A Year, A Nutshell

The Jon Swift Memorial Roundup for 2014.

On Majority Report, Sam and guest Digby sum up the year-end theme: no consequences to those who abuse authority, whether they ordered torture or fixed a grand jury.

Digby sees release of the torture report as a turning point: "Where it's a debate at all... it's just another issue to be haggled about, like capital gains tax." No matter what happened in practice, the government had never before admitted to torture, and now it's simply accepted policy. Of the White House's refusal to take a position on the report, Sam says, "It was basically a McCulloch: 'we let the grand jury take a look, and there's no point in us weighing in.'"

Digby kept returning to the idea that something very substantial has shifted. That it's no accident Cheney's goal was to restore executive branch power, or that he had the Justice Department issue orders, creating "a new world of 'get out of jail free cards': as long as some lawyer in some department signs a memo that it's legal... There's now a legitimate excuse for anything a member of government does, and there's no end to it." And the sheer incompetence at exercising the power they've seized only earns them promotions and Medals of Freedom. After all, says Digby, "They are patriots doing their best to protect us. If they make us less safe, well we need to thank them for that and move along."

With the new public attention to out of control police behavior, says Digby, the outrageously inappropriate reactions of some spokespeople is also like McCulloch: "Police have a tough job. I put every liar on the stand; let the people decide." Same for CIA threats: "don't criticize us or you'll make us afraid to do our jobs. Nice little country here; be a shame if anything happened to it." Police threatening to withhold protection if criticized use the same tactic. are the same. Digby thinks this is a broad cultural change in acceptance of this authoritarian "we're above criticism; if you criticize us, we'll make you pay."

And so the discussion continued, as we are about to move into the new year with GOP domination of Congress and an Establishment egging on "Bipartisanship" around issues like TPP. As Digby and Sam said, there are good reasons why TPP details are secret; "fast track" is purely a strategy for the Senate to avoid having to defend the indefensible. Sam: "It's another McCulloch moment: 'it's not our business to vote on this.'"

Sadly, "McCulloch moment" has got to be the most apt new usage of 2014.

Opportunity Knocks

The bodies were barely cold before right-wing pundits joined New York's police union head in blaming Mayor de Blasio for the murders of two policemen.

The killer was unbalanced, obsessed with media, and readily violent—he had in fact shot his girlfriend before driving to New York to make a name for himself. It goes without saying that the murderer would be turned into a left-winger spurred on by demonstrations against police violence. Also goes without saying: this is regardless of how non-violent demonstrators have been.

How likely is it that a deranged person in Baltimore would so much as even heard of Bill de Blasio? Silly question: logic is no obstacle to destroying a politician who's dared suggest he's had to have "The Talk" with his own son. Certainly, New York's mayor is Enemy #1 to a segment of the city's police force; for national punditry, blame for the murders also falls on Obama, Eric Holder, and any other useful name.

No one but a handful of New Yorkers might remember that previous mayors have been political targets of police unions. From the New York Observer—

This is a recurring theme," said Kenneth Sherrill, a longtime professor of political science at Hunter College. "Police respond with anger when mayors try to exercise authority over how they relate to the civilian population."

Police in 1992 police actually rioted against David Dinkins, abetted by Rudolph Giuliani's incitement. The Observer again—

On September 16, 1992, thousands of police officers stormed City Hall and stopped traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge to protest Mr. Dinkins' eventually successful attempt to create an all-civilian Civilian Complaint Review Board, as well as express their general frustration toward his administration. Just as police union leaders and their backers view Mr. de Blasio's desire to address the grievances of minorities who feel unfairly targeted by police as a thinly-disguised pretext to undermine law enforcement, they blamed Mr. Dinkins for undercutting police in an environment plagued with far more crime and unrest.

On the other hand, police reaction is downright soothing when it's demented white avowed right-wingers who kill cops. Digby brings up the murder in June of this year of two off-duty Las Vegas policemen. The killers were a couple drawn to the area to join the Bundy Ranch militia. The authorities verdict then: "Police believe the shootings were an isolated act, not part of a broader conspiracy to target law enforcement..." As in similar events, media reaction was mainly a yawn.

Roy Edroso remembers Team Con's reaction to the shooting of Gabby Giffords As he wrote then—

...once a connection had been suggested between the sainted Palin and an actual, horrific act of violence -- worse, a connection that such Americans as can remember back a few news cycles might actually grasp -- the necessity of severing that connection became stronger for rightbloggers than any faint impulses they might have had toward decorum, logic, or common sense.

Now, it's the usual drill—

...some of these same conservatives who defended themselves after the Giffords shooting are scapegoating like crazy after the murder of two cops in Brooklyn last weekend, claiming that protesters and officials who disputed the handling of the Eric Garner case are to blame for it.

Charles Pierce, on our recurring national theme: out-of-control authority demanding immunity from so much as criticism—

... If the CIA is insubordinate to the president, whom the country elected, then it is insubordinate to all of us. If the NYPD runs a slow-motion coup against the freely elected mayor of New York, then it is running a slow-motion coup against all the people of New York. There is no exemption from this fundamental truth about the way this country and its system is supposed to work. The military -- and its civilian analogues in Langley and in the precinct houses -- always is subordinate to the civil power which, no matter how much it may chafe them, means that they always are subordinate to politicians. If we render our torturers superior to the political institutions of the government, and if we render the police superior to the civil power of elected officials, then we essentially have empowered independent standing armies to conduct our wars and enforce our laws, and self-government descends into bloody farce.

But, alas,in the past few weeks, we have shown ourselves to be relatively at peace with that very thing -- as long as the torture is done in the prisons overseas and the judicial killing is done in the streets of the ghetto, and as long as our fear of some omnipotent Other is what drives our politics. In turn, and in its mind, the country has now turned peaceful mass protest into some sort of violent revolution, and it has converted the murderous rage of a criminal lunatic into the ultimate expression of the cries for justice that have been heard in the last month in Ferguson, and Cleveland, and on Staten Island. It is a deeply noxious perversion of reality, and it has been working like a charm. Very soon, the names of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner will be as unknown to our national dialogue again as are the names of those faceless, bartered souls who languished in shackles in Poland and in Thailand. The last thing to go to the waterboard is the tattered remnant of what we thought ourselves to be.

Breaking A Few Eggs

Charles Pierce here, on police unions following the usual right-wing M.O.: screaming loudly enough to block all other sound. He compares police PR to that of interested parties during two other "obvious public policy disasters," supposedly powerful enough to present the country with "Teachable Moments."

Example One: the NRA's Sandy Hook massacre response, so successful by this week's two-year anniversary date, "there are now places where you can carry your AR-15 to the pharmacy to pick up your anti-anxiety meds."

Example Two: CIA actions and public willingness to accept torture. Of this, Pierce writes, "What we did was justified, but don't tell us about it because it will disturb the Exceptionalist diorama that we have built in our heads."

