Senate Intelligence Committee Releases CIA Torture Report

The Senate Intelligence Committee just recently released a declassified (by the White House) report on torture engaged in by the CIA and other agencies under the Bush Administration post 9-11. There's not too much here which is surprising or that was unknown to anyone who was paying attention to some of the leaks and other allegations that have come out over the past decade. And certainly it's not unknown to the people who were tortured or the governments which assisted the US in activities which are illegal under both national and international laws. No, the only people who might be surprised are American citizens who don't pay a tremendous amount of attention to what their government is doing. Because the Obama Administration whiffed on bringing these perpetrators to justice immediately after the inauguration it's unlikely that any of these folks will ever be identified and held to account under the American criminal justice system. Prosecutorial discretion is a wonderful thing sometimes, eh? But that aside as others have said in a democracy, in a constitutional republic, in America, theoretically the citizens are still the boss. And the boss always has the right and for that matter the obligation to know what his employees are doing. It is amusing to me that some of the conservatives who were against this release claim to be more concerned about the possible negative impact on US interests or citizens overseas than they are about the rights of US citizens to know the crimes the government has committed in their name. 

I think that secrecy in government, even where needed or legitimate, tends to corrode trust. But in this case, unlike say diplomacy, there is no need or right for the government to commit crimes and then claim that we have no right to know what they did. It's important to point out that the torture techniques were harsher and more expansive than we were first given to believe. They also didn't work. Although this report release is only a very small step in doing the right thing, I think it's a good start. Let justice be done though the heavens fall.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA used sexual threats, waterboarding and other harsh methods to interrogate terrorism suspects and all were ineffective at eliciting critical information, according to a U.S. Senate report released on Tuesday. Senator Angus King, an independent, told CNN releasing the report was important because it could persuade a future president not to use these techniques.

Besides the now-well-known practice of waterboarding, tactics included weeks of sleep deprivation, slapping and slamming of detainees against walls, confining them to small boxes, keeping them isolated for prolonged periods and threatening them with death.

Three detainees faced waterboarding, the simulated drowning technique. Some were left broken by the treatment, pleading and whimpering, one described as assuming a "compliant" position on the waterboarding table at the snap of an interrogator's fingers.

"We did things that we tried Japanese soldiers for war crimes for after World War Two. This is not America. This is not who we are. What was done has diminished our stature and inflamed terrorists around the world."

• Rectal feeding
• Interrogators with histories of sexual assault
• Russian Roulette
• Kidnapping mentally challenged people to use as hostages
• Stress Positions
• Threats to kill and rape the children or mothers of prisoners

Executive summary of Senate Report

It's On Us and Yes Means Yes: Bad Ideas or Overdue Requirements?

The Obama Administration recently launched a public relations campaign to combat sexual assault. The campaign was titled "It's on us". You can check out the video here. I do indeed feel a special obligation to look out for some women. This group would include all related women, particularly younger ones, some really good women friends or close co-workers, and any woman with whom there is, was, or might be an intimate connection. For those women I will risk confrontation and physical danger. I was raised to believe that it's my job to protect such women or offer advice, even if occasionally they eschew such assistance. So that is indeed on me. I wouldn't like it were I ever in a situation where I could have helped a woman and chose otherwise from fear or sloth. But strange women, women who I don't know from Eve, are not my primary concern. This is 2014. Many women proclaim that they are independent and can look after their own affairs. I don't think that they need or want a stranger monitoring their alcohol consumption and clothing choices, or deciding on his own that their planned sexual rendezvous with that dangerous looking biker is too risky and must be halted. It's one thing to see a woman being physically assaulted and callously refuse to assist her. I'm almost 100% certain that I would run to her assistance. There's no ambiguity about what's happening when someone is screaming for help or getting throttled or beaten. But the PSA is discussing preemptive bystander intervention. That's a horse of an entirely different color. That means someone would be overriding the woman's judgment with his own. That might not be such a good thing. It also means women can't be trusted to make their own decisions. I disagree with that.

Police officers make errors. They don't get it wrong all or even most of the time but they do make plenty of mistakes. They arrest people for non-existent crimes, wrongly accuse women of being prostitutes, harass people walking down the street, shoot people's dogs from pure spite, make drug raids on the wrong address, shoot people armed only with wallets, and make other errors that result in people being insulted, arrested, tased, imprisoned, beaten, shot or even killed. And these are the experts! If they make mistakes why wouldn't untrained men make even more mistakes. Police are paid to serve and protect. They often enjoy legal protection for that. But if I preemptively intervene in a couple's private affairs because I think something looks wrong, I could be making a horrible mistake for no gain. Such action contradicts my worldview that, generally speaking, grown people handle their own business. So is it really on me to watch out for people who I don't know? No it's not. Sorry. My Superman suit is at the cleaners. If you, like the woman in the debunked Hofstra "rape" case, happen to think it's a good idea to have simultaneous sex with three or four men in a bathroom , I won't stop you. You're grown. I avoid interfering with grown people's romantic and/or sexual decision making. There's a crude word for this that rhymes with dock locking. And it is an excellent way to get your lights punched out. I can't read minds. I can't distinguish between the couple fondling each other because they're drunk and will shortly have sex that one of them may later describe as rape and the couple fondling each other because they've reunited after a three month business trip and are happily anticipating numerous Kama Sutra approved activities. I don't find anything malicious about the PSA. It amuses me that it calls for patriarchal protection when "patriarchal" is considered a dirty word. I think this PSA is well meaning, if misguided in today's world.

