Month: January 2014

Pete Seeger’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities is a joy to read. I also enjoyed reading Howard Husack’s strange lament and grudging tribute to Seeger in the National Review. Reading them back-to-back, it’s easy to see how Seeger kicked William F. Buckley’s ass.

Here’s my favorite part of Seeger’s testimony. He was being asked whether he entertained at events held by the Communist Party as part of his “service” to the party. Seeger refused to answer any questions about where he had performed or who he had performed for, and he told them that they were immoral to ask him such questions under compulsion.

MR. TAVENNER: I believe, Mr. Chairman, with your permission, I will have the question read to him. I think it should be put in exactly the same form.

(Whereupon the reporter read the pending question as above recorded.)

MR. SEEGER: “These features”: what do you mean? Except for the answer I have already given you, I have no answer. The answer I gave you you have, don’t you? That is, that I am proud that I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I have never refused to sing for anybody because I disagreed with their political opinion, and I am proud of the fact that my songs seem to cut across and find perhaps a unifying thing, basic humanity,and that is why I would love to be able to tell you about these songs, because I feel that you would agree with me more, sir. I know many beautiful songs from your home county, Carbon, and Monroe, and I hitchhiked through there and stayed in the homes of miners.

MR. TAVENNER: My question was whether or not you sang at these functions of the Communist Party. You have answered it inferentially, and if I understand your answer, you are saying you did.

MR. SEEGER: Except for that answer, I decline to answer further.

He received ten convictions for contempt.

This is also awesome:

In 1960, the San Diego school board told him that he could not play a scheduled concert at a high school unless he signed an oath pledging that the concert would not be used to promote a communist agenda or an overthrow of the government. Seeger refused, and the American Civil Liberties Union obtained an injunction against the school district, allowing the concert to go on as scheduled. In February 2009, the San Diego School District officially extended an apology to Seeger for the actions of their predecessors.

Husock writes that it is “a tragedy that this happened.” It’s a tragedy that Seeger inspired people to question whether a Jim Crow “American experiment was noble and the nation good, and imprint[ed] the idea that private business is anti-social.” That’s how the Buckley die-hard segregationists see it. Pete Seeger dealt with these nuts in the 1950’s and 1960’s when they had the power to fuck with him. By 2009, their successors were apologizing for how he was treated. That’s what the nation deserves from the National Review. Contrition. An acknowledgment that they are always wrong, always standing athwart bigotry and yelling ‘more.’

Seeger stayed in the homes of miners, like any good advocate for working folks would. They questioned his patriotism and he shamed them by pointing out that he was a true man of the people.

Now, let’s have some Seeger-inspired music.

Sometime in the next decade, every woman who was alive when the Supreme Court issued their Roe v. Wade decision will be past their childrearing age, meaning that no American women who can have children will have ever experienced living without legal abortion as an option. Nonetheless, we are still fighting over the issue:

Last week, a judge permanently struck down a controversial portion of North Carolina’s forced ultrasound law. Now, doctors are no longer required to display and describe ultrasound images to their patients before proceeding with an abortion, since U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles determined that basically amounts to forcing medical professionals to deliver a state-sanctioned anti-choice message.

Gov. Pat McCrory (R) has indicated he doesn’t want to appeal that ruling. “After extensive review, I do not believe costly and drawn out litigation should be continued concerning only one provision that was not upheld by the court,” the governor said in a statement. Several other parts of the law — like provisions requiring women to wait 24 hours before accessing abortion services, and to undergo mandatory “counseling” with information about adoption and child care — remain intact.

But that’s not good enough for some of McCrory’s fellow Republicans, who are pushing to continue the legal fight.
“It’s an important law that saves lives and the ruling should be appealed,” House Speaker Thom Tillis (R), who’s currently seeking a senate seat in North Carolina, tweeted on Saturday. The state’s Senate Leader Phil Berger (R) agrees, and the two lawmakers issued a joint statement on Monday urging for an appeal of Eagles’ recent decision.

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper (D) has not yet indicated whether the state will seek an appeal. But it might not matter. Last year, the GOP-controlled legislature gave itself the authority to intervene in lawsuits that top lawmakers believe aren’t being handled correctly by the attorney general. Under that new law, Tillis and Berger could step in and make their own decisions about the case.

Spending taxpayer dollars litigating anti-abortion laws is nothing new for Republican lawmakers, even in traditionally fiscally conservative states. In Kansas, for instance, legal fees from defending abortion restrictions just topped $1 million dollars. North Dakota recently sought a $400,000 budget increase to defend the harshest abortion ban in the nation, a price tag that doesn’t faze state lawmakers. “I don’t look at it from the financial side of things; I look at it from the life side of things,” Rep. Bette Grande (R), the sponsor of the abortion ban, explained.

And then there is this and this.

