Month: April 2015

I remember when I bought this album. Do you own it?

This correspondent abhors violence in any form, let alone what is happening on the streets of Baltimore.  But he concludes that civil unrest may be the only way to provoke meaningful and lasting police reform, including an end to the rampant brutality that has been part and parcel of policing in Baltimore and too many other big American cities.  (It is highly likely that in the very dead Freddie Gray’s case, police took him for what they derisively call a “nickel ride.”)  

Face it, folks, do-gooder reports aren’t getting the job done.  

Will Philadelphia be next?  As I wrote at my home blog in January:

“I saw enough bad police behavior to last several lifetimes during the 21 years I worked for one of Philadelphia’s two major daily newspapers.  This did not make the unjustified and widely publicized killings of black men by police officers in a St. Louis suburb and on Staten Island in the year past any less vile.  It merely reconfirmed for me that until the police in this country are brought under control, there can be no racial rapprochement. . . .

“During my two-plus decades in Philadelphia, officers routinely brutalized criminal suspects and innocents alike with little likelihood of their being sanctioned by their department, let alone charged with criminal offenses.  Efforts to reform the department through blue-ribbon panels, task forces and legislative fiats came and went with the seasons and today, 13 years after I left the City of Brotherly Love, its police department remains deeply corrupt and rogue officers — taking advantage of a powerful police union, weak laws and compliant district attorneys — continue to terrorize the communities they are sworn to protect.”

How else other than civil unrest to bring attention to and provoke action on this hitherto intractable issue — which has been so much background noise for far too long?  

George W. Bush just sharply criticized Obama for the first time | Business Insider |

Earnest was responding to reports over the weekend on Bush’s remarks to a closed-door gathering of Jewish donors. At the Republican Jewish Coalition event in Las Vegas, Bush allegedly criticized Obama for putting the US in “retreat” around the globe. Bush also panned the current president’s nuclear negotiations with Iran.

Both Bloomberg and The New York Times reported Bush said Obama pulled US troops out of Iraq too quickly in 2011, paving the way for the Islamic State jihadist group (also known as ISIS or ISIL) to take root there. Attendees recalled Bush quoting Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina): “Pulling out of Iraq was a strategic blunder.”

○ Sen. Lindsey Graham: Send US troops to topple Assad – April 2015
○ Sen. Lindsey Graham: Calling for U.S. troops to secure the Assad’s WMD’s – March 2013

GOP Contenders Gather at ‘Sheldon Adelson Primary’ in Vegas   [warning: link to Breitbarth]

Last year, one of the major figures at the meeting was former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who has recently fallen out of favor with Adelson and other Jewish conservatives over his embrace of former Secretary of State James Baker. Baker is seen as hostile to Israel and recently addressed the far-left group J Street.

In an apparent attempt to walk back the controversy around Baker, Jeb Bush told a group of donors in Manhattan this week that he does not share Baker’s views on Israel, even though he invited Baker to be one of his foreign policy advisers. Baker also took a tougher stance against the Iran deal in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

○ Republican contenders schlep to Vegas to woo growing Jewish donor base
○ US Congress Fails In Strategic Thinking Middle East

GOP’s Baker Hints Iraq Plan Needs Change  | NY Times |

WASHINGTON, Oct. 8, 2006 — James A. Baker III, the Republican co-chairman of a bipartisan panel reassessing Iraq strategy for President Bush, said that he expected the panel would depart from Mr. Bush’s repeated calls to “stay the course,” and he strongly suggested that the White House enter direct talks with countries it had so far kept at arm’s length, including Iran and Syria.

“I believe in talking to your enemies,” he said in an interview on the ABC News program “This Week,” noting that he made 15 trips to Damascus, the Syrian capital, while serving Mr. Bush’s father as secretary of state.