I'm not sure I could say that the "yes means yes" law is well meaning. California recently made a change in the law by passing the so-called "yes means yes" bill. This only applies to college students who are studying at institutions that receive state funding. All non-savages want to reduce the incidence of rape but I just don't see how this law helps with that goal. All I can see coming from this law is unintentional comedy and further degradation of the innocent until proven guilty standard. The very best that could happen is that nothing changes. All we have is a reframed version of the current conundrum in such cases. There are no witnesses other than the accused and the accuser. The accuser says she was raped. The accused claims the accuser agreed to consensual sex. At trial everyone else has to weigh the evidence, such as there is, and decide if the accused was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Reasonable doubt means that the prosecution has the larger burden of proof. In other words a woman's word alone is not enough to convict a man of rape in a criminal court of law. Nor should it be. There has to be something else. Feminists have never really liked the presumption of innocence as applied to rape accusations and have been chipping away at it for quite some time in the criminal justice system and in the court of public opinion. "Yes means yes" is a way to do that in the college justice system. The Obama Administration has already informed colleges that under Title IX legislation, colleges are to use a weaker "preponderance of evidence" standard when adjudicating rape accusations, something that received serious pushback and criticism from Harvard professors across the political spectrum.

The main problem with "yes means yes" legislation is that such legislation does not at all comport with the reality of how people really initiate or have sex. Although it might be amusing to imagine that everyone sounds like this when engaged intimately, the reality is that they don't. The "yes means yes" law virtually makes this reaction a requirement for every discrete sexual action. So if a man and woman are fooling around on their living room couch the man might ask the woman if she wants to go upstairs. Now both adults know damn well that this question is shorthand for "Would you like to get naked and combine body parts in interesting ways for the better part of two hours?". However under this law if the man did not get explicit permission for each separate action of inserting tab a into slot b, a woman disappointed with his performance, disappointed with her performance or annoyed for any number of other reasons, could come back at a later date and correctly claim that she was raped. A defender of the law might claim that well, better safe than sorry. That's always true when it comes to sex in a lot of different ways. But it's also true that the steps which a man would have to take to avoid liability under this law also happen to be steps which would destroy many women's erotic interest in that man.

More than once I saw disappointment in the eyes of women when I didn’t fulfill the leadership role they wanted me to perform in the bedroom. I realized that women don’t just desire men, they desire men’s desire―and often they don’t want to have to ask for it. I also realized that I was in many ways ashamed of my own sexual desire as a man, and that this was not healthy. 

At this point I was experiencing some cognitive dissonance with my upbringing, but in time learned to take an assertive lead unless I got a “no” or otherwise thought I was about to cross a boundary as indicated by body language.One night I ended up back in a girl’s room after a first date (those do happen in college). She had invited me in and was clearly attracted to me. We were kissing on her bed, outer layers of clothing removed, but when my hands wandered downward she said, “No, wait.” I waited. She began kissing me again, passionately, so again I moved to remove her underwear. “Stop,” she said, “this is too fast.” I stopped.“That’s fine,” I said. I kissed her again and left soon after, looking forward to seeing her again. 

But my text messages received only cold, vaguely angry replies, and then silence. I was rather confused. Only many weeks later did I find out the truth from one of her close friends: “She really wanted you, but you didn’t make it happen. She was pretty upset that you didn’t really want her.”“Why didn’t she just say so then, why did she say we were moving too fast?”“Of course she said that, you dumbass. She didn’t want you to think she was a slut.”

The man was correct to stop. The risks of not doing so were too great. No means no. But a law that presumes that men and women behave exactly the same in or out of the bedroom and that most women still don't expect men to be the ones to "make it happen" is a law that will be abused. The bedroom is not necessarily a place where there is constant talking, negotiating and begging going on. It's not always "Mother may I" unless you happen to be Norman Bates. Some people like other people to take charge. Some people like to take charge. This doesn't indicate lack of consent any more than a man taking the lead in a dance indicates lack of consent. Rape is a horrible crime. It is second only to murder in how despicable it is. Rape means lack of consent. That means someone does something to you without asking OR you are unable to consent OR you tell them no and they proceed anyway. Rape should not mean that you and someone are having sex, one of you tells the other one to move to the left and a week later one of you is in front of a college kangaroo court because after all there was no explicit permission granted for that "move to the left" order.