Even though I have lived in the Philadelphia media market for 12 years, I am still, at heart, a New York City media market kind of guy. And I think that the border between North Jersey and New York City is kind of an arbitrary and irrelevant thing from a cultural perspective. It’s all the same neighborhood and the same economy. So, yeah, the Super Bowl is being held in New Jersey, but we don’t call them the New Jersey Giants or the New Jersey Jets, or even the New Jersey Red Bulls. We could call them that. After all, we have the New Jersey Devils, and for a long time we had the New Jersey Nets. But just like Cherry Hill is a part of Philly, the Meadowlands are a part of New York. Being from Jersey is a big part of my identity, but I also consider myself to be from New York, because that’s the culture I grew up in. That was my local news. That was my playground. That’s home.

So, Cory Booker can complain if he wants and try to be a booster for the Garden State, but the Super Bowl is being played in New York, too. Even though it isn’t.

Let’s hope Christie keeps the bridges and tunnels open on Sunday.

Last Thursday night, John Boehner appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and admitted that he never thought it was a good idea to shut down the government:

“When I looked up, I saw my colleagues going this way. You learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk. So I said, ‘If you want to go fight this fight, I’ll go fight the fight with you.’ But it was a very predictable disaster. So the sooner we got it over with the better. We were fighting for the right thing, but I just thought tactfully it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

I think he meant “tactically,” but it works either way. The truth is that Boehner doesn’t have the power to work with the president. Tip O’Neill and Newt Gingrich were willing and able to work with a president from the other party to get things done. Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ) rewrote the country’s tax system in 1986. It’s possible to have a divided government that does big things, but we can’t do anything because the Republicans are so intransigent.

That’s why President Obama is reduced to acting unilaterally to do things like raise the minimum wage for federal workers and contractors. It will only help a few hundred thousand people, but it’s better than nothing. Still, it’s hard to listen to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:

Republicans dismissed the notion that Mr. Obama should give up on Congress and rely on his own power more. “Ronald Reagan didn’t think that, and Bill Clinton didn’t think that,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said on “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend. “Frequently, times of divided government are quite good times in terms of achieving things for the American people.”

Remember what the New York Times reported back in May 2010:

Before the health care fight, before the economic stimulus package, before President Obama even took office, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, had a strategy for his party: use his extensive knowledge of Senate procedure to slow things down, take advantage of the difficulties Democrats would have in governing and deny Democrats any Republican support on big legislation.

Republicans embraced it. Democrats denounced it as rank obstructionism. Either way, it has led the two parties, as much as any other factor, to where they are right now.

Nearly four years later, we are in the same place, so Mitch McConnell should shut his pie-hole. He made the decision to oppose legislation regardless of its merits as part of an overall strategy of complete obstruction. John Boehner was initially a bit more willing to work with the administration, but he learned that
“a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.”

The president has now learned that he cannot rely on either of them to follow through on anything, so he has no choice but to “give up” on Congress. They’re worthless.

And, contrary to Ron Fournier, the blame for that does not belong to the president or his leadership skills. It is a choice that the Republicans made. The people elected and reelected the president, but they also elected Congress. If they don’t get rid of Republican control of Congress, nothing is going to happen. Either the American people figure this out, or we’ll be stuck with a broken legislature and a president who has to act unilaterally through executive action to address any of the nation’s pressing problems.

He lived a long life, but I’m sad to see Pete Seeger go anyway.

He was one of the good guys. We have too few of them.

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Whose bidding is Abe Foxman doing at Anti-Defamation League (ADL)? What a bunch of crap by this idiot. Israel master spy and handler [Rafi Eitan] of Pollard was quoted as saying he should have put a bullet through his head. Many private persons and organizations in America, in the cause of Liberty and Freedom, call for Edward Snowden to be assassination while self-exiled in Russia. Seems to me Pollard got a fair deal and will be up for parole in 2015. Why this hatred for America Mr. Foxman?

One instance where Israeli lobby leads to no result … I wonder to whose credit or blame. In a country of political corruption, this condition of treating a citizen accused of treason could not evolve this way.

Responses To Our Call to Free Jonathan Pollard

(The Tablet) – Last week, we published an editorial arguing that Jonathan Pollard’s continued imprisonment sends a chilling message to American Jews that they are all potential traitors to their country, evincing a distinct odor of political anti-Semitism. We called on Jewish leaders and organizations to recognize and combat this implicit prejudice. Most of the leaders we reached out to for comment refused to go on the record with any–an indication of the issue’s continued untouchability. But a few did.

Below are replies from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and the Rabbinical Council of America.

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League:

When the Jonathan Pollard affair surfaced 28 years ago, there were claims by some that the sentencing of Pollard, life imprisonment, was tinged with anti-Semitism. We at the Anti-Defamation League took that charge seriously, made our own investigation, and concluded there was no basis for such an accusation.

