Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

In my day, never was longer.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

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Zaid Jilani wrote at Balloon Juice for a few weeks in 2014.

Zaid Jilani

Ronald Reagan Was “Anti-Israel” And Obama Isn’t (But Should Be)

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It is a common meme among the American Right that Obama is anti-Israel. This despite Obama giving huge military aid to the Israelis, just like every recent American president, defending them at the UN, and doing little to nothing to stop anything the Israelis have done over the past few  years.

A lot of these memes seem to be based on Obama sometimes saying that Israel should maybe stop colonizing the West Bank, and maybe move towards making a just peace (nothing out of the ordinary for American presidents, but this one is black and has a foreign-sounding name, so that probably makes the Adelson-types angry).

We have, however, had presidents who did restrict the flow of aid and weapons to Israel when its behavior spun out of control. Here’s Ronald Reagan in 1982, following massacres in Lebanon:

haltsshipment

 

Reagan went even further in private conversations with the Israeli leadership, from Reagan’s diaries:

diaries

 

Reagan’s vice president, who later became president, was Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got into a pitched battle with Congress to actually delay aid to Israel to force them to come to peace negotiations. Here’s the press conference where he announced the delay, and bragged about taking on “1,000” Israel lobbyists.

Obama, on the other hand, waited for weeks of the Israeli offensive before condemning a single action (the shelling of a packed school being used as a shelter this morning). While he did this, the U.S. government has simultaneously been shipping weapons to the Israelis, in real-time.

In other words, Obama is much more pro-Israel than Republican Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr (and some would argue W as well). Yet he gets pilloried as the opposite by the Israeli and American right, which is probably at least partly driven by racism. The biggest losers? Palestinians. But Israel, ultimately, loses a well. A good friend is capable of taking away the keys when you’re drunk.

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Atlanta Pro-Israel Protesters Bring Assault Rifles, Handguns, Call Islam Religion Of Death

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There’s been a lot of attention placed on antisemitism at Palestinian solidarity rallies, particularly in Europe (the ADL has tried to make the same case for protests in the United States, but their evidence amounts mostly to a handful of signs comparing Israel to Nazis).

What’s been given less attention is the blatant extremism of the pro-Israel movement in the U.S.

Yesterday a friend and I attended a solidarity rally with Gaza outside the CNN Center in Atlanta. The organizers of the event worked with the American Friends Service Committee, a pacifist quaker organization, and made clear in their organizing instructions that we were not there to agitate against any religion or ethnic group and that it would not tolerate hate.

The rally was pretty refreshing and free of the hyperbole you see at a lot of Palestinian solidarity events. I only saw one sign directly comparing Israel to the Nazis, and a kid who looked like he was twelve and made it himself was holding it, so he’s got a little time to learn the unhelpfulness of that comparison.

Here are some pictures courtesy of my friend @brassiest.

brassiest

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The crowd was multi-ethnic, including black, white, and brown people, Muslims, Jews, and atheists. I would say the crowd was majority Muslim, but it still had  the diversity you don’t typically see at pro-Israel events.

Unfortunately, you can’t say the same for the pro-Israel protesters at the event (who appeared to be the same crowd that held a larger rally earlier this week that, sadly, Jason Carter attended). Here’s some of the nice fellows on that side:

guns

These individuals were carrying rifles and hand guns that appeared to be semi-automatic (I’m not an expert on weapons, so I can’t really say what they were).

When I first encountered them I sort of assumed they just showed up — Islamophobic nuts who wanted to show off their Wal-Mart weapons to a largely Muslim crowd.

Then I went on the Facebook page of the event and it appears that one of the organizers, Ronen Asher, who writes on his  profile page that he’s originally from Tel Aviv, invited them:

 

ronen

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Then there was rhetoric like this from protestors, who explained to the press: “This is not about Israel vs. Gaza, this is about a religion that values life versus a religion that values death.” Keep in mind that this is what one of them was willing to say directly to a reporter:

 

This is who politicians, Democrats and Republicans, are siding with and pandering to.

As far as I know, nobody from AFSC called the Atlanta PD to make sure they could protect us from these guys.

UPDATE: Had to add this pic, the hat is too good

hat

 

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Jeffrey Goldberg Concern Trolls About Dead Muslims In Not-Gaza

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Concern trolling is a fine art in politics, especially on the Internets.

Case in point: Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic and Bloomberg View staffer who writes almost exclusively about Israel and perceived threats to Israel (he’s a former Israeli prison guard who admitted to beating prisoners, FYI).

Now, he’s complaining people are writing too much about Israel:

mackey

He wrote a whole article about how Syria is being ignored and people are “obsessed” with Gaza.

Goldberg pointing to Other Dead Muslims to distract from Israeli behavior isn’t new. Here he is in 2012:

goldbeg

If there were enough Muslims in the press to be offended by this tactic, they would probably call him out on it. It’s pretty obvious why the U.S. should be focused on Gaza and in particular the American press — because our political system is arming Israel and defending it, it isn’t arming or defending Assad or Boko Haram. It’s also been going on for fifty years of statelessness for the Palestinians.

