wrongologist – Page 215 – The Wrongologist

Thirty Years of Wrong

Everyone probably knows about Jade Helm 15. It is a two-month operation by the Pentagon in which Special Forces from four branches of the military will carry out simulated operations amid territory designated as “hostile” in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.

US Army Special Operations Command said that simulated exercises like this are routine. They also said that the public wouldn’t experience any disruption in their day-to-day lives, since the entire operation takes place in remote areas.

But, many Texans have expressed both suspicion and opposition to the project. Some claim it’s an attempt to institute martial law. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz told Texans that he is on it: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

My office has reached out to the Pentagon to inquire about this exercise…We are assured it is a military training exercise. I have no reason to doubt those assurances, but I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty, because when the federal government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this administration, the natural consequence is that many citizens don’t trust what it is saying.

And Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) called up the Texas Guard (one of three of Texas’ quasi-military groups), ordering them to “monitor” the Special Forces troops during their eight weeks of training.

Abbott seems to think his weekend warriors will accomplish…what? Then again, if you’re convinced that Jade Helm 15 is a false-flag operation designed to distract you while The Black Guy in the White House and his evil Muslim overlords plot a takeover of Texas, nothing will convince you otherwise.

It can be exceedingly difficult to discern where the parody ends and the serious conspiracy theories begin. Here is a claim from The Common Sense Show:

You see, there are these Wal-Marts in West Texas that supposedly closed for six months for ‘renovation’. That’s what they want you to believe. The truth is these Wal-Marts are going to be military guerrilla-warfare staging areas and FEMA processing camps for political prisoners.

How do you reason with people gripped with an ironclad conviction that all of the above is true, and that those who can’t see it, are dupes under the influence of Obama, Rachel Maddow, and George Soros?

Texas isn’t a barometer of much, except perhaps the price of oil pipe for fracking. Illegal immigration is going down. The number of Mexican-Americans in the voting population is going up. Rick Perry is still learning to count to three, and Ted Cruz, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, certainly knows which way is up. Apparently, he is more a deeply cynical man than a deranged one. Either way, he’s unfit for public office.

This false issue and the Republican response to it, is another example of Neo-Fascism in America. In this case, it is billionaires aligned with corrupt Republican politicians. They have an organization, ALEC, that drafts and shares model state-level legislation among state governments in the US. They have purchased state and federal legislators to do their bidding. Fascism doesn’t say, “We hate you!” It says, “Those guys over there hate you. They’re out to get you. Luckily, we’ve come to help you”.

This is the price we are paying for false equivalence by the media, which was popularized starting in 1982 with CNN’s Crossfire. It’s the same thing you get if you allow children to engage in anything their little heart desires: What do you get when there are no negative consequences for despicable actions, including bigotry, or in-your-face political ham-handedness?

You get a situation that is out of control, as it has been in the past 30 years.

Today’s conservatives/Republicans/libertarians are grown-up delinquents who have figured out that there is no bed time, no chores, no tests to take, and no need to eat their vegetables of responsibility.

The continuing assertion by the GOP that the President is behaving illegally, or that his orders should be ignored, is contributing to public distrust. Since our laws flow from the Constitution, it’s particularly annoying that those that claim to love it the most are directly attacking it with claims like this.

We are surfing down a very slippery slope. Right-wing politicians win elections by demonizing the government. They are now addicted to it. Like other addicts, they have to keep upping the dosage to get the same effect.

Unfortunately, they’re into serious overdose territory now.

RIP Guy Carawan

Unless you were around for the folk revival era in the late 1950’s − early 1960’s, you probably don’t know who Guy Carawan was. He co-wrote and popularized the protest song “We Shall Overcome” in the American Civil Rights Movement by teaching it to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. He just died at the age of 87.