Now you would think that civil libertarians would be the ones leading the charge against this law. Well some are. But as I've always said we are all hypocrites in some way or the other. There are some people on the right who are big defenders of the Bill of Rights, except when it comes to black people being harassed or searched without warrant by the police. At that point they will talk about black criminals, say that there's an emergency and claim that the police are justified in unconstitutional activities against the black population. They will demagogue on the issue by claiming that if you're against stop-n-frisk you must be for "black crime".

Well not to be outdone in contempt for the underlying values of our legal system, Ezra Klein, while openly admitting that "yes means yes" is a bad law and that innocents will be harmed, still says that he supports it because the rape crisis on college campuses justifies extreme actions.

If the Yes Means Yes law is taken even remotely seriously it will settle like a cold winter on college campuses, throwing everyday sexual practice into doubt and creating a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent. This is the case against it, and also the case for it. Because for one in five women to report an attempted or completed sexual assault means that everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.

Colleges have settled into an equilibrium where too little counts as sexual assault, where the ambiguity of consent gives rapists loopholes in which to hide, and forces women to spend their lives afraid. The Yes Means Yes laws creates an equilibrium where too much counts as sexual assault. Bad as it is, that's a necessary change.

Da Kommissar! That should be the law's primary purpose. These evil men need to feel fear when they start having sex. They should know that the state is watching them. There are no innocents in Klein's world when it comes to rape. There are only guilty people who haven't been caught yet. And if well a few eggs get broken while making an omelet, well we can't build our Brave New World without a few sacrifices along the way. Anyone who disagrees is obviously pro-rape and need not be taken seriously. Klein shows shocking disregard for one of the basic foundations of the Anglo-American legal system, the Blackstone Ratio. Obviously Klein would reverse that ratio. In his ideal world it's better that ten innocents suffer than one rapist go free. And if this "yes means yes" law makes those college men live in fear, so much the better. Again, for those of us who are not in college, do not live in California or have sons going to college in California, this may not seem like too much of a big deal. But make no mistake, this law will eventually spread beyond California and beyond the college judicial system. And that would indeed be a big deal because even more men would be convicted of crimes which they did not commit. This "yes means yes" law is simply alien to our stated values of law. It's also important to point out that over the past twenty years there has been a large decrease in the numbers and rate of sexual assault against women and girls. The idea that there is some sort of epidemic of rape is just not accurate. The way to reduce rape is to harshly punish convicted rapists and teach men and women that drunkenness is not a necessary precursor for sex. You don't reduce rape by claiming that almost every man is a rapist and making men prove their innocence. 

I thought we wanted the state out of people's bedrooms? Unless you want men bringing a public notary and video camera into the bedroom or avoiding college women altogether, this "yes means yes" law may have some unpleasant unintended consequences. Everyone is against rape. But there must be a better way to combat it than this.

What do you think?

President Obama Sells Out Workers

We all are hypocrites in one way or the other. It's just part of being human. Nobody is consistent across the board on everything. However I am amazed by the fact that the Obama Administration has managed to maintain so much support from labor and many members of the working class when it continues to display that it is not necessarily a big friend of the working class. Its rhetoric doesn't match its actions. One of the critical employee rights which we are supposed to have in this country, whether we are union or non-union, white collar or blue collar, is that if you work for someone else you should be paid for the time you're at work and the tasks you complete. There are a few marginal exceptions to this. The exempt professional worker usually does not automatically get time and a half overtime pay for more than 40 hours of work per week. Such pay might be made but it's much more likely to be compensated (if at all) in additional time off at some later date. Possibly. Maybe. It depends on your company's policy and boss's needs. Obviously in some professions, working 40 hours per week is considered slacking. You don't become partner at a law firm, trading boss at a hedge fund, or head surgeon at the hospital by only working 40 hrs each week. The flip side of that though is that if a salaried professional leaves early one day because they're sick or have a family emergency or just want to see a playoff baseball game, their next paycheck probably won't include a line item for pay docked. So in theory it balances out.

Still whether professional or not, if the company says you must do X as part of your job duties chances are you will do X as part of your job duties, if you want to continue getting paid. And getting paid is the key thing here. The company shouldn't be able to obtain work or time from you for free. Of course companies are amoral and increasingly want to do just that. And for some strange reason the Obama Administration is siding with the companies.
After his 12-hour shifts at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Jesse Busk says, he and 200 other workers typically waited in line for 25 minutes to undergo a security check to see whether they had stolen any goods. Upset that the temp agency that employed him refused to pay workers for that time, Mr. Busk sued. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about this hotly contested issue. The nation’s retailers are paying close attention because such security checks are common. The Supreme Court is to determine whether the check and related waiting time were part of Mr. Busk’s regular, compensable workday or, as the temp agency argues, were time after his workday and not compensable.

