Some Truth; No Consequences

His party found it no big deal when he claimed that "Mexico is sending us their rapists and drug dealers." And they were rather quiet when he wanted to emulate Ike.

But Trump still leads the pack, so the GOP has finally taken a stand: that barring Muslims entry to the U.S. is "Un-American."

The supposed pivot is almost amusing in suggesting that, until this, Trump had not gone too far... And it predictably signaled the media that criticism of Trump is now OK.

Why, the NYT has gone so far as to run this.

tengrain says, "I for one am glad to welcome the NYTimes to the blogosphere, where we've been saying for more than a decade that the Right has lost its mind and has spiraled into fascism."

The new forthrightness will last just until Trump is out of the picture. At which time the media pack will take the departure as their cue to pretend the GOP has returned to sanity. Along with that will go the corollary: that whichever extremist becomes the nominee will then be deemed "serious" and "presidential."

Good discussion by Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter (starting at :30)–on the media's pretense that Trump has now been renounced by the GOP. That's when the reality is that even as the candidates stumble over themselves to condemn Trump for saying such awful things, they all affirm that if he becomes the nominee, they will vote for him.

There certainly has been no denunciation. As Sam says, the candidates are simply running against each other, responding to every statement from Trump with, "I have a different proposal." Republican "condemnation" of anti-Muslim statements is mere policy quibble, as in Jeb's previous "we should only let in Christians" line about Syrian refugees. The GOP immigration "debate" is all about who will build the biggest wall and mete out the cruelest punishment to immigrants and refugees.

After decades of their party's ginning up anti-immigrant fear and hatred, Republican voters are eager for just such immigrant-bashing and deportation as Trump's. As Sam puts it, "The suit has been tailored for years; Donald Trump just walked into it..."

And as Cliff says, Trump simply came out and said things that until now were supposed to be only implied. Cliff also brought up a Republican of yore: Margaret Chase Smith, who managed to get at least a few other Republicans to join her in censuring McCarthy.

As it happens, I've been reading this: J. Fred MacDonald on how television as a mass medium arrived about the same time as the Cold War, with anti-communism providing the new medium a programming theme. Trump certainly is reminiscent of the author's description of an earlier media phenomenon—

Senator McCarthy appeared on many TV discussion programs in the early 1950s... Always, McCarthy demonstrated his peculiar argumentative style: making broad charges certain to garner headlines the next day; dropping names, dates, and specifics even if they were inaccurate; and dominating any opposing views by undermining the credibility of speakers on the show. ...on June 21, 1953, for example, McCarthy employed accusations, oversimplifications, and interruptions to dominate a discussion... To one reviewer, the senator's debating "acrobatics" were by turn bland and savagely harsh for vocal effects"...

McCarthy was a good television performer. . TV critic Jack Gould described him as "a master...[who]skillfully exploits an elementary rule of showmanship—a sensation or two never fails to hold an audience." And his message was believed. McCarthy continued to hold great popularity among the American people...

It was only after he took on the Army in the spring and summer of 1953 that McCarthy was finally stopped.

...The [Eisenhower] White House would not cooperate with him. With elections in the fall, Republicans tried to end the hearings as soon as possible, as McCarthy's sullen attitude toward the Army quickly became a debilitating revelation of his own pettiness and ambition.

Later that year the Senate voted to censure McCarthy. He upped his game by attacking Eisenhower, but the censure had ended his official power. When the Senate changed hands he lost his committee chairmanship and public platform.

If television finally helped expose McCarthy as a fraud, MacDonald notes that coverage of the Army hearings was "no ringing victory for public affairs television"—

The two networks that covered the hearings live, ABC and Dumont, did so because they had virtually no morning or afternoon programming. With a roster of sponsored soap operas and game shows, CBS rejected the hearings, preferring to air a 45-minute daily summation at 11:30 P.M. NBC offered the hearings live for two days. But since those two days cost $125,000 in lost advertising revenue, that network also opted for a late-evening summary.

1953 stakes; one can adjust for a different value for the dollar, but there's no comparing the astronomically higher level of media stakes today.

Another comparison with 1953 is more apt, though. Media coverage of Trump's demagoguery can be seen in view of the fact that McCarthy's anti-communism was not to be discredited by his downfall. Look at MacDonald's conclusion, and just update "anti-Communism"—

McCarthy's fall ... did not signify the end of anti-Communism as an alluring mind-set. McCarthyism was only one of the more virulent strands of this popular hatred of the political left. Thriving on fear and ignorance, McCarthyism represented oppressive power emanating from unsubstantiated accusation. It pursued enemies of the state where there where no enemies. It was aggressive and egotistical, colorful and falsely reassuring. The Army-McCarthy hearings only demonstrated that McCarthyism had overstepped the boundaries of permissibility in American politics as well as television. They did not demonstrate popular determination to reappraise anti-communism or to approach the East-West struggle in more realistic terms. Anti-Communism continued to thrive in politics and video.

An opponent will always be accused of softness on immigration (or terrorism, or political correctness, or War on Christians). Trump invented none of this, and any will serve as the torches to be picked up when Trumpism ends.

If At First They Don't Suceed

They will try again, and again.

And as he again proves: "Scalia Better Off in 'Less Advanced' Court"

Tower Of Babble

When horrifying things happen, they tend to be recognizable as such to regular human beings. That they happen so often and so quickly must occasionally throw even right-wingers off their game—of turning any horror into grist for the propaganda mill.

This time around they've received a bit of negative reaction. Even the NY Daily News has had some things to say with recent covers ("Syed Farook joins long line of psychos enabled by NRA sick gun jihad against America in the name of profit.")

And this—

It's just this that makes the right certain they are the real victims: their feelings are being hurt. Roy Edroso explains the inexplicable; that is, riffs on it—

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...
...about the San Bernardino shooting and rightblogger attempts to wrest benefits from it. The War on Whatchamacallit angle was expected since the assailants turned out to be Muslim, but the "prayer-shaming" bit was something new and unexpected. I mean, it fits their classic template -- since they lost their 9/11 juju rightbloggers have perfected the rhetorical soccer dive, and Lord knows they like to pretend they're oppressed because of their Christianity, as we saw after the gay marriage ruling. But whereas their gay-marriage victimhood claims were based on the possibility that The State would make them do something -- bake cakes for gay weddings, for example -- the prayer-shaming shtick is nakedly about people making them feel bad....

In post-massacre San Bernadino, reporters themselves created quite a spectacle. About which David Ehrenstein adds an interesting perspective on paparazzi and crime scene behavior.

Cause and Effect

The victims were in range of the Planned Parenthood clinic targeted by a "Christian." Apparently, "baby parts" provided the marching orders the assassin heard in his head—marching orders unlikely to have occurred to him independently.

It also happens that one of the dead was an off-duty cop and church minister who had responded to the emergency. But as Steve M. observes, expect silence from the Right, because—

In this case, blue lives don't matter, and this wasn't part of the war on Christianity. The killer wasn't a member of any group conservatives hate, and his main target was a group conservatives absolutely hate.

Holding The Line

Since the newest attack in Paris, governors of states here have been taking a brave stance: against women and children.