I bring that up now because as the years pass and the world has changed many times over, and with more and more prominent Americans, including individuals from the intelligence community, saying “enough already,” Pollard remains in prison.

Pleas for his parole are raised on a regular basis, but go unheeded. The whole thing at this late date makes no sense. There surely is no information that Pollard possesses after all these years that can be harmful to American interests. The fact that Pollard shared information with an ally–Israel–was no reason for him not to be punished. But after this long imprisonment, the fact that it was such a close ally who received his information should have influenced a positive response when the subject of parole arose.

I am not one to equate what Pollard did, to betray his country, to the recent revelations that the United States has been spying on top Israeli leaders. Here too, however, these revelations add further context to the absurdity of the ongoing vendetta against this one man.

Yes, I use that word because that’s what it seems like at this point. If it were only a vendetta against one individual it would be bad enough. But it has now become one against the American Jewish community.

In effect, the continuing imprisonment of this person long after he should have been paroled on humanitarian grounds can only be read as an effort to intimidate American Jews. And, it is an intimidation that can only be based on an anti-Semitic stereotype about the Jewish community, one that we have seen confirmed in our public opinion polls over the years, the belief that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country, the United States.

In other words, the underlying concept which fuels the ongoing Pollard incarceration is the notion that he is only the tip of the iceberg in the community. So Pollard stays in prison as a message to American Jews: don’t even think about doing what he did.

I come to this conclusion with much sorrow and, as noted, as someone who resisted efforts early on to connect the Pollard affair to anti-Semitism. It is harder and harder to do so any longer.

Rabbinical Council of America Calls on President Clinton to Free Jonathan Pollard (1994)  

FBI’s Robert Mueller in a repeat performance at the Anti-Defamation League conference

“In 1987, the ADL came under FBI scrutiny in the wake of the Pollard spy scandal. While assigned to the Navy’s Anti-Terrorist Alert Center, where he had access to the most closely-guarded U.S. secrets, Jonathan Pollard stole thousands of pages of classified documents for Israel, which, according to Federal prosecutors, ‘could fill a room the size of a large closet … ten feet by six feet by six feet.’ Pollard’s handler was Avi Sella, an Israeli air force colonel whose wife worked for the New York ADL as a lawyer. Pollard later wrote to friends that a prominent ADL leader was deeply involved in the Israeli spy operation.” Behind the Mask of Respectability: The truth about the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

In November 1985, civilian U.S. Naval Intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard was arrested and charged with spying for Israel. Pollard was convicted and is still in Federal prison, but investigators never succeeded in capturing his top-level U.S. accomplices, known as the “X Committee.”

“One document Pollard is believed to have slipped to the Israelis–thought to have landed in Soviet hands, albeit unintentionally–was a huge compendium of frequencies used by foreign military and intelligence services [which] cost the U.S. billions of dollars but Pollard rendered . . . useless [and, by compromising it] may have cost informants their lives.” –Time magazine, Dec. 13, 1993.

Pollard’s Israeli handlers were granted immunity from prosecution in the United States in exchange for cooperation after Pollard’s arrest. Sella’s role, however, was unknown at the time and the Israelis were not forthcoming about his involvement. For this reason, Aviem Sella was not given immunity by the US when his role was uncovered. Israel then refused to extradite Sella for questioning. In March 1987, Sella was indicted in absentia by a Federal grand jury on three counts of espionage, facing a maximum sentence of life imprisonment and a $500,000 fine.

After Sella was promoted to Brigadier General and given command of Tel Nof Airbase, and the U.S. Congress reacted by threatening to cut aid to Israel. U.S. officials in Israel were instructed to have no contact with Sella, or with the airbase so long as he commanded it. Israel refused to relieve him of his duties, creating tensions. Sella then resigned to defuse US-Israel tensions, and was subsequently appointed an instructor at Israel’s National Security College.

This is the same ADL which received $250,000 from Marc Rich and pushed his pardon.

Congress urges espionage affair not disrupt U.S.-Israeli relations or the quest for Middle East peace (1987)

○ Rabbis Meet Jonathan Pollard in Prison

There’s really no other way to put it. Ron Fournier just really dislikes the president. I don’t know why, but it’s personal. And Fournier is clearly annoyed with anyone who defends the president. But how many times can Fournier write essentially the same article criticizing the president’s leadership?

I also loved this:

For months, the White House and its allies mocked critics of Barack Obama’s leadership, arguing that no president has “Green Lantern” superhero powers. Now these same people are predicting that Obama can salvage his agenda by waving a magical “pen and phone.”

The contradiction illustrates how far partisans will go to defend a flailing presidency, grasping at slogans and insults as a growing majority of Americans tune out. We witnessed a similar drama under President Bush, who set a low bar for public approval that Obama is close to matching.

