Rumormongering at its most despicable.
Two weeks ago, a rumor circulated that the Department of Homeland Security was “behind” the crackdown at Zuccotti Park. The rumor originated with Michael Moore who got it from a thinly-sourced article in Examiner.com. I wrote about it here and here.
The author of the Examiner.com article, Rick Ellis, published multiple updates to his thinly-sourced post, and promised that he would provide more information once he had it. That was on November 15. No further information has been provided.
I figured it had been settled. As Joshua Holland, writing for Alternet noted, “There’s a lot of speculation, but very little substance to the tale of the “nationwide” crackdown on the Occupy movement. ”
So I figured this rumor would be put to bed. I was wrong.
Today — ten days after the rumor had been debunked — Naomi Wolf saw fit to write an article so fraught with hyperbole — “what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war” — and so utterly fact-free that its publication should hang like an albatross around Naomi Wolf’s neck for the rest of her career. It is Judith Miller-style hackery, and it is shameless.
Karoli has the story in a post aptly titled “How Bullshit Magically Turns into Fact“:
Naomi Wolf wrote a nonsensical piece today that’s being spammed all over Twitter. It asserts that there is a deliberate plot afoot via collusion by the United States Congress, the Department of Homeland Security and our oligarchical overlords to undermine the very populist, leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement. One of her key pieces of evidence is an unsupported and unverified report that 18 mayors coordinated their crackdowns with the Department of Homeland Security. There’s only one problem with that: It’s nothing more than innuendo. Here, let me show you.
Here are the two links she provides as evidence: One to Wonkette; the other to Washingtonsblog.com. Both articles point back to this absurd article on the Examiner.com site (a very, very right-wing Phil Anschutz, write-out-of-your-butt-with-no-evidence kind of site). Washingtonsblog goes one step further, updating with this:
(And for those who are understandably doubtful about Examiner.com as a news source, here’s an AP story from a couple hours ago that verifies everything except the specific mention of DHS coordination.)
Got that? The headlines on both of these stories (Wonkette and WashingtonsBlog) were splayed across the sites in very large heading fonts: “Homeland Security Coordinated….” and yet the AP confirms everything BUT DHS coordination. Still, that didn’t stop Wolf from ignoring the AP story entirely and writing a piece for the Guardian that included links to bolster her argument that clearly don’t.
Why? I reiterate. No one has a source, no one has any evidence, and the originating story which Michael Moore and now Naomi Wolf breathlessly spread quotes an anonymous source with the promise of still more to come in the future. Well, it’s the future. It’s two weeks later and crickets from Mr. Ellis. Mission accomplished, though. Ask people who are paying attention to the OWS movement and they’ll swear up and down that yes, it was coordinated by DHS because MICHAEL MOORE and now NAOMI WOLF say so.
Truth: We don’t know. It isn’t completely out of the realm of possibility for mayors to consult with DHS. After all, that’s what they’re there for. To help local and state governments deal with threats. At best, one can conclude that maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t coordinate.
But again, it doesn’t matter if you can spread it on the Internet and get Keith Olbermann to pick it up and give Michael Moore a mic to spread that nonsense further (see video).
Milt Shook did a fantastic job showing us that the originating Examiner.com writer is not a credible source, too. Read it.
Undeterred, Wolf actually says this like it’s something readers have reason to believe:In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.
There you have it. Bullshit, spread worldwide, with the full cooperation of so-called journalists. It’ll work, too, because she has enough name recognition that people won’t question her claims.
Naomi Wolf should supplement her article with information necessary for readers to make a judgment as to whether her claims are merely opinion fueled by conspiracy theories and designed to exploit the emotions and tensions running high in the wake of the various Occupy crackdown, or whether her claims have the sort of basis in reality that publication in an international newspaper of the Guardian‘s stature should require. It’s what a “real” journalist would do. Then again, perhaps Drudge journalism is winning the day and we simply cannot trust what we read at all anymore — from any source. With rare exceptions, I’ve already given up on American newspapers. Am I going to be forced to give up on papers in the UK as well? If publication of this sort of tripe is any indication, then yes — yes I will.
This is an egregious failure on Wolf’s part, and she should correct it.
Karoli has an update:
Update re: alleged DHS coordination In Portland, Feds were involved because occupiers were on federal land. But pay attention:
There is another line of thinking out there that runs directly counter to the federal-coordination theory: Ruiz wouldn’t comment on this, but one well-placed city source said, in fact, that the feds were mostly inclined to leave Schrunk Plaza open. It was city officials who cajoled them into getting on board—lest they watch most of Occupy’s camp merely move several hundred feet south onto federal land. Which would have been awkward for the city. But also interesting.
Should you accept as fact the idea that the feds were reluctant and the city pushed them along? NO. Why? Because it’s attributed to an anonymous source with nothing to back it up, which makes this theory as worthy as the DHS coordination theory, or just speculation with no facts behind it.
[via Odd Time Signatures]
[cross-posted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles]
capt
The article wasn’t meant as a factual statement.
:)
General Stuck
Looks like The Pro Left/Firebagging crowd has its own Wurlitzer now, like the wingnuts have. Only directed at their own side. It’s kind of puny in comparison with Fox News and the like, but reckon they have to start somewhere. I am going to tune this shit out, and just hope they don’t affect the upcoming election, any more than a tempest in a crock pot.
Karen
Good luck with that. Since when is proof necessary? Murdoch proved that by making facts irrelevant and killing real JOURNALISM. There is no such thing anymore, only news readers and column writers. It’s been the truth in the right wing for decades and it was only a matter of time until the left wing followed right along.
My guess is that Wolf is doing this as a part of the “draft Hillary” movement. Does she have history as a PUMA?
WeeBey
Just for the record, neither Naomi Wolf nor Michael Moore are journalists.
People need to pay attention to that.
Baud
Gotta push back a little. These people are essentially swiftboaters — same tactics, same goals.
Arclite
At least on the left, people who lie are usually called out. On the right they are celebrated.
Mnemosyne
As I said when the story first broke, I would not be surprised at all if the various mayors coordinated the breakups of the camps, but I would be absolutely astounded if DHS, the FBI, or any other federal agency coordinated it.
The mayors are fully capable of making incredibly stupid decisions all on their own without needing to receive instructions from on high.
eemom
ugh.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: that insufferable twit was a college classmate of mine. I once had the good fortune to witness, at close range within the confines of an English seminar, the glory of her trademarked hair-toss in the direction of all who came forth to share in the splendor of her abundant self-adoration. She was full of shit then, she’s full of shit now, and she’s been full of shit without interruption at all points in between.
David Koch
MikeJ
@WeeBey:
Point me at anyone who works for any of the nets, or WaPo or the Times that isn’t as horrid as either of them.
General Stuck
Yes, absolutely. And AbL and others are doing that quite well, and someday I hope to see her on MSNBC pounding this shit into the ground, like it deserves. I am personally fed up with it, and commenting on a blog is not worth a single point for raising ones blood pressure.
eemom
@Karen:
She’s not a PUMA. She has no agenda other than her own self-aggrandizement
— least of all one that would empower any other woman.
This is the celebrated “feminist” who applied that, um, expertise to declare the alleged rape victims of Julian Assange to be politically motivated liars.
jeff
Words matter, sometimes catastrophically. Thanks, ABL, for staying on the case.
eemom
@MikeJ:
That is an incredibly stupid ass statement.
Baud
@General Stuck:
Absolutely. Stay healthy. We need your vote next year. :)
WeeBey
@MikeJ:
Ezra Klein.
Sy Hersh.
Eleventy billion others who aren’t “names” who just report things that happen.
sherifffruitfly
In every way of importance, FIREBAGGER = TEABAGGER.
In this instance, the dimension that is the same is their willful disdain for the truth, in order to further their own sense of victimhood.
Ironically enough, the phenomenon is VERY well described by St. Glenn Of Greenwald. But only in reference to teabaggers. He’s too un-self-aware to see it in himself and other “progressives”. http://www.salon.com/2008/10/02/self_absorption/
mk3872
While I fully understand and also feel ABL’s pain, this episode really just proves that fearmongering about govt conspiracies has no ideological boundaries.
newhavenguy
Thanks again, ABL. We are familiar with ratfucking, are we not?
A pox on all self-proclaimed “Progressives” who parrot this evil bullshit.
Cheers, all. Hope you all had a nice Turkey Day.
newhavenguy
@sherifffruitfly: Grrrr. I used to like a lot of his civil liberties writing, but I too have soured on Glenn. Also, too St. Michael Moore.
FlipYrWhig
@sherifffruitfly: “There are shadowy forces out there who’d love to see us fail. They’ll do everything in their power to discredit us, just because we see through their lies. But we’re not going to let that happen. Our cause is just and we will not be denied, no matter how powerful our opponents think they are and no matter how strongly the establishment takes their side. You and I and our friends in this ragtag band of righteous dissidents–we will never be defeated!”
It works well for any political persuasion.
Karen
@eemom:
I don’t know which is worse!
smintheus
@eemom: She’s always been at best a self-involved flake. Crossed paths with her when we were students at Oxford, and was not impressed by her behavior. She’s been producing hyperbolic, poorly researched, factually challenged stuff for decades. The main principle behind her writing seems to be that whatever thoughts happen to lodge in her head deserve to be presented to the rest of us as reality…and a really, really important kind of reality at that.
In the last years of the Bush administration, she was trying to convince the world that conservatives were executing an elaborate plan to establish a fascist state in the US. The evidence was, ermm…somewhat lacking. But she got herself a bit of attention, which I guess was an important consideration.
FlipYrWhig
@smintheus: That “Beauty Myth” book, though, got all kinds of positive press. Was that all hype? I never read it myself. Bob Somerby of _Daily Howler_ fame often speaks up for Wolf as one of the undeserving targets of the War On Gore in the run-up to the 2000 election.
agrippa
Rumor is the correct choice of word.
There is no evidence of DHS involvement.
Schlemizel
@newhavenguy:
The difference is I get where Mike is coming from. I can forgive him because I know that he understands what the problem is & how to fix it. What he is missing is the ability to understand what is possible today in this shitty country we have built for ourselves. He wants it all now. That is a very valuable pressure for politicians who are satisfied with the status quo. Moore serves as the crazy left we need to move things back to a more rational nation.
The constant demonizing him & others who really are movement leftist (as opposed to ego driven pundits) is not good for us. Hate the sin not the sinner.
fasteddie9318
@sherifffruitfly:
Except in terms of how teabaggers inexplicably have some mainstream credibility and influence while firebaggers only have mainstream value as useful idiots.
Carolinus
Comment Is Free is the part of The Guardian where bloggers and writers can post commentary. The journalism side of The Guardian says this about the Examiner article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/nov/15/occupy-wall-street-zuccotti-eviction-live
and
mk3872
They wrote these stories by taking unattributed quotes out of Examiner.com !!!??? Friggin’ idiots. Liberals are just as so gullible.
Why not just take Drudge Report quotes as actual facts, too?
The desire to believe governmental conspiracy theories on both sides of the ideological divide is depressing.
Schlemizel
@newhavenguy:
I don’t see any difference in the things GG was angry about under Bush then under Obama. Sure, we can say Obama’s hands are tied by Blew Dogs and Republicans but those things are wrong even when a Democrat is in charge. What he may be missing is how his complaints could be used against Obama.
eemom
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s because Somerby is a deranged lunatic-savant who will never get past 2000 if he lives to be 200.
If he were to judge Wolfette according to his own most cherished principles rather than through the deluded lens of his eternal grudge against those who dissed Al Gore, there is no way he would come to her defense.
Davis X. Machina
@agrippa: But, don’t you see? The absence of evidence is the most damning evidence. DHS didn’t want any fingerprints on the hit.
nancy
Naomi was recently heard making the argument that Palin and Bachman are the new legitimate faces of feminism because … drumroll… they are female. h/t feministing. So, whatever.
@eemom — love the hair toss report.
David Koch
@eemom:
/fixed.
smintheus
@FlipYrWhig: All of her work has been vastly overhyped. Her basic problem is that she has no interest in testing her ideas or theories. She doesn’t go looking for counter-evidence, she doesn’t address counter-arguments or competing interpretations of whatever evidence she does cite. She just runs with whatever idea she holds dear.
And apart from not looking around for alternatives, much of her evidence is inadequate to support her own interpretation. It’s usually just sloppily assembled stuff that shows no real thought or research…in other words, a more serious person could step in and with a little work argue some of her ideas much more effectively than she does.
Don’t know whether she was fairly criticized in 2000, though I must say my estimation of Gore fell when I heard he had turned to Wolf for advice.
MGLoraine
So the alleged involvement of DHS remains unsupported innuendo. But it has yet to be debunked, as in proven false.
newhavenguy
@Schlemizel: In 1864 Greenwald would be savaging Lincoln over civil liberties and smearing him as a racist OK, Abe was sort of a racist, but you’d have to be very idelogical indeed to see him and Jefferson Davis as equivalent in any meaningful way.
Greenwald is beyond that even. He’d certainly think Lincoln the greater villain by far. Policy, economics, reality? Greenwald is all about morality. What happens to real people in the here and now is utterly irrelevant. No friend of mine nor even an ally, even if he is right about the Patriot Act and the drug war. A “Left Libertarian” maybe, but no better than Ron Paul or his wretched son.
Nanette
Well, heck, her first sentence clues you in to her grasp on facts and reality:
Seriously, is she stupid or what? Not taking anything from the pain, outrage, or harm done to the OWS protesters, but really. Unparalleled? Selma, anyone?
FlipYrWhig
@smintheus: Somerby–who I’m not prepared to write off, as obsessive and picayune as he tends to be–has some funny stuff about how the media seized upon Wolf as pretty much the same as Monica Lewinsky. Of course, being that it’s The Daily Howler, it’s a five-part series, and that doesn’t even begin to cover the entirety of his oeuvre on l’Affaire Wolf.
Baud
@MGLoraine: God I hope that was snark…
FlipYrWhig
@newhavenguy: To me he’s the kind of person who would insist that it is never appropriate to kill a living thing, even a microorganism that could lead to the fatal infection of a billion people, because Killing Is Wrong, period. In a way it’s commendable, and in another way it’s totally insane.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Someone over at the GOS posted a diary the other day about how the OWS movement doesn’t need Michael Moore as its face.
It wasn’t popular.
I wish MM would step back and let the movement be the face of the movement.
His face is getting tiresome.
ABL
@Nanette: if you liked that, you’ll love this: https://twitter.com/#!/naomirwolf/status/139045322658811904
my jaw dropped when i read that.
FlipYrWhig
BTW, my FDL-ish brother is now worried about rumors about a conscience clause relating to contraception. “If true, will you still support the Democrats?” That sort of thing. Steve Benen mentioned it recently but that was the first I’d heard of it. Is this the next OMG backstabbing worse-than-Bush-ism to prepare for?
Baud
What’s the context?
Nanette
@ABL:
Dang. “Stupid” might be too generous an explanation.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Baud:
I have a feeling it wasn’t.
FlipYrWhig
@Baud: Sorry to be obscure… here’s the Benen version.
ABL
@FlipYrWhig: oh, that was a short-lived freakout. digby wrote about it:
but then Posner updated the post and the story was dead before it was alive.
i swear, these people…
David Koch
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Most importantly, they don’t want a public face.