At Hullabaloo: Tom Sullivan on who was turned away in 1939.

Syrian refugees already face years of screening, as in the case of the two families described here. Gaining admission to the U.S. has never been quick or easy for most refugees. That's something that doesn't change—unless even more hurdles are added, out of xenophobia and political calculation.

In this 1998 collection of essays, Charles Simic recalls nine years of his childhood—

"Displaced persons" is the name they had for us back in 1945, and that's what we truly were. As you sit watching bombs falling in some old documentary, or the armies advancing against each other, villages and towns going up in fire and smoke, you forget about the people huddled in the cellar. Mr. and Mrs. Innocent and their families paid dearly n this century for just being there. Condemned by history, as Marxists were fond of saying, perhaps belonging to a wrong class, wrong ethnic group, wrong religion—what have you—they were and continue to be an unpleasant reminder of all the philosophical and nationalist utopias gone wrong....

My family, like so many others, got to see the world for free thanks to Hitler's wars and Stalin's takeover of Eastern Europe... Small fry, we made no decisions ourselves. It was all arranged for us by the world leaders of the times. Like so many others who were displaced, we had no ambition to stray far beyond our neighborhood in Belgrade....

...

It's hard for people who have never experienced it to truly grasp what it means to lack proper documents. We read every day about our own immigration officers, using and misusing their recently acquired authority to turn back suspicious aliens from our borders. The pleasure of humiliating the powerless must not be underestimated. Even as a young boy, I could see that was the case. Everywhere there are bureaucrats, the police state is an ideal.

I remember standing in endless lines in Paris at police headquarters to receive or renew residential permits. It seems like that's all we ever did when we lived there. We'd wait all day only to discover that the rules had changed since the last time, that they now required, for instance, something as absurd as my mother's parents' marriage certificate or her grade-school diploma, even though she was in possession of a French diploma since she did her post-graduate studies in Paris. As we'd stand there pondering the impossibility of what they were asking of us, we'd be listening to someone at the next window trying to convey in poor French how the family's house had burned, how they'd left in a hurry with only one small suitcase, and so on, to which the official would shrug his shoulders and proceed to inform them that unless the documents were procured promptly, the residence permit would be denied.
...

The mail didn't travel very swiftly, of course. We would go nuts every day for weeks waiting for the mailman, who couldn't stand the sight of us since we were always pestering him, and finally, somehow, the documents would arrive thanks to a distant relative. Then they had to be translated by an official translator who, of course, couldn't make heads or tails out of the dog-eared fifty-year old entry in a provincial Balkan school or church registry. In any case, eventually we'd go back to the long line only to discover that they were not needed after all, but something else was. Every passport office, every police station, every consulate had a desk with a wary and bad-tempered official who suspected us of not being what we claimed to be…. The officials we met knew next to nothing about where we came from and why, but that did not prevent them from passing judgment on us....

Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. ...

...we got used to the idea.... Being nobody struck me personally as being far more interesting than being somebody. The streets were full of these "somebodys" putting on confident airs. Half the time I envied them; half the time I looked down on them with pity. I knew something they didn't, something hard to come by unless history gives you a good kick in the ass: how superfluous and insignificant in any grand scheme mere individuals are. And how pitiless are those who have no understanding that this could be their fate too.

I stepped off the boat in New York City on August 10, 1954, with my mother and my brother....

All Wet

Writing at Hullabaloo, Digby says—

"I must confess that I'm a little bit surprised that so few journalists seem to have been familiar with "Operation Wetback" or that Donald Trump had been extolling its virtues on the campaign trail for months. I guess they don't actually listen to what he's saying.

From Digby's piece in Salon—

In the debate on Tuesday, Trump reiterated the plan which half of Republicans in the U.S. support. He promised to build a wall along the nearly 2,000 mile border and to make Mexico pay for it. He also once more committed to rounding up and deporting all illegal immigrants. As he has in the past, he referenced President Eisenhower's program from the 1950s, fatuously insisting that it must be "nice" since everybody "liked Ike," even as he assiduously avoided calling the plan by its name: "Operation Wetback."

Here's Trump’s exact quote from the debate:

Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. "I like Ike," right? The expression. "I like Ike." Moved a 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of this country, moved them just beyond the border. They came back.

Moved them again beyond the border, they came back. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south. They never came back.

(LAUGHTER)

Dwight Eisenhower. You don't get nicer. You don't get friendlier. They moved a 1.5 million out. We have no choice. We have no choice.

Indeed, Trump has been saying this all along. Back in September, the Washington Post responded with the
history of how "repatriation" actually was conducted—

In Mexicali, Mexico, temperatures can reach 125 degrees as heat envelops an arid desert. Without a body of water nearby to moderate the climate, the heavy sun is relentless — and deadly.

During the summer of 1955, this is where hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were "dumped" after being discovered as migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Unloaded from buses and trucks carrying several times their capacity, the deportees stumbled into the Mexicali streets with few possessions and no way of getting home.

This was strategic: the more obscure the destination within the Mexican interior, the less opportunities they would have to return to America. But the tactic also proved to be dangerous, as the migrants were left without resources to survive.

After one such round-up and transfer in July, 88 people died from heat stroke.

At another drop-off point in Nuevo Laredo, the migrants were "brought like cows" into the desert.

Among the over 25 percent who were transported by boat from Port Isabel, Texas, to the Mexican Gulf Coast, many shared cramped quarters in vessels resembling an "eighteenth century slave ship" and "penal hell ship."

These deportation procedures, detailed by historian Mae M. Ngai, were not anomalies. They were the essential framework of Operation Wetback — a concerted immigration law enforcement effort implemented by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 — and the deportation model that Donald Trump says he intends to follow.

In the Hullabaloo post above, Digby adds this—

I noticed this morning that Luke Russert and Tamron Hall both refused to use the word "Wetback" when describing Eisenhower's program. This is a big mistake. People need to know exactly what they called Donald Trump's "nice, humane, 'I like Ike'" program. It brings the reality of what he's talking about right home. His voters won't care. They probably like it. But normal people will recognize it for what it is.

Certainly, our native Nazis recognize Trump's shout-out; via tengrain—

The New Confederacy isn't even trying to hide it anymore: White Supremacists Are Thrilled Donald Trump Mentioned "Operation Wetback"

White supremacists are praising Donald Trump for citing a 1950s U.S. government policy that deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants.

After Trump mentioned the policy, called "Operation Wetback," at Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Richard B. Spencer, the president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute, tweeted, "Operation Wetback, fuck yeah!"

... A post that ran on the white nationalist site Vdare.com and the white supremacist site the Daily Stormer called it a "milestone in the immigration debate."

Passion Play

He has one all his own, and it has had a 21-year run—

..."Ben Carson, M.D.," a children's theater production seen by a generation of Baltimore area school kids who read Carson's memoir Gifted Hands as part of their curriculum.

Quote is from this. Politico intends the hook of this rambling article to be reactions to Carson's new endeavor by Prince Havely, the actor who has made a career of playing the man—

...allegations that Carson fabricated significant features of his autobiography—the stabbing of a childhood friend in a "pathological" rage and the candidate's claim that he was admitted to West Point on a full scholarship—have not swayed Havely's faith in Carson. "I don't doubt anything he says."