In its brief, the temp agency, Integrity Staffing Solutions, argues that the security check and the related waiting time are part of the “preliminary” or “postliminary” activities that are not compensable under the Portal-to-Portal Act, which Congress passed in 1947.  Mr. Busk’s lawyer, Mark R. Thierman, disagreed. “The antitheft check is integral and indispensable because the company said you have to do it,” he said. “If the company tells you to do it, it doesn’t matter whether it’s related to what else you do on the job.” The Obama administration has filed a brief backing Integrity Staffing. 

Some pro-labor groups voiced surprise that the administration was backing Integrity Staffing. “The administration says it’s time to put more money in the pockets of workers who work long hours with low pay,” said Catherine Ruckelshaus, general counsel for the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for workers. “Their position in this case is contrary to what they’ve been saying.”

LINK

Ok. Let me get this straight. The company pays its workers chump change and then is concerned that some of the workers will make up the difference by "liberating" some company merchandise for resale. It's a reasonable worry. The company could address this problem by raising everyone's pay so that getting busted for stealing some crap from a warehouse wouldn't be worth anyone's trouble. Unrealistic I know. Well. What to do then? Ooh! Ohh! I know! I know!! The company could maintain its security procedures, demeaning and insulting though they are, and PAY the workers for the extra time that they are spending at work being shaken down for possible stolen goods. This search is part of their job. Mr. Busk could not say "No, I'm not going through those searches tonight" and reasonably expect to have a job the next morning. This is not something that was externally imposed by the municipal, federal or state government where the company and/or the subcontractor could argue that they had no responsibility. And no this is not something where the Obama Administration is being forced by those "wascally Rethuglicans" to do something which is against its better nature. The Obama Administration, in the form of the Labor and Justice Department, is siding with the U.S Chamber of Commerce, the Retail Litigation Center and several other pro-business anti-labor groups. If the President didn't want this he could use his celebrated pen and phone to tell Labor Secretary Perez and Attorney General Holder to withdraw Administration support from the company's side of this dispute. This really is a watershed moment. As much as anything else this tells you which side the Obama Administration is on when it comes to conflicts between capital and labor. Hint, not labor's.

As mentioned, under the logic being pushed by Integrity Staffing Solutions and the Obama Administration, a company could order an employee to do ANYTHING after or even during his shift and then refuse to pay the employee by claiming that the task was not integral to work. So a boss could theoretically order someone to go pick up his dry cleaning and then refuse to pay because after all, retrieving your supervisor's laundry is not really a key task. But if you don't you're fired. Right. If the Supreme Court sides with the company you will see many corporations transfer more and more unpaid tasks to workers under the fallacious idea that these tasks aren't integral. Worker income will continue to stagnate or fall. Corporate profits will continue to rise. Under the current Supreme Court who can predict what can happen. But I will bet that Scalia and Thomas will side with the company and with President Obama. 

What do you think the right thing to do here is?

Why has President Obama sided with the company?

Have you ever been in a situation where your employer tried to extract unpaid work?

President Obama and Foreign Policy: Et tu, Hillary?

I could never ever ever be a politician. There are just too many times that you must smile and eat a big bowl of crap while pretending that it tastes good. And if you're good at pulling off that trick you can expect that many more such bowls will be delivered to you. h/t The Wire. You must occasionally pretend to be all things to all people, be on all sides of any issue at once and come up smelling like roses even as you're wading knee deep in the sewage of backroom deals and donor stroking. One of the most important skills you must have as a politician could be to never take anything personally. It's just business, after all. Everyone is self-interested. Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama are consummate politicians. And Mrs. Clinton is basically running an as yet so far formally undeclared campaign for the 2016 Presidential election. I think that with two years and change left in the Obama Administration it's a little early for her to be getting her name out there but she apparently operates on the principle of don't put off until tomorrow what you could be doing today. 

As a key member of the Obama Administration, former Senator, and Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton, should she run, would be wise depending on the President's popularity around 2016, to keep her options open on whether her Administration would represent a break from the Obama Administration or a continuation of Obama policies. Recently, Mrs. Clinton sent a very deliberate message that at least as far as foreign policy is concerned, she would do things differently than President Obama.

This signal was sent loud and clear in a recent interview with centrist-right author and correspondent for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. You can read it here in its entirety. I urge you to do so. It's long but gives you a great idea of how much Mrs. Clinton had to bite her tongue during her stint in the Obama Administration or perhaps more accurately how much she might want possible voters to believe she had to bite her tongue. Although she talks about how smart the President is, she unhesitatingly called out his foreign affairs principle by name saying:

• Great nations need organizing principles, and “Don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organizing principle. It may be a necessary brake on the actions you might take in order to promote a vision.  
• "You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward.” 