Yet Moore, who’s in the middle of selling a book, has been trying to co-opt it.
4tehlulz
@ABL: Even the liberal Naomi Wolf…
SW
I don’t know Naomi Wolf from Wolf Blitzer. But you people scare me. If you don’t think that we have a problem with the permanent government, the national security state, the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us against that nobody elected that has nothing to do with partisanship , we are in serious trouble.
The last fifteen years have seen an amazing increase in the size of the secret part of the government even though its overt reason for existence (the cold war) ended in this time frame. Funny that. And it is no coincidence that one of its greatest allies is the contempt that is heaped upon anyone whom the label ‘conspiracy theorist’ can be hung on. Forty years from now, in retrospect, when this period of history is being analyzed I seriously doubt that rumormongering is going to be perceived as one of the major problems that that lead to the decline of the Republic.
Was this particular story true? Fuck if I know. But I’m glad that somebody wrote it and it got some traction. You know why? Because if it wasn’t true, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that there were voices within these organizations who argued strenuously for just this course of action. And if the civilian leadership was able to restrain the fire breathers in this instance and the article is bullshit well that is a good thing. On more than one level. It is good because it shows that the elected officials, that is the chain of command are really in charge, and it shows that they share our values. The publication of the rumor also strengthens their hand against the fire breathers in the internal battles. The next time, they can point to that and say look at this stuff, we can’t have our fingerprints on this we’ll get crucified look what happened here from a fucking rumor! The point is that these things are a process with lots of forces at work. We are fighting something here that is a real evil. And because of that you have to take into consideration the prophylactic effect of these stories.
I’m fine with the story being reported. Shot down as rumor. That is the process. The concept is raised and discredited. Therefore the tactic is put off limits before it can be considered, if it ever was.
MikeJ
Did you know the reason why Michelle Obama is so “concerned” with obesity is so we can all have our BMI tattooed on our foreheads so when Obama sells us all for meat the USDA will know how much marbling we have.
It’s true. I read it online somewhere.
smintheus
@FlipYrWhig: Read the first part, and Somerby has the goods on the usual suspects. But on the other hand, Wolf was behind the half-witted school uniforms initiative? That itself would have merited a certain amount of bashing in the media.
4tehlulz
@MikeJ: You know, there are probably voices in the USDA arguing for just exactly that. By bringing it to light, this idea was put off limits before it can be considered, if it ever was.
Xecky Gilchrist
I’m fine with the story being reported. Shot down as rumor. That is the process.
Then what’s your problem with a post doing exactly that?
WeeBey
@SW:
So, wait.
Who cares if it’s true? It feels true. It could have been true. This is your argument?
Down that path, madness lies.
Baud
@MikeJ: “To Serve Man.”
@SW:
That would be fine if it were actually being shot down. The problem is that people who should know better keep perpetuating it.
MikeJ
John Bryson, Secretary of Commerce, once shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
The story is out there. Why haven’t we heard denials?
WeeBey
Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990.
newhavenguy
@ABL: This isn’t racist in the same way that, say Mark Williams teabagger hate screeds are, but… yow.
For context, I am a 40 year old white guy who grew up in and lives in [city redacted, you’d never guess]. Our PoPo don’t kill too many people and are usually decent enough, but this is like a suburb of NYC. Last year their (spit) finest only killed 8 people, an all-time low so good for them— but I know too well what kind of people get killed by cops. (Shorter: “I am not making this about race, but I am not fucking blind either.”)
To some very pure progressives, former human beings like Amadou Diallo are I guess invisible. Better to be invisible than to be a hate totem, if I had to choose… but that’s fucked up. Naomi Wolf said a lot in just 140 characters. Maybe not what she wanted to say out loud, but at least she’s succinct unlike me.
Steve
Am I the only one who can’t keep Naomi Wolf and Naomi Klein straight?
OMG
@Steve: One’s relatively smart, one isn’t.
newhavenguy
@FlipYrWhig: Good god, if Steve Benen is “obscure”, we’re doomed as a nation. I love Balloon Juice, but Political Animal is a national treasure. If I had only 5 minutes on the intertubes a day I’d spend it there.
Lobito
If Feds are against it why aren’t they saying something ? I honestly am trying to understand why are they not distancing themselves from this. If they weren’t involved they should simply say so. Am I missing something ?
Tying to this point isn’t DOJ in charge of prosecuting people for violating the 1st Amendment rights of citizens ?
David Koch
@SW:
That’s really retarded. The process is you print stories that are true. Not inflammatory speculation that places the burden on the accused to proves his or her innocence.
I’m sure you didn’t feel that way when papers printed Bush’s propaganda that Iraq had WMDs and Saddam was behind 9/11. Sure the stories were eventually exposed as false, but not before 100,000 Iraqis had been killed.
I’m sure you wouldn’t defend tories accusing Michael Moore of rape, later proven demonstrably false, as the correct process.
Raven
@Steve: I don’t give a rats ass about either one of them. Or whoever this fucking Mc Megan is.
or “Sully”
gogol's wife
@Steve:
No, it took me halfway through the thread to figure it out.
Donut
@SW:
I agree with the general consensus so far that this is a non-story, but what SW said deserves some praise.
It amazes me how easy some of you find it to say, “it’s cool, Obama’s in charge, I trust him, and there is no way he is doing anything that extends and builds on the Bush-era push for more executive power, there is no way he really wants to further entrench the powers of the NSA, the CIA, etc…”
News flash – Obama don’t have your back all the time, people. No president does. He is just as power-hungry, just as conniving, just as narcissistic as pretty much any other president – THEY ALL ARE. They are not always on your side, neither figuratively nor literally.
I don’t agree with Wolf on this (nor do I necessarily agree with SW that it was “good” that Wolf wrote the artice). Wolf’s claims do not seem worth much – and to me Wolf is a big ol’ nothingburger, and not worth all the time and effort people are taking here to pile on her. Why? Why do it? Her audience is limited and set in its thinking. You won’t change their minds.
But hey – you guys who defend Obama on every. single. thing. need to one day realize that he is not always the good guy, that some people feel legitimately upset with the President, and god damn, it is okay to criticize him.
People, in other words, are paranoid about Obama for some legit reasons. And some of it is not legit. But it’s silly to pretend that the man is perfect, and that this type of thing is beyond the pale for the government to do.
And…this is another one of those instances where I close the post saying – I AM GOING TO VOTE FOR OBAMA AND I AM GENERALLY SATISFIED WITH THE JOB HE IS DOING. I WILL EVEN DONATE TIME AND CASH TO HIM NEXT YEAR, AND I WANT HIM TO BE RE-ELECTED..
But I wouldn’t trust him any further than I can throw him, as the cliche goes.
burnspbesq
@Steve:
No. Not that there’s much difference.
wilfred
Move on, you say? Maybe a little investigation is in order, no?
The Pentagon denied for weeks that missile had killed 90 Afghan school children – at point resorting to the malicious rumor tactic.
Question: If an intrepid reporter wanted to look behind the ad hominem curtain a little bit, would you denounce the effort?
Nanette
@Steve:
No – :(
Though I am glad to know (after Googling just now) that Wolf is not the Naomi who wrote The Shock Doctrine. Not that I’ve read it, but I’d been meaning to one of these years and almost crossed it off my list.
burnspbesq
@newhavenguy:
Then we’re absolutely doomed. Divide Benen’s number of unique visitors per month by the number of people who voted in the 2008 election. I’m willing to bet a beer that there are four zeros to the right of the decimal point before you get to a number other than zero.
Sly
@SW:
Please read Eisenhower’s farewell address. He wasn’t talking about some shadowy fascist conspiracy. He was talking about the corruptive influence of what was then a new defense industry on legitimate political processes. Politicians of previous eras said the same thing about maintaining a standing army or military alliances; it’s something new, and we should endeavor to control it as best we can so it becomes a means to an end rather than an end unto itself.
No you aren’t. You just said that the people who are shooting down the rumor scare you, and that you are fine with unsubstantiated innuendo being perpetuated as fact so long as it advances your political goals. Adults call that demagoguery, and its one of the reasons why we can’t have nice things.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@MGLoraine: And, in the US, that used to mean it is not true and not worth believing.
Raven
@burnspbesq: I love this “doomed” bullshit as if everyone is NOT.
Xecky Gilchrist
I don’t agree with Wolf on this (nor do I necessarily agree with SW that it was “good” that Wolf wrote the artice) … some people feel legitimately upset with the President, and god damn, it is okay to criticize him.
Defending Obama from untrue allegations is not the same thing as saying that it is not okay to criticize him.
Baud
@Donut:
That’s a decent point to make in the context of a post addressing a legitimate criticism of Obama – not some unsourced speculation that some have chosen to treat as fact.
@wilfred:
No. I don’t want our country to waste resources investigating rumors that originate on right-wing websites. We’ll be drowning in irrelevant investigations if we adopt that approach.
gwangung
@Donut: I don’t think defending Obama is the point. It’s that there is so little substance here, even after questions have been raised.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if a solid investigation had uncovered some top down coordination. But the continued persistence of the idea, after virtually no evidence to support, suggests loose, muddy wishful thinking and little critical (in the meaningful sense) thought.
WeeBey
@Donut:
That’s fucking stupid.
“Sure, it’s wrong, but IT’S OK TO BE WRONG CRITICIZING THE PRESIDENT BECAUSE THE PRESIDENT MUST BE CRITICIZED.”
Tautology, FTL.
gwangung
@wilfred:
Would have been nice if that had been done BEFORE the idea was published.
That’s what I was taught in journalism school.
Dr. Loveless
@Steve:
Hell, I sometimes get both confused with Naomi Campbell.
wilfred
“…and that you are fine with unsubstantiated innuendo being perpetuated as fact so long as it advances your political goals.”
Hm. Well, just remember that the next time the Administration says Iran is building a nuclear weapon and will aim it at the US. Or any other fucking thing that it transmits through anonymous sources, which in turn is passed on as ‘fact’.
Sly
@Donut:
It’s so easy to say that no one has even bothered to expend the energy needed to actually say it!
Baud
@Dr. Loveless: So then WhoTF is Naomi Watts?
Cassidy
@Donut: Shorter Donut: WORDS. BIG JUICY WORDS THAT ARE ARGUING AGAINST THINGS NO ONE EVEN SAID!!!!!!!!!!
Mnemosyne
@Donut:
So it’s perfectly fine for people on the left to promulgate crazy rumors about DHS coordinating the breakup of the OWS camps because there are other, unrelated things for which Obama should legitimately be criticized?
So much for us being the “reality-based community.”
eemom
@SW:
God, you’re an idiot.
wilfred
This is from Naked Capitalism:
“Gregg Levine tells us, based on a BBC interview of Mayor Quan of Oakland, that as some readers and this blogger speculated last night, the 18 police action was a national, coordinated effort. This is a more serious development that one might imagine. Reader Richard Kline has pointed out that one of the de facto protections of American freedoms is that policing is local, accountable to elected officials at a level of government where voters matter. National coordination vitiates the notion that policing is responsive to and accountable to the governed. Even though the blog the Stranger gives a tidbit from the Seattle mayor, who did not participate in the crackdown, that the effort was coordinated through the US Conference of Mayors, it is not hard to imagine that there was more that a little bit of, erm, help from the Feds. Gregg points out that New York city police chief Ray Kelly has a tight relationship with the CIA and the FBI. Homeland Security has also trying to increase its influence over police forces in major cities. It is not hard to imagine it playing a role in this effort as well.”
That’s reasonable speculation, no? Now whether the original story was factual enough doesn’t belie the possibility that DHS participated. It certainly merits investigation.
The post protests too much, I think.
Mnemosyne
@wilfred:
I’m still waiting for the current administration to say that for the first time. Can you please point me to, say, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech where she said that?
Yutsano
@SW:
They may or may not have actually done anything. BUT THEY WERE THINKING ABOUT IT! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!
Do you think you could stop and think for a second before you answer a question?
Sly
@wilfred:
Oh, I’m sure someone from the Judean People’s Front will be here to remind me in case I forget.
Baud
@wilfred:
Really?
Princess
@Steve: I always, always mix them up. Including for the entirety of this post and for roughly half the comments. I kept wondering why eemom studied in Canada…
WeeBey
@wilfred:
No, that is not reasonable speculation. It’s all based on… Nothing.
Conspiracy theories aren’t journalism.
Try harder.
Nanette
@wilfred:
Something about this post brings to mind people shooting watermelons in a backyard or park or wherever it was to test “reasonable speculation.”
boss bitch
@Steve:
That’s ok. I used to mix up John Cole and Juan Cole.
Mnemosyne
@wilfred:
And the proof is … where, exactly? Any indication that any of that came anywhere but from the writer’s own — wait for it — imagination, given that he used the word “imagine” twice?
When you’ve gotten to the point where you’re basing your criticism of the administration on what you imagine might have happened and not on any actual proof, you’re deep into ODS territory.
The original reporter of the story now says that the mayor of Oakland was referring to the conference call with the other mayors, not to a conference call with DHS or any other federal agency, but somehow the fact that the guy who originally broke the story has backed down means that you should totally double down on the speculations even though the guy whose reporting you based those speculations on now says he was wrong.
Like I said, so much for us being the “reality-based community.”
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©
“It was completely spontaneous,” said Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group that organized calls on Oct. 11 and Nov. 4. Among the issues discussed: safety, traffic and the fierceness of demonstrations in each city.
That’s from the A.P. story.
A.P. does not note that Chuck Wexler, and other members of P.E.R.F., are Homeland Security Advisory Council Members.
Nor does A.P. mention their role in heavy-handed responses during events such as the 2008 GOP convention.
PERF’s current and former directors read as a who’s who of police chiefs involved in crackdowns on anti-globalization and political convention protesters resulting in thousands of arrests, hundreds of injuries, and millions of dollars paid out in police brutality and wrongful arrest lawsuits.
Which isn’t to say that Naomi Wolf’s conclusion is proven or even correct. I am saying that A.P.’s article isn’t as informative as it could be, and it is (as is typical for the A.P.) slanted in favor of the authorities.
~
The prophet Nostradumbass
@wilfred: How very Peggy Noonan of you.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@SW:
Really? I heard that you are a terrorist. It wasn’t sourced or anything, but I was glad it went out anyway. (No, I didn’t mention the murder story.)
I’m certainly glad you went with that idiotic reasoning.
tweedstereo
@wilfred
“The post protests too much, I think.”
Yea, that seems to be the tenor of a lot of ABL posts. ZOMG!
Kerry Reid
@Baud: Easy – she’s the woman standing between me and one of my imaginary husbands, Liev Schreiber.
Also, bell hooks once took apart Naomi Wolf in a Ms. Magazine piece about twenty years ago and it was beautiful but I can’t remember the exact context. But Wolf is a ninny. hooks, on the other hand, is a gem.
wilfred
Well, if I were a journalist, I’d be looking into it. And if there was nothing there, I’d accept it.
I certainly wouldn’t be off by people screeching that Naomi Wolf is a stupid t**t or that some 15 day window for confirming something has elapsed.
A coordinated effort against the OWS effort? Nah.