Need it be said? Some not particularly astute reactions from a party with an interest in accepting anything Carson does. While Havely says the political run came as a big surprise from someone he thought he knew so well, in all the surpising events, Politico reports—

What is shocking to Havely is that the play is not being staged this year—the first time, he says, since its debut in 1994.

Havely suspects that the directors and crew at Toby's Youth Theatre in Columbia, Maryland, where the play was born, wanted to avoid any association with Carson's politics. The theater's spokesperson rejects that notion, saying that the book on which the play is based is falling out of favor with teachers. "No political agenda on our part," Janine Sunday of Toby's told Politico in an email. "Just trying to make connections between theatre and the core lessons the students are learning."

"It's the perfect time to do the show," Havely says. "My jaw is on the ground."

Grist for the Politico mill, at least.

The play sounds like pretty standard uplift—well-meant, if crude, and offering a heroic figure with whom audiences are meant to identify—

"This young boy with the knife would have ended up in jail or reform school!" the narrator says as Havely, in a surgeon's smock, turns around to face the audience. "That man with the knife led a team of 70 on a groundbreaking operation!"

If they were a captive one, schoolkids were not the only audience—

The show went from a local novelty to a sprawling exposition of Ben Carson literature, including his self-help book Think Big.
...
Over the years, the Carson family remained devoted to the production. Sonya Carson, Ben's mother, came to a performance of the play every other week, according to Havely. She was a constant critic of her son's character and her own, letting Havely and the play's directors know when the fictional "Mama" got a little too sharp-tongued. In a 1997 feature about Sonya Carson in Parade Magazine, she asked the author to accompany her to the play, where she basked in the "moist eyes" of the students around her.

Havely says that area teachers would arrange for children who had been operated on by Carson to attend the play. Havely would feature them in the post-show Q&A session. He believes the idea of kids seeing Carson's patients in their classrooms and social circles served to accentuate the force of the Ben Carson lore.

The real Carson saw the play at least once every year starting in 1994. The surgeon, Havely says, didn't just come to watch. Once, while bringing a group from the Carson Scholars Fund to a performance, Carson stood up in the front row to play himself in the play about himself. "It was cute, because I got ready to end the play, and I go, 'I have an answer for that: it's think big!' He's in the front row and he goes, 'Let me take that from here.' And he comes up, and everybody applauded. It was the coolest thing," Havely says. On several occasions, Carson brought Havely to dinners and Scholars Fund events to appear in character for a selection of the most memorable scenes.

The Passion of Dr. Ben is of a piece with the museum.

You can't help but notice who seems to have pride of place here.

Ben Carson inside his home in Upperco, Maryland, in November 2014.
Photograph by Mark Makela

Magic Money

At least CNN assigns its "America's Choice 2016" coverage the appropriate category—Money. There, we find the sad story of "'Shell-shocked' CNBC staffers" on their "long flight home," and this—

The Republican National Committee says it is suspending its February debate with NBC News amid anger over CNBC's handling of this week's debate in Boulder, Colorado.

NBC said in a statement it will "work in good faith to resolve this matter."

Now that's more like it: having networks agree to this. Among the long list of conditions the Republicans' negotiator demands of the networks—

Will you commit that you will not:

o Ask the candidates to raise their hands to answer a question
o Ask yes/no questions without time to provide a substantive answer
o Have a "lightning round"
o Allow candidate-to-candidate questioning
o Allow props or pledges by the candidates
o Have reaction shots of members of the audience or moderators during debates
o Show an empty podium after a break (describe how far away the bathrooms are)
o Use behind shots of the candidates showing their notes
o Leave microphones on during breaks
o Allow members of the audience to wear political messages (shirts, buttons, signs, etc.). Who enforces?

What is the size of the audience? Who is receiving tickets in addition to the candidates? Who's in charge of distributing those tickets and filling the seats?
What instructions will you provide to the audience about cheering during the debate?
What are the plans for the lead-in to the debate (Pre-shot video? Announcer to moderator? Director to Moderator?) and how long is it?
Are you running promo ads before the debate about your moderator(s)?
What type of microphones (lavs or podium)?
Can you pledge that the temperature in the hall be kept below 67 degrees?

There's nothing new in the media pretense of maintaining the highest professional standards even while bowing to the demands of bullies. But the spectacle of broadcast media wallowing in unprecedented amounts of cash in exchange for abetting a GOP every day more willing to display its real nature—well, it makes me think of think of this particular scene in a novel—

Grand buys a huge downtown vacant lot in a major city. He then has a three foot brick wall built around the perimeter and fills it with feces and offal into which bills of all denominations have been mixed. He then takes pleasure watching immaculately dressed people defiling themselves by braving the stench, and ruining their clothing and dignity, by wading through the muck for the bills.

image: wikipedia

What Never Can Be

The death of Fred Thompson as noted in Morning Edition Monday political punditry—

ROBERTS: Well, of course everybody thought that his popularity on TV and in the movies would propel him into the presidency. And he declared for president, as we've just heard, in 2008. But it fizzled pretty quickly. And, you know, Renee, that happens every cycle. There's somebody who everyone thinks is the natural - think John Glenn for instance. And then they fizzle out. This year is a different year. His TV appearances seem to be - still be helping Donald Trump. We'll see what happens in the long run.

"Everyone thought...": the wisdom of Cokie can always be relied upon. Since there's nothing like a fake homespun ham actor to inspire a pundit crush or to be a ready fit for what The Heartland is supposed to buy.

On the other hand, here's a great catch of a reality check from Steve M—

You probably lost track of Thompson after his 2008 presidential run, but he kept himself active on social media nearly to the end -- and he was really kind of a jerk until the end. His specialty was the wingnut one-liner ...

...this, about Richard Branson, was his final tweet:

Branson wants "world powered by sun, powered by wind." Ohhh...like in the Dark Ages when everyone used sailing ships and clotheslines...

...

They say that a near-death experience can give a person a perspective on what really matters in life, that coming face-to-face with one's own mortality can make certain squabbles in one's life seem small and petty. Thompson got a cancer diagnosis in 2004. I don't know when he became aware of the recurrence that killed him. But it seems as if none of this ever made him think, "Y'know, I want to do more with my remaining days than script an ideological social-media Hee-Haw." He did this almost until the end.

A Romance That Will Never Fade

After its fawning over St Boehner (and yawning over this), the media has new opportunity to swoon over the object of its affection.

Ryan may be in a new role, but he lost no time in being predictable. For openers, claiming the House can't act on immigration because the president is "untrustworthy." As tengrain says—

So, um, Paul: legislate something. Put it before the president. He signs it or he doesn't. That's the process.

Unless of course, you want him to use Executive Orders on immigration which you can then use to fundraise as you posture with the rubes.