Wrongo has written about the genealogy of this song:

The story behind the story of We shall Overcome is that the song is based on the early hymn “U Sanctissima.” Charles Albert Tindley, a minister in Philadelphia, added new words in 1901 and called his new hymn “I’ll Overcome Some Day.” In the ensuing decades, the song became a favorite at black churches throughout the American south, often sung as “I Will Overcome.” Eventually, the song was brought to a workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, TN. The school’s cultural director was Zilphia Horton. Pete Seeger visited the school and changed “We will overcome” to “We shall overcome.” Guy Carawan, a great folk artist who plays the hammer dulcimer, was then a music director at the Highlander School. He introduced it to civil rights activists during a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meeting in 1960. Frank Hamilton was in Seeger’s band.

The song’s copyright includes Zilphia Horton, Frank Hamilton, Pete Seeger and Guy Carawan, but omits Charles A. Tindley.

Carawan lived in California at the beginning of the folk revival movement, but ended up at Highlander, a place famous for its role in left-wing southern organizing in the 20th century. Few know that Rosa Parks had already trained at Highlander on civil rights issues before refusing to move to the back of the bus which led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Martin Luther King had visited Highlander as well.

In 2013, NPR’s Noah Adams had a piece about Carawan and the song. Apparently, Carawan heard the song in the early 1950’s when he was finishing graduate work in sociology at UCLA and doing some singing on the side. He also learned about the Highlander Center, and eventually that’s where he spent most of the rest of his life. He told a history of the song:

I first heard this song from a friend of mine, Frank Hamilton. He taught me this song, and he also had put some chords to it [on guitar]…When I came to Highlander in 1959, Zilphia Horton had died, and I had some singing and musical skills and they needed somebody there. So by the time I came to Highlander, I was playing it with the guitar…

Today, few people sing at civil protests. Somehow, outside of concerts and church, we have lost an understanding of the power of shared singing, of unrestrained sincerity, and the strength it provides to the group.

But its power was important to Dr. King. Here is what he said about the song on March 31, 1968, just days before his death:

There’s a little song that we sing in our movement down in the South. I don’t know if you’ve heard it…You know, I’ve joined hands so often with students and others behind jail bars singing it: ‘We shall overcome.’ Sometimes we’ve had tears in our eyes when we joined together to sing it, but we still decided to sing it: ‘We shall overcome.’ Oh, before this victory’s won, some will have to get thrown in jail some more, but we shall overcome.

One difference between the civil rights movement, which resulted in political change, and the Vietnam demonstrations which did not, was the power of churches working together with students, singing a song that reflected the struggle. Regardless of whether it was sung by Mahalia Jackson, the earnest Carawan, Pete Seeger, or simply kids carrying signs, it had a power to inspire.

A successful movement also required a charismatic leader like Martin Luther King, Jr. who could tell a story, and take America on the journey with him.

Guy Carawan isn’t well known today, but he was really important to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and he will be missed. Here is Guy Carawan singing “We Shall Overcome”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tftdes9dp-A

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Monday Wake Up Call – May 4, 2015

The 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon passed unnoticed by this blogger last week.

Wrongo was drafted in 1966. He was on orders for Vietnam twice, but managed to spend most of his service time in West Germany, running a nuclear missile unit. He lost many friends in Vietnam, but was home, and out of the service in time for most of the big protest marches of the 1970’s. By 1974-75, no one in the States truly expected a “victory”. The debate was, according to Richard Nixon, how to achieve “peace with honor.”

For Nixon, that meant selling America on the premise of “protecting the troops as they withdraw,” or, “securing the release of POW’s”, which Nixon used to extend the war for years.

Since the 1970’s there has been a meme among conservatives that the reason we lost in Vietnam was a lack of national will, brought on by liberals and the war protesters. We still hear this today from a few career military, and many Republican chicken hawks. But, the idea that the primary reason we lost Vietnam was a liberal stab in America’s back is ridiculous, when you realize that Nixon stretched out the war for 6 years beyond the announcement of his “secret plan” to end it.

