Signs Of The Times

The Dalai Lama is retiring.  He announced it via his website.  Both events are telling of new times and how different things are now than they were even 50 years ago, when he left China as a young man.

"Since I made my intention clear I have received repeated and earnest requests both from within Tibet and outside, to continue to provide political leadership," the Dalai Lama said in his statement. "My desire to devolve authority has nothing to do with a wish to shirk responsibility. It is to benefit Tibetans in the long run.

Though retiring from political duties, he does intend to continue his role in spiritual leadership.  The man has lived his life making a point, but eventually  even the strongest of men grow old.  He acknowledged that he will "have to go sooner or later" and  "I'm also a human being. ... Retirement is also my right."

Look For The Union Scapegoat Label, Part 4

PolitiFact has hit the right with a Pants On Fire liar alert on the supposed $7.5 million cost to clean up the Wisconsin State Capitol after union protests.

While urging a judge to scale back protests, a state Department of Administration official said the state Capitol sustained $7.5 million in damage. State officials could not immediately provide a basis for the number, and later backtracked from it.  The new estimate: $347,500, some 20 times less than the original one. And there are indications that even that could be high.

This smells like an effort to pour gas on the anti-protester fire. The claim was ridiculously high. And that gets a Pants on Fire rating.

Gosh, you mean Republican state officials would flat-out lie in order to paint union protesters as "thugs" and "criminals" in an effort to destroy unions and hurt the Democratic party in the state?  I'm shocked.



Yeah, but it's all about the state's deficit.  Right?

Our Real Domestic Terrorist Problem

As GOP Rep. Peter King of New York gets his show hearing on today about "Radical Islam" in the United States, there are two important points that he won't mention.  First, a vast and overwhelming majority of American Muslims not only want nothing to do with radical anti-Americanism, they are the key to stopping it.
Danger Room's Adam Rawnsley:

But the numbers tell the story of jihadis’ marginality in America in better detail. In a forthcoming report, Brian Michael Jenkins, a terrorism expert and senior advisor at the Rand Corporation, updates a previous study on the subject and counts  the number of Muslims in America who’ve participated in jihadist-related crimes from 9/11 through 2010. He shared the results with Danger Room ahead of publication.

181 Muslims have either been indicted, arrested or self-identified (such as through suicide bombings in Somalia) as participating in jihadist-related crimes since 9/11, according to Jenkins’ study. Estimates on the number of Muslims in America  population are numerous and inconsistent; the Pew forum fixes the number at 2.6 million, Jenkins uses a figure of 3 million. In either case, the figure lies between 0.007 to 0.006 percent of American Muslims — an extreme minority in the fullest sense of the words.

“This is half-hearted jihad,” says Jenkins. Even if hundreds or thousands of American-based Muslims support or tolerate the radicals on the sly, it’s still a tiny, tiny percentage of the whole.

Those few Muslims who choose to engage in terrorism still represent a threat that needs to be taken seriously. But their relative position on the fringe of the community yields an important insight as to how this should be undertaken: America’s Muslim community is an obstacle to participation in al-Qaeda’s twisted interpretation of jihad, not a gateway. The logical conclusion is that we must embrace this community in the fight against terrorism rather than undermine it through fear-mongering.

And while some Republicans are quick to demonize all American Muslims (and all Muslims everywhere for that matter) the reality is that the domestic terrorism problem we really do have involves not Muslims, but white supremacist hate groups.

Finally there has been an arrest made in the attempted terrorist bombing of the Spokane, Washington Martin Luther King Day Parade in January, and the suspect is a real doozy.

The man arrested today in Washington State for the attempted MLK Day bombing in Spokane is named Kevin William Harpham. Here's what the Spokane newspaper has found so far:

The Southern Poverty Law Center confirmed that Harpham in 2004 was a member of the National Alliance, which is one of the most visible white supremacist organizations in the nation. It was founded by the late William Pierce, who authored "The Turner Diaries," a novel about a future race war. That book was believed to be the blueprint behind the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh. 