And is in usual form with this; in tengrain's synopsis—

Zombie-eyed Granny-starver Paul Ryan explains to us why it is that members of Congress deserve work-life balance, well him anyway, but the rest of us don't...

tengrain adds —

Personally, I want my representative to be exactly like the rest of us: in a hurry, harassed, exhausted and living in fear from paycheck to paycheck (but considering that most of them are multi-millionaires this is unlikely).

I'd like them to feel exactly what the rest of us feel as they chop away at the safety net and set the ammosexuals loose against the rest us.

I’d also like to think that they care, but they are clearly sociopaths.

They Also Serve, Who Shill

In what's now post-massacre routine, the Noise Machine went into high gear, reassuring the audience that mass murder should be blamed on anything other than guns. And as it suggests enemies to blame, this encouragement for paranoids to stock up an ammo is less than subtle.

With the lunatic segment so well served, why shouldn't the industry try some seemingly gentler PR—say, on the NPR fans? Ergo: Malcolm Gladwell, on today's Morning Edition.

Here, Gladwell's spuriously "scientific" talking point was that—

The first person who throws the rock is a lot more radical than a hundredth person. By the time the riot has attracted a hundred people, you don't have to be nearly as much of a daredevil or a hothead or committed or any of those things to want to engage in a riot.

...

The first half-dozen or so cases [of school shooters, beginning in the 1990s] are kids who are profoundly psychotic, deeply traumatized or, in the case of someone like Eric Harris at Columbine, are kind of textbook psychopaths. Now 20 years into the epidemic, the kinds of boys - it's all boys - who are attracted to this are no longer as profoundly troubled or - you know, as the early ones were. We're replicating Granovetter's theory of riots. The hundredth person is not nearly as much of a committed radical as the first person in. And that's a terrifying conclusion if that's what we're seeing.

I found the segment incoherent, but Gladwell was touting his latest piece in the New Yorker, where he no doubt aimed to overwhelm objection by expounding on the theme at more stupefying length.

Gladwell is so entrenched, by Establishment embrace and by his book sales, that it's hard to find much public critique. There's this, which notes that social scientists have objected to Gladwell's use of their work, complaining of "the writer's penchant for reporting correlations as causations."

Certainly, it could be at most correlative for the psychology of people joining a riot in progress to have any relation to the mental workings of an emotionally isolated person who decides to enter a school and start firing. But, it serves as a change of subject: from guns, to something abstract and purportedly Scientific.

If, for that matter, social science was anything to Gladwell other than material to mine for great profit, he could examine what social context might tend to produce these enraged loners. And, perhaps even look at Family; now that would seem a good topic of inquiry, considering some of the parents who have encouraged their sons' "interests." In the case of this most recent massacre—

According to multiple reports, the shooter's mother boasted online about her arsenal and feared that gun ownership would soon be restricted.

"When the mood strikes," Harper reportedly wrote on Facebook, "I sling an AR, Tek-9 or AK over my shoulder, or holster a Glock 21 (not 22), or one of my other handguns, like the Sig Sauer P226, and walk out the door." "Shotguns," she said, "are a little too cumbersome to open carry."

According to officials, the Harper family moved from Torrance, California to Winchester, Oregon, in 2013. "I moved from So. Calif. to Oregon, from Southern Crime-a-mania to open carry," Harper noted in that same Facebook post advocating for open carry laws.

Harper, a registered nurse who shared an apartment with her son, spoke "openly about her love of guns," according to one of her patients.

But to examine this sort of thing is certainly not what Gladwell is about. The most thorough critique of his career has been Yasha Levine's. Unsurprisingly, Gladwell got his start in a right-wing pundit mill, from whence he was thrust into prominence. Along the way up, says Levine—

... Gladwell has shilled for Big Tobacco, Pharma and defended Enron-style financial fraud, all while earning hundreds of thousands of dollars as a corporate speaker, sometimes from the same companies and industries that he covers as a journalist.

Malcolm Gladwell is a one-man branding and distribution pipeline for valuable corporate messages, constructed on the public's gullibility in trusting his probity and intellectual honesty in the pages of America's most important weekly magazine, The New Yorker, and other highly prominent media outlets.

Presumably, the New Yorker, NPR, and Gladwell's many other forums will be a source of new PR work, on behalf of yet another industry with no regard for human life.

Bad Medicine

When guns can never be the problem the subject will be changed to anything else.

Steve M. runs down Ben Carson's lunatic statements, from "I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away," to his suggestion that kindergarten teachers be armed.

Insane these may be, but proclaiming them is mere SOP for GOP vote-getting.

Another change of subject, from real to paranoid fantasy: the narrative that the latest school shooter was out to persecute Christians.

With this perfect marketing move...

... He looked ever so pleased with himself. The Noise Machine was pleased, too, using the photo op to boost Carson's popularity.

Next up: gun control enabled the Holocaust. Even if the usual media had never before deigned to take note, Carson was simply parroting established right-wing mythology.

After the bravado of Carson's fantasy heroism ("I would not just stand there and let him shoot me"), this was particularly telling—

In an interview with Urban View host Karen Hunter Wednesday, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson recounted a story about being held up at gunpoint at a Popeyes.

"Guy comes in, puts the gun to my ribs and I just said, 'I believe that you want the guy behind the counter,'" Carson recalled.

Sociopaths of a feather... Carson's self-satisfaction reminiscent of nothing so much as Mitt Romney's citing Seamus on the car roof as proof of his executive ability.

The Only Amendment That Matters

Just over a month ago, the year to date reckoning was an average of one mass shooting a day.

Figure in the October 1 body count.

Charles Pierce...

After this new massacre, one couldn't exactly say "nothing will happen". Certainly nothing constructive, just the inevitable: that in the days following the classroom rampage GOP candidates would hop anew on the gun-love bandwagon. It's been a big winner for Trump and for Carson.

As Digby writes in Salon, "... the extremist strategies of the NRA have overtaken Republican politics"—

... the recent emergence of the Tea Party right and the intransigent "Freedom Caucus"in the House evinces an anarchistic spirit that even Gingrich couldn't have imagined. (And he has quite an imagination.) No this slash-and-burn style was modeled elsewhere, by an ultra-successful right-wing institution which continues to flex its muscle today: the NRA.

The NRA had once been a sportsman and safety organization, which took a turn toward the political back in the '70s, just as the conservative movement was gaining steam. By the '90s it had transformed itself into a potent political institution which perversely thrived when it was attacked, and built its clout by never giving an inch. Ever.

If Only She Could Be Cloned

It's hard for women in politics—or, in pretty much anything public—to avoid being seen as shrill (or, whatever). Given that atmosphere, Elizabeth Warren never fails to impress with her calmness and talent for explaining things to an average person, without talking down. If her abilities are not entirely rare, they seldom make an appearance in our public life.

There were her questions at this July hearing.

Add this example of Sen. Warren's ability to bring up taboo and get to truths.

The influx of trolls to Pierce's comment thread is testimony to the fear her effectiveness inspires in the wingers.

Moved

Someday, I may be a little less buried under it all. Until then, it's dig out just enough to get dressed and to the office weekdays.

Not that it seems I'm missing much elsewhere; as Driftglass has noticed, what can be ordered on the media menu is Trump, Trump, Trump, or Trump.