And if you remember how rapidly the South Vietnamese regime collapsed when it was no longer being propped up by the US military, you know their argument falls apart.

Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan are all places where our boys bled on foreign soil. All are places where our money was recycled to our war profiteers, and where we left behind no ability to bring about the “democratic” way of life that some of us had wished for them.

War profiteering for private corporations, socialized losses for the people. US soldiers dead or maimed for life. This is the legacy of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And do Chicken Hawks care about taking care of our veterans after the fact, here at home? They do not. Their mantra is cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes on the war profiteers. Cut social programs, because how can a war profiteer (including those in Congress) possibly make any money off a government-run non-profit social program?

Wake up America, time to throw the Chicken Hawks out of office! Today’s wake up song is “There’s A Wall in Washington” by Iris DeMent:

Sample Lyrics:
A boy, he traveled from far away
to walk the path ’til he finds that name
He reaches his hand up and traces each letter
He stares at the name of his unknown father
His heart is young and it’s filled with pain
in anger he cries out
‘Who is to blame for this wall in Washington
that’s made of cold black granite?
Why is my father’s name etched here in it
On this wall in Washington?’

Your Monday Hot Links:

Czech libertarians received 200,000 applications for citizenship of Liberland, a seven-square-mile microstate established between Serbia and Croatia. The economy will be based on a digital cryptocurrency. Libertarian paradise. What could go wrong?

Reuters says that China will crack down on strippers who perform at rural funerals. Apparently, the Ministry of Culture is taking aim at performances which corrupt “social morals”. Strippers at funerals?

Statues of Snowden, Manning and Assange were unveiled in Berlin. All are considered heroes on the German political left for leaking US intelligence documents. The life-size statues will be going on a world tour, since they have fewer travel restrictions than the real people.

Want to carry a gun in your pants without risk of becoming a gelding? Try Thunderware, a holster designed to give you security while you pack heat near your meat. Is it pants stuffing? Is this for the guy who want you to think he has more down there than he really has? You be the judge. Gun fanatics bristle when people say that their attachment to guns is very phallic, yet they market Thunderware with a straight face.

Audi has announced that it is making synthetic diesel fuel from just water and carbon dioxide. In a bid to put an end to our fossil fuel crisis, Audi’s experimental diesel fuel is made from air and water. Called “e-diesel,” it has less sulfur and fossil-based oils, so it is more environmentally friendly. Audi claims an overall energy efficiency of around 70%. Sounds too good to be true and so far, they can only make 42 gallons/day. Invest at your own risk. If you have an Audi vehicle take a look at this VW service Melbourne as the provider also specialises in the same for Audis.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – May 3, 2015

Baltimore riots, Nepal earthquakes, same sex marriage in front of the Supremes, Bernie Sanders runs against Hillary. Quite the week.

Did the Baltimore riot result in a move towards justice for Freddie Gray? It is more than an exaggeration to say the rioting caused manslaughter indictments against 6 Baltimore police officers. With the city electing Marilyn Mosby, a daughter and granddaughter of police officers as the Maryland state’s attorney for Baltimore City over an incumbent white Democrat, maybe the indictments would have happened without the riots. Could the justice system now be working a bit better because people in Baltimore voted?

Seven months after Michael Brown, systematic failure to deliver justice in our cities is playing with fire, possibly, a little like 1965 all over again. The number of people in the streets in other cities in solidarity with Baltimore has been growing. And the hot spots are New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta and poor suburban cities with police departments that grift with fines and court penalties.