David Koch
@Donut:
How can printing unsubstantiated speculation that puts the onus on the accused to prove their innocence be praise worthy?
Do you feel that way when the right wing pushes unsubstantiated speculation saying inoculations cause retardation or Climate change is a scam by scientists to generate fund raising or Nancy Pelosi has secretly passed Sharia law or evolution is false?
Mnemosyne
@ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©:
So is the current Police Commissioner of New York. I guess that’s your proof positive that the breakup of the OWS camps was ordered by the feds and carried out by DHS just like Wolfe said, amirite?
By the way, this is the claim by Wolfe that you’re defending as true:
burnspbesq
@Dr. Loveless:
I can give you the name of a good eye doc if you’d like.
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©
@Mnemosyne:
I guess that’s your proof positive that the breakup of the OWS camps was ordered by the feds and carried out by DHS just like Wolfe said, amirite?
Are you incapable of reading what I just wrote?
Would it help if I repeated it?
Which isn’t to say that Naomi Wolf’s conclusion is proven or even correct. I am saying that A.P.’s article isn’t as informative as it could be, and it is (as is typical for the A.P.) slanted in favor of the authorities.
~
gwangung
It’s internally consistent, but that’s not enough. Several competing hypotheses could fit the observed facts, but there is not enough to choose between them.
You’re engaging in unscientific thinking. Find something to narrow down the possibilities THEN speculate–and DON’T STOP THERE.
burnspbesq
@wilfred:
Who is Gregg Levine, and why should I believe anything he says or writes?
This is the journalistic equivalent of the old lawyers’ saying, “you don’t need a case to file a lawsuit, all you need is a word processor and a check for the filing fee.” All people like Wolf need is an idea, however crackpot, or wild-assed speculation based on some coincidence, that fits within a pre-conceived world-view, and they’re off to the races.
David Koch
@Baud:
She’s the mayor of Watts.
Yutsano
@ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©:
So your point has nothing to do with the actual subject at hand. Duly noted.
wilfred
My point is that I’d like to know if the DHS was involved, not whether Naomi Wolf is a stupid t**t.
As far as I’m concerned, there is enough there for me to ask whether the DHS is/was involved. The fact that Quan participated in a conference call with other mayors makes me ask questions.
Whatever Wolf said or didn’t is not the point. Denouncing her doesn’t answer questions. You don’t like the questions, but why the outrage when someone else does?
In any case, the DHS denied involvement. Case closed, right?
gwangung
As I mentioned before, this is generally done before publication, not after.
eemom
We are all Digby now.
MikeJ
@wilfred: You’re the only person who has called her a twat. Why are you such a misogynist?
WeeBey
@wilfred:
Other mayors does not equal DHS.
And as to your last, absent any other evidence? Yes.
suzanne
@Mnemosyne: Mnem, I asked other pet-loving in-the-know friends about a good shelter to which to donate in the PHX area, and they recommended the AZ Animal Welfare League. I don’t know anything about them personally, but they look like a good organization.
Mnemosyne
@ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©:
Actually, I’m not sure what your point is supposed to be since you seem to be arguing simultaneously that Wolfe is wrong but AP is also wrong, so therefore Wolfe must be right. Or something.
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©
@Yutsano:
That’s from the blockquote up top.
It’s where I got the A.P. link.
~
Mnemosyne
@suzanne:
I’ll check them out, too — thanks much!
Mnemosyne
By the way, the reporter who originally reported the story that Wolfe is basing her hysteria on has filed two additional stories. And, surprise surprise, neither one of them backs up her claims.
Homeland Security role in ‘Occupy’ crackdowns limited, says agency
Worries about Fed involvement in ‘Occupy’ crackdowns ‘overblown,’ says official
But I realize that actual facts and the existence of further reporting won’t convince anyone here that Wolfe’s charges are overblown at best, and outright lies at worst.
Crusty Dem
Burnsbesq: four zeroes? Bet taken and won with a final value of 0.0019. Stick with the pedantic legalese.
Tommy D
@MikeJ: well, now, that’s really silly. Everybody at the Washington Post and NYTimes and whatever is a terrible reporter? Get a grip.
suzanne
I was surprised to read this because I thought The Shock Doctrine was so great. I plead vacation for my obviously deficient cerebral faculties.
suzanne
I was surprised to read this because I thought The Shock Doctrine was so great. I plead vacation for my obviously deficient cerebral faculties.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Mnemosyne:
AP also did not report that Bush and Kerry were both members of Skull and Bones in the run-up to the presidential debates. Not to say that the Tin Foil Gazette’s conclusion that the Illuminati chooses primary winners is proven or even correct. Just that the AP isn’t as informative as it could be.
Yutsano
@suzanne: Different Naomi, fortunately. Naomi Klein wrote The Shock Doctrine.
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©
@Mnemosyne:
Stating that a thing hasn’t been proven isn’t the same as stating that it is untrue.
But that is the leap that’s being encouraged by both ABL and Karoli. They cite an A.P. story that left out key facts which are easy to find with google.
Facts that do not allow one to conclude DHS coordination, as Wolf has.
But those facts certainly warrant more investigation, and skepticism of the authorities’ claims, than “This is criticism of the Administration and therefore shut up firebaggers!”
~
Mnemosyne
@ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©:
Follow my links at #122 to some actual follow-up reporting from the actual reporter talking to actual federal officials. But I realize that no amount of investigation and factual reporting will convince you at this point. You think you spotted a conspiracy, and anything that debunks that conspiracy is just more proof that the conspiracy is real, man, or they wouldn’t be trying to debunk it.
ETA: And, no, it’s not reporting from AP. It’s reporting from the guy at Examiner.com who made the original claims.
ETA #2: I would be interested to find out if the mayors of the cities did, in fact, coordinate the closings, but apparently it’s a way sexier story to decide that Obama ordered it, so I guess we’ll never know now.
WeeBey
It’s more of a “This is shit that should be checked BEFORE you print something, and the people who are eager to lick it up are pretty stupid.” But YMMV.
Jess
Every functioning nation, or nation that wishes to remain functional, has to maintain a reasonable balance between the the forces of authority/status quo and the forces of liberty/revolution. Even if there were a “conspiracy” to keep OWS contained, that would be entirely normal and, while worth resisting, nothing to get hysterical about. We push them, they push back, we push back more, etc. As long as it doesn’t get way out of hand (as in Kent State), we can condemn the excesses (UC Davis) without giving up on negotiation.
We need to maintain some faith in the capacity for the government to work for us more often than against us, or we lose all traction in our efforts to influence it. Too much cynicism is just as deadly as too much naive ignorance.
kay
I think if you’re a national pundit you need a national (federal) issue, and so you’ll find one on the slightest evidence.
Wolfe isn’t going to write about a lowly mayors’ meeting.
She needs Congress, the President, federal police agencies.
Big Important National Issues, not that chump change local stuff.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@Steve: You certainly are not – I had to do a Wiki search, to learn I was not an idiot for loving Naomi Klein.
WeeBey
@Jess:
Probably the best post on this thread.
Also, I must note, the bind Obama is constantly in. He’s the one arguing government can — and must — work.
That people who share my political beliefs don’t see this consistently baffles me.
General Stuck
@Jess:
Yes, but how you gonna get to Obama Worser Than Bush, thinking like that?
suzanne
@Yutsano: I know—I realized it by about comment #50. That’s why I said that I’m obviously a moron.
FlipYrWhig
Remember when Peggy Noonan said, “Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to,” and we all laughed because that was obviously idiotic? Can we go back to that, please?
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©
@Mnemosyne:
Neither of your links debunks a thing. They quote the responses from DHS. Look up the word ‘debunk’ in a dictionary before you throw it at me again.
@Jess:
Britney Spears
~
Jess
@WeeBey: awww, shucks…thanks! I have to say, the more I study history, the more ordinary and relatively manageable our problems seem. Except perhaps the whole Global Warming thang. Really, I’m amazed that we’re doing as well as we are.
Yutsano
@ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©: Here’s your problem: you don’t have any solid evidence anywhere for your position. You don’t even have the preponderdance of the evidence. Your response to this is to attack the sources who are not giving you what you are asking/demanding. It doesn’t work like that. You have to show us something else beyond what’s been presented.
Jess
@ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©: Yes, a nice example of blind naivete, which is actually easier to overcome than blind cynicism: “I think we should just mistrust our president in every decision he makes and should just condemn that, you know, and be relentlessly critical about whatever happens.”
auntieeminaz
@suzanne: I can vouch for them from personal experience.
FlipYrWhig
I think DHS arranged things so that Tim Tebow would start winning games for the Broncos. And I’m pretty sure he was using a phone before his last game. Apart from that part where I allege DHS involvement, I have a rock-solid case. Disturbing, if true.
suzanne
@auntieeminaz: Awesome. I’ve adopted three animals from the AZ Humane Society, but I know some people don’t like to support shelters and organizations that rent no-kill. Mnem was looking for a local organization to donate to for a gift, and I’m glad there’s a good option.
kay
Ifthethunderdontgetyou,
Does it bother you that the original reporter didn’t follow the ’18 mayors’ part of the inquiry?
Who would you ask?
DHS or the mayors?
Why the obsessive and singular focus on the federal side?
Does that make sense? Who is more likely to answer his questions?
Orizabajack
I agree, it’s pretty paranoid over-the-top stuff, but I’m surprised nobody has brought up #PERF. This is their statement on the matter: http://policeforum.org/news/detail.dot?id=2161738
There are, of course, other opinions on their role in the crackdowns.
Maybe it’s not fully as evil as Wolf’s fevered piece insinuates, but still, national coordination.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Note for balloon-juice.com Newbies
The whole point of a balloonbagger circle-pop, as we have here currently raging, is to vilify the people who may pose a threat in any way to President Obama’s reputation and re-election. These people must be cast as personally and intentionally evil and corrupt. No single contrary personality can be allowed to interfere with the preferred balloonbagger Cult of Personality and remain unattacked. Balloonbaggers are a simple folk; no further analysis is necessary to understand them.
.
.
eemom
fwiw, “thunder” the trademark-copyright clown is a long-time regular over Lake Batshit, aka Jane’s house of lie-lovers.
‘nuther words, if it’s good enough for the pretty lady at the top of the page, it’s good enough for him.
dead existentialist
Look! It’s Uncle Clarence Thomas! Let’s get him!
kay
No Clarence, I just think I might ask one or all of the ’18 mayors’ rather than repeatedly asking the DOJ or DHS.
The whole premise is ‘we don’t accept the DHS denial’ so why does he keep asking them to verify his theory?
Ask the mayors in the cities where the events occurred. ‘Did you coordinate with DHS?”
Mnemosyne
@ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©:
Were you surprised at all that I predicted your response, or did you just skip right over that part?
You decided what the “truth” must be before you came here, and nothing you read to the contrary will ever change your mind.
Yutsano
@kay: You’re not one to usually beat your head against walls. :)
bin Lurkin'
I for one was heartened by Obama’s clear and unequivocal condemnation of official violence against peaceful protesters in the USA.
The fact that the rest of the Democratic party joined in that condemnation of official violence against peaceful protesters only made Obama’s condemnation that much more powerful.
It’s a sign of a healthy democracy when elected public officials speak out against gratuitous violence on the part of portions of the state security apparatus.
FlipYrWhig
@Orizabajack: If you mean by “national coordination” that the mayors and police chiefs worked together, sure. But that’s not the only implication of the claim of “coordination” that Wolf et al want to run with. They want the story to be that orders came from on high, all the way to the top. They want “coordination” to mean “leadership,” rather than “cooperation.”. Because that way they get to tell a story about Obama running roughshod over civil liberties, which feels true enough to a certain type of denizen of the blogosphere.
William Hurley
Glass houses…, I think you know the rest.
DHS and the FBI were involved as a physical presence at the downtown Portland, OR presences of “Occupy” (as many photos evidence) and the respective departments have confirmed their regular interaction with PPB Chief (and no longer Mayoral prospect) Reese, lame-duck Mayor Adams and other city officials.
What I’d consider to be egregious is not Wolfe’s essay, but your trenchant refusal to comment on the President’s unilateral and extra-legal use of drones to kill individuals who are citizens of and reside within nations not at war with the US or vice-versa. The majority of individuals murdered in drone strikes are innocent persons – young, old, male, female, educated, illiterate, poor and of means. Yes, drones are non-discriminatory in service of indiscriminate killing.
Why the abject silence on an issue of such manifold importance? How many innocent lives must be stolen and how many families touched by remote-controlled death before these acts of imperial terror rise to the level of seriousness that they offend your “liberal” sensitivities?
Karoli
For those of you minimizing Wolf’s ratfuckery here, did you read her article? The part where she concludes, after putting all of the “pieces” together, that our President and Congress are waging a bloody civil war against those they represent? Because that is what she says. In those words. So don’t assume it’s all about simply reusing a right-wing unsourced story. It’s not. It’s about climbing on an international platform to foment discontent and anger toward the government, whether it be this one or any other.
cat48
I read that screed by Wolf in the Guardian. The only question I have for folks who are sure that the Feds ordered all the camps disassembled in a coordinated attack is:
Why weren’t all the camps “attacked” and shutdown since it was all coordinated by Federal officials. Occupy DC, LA, STL, among others, were not shutdown or “attacked”.
I’m just curious.
Sly
@FlipYrWhig:
Wolfe isn’t an Obama detractor by default. Her thesis, if you wish to call it that, is that the United States is the world’s most cleverly disguised fascist dictorship. She establishes this argument by laying out a dozen or so criteria for what a fascist dictatorship means, and checks them all off like a shopping list. The U.S. is not a fascist dictatorship because it is, its a fascist dictatorship because it must be. And any President will inevitably be part of the problem, because transcendental forces of history shall inexorably force them to act as such.
Its the same kind of teleological nonsense that way too many writers try to pass off as avant-garde political theory, and its been a persistent intellectual vice among political theorists since, well, Aristotle.
As for her defenders here? Yeah. ODS.
Sly
@William Hurley:
Because you’re just a better person than the rest of us, and we are all over-awed by your obvious moral and ethical superiority.
There. I’ve told you what you wanted to hear. Can I touch your fucking halo?
Mnemosyne
@William Hurley:
Shorter William Hurley: Wolf is so wrong about this that I’ll look like an idiot if I defend her, so I’ll change the subject instead.
ruemara
@wilfred: You are an idiot. I’ve said this here several times. There are national mayoral groups and forums. There are federal level training sessions and consultations. It has nothing to do with FEDERAL COORDINATION of anything. It has everything to do with providing training, guidance on federal laws and regulations and allowing mayors, chiefs of police, etc, the ability to discuss situations they are all facing and see how they are handling it. Period.
Jess
The problem for Naomi and her ilk is that if Obama is reasonably good in terms of civil rights and progressive issues, then she becomes irrelevant. Her entire career and professional identity is built on resistance to the Evil Empire, and she can’t give up the glory of that fight. A reality-based critique of a middle-of-the-road republic just doesn’t provide the same sense of grandiosity that a narcissist like her requires.
FlipYrWhig
Does anyone else think William Hurley and Uncle Clarence Thomas are the same guy, only one is putting on a persona that recalls Winchester from MASH?
