive and illegal. The Obama program is not very invasive and legal, but it is vast. What's more, I have little doubt that the information will creep into other uses. The New York Times editorial board has been very good on this issue; however, I thought they asked some naive (but good) questions this morning:

Are the calls and texts of ordinary Americans mined for patterns that might put innocent people under suspicion? Why is data from every phone call collected, and not just those made by people whom the government suspects of terrorist activity? How long is the data kept, and can it be used for routine police investigations?

Let's see now. It isn't that the program might put innocent people under suspicion; it is that it does. All the data are[1] collected for the same reason a dog licks its balls: because it can be done. I don't think that can be stressed enough: the surveillance state does not processes so much data out of any need. It is just like video stores asking for you Social Security number: they don't need it; they are just mindlessly collecting all of the data that they can. That's what the NSA does. The data will be kept forever. And of course the data can be used for other purposes. As I've noted before: it can figure out if you are using illegal drugs and it can be used to figure out if you are having an affair. All from so called meta data.

But I'm not worried about any hypocrisy on the part of about 25% of the Democrats and Republicans. There are any number of reasons they could give for the changes in their opinions anyway. What's more, a lot of those reasons are valid. What I'm worried about is that roughly 55% of both parties are never worried about the government snooping at what we are doing. This is a horrifying, but hardly unusual position for me to find myself in. Large swaths of Americans aren't worried about global warming. And that's more important than this. Large swaths are not worried about income inequality. And that's more important than this. Even fewer care about our racist "justice" system. And that's more important than this.

So many moral catastrophes, so little time.
______________

[1] "Data" is technically a plural. But that isn't why I use it as a plural. It just sounds wrong to me to do otherwise. It's just one of my eccentricities.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

A.M. Headlines

(New York Times): "NSA disclosure puts awkward light on previous denials"

(The Hill): "Hoyer: No comparison between Obama, Bush on secret NSA surveillance"

(Huffington Post): "Darrell Issa on IRS investigation: Releasing full transcripts now would be 'reckless'"

(Washington Post): "Immigration bill passes first test vote in Senate"

(Reuters): "Turkish police fight protesters, clear square"

P.M. Headlines

(Chicago Tribune): "Daley exploring bid for governor"

(USA Today): "ACLU sues Obama administration over NSA surveillance"

(CBS Minnesota): "Franken 'very well aware of' NSA tracking phone records"

(Los Angeles Times): "Analyst overstated claims on NSA leaks, experts say"

(New York Times): "Obama presses immigration bill as Senate opens debate"

(Politicker): "What Anthony Weiner's schedule reveals about his strategy"

A few thoughts on freedom

By Carl

The non-scandal scandal – OMG! You mean the government is doing what it’s been doing for the last decade since we as a people told it that it could do it? – has raised some interesting dynamics in American society and culture.

For instance, for all the foofaraw you hear in Blogtopia (© Skippy, the Bush Kanagaroo) and the rightwing blogosphere, the American people seem reasonably OK with the revelations that the government can pretty much know who we’re talking to at any time.
We don’t just get the government we deserve. We seem to get the freedom we deserve. Here, I have to give the bloodthirsty monotonous savages at the NRA and the Gun Owners of America some credit: they’re putting up a real fight for a freedom, even if it’s an antiquated and misguided freedom at best in a modern society.

For another thing, it’s been interesting to see some of the same folks come out now, arguing against the NSA program as well as the government intrusion into the Associated Press phone records and giving full throated support to Edward Snowden, who also stood behind the Bush administration when Valarie Plame was being skewered and castigated for being involved in essentially the same whistleblower activity (via her husband, no less).

I’m of two minds about this: as someone who was vocal in his opposition to the war in Iraq, I suspect my name came up in at least one database under the Bush administration and while I was probably given a surveillance miss – altho for reasons unrelated to my politics, I know I was vetted at least once last decade – that part of me is tempted to say “Welcome to the party, pal!”

Read more »

Rep. Alan Grayson has a challenger

By Richard K. Barry

Yes, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has a challenger. It's some guy by the name of Jorge Bonilla (R), a conservative blogger and Navy veteran.

Bonilla announced his candidacy in a video, which I'll post below. Here are some highlights.

The central question of the 2014 election is this: Are we the people still capable of self-rule, or do we abandon the American revolution and concede that a small connected elite out of Washington, D.C., and New York is better capable of running our lives than we are ourselves? This is America, guys. We can do better, we must do better and we will do better.

I particularly like his exhortation that "this is America, guys." Nice touch, unless you're not a guy. And he says "we the people" a lot. 