Indictments notwithstanding, this is Baltimore and many other cities:

Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press

If you watched mainstream media coverage, all of Baltimore was on fire:

Gay marriage discussion brought out the best in our politicians:

And ministers now have a new take on the old question:

Same Sex wasn’t the only type of marriage decided by the Supremes:

Bernie Sanders threw hat in the ring, and almost no media covered it:

Nepal was on everyone’s mind, including Christian bigots:

Ever hear of Tony Miano? He’s a former LA cop who seems to be a Christian. He should ask “What would Jesus tweet?” because what he did was an epic fail for a human, much less a Christian. Miano could be organizing a drive to collect donations, but instead, he’s tweeting about “pagan temples” and how the people of Nepal need to repent and receive Christ.

Onward, Christian soldiers!

Has The Saudi Military on Yemen’s Border Deserted?

Just saw a disturbing story about Saudi Arabia’s fight in Yemen, a story that has not surfaced in our media. It comes from News786, an alternative news channel that calls itself the largest Hindi news website of Punjab. It covers news from India and the world:

Here is the real reason why Saudi Arabia halted operation `Decisive Storm’ and failed to launch a ground invasion of Yemen: in a stunning revelation, it has come to light that on 25-26th April, almost 4,000 Saudi forces fled their border bases in anticipation of Riyadh’s order for sending its troops inside Yemen.

News786 goes on to say that the West knows this:

The Intel gathered by the western intelligence agencies shows that the Saudi military forces have fled their bases, military centers and bordering checkpoints near Yemen in groups…European Intel said that Saudi forces’ mass AWOL forced Riyadh to declare ceasefire and dissuaded it from launching ground attacks against Yemen.

Col. Pat Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis, is a retired US Military Intelligence officer who served in Yemen and was the first Professor of Arabic Language at West Point. He said this:

Saudi Arabia has no ground forces worthy of the name. They are the worst sort of rabble recruited in economically distressed parts of SA where the chance of an easy, well paid job in an army that has never fought anyone is a pleasing prospect. That is the Saudi Arabian Land Forces in a nutshell. Then there is the Saudi Arabian National Guard, a Sunni, largely Wahhabi internal security force.

Now, the news that the Saudi National Guard and its regular Army forces are deserting could all be put down to disinformation. Some of the information cited by News786 comes from Al-Manar, a Lebanese TV network owned by Hezbollah that has been designated as a terrorist entity by the US. Much of the original reporting was by FARS News Agency, usually described as Iran’s semi-official news agency.

So, is it disinformation put out by Iran and Hezbollah to cause Egypt and the US to think before they jump in? More from Col. Lang: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

I have told people here endlessly that information and sources must be evaluated separately. IMO the Saudis have no ground forces worthy of consideration and will not invade Yemen in any significant way. One must remember that SA has a government controlled press and any such news would be ruthlessly suppressed in SA sources.

So, what’s the point of starting a war you cannot fight yourself? Could it be that the Saudis did not have a realistic assessment of their military strength? Or that their officers were yes-men, who didn’t want to upset the Saudi royals?

America knows too well how difficult it is to win a ground war in a Middle East country.

A Saudi ground war in Yemen could likely end in a defeat, one with huge repercussions for our ME strategy. America thinks of the Saudis and the Israelis as our best pals in the ME. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are enthralled with these two racist countries, and believe what they tell us is the truth about the geopolitical situation in the ME. We have backed our belief with money and arms.

Imagine our surprise if after all the arms we have sold them and after all the training we have provided them, Saudi Arabia turns out to be unable to defend itself. Like Iraq, or Afghanistan.

Let’s start the weekend with a song. Here is “Blame It On Obama” by Andre Williams. This came out in September, 2012 inspired by the presidential campaign. Williams is a 77+ year-old R&B singer who is better known for his salacious R&B than his political commentary:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.
See you Sunday.

Let’s Talk About Baltimore

Regarding Baltimore, the NYT says:

Hundreds of rifle-toting National Guard members began deploying here on Tuesday morning, lining one of the city’s main thoroughfares and taking up posts around a police station in western Baltimore that had been the scene of earlier protests.