By the way, Goldberg had a long interview with Obama in 2012, asking him about  Israels nemesis Iran but not Pakistan once.

UPDATE:

Just had to add this line in the aforementioned Goldberg column:

Judging by the number and scale of anti-Assad protests (or anti-ISIS protests) in the Muslim world, she is obviously on to something. The Muslim world does seem more interested in Arabs who are killed by Jews than in Arabs killed by Arabs, and I’m guessing that this influences the scope and scale of the Gaza coverage as well. 

I have been flooded with invitations to Syrian protests, fundraisers, and charity work since the revolution began in 2011. Thousands of Muslims care so much about getting rid of Assad that they’ve volunteered as foreign fighters to risk their lives to do it. Goldberg can ignore this, I guess, because he’s the ex-IDF prison guard who is The Expert On Muslims and the media seems fine to keep it that way.

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CNN Poll: Liberals, Democrats, Poor, Women Most Likely To Oppose Israeli War, White Men Most Supportive

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There is a reorientation going on right now with respect to the Israel Lobby. It used to be that it found its base of support among Democrats, with Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush being the ones most likely to be critical of Israeli policy.

A new CNN poll finds that things are changing. Check out these crosstabs on whether people think Israel is using “too much,” “too little” or just the right amount of violence (its like porridge):

poll

 

A few interesting things: the bulk of support for Israel comes from whites, with slightly more coming from those with incomes above the median. The majority of liberals oppose Israel’s level of violence, and 50 percent, a plurality, of minorities do the same. Women are also considerably more opposed.

In other words, the issue of Israel and the Palestinians is being polarized — with liberals increasingly believing that Israel is mistreating the Palestinians, and conservatives holding the opposite view.

I noticed that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has been trying to hire a progressive policy analyst since November, whose job is to do outreach to progressives. Poor guys can’t seem to fill it.

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How Israel Helped Birth Hamas, Plus Ned Lamont In Gaza City

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There’s always a lot of chatter about Hamas, and how Israel can’t deal with Hamas (pro-tip: it does, where do you think those ceasefires and prisoner swaps come from?), and if Hamas wasn’t there, this would all be over anyway because the problem is hummus, I mean Hamas (watch the fun short musical West Bank Story for some jokes about this).

A lot of wiser security experts now are actually warning that not engaging with Hamas, a broad political movement that seeks some level of international legitimacy, could lead to much worse — like an ISIS presence that Hamas has worked to prevent. Here’s the former head of Israeli Mossad warning about this.

Where did Hamas first come from, anyway? After all, the Palestinian movement was led for almost half a century by secular nationalists, some of them atheist Marxists, others Christians, others left-wing Muslims, certainly not the Islamist-tinged variety Hamas comes from.

This article from 1988 explains a little bit how Israel, then trying to refuse to even talk to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), was cracking down on Palestinian protesters of the first Intifada but purposely avoided the then-much more extreme Hamas:

The Israeli authorities have taken no direct action againt Hamas despite repeated crackdowns and roundups that Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin says have seen some 18,000 Palestinians in custody at various times since the protests began last December. A Toleration Is Seen

Many Palestinians maintain that the fundamentalists are being tolerated by the Israeli security forces in hopes of splitting the uprising, noting that such tactics have been used in the past in the Gaza Strip to set Islamic fundamentalists against Palestinian leftists.

”It certainly is remarkable with all these arrests, that someone like Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who just goes on saying the most awful things about Jews, isn’t touched,” said a Western diplomat, citing the fiery Gaza clergyman who is regarded as the spiritual leader of Hamas.

How did that work out for Israel (or for anyone else, for that matter)?

Those in Israel who argue they have to keep Gaza under permanent inhumane siege and never seriously talk to Hamas about anything else than occasional prisoner swaps might want to imagine what happens when Hamas is usurped by a group that lacks any desire to talk or endorsement of the international consensus that Hamas has been moving towards.

Something else on the topic. Remember Ned Lamont, the netroots-driven candidate who almost defeated Joe Lieberman? During his 2006 run, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Lieberman (and against the wise words of Chuck Hagel) in supporting Israel’s side of the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

It turns out when you’re not running for office in the United States, trying to court donors close to the Israel lobby, you can actually speak your mind and be a decent person. Lamont recently took a trip to Gaza City with a relief organization. You can read about his experience here. Here’s a picture of him with Gaza fishermen, who he explained were upset that Israel does not allow them to fish more than 5 kilometers away from seashore, even though fish start running at ten kilometers.

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Can you imagine this picture surfacing in an ugly attack ad during Lamont’s 2006 run for Senate or 2010 run for Governor? Sadly, I can.

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GOP House Candidate Jody Hice Implies Armed Individuals Should ‘Step Up’ To Defend Against Migrant Kids

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The 10th District of Georgia is a wild place. Housing both the University of Georgia and Athens, GA, a progressive hotspot, and, well, everything else in that district that makes it not-so-progressive, it has been represented by incredibly crazy Rep. Paul Broun (R) for several terms. Broun lost his race for Senate and will be retiring to hopefully some place outside of public life.

