John’s in talks with Tina Brown about moving this dump to the Daily Beast. Thoughts?
Update. This was just supposed to be a jokey thread opener. I would have posted it on April 1 if I’d known it would work as a prank.
by DougJ| 146 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
John’s in talks with Tina Brown about moving this dump to the Daily Beast. Thoughts?
Update. This was just supposed to be a jokey thread opener. I would have posted it on April 1 if I’d known it would work as a prank.
by DougJ| 79 Comments
This post is in: War, We Are All Mayans Now
I’m probably less opposed to intervention in Libya than John or mistermix (I’m honestly ambivalent bordering-on-opposing), but it creeps me out how Orwellian/Rumsfeldian/nonsensical wartime press conferences can be. Today, Jake Tapper pressed Jay Carney on what the White House plans are for Libya and was told:
“I think that in some ways, your questions are answers, in that we carefully consider all those issues.”
Libya is not Iraq. It’s not. The scale is nowhere the near the same, it’s an international effort, toppling the government is not an explicit goal…I could go on and on. But don’t be surprised if we start hearing about “known unknowns” and the area around Tripoli and Benghazi and east, west, south and north somewhat.
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 56 Comments
This post is in: Kiss My Black Ass, Vagina Outrage, Assholes
THIS JUST IN: part of your head just exploded.
In pushing this bill through, Republicans in Arizona relied on “statistics” showing that a high percentage of minority women are seeking abortions in clinics purposefully located in minority communities. Republicans also cited statistics demonstrating that some populations are seeking more and more abortions because they don’t like the sex of the fetus (really!? no the fuck they’re not.)
BREAKING: the rest of your head just exploded.
Essentially, this law attempts to turn abortion into a hate crime in order to lend an air of credibility to the absolutely bullshit theory that abortion is some sort of black genocide.
::sigh::
Here’s the thing about hate crimes: They are different from “regular” crimes in that proof of hate crimes require proof of a little somethin’ extra — prejudicial motivation.
For example: It’s one thing to assault a guy and steal his wallet. It’s quite another thing to assault a guy while calling him a homo and screaming about how you’re going to teach queers a lesson, and then steal his wallet. Both are crimes. The latter is fairly undeniably a hate crime.
Of course, the former may also be a hate crime; maybe the assailant only steals gay people’s wallets, and maybe he keeps a journal somewhere entitled Number of Queer Wallets Stolen. Suck it, Homos! which can be introduced as evidence against him. But unless a prosecutor can prove a prejudicial motivation beyond a reasonable doubt, no conviction for a hate crime will result.
In order to morph a run-of-the-mill assault — an act intended to cause an apprehension of harmful or offensive contact, and which causes apprehension in the victim that harmful or offensive contact is imminent — into a hate crime, a prosecutor must prove that the accused’s undisclosed intent was based upon prejudice.
So, not only does a prosecutor have to get inside the accused’s mind to prove intent, the prosecutor must then go one layer deeper into the accused’s mind to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that bias or prejudice formed the foundation for that intent.
If you’re confused, you should be. A hate crime is, essentially, the Inception of crimes — a crime within a crime.
With that in mind, I give you a brief rant:
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Republican Venality
The more she’s written about, the more I admire Professor Warren. Today, she visited the Borg collective at its hive:
She never actually uttered “I come in peace,” but Elizabeth Warren, the Obama administration aide charged with setting up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, might have felt like an alien visiting an anxious planet Wednesday when she went to the United States Chamber of Commerce.
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“I do not consider myself in hostile territory right now because I believe we share a point of principle: competitive markets are good for consumers and for businesses,” Ms. Warren told about 300 executives at the chamber’s annual conference on capital markets. But, she added, “Markets don’t work in the way they are supposed to unless there are some well-enforced rules.” …
[…] __
Regulation and competition are not, she said, mutually exclusive. “In fact, when done right, they support each other,” Ms. Warren said. “Are the Chamber’s members, as citizens or business owners and executives, in a better place today because the F.A.A. regulates air safety, because the states regulate insurance companies, because the federal government enforces antitrust statutes? Of course they are. And so is this country.”
The Borg and its servants, needless to say, were not impressed:
The disagreements between Ms. Warren and one of her chief critics, Representative Spencer Bachus, Republican of Alabama and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, grew more heated hours after her address…
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On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Bachus released a seven-page document titled “Perspectives on Settlement Alternatives in Mortgage Servicing,” which, in a letter to Ms. Warren, he said demonstrated that she had a larger role than she had indicated to the committee. The letter was co-signed by Representative Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia and chairwoman of the subcommittee on financial institutions and consumer credit.
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Mr. Bachus, a consistent critic of both the consumer agency and Ms. Warren, filled that role again Wednesday when he addressed the Chamber of Commerce conference immediately before she spoke. Noting that he has introduced a bill to change the governance of the consumer bureau from a single director to a five-person, bipartisan commission, he characterized the powers given to the head of the consumer agency as unmatched in government.
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Ms. Warren was followed by Thomas J. Donohue, president and chief executive of the chamber, who warned that the consumer agency could choke off economic growth in the United States. “If not used carefully, the C.F.P.B.’s tremendous power to go after bad actors could cause serious collateral damage to America’s job creators,” he said.