Which leads Pierce to conclude—

If the public has demonstrated its willingness to eat the omelettes without learning how the eggs were broken on these two obvious public policy disasters -- and that is being incredibly kind to their architects -- why wouldn't they Support Their Local Police in these times of trouble and woe and obvious danger? The unions have every right to feel confident that the public, eventually, and not necessarily slowly, will come around to their way of thinking. One of the chief ingredients that are crucial to the narcotic concoction that is American Exceptionalism is the idea that everything the country does is for the purposes of moving it toward...something, some hazy Utopia in The West where all will be forgiven and all will be justified by their faith in the fable alone. Therefore, any of the episodes of the country's basic brutality-- slavery, the genocide of the Indians, Jim Crow, the bloody reaction to the Civil Rights movement, the killing of a 12-year old boy by a cop who wouldn't have passed the competency test to be a crossing guard -- are seen as hurdles to be overcome on the golden road to some vague land of redemption, and not as demonstrations of a fundamental moral deficiency in the entire experiment that desperately needs to be examined before the country can move forward at all. We love the Teachable Moments as long as we don't have to learn anything from them.

Second Trumps First

Free Speech—in the intimidating form of a T-shirt—outranked by the usual.

An impressive response—

"I was taught that justice is a right that every American should have. Also justice should be the goal of every American. I think that's what makes this country. To me, justice means the innocent should be found innocent. It means that those who do wrong should get their due punishment. Ultimately, it means fair treatment. So a call for justice shouldn't offend or disrespect anybody. A call for justice shouldn't warrant an apology."

The common element in the recent killings attracting notice: there's no "drop the gun" warning by the police—who also are not necessarily bothering to determine if a suspect is even armed, or a child. These police incidents are matters of shoot to kill, and later... well, questions can always be shut up later.

Though it is impressive how police are the soul of discretion when facing armed right-wing whites.

Tag Team

Of course "Meet the Press" would be given over to Cheney on Sunday, but Steve M noticed another public appearance that day—

THIS IS HOW GEORGE W. BUSH SENT THE MESSAGE "9/11 MEANT TORTURE WAS OK"...

Bush "just happened to show up" at the 9-11 Museum in NYC on Sunday.

Oh yeah -- it's so obvious that it wasn't a photo op. (Here's a local news slideshow of the visit.)

And why does Bush always talk about 9/11 as his presidency's defining moment? Why, for Bush, is 9/11 all about him? Why is it all about how 9/11 shaped his write-up in the history books?

...

...the museum opened in May; the memorial on the grounds opened in 2011. What took him so long? It's not as if he has a job.

No, he wanted to wait until now because of the torture report. Oh, and because he hopes it will occur to some people that his new book about his father would make an excellent Christmas gift. Oh, and Jeb's clearly running for president -- gotta polish up the Bush brand on his behalf.

We Resume Our Regular Programming

Pierce on this Congress' last favor to the oligarchs.

Barry Friedman, in comments—

Clearly the GOP listened to the voters: Last month, throughout the land, we heard that it was time that arbitrage and derivative specialists were released from the shackles of their private hell, that truckers had it too easy, and that there wasn't enough money in politics.

Why, if Democrats listened to their constituents--wait, that's class warfare.

Now we can get back to anticipating the next media cycle. Though we already know who will be in charge of history cleansing.

Brainchildren

Tom Sullivan on details emerging about our torture regime, including how Camp Bucca prison in Iraq  became the incubator for ISIS.

So much of the post-9-11 operation so ludicrous, "it would be funny except for the torture part"...

Pro-torture's Exhibit A.

Too bad for Jose Padilla that he wasn't the only one to take seriously The Journal of Irreproducible Results.

Expect No Less Than Impunity

Steve M. compares "CIA Fifth Columnists" to "defiant, petulant cops."

Will Bunch on the likeness of torture to unaccountable police killings.

Not New News

Some specifics are new, thanks to the newly public portion (small) of a report (voluminous). But among those details that are new, the most lurid and sexually sadistic ones merely confirm what was clear all along.

That's to say, what would be clear, if we bothered remembering... We've already seen such evidence as the pictures from Abu Ghraib, which showed sexual humiliation of prisoners was all in a days' work for guards.

The same goes for "rendition" routines, as described years ago by Jane Mayer.

The current report—and CIA response—are in a familiar mode. And newly released details of "'rectal rehydration' or rectal feeding without medical necessity"—complete with "lunch tray" menu—those details are unsurprising after Mayer's 2007 reporting. Her work revealed procedures of "takeouts": the snatching of targets for transport to "black site" prisons—

... A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the "takeout" of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location.

A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to "sodomy." He said, "It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone's sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation." The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, "because it's demoralizing." The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.'s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.

Back in 2007, Mayer's reporting exposed how post-Korean War torture resistance training of military personnel ("SERE") was reverse-engineered after 9-11—

The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.'s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. "They were very arrogant, and pro-torture," a European official knowledgeable about the program said. "They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences."

Just for the record, here's Charles Pierce on CIA torture report release day, in three parts: "What It Says"; "What It Means"; "What Will Happen Now."

Action on "What Will Happen" was immediate and decisive. Throughout the Liberal Media, the pundits' verdict was duly endorsed: A Partisan Report.

Ooga Booga Men

Steve M. makes some connections between police fears of black men and how well the right uses the myth of the "evil black superman"—not only to race bait, but also to turn all political opponents into demons—

I've long felt that, since the days of Reagan, conservatives have thrived by modifying the "Southern strategy" demonization of blacks -- the demons now include Democrats, liberals, college professors, Hollywood stars, feminists, gay people, immigrants, and other groups. The rhetoric frequently circles back to race, of course -- especially, needless to say, while we have a black president -- but the same basic anger is stoked when the top Democrat is Bill Clinton or Nancy Pelosi.

Cutting Off Oxygen

The death of Eric Garner was caught on video, for anyone to see; the coroner's finding was homicide, yet the prosecutor wouldn't lead a grand jury to indict the cop responsible.

Garner's death, writes Digby, "wasn't the first time we've been able to hear someone begging for his life, unable to breathe, as police killed them on camera." It happened to a white homeless man, whose vicious beating by Fullerton, CA police was recorded on surveillance film. The police responsible were later indicted, but not convicted.

Charles Pierce on legal "justification" for chokeholds. Also on an old quote—

When police Chief Daryl Gates was asked why almost all of these fatal chokeholds involved African Americans, Gates replied that the "veins or arteries of blacks do not open up as fast as they do in normal people."

Pierce adds, "And they look like demons, too."

Response to public notice of police lawlessness: "Shut up." Victimization plays so well when it comes from the same right-wingers who are forever shrieking about "political correctness," so police have plenty of precedent to follow. Among the results, such fine displays as this and this.

And the team's pundits are always available for turning up the volume.