"What to me this arrest suggests is that the Martin Luther King Day attack is what it always looked like: A terror-mass murder attempt directed at black people and their sympathizers," said Mark Potok, who is the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project that tracks and investigates hate groups.

Potok said his organization's records also indicate that Harpham was in the U.S. Army in 1996 and 1997, serving with the 37th Field Artillery Regiment at Fort Lewis.

Ex-military white supremacist trying to kill a bunch of Americans, why does that sound familiar?  Oh yeah, and the bomb was specifically targeting African-Americans too.  But Kevin William Harpham?  Strangely, not a Muslim.

But you won't hear anything about this at Rep. King's "blame the Muslims" hearing.  The Spokane bombing story has been spiked since day one.  The story will continue to be spiked, too.  If King was serious about investigating radicalism in the country, he'd have to take a look at hate groups like this.  But that goes against the GOP narrative that there are no racists, only people who are racists for thinking racism still exists in 2011.

Patriot Games

Wisconsin State Senate Republicans stripped the financial parts out of the budget repair bill and passed the "strip collective bargaining from employee unions" part with no Dems present to even vote on it.  TPM's Eric Kleefield:

Capping a dramatic turn of events, the Wisconsin state Senate on Wednesday night passed a new, stripped-down "budget repair bill" -- which now excludes all the fiscal elements of the original budget repair bill, and simply includes the original's provisions to roll back the collective bargaining and organizational rights of Wisconsin's public employee unions.

With all 14 Democrats absent, having fled the state weeks ago in order to block the three-fifths budget quorum, the bill passed by an 18-1 margin, with only moderate Republican Dale Schultz voting no.
Gov. Scott Walker (R) has released this statement:

"The Senate Democrats have had three weeks to debate this bill and were offered repeated opportunities to come home, which they refused. In order to move the state forward, I applaud the Legislature's action today to stand up to the status quo and take a step in the right direction to balance the budget and reform government. The action today will help ensure Wisconsin has a business climate that allows the private sector to create 250,000 new jobs."

Meanwhile, state Democratic Party chairman Mike Tate has released this statement, vowing to recall all those Republican state Senators who are eligible under the state's recall laws, which require at least one year of a term to be completed -- and to recall Walker next year:

"Using tactics that trample on the traditions of our Legislature, the Republican leadership has betrayed our state. Republicans have rubber-stamped the desire of the Koch Brothers and their godshead Scott Walker to cripple Wisconsin's middle class and lower benefits and wages for every single wage-earner in our state. The vote does nothing to create jobs, does nothing to strengthen our state, and shows finally and utterly that this never was about anything but raw political power. We now put our total focus on recalling the eligible Republican senators who voted for this heinous bill. And we also begin counting the days remaining before Scott Walker is himself eligible for recall."

Whirlwinds and reaping come to mind.  Remember, the entire plan here is to eliminate public unions, and by doing so break the political back of state level Democratic Party organization.

This was never about the state budget, or the state's deficit, or taxes or expenditures.  This was about partisan payback, one side using the power they were given by the people not to govern the whole state fairly, but to cynically and cruelly dismantle the political power of their opponents to eliminate them, and it didn't matter whose throat they cut to win as they plowed through teachers, firefighters, cops, and nurses.

And in doing so, they proved beyond a doubt that the only thing that mattered was to wreck as many state employees lives as possible as partisan punishment for daring to support the unions or the Democrats.  It's not about governing the state, it's about destroying the opposition so that you don't have to govern.



I believe the Republicans in Wisconsin have badly, badly miscalculated here.  A big, red line was crossed. And it's something people aren't going to soon forget.  The first shots in the Great Austerity War have been truly fired.  There will be more.  And the losers will be American workers, unionized or not.

StupidiNews!