Grayson lost his House seat in 2010 in a GOP-leaning district.  He then ran in a Democratic-friendly Orlando-based district in 2012 and won. In fact, Obama got more than 60 percent of the vote in the district.

The Hill writes that Bonilla is of Puerto Rican descent and writes for a conservative blog and that this might be interesting. Maybe in a mid-term year. I don't know. Grayson is pretty tough.



(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

Global warming and American leadership

By Frank Moraes

This afternoon, Steve Benen was writing about Obama's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. They sort of agreed that maybe they kind of ought to think about someday considering the possibility that there could at some point in the distant future might be an agreement that could conceivable lead to an arrangement that something really should be done about climate change in the not too distinct future, but perhaps the very distant future if that doesn't seem politically viable. (Samuel Beckett would be proud!) Anyway, it's good that they are talking about these things. You can be certain if it were a Republican in the White House, they wouldn't be discussing it.

Benen brings up a common conservative argument against an agreement, "But without China, it will be useless!" Before I get to Benen's comments on this, let me take a moment to talk from the perspective of a man who was in the trenches in the earlier days of the climate change wars. Many people at that time were really worried about Chinese air conditioners. It sounded then like it sounds now: American imperialism. We as in us, the fucking United States of America, are the worst polluter. Let's take care of our own addiction to fossil fuels and then we can think about the rest of the world. As it is, if we acted alone, it would make a big difference.

So I have little tolerance for this selfish madness. Steve Benen is like minded. But he has a slightly different take on it. He writes:

I've never cared for the argument, not just because it's a defeatist attitude that dooms the future of humanity, but also because it ignores the potential for American leadership. Our willingness to lead shouldn't be dependent on some other country's willingness to do the same—we're the global superpower, and we do the right thing because it's the right thing, not because China agreed to a deal.

I completely agree with him. What's more, this is one of my big complaints about the United States. You see, I used to be a true believer. When I was in school, I believed all that shit about our ideals. I thought that we really did always try to do what was right. Those people who hated us just didn't understand us. We stood for things! And I still hope. But I think that Benen and I are both being way too idealistic. No one in power in the United States is going to do anything because it is right.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Behind the Ad: Sen. Ayotte on background checks - Round II

By Richard K. Barry

Who: American Future Fund

Where: New Hampshire

What's going on: There is a back-and-forth going on between those who are critical of New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte's vote against the most recent failed Senate background check legislation and those who support her. Her critics, led by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's gun control group, produced an ad that responded to claims by Ayotte supporters that she had previously worked to strengthen background checks and was actually on the side of the angels.

They find that claim unconvincing.

What is most interesting about the ad by the American Future Fund, a conservative group, is that it doesn't really bother with any specifics, it simply vilifies Bloomberg for being a rich, pushy, big city type who is trying to tell the good people of New Hampshire what to think and do.

An earlier Bloomberg ad attacking Ayotte featured a Minnesota police chief who also served as a former chairman of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Firearms Committee.  Again, the conservative ad doesn't really address the specifics of this cops charges, but only puts up some other cop by the name of Richard Crate who is identified only as "New Hampshire law enforcement." Apparently he speaks for all cops in the state.

Again, no real substance, just an appeal to citizens most childish instinct not to let outsiders boss them around.

The closing line is "Don't let a New York billionaire use a Minnesota cop to tell New Hampshire what to think."

The funny things is, as The Hill points out, that Sen. Ayotte is not even up for reelection in 2016, but gun control advocates think they might be able to move her vote the next time this comes before the Senate.



(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

Just a reminder

By Mustang Bobby

In case you missed it: Via ThinkProgress:

Five are dead after a gunman rampaged through Santa Monica, CA, on Friday, ending at the local community college. The Santa Monica shooting marks the tenth mass shooting on a school campus in California since 1976.

The suspect, 23-year-old John Zawahri, was known as an angry young man with a “fascination with guns” that worried family friends. Zawahri was born in Lebanon but has lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years. In a press conference on Sunday, police said the troubled young man had planned out the attack and likely hoped to kill hundreds. The spree lasted 10 minutes, ending when police shot and killed Zawahri on the scene.