Clinton openly identified with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's refusal to countenance an independent Palestinian state saying that:

• If I were the prime minister of Israel, you’re damn right I would expect to have control over security, because even if I’m dealing with [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas, who is 79 years old, and other members of Fatah, who are enjoying a better lifestyle and making money on all kinds of things, that does not protect Israel from the influx of Hamas or cross-border attacks from anywhere else. With Syria and Iraq, it is all one big threat. So Netanyahu could not do this in good conscience. 

She also hinted that ISIS might not have become the problem that it is now had the US armed Syrian rebels. In short Clinton as President would tack a bit more to the right than President Obama has. It's not fair to uncritically proclaim, as some have stated, that she sees him as a wimp, but it is fair to infer that she would have a more aggressive foreign policy and would not be as cautious about the use of military power. It's amusing to read what Mrs. Clinton had to say about President Obama considering he has stretched executive authority on drone use far beyond what the second President Bush thought prudent, attacked Libya, and is currently at the time limit for the War Powers Act regarding intervention in Iraq, but life is strange. Obama loyalist David Axelrod not so subtly tweaked Mrs. Clinton for her "stupid" vote for the Iraq war, a signal that President Obama and his inner circle might be more than a bit peeved about Mrs. Clinton's interview.

Now it's not unusual for politicians to work with or even include on their team people they don't like. JFK wasn't very fond of LBJ. Eisenhower was coolly contemptuous of Nixon. Nobody liked Hoover. So it goes. And it only makes sense that Clinton would hint that she would chart her own path should she become President.way. Still, given the nastiness shown between Obama and Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary, I was a little surprised that the President welcomed her into his Administration in the first place, let alone gave her such a high profile position as Secretary of State. If I were the President I wouldn't have hired her. And if advisers claimed I had to do so I would have given her a relatively low profile unattractive position and then micromanaged the hell out of her, all the while leaking to the press how disappointed "high ranking officials" were with her work so far. But that's just me. I would not have wished to help her burnish her resume.

It is a delicate balance to seek to succeed someone for whom you worked. Show that you're your own (wo)man but at the same time show that you're going to provide continuity for successful policies. The issue with Clinton's criticism is not that she made it. The issue is that it hearkens back to charges she made before and which Republicans make today, that the President is in over his head and substitutes sloganeering for action. It's not necessarily a fair critique but I wonder if the President, who has been accused of being rabbit eared about criticism, is at at least in part reacting to such feedback by intervening in Iraq without Congressional authority when just a few months earlier he claimed that he needed such authority to intervene in Syria. If Obama's approval ratings were higher I doubt Clinton would be running her mouth. But as they say about politics, if you want a friend, get a dog. 

So what do you think?

Are Clinton's criticisms just par for the course and no big deal?

Is Clinton disloyal?

Is she putting her name out there too early?

VA Secretary Eric Shinseki Resigns

This was hardly unexpected. When your boss refuses to give you words of support and your peers are distancing themselves from you it's time to do the right thing and fall on your sword like a good little soldier. I really think that the problems with the VA are both about the people at the top and the entire bureaucratic VA culture. I don't know if the next person to be approved as secretary will make any difference but as one lady manager told me quite some time ago "Your time for excuses and explanations ended when you took the job". If something happens on your watch you are responsible. Period. Nobody wants to hear about what the last Administration did or do not do, especially six years after you took over responsibility and actually ran on making changes. Once again, though this continues a pattern of the President and his direct reports seemingly being out of the loop when major bad mojo is going down. I really do think that this is at least in part a byproduct of the fact that before his election the President had never managed large organizations, either in business or in government bureaucracy. It is also in my opinion a byproduct of the fact that in a bipartisan sense, people love giving lip service to supporting the troops but are often nowhere to be found when the troops need help. Anyway, Shinseki gave us his ritual pound of flesh. It wasn't all his fault but apparently he didn't improve things either. I have no pleasure in seeing him resign nor am I saddened. Let's see if actual changes are made to how the VA delivers health care. I think that a voucher system allowing vets to get private coverage might be the way to go. There's no reason that anyone who laid it on the line for this country, whether you agreed with the policy or not, should have to deal with a p**s poor health care system. Heck, none of us should have to deal with such a system.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned Friday in a personal meeting with President Barack Obama, shortly after publicly apologizing for deep problems plaguing the agency's health care system that Obama called "totally unacceptable."

Obama said Shinseki had served with honor, but the secretary told him the agency needs new leadership and he doesn't want to be a distraction. "I agree. We don't have time for distractions. We need to fix the problem," Obama said.Obama said he accepted the retired four-star general's resignation "with considerable regret" during an Oval Office meeting. Shinseki had been facing mounting calls to step down from lawmakers in both parties since a scathing internal report out Wednesday found broad and deep-seated problems in the sprawling health care system, which provides medical care to about 6.5 million veterans annually.