All Buttons Pushed

Inciting racial fear has been the right's most useful and open tactic throughout Obama's tenure. As national media continue reporting police killings of unarmed black youths, the noise machine follows by turning the victims into thugs who had it coming.

The 1990 murder of Carol DiMaiti Stuart represents, in Charles Pierce's view, a particular turning point, when—

...her husband, Charles, the murderer threw out a fairy tale about a black perpetrator that sent the Boston police on an absolute rampage through the neighborhood where the shooting occurred. It didn't stop until Stuart confessed by throwing himself off the Tobin Bridge.

Racial fear-mongering in the post-Reagan 1990s was marketed through such tropes as a supposedly new, horrifying, and academically-endorsed phenomenon: young ghetto "superpredators," more deadly than any criminals ever known before. And around this time "Cops" on Fox preceded the network's marketing of "News" to a credulous audience.

So here we are, all these decades later, as the "thugs" theme gets a bigger, brighter spotlight.

Confucius Say

Recycled script this morning: "Storytelling: workplaces have heroes and legends… What are yours?..."

Followed by precisely the same examples as last time: "Maybe it was the time we processed a record number of patients in one night"; [something about starting recalcitrant machinery]; "The co-worker who wore that Halloween costume..."

Here's an outfit selling a version of this.

Your employees will love their job and their workplace.

Every great organization has its own heroes. These heroes become company legends. These heroes build great cultures.

Your organization's legend may be a support associate who set her alarm for 2 a.m. so she could respond to a client only available in the wee hours of the morning, or it may be the cutomer service agent who drove accross town to deliver a replacement part after 9 p.m. on a Thursday night.

What photo pick could better represent corporate greatness?

At least it's not this one.

This company claims some big corporate players as clients. Perhaps low-budget cheesy sites filled with misspellings are a sign of outsourcing Mission Accomplished.

It certainly suits the quality of the ideas, that they are represented by fine clip art like this.

Translated from a Chinese manuscript of the 6th or 5th century B.C., no less.... Those ancient sages sure had their greeting card sentiments down pat.

Spin Cycle

If the head spins, too, it's understandable: the cycle moves at whiplash inducing speed.

Just one night earlier Honest Bob McCulloch had been the scourge of media; next day, his fair-haired boy was thrust onto its center stage.

No matter how very weird an appearance Darren Wilson's was, all dog whistles were loudly and clearly delivered to the intended audience.

Digby notes the very long history of this particular tune.

Results 100% Guaranteed

The case presented to the grand jury: prosecution of the victim.

Following days of manipulating the media to tease whether the decision was about to come, yesterday's announcement was made at night—just to ensure proper riot footage for Fox.

After the verdict, broadcasters thoughtfully gave McCulloch much valuable airtime. This, he used to blame "the 24-hour news cycle" and "social media" for his having had to even pretend to address Michael Brown's death in the first place.

Longtime observer of politicians,Charles Pierce, was moved to say

... this Bob McCulloch guy may be the single greasiest public servant I've ever encountered. I've never seen a DA who was so damned proud of himself for putting a grand jury on automatic pilot. ... And I've never seen such a perfect mixture of condescension and willful nonfeasance in my many years of watching how law enforcement in this country operates. This, after all, is a guy who once personally wrangled a grand jury to discover the identity of a whistleblower. This is a guy who once lied through his teeth about another police shooting, this one involving a car that allegedly "charged" a couple of officers, much as Michael Brown allegedly "charged" Darren Wilson. The kindest evaluation of McCulloch's record is that he is a very active prosecutor with a very clear sense of what he can make a grand jury do, if he chooses to do so, which he did not in this case, for reasons that are far from unclear. In the most high-profile case of his career, prosecutor Bob McCulloch insisted he was just a feather in the wind, just gathering evidence so the grand jury could make up its own mind...

Tbogg catches this: State of the Union, in a nutshell—

Mandating Game

Don't notice the low turnout. It goes without saying: Republicans elected, Mandate follows.

As Charles Pierce observed, among other things, "The Tea Party Is Not Dead, It's Just Wearing Shoes This Time".

I detected not the slightest pause for breath between "We Rule", and, "Keystone XL"...

Next up: judicial fix. Pierce again, on "...The Lingering Death of Health Care Reform" and its connection to sociopathy and Moops.

Season's Trickings

It's fitting that Halloween comes so close to elections.

Sure, it must have been haints: that would explain why 40,000 voter registration forms vanished so thoroughly, Georgia's Secretary of State (R) couldn't find 'em. Charles Pierce, on that and other tricks—past, present, and always under improvement for the future.

Earlier in the month, Pierce wrote of the Supreme Court majority—

... One of the things it really wants to do is open the political system to the new Gilded Age of corporate oligarchy. One of the other things they really want to do is block off any avenue of political resistance to that goal, particularly at the ballot box. They really are dedicated to restricting the franchise as much as they can, and to allowing the states to do whatever they want in furtherance of that purpose. I was in the courtroom when the case of Shelby County v. Holder was argued, and when Antonin Scalia said voting was a "privilege," and John Roberts himself declared that the Day Of Jubilee had come, and race was no longer a factor. The longer in time I get away from that morning, the more absurd those arguments seem. But they prevailed, and the majority that supported them meant business. It gutted the Voting Rights Act, and it has strongly resisted any attempt either to bring the VRA back, or any attempt to work around their ruling in the Shelby County case.

Yesterday, that majority essentially endorsed the most restrictive voter-suppression act passed since the (alleged) demise of the poll-tax. Back in July of 2013, the legislature of the newly insane state of North Carolina passed a law that essentially demolished every attempt to extend the franchise. It was this law that fired up the Moral Monday movement, and brought to prominence the Reverend William Barber, who saw the snake-line getting ever higher and more inaccessible. Over this past summer, the fight against the law went into the courts, and the people opposed to the law won an important partial victory when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated both same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting, two of the most important restrictions provided for in the law. Then, Wednesday night, without comment, the Nine Wise Souls issued a stay of the Fourth Circuit's order, thereby reinstating the restrictions that the circuit court had overturned....

Just in time to restrict NC voting access in this election, and to reward this effort by presumably sending him to the Senate.

The Court's decision is a routine day's work in the long game. Endorsed by bi-partisan consensus, with only Justices Ginsberg and Sotomayor dissenting.

Pierce—

There is a long, blue river of sadness running through the words of that dissent. It runs under the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama. It pools into a lagoon of sadness behind an earthen dam in Mississippi. The survivors of the generation that fought and bled for the right to vote are getting old and dying off right now. John Lewis is 74. Soon, there won't be any of them left. But it always was thought that the victories they won would survive them. That the real monument to their cause would be lines of the historically disenfranchised suddenly empowered, swamping the system, and realizing that elections in this country are meant to be the most powerful form of civil disobedience there is. And now, it looks very much as though powerful interests are in combination to make sure their victories die with them, here as we celebrate John Roberts's Day of Jubilee. There is a long blue river of sadness running through those words, and a darkness spreading across its surface, and a long night is falling on the face of the water.

