Smooth jazz is really my Dad’s thing so I’m generally not all that turned on by modern praise and worship music. But the words…Lord, God Almighty.
Every Issue Isn’t A Voting Issue For Everyone
Every Issue Isn’t A Voting Issue For Everyone:
“And the last thing that needs to be said is black voters are generally good at naming their interests. The party that embraces white populism–whatever party it may be at the time–has generally not been judged to be in the corner. I see no reason why this will be different.”
(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)
Nor do I.
Yes, You Have to Pay for Tax Cuts
“The problem is that a heavy majority of the supposed fiscally conservative congressmen, although passionate about cutting government spending in the abstract, are in truth no better able to find specific dollars of budget cuts that they can support or defend to their constituents than are the Democrats. Factoring in their immutable desire to cut taxes, I believe that if the Republicans were in full control, we would have larger budget deficits in the coming years than if the Obama crowd retained power. This is what happened in a big way when Presidents Reagan and GW Bush took office promising to cut the debt while also cutting taxes. Spending, deficits, and debt soared during their terms, relative to their respective Democratic predecessors. There is no reason to think anything has changed…
Rep. Paul Ryan’s supposedly tough long-term plan to cut spending doesn’t balance the budget until 50 years from now and runs up another $62 trillion in national debt in the meantime…” [emphasis mine]
(Via Grasping Reality with Both Hands.)
Democratic “investment” = GOP “tax cuts” = increased government spending.
What Will a Republican Majority Do Next?
What Will a Republican Majority Do Next?:
“The current Republican Party lacks a similar basic, manageable agenda. It’s all or nothing. And the GOP no longer seems to have the capacity to get policy plans developed into legislation that is written, negotiated, and signed into law. The GOP has made a political choice to cut off a lot of its policy capacity. That’s why it has no budget plans other than Ryan’s super-unpopular one. It’s why it didn’t come up with any meaningful alternative to health reform. It’s not because Republicans are dumb — although Boehner and his allies were no match for Nancy Pelosi in a battle of tactics and determination — but because offering an alternative would mean negotiating, finding areas of agreement and disagreement.”
(Via Grasping Reality with Both Hands.)
Now this is punditry. Predicted circa July 2010.
Does The U.S. Really Have A Fiscal Crisis?
Does The U.S. Really Have A Fiscal Crisis?:
“But the problem here is bipartisan – as it was with the tax cut last year. None of the leadership on either side is willing to talk openly about how our biggest banks caused great fiscal damage. No one is willing to explain why our healthcare costs continue to rise. And no top politicians currently champion real tax reform.
The Republicans have seized a moment. To them, this is not really about fiscal responsibility; this is about an opportunity to shrink the size of government.
But the Democrats have played perfectly into their hands. The heart of their mistake was the president’s refusal to explain clearly how the financial system produced a recession that has pushed up our national debt. “
(Via The Baseline Scenario.)
Live up to Expectations
I want to live up to her expectations. (Applause.) I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. (Applause.) All of us -– we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations. (Applause.)
Read the speech. It’s worth it.
(Via The White House.)
Security Theater
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Security Theater:
“This is a good piece by Ted Conover pivoting off the arrest of the Oregon bomber, to talk about the convictions of supposed terrorists in Newburgh, New York:
These prosecutions fail the smell test, and lately the odor has washed over my own Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale. Last month, if you missed the news, four African-American ex-cons from Newburgh, N.Y., were convicted of plotting to bomb two synagogues here, one of them half a block from my house. The government released a photo of some of the men casing the joint that our local paper ran the day they were convicted.
One of the men in the photo is an FBI informant, Shahed Hussain. The case seems like a slam-dunk–until you learn more about him. Hussain, driving a flashy Mercedes and using the alias Maqsood, began to frequent the Masjid al-Ikhlas in down-at-the-heels Newburgh in 2008. Mosque leaders say he would meet congregants in the parking lot afterward, offering gifts and telling them they could make a lot of money–$25,000–if they helped him pursue jihad. The assistant imam said the suspicion Hussain was an informant was so great ‘it was almost like he had a neon sign on him.’ A congregant told a reporter that, in retrospect, everyone wished they’d called him out or turned him in. ‘Maybe the mistake we made was that we didn’t report him,’ the man said. ‘But how are we going to report the government agent to the government?’
Hussain bought meals for the group of four men he assembled because none of them had jobs or money. The owner of a Newburgh restaurant where they occasionally ate considered him ‘the boss,’ because he would pick up the tab. Among his other inducements were the offer of $250,000 and a BMW to the most volubly anti-Semitic plotter, the man the government says was the ringleader, James Cromitie. To drive that car, Cromitie would have needed a driver’s license–which he didn’t have.
Another supposed plotter, a Haitian, was a paranoid schizophrenic (according to his imam), which was the reason his deportation had been deferred (according to The Nation’s TomDispatch.com), and who kept bottles of urine in his squalid apartment (according to the New York Times). The last two, both surnamed Williams, have histories of drug busts and minimum-wage jobs in Newburgh. At trial the government asserted that the plot was driven by anti-American hatred. But in papers filed in court by defense lawyers before the trial began, Cromitie is quoted in government transcripts explaining to Hussain that the men ‘will do it for the money. … They’re not even thinking about the cause.’