“It’s got to be hard-nosed, it’s got to be determined,” Mr. Baker said. “You don’t give away anything, but in my view, it’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”

○ GOP, Increasingly Party of Corporate Elites, White Males, Evangelicals and Israel Lobby | Tikum Olam |

Check out these Crips and Bloods:

Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations [by the Baltimore police department]. 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.

According to state law, the Baltimore cops cannot be sued for more than $200,000.

Evidently, they need to add a zero to that.

If he wants to be active office holder when he seeks the presidency, Andrew Cuomo will probably have to win two more terms (in 2018 and 2022) as governor of New York. Of course, he’ll be positioned for a challenge in 2020 should the Democrats unexpectedly lose in 2016. But it might not be until 2024 that he has a real shot.

In that case, though, he’d be vying for a fifth straight term for the Democrats in the White House.

And he’d have a very long record as governor of New York to defend.

This is the video Dana Hamrick originally posted to YouTube last Monday about the bullying she endures every day at Truman High School in Taylor, MI.

I know that was hard to watch. It was hard for me to watch. It is so visceral, so painful, hearing Dana describe her situation.

When the video went viral, and it came to the attention of school authorities, they told her to her and her parents to a “take it down.” Now it is back up, and the girl and her parents are making damning accusations regarding the failure of the school’s staff and administration to address the issue of bullying at Truman High School:

“Please understand how your words how I feel?” Hamrick says in her video. “How your words affect people.

“I am sitting here, bawling my eyes out and you tell me to get out of your sight.”

The 16-year-old Taylor Truman High School student says she gets bullied daily and when she tries to tell school staff, she says they don’t take it seriously.

In the video, Hamrick says she has to hide from students during lunch hour because the bullying is so bad.

“One of the vice principals, he would threaten to suspend me for three days because I wasn’t in the cafeteria … getting bullied,” she said.

The school came out with the standard, “we tried to help her, but she refused to cooperate so the student is to blame” bullpuckey. Dana and her mother, however, in their interview with a local TV news outlet deny those charges.

But Hamrick’s mother tells FOX 2 that although she and Dana’s father were alerted several months ago of the problem, they say the school only followed up again after Dana’s video was posted.

The 16-year-old says the school asked her to name the bullies, so she let it go because she didn’t want to get hurt.

“People send their kids to school, it should be a safe environment,”Hamrick said. “I don’t think I’m safe. I don’t feel safe.”

Another parent of a Truman student told FOX 2 that when her daughter got a concussion from a fight recorded on cellphone video a year ago, the school didn’t react – even when she says her daughter warned staff of the possibility of an attack beforehand.

Please go watch WJBK’s video report at this link, which includes footage from the student who was concussed, as well as portions of their interview with Dana.

Here’s the link to Truman High School’s website: http://www.taylorschools.net/truman/

Please feel free to send a polite but firm email to the school’s principal, Melissa Skopczynski, at this address – skopczm@taylor.k12.mi.us – and let her know her administration’s response to a bullied child is unacceptable.

AdNags has a formulaic and mostly unobjectionable piece up at the New York Times on the Republican Party’s internal squabbles and fears about how their opposition to gay marriage will play out in the 2016 election.

As you might expect, Nagourney relies heavily on consulting class conservatives for his sources and analysis. These are people who can read the internals of polling data, but they’re also a class of people for whom gay marriage is not a particularly passionate topic.

The basic story is familiar. America, as a whole, has moved rather rapidly to embrace gay marriage and it is widely expected that the Supreme Court, which will hear argument on this topic tomorrow, will soon move to ratify the public’s shift in law. But, when you drill down into the data, you soon discover that Republicans (alone among ideological groups) continue to oppose gay marriage. That might be nearly the end of the story, except that when you drill down still further you find that young Republicans are different. A majority of them differ with their elders and also embrace gay marriage.