A Company; A Staff; A Leader

NYT article causes a small stir. After which the Times prints this, noting Jeff Bezos' response to employees. The followup is also a reminder of one career move—from a position of prestige, to proximity to serious power—

Amazon spokesmen declined to comment further on Monday. Jay Carney, Amazon's chief spokesman, appeared on "CBS This Morning" to defend the company, which is based in Seattle. "This is an incredibly compelling place to work," he said.

Yes, the NYT can offer an exposé, but any news is likely to be just in the details, when we're talking about a corporate behemoth operating under its particular version of messianic capitalism. As usual, we see holy writ; here, called the Leadership Principles. (Never mind how directly that translates into German). There are fourteen bullet points, as these organizations always do aim for exceeding Ten.

It all serves as justification for the company to conduct (in the words of the Times' headline writer) "an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers." Why, then, should it be surprising if those in positions of authority behave as in the Times' examples—

A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. "I'm sorry, the work is still going to need to get done" she said her boss told her. "From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don't know if this is the right place for you."

A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a "performance improvement plan" — Amazon code for "you're in danger of being fired" — because "difficulties" in her "personal life" had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.

A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. "What kind of company do we want to be?" the executive recalled asking her bosses.

The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. "I had just experienced the most devastating event in my life," the woman recalled via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored "to make sure my focus stayed on my job."

Or is it surprising that workers would be pitted against each other, with the company's "Anytime Feedback Tool" used to sabotage peers. Or is it surprising if this environment exists—

In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. After Max Shipley, a father of two young children, left this spring, he wondered if Amazon would "bring in college kids who have fewer commitments, who are single, who have more time to focus on work." Mr. Shipley is 25.

But regard for workers is a trivial distraction from the pursuit of greatness. After all, an eager world of consumers awaits fulfillment of 'really practical need'—

"A customer was able to get an Elsa doll that they could not find in all of New York City, and they had it delivered to their house in 23 minutes," said Ms. Landry, who was authorized by the company to speak, still sounding exhilarated months later about providing "Frozen" dolls in record time.

That becomes possible, she and others said, when everyone follows the dictates of the leadership principles. "We're trying to create those moments for customers where we're solving a really practical need," Ms. Landry said, "n this way that feels really futuristic and magical."

Julian Bond, 1940 - 2015

The loss is of someone who had vision.

[Rep. John] LEWIS: People respected him because of what he stood for. He came out against the war in Vietnam, so - became one of the first leaders to speak up and speak out against the war in Vietnam. And the Georgia legislature challenged his seating, and it went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. But he never gave up, never became bitter or hostile. He kept the faith, and the Supreme Court ordered the state legislature to seat him.

...
...Julian must be remembered as one who inspired another generation of young people to stand up, to speak up and speak out. He traveled all over America, speaking on college campuses, but also to large groups of - for peace, for nonviolence and for protecting the environment. One of his latest - probably the last thing that he wrote - it was about including the gay, lesbian, transgender communities as part of the civil rights legislation of 1964. He supported that effort.

More remembrances here,of his life and most recent work.

Standards

Sam Seder with Harold Myerson, on how the South's rules govern the economy.

Myerson sees recent economic history repeating that of slavery, with "high value work" done elsewhere and America's South as a pool of low-end labor. In relative terms, Chinese labor costs are now actually higher than those in the U.S., where wages continue falling as international corporations locate to southern states. The South's historically anti-union climate combines with such current practices as using temporary workers to depress wages and avoid paying benefits.

"The South remains hard-wired for a low-wage economy," says Myerson, in its ethos of racism and all profit going to one class. And it is Southern labor standards that are winning, as GOP control in northern states replicates southern labor laws and vote suppression.

Then there's the show segment starting after 28:00...

Sam sets the background: the legality of investment advisors having no duty to protect their clients' interest, and a current Senate Committee hearing on proposed reform. Then the hearing clip, in which Elizabeth Warren calmly and expertly demonstrates how a slimy corporate exec can legally bilk teachers and firefighters of their pensions. She accomplishes this by asking some simple questions he won't answer—

Mr. Scheider, I just want to understand your company's advice in these cases. Do you believe that people like these firefighters from Florida who are near retirement and have secure pensions with guaranteed monthly payments should move their money into riskier assets with no guarantees, just before they retire?

More from Susie Madrak—

He never directly answered her very direct question, even though she asked a version of it three times. The closest he came was to argue "each situation is very different," and that his firm offers its risky investment opportunities to people who could benefit from it, like retirees on the brink of death.

"I"m sorry, are you suggesting that these 238 people were weeks away from dying, and that's why they all got this advice?" Warren asked, referring to the number of people Primerica was forced to settle with to the tune of $15.4 million in 2014.

Video of the complete Q and (non-)A here.

The Majority Report clip is followed by extended riffs from host and producers, all getting into character as slimy corporate President ("not the CEO").

Time-wasting: Guaranteed and PatenTED

Spotted on the library book shop's giveaway shelves—

Actually, I spotted it months ago: back when Morning Huddle was held daily, its script cobbled together by someone with all too many dates to fill. At the time, I felt quite relieved to know Patton was unlikely to be among the current crop of management consultants whose wisdom would be cribbed to produce daily scripts.

On the other hand, a mere one-minute sounds much better than the present routine. Now that it's Weekly Huddle, the boss expects a full week's padding to be stuffed into the pointless gathering.

Well, his agenda is what he hinted at last week: Simone Legree's group huddles for an hour, "to exchange information and discuss problems"... Now we must compete with them. Therefore, we were told any kind of presentation will do ("It doesn't have to be about work; it could be something you're interested in...")

After he dropped these hints, his assistant (helped by someone marginally more plugged into management lingo) planned today's festivities: subjecting the group to a TED Talk.

Cruel and unusual huddling, I call it. The session started with ten minutes of impressive technological action: a third person's unsuccessful fumbling with the controls of a giant monitor, until the official organizers decided to give up and project the video by other means. The main event was introduced by the marginally more sophisticated of the two: "Has anyone heard of TED? It's a non-profit that sends around YouTube clips that are ...[pause for grasping] ... educational..."

It also just so happens (as she mentioned) that the faculty's LEAN taskmaster had sent this particular TED to the whole department. (Nothing says streamlining the operation as well as having your entire staff spend time this way.) Of course, this is the process by which my co-workers keep up with the latest: they snap to attention upon learning a superior is gung-ho about some lame cliché that's news to them.

This was the Talk.

The Good Leaders including a couple of Heroic CEOs, but it's mostly military who "make you feel safe."

This earlier military hero seems to have had a bit of a temper problem with some underlings. And it must have really set him off, that his men got their bad ideas from "The Jews."

It would seem he kept his promises.

Leaders do mark their territory; it seems he was, uh, manly about it. A bit different today, at least where I work.

The previous Dear Leader marked his turf this way. And my absolute favorite: instead of keeping to institutional tradition that the space remain discretely unmarked, the toilet across from the Chairman's office suddenly sprouted a sign reading, Executive Rest Room... Below that, a repeat in braille—just to be sure no uppity blind person wander in and take liberties.