LINK

Double Standard: Cliven Bundy Standoff and Race

We live in a world in which black men are "accidentally" shot multiple times because police thought that a wallet looked like a gun. We live in a world where black teens climbing trees have guns drawn on them by police who feel threatened or more likely just wanted to put the fear of God into someone they viewed in a negative light, despite their tender age. We live in a world where black people stopped, not arrested but just stopped, by police are more likely to have force used against them. So if some black people who were members of what some people considered to be a fringe religious or political group decided that they weren't going to pay taxes or fees on commercial activity and ignored court orders to do so while continuing to engage in illegal activity and threatening law enforcement officials, well the response would likely be swift and bloody, probably something like this. Most Americans, regardless of where their sympathies lay, would point out that disobeying court orders and drawing down on police officers really isn't very smart unless you're ready to go all out. 

And if you are ready to shed blood well you've either got guts and are quite dedicated or are quite reckless and dumb. If you tell local law enforcement, state police and the United States government to bring it, well don't be surprised or offended when they do indeed bring it. This is obvious to most people, at least when it's black people stirring up a fuss.

But recently in Nevada we saw the spectacle of Cliven Bundy, a rancher, refusing to pay the proper government fees for letting his cattle graze on government land and also refusing to stop his cattle from grazing on government land. He claimed that he and his had been doing it for decades and that he didn't recognize the authority of the Federal government. The proverbial stuff hit the fan after the federal government impounded some of Bundy's cattle.

Flat on his belly in a sniper position, wearing a baseball cap and a flak jacket, a protester aimed his semi-automatic rifle from the edge of an overpass and waited as a crowd below stood its ground against U.S. federal agents in the Nevada desert.

He was part of a 1,000-strong coalition of armed militia-men, cowboys on horseback, gun rights activists and others who rallied to Cliven Bundy's Bunkerville ranch, about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, in a stand-off with about a dozen agents from the federal Bureau of Land Management.

The rangers had rounded up hundreds of Bundy's cattle, which had been grazing illegally on federal lands for two decades. Bundy had refused to pay grazing fees, saying he did not recognize the government's authority over the land, a view that attracted vocal support from some right-wing groups.

Citing public safety, the BLM retreated, suspending its operation and even handing back cattle it had already seized. No shots were fired during the stand-off, which Bundy's triumphant supporters swiftly dubbed the "Battle of Bunkerville," but the government's decision to withdraw in the face of armed resistance has alarmed some who worry that it has set a dangerous precedent and emboldened militia groups.

LINK

I can often sympathize in theory with people who think that the federal government and law enforcement in general has become too large and too powerful. Whether it's CPS mandarins seizing children because they disagree with the parents' medical or naming decisions, or alphabet agencies descending on a landowner's property to prevent him making some routine changes there is definitely room to fine tune and/or reduce the authority of the federal and local polity over the individual. Unfortunately many of the people on the right who claim to feel that way virtually never show any sympathy for black people who run afoul of federal or state government law enforcement. Then we usually hear a predictable rant about "law and order", "family breakdown", "the need to support the thin blue line" or any other number of oft racialized tropes. Funny. Remember that Fox news and other right wing outlets had the vapors over members of the New Black Panther Party standing near polling stations. This was spun as voter intimidation and black thugs and threats and AG Holder conspiracy and so on. Yet these same media outlets celebrate white men pointing guns at federal agents. Let that sink in a little won't you? If I am stopped by the police and do not have both hands in sight at all times there's a good chance I might be tased, beaten or worse. Yet a white man and his buddies who were ready to shoot at law enforcement walk away clean.

It's also very important to remember that Bundy is not in fact fighting for the right to do something on his land. No. He doesn't own the land in question. It's federal land. So Bundy is no different than someone who enters a federal park, throws a lot of trash all over the place, refuses to clean up after himself and when told to do so has his friends pull guns on the park rangers. This is not political protest. It's thuggery. How can we tell the difference? Well one of the easiest ways is to look to Kant's categorical imperative. Are Bundy and his right wing supporters willing to: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. 

I doubt it. 

If environmentalists showed up with guns to stop fracking, if Native Americans showed up with guns to stop mining, if Black people showed up with guns to stop police brutality, if Latinos showed up with guns to stop deportations, if feminists showed up with guns to ensure that a defendant accused of rape was convicted regardless of the evidence, the right wing would go ballistic. And police would no doubt call that bet of violence and raise it quite a bit. Nobody considers those sorts of "marginalized" groups to be the proper descendants of American revolutionaries. Believe that. We can't have a system where political decisions are made based on who can put more button men in the street at any given point in time. In the same way I'm critical of people trying to physically prevent deportations, I'm just as critical of Bundy and his supporters. If you don't like the law, work to change it. Convince people that it's wrong. Blanket the media with your arguments. But when you reach for your gun and start claiming you don't recognize the federal government, that my friend is a different conversation. 