FlipYrWhig
@Jess: IMHO, that’s more true of Naomi KLEIN than Naomi Wolf.
vernon
@Jess:
Christ yes! There is no substantial criticism of POTUS! For instance he isn’t championing the use of cluster bombs or anything—haters just hate him cause, you know, well, for no reason actually (I think)! Just like Obama never extended Bush’s regressive tax code, never escalated the war on due process, and NEVER let a lobby write a bill, right? Let’s not worry about reality, cause reality has a pronounced & increasingly well documented case of Obama Derangement Syndrome, so FUCK reality, am I right? Fuckin’ reality based community. I, personally, hope Obama puts on a flight suit next, and declares “Mission Accomplished”; that would be an incredibly iconic moment in the history of my power-mad boners.
Hey, so we lost Michael Moore and now Naomi Wolf; big deal, they aren’t genuine left wing people anyway. We still have Andrew Sullivan on our side, and Tom Friedman, and Dick Cheney! Walk proud, fellow Obots, and smile hard!
William Hurley
@Mnemosyne:
Please do feel free to guess again.
Here’s photos of DHS agents acting as I described in Portland, OR.
The point I raised was to call into question the absolute rejection of Wolfe’s premise as well as the wholesale rejection of the facts pertaining to inter-agency cooperation – with political guidance – by law enforcement against OWS in the entry anchoring this thread.
To amplify my point, I brought forth a subject that, within this forum, has gotten less than short-shrift. As Connor Friedersdorf wrote, certain self-described “liberals” are committed to the “santize Obama’s record” project no matter the deeds or moral short-comings being revised.
AA+ Bonds
It doesn’t serve your purposes to write about this
AA+ Bonds
I mean this is pretty much the full depth of left-wing navel gazing in this “debate” right here
burnspbesq
@William Hurley:
Lazybones, search the archives and you’ll find all sorts of condemnation of the indiscriminate use of drones. Drones are completely irrelevant to the subject matter of this thread.
Take your obsession somewhere else.
ABL
@SW:
Truthiness, for the win.
My lord, we’re fucked if this is what counts as sound logic.
AA+ Bonds
I mean, just think this through, so you “debunk” Naomi Wolf, what is that going to do for you,
is it going to get more votes for Democrats in 2012,
is it going to prevent the President from getting arrested over it or something,
what’s the real practical purpose of arguing over this besides helping out the Republicans?
Sly
@William Hurley:
Schrunk Plaza, where the arrest depicted took place, is owned by the Federal government.
I’ll do you a favor and assume you were ignorant of the fact Schrunk Plaza is owned by the Federal government, and not ignorant of the fact that Federal law enforcement agencies under the umbrella of DHS have jurisdiction on property owned by the Federal government. Because if its the latter, you’re pretty much not worth the effort of a response.
AA+ Bonds
Here’s how I see it: every last single thing that makes OWS look independent of the Democrats and the President will help the Democrats and the President in 2012
ABL
@William Hurley: if you’d read the post, you would have seen and followed this link.
AA+ Bonds
I honestly think Democrats are still learning when to let their left-wing influence do its work. A few liberals still want to prove The Point against a popular movement, as far as I can tell, as though it would be effective if it were viewed as behind the federal government.
burnspbesq
@William Hurley:
Once again, there is no there where you think it is.
The DHS personnel involved in Portland were Federal Protective Service. Here is what the DHS website has to say about FPS’ mission:
If Occupy Portland was or is doing its thing on or near Federal property, FPS has jurisdiction, and there is nothing out of the ordinar (much less sinister) about its exercise of that jurisdiction.
Fail.
ABL
@AA+ Bonds:
i get a free toaster oven.
i simply cannot take this question seriously.
AA+ Bonds
I mean, posts like this are, well, they’re very David Frum, very John Huntsman, very Evan Bayh, very please-will-the-other-side-like-me-please
Mnemosyne
@vernon:
Uh, no. He isn’t. Greenwald’s link is to a story of the bombs having been used in 2009, which he then uses to whip up hysteria about a proposal that then proceeded to fail miserably with the rest of the UN.
But, hey, why deal with facts when you can spread hysteria instead?
Sly
@burnspbesq:
It was:
AA+ Bonds
@ABL:
I’m sorry, but I do. The tactical question is the only question right now. We face national crisis. Fighting over OWS hurts Obama in 2012.
Bago
With a Wesker in residence, only evil will follow.
William Hurley
@Sly:
No, you cannot touch my halo as I am not in possession of one.
I do want to thank you for your comment, though. You have clarified a perspective I’ve been hesitant to give greater weight. The perspective is that the tribe of ardent o-bots is more concerned with power than anything else. As such, the long list of Obama’s failures and Bush-esque exercises of Unitary Executive authority are A-OK! “He’s our guy”, you o-bots say to yourselves. Its a rationalization that allows crucial facts to go unseen or, if seen, under-appreciated.
Here’s a question for you.
How many tens of millions of Americans can be un- or under-employed before an incumbent President is un-re-electable? 25 million? 30? 35? More? Fewer?
I ask because its an historical pertinent, if nor critical point for an incumbent and her/his supporters to understand clearly. I ask, also knowing that the state of the economy will result in election day arriving at a time when there will be ~30 million working age Americans either un- or under-employed. Viewing history guide on such circumstances instructs those taking these facts seriously as being perilous if not fatal to the incumbent’s electability. And yes, that history includes the response of self-preservational efforts that included taking responsibility and promising more diligent efforts as well as campaigns that put blaming the opposition at the center of the argument. Since FDR, such incumbents have lost regardless of campaign strategy.
MikeJ
@burnspbesq: There’s more fail than that. The sinister stormtroopers swooped in and arrested one guy. What a massive federally coördinated crackdown! The linked “story” (a word which has several meanings) claims Portland cops were assembled somewhere else entirely putting on riot gear, but apparently they never stormed out from underneath the bridge and the Portland PD says they were never there at all.
If those two feds were there to crack skulls because Obama told them to, why are they ignoring all the other people in that pic wandering around? They arrested one guy on charges unrelated to occupy, and the arrested guy never said that wasn’t true.
AA+ Bonds
I really think that these posts act as a magnet for those among BJ’s Democratic professionals who WANT to hate OWS, who RELISH the idea of Americans losing their First Amendment rights.
I think that’s pretty much all these posts do.
Likely, some of the posters here have Wall Streeters for clients and fancy themselves at the feet of True Power. Thankfully, they’re a disappearing minority on BJ, the Yglesias-style cork-sniffers.
vernon
@Mnemosyne: Ah, and what about the Guardian’s story from last Tuesday regarding negotiations which ended in Geneva today? Also from 2009? Or what? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/22/us-pushing-un-cluster-bombs
Thanks, I’ll try not to let those pesky facts get in the way! That’s good advice! WALK PROUD MY FELLOW OBOT!!
Mnemosyne
@William Hurley:
You mean that federal agents were policing federal property? Oh my heavens! Next thing I know, you’re going to tell me that the federal government polices interstate commerce! Or that the (federal) US Coast Guard has stations along the Great Lakes even though lakes don’t have coasts at all!
I must lie down on my fainting couch now that I have received the amazing news that federal officers are responsible for federal property. Who knew?
Sly
@AA+ Bonds:
Fighting over whether or not Naomi Wolf spread innuendo in an attempt to substantiate an insipid political theory she wrote about in a book published in 2007 is not fighting over OWS. Nor does pointing out the fact that the usual suspects are gobbling up said innuendo in order to substantiate their own delusional thinking amount to “fighting over OWS”.
Mnemosyne
@vernon:
Gosh, sorry, I didn’t realize that the story from today’s New York Times that I linked to about the failed negotiations was less timely than a Guardian story from last week. Once again I underestimated the power of the Guardian’s time machine that allows their older stories to supercede more recently reported ones.
ETA: Re-added the link to this post since you seem to be confused by temporal differences between “today” and “last week,” so I’m not sure if you will be able to figure out the “scroll wheel.”
William Hurley
@AA+ Bonds:
OWS = unBama.
The sad part is that too many o-bots refuse to understnad that OWS is very loud alarm notifying him that his reelection bid is doomed.
OWS is the primary challenger the Democratic Party will not institutionally allow. It’s a challenge that arose not to defeat Obama, it arose because he failed. OWS, as primary challenger (metaphorically speaking), is doing what actual competitive challengers in all forums do. They/it/us are offering a different (not merely “differentiated”, which is a marketing tactic) means to political participation, expression and affiliation from that offered by the institution and the incumbent.
That o-bots react with uncontrolled hostility to OWS shows the primacy of their faith-based attachment to the President and current crop of DNC apparatchiks.
vernon
@Mnemosyne: The Guardian story was from Tuesday. How is that “last week”?
Both it and your NYTimes link report the same thing as regards US policy: that the US, under the wonderful life-giving pony-distributing rainbow-farting sunshine shitter Obama, was as a matter of international policy promoting and defending the use of cluster bombs. Calling it a “fail” doesn’t change that; trying to insinuate that GG was referring to matters 2 years ago doesn’t change that—you know this, Sold Brother #1, and I know it too! And the more you post the more obvious it becomes. Gosh, sorry!
Mnemosyne
@AA+ Bonds:
Wait, how did we get from Naomi Wolf claiming that Obama personally ordered the breakup of the OWS camps to people hating OWS? Did you just skim over that part of the post?
Here’s what she said that you’re defending:
So pushing back against a claim that the president and Congress personally ordered the breakup of the OWS camps is what Dick Cheney would do? Really?
William Hurley
@burnspbesq:
I can assure you that having walked past the various DHS presences sprinkled around and among those of the PPB everyday – multiple time a day – your effort to squeeze out the elementary and empirical facts of the matter are – as you put it – failing. My apt building is on the same street as the parks Occupy was holding. Just an FYI, those 3 downtown parks have been barricaded by the city with 6′ chain-linked fencing rendering them inaccessible to the public for recreation or as pedestrian routes between local businesses and transportation. When Occupy was holding them, there were no impediments to the public at-large.
I “admire” your choice of political entity to defend.
Mnemosyne
@vernon:
And by that you mean trying to come up with a proposal that the other countries that have refused to sign the accord would agree to, yes? But I guess purity and no regulation is better than imperfect regulation.
I admit, I did skim Greenwald too quickly — otherwise, I wasn’t sure how he went from a bombing in 2009 to:
After all, I’m sure Obama was totally thinking about the 2012 election when that bombing happened in 2009. Thank you, again, Glenn Greenwald, for your mind-reading skills to tell us exactly why Obama does things.
Sly
@William Hurley:
I’m more than happy, and always willing, to validate the sanctimonious narcissism of others. I have friends and family in the head shrinking game, and I consider it doing my part to help them and their colleagues out in times of economic hardship. Speaking of which:
No, you ask because you just got caught doing something stupid by portraying a Federal law enforcement agency enforcing the law on Federal property as a conspiracy between Federal and state authorities to crush freedom of assembly, and are changing the subject. Again.
But I’ll play along. How many millions? Don’t know. The correlation is tenuous at worst and too complex to be valuable at best, and the rate of correlation since employment statistics have been collected is basically zero. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. One could make a plausible argument that unemployment contributed to the defeats of Carter and the first Bush, but it did not contribute to the defeats of Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, or the second Bush. Nate Silver ran the numbers back in June.
And one could also make a plausible argument that FDR got the United States out of the Great Depression by turning the United States into a giant factory, the express purpose of which was to build the ordinance that would completely annihilate the urban residents of other countries through both conventional and nuclear fire. I only mention this because you’re jumping from one insipid critique to another, so I thought I’d go ahead and give them some kind of coherence.
Mnemosyne
@vernon:
In case you’re curious about current US policy regarding cluster bombs:
Oh, Human Rights Watch, you insane Obama apologists! Don’t you know that Glenn Greenwald knows that Obama loves him some cluster bombs?
ETA: Wait, wait, I have a coherent critique! The administration went for weak regulation that the bad actors like Russia and Iran would go for in hopes of
bipartisanshipinternational agreement at all costs instead of going for stronger regulation.Oh, wait, not enough personal hatred of Obama in there, just a straightforward critique of a major weakness of the administration that has a factual basis. I guess Greenwald can’t use it after all.
Sly
@William Hurley:
OWS is the political manifestation of America’s disgruntled animus. As such, it can mean different things to different people, and those meanings will vary based on the type and tone of the anxiety felt by each individual observer and/or participant.
You don’t want Obama to be re-elected, hence OWS is a vehicle for him not to be re-elected. Any attack on your arguments for why Obama should not be re-elected is an implicit attack on OWS. That is the meaning that it must have simply because you refuse to extend your field of observation beyond the narrow scope of your own emotional demands. But few if any here actually attack OWS as a movement.
So stop accusing everyone of who disagrees with you of allowing “crucial facts to go unseen” or engaging in a “faith-based attachment.” Because, based on the shit you’ve been shoveling so far, all that does is make you look like a stupid prick.
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne:
Needs moar irrationality.
And a point about FPS: they are there to respond to incidents on federal property. I’ve seen and interacted with them before. Suggesting they were called in exclusively on Obama’s order is ludicrous. That’s like saying I issued my last levy on his explicit instructions.
Dr. Squid
@eemom: 2000 is instructive. The firebaggers seem to be desperate to repeat it.
Sly
@Dr. Squid:
Vote for Bushgore!
Uriel
@wilfred:
You may want to really explore the actual weight that qualifier imparts to anything that follows it.
A hint? Not much.
Uriel
@William Hurley: Good lord-you, with this shit, again.
nancydarling
Y’all forgot Naomi Judd,or did someone already say that. The one thing I know for sure about this is a market exists for tin foil hats on the fringe of the left, and just about the entire wing of the right.
Cuppa Cabana
The DHS connection to the conference calls coordinated by PERF is not “innuendo” traceable only to an Examiner article. It is something that PERF itself is copping to. I call bullshit on Karoli’s bullshit.
Is the DHS connection to a crack-down really shocking? For ten years local police forces have become ridiculously militarised — financed, trained, equipped by the DHS and the Glorious Endless War on Tourism. Now we’re surprised that the little armies are using their weaponry?
Also, ABL criticising a writer for hyperbole is like Tub Girl complaining about someone else’s personal hygiene.
agrippa
@William Hurley:
OWS = unBama.
Translation: You do not like PBO.
“fixed”.
agrippa
@William Hurley:
Your # 194
Empty words; a cipher.
harlana
what would we be thinking if Bush were still president? just saying.
ornery
LOL. Reminds me of the dkos explosions that marginalized that community.
Screw you Armando, or ABL or BDT or whatthefckeveryouare, for reopening wounds and playing in them. Though it’s a beautifully done troll job: Got folks hatin’ their allies, choosing sides for the circular attack and wasting energy on ‘our side.’
Very familiar.
I think this is the time to say, loud and proud now, that this is all the fault of Ralph Nader. Maybe we could get an ABL post rehashing all that internecine hatred again, in case nothing else is at hand to destroy unity and morale?
debbie
I read a few days ago about consultants trying to get Wall Street firms to hire them to undermine OWS. Is this part of that, or was that a true story? I can’t tell anymore.
harlana
Really????
harlana
@debbie: it’s true – somebody may have done a post on this a few days ago, can’t remember
debbie
Thanks for the link.
harlana
these comments are incredibly exhausting to read
((sigh))
not everyone who questions the current government’s activities is necessarily an Obama-hater or is out to destroy Obama; chill
harlana
people here fighting about Naomi Wolf and they don’t even know the difference between that Naomi and Naomi Klein! XD
lawguy
@Nanette: I understand your being that stupid, I don’t understand you admitting in print.