• Foreclosures were down a record 27% in February, but most of that drop can be attributed to banks' problems with MERS.
• Three BBC journalists were detained and roughed up in Libya as part of a "mock execution" by Qaddafi loyalist forces.
• Gulf state Senators want to extend offshore oil leases for 12 months to make up for "lost time" due to last year's moratorium in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
• Only 1 in 7 Americans believe the country is in economic recovery right now, almost half believe they are worse off than they were two years ago.
• Microsoft says it has sold ten million Kinect units for the Xbox 360, 8 million in the unit's first 60 days.

Last Call

Doug at Balloon Juice nails my thoughts on the passing of David Broder:

I went through a long stage of disliking David Broder for being an establishment dispenser of Beltway conventional wisdom. Why he couldn’t he be smarter and more fact-based, like, say, Paul Krugman?

Then I realized that was the wrong comparison. There is not much place for smart, fact- based argument in our system. Broder should be praised for having been smarter and more diligent than Cokie Roberts and Richard Cohen.

The problem with the Village was never David Broder, it was the system that made somebody like David Broder the "Dean of the Washington press corps" and treated him as its high priest for 45 years.  It's the same system that views John McCain as a serious policy wonk, Paul Ryan as an economic genius, and always rewards access, access, access.

Broder appeared on Meet The Press some 401 times in his career.  That's close to eight years of consecutive Sundays' worth, or once a month every month for 34 years, which is pretty much what he did.  And yes, the fairest thing I can say about him is he was better than Cokie Roberts.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

The lesson from today's resignation of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller over a departing fundraiser getting caught telling the truth about conservatives?  If you lie, you win.  If you tell the truth, you lose.

NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller has resigned, NPR just announced.

This follows yesterday's news that then-NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller (no relation) was videotaped slamming conservatives and questioning whether NPR needs federal funding during a lunch with men posing as members of a Muslim organization (they were working with political activist James O'Keefe on a "sting.")

Vivian Schiller quickly condemned Ron Schiller's comments, and he moved up an already-announced decision to leave NPR and resigned effective immediately. But Ron Schiller's gaffe followed last fall's dismissal of NPR political analyst Juan Williams, for which Vivian Schiller came under harsh criticism and NPR's top news executive, Ellen Weiss, resigned.

Schiller fell on her sword to try to save public broadcasting funding.  Republicans immediately responded with "Screw you, we will burn you to the ground."

The issue about taxpayers funding public broadcasting isn't about who gets hired or fired, it's about two simple facts: we can't afford it and they don't need it. We're facing a $1.5 trillion deficit and spending hundreds of millions on public broadcasting makes no sense today when they are raising millions from private donors and Americans already have thousands of media choices.

Oh, and the fundraiser exec who was leaving NPR anyway for a job with a think tank?  Lost his new job too.  Meanwhile, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh continue to lie on a near daily basis with zero consequences.  To recap, a known professional liar with zero journalistic credibility on a crusade to destroy the institution has all but decapitated NPR.

Anyone to the left of FOX News must be annihilated.  Don't think it will stop with public broadcasting, either.

No Hope For Newt Doesn't Mean He's Not Dangerous

Josh Marshall is quick to dismiss Newt Gingrich as having any real shot in 2012 at the GOP nomination for President.

Let's remember, Newt famously dumped wife #1 for wife #2 while wife #1 was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. As in literally went to the hospital to present her with divorce papers while she was recovering from surgery for uterine cancer.

He eventually dumped wife #2 for wife #3 shortly after wife #2 was diagnosed with MS back in 1999. And he was having the affair on wife #2 with wife #3 while he was turning the country upside down trying to drive Bill Clinton from office over his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

There are so many reasons why Gingrich is the lead balloon of presidential politics, but Frum really has this right that the infidelity thing is just something he cannot survive. Not because voters won't tolerate infidelity -- in many circumstances they will -- but because the pattern with Gingrich shows a level of hypocrisy, cruelty and emotional immaturity that most people won't accept in a president. 

Bullcrap.  One word for you, Josh.

Dubya.