The BLM made a big mistake backing down to Bundy and his supporters. It may have been done for political reasons in an election year. It may have been done because some government agent somewhere lacks the normal amount of testosterone. I don't know. But I do know that when you submit to a bully, all you're going to get is more bullying. This is going to give certain people more swagger and recklessness, guaranteed.

Thoughts?

Obama Administration: DHS Proposal for National License Plate Tracking

If you're like millions of other people, you probably woke up this morning, had breakfast, and performed the usual toiletries that clean, psychologically normal and healthy people perform. You then bustled yourself off to yet another exciting day of work, school, raising your children, enjoying your retirement or any other number of productive or leisurely activities. One thing you probably didn't do is stop by your local police station or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office and provide those kind men and women a detailed, hour by hour itinerary of your plans for the day, how long you thought these things would take, who you'd be seeing and where you'd be for most of the day. I know that you're probably pretty busy. Perhaps the critical importance of letting the government and its running dog corporate lackeys know where you were slipped your mind. Never fear. DHS has got you covered.

In a sad reminder of just how far government has sunken and how contemptuous many governmental bureaucratic or law-enforcement types are of a citizen's right to privacy and to be left alone, the DHS confirmed that it is seeking a private agency to assist it in building a database of every US license plate and its real time location.

The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.The national license-plate recognition database, which would draw data from readers that scan the tags of every vehicle crossing their paths, would help catch fugitive illegal immigrants, according to a DHS solicitation. But the database could easily contain more than 1 billion records and could be shared with other law enforcement agencies, raising concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens who are under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.

The agency said the length of time the data is retained would be up to the winning vendor. Vigilant Solutions, for instance, one of the leading providers of tag-reader data, keeps its records indefinitely. Nationwide, local police as well as commercial companies are gathering license-plate data using various means. One common method involves drivers for repossession companies methodically driving up and down streets with cameras mounted on their cars snapping photos of vehicles. Some police forces have cameras mounted on patrol cars. Other images may be retrieved from border crossings, interstate highway on-ramps and toll plazas.

Customs and Border Protection, another DHS agency, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is part of the Justice Department, also have deployed cameras along the country’s borders. But DHS’s effort appears to be the first time a federal law enforcement agency is seeking such extensive access to a broad repository of data capturing the movements and images of American motorists from metropolitan ­areas...

Read the full article here. It's even worse than it sounds. 

DHS Solicitation of bids

If you've read this blog for more than a month or so you know where I stand on civil liberties and privacy. So you can probably guess what I think of this idea. Very simply this is bovine excrement. Wet stinky greasy foul bovine excrement. This is precisely the sort of thing that we read about states like Communist China or the former East Germany doing. A government that tries to know what its citizens are reading, with whom the citizens are communicating via phone, email, letter, and where the citizens are traveling and why is not a government that I have any respect for. It's a government that needs a radical haircut in its powers and so-called authority. If someone from the government wants to know what I did today they could ask me. And I could tell them to go  attempt airborne copulation with a rapidly revolving pastry. Unless I am under formal government control via imprisonment, parole or probation, who I talk to, why I talk to them, who I sleep with, where and why I travel, who my friends are and so forth and so on are none of the government's business. If the government REALLY needs to know, get a warrant. This is most definitely not a partisan issue. The great problem as I see it is that these increasing attacks on civil liberties and stepped up surveillance of citizen movements are sort of a Nixon to China moment. It took a right wing politician to attempt to woo China into the capitalist marketplace and make diplomatic concessions to the Chinese. This neutralized and isolated the rabid right-wing base that would have otherwise fiercely opposed such an action by a centrist or left leaning politician. Similarly if it had been widely reported under a Republican Administration that the FBI/DHS etc were seeking to maintain records of individual travel by all Americans, I suspect that many more left leaning activist groups and politicians might have slightly more than a few mild concerns to express. But because Obama is behind it you won't hear more than a few mumbles from most progressive people. This is wrong. Everyone should oppose these steps.