“This is an issue that is being decided by demography every single day — 59 percent of Americans support marriage equality, including 52 percent of Republicans under 50 and more than 60 percent of evangelicals under 30 — and also by human experience,” said Ken Mehlman, a businessman who came out as gay after serving as the Republican national chairman. “When people see couples who have married, they see love, they see more stability, they see more commitment and they see more compassionate care for people who are old and are sick and more stable homes where children are being raised.”

Ken Mehlman refers there to 60% of evangelicals under 30 supporting gay marriages, and this suggests to me that the number may be higher for young Republicans as a whole. Without access to the polling data, I can’t be sure how these groups are split out, but the point is that there is a big generational divide within the right. The future seems to be foreordained on this issue, even for the GOP.

Yet, if you turn on Fox News or Hate Radio, or you read right-wing periodicals and blogs, you’ll notice that there’s a bit of full-court press going on at the moment. The idea they’re pushing very hard right now is that opponents of gay marriage are being oppressed and that this constitutes an overt and aggressive war on Christians and Christianity itself. The president is portrayed as the alternatively atheistic or Muslim leader of this war, and the Supreme Court is coming under preemptive fire, but it’s the so-called “Gaystapo” or “Gay Mafia” and the liberal left who are the primary villains in this story of martyrdom.

It’s hard to separate true passion from cynicism in this media campaign, as both are present in large supply. What’s a bit easier to assess is the effect. The predominantly older white conservatively Christian audience for this barrage is being told in a very repetitive and aggressive manner that their way of life is under siege. And it’s not just media that is engaging in this rhetoric. Many of the putative Republican candidates for the presidency are pushing this line, too. Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz have gone so far as to suggest that the Supreme Court’s ruling (presuming it favors gay marriage) should not be respected.

Let’s pause here for a moment to talk about Senator Cruz since he’s in the news on this subject and what he’s saying is fairly representative of what right-wing media have been saying.

In the likely event that the Supreme Court brings marriage equality to all 50 states this summer, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wants to strip the entire federal judiciary of its power to hear cases brought by same-sex couples seeking the right to marry, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Cruz’s remarks came during a speech in Sioux City, Iowa, where the tea party senator also praised the original, more discrimination-friendly version of Indiana’s new “religious liberty” law, and claimed that a cabal of liberals and big business endorsed a “radical gay marriage agenda” which says that “any person of faith is subject to persecution if they dare” disagree with marriage equality.

Now, let’s put aside any possible merits to Cruz’s argument. What is the likely result of sending these kinds of messages to the conservative base of the country in a presidential election season?

I think this polarizes the electorate at the same time that it corrodes acceptance of the legitimacy of our most important political and legal institutions.

And, perhaps unfortunately, the Democrats have little reason to discourage this kind of behavior for a variety of reasons. First, they have the majority position. Second, they are on the right side of history and well-positioned for the future. And, third, it is one area of real strength with independents.

During the 2016 campaign, Mr. [Glen] Bolger [a Republican pollster] said, he thought same-sex marriage would fade as an issue. Still, he said, a key question is whether independent voters, who strongly support same-sex marriage, end up considering its importance when the time comes to vote.

“Independents are the vanguard — they are the tip of the spear on this,” he said. “This is one of those issues where independents look more like Democrats. It’s one of the few issues where they do.”

I think the Dems are better positioned with independents than Mr. Bolger does, but he’s correct to identify this as probably the starkest issue advantage the Democrats have with that cohort. So, we shouldn’t expect the Democrats to let this wedge go untapped. Even if the Republicans were inclined to gloss over their differences and focus on other things, the Dems won’t allow it.

I say that this is unfortunate not because the Democrats are wrong or even responsible for this debate, but because it’s a phony and temporary war that will help the Republicans rally their base while alienating everyone else. It will also exacerbate racial/tribal thinking on the right and further diminish their respect for government and the legitimacy of our courts and justice system.

It’s bad leadership on the right’s part that might mobilize their supporters but not in a good way. It makes them worse people, and it will make it harder for the rest of us to deal with them later.