He got elected and re-elected.  Newtie, like Moose Lady and the No Fun Bowdlerization Bunch along with her, are all about hypocrisy, cruelty and emotional immaturity.  That's what Republicans friggin do these days, 24/7. 

Everything's about baldfaced hypocritical lies that Democrats are doing X destroying the country when Republicans pushed the same thing under Reagan-Bush.  Everything's about being completely cruel to women, minorities, unions, government employees, intellectuals, scientists, anyone who's not a Fortune 5000 CEO is a "moocher" who needs to be eliminated from American society as one of "them", and the daily Perpetual Outrage Machine is prima facie evidence that emotional immaturity is the key to the hypocrisy and cruelty parts of the equation.

By that yardstick, Newt is the perfect 2012 candidate.  Don't dismiss him out of hand, he's still dangerous because frankly all the Republicans mentioned for a run against Obama are guilty of the same circus nonsense.  And anyone who survives the GOP primaries will have perfected all three of those.

Be afraid.

The Netflix Conundrum, Part 2

Bon The Geek noted back in December that Netflix climbed to the top in the video rental business by giving customers what they wanted:  convenience of delivery.  She's right...and the model has worked so well that there's a new player in town who wants a piece of that success.  Is the new guy big enough to tangle with the Big Red Envelope?

I'd say so.  It's none other than Facebook.

Movie rentals are coming to Facebook. Warner Bros. says it is testing a service that will offer select movies for purchase or rental through the public pages of these movies on the world's largest online social network.

Starting Tuesday, Facebook users who visit the official page of "Batman: The Dark Knight" can click a "watch" icon and pay 30 Facebook credits, or $3, to watch the movie. The movie is streamed through a Facebook application.

Renters have access to a movie for 48 hours and can replay it as many times as they like. Warner Bros. said it will add other movies in coming months but did not say what those would be.

That choking sound you heard yesterday was Netflix stock taking a shot to the gonads.

"While officially dubbed a test, we expect to see more studios get behind the effort given the large platform and higher price point," wrote Jefferies analyst Youssef H. Squali in a note to investors. He added that he sees the Facebook-Warner Bros. deal as "yet another caution sign" against movie rental company Netflix Inc.'s high stock value.

Netflix lost $11.95, or 5.8 percent, to close at $195.45. Time Warner Inc., which owns Warner Bros., fell 35 cents to close at $36.43.

"With Facebook's entry, the competitive playing field is getting crowded," the analyst said. "We expect this competition to curtail Netflix's subscriber growth and drive higher content costs, impacting revenue growth and (profit) margins over time."

Yeah, Facebook's 100 million plus US users can do that.  If even one percent of Facebook users decide to use the service, that's a big ol' chunk of Netflix's revenue that goes away.  The streaming movie war is officially on, folks.

Stay tuned.

What's In A Name?

LAUREL,Md. - Instead of reporting to school each morning, 15-year-old Byron Preston is reporting for work in his father's barber shop and nail salon. Byron was expelled from Laurel High School three months ago. He was found with a device called a "tattoo gun" in his possession.
A tattoo gun fires no bullets or other projectiles. Like a solder gun or a caulking gun, it is a tool.

"They said it was a weapon because it could inflict bodily harm," explained the high school sophomore, who added he had no intention of tattooing himself or anyone else. Byron said he just wanted to practice tattooing on pieces of fruit.

The school wasn't even offended that the tool is used to give tattoos.  Because it has the word gun in it, the school has recommended that Byron be expelled.  Meanwhile, the art lab should hide their glue guns, and shop class should steer clear of staple guns, because you never know what might happen.

Preventable Stupidity

Markeda Oyeyinka was said to have been a normal, healthy infant before she was rushed to the emergency room at Cook County Hospital in September 1993.

She had suffered multiple injuries and was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome. For the rest of her life, she would suffer severe health and developmental problems.