Podium For Panic

Nurse returning from Liberia, essentially kidnapped at the airport, but manages to get the story out. At that Dallas News link, readers pretty much want to burn her as a witch.

Along with the medically inappropriate actions against Kaci Hickox, there are more opportunities for politicians to grandstand—

...In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, issued a stern warning on Thursday to medical experts coming to an international conference on tropical diseases that they should stay away if they had been in Ebola-affected countries in the past 21 days, and that those who defied would be confined to their hotel rooms.
...

Dr. Alan J. Magill, the president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, said the move by Louisiana to block doctors who had treated Ebola patients from its conference this weekend would harm crucial sessions where scientists, doctors and administrators who had been in the region were going to teach others.

So far, 10 to 15 participants had scrapped their trips, he said.

"We are clearly going to lose some of our speakers who have had the most experience, and that would deprive the learning from going forward," said Dr. Magill, also the director for malaria at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Global Health Program.

Decision-making style here can only be a source of envy for our own aspiring dear leaders.

But, just in case there were any call for a little perspective, here's some from Charles Pierce—

As long as there have been human beings, there has been epidemic disease. As long as there has been epidemic disease, there has been panic. As long as there has been panic, there have been heroes who stand in the middle of it, heedless of the blind terror, and beat it back through the sheer force of their humanity.

And as long as there have been human beings, there have been human beings with power over other human beings. As long as there have been human beings with power over other human beings, there have been governments. And as long as there has been epidemic disease, and as long as there has been panic, there have been human beings who have the right combination of rancid ambition and foul cowardice who come into the government and seek advantage from the panic and, therefore, from the epidemic disease itself. There have always been human beings who are heroes in the face of epidemic disease. And there have always been slaves to their own worst instincts.

Which is where Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo come in, along with the right-wing noise machine fueling this panic, aided and abetted our craven media—

CNN can't help itself because it already has fired up the logo and the doomy music. Sorry, Malaysian Airlines 370. You're on your own now, wherever you are.

That's infinitely more profitable than promoting reality, which can be summarized—

Another North-South Divide

Digby's tale of two captions—

Pierce—

I am now in my fourth hour of watching the CBC's coverage of the shooting at the Canadian parliament today. There has been virtually no mention of Islamic fundamentalism, or ISIL, or ISIS, or any other of the popular bogeymen. Moreover, the only casual reference to any of that came from a CBC reporter who was reporting from outside the White House, and the only hint of a political reaction to come is some confusion as to whether Canada had been placed on heightened alert some time last week. (They don't use the phrase "terror threat," and the reporters are quick to point out that official talk about "chatter" can mean anything at all.) Nobody in parliament has blamed Stephen Harper or leaped to a microphone to yell about closing Canada's borders. The coverage has been calm, judicious, and remarkably intelligent.

It's an enviable reaction—at the moment. Perhaps it will hold against Harper's likely moves to make the place more Homeland-y.

Meanwhile, south of the border: crisis over. Can't be long before our media are on to the next panic to be stoked.

Fear Mongering, 101

On the bus weekday mornings, I chat with a woman going to the same destination. She's a medical research scientist, and last Wednesday she began bringing up the subject of Ebola. Immunology is not her field, and it wasn't as a medical topic that it was on her mind: of course it was the sudden prominence in US media of the West African epidemic prompting this.

Next morning, same topic. I had to say that that, so far in this country, one caregiver has gotten sick, after her hospital's mismanagement of an infected patient. As serious a concern as epidemic prevention is, the US numbers don't warrant the public's level of fear. And that fear is thanks to the same media that won't look at an ongoing public health issue like the staggering number of gun deaths.

My seatmate agreed—then reminded me her son has been traveling to medical school interviews, and she's concerned about his going through airports. It's an understandable reaction, and I hoped I hadn't sounded harsh.

Still, it's depressing how fast and effective the fear mongering is, and how it works just as well on people who might be expected to stop, think, and remember some facts.

At least my fellow bus rider was able to see some context beyond the headlines. Most of our fellow 'Murkans aren't likely to be exposed to facts, certainly not when those only get in the way of a politically profitable panic.

Steve M. makes a noble effort to clue in the media—

I know that, by now, much of America probably thinks that "we don't really know" what the incubation period is, just as they think "we don't really know" how Ebola is transmitted. But no matter what they think, they need to be reminded that there are no non-medical personnel who've contracted Ebola via Thomas Eric Duncan. Not his relatives. Not his fiancee. Not the people at the apartment complex where he was staying. ...
...
... I have to think that some people would understand if they were reminded that the disease is being transmitted pretty much exactly the way the authorities have always thought it's transmitted, and isn't being transmitted ambiently, just as the experts told us.

Ebola was discovered in 1976. Do most Americans know that -- know that scientists have had 38 years to figure out what it does? Could the press please remind the public of the fact that this virus hasn't been a mystery to scientists for decades?

The Dallas hospital grossly mishandled the first US victim's condition. Yves Smith quotes the BBC—

This is a crude, and damning, statistic but so far Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) has treated thousands of people in West Africa with Ebola, and has seen 16 medical workers contract the disease. This hospital in Dallas has treated just one patient, and has two sick healthcare staff.

Smith's post introduces an article by Roy Poses, MD, which "goes into considerable, damning detail about the considerable mismanagement of Duncan's case and how it demonstrates how short-sighted it is to have MBAs run hospitals. These details have become public despite a gag order having apparently been put in place on the staff of the hospital that treated the first patient, hospital, Texas Health Presbyterian. Imagine what we don't yet know."

Poses oulines the predictable results of cost-cutting: Duncan's being left alone, but in an area where others were exposed; management resistance to placing him in an isolation unit, despite a nurse supervisor's insistence; lab samples sent through normal procedures, possibly contaminating the hospital's entire tube system.

Despite hospital gag orders against nurses, some brave ones got the story out—via some unionized sisters. One nurse also spoke directly.

And a week ago, Roy Edroso calling "...War on Science, Only Dumber"—

National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins, probably annoyed that Republicans who couldn't give two shits about medical research are whooping up Ebola like it's an STD Obama is giving to white women, came out and said that budget cuts to the NIH have adversely impacted their development of a vaccine.

Holding Sandwich While Black

Killed by St. Louis police: a black teenager, armed with a sandwich.

Protests continue in St. Louis and Ferguson; Cornel West among those arrested.

2014 or 1914?

The casual racism and insensitivity may be in the mode of 21st century branding—

Federal officials intervened Friday to stop police in Ferguson, Mo., from wearing "I am Darren Wilson" bracelets in solidarity with the police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black 18-year-old there last month.

Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson agreed to bar his officers from wearing the bracelets while in uniform and on duty, and to ensure that other local police agencies did too, according to a letter released Friday by Christy Lopez, deputy chief of the special litigation section of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

But it's not trivial cluelessness— not when the St. Louis area has a long history of violence against blacks.

East St. Louis, 1917: rampaging whites incited by a familiar narrative—that blacks were coming to take their jobs and steal elections.

Public Servants

David Ehrenstein, on the apology forced in Ferguson.

Charles Pierce, on new episodes of police violence against unarmed citizens, and old stories

Something has gone badly wrong in the relationship between local police and the citizens they are supposed to serve. It has taken a long time to get to this point. It probably began during the early days of the "war" on drugs, in which local police were encouraged to believe that almost anything was permissable because they were facing a well-armed and well-financed "enemy" in the streets. This introduced the "Powell Doctrine" of overwhelming force to local law-enforcement, with all that entailed, including arming local sheriff's departments as though they were heavy-weapon platoons advancing on Bastogne. This attitude, and the equipment available to act it out, naturally bled over from drug busts to local police work in general.

As should be sadly obvious, black folks were the first to notice what was going on. In 1990, in Boston, when Carol DiMaiti Stuart was murdered by her husband, Charles, the murderer threw out a fairy tale about a black perpetrator that sent the Boston police on an absolute rampage through the neighborhood where the shooting occurred. It didn't stop until Stuart confessed by throwing himself off the Tobin Bridge.

He concludes his piece with this comparison

In February of last year, two Muslim men were sentenced in a London court for butchering a British soldier named Lee Rigby to death in broad daylight on a public street. The two demanded that onlookers take videos of their barbarity as the two of them literally dripped with blood. When the London police arrived on the scene, the two killers charged them. They were shot. But they were only wounded. They were alive to stand trial, to be convicted, and to be sentenced. They were not killed in the street next to their victim. They were shot by police but they were alive today, which is more than can be said for Michael Brown, killed for being big and black, or John Crawford III, killed for holding a BB gun while black. Something has gone badly wrong in this country.

Retired Captain Ray Lewis (R) of the Philadelphia Police department displays a sign during a peaceful protest on West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Missouri on August 23, 2014, two weeks after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown (AFP Photo/Michael B. Thomas)

Derangement

Notes on an anniversary.

Considering the latest, Digby recalls this statement—

All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa'ida in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies… So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. --- Osama bin laden

Tengrain re-posts "Falling into History"—

...originally from the SF Chronicle from 2006, which seems like a lifetime ago; It was written by Neva Chonin, who has long since gone from The Chron. I still think this essay remains the best writing about September 11 that I have encountered. This essay has fallen into the void and is no longer on their servers. I want to ensure that it remains on the web...

Charles Pierce—

So it is the 13th anniversary of the day on which America was successfully encouraged by murderers to lose its mind and, last night, the president gave a speech entangling the United States in another combat situation in another place in that same part of the world against a different group of murderers who have taken it on themselves to encourage America to lose its mind....

The president, says Pierce, is

... groping, still, to find logic to the derangement that broke out on this day, 13 years ago. He is groping, still, for a way out of the profitable trauma.

Undead, Again

A history re-write that's just a little too much, too soon?

The NYTimes suddenly remembers that Dick Blam-Blam Cheney was actually not the president.

Correction: September 9, 2014
An earlier version of a summary with this article misstated the former title of Dick Cheney. He was vice president, not president.

Oh well, perhaps it's an easy mistake for a stenographer. After all, Dick Cheney is a very important man who gets around.

As does Henry K.—who is currently on the book tour and bland revisionism circuit.

Cheney snowglobe
Philip Toledano - America, The Giftshop

Impunity

Some more national notice, of this bizarre police shooting in Ohio—at the instigation of a false report. The couple who made it, sound quite untethered (but... white).

And more of police behavior in Ferguson.

Fifty Years Later

Freedom Summer anniversary; "hands-up" demonstrations.

Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg

Brad Friedman, "Tale of Two Protests: The Armed Bundy Bunch and the Peaceful Demonstrators of Ferguson"—

It was peaceful citizens, with their empty hands in the air --- not pretend "patriots" aiming long guns... who may ultimately be seen as the ones who helped begin a national rollback of the absurd militarization, perhaps better described as "Hollywoodization," of our nation's law enforcement organizations.

Now, as fifty years ago: different treatment for different protests—or for just being on the streets—

A man, his shirt stained by blood running down his face, is cornered in a doorway by club-wielding police early August 30, 1964 in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The man had been clubbed for refusing to move along. (AP Photo)

Demonstrators shout at policemen who ask them to move on along City Hall in New York, Sept. 24, 1964 as they protest a Board of Education busing program aimed at increasing racial balance in New York City schools. (AP Photo/Harry Harris)

Both photos (and very much more), from 1964: Civil Rights Battles

Roy Edroso sums up the right's response—

After Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson on August 9 and word started to get around that the killing might not have been as kosher as the cops said it was, many of the brethren went about dealing with this dead unarmed black guy the way they deal with all dead unarmed black guys: slurring the deceased, and portraying the negative reaction of his friends, family, and community as proof that black people are thugs, the real racists, etc.

Charles Pierce says what should not be forgotten—

I keep coming back to what seems to me to be the most inhumane thing of all, the inhumane thing that happened before the rage began to rise, and before the backlash began to build, and before the cameras and television lights, and before the tear gas and the stun grenades and the chants and the prayers. I keep coming back to the one image that was there before the international event began, before it became a television show and a symbol in flames and something beyond what it was in the first place. I keep coming back to one simple moment, one ghastly fact. One image, from which all the other images have flowed.

They left the body in the street.

Dictators leave bodies in the street.

Petty local satraps leave bodies in the street.

Warlords leave bodies in the street.

Hands Up

Even if the narrative of unarmed black teenager killed by police is entirely too familiar: this time around, there's a special motif of pictures, and it's leading the story in remarkable directions.

When police left Michael Brown's body in a Ferguson street for several hours, witnesses took photos and spread the story to social media, and to the world.

The apparent abandonment of the body added a new outrage to old reasons for outrage.

Media coverage was predictable, and outbursts unrelated to the peaceful protests garnered the usual "if it loots it leads" treatment.

But protestors' hands-up theme created powerful counter-images.

In words and pictures: one eyewitness account of protest and arrest.

In the context of covering the right-wing punditry beat, Roy Edroso—

To see a middle-American cop gun down an unarmed black kid, and then see his colleagues go colonial on his black neighbors while arresting MSM reporters in a vain attempt to conceal it, and then say it's Obama's fault -- that is some bullshit. And it beautifully encapsulates a conservatarian strategy we've been seeing a lot of lately: Stroke the bigots who are mashing down black folks with one hand, while pathetically pressing the other against your brow and weeping crocodile tears for the civil liberties you claim Democrats stole from you.

At Roy's police go colonial link: a very large screenshot (from NBC coverage), that is something to behold.