Sko Hayes
@Cuppa Cabana: But there is no DHS connection to directing or ordering the crackdown and as Naomi implied, any “blessing” from the White House on the crackdown.
As you said, considering the money the cities get for terrorism training and the like from DHS (NYC gets billions), the connection to the DHS is there:
http://www.alternet.org/media/153104/why_federal_officials_are_probably_not_coordinating_a_nationwide_crackdown_on_the_occupy_wall_street_movement/
But the connection doesn’t seem to go anywhere past that.
lawguy
@Mnemosyne: The National Lawyers Guild has filed FOIA requests to find out whether or not the coordinated actions against OWS were coordinated with the FBI/DHS or just amoung the various mayors. I’m sure that we might know the answer in a few months, maybe.
agrippa
@harlana:
Understood.
Asking pertinent questions and making an honest effort to get something called ‘truth’ or ‘proof’ is completely apporopriate.
Wolf has asked the question. Wolf has not, to my satisfaction, answered the question.
Sko Hayes
@William Hurley: honestly, that’s just silly.
You may think that the OWS movement is a political statement against Obama, but talk to 20 different occupiers and you’ll get 20 different answers.
The most shortsighted people claim that they won’t be voting, as if fading into the background of the 50% who don’t care enough to get out and vote will somehow get their message of dissatisfaction across to the Democrats.
Putting Republicans into office never works out to our advantage. You might think back on the Bush years, with a Republican majority in Congress held until 2006, and how that voting for Nader worked out for you.
kay
Harlana, Wolfe didn’t ask any questions.
She announced DHS was working directly with the mayors and then went from that to King and Obama.
It’s a crappy, sloppy piece of work.
Am I under some obligation to consider it credible?
Why? Because she’s famous? I don’t care who she is.
different-church-lady
@Baud:
Fixed.
kay
It’s also patronizing and silly.
Her big smoking gun is where she tells us that DHS has congressional and executive oversight.
That’s the ‘connection’
No shit. Really? You mean to tell me we don’t have rogue federal police agencies that act on their own orders?
Who does not know that harlana?
6th graders?
lawguy
@Mnemosyne: The point was pretty simple. The guy who organized the calls according to the A.P. is a guy who is on some sort of DHS advisory committee. Although the A.P. doesn’t mention his connection with DHS. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to speculate on DHS involvement. On the other hand before one writes a report where one states that DHS was definately involved one needs to get evidence. But there should be a lot of reporters digging to find out. Ok, the last sentence was snark.
vernon
@Mnemosyne:
No personal hatred of Obama anywhere at all, in fact. Certainly not here. I hold him, dispassionately and impersonally, as a leader and policy maker, to the same standard as George W. Bush. Why don’t you?
He fails as a leader for the same reasons as GW Bush. It’s nothing personal. On a personal level, I find Obama infinitely more likeable, intelligent, respectable, and thoughtful. And all those considerations are completely irrelevant to my priorities as a citizen.
Allan
I feel bad for Naomi Klein. Sharing a first name with Naomi Wolf is like being a children’s entertainer named John Wayne Macy.
vernon
@Mnemosyne:
You might want to parse that link there, Slick. I do not think it means what you think it means.
“Regrettably, the move to eliminate cluster munitions is under attack, with the United States leading the way … Though cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric, the draft is clearly an effort to provide political and legal cover for potential future use of the weapon … It will fail to offer greater protections to civilians. In fact it could lead to an increase in the use of cluster munitions, by providing a specific legal framework for their use.”
Etc, etc, etc. Yeah, Greenwald really twisted that one.
ABL
@ornery: Off your meds again, are we? ’tis a pity.
Jennyjinx
@Mnemosyne:
What no one here has mentioned or even hinted at is this:
The original “reporter” is not a reported but a bit content producer for a content mill. Anyone who can string together a sentence can write for Examiner.com– they even have liberals writing over there. It’s not a newspaper or even a reputable site. You can go over there and find people who write only about knitting or people who only write about roses or people who only write about homeschooling or even liberal politics. None of those writers was vetted and none of them has a fact-checker.
Look, the dude didn’t get paid for writing that piece, he gets paid in pageviews. Quite literally pennies for a few hundred views. That means that the more people click on his shit, the more he gets paid. He might be all the way up to $10 for that piece by now.
Examiner.com doesn’t care if their people write bullshit, as long as it brings traffic. Let me repeat: they are a content mill. I can’t say that enough. The fact that anyone gives them credence for anything is laughable– even calling them a rightwing rag.
So is Associated Content (aka Yahoo! Contributor Network), Gather, The Daily Glow, and efuckinghow.
Everyone’s investigating the writer (he’s not a reporter) of the piece, but no one seems to give a flying fuck about the site on which it was published. Why would anyone give a legitimate interview to someone who writes for a content mill? Hmm? That is enough to discredit the story and any other story that is born from it.
Google doesn’t even like Examiner.com. They gave them a bitchslap in the last Panda update. No, I won’t link. If you don’t know, I’m sure you won’t be interested. But people who take this stuff seriously are aware which sites are solely for generating ad clicks and which are for actual “reporting”. Examiner.com shouldn’t be taken seriously no matter who is writing for them.
That’s the problem with most bloggers. They don’t do enough investigating of the sites where the bullshit appears. I laughed at Michael Moore for a full day on Twitter because he linked to that site. I’m going to laugh at her too. I’ll laugh at anyone who thinks a content mill is a legitimate news site.
different-church-lady
@William Hurley: You’re flogging those photos again?
This time it’s clear it’s not just a simple mistake — you’re being willfully dishonest.
different-church-lady
@Jennyjinx:
The reason nobody’s mentioned it is because we all mentioned it exhaustively earlier this week when this bullshit first hit the 5 watt cooling fan. And it didn’t make a scrap of difference to the junior anarchist crowd.
FollowtheDough
Naomi Wolf is a shameless sensationalist. But the sad reality is no one on the progressive side would write about her if she was painting a gossipy negative portrayal of the Bush Administration. For the most part she was heralded & applauded. Naomi Wolf was always a rabble rouser and as long as the political lense was filtered a certain way, she was a “progressive voice for decency”
FollowtheDough
And now Naomi Wolf has come to show even further how far she is willing to go to splash headlines. But ALL sides of the political spectrum have rabble rousers. Look at twitter for example of that.
vernon
@FollowtheDough: It sounds like you’re talking about Klein, not Wolf. If you’re talking about Klein I totally agree with you. Ms Wolf is more of a class act though.
kay
@harlana:
harlana.
If I said to you that the county sheriff’s department was coordinating with the mayor’s office and the city police on something, and for proof of that I told you that the county commissioners oversee the sheriff’s department you might well ask me why that was proof of anything.
Telling us that Congress and the executive branch have an oversight role re: DHS just isn’t proof of anything. It’s a statement of (obvious) fact. It doesn’t mean anything.
It’s just bothersome to me because she makes it sound so shocking and damning. There’s a congressional committee in charge of homeland security? Okay, sure, makes sense that there would be. I never thought they were a law unto themselves. How is writing that fact “connecting the dots”? What dots? It’s an organizational chart, basically. It’s not secret or nefarious, without more.
John
A B L engaged in a campaign on social media to get people to post Karoli’s piece. Sorry you were unsuccessful at silencing this story, despite your efforts.
John
I for one am glad that the D HS story was not effectively silenced despite the efforts of some
sharl
Sooo, Naomi Wolf has decided to use The Cavuto (h/t Jon Stewart):
Matt
Great article by Naomi Wolfe
different-church-lady
@sharl: Otherwise known as JAQing off.
ABL
@John: Dude, are you following me around the Internet? I don’t have any bacon in my pocket.
Go take your meds, fool.
Yutsano
@ABL:
You’re right. It’s pancetta. :)
William Hurley
@Mnemosyne:
Ahhhh, no. Allow me to encourage you introduce yourself to the early works of Sissela Bok.
Your attempt to insinuate that DHS and DoJ agents contained their physical presence, video & audio surveillance and general “show of force” to the strict confines of Shrunk Plaza is as false as were PPB Chief Reese’s comments regarding OWS’s effect on policing in Portland. What you’ve omitted includes the detail that the 3 formerly Occupied parks in PDX’s downtown are adjacent to each other on a north-south line.
Federal agents were active on-foot and in vehicles maintaining a presence around the perimeter of the entire – 3 park long – occupation. Furthermore, news reports here included references to DHS agents working side-by-side with PPB, Multnomah county and other law enforcement when conducting the eviction of Portland Occupiers from Jamison Sq – a public park located in the heart of the swanky, urban revitalization zone known as the Pearl District.
My for you and the others hostile to the oft observed intermingling of local and Federal agents is this; why are you so reticent in your rejection of interagency cooperation?
Might you be leery of having to acknowledge yet another promise broken, another trust betrayed by a President whose assumption of unfettered executive authority far surpasses even that of the Bush/Cheney team?
In the end, you can and will believe what you need to. I can assure you, though you will no doubt find no assurances in my reporting, that as a resident of downtown PDX who also lives on one of the streets that the 3 park site is located I walked past the site daily (and still do) at least once every day. I had also meandered through the 3 occupied parks and attended GAs. The perpetual show-of-force made by city, county, state and Federal agents was – as shows-of-force are – intentionally obvious and all encompassing of the parks and their occupiers – regardless of the underlying “jurisdictional”/map-made lines.
So again, why so reticent? Why such reluctance to consider the available facts and, maybe, support investigations to ferret-out and report a truth that may well support your reactions.
Yutsano
@William Hurley:
This is funny, since no one is denying this. The suggestion that they all did so under the personal order of the President is where you fall short.
Crusty Dem
@Soonergrunt:
Poor bastard, living in Detroit and now this..
Longtime Lurker
You people here are all outrage junkies. What a mess you leave.
General Stuck
Forgive our spins, we know not what we do.
Longtime Lurker
@eemom
You wish you could be Digby. From what I read here, you have a very ugly mind.
John
Soonergrunt go ahead and publish the comments I made that were so vile they had to be censored. I said great article by Namoi Wolfe. Seriously, you are censoring because I disagree with the author and publishing e-mail and ISP addresses? By the way, #238 comment is also mine. Censor that.
Longtime Lurker
@Stuck
Oh sure you know what you’re doing. You’re getting all angry about some outrage or another and when someone like SW comes along and has a reasonable point that’s not lined up with the outrage, your red eyes see only the enemy so you call him all kinds of nasty names.
It’s group-think, a regular outrage echo chamber.
( although to be fair, General, you don’t seem to join in the bashing all that often. )
General Stuck
@Longtime Lurker:
anyone one else here, you feel the need to insult? Cause pretty soon this thread will disappear below the fold, and that will be that.
General Stuck
SW is a wanker, and so are you. I bash firebaggers with the best of them bud, dispossessed of nary a shred of remorse.
They are not on my side, even a little.
Go ahead and insult me. I bash, therefore I yam.
John
I also wrote that I am glad the D HS story was not silenced. Why was that comment deleted? What an oppressive blog.
John Cole
I am not sure what all has happened here and I am waiting for Soonergrunt to get back to me, but I want to apologize to John and well, everyone else, because I am just appalled that someone published an IP address. I give people front page access to post their ideas, not to act as hall monitors and engage in the kind of behavior you see at Red State.
This will never happened again.
General Stuck
@John Cole:
Absolutely, I was holding my tongue about it, out of respect for Soonergrunt, that and it not being my business. I don’t think sockpuppetry should be a bannable offense, and certainly not publishing personal info. big booboo.
xian
@FollowtheDough: that’s not entirely true. a lot of us found Naomi Wolfe sensationalist and self-promoting, and somewhat off the hinge even in the Bush the Lesser era.
Valdivia
@eemom:
I don’t know if you’re still reading but I loved loved your comment about la Wolfe. Made my day.
William Hurley
@Sly:
Sorry to burst both of the bubbles you floated, but here we go.
You have not “caught” me doing something to the facts. In Portland, DHS/DoJ agents were omnipresent from day 1 and were among the many non-Portland Police riot control units that evicted Occupiers from public spaces. If the “help” you offer your family members is of the same quality, then I hope they’re taking advantage of second opinion options.
Your reference then reliance on Silver’s 6-month old write-up is interesting in that you wash away the one correlation that’s hard fact. That is that Reagan is the only modern era President to win re-election with high unemployment – a 7.2% figure for “headline” unemployment.
Having done the math, layering my extrapolations on-top of those published by Calculated Risk, it is almost axiomatic to expect headline unemployment to be at or above 9.0% around election day. The headline number is but one factor in assessing the impact of a poor economy on employment let alone the mindset of the un- and under-employed. Other measures of unemployment, measures that are far more inclusive, is the “U6” number. In Silver’s article, he touched on variables and variability, but he did nothing to provide readers with clarity as to a) his control assumptions for the various variable b) nor did he identify the dynamics of statistical and model revisions by BLS over the decades – revisions that make headline-to-headline unemployment rate comparisons over time untrustworthy. I expressed such views on another “PoliCultural” blog when Silver’s article was published.
As it stands today, the “U6” unemployment rate is over 16% or 26.5 million. This number will rise over the next year to reach over 30 million.
Of course, Obama, relying on Wall St sympathetic economists (Summers having been just one) declared that the unemployment rate would, by this time, be 8% or lower. The President’s confident prediction made back in early ’09 was in doubt in environs far and wide – save the Village. With economic “recovery” duly legislated, the President first submitted then pushed legislation that would have created a deficit commission, which failed in the Senate. Not to be denied, Obama issued Executive Order 13531 unilaterally creating the Debt/Deficit Committee to which he, alone, appointed Simpson & Bowles. From that time until now, the national (read Villager) discourse has been singularly “debt/deficit” obsessed.
I raise the above chain of events for consideration to both ground the austere contours of numbers in history and in their impact on lived lies. In terms of history, Obama, like FDR, has chosen to cave-in to the voices of austerity – his own included. In ’37, FDR could have opted to stick with rather than abandon “New Deal” (proto-Keynesian) expansion. Had FDR stood fast, the impact of the depression would have remained fleeting robbed of the policy mistakes that opened the door to its return. With the depression in retreat for 8 or so years, would FDR and the nation ignored the growing war in Europe and Japan? Would the Japanese “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor and other installations been ignored? No – under either circumstance.
In today’s economy, Obama’s quick leap from stimulus to austerity (evidenced by EO 13531) has undercut the limited growth potential his conservatively designed ARRA produced. From the time Obama issued EO13531 (24FEB10) though May of 2011, the President was advocating debt/deficit austerity as the administration’s driving economic goal. Now we’re at a point where Obama’s facing his own 1937. Will Obama – in he next 11 months – reverse course as best he can with Executive Branch authority or will he play hapless leader whose been rendered ineffectual by a strident opposition? I suspect, as evidence demonstrates, he’ll try both.