Markeda died on March 7, at the age of 17.  Every minute that she suffered could have been prevented. Shaken baby syndrome (or abusive head trauma) is the leading cause of deaths among abused children.  I have worked with mentally disabled kids for years. I have been to group homes, both good and bad, and worked with kids who never had a chance.  Almost every long-term care facility had at least one child who did have a chance in this world, but it was taken away by someone else.  Someone who couldn't control their temper and took it out on a little child.

If you see an adult who is out of control around a small child, please report it.  You could save a life.  You could set an example.  And you can prevent a lifetime of suffering.

Detainment Entertainment

You'd figure with President Obama's executive order reinstating military tribunals over Gitmo terror suspects and codifying indefinite detention without trial into law would cause the GOP to yell FASCIST really, really loudly and for them to oppose it, because Obama is doing something, so Republicans must do the opposite.  But Republicans apparently love the idea of the military being able to declare anyone a terrorist and detain them indefinitely so much that they're fighting to remove Eric Holder and the Department of Justice from having any oversight over terrorist detainees whatsoever.

And guess who's leading the charge?  That's right, Mean Old Yelling Man and Huckleberry Hound.

Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are teaming up with Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee to write legislation that would take decisions about trying detainees out of the attorney general's hands and hand that power to the secretary of defense.

In the wake of the White House's new executive order allowing Guantanamo detainees to be held indefinitely, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) unveiled legislation that would, among other things, affirm the military's right to detain, hold and interrogate detainees at its discretion without Department of Justice or Attorney General Eric Holder involvement.

McKeon said he was working with McCain and Graham to craft a bill that would try to gain traction in both chambers.

Such legislation could attract significant Democratic support, considering Democrats' willingness to buck Obama's attempts to shutter Guantanamo Bay and Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in civilian court in New York City, a decision that was later reversed after prominent Democrats, including Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) vigorously opposed the move.

In a striking move late last year when Democrats still controlled the House majority, they attached a provision to a $1.1 trillion resolution to keep the government funded next year that would prevent Obama from spending any funds to try terrorism suspects in civilian court instead of military commissions.

"Our military, not the Department of Justice, should be leading on law of war issues," Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL), a reservist in the Army's Judge Advocate General program who serves on the Armed Services panel, told reporters Tuesday afternoon. 

So Republicans are not only completely okay with our military declaring people to be terrorists, detaining them indefinitely without due process, possibly subjecting them to military tribunals and then removing any oversight from the Justice Department, they're actively changing the law to do this.

Double G had this one pegged on Twitter yesterday.

GOP wants to empower military to detain people without involvement of AG - uh, that's called "military dictatorship"

Pretty much.  Republicans love freedom and law and order and the Constitution, unless Scary Mooslim Supervillians from the Legion of Doom show up and we have to throw all that away in a frenzy of pissing ourselves or else Lex Luthor and Magneto will show up and break them out of superjail.

Hey, plenty of Democrats will go along with this crap too.  I think they might be able to use this as a poison pill on the debt ceiling or the budget and force a shutdown scenario, or hell they might have enough Democrats go along to get a veto-proof margin on this.  Keep an eye on this one.

Possibly The Wrong Guys To Frak With

Our government really didn't seem to care too much one way or another about hacker group Anonymous as they went to bat for Julian Assange against MasterCard and against HBGary.  But taking on the Pentagon over Bradley Manning?  That's a whole new level of "Oh no you did not."

The Pentagon said Tuesday it had requested an investigation into a hacker group's reported cyber threat against a military base that is being used to hold a US soldier suspected of giving documents to WikiLeaks.

Pentagon spokesman Colonel David Lapan said the probe was requested after news that the hacker group called Anonymous was seeking to disrupt online activities at the Quantico, Virginia, base where Private Bradley Manning is incarcerated.

"The base at Quantico, including the brig, are aware of that and they have made law enforcement agencies aware of that as well," Lapan said.

The Financial Times reported that hackers known as "Anonymous," which had claimed credit for attacks supporting WikiLeaks in recent months, was seeking to disrupt communications at the US Marine base.

Manning, 23, has been held at the prison since July under a maximum security regimen because authorities say his escape would pose a risk to national security.