The newest Dear Leader's real estate grab.

At my office-in-exile, it appears the ego of our unit's leader was adequately messaged today by TED. The payoff: he let us leave for tomorrow's holiday an hour early.

Sides Of History

A new landmark in civil rights. Unlike such decisions as this, and this, the vote fortunately took place while Anthony Kennedy was in a sane phase.

Kennedy couched his opinion in rhetoric about marriage as "the keystone of our social order." But more importantly, he found "The right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment..."

It's an historic extension of Loving v. Virginia, also decided on Fourteenth Amendment grounds.

Marriage rights was an issue that Mildred Loving certainly understood, and she endorsed equality before her passing in 2008. Her statement was issued on the fortieth anniversary of her own landmark case, which had been a victory over legal oppression long justified as being ordained by God.

From the NYT editorial—

The humane grandeur of the majority's opinion stands out all the more starkly in contrast to the bitter, mocking small-mindedness of the dissents, one each by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr. and Antonin Scalia.

Faced with a simple statement of human equality, the dissenters groped and scratched for a way to reject it.

Which leads to the other side of celebration; Steve M. asks, "What happens when crazy apocalyptics get their apocalypse?"

I know I should just relax and savor the Supreme Court ruling making same-sex marriage legal nationwide. But it's been a devastating week for angry American reactionaries who think civilization as we know it is going to hell in a handbasket -- yesterday's Obamacare ruling, the sudden rethinking of Confederate symbols, and, let's not forget, gruesome terrorist attacks in France, Tunisia, and Kuwait. If you're an American right-winger, all of this is connected. It's a sign that we've mocked God and fallen out of his favor. It's a sign that satanic forces are winning.

I wouldn't give a crap what these people think except for the fact that they vote, they dominate many American states, and they own guns.
...

When I think of the roadblocks to legal abortion devised by the right since Roe v. Wade, what astonishes me is the sheer creativity. Say what you will about conservatives, they have a genius for concocting ways around laws they don't like. I can't believe they won't find ways around this one.

Right-wingers are really, really mad right now, in both senses of the word. I get nervous when they're this mad.

To Market, To Market

It doesn't garner gory headlines; well, it hardly garners headlines at all. But that's exactly the idea behind a done deal. Our betters know that secret corporate governance is too hard and boring for the public to bother its little head about.

And the King v Burwell is decision comes without yanking the rug from under the millions of people covered by ACA. Roberts' opinion lays out Sacred Principle—

"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them."

Best For Business

Look Away, Dixieland... A bill is introduced into the SC legislature to remove Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds. A bit overdue, seeing as it's over 150 years since they lost the war, and this may or may not be passed. Also a bit slow: Nikki Haley backs the bill, after initial non-commitment.

Charles Pierce, on Republicans and "solid principle"—

... look at the photo of Haley during her press conference yesterday. If you look closely, in the background, you can see obvious anagram Reince Priebus, the emptiest suit in American politics, who was in attendance to represent the Republican party's long-standing opposition to the display of symbols of treason, a solid principle since at least last Wednesday. Of course, he was there because most of the candidates for his party's presidential nomination have been flopping around like fish in a boat on this issue for a week now, and Haley was doing Priebus and the rest of those political giants the inestimable favor of letting them off the hook, at least for the moment.

Walmart, Amazon, Sears, eBay had acted more quickly, announcing they would stop selling Confederate flag merchandise.

Don't know if this purchase came from Walmart, but the company's new policy won't affect the amount of firepower always on sale.

Truisms

It was an attack by a lone wolf; nothing at all to do with race/domestic terrorism/guns...

Pay no mind to the NYT's side-by-side headlines—

Suspect Wore Symbols of White Supremacy/
A Church Long at the Fore of the Fight for Equality

If it's unlikely the murderer knew the history of this particular church, there's no mistaking his choice of target: Southern Black Church, the institution where the previously voiceless have been heard and have built their political strength. And an institution so often targeted.

If he didn't know history, Dylann Roof did "know" other things; as the Times reported—

Law enforcement officials identified Mr. Roof, 21, as the suspect in the mass shooting at an African-American church in Charleston on Wednesday night that left nine dead, including the pastor, Clementa C. Pinckney. Mr. Roof was arrested Thursday in North Carolina.

A cousin of Mr. Pinckney who had spoken to a witness, Sylvia Johnson, told NBC that the gunman entered the church, asked for the pastor and sat next to him during Bible study before opening fire. "I have to do it," he said, according to Ms. Johnson. "You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go." The shooting was being investigated as a hate crime.
...

Heidi Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's intelligence project, which tracks the activity of American hate groups, said the gunman's reported comments reflected a major topic on white supremacist Internet forums, which are preoccupied with the idea that whites are being hugely victimized by blacks and no one is paying attention. The specter of white women being sexually assaulted by black men has a long history as well, she said: "It's probably the oldest racist trope we have in the U.S."

After observing Fox's viewership explain the massacre, Steve M. findings—

So, to sum up, the real villains here are Al Sharpton, Al Sharpton, Al Sharpton, Rachel Dolezal, the racist (and anti-Semitic) president and liberal media, legislators who turn churches into gun-free zones, and, of course, gay people.

Soon enough, that post needing updated, for Steve M. to add "War on Christianity"—

... on Fox & Friends, commentator E.W. Jackson (who got 45% of the vote as the GOP's candidate for [Virginia] lieutenant governor in 2013) said precisely that. He also called on church members (but only the men) to carry firearms in church...

JACKSON ... I am deeply concerned that this gunman chose to go into a church, because there does seem to be a rising hostility against Christians across this country because of our biblical views. And I just think it's something that we have to be aware of, and not create an atmosphere in which people take out their violent intentions against Christians.

And I would mention one other thing very quickly, and that is, I would urge pastors and men in these churches to prepare to defend themselves. It's sad, but I think we've got to arm ourselves -- at least have some people in the church who are prepared to defend the church when women and children are attacked.

It didn't take the NRA long. The murdered pastor was responsible for his own death and that of eight others; when he was alive and a state senator, he voted against concealed carry.

Charles Pierce—

... This was not an unthinkable act. A man may have had a rat's nest for a mind, but it was well thought out. It was a cool, considered crime, as well planned as any bank robbery or any computer fraud. If people do not want to speak of it, or think about it, it's because they do not want to follow the story where it inevitably leads. It's because they do not want to follow this crime all the way back to the mother of all American crimes, the one that Denmark Vesey gave his life to avenge. What happened on Wednesday night was a lot of things. A massacre was only one of them.

Driftglass—

Even after a day of tragedy and slaughter, the American Swastika continues to fly proudly and at full-mast in front of the South Carolina statehouse.

But maybe that's the point.

Change Of Subject

This morning: NPR fluff about "'Jebcito,'" who "once mistakenly listed his ethnicity as Hispanic on a Florida voter registration form," and "once called himself the first 'Latino governor of the state of Florida.'" That story followed by furor over racial self-identification (of someone not a member of the Bush family): Rachel Dolezal's "passing" as black.