Too bad there’s not a war to stoke (echoing your comment). Maybe a war on OWS or an expansion of the open secret drone killings or maybe he’ll try to repair his standing with Netanyahu and turn the militaristic belligerence toward Iran up to “11”.
As for my stance re: Obama, let me state it again since you missed many prior posting of such or have chosen to ignore my position. In the generals, if Obama is the Democratic Party’s nominee, I’ll vote for him and likely volunteer to phone bank or other necessary campaign task – as I did in 2008. But, as in ’08, I was not an Obama supporter until my preferred candidate dropped out (thankfully). Edwards and his “2 Americas” thesis rang far more true to my ear and reading of the data than did Clinton’s or Obama’s campaign strategies and themes. However, primaries in my state are among the last leaving us Oregonians to register a protest vote or endorse the plebiscite. Without a primary race this cycle, I expect to become involved after the Convention – with the Presidential contest.
The elections in 2012 are not solely intended to determine the next President. There are hundreds of critical races up and down the political ladder. I’m already involved, to the extent I can be, in a couple of these campaigns – yes, on the side of the Democrats.
Lastly, the intentionally limited focus of our exchanges have left little room, until now, to put forth the breadth of concerns I (not alone) have about Obama the President and Obama the candidate. I’ll not now carry-on more than I’ve already carried-on, except to say that unemployment is merely one of a long-list of policy and outcome failings on the President’s part that make him un-re-electable. There’s also the influence that unlimited, secret campaign funding will have on this election – an influence that’s without historical parallel.
My goal in typing out such a wordy reply is to try to be as clear as I can be within certain (flexible) notions of brevity and within the limitations of the medium. If my points lack clarity, I will endeavor to correct that as best I can.
John
@John Cole Thank you for publishing my comments. I only used an alternate name because it was obviously getting censored in moderation for a long time. Apology accepted and thanks again!
General Stuck
@William Hurley:
A whole lotta nuthin’ comment. Such a waste.
Why don’t you pull that duck out of your ass for some “flexible notions of brevity”
William Hurley
@different-church-lady:
I’m not sure what you mean by “again”. Unless my memory is failing, I’ve linked to arrest photos from PDX once – and it’s on this thread.
Your point?
William Hurley
@General Stuck:
Sorry to have expressed myself in English using facts, evidence and reason. I didn’t mean to confuse you.
General Stuck
@William Hurley:
Fax, you say! What do you know about Fax?
The Portland DHS arrests have long since been debunked on this blog and everywhere except the fetid fever swamps around Ratfuck Lake. It was done on federal property with federal cops having jurisdiction, according to existing law and policy regarding protests on fed property. That is the only case of DHS participating in the outdoor arrests of OWS personnel. Consider yerself faxed.
Brian S
@General Stuck: So why shouldn’t sockpuppetry be a bannable offense? It’s dishonest at the very least. If your shit is so weak that you have to create allies for yourself, you don’t have any business being in the conversation.
William Hurley
@Yutsano:
I there a thread of dialog you involve yourself in that isn’t degraded by your “input”?
On this and other threads regarding OWS, post-mass/multi-city evictions, my simply made observation of interagency operations are the norm and that a Federal presence was as omnipresent as was that of the local cops around OWS in Portland.
On the matter of “coordination” of Occupy evictions, o-bots are behaving like classical anti-AGW nuts. At first, the very possibility is denied absolutely. Then, as more and more facts surface, you, like anti-AGW’ers, begin to revise your position while trying to remain stridently opposed to the premise. And yes, I’m judging you by the company you mimic.
William Hurley
@General Stuck:
A) If they’ve been “debunked” on this blog, then why did you not link such debunking?
B) Having witnessed such arrests with my very own eyes, the evidence in hand is far more reliable and convincing than the “evidence” supporting a “debunking” bandied about here.
Please do feel free to guess again.
General Stuck
@Brian S:
First of all, sockpuppetry has a definition of the same commenter using different handles to support one handle or the other, or their arguments. And simply using different handles is something all of us do from time to time, and what John claims was the case with his comments.
And also, it has long since been the policy of the blog, as I recall it, that bannable offenses usually include some version of what could be called hate speech, to a level the fp wise ones deem out of bounds. I don’t see that here, but then I didn’t read John’s comments that were deleted. And ironically, though I am sure Soonergrunt will be given a break, since he is new at front paging, the other bannable offense is releasing personal info of anyone by anyone that participates on this blog.
I don’t think it out of bounds, a front pager exposing a true sockpuppeteer, but that is about it, when no hate speech is involved. Senor Cole can correct me, if I have it wrong, the policy.
kc
Cole, glad you spoke up about the IP posting-I was beginning to think I’d wandered into FDL by mistake.
Yutsano
@William Hurley:
Amazing that would happen on federal property in the city of Portland in the county of Multnomah in the state of Oregon. Imagine if there was no coordination. What do you suppose would have happened then?
I had to read this sentence three times before I could grok it. And sorry sunshine: you don’t like my input go start your own blog. The owner allows me here and I stay within his rules. You have no say over what I do here.
General Stuck
@William Hurley:
Oh, you silly wabbit. Here is a link for those just now emerging from a cave. Federal cops for federal property. duh
Ihatethepress
@WeeBey: Yea – good point, although they exaggerate dubious stories just like “real” journos, at least they don’t use illegal phone hacking ;)
ornery
I got a ‘off your meds’ insult from ABL too, lol. So why is ABL posting nasty trash-comments as if she’s an anonymous troll?
I haven’t interacted with ABL before. She’s just handing out tacky insults to the community at random. Not really aiming that angry mouth too well.
ABL, your standing as a post writer at what can be a pretty cool blog requires a little more class from you. You are divisive and bullying. If you wish to foment chaos, you probably will get it.
John
@Brian S. If you care to read my “inflammatory” comments now that they are all posted #239 and #241 the “controversial” comments. I knew something was up because they were being moderated for 20 minutes
eemom
@Longtime Lurker:
That I do, and here’s a piece of it: go Longtime fuck yourself.
eemom
query: if you know someone’s IP address, can you go peek in their window at their countertops?
ABL
@John: no one is trying to silence the story. i am simply providing information that wolf herself should have provided so that her readers could judge the accuracy of her “journalism.”
her post in the guardian is akin to what fox news does. it is sad that there are some on the left who are as prone to believe lies as teabaggers are.
to be clear: she claimed as a fact that obama and congress are waging war on occupiers. she has no basis for that claim except a low-level reporter publishing in a content aggregator run by a wingnut, who claimed — then walked back the claim with promises of more information that has not yet been provided — that a DOJ source told him that DHS was informing cops to use force and riot gear to suppress occupiers.
that you don’t have a problem with such shoddy reporting says more about you than it does about me.
but i guess some people will believe anything that fits their preconceived notion.
meanwhile, naomi wolf has also compared obama to hitler, but i suppose that doesn’t bother you either.
ABL
@ornery:
at random? i think not, nutbag.
ABL
here’s a tissue. go wipe your tears.
taylormattd
LOL @ the firebagging sockpuppets.
different-church-lady
Yay! Almost to comment 300! Soon the thread will be useful again.
@John:
I for one am perpetually amused by how many people use other people’s blogs to kvetch about how so many people are being “silenced”.
different-church-lady
@William Hurley: Speaking factually, it would appear I mixed up someone else’s statments on a thread you participated on with your own.
One choice I would have here is to create some kind of chachameme way in which I could convince everyone that when I said “again” what I meant was that somebody was doing it again, just not you in particular.
The other choice would be to apologize for getting it wrong.
The second choice seems easier. Sorry.
smintheus
@xian: Yup, and some us stated flatly back in 2007 that Wolf’s rantings about a supposed fascist coup were garbage. Course, some of us realized she’s a self-absorbed flake at least 25 years ago.
TooManyJens
Links or STFU. If you want to just make up positions and ascribe them to people you don’t like, go apply at Fox News.
parsimon
Huh. Wolf’s Guardian piece is absurdly hyperbolic from the outset.
This from Karoli’s piece linked and quoted in the OP:
is rather overkill as well, however. I don’t think an awful lot of people are swearing up and down that DHS coordinated the entire thing.
John
Soonergrunt fails to mention in his post that he tried to publish my email and ISP which John Cole has had retracted. The story is I posted first post in a browser that seemed to be having problems and wasn’t sure if it did post. I went to another browser, posted a similar comment that went into “moderation” for 20 minutes so I felt like I was being censored and posted under a different email and nae. This whole scenario is not that farfetched. Anyway,situation has been rectified, and I appreciate the forum.
John
Well, my comments actually were censored, temporarily. Because I disagree with this article that means I am mentally ill and not taking my medication according to Angry Black Lady’s undignified response. Seriously, a professional would be able to handle criticism more maturely.
sharl
Just because I hate to see it lost in the comments as this thread sails into the sunset, I want to link to Jennyjinx‘s comment. Some of it is repeated here:
I think this point is far more important than the lack of attention it received would indicate. Whether the original author at this site is a “true journalist” – whatever THAT is in today’s media environment – bringing in the page clicks matters hugely to these online media types. After all, Politico started life whoring for page hits from Drudge; maybe these types start out caring about good reporting, or maybe they don’t, but it becomes quickly apparent that they chuck ethics out the window before clicking on the ‘POST’ button.
General Stuck
@John:
Think of it as another word for “idiot”, but even idiots don’t deserve having their email and IP address published. You might want to quit while you are ahead, or go on running your mouth like a fool.
different-church-lady
@John:
She addressed that insult to some other commenter, did she not?
Odie Hugh Manatee
@John:
If you haven’t been here long you need to know that if you require a dignified response to everything you say or your feelings get hurt then you are in the wrong place.
Dignified and BJ aren’t even in the same universe.
Blame everyone.
As far as you having a mental illness? Nah, IMO you’re just stupid.
Sly
@William Hurley:
The link you provided is a photo taken from a Federally-owned space depicting Federal law enforcement enforcing Federal laws. I was way too generous with you yesterday; apparently you aren’t aware that Federal law enforcement has jurisdiction in such places, and it would be out of the ordinary if state or local police had made arrests in that area. If you have evidence that Federal agencies directly participated in arrests within the jurisdiction of state or local agencies, provide it.
Y
Silver’s piece being six months old is irrelevant, as it deals with facts and figures from decades in the past. If there has been any more substantive work that challenges his conclusion that there is a weak at best correlation between unemployment and elections, provide it.
A commission that that neither passed a final report nor has influenced any legislation that has been proposed since it was dismissed. So what? What is this obsession with Simpson-Bowles about? That it was called in the first place? Your arguments that Obama is a war criminal have greater substance, and that isn’t saying a whole hell of a lot.
Oh. Another (former!) Edwards supporter who thinks Obama is an empty suit and not a genuine liberal. I am absolutely shocked by this stunning revelation.
John
@different-church-lady no, she said that to me as well. See post #243. You are incorrect.
mclaren
Prediction: everything Naomi Wolf has said will prove to be correct and factual, while essentially everything Karoli and ABL have said about Naomi Wolf will prove false and contrary to observed reality.
That said, I do applaud ABL for having the guts to state her opinion in contradiction to the current fashion. In this case she happens to be wrong, but it’s healthy to have a contrarian viewpoint on the left.
Here’s one question for ABL, though: why spend your time hammering on Naomi Wolf?
Do you truly believe that Naomi Wolf has one millionth the influence of Roger Ailes, or is one ten thousandth as dangerous to America as Roger Ailes?
Do you genuinely think that Naomi Wolf is more worthy of a lengthy diatribe as opposed to, oh, say, Ralph Reed, or Karl Rove, or the Heritage Foundation, or the current chief justice of the supreme court? Or, for that matter, the entire gang of current Republican presidential nominees?
I mean..seriously…what’s wrong with your priorities here, ABL? You seem to have endless amounts of time to flame away at people like Naomi Wolf whose predictions are one by one coming true, while ignoring the real dangers — conscienceless opportunists like John Boehner, raging sociopaths like Newt Gingrich (the current front-runner for the Republican nomination) or brutal thugs like Grover Norquist. What’s up with that, girl?
different-church-lady
@John: Correct you are.
different-church-lady
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Sadly true.
David Koch
@Longtime Lurker:
Why would anyone want to be obese?
different-church-lady
@David Koch: And the proposition at 292 is proved.
David Koch
@different-church-lady:
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ-plD1jBz3LuGnyPtBhEMTJz5WV6UH5RtpyLc80ddO7tVhHfBeGWQ6x2Q3
Allan
I’ll just drop this here.
Naomi Wolf’s ‘Shocking Truth’ About the ‘Occupy Crackdowns’ Is Anything But True from Joshua Holland, who notes that AlterNet has asked Wolf to retract an untrue claim she makes about reporting at AlterNet. He’s underwhelmed with her reporting, to say the least.
different-church-lady
@David Koch: Lifesized photo of the world’s tiniest violin?
mclaren
@eemom:
Thank you for telling us everything we need to know about you, eemom.
Corner Stone
@John Cole:
I’ll tell you what happened here. You gave the keys to a reflexive obot with hardcore authoritarian tendencies.
And he did just what he was always going to do.
What the fuck did you think Soonergrunt was going to do with the keys? Didn’t you know who he was? And if not, why the fuck did you give him the keys?
It turned my fucking stomach to see that power tripping asshole post IP addresses just because he could.
Allan
@Corner Stone: You forgot to point out that Soonergrunt’s actions were coordinated with DHS under direct orders from Peter King and Ooga Booga Obama. Nice pearl clutching, though.
mclaren
@ABL:
Some of Barack Obama’s actions are identical to those of Hitler, or Stalin, or Pol Pot.
Ordering the murder of a citizen of your own country without a trial and without even charging him with a crime is the kind of unconstitutional brutality used by Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot.
This does not mean that Barack Obama is another Hitler. It does not mean that Barack Obama is another Stalin. It does not mean that Barack Obama is another Pol Pot.
What it does mean is that Barack Obama is using the same kind of illegal uncontitutional powers that Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot used.
Let’s be very clear here: throwing out the rule of law is incredibly dangerous. It sets yoru society on the path to barbarism.
Right now, Barack Obama is using the same kind of illegal uncstitutional powers used by Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot but he’s using these illegal powers very sparingly. What Angry Black Lady doesn’t seem to understand — and this is unbelievable shocking for a lawyer — is that once you throw out the rule of law a few times, in a very limited way, pretty soon your society starts abandoning the rule of law more and more often. And eventually your society throws out the rule of law entirely. It becomes routine to get rid of the rule of law.
Once you start torturing a few prisoners, the torture spreads until eventually it becomes routine.
Once you start using star chamber courts with secret evidence and secret verdicts, the star chamber courts become more and more common until eventually there are only star chamber courts with secret evidence obtained by torture and secret verdicts, and no regular trials.
Once you start kidnapping the citizens of your own country without charging them with a crime, this becomes more and more common until eventually the rule of law vanishes and there is no more habeas corpus and no more jury trials and no more requirement that the prisoner ever be charged with a crime.
We have seen this over and over and over again throughout history. We’ve seen it in the late Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s and we’ve seen it in Russia in 1917 and we’ve seen it in Vietnam when the Khmer Rouge took power.