R.I.P ... S.O.P.

The Middle East blows up anew, as we get mired in Iraq anew.

We seem to have a sudden flurry of losing old liberals.

True, Bacall was 89, but this was a shocker.

No misfortune befalling a liberal's family can ever be too sad to give the usual types pause. Tengrain cites "LifeNews.com" headline—

"Robin Williams: Abortion of His Unborn Child May Have Added to Struggle With Depression"

Tengrain continues—

They pulled the article down just now, but it shows us that the Xristian Xrazies have absolutely no ethics or sensitivity.

TPM has excerpts.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the GOP good-will ambassador to the third world's boy bordellos and notorious spokesmodel for better living through chemical dependency, Rush Limbaugh says that Robin Williams suicide was because of his political leftist attitude.

Sounds About Right

Yastreblyansky—

First Israel was fighting to rescue the kidnapped Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Frenkel, although they knew the boys were already dead, then to punish the Hamas organization for killing them, though they knew the organization hadn't done it.

Then Israel was fighting to stop firing of thousands of Hamas rockets (which set a kind of record by not even slightly harming a single person during the whole month of attacks), only they didn't know (contrary to their claims) where the rockets were. But they could find some of the tunnels Palestinians had built out of their prison camp to attack their guards on the other side of the border, so they fought to destroy those.

And so on: just a few succinct paragraphs, concluding—

The only true possibility of peace remains what Yitzhak Rabin called the Peace of the Brave, in which Israelis accept that there is a certain amount of ineluctable risk. There is a risk that some Israelis will be hurt if there is peace; if Gazans are permitted to travel in and out of the territory, or if Palestinians in general are permitted to constitute themselves as a state.

Then again some Israelis will certainly be hurt if there is no peace (64 IDF soldiers in the course of the current adventure dead, for what?). The Israeli government seems to have adopted Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine" in which if there's a one-percent chance that something dreadful will happen you must act, but if there's a 90% certainty (e.g. that America's coastal cities will be drowned over the next century by the ongoing rise in the sea level) you can ignore that. It's the War of the Hysterically Frightened.

Nice touch: Israel's placing a former GOP trickster in this position. If not surprising—considering how much our right-wingers have mucked around there—it is yet more evidence for how well things go, wherever these folks pull the levers.

James Garner

It was natural for someone with his good looks and genial air to have been cast as heroes.

The image may not have been so different from reality. Garner does seem to have been humble enough to remember his past; according to the NYT, it included his leaving home home at 14 to escape abuse, then drifting for years before finding his way to acting.

And Garner was willing to step up as a citizen. As Soraya Nadia McDonald recounts—

When actor James Garner decided to help organize and attend the March on Washington in 1963, he wasn't just listening to his conscience. He and other actors who attended may have been embarking on Hollywood's first large-scale political act since the days of McCarthyism and Hollywood’s anti-Communist blacklist.

Garner's involvement was part of a long career of political activism. He told people he met his wife, Lois Clarke, at party for Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Democratic Party presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956. (Clarke gently corrected him in an appendix to his memoir, "The Garner Files" — they actually met at an earlier party, she said.)...

You have to admire a star who not only had the same wife for 58 years, but who wanted to say he had met her thanks to Adlai Stevenson!

Nelson continues—

...Though he believed in supporting causes political and environmental, Garner was staunchly against actors holding office for the most part. In "The Garner Files," the self-identified "bleeding-heart liberal" wrote:

Too many actors have run for office. There's one difference between me and them: I know I'm not qualified. In my opinion, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't qualified to be governor of California. Ronald Reagan wasn't qualified to be governor, let alone president. I was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president. My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That's no way to run a union, let along a state or a country.

This long Wiki page adds—

The "most explosive revelation" in his autobiography was that Garner smoked marijuana for much of his adult life. "I started smoking it in my late teens," Garner wrote. "I drank to get drunk but ultimately didn't like the effect. Not so with grass. It had the opposite effect from alcohol: it made me more tolerant and forgiving. I did a little bit of cocaine in the Eighties, courtesy of John Belushi, but fortunately I didn't like it. But I smoked marijuana for 50 years and I don't know where I'd be without it. It opened my mind and now it eases my arthritis. After decades of research I've concluded that marijuana should be legal and alcohol illegal."

I best remember Garner in the role he named his favorite. (Co-star Julie Andrews said the same of her part.) It's understandable that the actors felt that way about this one.

The News From Radio Rwanda

During a season that happens to mark the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, the recently concocted media narrative is "crisis"—a rising number of unaccompanied Central American children turning themselves in at the border.

This is not about immigration, "illegal" or otherwise. And yes, there is a crisis, but a completely different one: a crisis of human rights. It's also a crisis many years in the making, and intimately tied to US Central American policies: support of repressive regimes, "free trade," drug war. By now, the escalating brutality of criminal gangs and absence of functional governments in the region has made the future so dire for these children that families risk sending them on this dangerous trip.

A different, and perpetual "crisis": the Right's need to get the crazies riled up and staying that way until November. A crisis decades in the making? All Obama's fault...

The usual opportunism and lack of human decency is on display, as in the "diseased immigrants" theme.

And—to carry on the tradition of Republican politicos who once took the Hippocratic Oath—the cynical conflation of this refugee crisis with the current outbreak of Ebola in west Africa.

Establishment pundits are eager as always for some imagined means of making the lunatics happy.

The rabble-rousing is effective: residents of a town—a suspiciously named town, at that—succeed at mob action, a la Bundy Ranch.

With rightwingers' eagerness to use these children's suffering for political gain, Edroso deems them "Borderline Personalities: Rightbloggers Vs. Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free."

And, never forget: It's Obama's Fault! As Roy puts it—

As the Obama Administration has deported at least two million aliens, and on immigration matters is basically following a federal law signed by George W. Bush, that's pretty rich. But since Obama's a liberal and liberals are notorious bleeding hearts -- plus which he's not white, either! -- rightbloggers still accused the President of flooding the nation with dangerous brownskins for some nefarious purpose.

Hocus Pocus; Opus SCOTUS

Of today's first big win for the Opus Dei Court's double-header, Charles Pierce looks at a ruling "so obviously discriminatory toward ladies and their ladyparts that no explanation seems necessary." The majority opinion certainly broadcast that, loud and clear—

This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to mean that all insurance mandates, that is for blood transfusions or vaccinations, necessarily fail if they conflict with an employer's religious beliefs.