President Obama’s approval numbers are improving and are not that bad. Rasmussen actually has him in positive territory. CBS has him at 46/47. And even Gallup and FOX have his approval in the forties. Let me remind you where Bush stood when he left office:

President Bush will leave office as one of the most unpopular departing presidents in history, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll showing Mr. Bush’s final approval rating at 22 percent.

Seventy-three percent say they disapprove of the way Mr. Bush has handled his job as president over the last eight years.

Mr. Bush’s final approval rating is the lowest final rating for an outgoing president since Gallup began asking about presidential approval more than 70 years ago.

The rating is far below the final ratings of recent two-term presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, who both ended their terms with a 68 percent approval rating, according to CBS News polling.

Recent one term presidents also had higher ratings than Mr. Bush. His father George H.W. Bush had an end-of-term rating of 54 percent, while Jimmy Carter’s rating was 44 percent.

But Fournier made that comparison anyway, which is how you can tell that he is consumed with hate.

The NSA and GCHQ are not making any corporate friends with their incessant snooping. They’re using the apps we use on our smart phones to glean just about everything about us, which is not only going to annoy people and keep them from using apps but also brings attention to how much corporations are stealing our information.

The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of “leaky” smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users’ private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.

The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users’ most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.

Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.

Don’t upload photos or use Google Maps, either.

In practice, most major social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, strip photos of identifying location metadata (known as EXIF data) before publication. However, depending on when this is done during upload, such data may still, briefly, be available for collection by the agencies as it travels across the networks.

Depending on what profile information a user had supplied, the documents suggested, the agency would be able to collect almost every key detail of a user’s life: including home country, current location (through geolocation), age, gender, zip code, martial status – options included “single”, “married”, “divorced”, “swinger” and more – income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, education level, and number of children.

The agencies also made use of their mobile interception capabilities to collect location information in bulk, from Google and other mapping apps. One basic effort by GCHQ and the NSA was to build a database geolocating every mobile phone mast in the world – meaning that just by taking tower ID from a handset, location information could be gleaned.

A more sophisticated effort, though, relied on intercepting Google Maps queries made on smartphones, and using them to collect large volumes of location information.

So successful was this effort that one 2008 document noted that “[i]t effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system.”

If anything is going to put a stop to this, it’s companies like Google throwing their weight around. They don’t want people thinking that using their maps “is working in support of a GCHQ (or NSA) system.”

After all, they want your information for themselves.

Does anyone have a theory for why we are being deluged with random shootings in malls and schools? Is it a copycat effect, where one shooting begets another? Is it something societal like the lack of opportunity for kids in their early 20’s? Is it just a random cyclical uptick that will subside on its own?

I honestly don’t know what to do about it. I mean, making it more difficult to acquire a firearm might help a little bit, and making sure that background checks are done to keep guns out of the hands of known criminals and the mentally ill is a common sense precaution.

But I suspect that the real answer lies somewhere deeper, and it might not have anything specifically to do with guns.

What’s your theory?

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Looking at the bright side, there is yet hope for the Middle East. Love pushes back frontiers. Yair lost some of his own racist feathers?

Israeli PM Netanyahu faces Zionist Racism from Son dating Norwegian

(Informed Comment) – Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is caught in a firestorm of controversy because his son Yair, 23, is dating a Norwegian woman whom he met while she was studying at university in Israel.

But the story is not about the young man; rather it is about the reaction to this news in Israel. The reaction is racist.

So here are quotes from the AFP article:

Nissim Zeev (Shas, an ultra-Orthodox party): [Netanyahu as prime minister must] “display national responsibility” … “It’s a big problem . . . I bet it pains him.”

MP Moshe Feiglin (Likud, the far right ruling party): “is very unfortunate”.

The extremist Israeli organisation Lehava (which says it aims “to prevent assimilation in the Holy Land”) called on Netanyahu “to prevent this relationship”.

Bentzi Gopshtain (Lehavi, a far right organization opposed to Jews marrying out): “Your grandchildren, as you know, will not be Jewish.”

(According to the Talmud, Jewishness is passed on through the mother).

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Sandra (25) from Grimstad is romantic partner with the son of
one of the world's foremost terror targets (Jewish Week)

Let us just say that the son of the Norwegian prime minister started dating an Israeli university student in Oslo, and Norwegian politicians said it was “painful,” and “a big problem,” and called on the PM to intervene to stop it, and warned that the PM’s grandchildren would not be Norwegian because of this racial admixture.

Can you imagine?

Yair Netanyahu’s non-Jewish girlfriend, and the Ben-Gurion precedent

○ MKs slam Netanyahu over his son dating a non-Jewish Norwegian woman
○ Recognizing Israel as a Jewish State is like saying the US is a White State