And, no matter what the right does, they can’t propagandize their way out of the fact that this issue divides them.

The folks over at Power Line must be eating too much Gulf Shrimp, because Dartmouth called and they want their degrees back. Or, to take another stab at it, “hey, Hinderaker, your cranium called and it has some spaces to rent.”

It’s hard to believe the garbage that place spews. The other Ivies have their share of problem alumni, but Dartmouth takes the cake. It’s like their most popular major is in Scam-Artistry.

Of course, even with their fine Dartmouth educations, it’s actually easier to scam these guys than to be scammed by them.

It’s true what Ezra Klein says: the reason the Anger Translator bit at Nerdprom was so funny was because it wasn’t actually a joke. The president really does think that the media (Ebola!) are sensationalist and that Fox News considers it its mission to “terrify old white people with some nonsense!” He really does think Dick Cheney was the worst “president” of his lifetime. He really does think that climate science denialism is an outrage that threatens the wellbeing of our children.

Also, for Hinderaker’s benefit, the reference to senators throwing snowballs in the well of the Senate? It’s a reference to Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, and it really happened.

Yeah, right, like I am supposed to believe that Harry Reid’s brother, Larry, didn’t show up intoxicated at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on New Year’s Eve in Henderson, Nevada and claim to have beaten up a relative?

Deniers have repeatedly claimed the global warming “hit the pause button” over the last few years. This idea that global warming had “paused” has been their biggest talking point of late. They have employed it to attack research that shows global warming was caused by increased emissions of greenhouse gasses. In short, they argued climate scientists were the ones “in denial” about “global warming,” not them. They proudly proclaimed victory over “eco-alarmists,” asserting that this “pause” demonstrated that all climate change models based on climate research were grossly inaccurate and misleading, at best, and outright lies, at worst.

Primarily, the argument they make says that rising temperatures have plateaued over the last 15 years or so. And it is true that atmospheric warming slowed. But global warming did not. This short video reveals the lie behind the claim of a global warming pause better than a thousand words from me:

As you can see, 93% of the increased heat caused by more and more greenhouse gas emissions leading to ever increasing levels of those gases in the atmosphere, was absorbed by the Earth’s oceans. The rise of ocean temperatures never paused or slowed or leveled off – quite the contrary. And now we are poised for rapid increases, again, in atmospheric temperatures.

Humanity is about to experience a historically unprecedented spike in temperatures. […]

Papers in two leading journals this week reaffirmed that the warming effects of a substantial chunk of our greenhouse gas pollution have been avoided on land for the last 15 to 20 years because of a phase in a decades-long cycle of ocean winds and currents. With Pacific trade winds expected to slacken in the years ahead, the studies warn that seas will begin absorbing less of global warming’s energy, and that some of the heat they’ve been holding onto will rise to the surface.

“Their results make sense to me, and are consistent with other evidence,” National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist Kevin Trenberth, who has published research dealing with the relationship between Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) phases and surface warming, but who was not involved with either of the new studies, said. “The PDO clearly plays a key role — and very high PDO values in recent months appear to signal a change.”

The growing body of research helps explain why ocean temperatures have been rising faster than anticipated, and, perhaps more compellingly, why land temperatures rose less than models had projected after the turn of the century — a mystery, sometimes dubbed the warming “hiatus,” “pause” or “faux pause,” that confounded science until just the last couple of years.

“The hiatus [i.e., “pause”] is associated with the negative PDO phase — with strong subtropical trade winds that pile the warm water up in the tropical western Pacific, and bury some warm water in the subtropics,” Trenberth said. “If you turn that off, then the waters warm more generally and over a shallower layer, with consequences for the atmosphere above.”

So, the next time your climate challenged friends claim that temperatures have stopped going up, and thus the science that supports climate change is “all wet,” tell them, “Yes, that’s exactly what it is.” Then show them this video.