Dolezal is hardly the first: there is a long history of "passing" on different sides of the supposed divide. In a scholarly take here, Daniel J. Sharfstein notes such cases as the Nazi Party secretary and KKK Grand Dragon who had been a Jew, and the former speechwriter to George Wallace who wrote a best-selling "memoir" in the guise of being Native American.

Scharfstein also cites older history: that of the first free families of color and white mothers of black children. Those mothers had to find—

... new ways for their families and themselves to parse slavery, freedom and race, akin to James McBride's account in his memoir, "The Color of Water," of how his mother described her own identity while raising 12 African-American children. When McBride asked her about her parents, she would respond, "God made me." When he asked if she was white, her answer was, "I'm light-skinned."

James McBride's mother is an example Clever Sister brought up a couple days ago;Johnny Otis is another.

Considering Dolezal's multiple and apparently false claims of death threats and harassment, there may be a serious personality disorder involved. But the people it should concern are Dolezal, her family, and her associates. What should have been, at most, a local story in Spokane has been turned into day after day of national headlines.

That it's not simply a local story is no accident—not when it serves to reinforce a worldview of They get special privileges; the NAACP is phony; and the like. Once out, the story was amplified by the immense public shaming platform social media offers.

By now, it's become the perfect narrative for displacing stories that had been getting attention, like armed white cop vs. teenaged black girl clad only in swimwear. And for any attention paid to solid citizen reaction ("the blacks are the ones causing the problems and this 'racial tension.'").

Why Ask Why?

Dennis Hastert indicted for lying to Feds over blackmail for "Decades-Old Sexual Abuse."

Best part of NYT story—

...the indictment said Mr. Hastert denied to the F.B.I. that he was making payments to the individual, saying he withdrew the cash because he no longer trusted the banking system.

Who would better know how vulnerable our institutions are, than someone intimately involved in undermining them for political and financial gain.

This, and the fact that Hastert had so much money to pay in extortion are items of interest, at least to me, Clever Sister, and other noticers.

Among comments at Charles Pierce's blog—

Dave Wing ...·
... He was never an honorable man. He went from being a high school teacher and wrestling coach to being worth many millions of dollars, all while supposedly being engaged in public service. Among the things that he did was sneak a provision in to a Defense Appropriations bill granting immunity to vaccine makers for injuries or deaths caused by their drugs. He was also instrumental in preventing Medicare from being allowed to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries. I feel sad for the people who suffered and continue to suffer because of the things that Denny Hastert did.

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2006/05/08/5235/vaccine-industry-giveaway/

John Kelly ...
Hastert's land became lots more valuable when a new cloverleaf providing direct access to the property got federal money courtesy of a bill introduced by -guess who ? D.H !

John Kahler ...
If convicted, he might have a good case on appeal. After all, as shepherd of the "patriot" act, he'd be a good witness to explain the unconstitutionality of the law.

Faith Biggs King ...
Not for nothing, but whistleblower Sibel Edmonds had quite a bit to say a few years ago about Hastert's illegal dealings with agents of the Turkish government. There was probably a celebrity White House press corp function happening in town some night that month, so, really, why investigate? Shiny object!

John Robinson ...
It's funny how when the Turks blatantly bribed Hastert (and by extension, the US House of Representatives), it was largely ignored by the same US media that is presently shrieking and running around in circles over vague 'improprieties' by the Clinton Foundation. Why, it's almost like the Republicans get to use the Special Rules...

Genteel

Hushed and awed tones were heard on NPR this morning—

The scene was a luxury hotel in Zurich. The alleged crimes - corruption and bribery. The accused are some of the world's top soccer officials. They had gathered at the hotel for a meeting. Little did they know, Swiss police were also there to arrest them. This happened early this morning. Now seven officials in FIFA, the wealthy organization that governs soccer, are facing extradition to the United States....
...

"It was all very polite. People were escorted from the building. They were allowed to bring their luggage. People weren't in handcuffs. One of my colleagues remarked that it looked like people were leaving with a group of friends. It was all - it was all very friendly."

The quote is from NPR's guest, one of the NYT reporters covering the story.

Thoughtful hotel staff wielded bedsheets—held as privacy screens for the unfortunate guests being led off.

Photo: Pascal Mora, NYT

Indeed, it was a thoroughly genteel arrest, but these men are not are savages.

Certainly the Geneva hotel had no guests so terrifying as a twelve-year old, to be gunned down once a police car pulls up.

Nor were the FIFA arrests in need of a cop's jumping onto the hood of a stopped car, to fire "at least fifteen rounds" at the trapped occupants.

Regarding FIFA, Charles Pierce observes—

Here and overseas, the entire corporate universe is shot through with metastatic corruption and crime. It is an essential part of the business model almost everywhere, from Wall Street offices to the pitch at Wembley. FIFA's corruption is more than an endemic phenomenon. FIFA was simply one corrupt enterprise working with and through hundreds of other corrupt enterprises. There are governments, and there are communications empires, and there are all manner of companies advertising their wares -- the "corporate partners" of a claque of brigands. If you did business with the crooks of FIFA, you're a crook, too. There's no way to avoid it. All of them are guilty. All of them are responsible. All of them are complicit in the corruption in the spotlight today, and in the death of anonymous workers in Qatar whose names they don't even know. The whole goddamn corporate universe is begging for a gigantic RICO indictment.

Mary Ellen Mark, 1940– 2015

She was one of the first women to join Magnum, later leaving the agency to control her work.

The NYT Lens blog calls her a "force of nature" over her fifty year career—

Perhaps Ms. Mark’s best-known work was her intimate series on prostitutes in Mumbai, then known as Bombay, that was published in The New York Times Magazine in 1987. She said that the book of those images, "Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay" (Knopf), "“was meant almost as a metaphor for entrapment, for how difficult it is to be a woman."

Lens quotes Mark from its 2012 interview—

"I don’t like gimmicky pictures; I’ve always hated them""...

"I think that's what's happened in photography now, which is too bad. Everything’s become overdone and overcomplicated and over-retouched. You know? There's no retouching in these pictures at all. None. It's all by light. You don't need to retouch if you know how to light."

Lens quotes former Magnum head Charles Harbutt

"I think she would probably be happy that she died working,"” he said. "That would have been a matter of pride for her. She never gave up. She always was out there trying to tell the most important story she could think of as best she could. And that was very good."

CNN offers this gallery, and notes of her final work—

Mark's most recent project was an exploration of New Orleans to mark the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The project will be published later this summer by CNNMoney.

Picture Of Family Values

Tbogg: "A lot of Republicans who want to be president got their picture taken with a child molester."

Well, of course they wanted to be seen with the guy: the godless, liberal media had made stars of these creepy Dominionists.

From a screenshot—

If a woman is raped, the rapist should be executed instead of the innocent unborn baby. Adoption is an option. Many couples would love to adopt and are waiting for a baby. Abortion has been and always will be the destruction of an innocent child. Rape and incest represent heinous crimes and as such should be treated as capital crimes.

"Death penalty for thee, not me," adds Digby. That position statement is "from Jim Bob's 2002 Senate campaign website. He was running for office as his son Josh was molesting his sisters in their sleep." And subsequently, engineering a coverup.