So Pierce suggests—

... let us look also at the religious discrimination embedded in the Court's logic. There are established religions in this country—Jehovah's Witnesses, to name one—that forbid their members to accept blood transfusions and to resist vaccinations. These are not small things. They are the basis for Christian Science. There have been religious objections to compulsory vaccinations going back to a movement among some clergy in Boston in the late 18th century. Until such time as a Jehovah's Witness owns a multibillion-dollar scrapbooking empire, and thereupon declines to offer blood transfusions to the employees of said company, and until such time as someone pushes that case all the way up the ladder, it looks very much to me like the Court, in limiting today's finding in this way, has decided to define what are acceptable religious beliefs... And, moreover, the Court's curious limit as described above lends an undue amount of credence to specific manifestations of Christianity—namely a segment of fundamentalist Protestantism, and the conservative elements of Roman Catholicism.... Garrett Epps argued, convincingly, that a ruling like the one handed down today would privilege some religions over others. In fact, I would argue, as a lifelong Papist, that this decision is nothing if it is not the clearest effect of having three conservative RC's on the Court at the same time and, as such, it has privileged conservative (and politically active) Christianity over all other forms of religion, including other forms of Christianity itself.

Pierce on the other big case, the anti-worker one—

... the conservative majority among the Nine Wise Souls once again played their favorite game of coring out a precedent while, simultaneously, chickening out on what they really wanted to do, but can't do, at least until a couple more of their ideological bro's come on board because, otherwise, they might scare Anthony Kennedy into common sense, and none of them wants that. What happened in this case happened to (for the most part) poor women doing one of the most thankless and necessary jobs that there is—home health-care workers. ... Another delightful 5-4 decision held that unions could not extract fees from all state employees working in specific fields. However, it left weakened, but intact, the 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board Of Education, in which the court held that public employees could be compelled to pay for collective bargaining. (The plaintiff in the Harris case was a woman caring for her disabled son at home and she argued that it was unfair for her to have to pay a fee to the SEIU to cover collective bargaining.) Writing for the majority, on the biggest day he's had on the Court since smart people were telling us what a moderate he was, Justice Samuel Alito made it plain that he didn't think much of the Abood decision, but that he didn't have the votes (yet) to blow it up entirely. He referred to it as an "anomaly," and said it was decided "on questionable grounds."...

...

To Samuel Alito and three of his colleagues, health-care workers in Illinois are now freer than they were yesterday, just as the butchers of New Orleans were made more free in 1873, because they no longer have to contribute to organizations through which their wages might rise, and through which they might collectively improve their lives.

Outsourcing Mission, Accomplished

Before this one is down the memory hole: James Risen—

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater's top manager there issued a threat: "that he could kill" the government's chief investigator and "no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq," according to department reports.

Siding with the protection racket, U.S embassy officials

... told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy's relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.

And so,

Today, as conflict rages again in Iraq, four Blackwater guards involved in the Nisour Square shooting are on trial in Washington on charges stemming from the episode, the government's second attempt to prosecute the case in an American court after previous charges against five guards were dismissed in 2009.

The shooting was a watershed moment in the American occupation of Iraq, and was a factor in Iraq's refusal the next year to agree to a treaty allowing United States troops to stay in the country beyond 2011. Despite a series of investigations in the wake of Nisour Square, the back story of what happened with Blackwater and the embassy in Baghdad before the fateful shooting has never been fully told.

All involved, as Charles Pierce has it, serving as "shiny new heroes" of privitization.

Credibility

It's not only Fox giving the same old crooks such prominent platforms. It's sure to be smooth sailing from now, as they promote repeats of the foreign policy catastrophes so profitable to themselves.

Passing Giant

Horace Silver died yesterday, at 85.

Some obits, from NYT and LAT.

NPR's piece included audio clips from an old interview, with some memories of how his immigrant father encouraged him when he was young.



Even if the quick summations emphasize the "hard bop" label, Silver had a great melodic gift. The beauty of tunes he composed is inseparable from how it's also impossible to sit still, when hearing the propulsive beat of Silver as arranger and pianist.

Double Your Pleasure

Eric Cantor's loss of his House seat and plan for speakership couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy.

Extra bonus fun: hearing the shock and sadness among members of the "news" media, as they reeled at losing their "young gun."

The downside: the same media about to seriously pounce on a "tea party" as the explanation.

A "party" that would exist, if "party" meant a propaganda infrastructure underwritten by zillionaires. What with the hate radio support the promoted the winner, and his a wingnut welfare professorship...

Patsies

As usual, a pre-made narrative awaited launch—

REPUBLICANS THREATENED TO RUN A WILLIE HORTON-STYLE CAMPAIGN IF OBAMA FREED BERGDAHL IN 2012

In 2012, Rolling Stone ran Michael Hastings'portrait of Bergdahl and his platoon. Hastings remarked about Bergdahl's continued captivity that–

In a sense, Bowe represents a threat to anyone who wants to see the war continue – be they Taliban militants or Pentagon generals. Once the last American POW is released, there will be few obstacles standing in the way of a negotiated settlement. "It's the hard-liners on both sides who want to keep this thing going," says a White House official. "The Taliban is struggling with its own hard-liners. They need space, and this confidence-building measure could give them space."

I hadn't followed read Hastings' piece then, or followed the story for that matter, until recent days. But immediately after Bergdahl's release came the tell in this kind of thing catapulted into instant media uproar.

For years, Obama was a traitor for not bringing the guy home; now he's a traitor for bringing the guy home.

Main sources for accusations against Bergdahl: soldiers enlisted by GOP operatives.

And Obama is to be scolded that "Americans don't negotiate with terrorists" by Oliver North.

The beard style wingnuts adored not so very long ago now makes the father suspect.

As usual: all grist for the mill, 180s being turned, and so on.

Most serious would be the charge that several soldiers died during the search for Bergdahl. Yet if concern for dead soldiers were real, it wouldn't be hard to come up some celebrated names responsible for very much higher death counts during the wars they—not the likes of a Bergdahl—chose to start.

After all his years in captivity, it's not as if Bergdahl had made it home (or even out of medical care) when the character assassination began. He's been unable to defend himself; unsurprisingly, a flag-waving media pack has been only too pleased to spread the smears.

And the "worst of the worst" terrifying terrorists who've been released... appear to have been a mix of working for "our" side—or trying to switch sides—when they were locked away, never to be tried.

So much for the family and hometown celebrating Bergdahl's release. The guy will have to go into hiding if he does make it back to private life.

The media's pack behavior is in no way surprising. Though it is (if this were needed) a depressing demonstration of the ever-accelerating speed with which a powerful agenda can insert character assassination by questionable sources into "the national dialog."

Maya Angelou

Some accomplishments of a life of 86 years.

Charles Pierce's reliably apt words—

Hers was an authentic American voice, as much as are Whitman or Dickinson, Melville or Dylan, Poe or Twain or Baldwin or Wright. It at first was marginalized as an American voice because she was an American whom Americans wanted to marginalize. But she broke through. She made art out of her life, and she made her life into art. She touched every element of the freedom struggle, from the marches in the streets to the arguments in literary salons, to the demand of the African American voice simply to be heard. She insisted on telling her story in order to tell the rest of us something about ourselves. She insisted -- nay demanded her place in the collective American narrative. She engaged in a lifelong project of reinvention, and she put that reinvention always to high and noble purpose, and that was what made her an authentic American voice after all. Her passing leaves a silence, but only a brief one. We will come back to Maya Angelou, again and again.