Professor Warren may show admirable discipline in reiterating her “cop on the beat” meme, but her Robber Baron Republican opponents prefer their market-tested “OMG socialist finance-industry death panels!!!” approach. Last week’s hissy-fit from Mary Kissel, ex-Goldman Sachs, at the WSJ:
… Everyone knows that Ms. Warren and a handful of state attorneys general are driving this settlement to punish the banks and reward voters with mortgage principal writedowns, despite profound doubts among bank regulators at the Fed and the Comptroller of the Currency. Ms. Warren’s weak-little-bureau routine is belied by the fact that she is rolling over other regulators even before the bureau is formally up and running…
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Ms. Warren’s media idolators are trying to shield her from Congressional oversight precisely because they understand her lack of accountability. They, too, want to punish the banks one more time and grab another $20 billion to redistribute to voters before 2012. The banks and clutch of AGs are right to resist, and Congress ought to put Ms. Warren’s unaccountable bureau under Treasury with an annual budget—or, better, put it entirely out of business.
Punishing banks and rewarding voters! Just imagine! Perhaps the squid-clouds of butt-hurt emanating from these weasels may finally choke even the Very Serious Persons given the authority to discuss the range of acceptable opinion (center-right to far-right, but not extremely far right). Timothy Noah, at Slate, on how the Republicans cleared Elizabeth Warren’s path:
I have no idea whether President Obama plans to nominate Elizabeth Warren as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If you’d asked me a year ago whether he should, I’d have probably said no, on the grounds that she was too much of a lightning rod. Better to install somebody with a lower profile who can get confirmed, I’d have argued. And, besides (as I wrote in September), she had no real management experience.
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Now I think Obama should nominate Warren. Partly that’s because Warren, in her six months as de facto CFPB director (ahem, I mean “special adviser to the secretary of the treasury and assistant to the president”) has demonstrated sufficient political and managerial skills (inasmuch as anyone can demonstrate such skills while running an agency that hasn’t actually done anything yet). But mostly it’s because Republicans have talked me into it…
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Last week’s House oversight hearing was not unlike a Senate confirmation hearing; you might say it was a kind of dress rehearsal for Warren. I thought she handled the steady stream of Republican attacks with grace and common sense. Other coverage of the hearing reached the same conclusion. Warren has established herself as a known quantity and a capable administrator. It wouldn’t just be unfortunate for Obama to pass her over for director. It would be strategically unsound.
Today’s shenanigans reminded me very much of the stern, yet kindly, grandma telling a couple of spoilt five-year-olds that they could choose between chicken fingers or a hamburger with their salad, because “both cheese puffs and gummy bears” did not qualify as a balanced meal. To which the five-year-olds respond by throwing themselves into a full-metal tantrum, screaming they’re gonna call 911 and tell the policeman that the boo-boo where they hit the floor means she touched them inna bad place. The only way the five-year-olds win that argument is if some well-meaning third party gets nervous and offers a trip to Chuck E. Cheese as an alternative, because Grandma knows better than to take parenting lessons from five-year-olds.
Elizabeth Warren, Still Making All the Right EnemiesPost + Comments (29)
This post is in: Open Threads
I’m sure some of you are tired of the topic.
This post is in: War
In all seriousness, this really isn’t news:
The Central Intelligence Agency has inserted clandestine operatives into Libya to gather intelligence for military airstrikes and contact rebels battling Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, according to American officials.
While President Obama has insisted that no American military ground troops participate in the Libyan campaign, small groups of C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks as part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help bleed Colonel Qaddafi’s military, the officials said.
In addition to the C.I.A. presence, composed of an unknown number of Americans who had worked at the spy agency’s station in Tripoli and others who arrived more recently, current and former British officials said that dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are working inside Libya. The British operatives have been directing airstrikes from British jets and gathering intelligence about the whereabouts of Libyan government tank columns, artillery pieces and missile installations, the officials said.
United States officials hope that similar information gathered by American intelligence officers — from the location of Colonel Qaddafi’s munitions depots to the clusters of government troops inside towns — might help weaken Libya’s military enough to encourage defections within its ranks.
In addition, the American spies are meeting with rebels to try to fill in gaps in understanding who their leaders are and the allegiances of the groups opposed to Colonel Qaddafi, according to United States government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the activities. American officials cautioned, though, that the Western operatives are not directing the actions of rebel forces.A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.
The question is why is all the official confirmation coming out today? To gauge reaction domestically? Or to simply continue the FITD strategy and prepare us for the next step? “Well, it’s just a no-fly zone. And yeah, we are bombing his ground forces. And yeah, we’ve said all along Qaddafi has to go. And sure, we’ve had agents on the ground from the beginning. So yeah, arming the rebels…”
The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and RoundPost + Comments (119)
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 41 Comments
This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Assholes
“Where are the jobs? Where are the jobs?” That used to be the Teabilly siren song.
For two years, John Boehner couldn’t stop whining about jobs. “Where are they? Where are they?” he cried, orange tears plopping down his face:1
So much did our Republican compatriots love the idea of giving a job to every man, woman, and child (yes, I said child) that they ran on a platform of OMG JOBZ!! even though they have a provably craptastic record of job creation.
To wit,
…
As the Wall Street Journal noted in the last month of Bush’s term, the former president had the “worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records.” And job creation under Bush was anemic long before the recession began. Bush’s supply-side economics “fostered the weakest jobs and income growth in more than six decades,” along with “sluggish business investment and weak gross domestic product growth,” the Center for American Progress’ Joshua Picker explained. “On every major measurement” of income and employment, “the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms,” the National Journal’s Ron Brownstein observed, parsing Census data.
Obama, by contrast — even with a too-small stimulus — created hella jobs:
Judy Biggert (R-Ill.): “Jobs Shmobs.” /eyerollPost + Comments (41)