Plumbing New Depths

There's no need for FBI entrapment of hapless would-be jihadists—not when the setting up is so easily privatized.

Even if the media choose to ignore it, the gist is as tengrain says—

... anti-Islam agent-provocateur Pam Geller set up an event that was ensured to get a negative reaction (a Muhammad Cartoon Contest, in Texas no less) and it got a negative reaction: two (allegedly muslim) gunmen (killed) and a security guard (injured) in an attack on the event. The 70 or so attendees at this free-speech hate-a-palooza were escorted by the police to a secure site after the attack, and sang God Bless America....

Steve M. says, "In the future, if she's being honest, Pam Geller will acknowledge that yesterday was the best day of her life..."

Well, Geller and Anders Brevik seem to be long-time mutual admirers, and her blood thirstiness is on the record. She has the right of free speech; as a right-wing loon, she also will be allowed the right to pour gasoline on a fire.

So this certainly is "two notches for Pamela Geller," as tengrain puts it.

Though Big Bad Bald Bastard suggests amending that, to—

Two and a half notches- the poor working stiff who got shot by the jihad assholes was just trying to earn a day's pay in a bad economy. He was just "collateral damage" in Pammie's existential war.

Shocker

So striking how a little sanity comes as a shocker these days. But Maryland State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby's May 1 statement—that the medical examiner had ruled Freddie Gray's death a homicide, and that six officers were being indicted on a number of charges—defied the usual mode of official reaction to suspicious deaths in police custody.

More sanity and common sense: while insisting that all citizens must receive equal protection under law, Mosby said—

I come from five generations of law enforcement. My father was an officer. My mother was an officer, several of my aunts and uncles. My recently departed and beloved grandfather was one of the founding members of the first black police organization in Massachusetts.

Mosby's entire statement was impressive, and it ended a tumultuous week in my hometown.

For days following Freddie Gray's unexplained death in Baltimore police custody, large crowds protested peacefully. Ultimately, a much smaller number prompted media to helicopter into town to supply the usual round of looting video. After all, they are animals, whose inexplicable behavior is expected to preempt all questions about Gray's death.

Some reasons for frustration are suggested by the Baltimore Sun's 2014 report, "Undue Force." It describes a pattern of police behavior so egregious that money talked: since 2011, the city had "settled lawsuits claiming that police officers brazenly beat up alleged suspects," to the tune of about $5.7 million. Reporter Mark Puente's summary—

Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations. Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson.

Those cases detail a frightful human toll. Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bones — jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles — head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests. Some residents were beaten while handcuffed; others were thrown to the pavement.

And in almost every case, prosecutors or judges dismissed the charges against the victims — if charges were filed at all. In an incident that drew headlines recently, charges against a South Baltimore man were dropped after a video showed an officer repeatedly punching him — a beating that led the police commissioner to say he was "shocked."

Puente's pointed conclusions—

Such beatings, in which the victims are most often African-Americans, carry a hefty cost. They can poison relationships between police and the community, limiting cooperation in the fight against crime, the mayor and police officials say. They also divert money in the city budget — the $5.7 million in taxpayer funds paid out since January 2011 would cover the price of a state-of-the-art rec center or renovations at more than 30 playgrounds. And that doesn't count the $5.8 million spent by the city on legal fees to defend these claims brought against police.

In a very thoughtful interview, David Simon considers reasons why abusive police tactics he observed as a local journalist thirty years ago have become unrestrained.

As soon as disturbances followed Freddie Gray's April 27 funeral, the ready-made narrative was broadcast day after day. NPR, as is its wont, pretended to seriousness and "context"—by comparing this week in Baltimore (A CVS was looted!) with the toll of 1968 riots in Baltimore and D.C. Just a quick glance at Wikipedia shows that in Baltimore, 1968, "six people died, 700 were injured, and 5,800 were arrested. 1000 small businesses were damaged or robbed." According to the D.C. entry, there were twelve deaths, 1,097 injuries, over 6000 arrests. Fires damaged or destroyed 1,200 buildings, including over 900 stores.

To compare that history with recent events in Baltimore is absurd, but was made worse by the forum NPR gave two white police and fire veterans of '68. Though they noted that Baltimore this week was minor compared to '68, there were casually patronizing remarks along the lines of how in '68 "it wasn't all the people" in those neighborhoods who were troublemakers. This jumps out in the audio, but is also not hard to spot in the transcript—

[Retired police sergeant] MATTSON: Yeah, well, I was in the police department 56 years ago. It was 98 percent white officers and a few percent black. There were no women on the street in the 1950s and '60s, not the early 1970s. And we actually walked beats without radios. We had call boxes. I'm going back a long time ago. And in '67, things started to change. We started to get cars and radios and all these kind of things. And we lost touch with the people. The police lost touch. And leadership started changing, and we started bringing in new people. We used to laugh about it and say, you know, lower them standards and you get what you going to get.

MARTIN: And do you mean race by that?

MATTSON: No, not race. Just the standards got lowered. I'm an old-timer. You know, I come from an old police department, and I still think the old way. I'm an old Baltimore kid. But everything, the political spectrum has changed. And, you know, it used to be the Irish were in charge and the Italians were in charge, and the now the blacks have maintained the city. They're in charge. So does the responsibility fall on them? I think so.

Fox's coverage is a given, but the rest of the pack were there with the usual they're just a bunch of thugs routine. While the right-wing Noise Machine hammered away at slandering the deceased, the Washington Post added more fodder, by obligingly printing this leak—

A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray "banging against the walls" of the vehicle and believed that he "was intentionally trying to injure himself," according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.

Charles Pierce's response.

Police reaction to any death in police custody is about institutional protection. NPR's story on the indictment included audio; this is from the officers' lawyer, but is pretty much the standard disclaimer from police officials and unions—

No officer injured Mr. Gray, caused harm to Mr. Gray, and they are truly saddened by his death. These officers did nothing wrong.

But why should police be expected to take responsibility for wrong-doing, when no one in the Too Big To Fail club need ever lose sleep over the victims.

Early in the week, after a curfew had gone into effect, Rep. Elijah Cummings worked the streets of West Baltimore, encouraging people to go home. Meanwhile, a Shawn Hannity crew showed up to interfere with his efforts (Fox footage here was uploaded from a right-winger's blog).

In the video, an unidentified woman with Cummings says, "Too many people have died in custody of police," to be interrupted by Hannity, who relays to his minion the question, "Do you think the president rushed to judgement with this?" In a word, "No"—and Hannity talks over Rep. Cummings, who's trying to get back to business as the Fox crew pursues him.

The footage at that point makes obvious what Rep. Cummings observes of the crowd: "This is media here; the people have gone home!" As the minion continues to follow Cummings, Hannity's voice persists in whipping up the Two Minutes Hate.

Which actually was several minutes, each second excruciating to anyone with a sense of decency.

After Friday's indictment of the six officers, Rep. Cummings was again a voice of sanity.

Did they see this man who was a mother's child? Did they see this man who was just trying to get through life? Did they see him as a human being? And I have come here today to thank God that Marilyn Mosby and her team saw him, saw him.