It’s been six months since the slaughter in Newtown. In our collective short-term memory, that’s a lifetime.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

A.M. Headlines

(The Hill): "Sen. Feinstein calls Snowden's NSA leaks an 'act of treason'"

(CNN Opinion): "Edward Snowden is a hero"

(New York Times): "US drops bid to limit sales of morning-after-pill"

(ABC News): "Judge to rule on Fort Hood suspect's defense"

(The Guardian): "Nelson Mandela: hospital tightens security"

P.M. Headlines

(Washington Post): "Most Americans back NSA tracking phone records, prioritize probes over privacy"

(Washington Post): "Edward Snowden says motive behind leaks was to expose ‘surveillance state’"

(Talking Points Memo): "Greenwald says 'There's a lot more coming," argues NSA revelations don't harm security"

(New York Times): "Leaker's employer is paid to maintain government secrets"

(The Daily Beast): "Supreme Court rulings this June: Everything you need to know"

(Smart Politics): "2,445 representatives who served with John Dingell"

I don't buy it

By Carl

Today, published reports reveal the identity of the purported whistleblower, Edward Snowden:

An ex-CIA employee has said he acted to "protect basic liberties for people around the world" in leaking details of US phone and internet surveillance.

Edward Snowden, 29, was revealed as the source of the leaks at his own request by the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Mr Snowden, now believed to be in Hong Kong, said he had an "obligation to help free people from oppression".

The recent revelations are that US agencies gathered millions of phone records and monitored internet data.

Admittedly, this story is unfolding and all the details have not been revealed about Snowden or his responsibilities, but here’s what he’ll admit to:

He told The Guardian he never received a high school diploma and didn't complete his computer studies at a community college. Instead, he joined the Army in 2003 but was discharged after breaking both legs in an accident.

Snowden said he later worked as a security guard for the NSA and then took a computer security job with the CIA. He left that job in 2009 and moved on to Booz Allen Hamilton, where he worked as a contractor for the government in Hawaii.

He told The Guardian that he left for Hong Kong on May 20 without telling his family or his girlfriend what he planned.

So he’s a high school drop out (CNN’s wording), never got even an associate’s degree in computer science, was discharged from the Army at age 20, and was hired by the CIA to do computer security work...after spending most of his adult life shouldering a gun only.

Does any of that even begin to make any sense to anyone? The CIA requires experts in their field, either from experience or from education, neither of which appears to be the case for Snowden, unless he did some bang-up job for the Army fresh out of high school.

And somehow, we’re also expected to buy his story that he had pangs of conscience over the “oppression” of American citizens, after years of data mining, even after he left the CIA and went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton (which is going to suffer an awful lot of consequences over this, I should add.)

A less cynical man than me would think that Glenn Greenwald has been set up.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind)

Behind the Ad: The DSCC and Senate Majority PAC have a first go at Gabriel Gomez

By Richard K. Barry

Who: The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and Senate Majority PAC

Where: Massachusetts

What's going on: Election day is June 25th for the special election to fill Secretary of State John Kerry's Senate seat. Some people think it's a competitive race. The DSCC and Senate Majority PAC may agree as they are spending real money on ad buys to attack Republican nominee Gabriel Gomez.

Roll Call:

[T]wo ads released Friday by the national Democratic groups specifically target seniors — potential high-propensity voters even in odd-timed elections. Neither ad mentions Rep. Edward J. Markey, the Democratic nominee, preferring instead to accuse Gomez of supporting cutting Medicare and raising the retirement age.

This is the DSCC ad called "Break:"

 

And the Senate Majority PAC ad called "Trust:"

(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

Maybe a Democratic surveillance state?

By Frank Moreas

I think of Mike Konczal as an economics writer, but he is usually just as illuminating when writing about other things. Yesterday at Wonk Blog, he wrote, Is a Democratic Surveillance State Possible? In it, he described work by Yale law professor Jack Balkin where he argues that there are two kinds of surveillance states: authoritarian and democratic. Of course, in the United States, we have the authoritarian kind. And that is perhaps understandable. It matches our pretend democracy.

Authoritarian surveillance states act as gluttons and misers of information. They are gluttons in the sense that they collect all the information they can without regard to content or source. As Konczal puts it, "More is always better, indiscriminate access is better than targeted responses, and there's a general presumption that they'll have access to whatever they want, at any time." But they are misers in that they want as little information as possible to get out about who they are and what they do. In other words, authoritarian surveillance wants ultimate power and no accountability or transparency.

Democratic surveillance states, on the other hand, are, "information gourmets and information philanthropists." They are highly selective about the information they collect and generous about what they are doing and for what purpose. Konczal points out that a big part of this would be information destruction. That's one thing you can count on: the government might, for example, take your finger prints to identify you. But they will use those fingerprints even after you die to accuse you of crime. The information just goes on and on. In the case of fingerprints, it probably makes sense. But does it make sense for the NSA to maintain all of my phone records until the end of time? I assure you that they think so.

Read more »

Behind the Ad: Republicans say having affordable health care will ruin your life

By Richard K. Barry

(Another installment in our extensive "Behind the Ad" series.)