From the start of the demonstration through Tuesday morning, 15 police officers were injured, 2 people were shot, both in the leg. And approximately 200 people were arrested. There is a night curfew. There are the predictable images of large groups of young black males, buildings on fire, up-armored cops and National Guard, and the shaking of jowls by media and politicians.

These stories are always depressingly similar: Police shoot a black guy. They obfuscate for several days. A protest turns violent, and some of those professing to be “victims” create victims of their own, mostly in their own neighborhoods. The police are happy to give them room to destroy property in black neighborhoods, but then draw the line when the crowd moves out of that prescribed area.

Something was bound to give in Baltimore. Check out this report from the Baltimore Sun, called “Undue Force“:

Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations [by the Baltimore police department].

According to state law, Baltimore cops cannot be sued for more than $200,000 for each “offense”. That statutory cap can be exceeded when there are multiple claims in a lawsuit, and if there is malice the cap may not apply. The largest settlement has been $500k. In total, the city has paid $5.7 million since January 2011, and that doesn’t count the $5.8 million spent by the city on legal fees to defend these claims against their police. Just a cost of doing business in Baltimore.

So, once the riot started the mayor and the governor called for calm. “Why can’t these people react non-violently?” Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic provides an answer:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con.

Here is a series of tweets by Billmon: (edited by the Wrongologist)

…but the cops did not destroy the black industrial working class, or finance the slumlords, or redline poor neighborhoods. Police brutality isn’t the only reason that #BlackLivesMatter.
… And not being unlawfully killed is a pretty minimal standard for “mattering.”
…And so the policy “debate” becomes limited to: “Black men: Should we let the cops kill them or not?” Which is fucking sick. Or: “Should America have an incarceration rate that’s 10 times higher than the rest of developed world? Or just 5 times higher.”

We are witnessing a continuing trend in US policing: Violence against inanimate property equals violence against “the people”. It brings a disproportionate response, whether it is the Occupy movement, Ferguson, or Baltimore.

“Urban riots” always conjure up bad images and bad responses, like the riots in 1964 in Harlem and Philadelphia, and in Newark in 1967, all of which were ignited by allegations of police brutality. In Newark, Governor Richard J. Hughes (R) called up the National Guard. When they arrived, reports were coming in of black snipers roaming the city, and terrorists with dynamite and arms heading towards Newark. The result was 26 deaths and 725 wounded in Newark, but no snipers or terrorists were found.

Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R), channeling his inner Spiro Agnew, vowed to quell rioting by sending in 1,000 National Guard troops. From the Baltimore Sun:

Hogan said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a political ally of the new Republican governor, would sent 150 troopers plus additional resources to Baltimore.

Christie will never let a good crisis go to waste.

The ultimate outcome of Baltimore will predictably be calls for more law and ordering by the right, and more calls for inconsequential band aids by the left. Perhaps the policy debate ought to be broader than: “what will it take for police to stop killing black guys?”, although that would be a good start.

Police need to remember that since they have the authority and the power, they also have the responsibility to use both properly. It’s not the responsibility of the person they pull over, the person they want to question, or the person who is standing nearby, it’s THEIR responsibility.

Let’s face it, Americans live in a soft police state. Whites may not sense its severity or doom like urban black males, since their threat is to privacy. But the freedoms of most Americans have never been more threatened and violated by governments at the federal, state and local levels.

Here is Randy Newman singing his composition, “Baltimore“:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

Moving the Goal Posts on Obamacare

Gallup has an informative chart about the declining percentage of uninsured in the US:

The percentage of uninsured Americans climbed from the mid-14% range in early 2008 and peaked at 18.0% in the third quarter of 2013. The uninsured rate has dropped sharply since Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) took effect at the beginning of 2014.

It is possible to argue that an improving economy and a falling unemployment rate may have accelerated the steep drop in the percentage of uninsured over the past year. However, the uninsured rate is significantly lower than it was in early 2008, before the Great Recession, suggesting that the recent decline is due more to Obamacare than to just an improving economy.