Greenwald makes a similar critique of the Oregon case. What scares me is how this sort of crime-fighting, post-9/11, basically justifies itself. So we’re at war with terror. A war means we need to find and isolate the bad guys. So we send agents provocateurs to areas where bad guys might frequent and, essentially, employ a version of buy-bust theory to smoke them out.Then we announce their neutralization via arrest, thus proving that….we’re at war with terror. Rinse. Repeat. Conover writes at the end:
This prong of our nation’s anti-terrorism strategy seems tantamount to sending lots of little devils out into Muslim communities and getting them to sit on people’s shoulders and whisper in their ears. One imagines that there is no shortage of Americans who, with enough money and other enticement, could be lured into crimes either ordinary or political: selling drugs or attacking gay people or racial minorities. But does dangling carrots that reward badness really make us safer? If it hadn’t been for the FBI, I don’t believe the Newburgh Four would have targeted my neighborhood, or anyone else’s.
Indeed, I suspect one could declare war against racism and just as easily employ provocateurs to cyclically ‘prove’ the problem of violent white supremacists. And once such a war is launched, and such a unit is formed, what incentive would such a unit have to declare the war won, essentially justifying it’s own dismemberment? Indeed, there’s always a potential terrorist out there somewhere…
(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)
Wow.
Fear Is the Path to the Dark Side
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Fear Is the Path to the Dark Side: “
Fear leads to anger…
It’s no surprise that the former Navy pilot sees himself as a champion of the military, and he chides Obama for inexperience in pushing to lift the ban on openly gay service members. But McCain is indulging in semantics when it comes to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
In 2006, he said on MSNBC that ‘the day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.’ Now that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, supports the Pentagon’s move toward junking DADT–and even McCain’s wife, Cindy, has appeared in a gay rights group’s video opposing the policy–the senator is blocking Obama’s plan.
Anger leads to hate…
‘I understand that’s his commitment to the gay and lesbian community,’ McCain says. But while a Pentagon study released Tuesday found more than two-thirds support for the change among service members and said disruptions would be minimal, McCain wants a broader study that would focus on combat readiness.
Hate leads to suffering…
His explanation: ‘The Marine commandant is opposed to [dropping] Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I know for a fact the other three service chiefs have serious reservations.’
As for their superiors, McCain casually mentions the commander in chief and defense secretary, ‘neither of which I view as a military leader.’
H/T to Andrew.
Figure Out What You Think About Wikileaks
TNC on Figure Out What You Think About Wikileaks:
“I just closed the thread on Peter King, because I think–in terms of this community–I jumped the gun. It became clear in comments that there are a number of us who would actually like some space to sort out what we think about Assange. In all honesty, I started a post on Wikileaks on Monday and deleted it, because I felt my thoughts weren’t focused. Peter King’s idiocy is a much easier target. It’s always a mistake to avoid the hard questions, in favor of the soft ones.
My rather muddled thoughts are as follows: I do think the American public is served by knowing that the U.S. forces killed civilians and reporters, and evidently tried to cover it up. I do not think it serves the American public, or those of us who prefer diplomacy over armed force, to basically allow no anonymity for diplomats. Much of the recent Wikileaks dump just struck me as the kind embarrassing gossip that exposes no cover-ups, but could make diplomacy harder.Having said all that, I’m not sure that all of these question are even relevant. What responsibility does Assange have to this country? Does American media exist to serve the immediate good of the American public? Or is there some longer, greater, good in disclosing these dispatches? Is information, in and of itself, good?It strikes me that there’s a lot of discussion about Assange. I’m much more interested in why an Army Pfc. was so easily able to access such sensitive material.Anyway, those are my thoughts. Not much expertise here. I’m still trying to figure it all out. But I think we’re better served talking about this, as opposed to the easily dismissed rantings of Peter King.
(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)
So how do we keep editorial judgment in the public interest?
He Reported the FBI’s Own Informant to the FBI
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
He Reported the FBI’s Own Informant to the FBI: “Here’s an incredible piece of reporting in the Washington Post about Craig Monteilh, a convicted criminal turned FBI informant-provocateur, and former foot-solider in our War on Terror:
Before the sun rose, the informant donned a white Islamic robe. A tiny camera was sewn into a button, and a microphone was buried in a device attached to his keys.
‘This is Farouk al-Aziz, code name Oracle,’ he said into the keys as he sat in his parked car in this quiet community south of Los Angeles. ‘It’s November 13th, 4:30 a.m. And we’re hot.’
The undercover FBI informant – a convicted forger named Craig Monteilh – then drove off for 5 a.m. prayers at the Islamic Center of Irvine, where he says he spied on dozens of worshipers in a quest for potential terrorists.
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the FBI has used informants successfully as one of many tactics to prevent another strike in the United States. Agency officials say they are careful not to violate civil liberties and do not target Muslims.
To wit:
Monteilh said he was instructed to infiltrate mosques throughout Orange and two neighboring counties in Southern California, where the Muslim population of nearly 500,000 is the nation’s largest. He was told to target the Islamic Center of Irvine, he said, because it was near his home.
FBI tactics were already a sensitive issue at the Irvine mosque, a stucco, two-story building that draws as many as 2,000 people for Friday prayers.
With tensions rising between law enforcement and Muslims over allegations of FBI surveillance, J. Stephen Tidwell, then head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, spoke at the mosque in June 2006.
‘If we’re going to mosques to come to services, we will tell you,’ he said, according to a video of his speech. ‘. . . The FBI will tell you we’re coming for the very reason that we don’t want you to think you’re being monitored. We would come only to learn.’
Two months later, in August 2006, Monteilh arrived at the same mosque. He had called earlier and met with the imam. That Friday, he took shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith, before hundreds of worshipers.
Read the whole thing. Monteilh can not be taken at his word, but the information the Post corroborated is damning. The parallels with the War on Drugs are alarming, particularly paying convicted criminals large sums of money to make cases against alleged criminals.
(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)
Here we go again.