Who: Citizens for a Strong New Hampshire

Where: New Hampshire

What's going on: A Republican super-PAC is airing its first ad attacking New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) over her support for Obama's heath care program. They call her the "deciding vote for ObamaCare," in an ad that features "a family deciding what to cut from a meal following hypothetical cuts to their income due to the healthcare law."

The ad is build on the "requirement in the healthcare law that employers have to provide healthcare benefits to part-time employees working 30 hours of more." Predictably, many employers have said they will cut hours so they won't have to pay the additional costs.

The point is that you shouldn't blame your employer for being a prick for slashing your hours in order to avoid having to provide health care. You should blame the president and those who support him for trying to make sure that unforeseen heath care catastrophes don't bankrupt you and your family for the rest of your lives. 

This is the same kind of thinking that says that the minimum wage should be kept very low in order to promote job growth. It may mean you can't feed yourself or your family, but at least you'll have a job. 

Unfortunately, in New Hampshire this kind of approach might work.

The Hill:

A near-majority, 49 percent, of New Hampshire adults oppose the [health care] law, while 34 percent favor it and 17 percent are neutral or don't know enough about it, according to a poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center last month.

Sen. Shaheen continues to be popular in the state and the GOP hasn't found a marquee challenger yet, so this may not have the desired effect. It's so damn sad that people can be fooled into believing that the big bad government is the villain because it wants to give people a chance not to have their lives ruined by potential medical costs they can't pay.

 

(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

Private parts

By Mustang Bobby

The ever-insightful digby leads us to an article by Daniel J. Solove in the Chronicle of Higher Education from 2011 wherein the discussion about privacy and why it matters is discussed. In short, it calls into question the trope that we hear whenever something like news of the N.S.A. looking into the data of every phone call ever made hits the headlines: “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

To describe the problems created by the collection and use of personal data, many commentators use a metaphor based on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.Orwell depicted a harrowing totalitarian society ruled by a government called Big Brother that watches its citizens obsessively and demands strict discipline. The Orwell metaphor, which focuses on the harms of surveillance (such as inhibition and social control), might be apt to describe government monitoring of citizens. But much of the data gathered in computer databases, such as one’s race, birth date, gender, address, or marital status, isn’t particularly sensitive. Many people don’t care about concealing the hotels they stay at, the cars they own, or the kind of beverages they drink. Frequently, though not always, people wouldn’t be inhibited or embarrassed if others knew this information.

Another metaphor better captures the problems: Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Kafka’s novel centers around a man who is arrested but not informed why. He desperately tries to find out what triggered his arrest and what’s in store for him. He finds out that a mysterious court system has a dossier on him and is investigating him, but he’s unable to learn much more. The Trial depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used.

The problems portrayed by the Kafkaesque metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition. Instead they are problems of information processing—the storage, use, or analysis of data—rather than of information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.

The question is not whether or not I or anyone else has something or nothing to hide. We all do, whether it’s our credit card statement or or web-browser history, and no matter what it is, the idea behind a country founded on a Bill of Rights that includes the statement “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated” should be taken as least as seriously as the one about the well-regulated militia.

Simply put, the only person who can decide for me what’s private and what’s not is me. I can go on Facebook and tell the world — or at least those who know me — what I had for dinner last night, what movie I saw last week, and so forth. I can even tell you if I’m in a relationship or not or where I work and who I work with. Those are my choices, though, and I made them freely. But the idea of things that I choose to keep private being subject to scrutiny by other people and without my knowledge or consent is offensive not because they might find some deep dark secret but because I’m the one who is supposed to be the one who decides that, not someone else.

I may indeed have nothing to hide. But that’s for me to decide.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

A.M. Headlines

Jason Furman

(Reuters): "Ex-CIA man says exposed spy scheme to protect world"

(The Atlantic): "Eric Snowden in Hong Kong"

(USA Today): "Obama picks Furman to head economic council"

(New York Times): "Third Democrat to seek Lautenberg's Senate seat"

(CNN): "Santa Monica shooting victim dies, bringing toll to 5"

P.M. Headlines

(Washington Post): "Edward Snowden identified as source of NSA leaks"

(Politico): "Former Massachusetts Gov. Argeo Paul Cellucci dies"

(Bloomberg): "Zuckerberg plans fundraiser for Cory Booker's Senate run"

(The Hill): "Rand Paul says he's key to uniting Senate, House on immigration"

(GazetteNet): "UMass poll has Markey with a wide lead over Gomez in Senate race"

(National Journal): "Why Republicans can get away with ignoring their problems"