Serious, ABL, as a lawyer don’t you realize how unebelievably dangerous it is to throw out the rule of law? To put black hoods over people’s heads and haul them off to secret prisons where they get tortured into confessing to whatever you want them to confess to, and then hold secret trials in which the “evidence” is transcripts of thsoe torture sessions?
How can a lawyer like you, ABL, possibly even try to defend this evil unconstitutional barbarism?
different-church-lady
@mclaren:
And you wonder why nobody takes you seriously?
Corner Stone
@Allan: The best part is that there is no doubt if Cole gave you the keys to this joint you would have done exactly the same type behavior well before now.
You practically salivate with anticipation to shut down opposing viewpoints.
I guess we’ll just have to survive with ABL front paging you here as she deigns to, and never really know.
You and Soonergrunt, who would’ve guessed?
Crusty Dem
@mclaren:
Excellent argument, though I believe you should really cite where your reasoning comes from.
mclaren
@different-church-lady:
Please explain why ordering the murder of a citizen of your own country without a trial and without any charges is something Hitler didn’t do.
Please explain why ordering the murder of a citizen of your own country without a trial and without any charges is something Stalin didn’t do.
Please explain why ordering the murder of a citizen of your own country without a trial and without any charges is something Pol Pot didn’t do.
Saying “nobody takes you seriously” is not an argument against documented facts.
Crusty Dem
@Corner Stone:
Quick, someone’s being repressed in the comment section of a moderately popular blog!! Call the ACLU!!
xian
@different-church-lady: at some point it doesn’t matter if the person is a ratfucker under cover or simply a useful idiot with no sense of proportion or nuance at all. the effect is the same. poe’s law in reverse or something.
Crusty Dem
@mclaren:
Double negative, so what you’re really saying is that “Nobody takes you seriously” is a documented fact.
Allan
@Corner Stone: Perhaps you should take ABL up on her frequent invitation for people to guest post at her blog. Who knows, if you write something really great, maybe she’ll FP you at BJ someday. Never let go of your dreams!
Corner Stone
@Crusty Dem: I’m sure you have a point…somewhere.
Corner Stone
@Allan: Sorry. I have a bad ear and the echo chamber commitment involved would make things difficult.
mclaren
@Crusty Dem:
Actually, my argument comes from The Federalist Papers and from the earliest decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, specifically from Marbury v Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803).
The very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury. One of the first duties of government is to afford that protection. The government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men. It will certainly cease to deserve this high appellation, if the laws furnish no remedy for the violation of a vested legal right.
Decision of the Supreme Court delivered by Chiefr Justice John Marshall, Marbury v Madison, op. cit.
Al-Awlaki was specifically denied remedy for the violation his vested legal right not to be murdered without a trial and without charges, so Marbury v madison directly applies.
In Federalist Papers no. 78, Alexander Hamilton points out that
What Hamilton is saying here, very simply and very clearly, is that Barack Obama (and any other president) cannot simply ignore the constitution if he finds the constitution inconvenient. Neither can any other member of the United States government. As Hamilton points out, the constitution is the supreme law of the land and once we throw it out, we abandon the rule of law.
Amendments 5 and 6 and 8 and 14 of the constitution render the extrajudicial murder of an American citizen without a trial and without charges illegal and unconstitutional. This is not my opinion. This is not some far-right wing trick. This is written in the constitution of the united states:
AMENDMENT 5:
My argument also comes from the petition to James I of the House of Commons in 1610:
I’m genuinely interested in the arguments Crusty Dem and people like him will now use to smear and ridicule and discret Alexander Hamilton and the Supreme Court of the United States of America and the constitution of the United States.
Are these far-right scams?
Are these extremist right-wing propganda?
Do you really think you can convince the people reading your comments that extrajudicial murder of U.S. citizens is a legal reasonable thing to do? Do you actually believe you can convice the people reading this that anyone who objects to murdering American citizens without a trial and without charges, in secret, is a far-right member of the lunatic fringe…?
mclaren
@Corner Stone:
Yes, Crusty Dem’s point is simple and clear: anyone who upholds the rule of law in America cannot be taken seriously.
Think about that statement for a minute.
Ponder it.
Do you find that attitude as chilling as I do?
mclaren
@Crusty Dem:
Since anyone can see that’s obviously not what I’m saying, we discern that your powers of logical reasoning are on a level with your respect for the constitution of the united states and the rule of law — which is to say, nil.
different-church-lady
@mclaren: Please explain to me why using a fork is something Hitler didn’t do.
Please explain to me why hitting my forehead on my desk is something I don’t do.
mclaren
Crusty Dem and ABL and people like them are industriously and with great dedication and zeal working to undermine America’s morality and its spiritual life by embracing and enthusiastically applauding Barack Obama’s abandonment of the rule of law by ordering the murder of U.S. citizens without a trial and without charges.
Folks, Stalin would be proud of you.
Yes, Pol Pot would also be very proud of you, Crusty Dem.
How is this different from Barack Obama’s attitude toward the American citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki?
Does this not sum up the barbarism and dictatorial savagery of a presidential order to murder a citizen without even charging him with a crime, in contradiction to 900 years of Anglo-Saxon law going all the way back to the Magna Carta?
To those of you cheer on Crusty Dem and his ilk…know that Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot applaud you from the depths of hell.
Crusty Dem
@mclaren:
I’m just left wondering what planet you’re thinking you’ve been living on all these years.
Can you guess which two words in your summary paragraph negate your entire dull-headed, overwrought, ass-clenching freshman year political science term paper C-grade argument? Think real hard. You can do it.
Crusty Dem
@mclaren:
Well, clearly I’m objectively pro-Pol Pot. And for “Movember” I should be growing out my pro-Hitler/pro-Stalin moustache.
Keep up the good work, mclaren, never say in 10 words what you could say in 500.
Crusty Dem
@different-church-lady:
Unless you have a granite desktop, it’s not going to be hard enough to clear out the tremulous, puritanical stupidity you’ve just read..
different-church-lady
@mclaren: Oh, I get it now: you’re just dicking with us.
Crusty Dem
@Corner Stone:
If I’m bothering to respond to you, I assure you, it’s only because I’m bored and looking for amusement.
eemom
@mclaren:
And you have told us, over and over and over and at excruciating length, everything we need to know about you: you’re an abusive, paranoid hysteric in desperate need of psychiatric assistance.
Or did you just finish up your latest stint in the state mental hospital? That might explain why you have graced us with your presence so very generously today.
mclaren
David Hume, History of England, ca. 1750.
In 1641 the depotism of the star chamber courts was finally overthrown by an act of Parliament in England:
Now Crusty Dem and eemom and Other Church Lady and Angry Black Lady propose to take us back before 1641, to the dark ages when the rule of law had been abandoned and secret courts with secret trial ordered the murder of their own citizens on nothing more than suspicion and whim.
Shame on you.
Shame on all of you.
Future generations will gape with wonder and disbelief that citizens of a free country so eagerly abandoned the essential fundaments of the rule of law which form the basis of a civilized society.
Many years from now, those who read Angry Black Lady defending Barack Obama’s illegal and unconstitutional order murdering a citizen of the United States without a trial and without charges will rock back in their seats, shocked and stunned that someone trained as a lawyer could applaud such a descent into lawless barbarism.
mclaren
@eemom:
Why does quoting the constitution of the United States render me “in desperate need of psychiatric assistance”?
Why does saying that the president of the United States must obey the law make me an “abusive, paranoid hysteric”?
Someone can’t be taken seriously here, eemom. That’s for sure.
Crusty Dem
In the 2nd century BC, the system changed:
Now mclaren and his ilk wish us to return to this same system, from before the 3rd century BC, when the family of victims were required to dispense justice as prosecutor.
Shame on you.
SHAME ON YOU!
eemom
Oh dear. Yes, now that you mention it I can easily see how a perfectly sane person would construe a discussion of Naomi Wolf’s fact-challenged demagoguery as a proposal to return to the dark ages. Someone here is batshit crazy, but obviously it isn’t you.
Crusty Dem
@eemom:
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. I say that even the trees were a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
General Stuck
Somebody must have spiked mclaren’s feed with some kick ass loco weed.
mclaren
Given the rabid and frenzied hatred for Naomi Wolf on this forum, it’s worth pointing out how prophetic and how correct she has proven.
In April 2007, Naomi Wolf published an article in the British newspaper The Guardian called “Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps.”
She identified 10 stages as necessary precursors to a totalitarian police state where the rule of law had been abandoned and dissent was greeted with brutality.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
Check.
For the recent version, see “Iran behind alleged terrorist plot, U.S. says,” Washington Post, Jerry Markon and Karen DeYoung, 11 October 2011, in which a ludicrously unlikely fumbler was charged in an absurd plot in which sinister Iranians allegedly wired him money through international wire transfer (even though they knew such wire transfers are closely scrutinized by the U.S. government) and even though the supposed Iranian plotter was a bumbler with no expertise. In short, more bullshit propoganda, like Padilla’s “dirty bomb” (which never existed).
2. Create a gulag
Check.
The US airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan contains a facility for detainees that is distinct from its main prison, the Red Cross has confirmed to the BBC.
Nine former prisoners have told the BBC that they were held in a separate building, and subjected to abuse.
BBC World News Service, Hilary Andersson, 11 May 2010.
(Note that the second secret prison at Bagram Airbase was uncovered and torture revealed during Barack Obama’s presidency. This means that Obama has continued the secret prisons and torture of his predecessor, George W. Bush. We now pause for eemom and Crusty Dem to explain that the Red Cross and the BBC news service are “abusive” and “hysterical” and “desperately in need of psychiatric treatment.”)
3. Develop a thug caste
Done.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
Check.
House Passes Bill Authorizing Warrantless Wiretapping, 28 September 2006.
“Palantir, the war on terror’s secret weapon,” Business Week, 6 November 2011.
7. Target key individuals
Not yet.
8. Control the press
Not yet.
9. Dissent equals treason
Done.
“DOD Training Manual: Protests are `Low-Level Terrorism,” June 14 2009, OpenSalon, Dennis Loo.
The training manual’s introduction reads:
The first question of the Terrorism Threat Factors, “Knowledge Check 1″ section reads:
Crusty Dem
@mclaren:
The unwarranted use of plural is telling. Mclaren reminds me of the old joke where the bear says “You don’t come here for the hunting, do you?”
mclaren
@General Stuck:
This is your response when someone points out that president of the United States is systematically violating amendments 5, 6, 8 and 14 of the constitution?
Really?
You people have absolutely no argument at all to justify the illegal and unconstitutional abandonment of the rule of law by, first, the Bush administration from 2001-2009, and then the Obama administration from 2009 – the present, do you?
All you can do is hurl vacuous insults and indulge in infantile name-calling whenever someone quotes the constitution of the United States.
That’s just pathetic.
Constitution of the United States of America
Amendment 5
No person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…
Amendment 6
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Amendment 8
..Nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Amendment 14
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws…
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@mclaren:
I think neither you nor Ms. Wolf quite grasp the concept of the gulag.
I think neither of you realizes that some of the Framers of the Constitution themselves drummed up the War of 1812.
I think neither of you understands the difference between the co-opted youth gangs who, in Germany, became the thuggish Brownshirts, and mercenaries. The former has roots in the street gangs of NYC who were co-oted by Tammany Hall, the latter in the mercenary bodies of the middle ages.
I could go on and on, Macca, but I’ll cut it short by saying that you and Ms. Wolf are attempting to squeeze a square peg through a round hole and using the coincidence that the peg is small enough to make the trip as proof that the peg is round.
General Stuck
@mclaren:
You keep howling at the moon, and I bet someday it will howl back. Then you will know all your hard work exposing the lies, will have been worth it. Now eat a cookie and get a hold of yourself. People are starting to talk.
mclaren
@Crusty Dem:
That’s a lie and you know it.
I have repeatedly called for conventional trials for terror suspects. Arraignment as specified in the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution, a jury as required by the sixth amdendment, due process as required by the fifth amendment.
Explain how that “requires the family of victims to dispense justice as prosecutor” or stand revealed as a pathological compulsive liar, Crusty Dem.
Allan
@mclaren: So you’re saying that because Naomi Wolf has been, in your opinion, correct in the past means that she can’t be wrong in her facts this time? That’s an appeal to authority, not an actual argument.
Crusty Dem
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
And don’t forget that saying dissent equals treason requires some sort of penalty like, you know, treason (as opposed to a fucking DOD manual that suggests that protest groups could be dangerous). I do like the peg analogy, when you’re dumb as a hammer, everything looks like a nail..
Could everybody do me a favor and not tell mclaren what we make soylent green out of?
mclaren
@General Stuck:
And that’s your response to the abandonment of the rule of law which respresents the basis of civilized society since the Magna Carta…?
You people are grotesque. Grotesque and appalling.
Social Studies 50th Anniversary Symposium: Is There Hope for the Rule of Law in America? Brad DeLong blog, 26 September 2010.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Crusty Dem:
A penalty like being sent to an actual gulag/concentration camp, not some POW camp that exists outside of the boundaries of the Geneva Conventions- as do the actions of terrorists, btw.
mclaren
@Allan:
What I said, and what I will continue to say, is that Naomi Wolf deserves considerable respect for the accuracy of her past predictions.
I have also said that when all the evidence is in, I believe that Naomi Wolf’s assertions about DHS involvement (and Federal government involvement) in the nationwide crackdown on OWS protests will prove to be substantively accurate.
That’s not an argument from authority. It’s a testable claim. We can’t test it yet because a veil of secrecy currently shrouds the federal government and DHS ongoing operations. It takes time for that veil of secrecy to lift. FOIA requests must be filed, lawsuits must be mounted, and this takes time. Months or years. I believe at the end of that process, Wolf will be proven substantively correct.
Crusty Dem
@mclaren:
Ok, could anyone remaining here please read comment 328, then 330, then 339 and tell me if there’s any chance mclaren would pass a Turing or “Voight-Kampff” test? I’ve really tried to avoid making mental health jokes, but this lack of basic comprehension just begs for it..
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@mclaren:
How Anglo-centric of you. Wonder if there might be some other cultures who don’t view the Magna Carta as all that civilizing?
mclaren
@Crusty Dem:
Keep screaming your lies. You still haven’t provided evidence to show why my advocacy of due process and the rule of law “requires the family of victims to dispense justice as prosecutor.”
Therefore you now stand revealed as a pathological compulsive liar.
Essentially everything you are saying is either a deliberate lie, or vacuous insults and empty name-calling.
mclaren
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
The rule of law going back to the Magna Carta circa 1200 A.D. may not be ideal, but it’s worked better than any of the alternatives.
Please explain what you propose to replace jury trials and court systems with: gladiatorial games? Endless inter-family feuds? Private revenge?
All these things have been tried and the resulted in the Thirty Years’ War and lynch mobs and mass violence.
Do I really have to explain the benefits of the rule of rule and civilized society to someone who was allegedly educated in a free civilized society?
Look in the mirror, people! You’re trying to argue that the rule of law is somehow “a far-right plot” and “a sign of mental illness” and “Anglo-centric”! What the hell is wrong with you people????? Are you all drunk, or brain-damaged, or on hard drugs?