Among other worthwhile comments is this thought—

David Clayton · The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

That she continued to live and die in the newly insane state of North Carolina should give readers of this blog hope for the future. Our greatest light has gone dark, but thankfully her voice will never be extinguished.

The Sick and The Twisted

Medical intervention being a scarcer commodity than your everyday weaponry: the most recent mass murder.

Unhindered access to lethal technology makes it so easy for a very sick person to enact the drama in his head; the real monsters are the twisted profiteers.

Mass murderers don't kill people would have as much logic as the NRA's intimidation slogan. For that matter, the amount of firepower available is rather odd, considering how Obama has been grabbed all the guns.

Charles Pierce: "It's Memorial Day And The Country Is At War With Itself"

... This is a country in which citizens make war on each other because that's what they are being encouraged to do. Someone finds it more profitable to maintain the war than they do to stop it.

It is a guerrilla war, fought on darkened streets against children in hoodies brandishing Skittles, against children in cars who play their music too loudly, against evanescent fears and the ghosts born of ancient prejudice and cultivated dread. Its battles are sudden but, sadly, no longer surprising. The whole country is the battleground now because cynical people have made it so. ...

Along with their own efforts, the profiteers have the benefit of a culture adept at riling up the unstable. While the source of blame is "culture," or any other distraction the Right pounces upon, there are many things awry in the realm of culture and worth discussion.

Steve M: here—

Pickup artist culture describes the way men and women relate to one another the way Fox News depicts the interaction of political forces in America. In each case, Both PUA culture and Fox News tell their followers that there's no place for compromise and negotiation, because the enemy (women for PUA, liberals and Democrats for Fox) are embodiments of pure evil who have all the power because they've rigged the game. In each case, the enemy can't be reasoned with -- it must be conquered. ...

And here—

... this hold-on-to-your-dream, anyone-can-have-it-all, all-it-takes-is-one-person idea pervades American culture, in a lot of different forms. It feed the cult of the entrepreneur. It feeds the gun culture, because every politicized gunner thinks he has the potential to be a lone-wolf hero thwarting a crime or overthrowing a tyrannical government.

I don't believe there's a direct connection between the killings and any fictional work -- Rodger, in his writings and videos, doesn't seem to invoke movies or books. But the pickup artist subculture Rodger became fixated on has something in common with a lot of the works I've mentioned. The notion of PUA culture is that with enough hard work (what the PUA people call "game"), you can fulfill your dreams. That's classic power-of-positive-thinking Americanism. It's also similar to the libertarian dream -- it's not just that there are ubermenschen in the world, it's that whoever has sufficient will can become one, and at that point you're entitled to whatever you get.

A bereaved father's bravery, in comparing his loss to that of Sandy Hook parents—

Those parents lost little kids. It's bad enough I lost my 20 year old. I had 20 years with my son. That's all I'll ever have. Those people lost their little 6- and 7-year-olds. How do you think they feel? And who's talking to them now? Who's doing anything for them now?

Cue instant attack on this victim.

No Mere 15 Minutes

Warhol hadn't an inkling; this particular spotlight has gone on for weeks. It appears the story was pushed into the media around the time of the no-terrorism-to-see-here shooting in Kansas City last month. And so: armed wingnut who mooches off public land and threatens civil servants because he doesn't "believe in" the Federal government becomes—with predictable absence of any real question from mainstream media—Heroic Cowboy Leads Sagebrush Rebellion.

In the first days—as right-wing politicians and pundits added rhetorical fuel—the armed confrontation seemed headed for a body count competition for Hannity vs. O'Reilly. Or it might have led to adding the past count for both, plus Bernard Goldberg's enemies list, along with the run of the mill and constant incitements to murder by right-wing punditry in general.

The armed "patriots" have gallant traditional values, indeed. TPM quotes "former Arizona sheriff" Richard Mack—

"We were actually strategizing to put all the women up at the front... If they are going to start shooting, it's going to be women that are going to be televised all across the world getting shot by these rogue federal officers."

From the start, the Bundy story was one more example of an incoherent and lunatic "sovereign citizen" in action. Yet there were interested parties who sure wanted this guy in public view.

Among te usual suspects: ALEC, and its "model legislation." The outfit has renewed its past "sagebrush rebellion" strategy of riling up credible rubes willing to threaten BLM agents with weapons. ALEC's aim is to undermine the legitimacy of federal control of public lands, and through legislation at state levels, to move control where it will most benefit oil, gas, and coal corporations.

And did someone mention the combination of extractive industries and right-wing lunatics? The Kochs are a rather interested party here. Happy to take on BLM, but—eyes on the prize of their long-range objective—really viewing this as "a proxy for the war they'd like to mount against the EPA."

Also to be expected: that the media had no particular worry over being burned by publicizing Bundy so heavily—or by the manufactured legitimacy of presenting him as "one side of a controversy," armed threats being equivalent to enforcing laws. Never mind the inevitability of what the guy would sound like when one microphone too many was pointed at him.

Because who ever could have predicted someone with Bundy's worldview would believe "the Negro" is in sad shape, being no longer free to pick cotton? Or that Bundy believes the real victim of racism is himself: he can't say "'black boy,'or 'slave,' without them being offensive"—and it's all the fault of Martin Luther King Jr. [Even if the Think Progress transcript of this makes the (liberal) mistake of hearing Bundy's remarks as more logical English than they actually were.]

Roy Edroso runs down reaction: "Cliven Bundy Betrays Rightbloggers, Forcing Them to Denounce (Some of) His Crazy Ideas," concluding—

We suppose the next time a posse comitatus nut summons shooters to a confrontation with ZOG, he will first have been briefed by a public relations team.

Edroso is careful to add that media attention to unpolished racism—of the kind too unsophisticated to know about using GOP-tested dog whistle—helps obscure the neo-confederate agenda of Bundy and his backers.

The attention to Bundy's input from MLK Jr. also overlooks other messages Bundy is receiving—from God.

And Bundy's followers apparently receive messages from their dental fillings. Not that this prevents the irrational from being heavily armed—and for opportunists to see a very big militia recruiting opportunity.

But why would there be a problem? These are heavily armed white wingnuts, after all; it's not as if they should be treated as the threat that [peaceful] Occupy protestors have been. (Digby here, on the different standard of treatment).

Meanwhile, the doings of Bundy and patriotic chums continue. Utah workers have been warned to be on the alert after a death threat made when the driver of a marked BLM truck was stopped by "two men wearing hoods," and driving a truck with license covered by duct tape. As digby observes of this latest, "Something terrible is happening in any culture where the only protestors who get any respect from authorities are those who are carrying deadly weapons."