From NY Magazine on this trend:

It is starting to look possible that this trend is not some random fluke that has happened six straight quarters but is somehow related to the enactment of Obamacare. So any day now, we can expect conservative politicians and intellectuals to begin publicly rethinking their analysis of this law.

They were correct. Here is the 2010-2014 short version of the Republican viewpoint on the ACA:

The ACA will not reduce the number of people without health insurance. Indeed, it might make this problem we don’t consider a problem, even worse.

Now that the ACA looks to be doing the job, the 2015 short version of the Republican viewpoint is:

Everyone knew that the ACA would result in a huge drop in the number of people without health insurance — what does that prove? Besides, how can we really know that it all isn’t a big coincidence?

This is called “Moving the Goal Posts”. Wikipedia says it means

To change the criterion (goal) of a process or competition while still in progress, in such a way that the new goal offers one side an intentional advantage or disadvantage.

Here is an example of moving the goal posts. From Cliff Asness: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

In contrast, the rise in coverage is heralded by a myriad of Obamacare supporters as one of two major pieces of proof the law is working. But, how can something we knew before the fact be proof of anything?

Shorter: If we predict that something good will happen as a result of a new law, and that good thing happens, it doesn’t count as proof that the law served its purpose or was any good at all, unless Republicans say so.

The goal post movers also said Obamacare was a job killer. House Speaker John Boehner announced on March 17, 2010, five days before President Obama signed the ACA into law:

The President … continues to push his job-killing government takeover of health care that will hurt small businesses at a time when they need certainty, not more Washington tax hikes and mandates.

In 2011, House Republicans even passed the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act” — the first time that any piece of congressional legislation ever had “job-killing” in its title. Sadly for both Mr. Boehner and the House Republicans, we have added 12 million new private sector jobs since the bill was passed.

There is a new J.D. Power survey which looks at enrollee satisfaction with the ACA. It finds that people who signed up for insurance on the exchanges were slightly more satisfied (69.6%) than people with non-exchange plans, usually through employers (67.9%). People re-enrolling on the exchanges were 74.4% satisfied. New enrollees for 2015 were 5.5% more satisfied than 2014 enrollees, who endured the disastrous roll-out of healthcare.gov. So people like the subsidies and they like their actual insurance policies.

Think about it: ACA forecasted costs have been consistently revised downwards. The number of uninsured are dramatically lower. Satisfaction with Obamacare is higher, and it didn’t kill jobs.

It’s utter Tyranny.

Maybe that’s why the Senate’s top five Republican leaders have cosponsored legislation to extend Obamacare insurance subsidies until 2017. The extension will give Republicans more time to again move the goal posts.

They should try this one: Now that Republicans control Congress and most state governments, we have way fewer uninsured.

Conservative policies work!

Monday Wake Up Call – April 27, 2015

Last week saw the sentencing of David Petraeus, former CIA director and the highest-profile general from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to two years’ probation for providing classified information to his mistress. Mr. Petraeus was also fined $100,000.

Petraeus remains a four-star US Army general. His retired pay is $220,000/year, plus the perks of shopping at the PX and the commissary store, full medical benefits, free travel on government aircraft, free legal advice; the list goes on.

A US officer convicted in a US civilian court of a felony is subject to dismissal from the service, at the discretion of the service secretary. A dismissal is the equivalent of a dishonorable discharge for an enlisted soldier. It strips the former member of all the perks, everything.

What Petraeus was convicted of would normally be a felony in a civil court. But he was charged by the Obama Administration with a misdemeanor so he wasn’t vulnerable to an administrative dismissal. This misdemeanor conviction will have about the same impact on his life as a conviction for littering. From the New York Times:

As part of the plea agreement, Mr. Petraeus admitted that he gave his lover, Paula Broadwell, who was writing a biography about him, black notebooks that contained sensitive information about official meetings, war strategy and intelligence capabilities, as well as the names of covert officers.