The army private faces numerous charges of stealing classified files and is suspected as the source of a trove of secret documents published on the WikiLeaks website in recent months, which have infuriated and embarrassed US officials.

US military authorities brought additional charges against Manning last week, accusing him of illegally downloading vast numbers of secret government files and "aiding the enemy."

His defense lawyers have filed a legal complaint over the conditions of his detention at Quantico, which include a "prevention of injury" watch, which his lawyer said includes being forced to sleep naked.

His supporters say the regimen is inhumane and has been deemed unnecessary by psychiatric experts.

I've stayed out of the Manning story because I don't know all the facts.  I don't agree with the harsh treatment, but the guy is military, and the guy is accused of giving a crapload of government secrets to Wikileaks.   The "aiding the enemy" charge does seem rather trumped up.  But Anonymous isn't helping by trying to screw with the Pentagon, those guys take cyber threats seriously...deadly seriously.

This just got escalated to a whole new level of engagement, and I don't think anything good will come from it.

Waging War On The Idea Of Government

The right's Perpetual Outrage Machine is blaring over this John Melloy CNBC article stating government outlays now make up some 35% of wages in America.

Even as the economy has recovered, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960, according to TrimTabs Investment Research using Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

“The U.S. economy has become alarmingly dependent on government stimulus,” said Madeline Schnapp, director of Macroeconomic Research at TrimTabs, in a note to clients. “Consumption supported by wages and salaries is a much stronger foundation for economic growth than consumption based on social welfare benefits.”

The economist gives the country two stark choices. In order to get welfare back to its pre-recession ratio of 26 percent of pay, “either wages and salaries would have to increase $2.3 trillion, or 35 percent, to $8.8 trillion, or social welfare benefits would have to decline $500 billion, or 23 percent, to $1.7 trillion,” she said.

OK, so what counts as "welfare" these days?  Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance by far make up the largest chunk of that 35%, that last one, unemployment insurance, has certainly increased dramatically over the last two years.

But there's another contributing factor:  a decrease in wages and salaries over the last two years as millions of Americans have taken pay cuts, layoffs, furloughs, hourly cuts, and had their jobs eliminated completely and replaced with lower-paying service sector jobs and increasingly temp and contract jobs.  Even Melloy admits the government needed to intervene.

Social welfare benefits have increased by $514 billion over the last two years, according to TrimTabs figures, in part because of measures implemented to fight the financial crisis. Government spending normally takes on a larger part of the spending pie during economic calamities but how can the country change this make-up with the root of the crisis (housing) still on shaky ground, benchmark interest rates already cut to zero, and a demographic shift that calls for an increase in subsidies?

And I'll freely admit Melloy's right about the root cause being the housing depression.  Yet here he is asking for the government to do something about that, too.

Meanwhile, the right is going nuts.

If there's anything the last half-century of failed Leftist policies have taught us, it's this: when you reward sloth, you get more sloth. When you reward hard work, you get more hard work.

Funny, I could have sworn Republican presidents were mostly in charge over the last 50 years, signing their names to budget bills.  The guy who ended up with a surplus?  Clinton.  Yeah, he really ran up that debt, huh.  Gosh, I had no idea Obama was in charge of the country during the Greenspan housing bubble that necessitated this government intervention, either.

Guy must hate Reagan and the Bushes then.  Ol' Ronnie tripled our national debt, something glossed over time and time again.

StupidiNews!

• Embattled Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi vows "his people" will rise up against any efforts to institute a "no-fly zone" over the country.
• Hundreds of thousands of dead fish surfaced in Redondo Beach, California, sparking concerns about pollution in the city's harbor.
• Republican governors say Medicaid requirements in the new health care law will bankrupt their states, but Democrats say the savings of covering the uninsured will more than make up for it.
• Emerging markets are finding "Internet by the minute" on smartphones are an affordable way to get millions online.
• Hacker group Anonymous is stepping up attacks on copyright trade groups under Operation Payback.