Allan
@mclaren: Pretty bold prediction considering that her primary source is a widely debunked blog post, and that another of her sources, AlterNet, has asked her to retract her erroneous characterization of their writer’s work.
No, you’re just a garden variety emoprog with a serious case of confirmation bias.
Allan
@mclaren: I only see one person screaming like an insane person on this thread, dear, and it’s you.
I look forward to your bolded, all-caps response.
different-church-lady
As Bugs Bunny used to say, “WHAT a PERFORMANCE!”
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@mclaren:
Ah, now four letter word that makes a little sense out of this- although freer or free-ish would probably work better…To us, but not necessarily, say, the Lakota.
And I’ve got to say that you’ve done a very weird job of getting from a critique of a piece of shitty, thinly-sourced 21st Century journalism to the Magna Carta.
Crusty Dem
@mclaren:
I assume that your response to all previous mockery was similarly devoid of any understanding that mockery was actually taking place. I’d like to take a little time-out here and note that I’ve been using a lot of sarcasm in my comments, and while others understand it, you appear to be completely devoid of any comprehension. I hope I’m not overstepping or offending in making a potentially malinformed or ignorant diagnosis, since I’m not a clinician (and frankly, if I were, this would be completely unprofessional), but have you seen a neurologist or psychiatrist? There are some very good support groups, and I think you might find these helpful. Once again, I apologize if this is offensive, but I don’t think spending your time making arguments in this particular forum is beneficial for you.
different-church-lady
@Crusty Dem:
You’re not getting it: that’s his shtick.
Just read all that stuff again, only hold a picture of trollface in your mind’s eye — it’ll all make a lot more sense.
different-church-lady
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
You know who else used to quote the Magna Carta? Stalin, Pol Pot, AND Hitler!
Yutsano
@mclaren:
The Napoleonic Code, despite its name, is based on ancient Roman law which goes back to the time of Christ. Jewish law systems have been more or less intact for 3000 years. Chinese legal systems go back to the days of the first emperors. All of them met the needs of their people. Nice of you to shit all over that.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@General Stuck: I thought he was just off the thorazine yet again.
Crusty Dem
@different-church-lady:
Well, he’s been coming here for a LONG time, I have a hard time imagining someone sticking with the same shtick for so long without breaking once. Occam’s razor and all that…
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@different-church-lady:
I DID! I DID KNOW THAT!
What did I win?
brewmn
@Crusty Dem: “I don’t think spending your time making arguments in this particular forum is beneficial for you.”
It has nothing to do with the forum. It’s that he wants to hang Obama for violating rules of conduct and laws that have been observed as much in their violation as in their adherence since the day after they were promulgated.
I blame Greenwald for letting hysterical dipshits like mclaren think they are making a novel point by noting that the letter of the US Constitution is being violated by this president. Yes, as they have to greater or lesser degree by every single president beginning Washington. The real world sucks. But Obama is still light years better, and much more observant of the rule of law, than Bush was, and still deserves to be re-elected against any plausible opponent. So the point of mclaren’s bill of particulars is what, exactly?
Yutsano
@Crusty Dem:
She, actually. By self-admission a long time ago anyway.
@brewmn:
Get the nigra out of the White House and restore Her Holiness Saint Hillary to her rightful throne. Same as it has been since 2009.
different-church-lady
@brewmn:
Oh. I thought
heshe was just trying to get on our nerves.eemom
The really sad thing here is that, much as Naomi cherishes the company of folks who share her passionate love of herself, mclaren isn’t her type at all. One look at this thread and she’d be filing for a restraining order.
lol
I suppose it’s too late to mention that Al-Awlaki was tried, convicted and order to be caught dead or alive by the country that he was residing in.
Or that as a enemy military commander, attacks on him were no less constitutional than, say, Operation Vengeance.
Allan
@eemom: I fear that mclaren is off somewhere cutting herself with cords she’s fashioned from a shredded copy of the Constitution.
sherifffruitfly
@mclaren: You’re a dumbass.
sherifffruitfly
@Yutsano: Ah. She’s a member of the group that invented birtherism. Teh awesumsauce.
dead existentialist
@mclaren:
Erm . . .you’re not? If not you might want to try it! And quick question: Who killed JFK?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@lol:
B-b-b-b-but…HE HAD SPECIAL RIGHTS AS AN AMERICAN CITIZEN!
(never mind that the Bill of Rights doesn’t distinguish between a citizen and non-citizen)
Crusty Dem
@Yutsano:
Remembered her from a long time ago, had no idea she was a she, I do remember something about wanting Fareed Zakaria’s head in a bag in her trunk…
vernon
I—and many of us—take mclaren’s arguments very seriously indeed.
To mclaren: don’t worry about it, dude, no one who matters posts here anymore. ABL’s comment threads got taken over by the slow kids quite a while ago.
David Koch
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): He wasn’t even a citizen.
Under US law, you lose your citizenship when you join a foreign military at war with the US.
vernon
@David Koch:
Fixed it for you!
BTW, Al Gore and Digby are fat!
David Koch
@dead existentialist:
Easy. He was killed by janet naplitano and obama
http://images.sodahead.com/profiles/0/0/1/1/6/8/5/7/0/wahoooo-45677703850.jpeg
David Koch
@vernon: yeah, Hitler was innocent too.
vernon
@David Koch: Yeah, well the Nazi leaders who didn’t commit suicide were tried at Nuremberg. Tried—not summarily killed—TRIED at Nuremberg. (But hey, they didn’t do anything really BAD, like allegedly instigate failed suicide missions …)
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@vernon:
It doesn’t matter: Foreign nationals have the same Constitutional protections as US citizens, and they can all lose those protections in times of war, de jure (any Confederate summarily shot by Federal forces during the Civil War, which wasn’t a declared war) or de facto (Yamamoto during WWII).
xian
@mclaren: yes we are all drunk or on hard drugs. you are the sane one.
the good news is you’re doing a bang-up job of convincing everyone. I especially like the incredulity.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@vernon:
Well, duh, yeah: The war was over.
Cassidy
Ah Mclaren….one of the few people who makes The BJ commentariat yearn for M_C for a sane, reasonable, and pleasurable conversation waiting to happen.
vernon
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Ah! So all we gotta wait for till justice is restored is for the War On Terror to be over? Hope you’re holding your breath …
xian
@vernon: You don’t know what summarily means, do you?
hint: you’ve excluded a middle: there were Nazi leaders who neither committed suicide, nor were tried at Nuremberg, nor survived the war. Guess what happened to them?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@vernon:
Am I to gather that you’re a MIHOP person?
vernon
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Or de executive order: don’t forget that one.
“It feels like there’s a war zone in my mouth … and everyone’s invited!!”
vernon
@xian: @Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Hell, I don’t even know what that means. Google says Maryland Int’l House of Prayer? No … No, I’m not that.
Xian: Again with the “excluded middle”! It’s not really a logical fallacy until a formal classical argument is proferred, you know. Meanwhile, are you really trying to pretend 2000-teens Yemen is a combat zone like 1940s W. Europe?
xian
@vernon: live by the analogy, die by the analogy
vernon
@xian: OK, then since David Koch brought up the analogy @ #375, I guess he “dies”?
David Koch
@vernon:
Untrue. FDR summarily assassinated Yamamoto and Reinhard Heydrich. Of course, they were innocent.
vernon
@David Koch: Yeah, I forgot about that renowned Nazi, Yamamoto(?!)
Heydrich was killed by the Czechs in 1942.
Come on, man, your shit might BEGIN to be relevant if I were complaining about Obama killing Ghaddafi, or OBL, although just barely even then. As it is it’s pure shit.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@vernon:
Heydrich was killed by two Czechs dropped back into the country by British SOE, armed and trained for the mission by the Brits. It was called Operation Anthropoid. So not the US, but….
The OSS, in 1944, sent Moe Berg to a conference in Zurich, where Werner Heisenberg, head of the Nazi nuke program, was giving a lecture. Berg’s mission was to ascertain how close that program was to completion, and if Berg figured it was close enough he had orders to assassinate Heisenberg. Trial by one man, of a civilian.
Hmmm
@suzanne: Naomi Klein wrote Shock Doctrine. Naomi Wolf wrote the shitty article that ABL linked to.
vernon
Hey Xian and David Koch: Via your reasoning, the US can save a fortune in annual court fees! All we do is execute every citizen accused of a capital crime, ASAP, on the grounds that neither Hitler nor Yamamoto stood trial! IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE.
Yer the brightest legal lights of our generation!
Sly
@vernon:
Generally speaking, one who does not grasp the distinction between the rights of citizens and the rights of all persons inside the jurisdiction of the United States should refrain from criticizing the legal acumen of others.
Nuremberg is irrelevant. Yamamoto is irrelevant. Citizenship status is irrelevant. If a person is a member of an organization against which Congress has authorized deadly force, then deadly force can be used against that person regardless of their citizenship status so long as that deadly force is used outside the jurisdiction of the United States.
Outside the United States, the executive cannot act without permission from treaties or Congressional statutes. We are not parties to any treaties forbidding the use of targeted killings or assassinations, and Congress authorized the use of force against Al-Qaeda back in 2001. That authorization is still in effect.
The fact that Al-Awlaki was still a U.S. citizen did not give him any magical powers of legal protection, aside from the fact that he could have sauntered into any U.S. embassy in the world and demanded consular protections. He chose not to do that, likely because he would have immediately been arrested.
gaiaguy
In support of this harmful bill, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explained that the bill will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield” and people can be imprisoned without charge or trial “American citizen or not.” Another supporter, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) also declared that the bill is needed because “America is part of the battlefield.”
different-church-lady
@Sly:
It did however, give over people magical power of whining about conspiracy theories and paranoid slippery slope arguments to bolster their pleas for us to recognize their superior morals, intelligence, and judgment in presidential candidates.
brantl
@eemom: Then at least give her her due about Assange, the stuff about Assange was extremely thin, upon real examination; did you ever examine it?
xian
@vernon: You’re not very good at following an argument are you? In fact, I wonder if you are just mclaren post taking her meds? You have the same pivot-y way of debating.
ABL
Well, this thread took a turn for the bizarre, didn’t it?
FWIW, I agree entirely with Sly at 393.
Pongo
@suzanne: Wrong Naomi.
vernon
@Sly: “Yamamoto is irrelevant.” Hey, tell it to David Koch and Temporarily Max McGee. I didn’t bring up Yamamoto or Hitler.
As for Nuremberg, if you guys are going to keep talking about covert operations against Germans during WWII it would be absurd not to bring up Nuremberg. Nuremberg represented what governments and leaders claim the overt power to do, out in the open, as a matter of course and by virtue of their office. Look, I’m sure the OSS also seized a private vehicle at some point, or used someone’s property for a stakeout; but no enumeration of such instances would grant the Executive the power to overturn the Fourth Amendment. Except in your minds, I guess.
The rest of your argument, Sly, is based on a presumption of guilt; it’s that simple.
Well, Xian, as I’m sure you know, I was following the argument just fine—y’all were trotting out that crap justification for al Awlaki’s killing based on the pretense that he was another Hitler or Yamamoto, and I was taking a giant dump on it like it deserves.
Sly
@vernon:
No it isn’t, actually. As Al-Alwaki wasn’t being charged with a crime, presumptions of guilt or innocence within a criminal context are irrelevant.
What is relevant is that the United States does not claim extraterritorial or universal jurisdiction. In other words, its actions are bound to physical spaces. The physical space known as U.S. jurisdiction includes anything designated as U.S. territory; the states, Federal land, territorial waters, incorporated territories, and unincorporated territories. In these areas, the government is bound by the constitution first and by congressional statute second, meaning that the government cannot act unless sanctioned by the constitution or a law passed by congress.
Outside these areas, you just replace the constitution with treaties. If no treaty exist, the executive has to receive permission from Congress. The executive has received permission from Congress to use force against Al Qaeda, and has been given broad powers by Congress to determine who is an operational member of Al Qaeda and who is not. If you go to the courts and say that Congress has given the executive too much power, they’ll more than likely throw the suit out under the political questions doctrine. As the courts did in the Al-Awlaki case.
Citizenship status is irrelevant because citizenship status does not confer any protections in and of itself that is relevant to this matter. U.S. jurisdiction does. You know what privileges and rights you have as a citizen? You can:
1) Serve on juries.
2) Vote in elections and run for office.
3) Obtain a U.S. passport.
4) Become eligible for grants, scholarships, and benefits (like SS/Medicare) established by the Federal government.
5) Bring non-resident family members to the United States and obtain citizenship status for any children born abroad.
Those are it. Those are the rights granted to you by your status as a United States citizen. Everything in the Bill of Rights? Those rights you get by virtue of simply being within U.S. territory.
Words have meaning. You can chastise the administration and congress for acting in a manner you believe exceeds ethical restraints on state power. What you cannot do is say, without pointing to specific laws, that something is illegal. Questions of legality deal with technical distinctions of fact.
different-church-lady
@vernon:
Well, we’ve already proven that you’re all the same person, so why harp on that?
vernon
@Sly:
On the contrary, they are ENTIRELY relevant. You’re claiming that the designation “enemy combatant” (or whatever it is—I believe your most recent verbiage was “a member of an organization against which Congress has authorized deadly force”)—that this designation removes all rights from the designee, renders him not only void of rights, but a legitimate target for incarceration or death. And since the President can so designate anyone he wants without due process, it’s de facto capital punishment without a trial. That is obviously, plainly exactly what it is, whether you’re comfortable facing that fact or not.
I know you love to point out the “legality” of this whole process; maybe you haven’t noticed that its “legality” is exactly what those on my side object to. We objected when Bush was finding the legal justifications for it and we object still.
So you’re really missing the point with this statement: “What you cannot do is say, without pointing to specific laws, that something is illegal.” I never said it was illegal. I said it was wrong. When Bush was busy trumping up his legal case for incarcerating “enemy combatants,” were you cool with it, as long as you could be assured in the end, by a few verbose lawyers, that imprisoning Jose Padilla was “legal”? Padilla was a member of an organization against which Congress has authorized deadly force, remember—that is, he was, until he wasn’t. If he had had the misfortune of being in Yemen in 2002, I doubt we’d be any the wiser.
Now if you can’t see that this is a matter of presumption of guilt, that it goes to the very heart of the question of presumed guilt or innocence, then you’ve completely missed the forest for the trees.
xian
@Sly: thank you for bringing some rigor to the discussion.
kyle
@Longtime Lurker: Go fuck yourself.
vernon
@xian:
Seriously? Let’s examine this “rigor” for a second. Sly ended his most recent post with the point that it’s not technically illegal for your government to kill you once you step off American soil; therefore, by implication, no one should complain when our government does in fact kill U.S. citizens. He can’t dispute the fact that this constitutes de facto capital punishment sans due process, so he pretends that I claimed it was technically illegal. And this is the kind of shit you will swallow in order to keep cheerleading for POTUS. You not only swallow it, you pronounce it rigorous. Why not call it Very Serious while you’re at it?
shano
https://twitter.com/#!/JasonLeopold/status/141791000359219201/photo/1
Here is a photo from Jason Leopard of a Homeland Security Police vehicle at the raid on OccupyLA.
Jason is a real reporter. He actually has filed FOIA requests on these raids.