War strategy. That would be the strategy written by the guy giving it to Broadwell, along with the names of covert officers? Compare that to the crimes for which Jeffrey Sterling and 8 others are facing hard time in prison. Sterling was convicted on 9 counts of violations of the Espionage Act for providing much lesser information to a guy writing a book, James Risen. Manning got 35 years, John Kiriakou gets 2, Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy for 3 years and counting, Snowden is on the run, and no military brass is doing time for Abu Ghraib.

Petraeus gave Broadwell that information for personal profit. It helped him in his amorous adventure and, most likely, helped the sales of her book. He has since moved on to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P., a New York investment firm where he is a partner.

That makes Petraeus just another example of too big to fail.

The Justice Department and the Obama administration need today’s wake-up, for not pursuing Mr. Petraeus to the fullest extent of the law.

So here is your Monday wake-up, the White-Throated Sparrow. These guys are all over our property right now:

If you read the Wrongologist via email, you can view the video here.

Your Monday Hot Links:
Everyone wants to appear smart when in a meeting. Here are a few tricks:

Kochs were defeated in Montana after spending a bundle to defeat Medicaid expansion. What? Medicare expansion passed in a Red state?

How much water is in your food? See this graphic. Everyone should look at this, not just Californians.

Wall Street Journal says more people are out of the stock market than are in it. About 52% of Americans are not investing in the stock market, and 53% of them say they don’t have the funds to invest. A different study from the National Institute on Retirement Security found that 45% of working-age households had no retirement savings at all; among the 55-64 age group, the average was only $12,000.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 26, 2015

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether same-sex marriage bans are constitutional. Gay marriage is currently legal in 36 states. And, by the end of this Supreme Court term in June, same-sex couples will either be able to wed in all 50 states, or gay marriage bans may be restored in many states where they’ve been struck down.

Opponents of same-sex marriage shouldn’t worry, because Rep. Steve King (R-IA), the Pride of Iowa, has their backs. He proposed legislation to strip federal courts of the ability to make any ruling on marriage. His “Restrain the Judges on Marriage Act of 2015” would, if enacted, strip federal courts of jurisdiction in all cases related to marriage. The bill would leave the issue solely to State courts. Mr. King released this statement along with his bill:

For too long, federal courts have overstepped their constitutionally limited duty to interpret the Constitution. Rather, federal courts have perverted the Constitution to make law and create constitutional rights to things such as privacy, birth control, and abortion. These un-enumerated, so-called constitutionally-protected rights were not envisioned by our Founding Fathers.

He isn’t alone with the “my religion is supreme” arguments:

Mike Huckabee warns gay rights will outlaw Christianity: Because God-fearing Americans know that the gayz will destroy traditional marriage and Christianity. Is THAT what you want, America?

Anti-Gay Activists: We Are Prepared to Die to Fight Gay Marriage ‘Slavery: E.W. Jackson, the 2013 Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia said this at the National Press Club. Maybe dead anti-gay activists is not such a bad idea.

Iowa GOP official says Christians should enjoy special rights: No, Steve King didn’t say this, it was Tamara Scott, a Republican National Committeewoman. She conceded that Muslims had First Amendment rights, but she said Christianity should be favored under US law.

Look, these charlatans have to whip up their base, those Gulfstreams aren’t going to buy themselves.

So in honor of their ideas, the anti-gay right gets a free McDonald’s next time in NYC:

GOP jerks twerk for Koch dough. Very hard to un-see this:

Loretta Lynch finally gets ticket punched to DC:

Europe still thinking about an acceptable migrant solution:

Earth Day comes and goes with speech-making and little change:

Is a Mob at The Gates?

There is an idea deep in the American psyche that there always is “a mob at the gates”. The mob wants in so that they can take advantage of the good things we have, or they want to lay waste to our culture and way of life. Therefore, we must be vigilant, because our innocence and openness makes us vulnerable to exploitation or infection from outside. This is well-documented in Robert Reich’s 1986 book, Tales of a New America.