In the race to replace him are two Republicans — Jody Hice and Mike Collins. The runoff in the primary is July 22nd, just a few days away, and given that these primaries are dominated by a small set of extreme voters, their incentives are to dial up the crazy about as high as it can get.

Take this interview with Hice, a far-right evangelical who has called for Islam to be stripped of First Amendment rights, with Liberty Conservatives. Check out this exchange on both gun rights and the immigration issue (shortly before this excerpt they are specifically talking about the migrant children that have been in the news):

HOST: It’s an invasion, there’s really no other way to look at it. But we’re just being invaded through our Southern border. Yakknow, right into the land that people own and you know its people’s right to that property. Which really you know should make the people wake up, particularly those that are down in those border areas,  but for everyone else throughout the country of the importance of our ability to protect ourselves and our property. You know, I know you’re an outspoken supporter of the Second Amendment. You’re endorsed by the National Association for Gun Rights PAC, you’re endorsed by GOA, which is one of my favorite organizations for gun rights, so this immigration issue that we have going on right now, I think it’s just, even more says to us we need to be able to defend ourselves, and defend ourselves however we choose to do so.

HICE: Absolutely, that is the reason we have the Second Amendment. Ultimately, it’s not about hunting and fishing and that type of thing. It is about our ability as individuals to defend ourselves, be it in our own private property, but most importantly ultimately it comes down to defending ourselves against tyranny should our government ever become a threat to our liberties. And when you’re talking about a government that refuses to secure our borders, you’re talking about a government that is not taking seriously its responsibility to defend us. So absolutely I couldn’t agree with you anymore, we have the responsibility both as individuals and as states, to step up in those areas that our federal government will not.

Listen to it (Start listening at 15:28):

The hysteria about the immigrant children is already bad enough when you have people like Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA), my esteemed current congressman, openly scaremongering about them spreading disease epidemics. Now we have a likely replacement to Broun encouraging armed individuals to repel the migrant “invasion” (in the words of the host) that the federal government won’t. As a pastor, Hice would do well to stop encouraging armed vigilantism that may result in harm or deaths of children and do well to listen to the tales of sojourners in the Bible — pro-tip: Jesus wasn’t for “closed borders.”

As of 2011, Georgia had the tenth-largest Hispanic population in the United States. With demographics growing the way they are, the Republicans promoting this kind of hate are digging their own electoral graves with this kind of rhetoric.

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Georgia Republican Candidate: Abolish The IRS, And Have Fairies Administer The Flat Tax

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Since finishing my Masters at the tail end of last month and moving back to Atlanta, I’ve gotten a little more dug into Georgia politics — which is on the cusp of particularly nail-biting election, as it looks like Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter may just pull it off. Carter in particular is a gifted politician, and despite coming from a presidential family was a former Peace Corps volunteer, married to a public school teacher, lives in fairly modest circumstances, and has no history of corruption — so basically everything Georgia’s Nixonesque governor Nathan Deal isn’t.

But despite Georgia’s increasingly likely Democratic tidal wave in November, there are a number of races where candidates are trying to out-do eachother in extremism. In my congressional district, where no Democrat will even be on the ballot in November (a real missed opportunity for me!), Bob Barr is trying to make a comeback by demanding that Georgia officials likely unconstitutionally bar the federal government from moving immigrant children into the state, and his opponent Barry Loudermilk is campaigning like this:

barryloudermilk

 

The classical “abolish the IRS” vehicle is the so-called “Fair Tax,” where you eliminate income taxes and replace them with a huge sales tax on most goods. It’s a pretty excellent way of slamming the middle class with an enormous tax hike while letting the rich, who have most of their wealth outside of regular spending, get off very, very well.

What’s more interesting here is that Loudermilk says that tax reform “can only be achieved by abolishing both the IRS and the current tax code” — as if anything else is simply subpar, the purview of RINOs. His mailer then instructs the reader that his replacement would be the “Flat Tax, Fair Tax, or Simple Tax.” I”m not sure what a “simple tax” would entail, but it does beg the question, who would be administering these replacement tax schemes? The first one he mentions, the flat tax, is an income tax that’s the same rate for everyone. Would fairies be in charge of putting it in place?

He also goes on to invoke the Tenth Amendment, the new trend among the far-right which, as my former colleague Ian Milhiser has documented, basically says most things the federal government does are unconstitutional.

What this long string of incoherent impractical recommendations adds up to is how you win a Republican primary in 2014. Folks like Barr and Loudermilk are hoping on a small turnout of the most ideologically extreme voters. There are a few antidotes to this, one of which would be for moderate Republicans to actually get out and vote (which is difficult, no one with money is pushing their causes despite any level of popularity, heck 58 percent of Republicans want to see a $9 minimum wage)  and to act as a counterweight in this primaries, flood open primaries (hello Mississippi), or beat them at the polls (also very difficult, with congressional districts being badly gerrymandered).

All of those are not easy solutions, but it might help if folks just stop repeating the myth that the Democrats and Republicans are equally extreme and polarized (okay, maybe on issues where they virtually agree, but not elsewhere). I don’t know of any mainstream, electable Democrats running on abolishing prisons and jailing bankers, or whatever the equivalent to all this would be.

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