We have a history of fearing and demonizing the “others”. It has been a strong weapon in hands of America’s conservatives. In the 1950’s we were visited by McCarthyism. In the early 1950s, conservatives were deeply frightened by Communism’s advances overseas (communists were ruthless and Godless!). By hunting alleged communists in the State Department, suggesting that the real threat lay not overseas but at home, Joseph McCarthy played brilliantly to those fears.

Sadly, the McCarthy period wasn’t the first time in American history that we demonized outsiders who we thought were trying to climb inside the gates. When they tried to get in, we attacked people from their homeland who were already here. We had slavery, followed by Jim Crow. Hyper-nationalists went after German-Americans during World War I, and we rounded up Japanese-Americans during World War II. After McCarthy was discredited, cultural conservatives moved on to “protect” America against supposed internal threats from black militancy, feminism, and the gay-rights movement.

After 9/11, President Bush defended Islam. He called Islam “a faith based upon love, not hate,” and even visited a mosque. In a Presidential debate with Al Gore, Bush condemned the fact that “Arab-Americans are racially profiled.”

But today, would-be Republican presidential candidates are turning on Muslim-Americans. From Peter Bienart in the Atlantic:

In January, the Republican presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal argued that “it is completely reasonable for [Western] nations to discriminate” against Muslims in their immigration policies, on the grounds that radical Islamists “want to destroy their culture.”

In February…Mike Huckabee, declared, “Everything [President Obama] does is against what Christians stand for, and he’s against the Jews in Israel. The one group of people that can know they have his undying, unfailing support would be the Muslim community.”

In March, after New York City announced that public schools would close for two Muslim holidays, Todd Starnes, a Fox News contributor, lamented, “The Islamic faith is being given accommodation and the Christian faith and other religious faiths are being marginalized.”

In fact, Bienart thinks that if George W. Bush were seeking the Republican presidential nomination today, he’d be excoriated for his view of Islam. Why are Republicans more hostile to Muslims and Islam today than they were after 9/11? And why are American Muslims, who in 2000 mostly voted Republican, replacing gays and feminists as the right’s chief culture-war foe?

Could there be a new McCarthyism emerging in the Republican Party?

A 2014 poll by the Pew Research Center found that Republicans were 31 percentage points more likely than Democrats to be “very concerned” about the threat of “Islamic extremism” around the world, and were 25 percentage points more likely to be concerned about Islamic terrorism in the US.

Most conservatives are happy to bomb ISIS or drone the Taliban, but many have lost the appetite for American boots on the ground against Islamic terrorists. And by reconceiving the Islamist danger as a domestic problem, (exactly as McCarthy did with Communism in the 1950’s), conservatives can now appear to fight it ferociously, without having to invade yet another Arab country.

Republicans all across the US have warned that Sharia might be adopted in parts of the US, and that American Christians might thus be subjected to Muslim law. Bobby Jindal said (falsely) that Muslims have established “no-go” zones for non-Muslims in some neighborhoods in Europe, with the implication that they might do the same in the US.

Muslims make up only 1% of the US population. They are not marching in the streets. For the most part, they constitute a small, culturally conservative minority that wants little more than to be left alone. They don’t have the numbers to punish Republicans at the ballot box for demonizing them.

For the rest of us, that makes the immorality of the Republican’s position clear.

Promoting Islamophobia is unlikely to hurt the GOP politically, and it will help them with their base. The February and March 2016 primaries are predominantly in southern states, where Islam is more reviled than elsewhere in the country.

So, look for the rhetoric on culture war issues, including the threat allegedly posed by Muslim-Americans to become even more outrageous in 2016, as Republicans launch their new McCarthyism against the mob both inside, and outside our gates.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Author: wrongologist