There are some fair minded people of goodwill who nevertheless still wonder why civil libertarians were so angered by warrantless wiretapping, metadata gathering, email and social network monitoring. They claim that as long as the government keeps us safe what's the big deal. To those people I would say that the big deal is exactly that giving the government a pass on the above activities, as we have largely done, just emboldens the government to take other bites out of our freedom. This really is a slippery slope.  People who come up with these sorts of ideas never ever have enough information. There's always someone out there who may have some fig leaf of privacy left. That bothers control freaks. There are many people who were alleged to have said this but it really is true that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.  If you're still not convinced that this expansion is problematic I'm not sure what to say to you. The opportunities for abuse are endless in such a system. We know that the government already targets people with political views that it doesn't like. Is it such a leap to believe that armed with a real time database of people's travels that further abuses would proliferate?  Let's imagine for a moment that there is that is a pugnaciously righteous attorney general or governor of a large east coast state. This man has numerous bitter rivals and enemies among the political and financial establishment. So his detractors monitor his movements until they realize this pompous populist gadfly is spending quality time at a brothel or house of a woman not his wife. So the politician's rivals then try to blackmail this man into softening his stances or failing that charge him with a crime thus destroying his ability to seek higher office or threaten established financial power. Of course nothing like that would ever happen would it? I'm just being paranoid...

Robert Gates' New Book Attacks Obama

I don't know how it's handled in the Federal government workforce but in the private institutions I've worked in, often but not always, when someone decides to leave for greener pastures, there is an exit interview, formal or not. This usually depends on how "important" you are, how long you've been there, whether you're direct hire or contract and how easy you are to replace. Your boss and/or the HR department want to know why you're leaving, what they could have done differently to make you stay, if you enjoyed your time working at Penetrode Inc., whether you might ever want to return, or if they would ever be interested in having you back. I've had a few of these. Usually both sides are professional and cautious. Although you and/or your boss might be secretly or not so secretly delighted that you are finally departing, the custom is often to play things close to the vest. After all no one wants to be sued or tip their hand about a possible lawsuit. And even ignoring legal unpleasantness, usually neither the employer or especially, a wise employee, wants to burn down a bridge they might want to come back across. So the employee mouths the necessary pieties about an exciting new opportunity he just couldn't pass up and the boss says she's sorry to lose such a key part of her team but happy that her former subordinate is moving on to bigger and better things.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates evidently decided that he would ignore those conventions in his new book Duty, which details his experiences under the Obama Administration. He himself says that he didn't really enjoy his time there. I think it's fair to infer that he didn't much like or respect many of the people he worked with. So if this book was his exit interview it was a big "F*** All Y'all!!" to his former team members.

• In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

• Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes

• “The controlling nature of the Obama White House, and its determination to take credit for every good thing that happened while giving none to the career folks in the trenches who had actually done the work, offended Secretary Clinton as much as it did me,” Mr Gates writes. In one meeting, Mr. Gates says that he challenged Mr. Biden and Thomas Donilon, then Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, when they tried to pass orders to him on behalf of the president. “The last time I checked, neither of you are in the chain of command,” Mr. Gates says he told the two men. Mr. Gates said he expected to deal directly with the president on such orders.

• In particular, Mr. Gates said he was incensed by the National Security Staff and their controlling nature. “Much of my conflicts with the Obama administration during the first two years weren’t over policy initiatives from the White House but rather the NSS’s micromanagement and operational meddling,” he writes. “For an NSS staff member to call a four-star combatant commander or field commander would have been unthinkable when I worked at the White House – and probably cause for dismissal. It became routine under Obama.”

• In “Duty,” Gates describes his outwardly calm demeanor as a facade. Underneath, he writes, he was frequently “seething” and “running out of patience on multiple fronts.”

I don't think this is all that big of a deal nor is it unprecedented. Sometimes I think that everyone who is anyone in a Presidential Administration (and many who aren't) will write a book purporting to give the inside scoop and tell the "real story" of how everything went wrong when the President didn't listen to him. I'm sure that right now some intern in the event planning office is writing a book designed to settle scores. Controversy sells. But Gates' book does show that the President's initial team of rivals approach had some limitations. Perhaps the next President, when faced with the question of whether s/he should keep on a cabinet member from the opposite political party will remember Robert Gates' book and think better of it. 

Is this no big deal?

Have you ever badmouthed former employers/co-workers? 

Is it a mistake to keep people from a different party in key positions?

Do any of Gates revelations about the President's managerial style concern you?

President Obama and ObamaCare Statements

The problem with simple definitive statements is that if you make them, e.g. "Read my lips, no new taxes" or "We were not trading arms for hostages, nor were we negotiating with terrorists" or "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" they need to be true. They don't need to have legal disclaimers added on at the end written in very small print or read aloud in a hurried cadence and low volume voice. And when it comes out that not only were the statements you made untrue but that also you may have had reason to know they were untrue but that you or your advisers decided that the greater good required you to continue making them, well maybe that's just good old fashioned politics. Politicians don't necessarily get elected by telling people things that people don't want to hear. Remember President Perot? Indeed. But for someone whose brand is that he's not like all the other snake oil salesmen politicians, definitive confident assurances that "If you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan. Period." are risky things to say right before hundreds of thousands to millions of cancellation notices are sent out.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe my eyes and ears deceive me. Perhaps the President was, as he recently implied, merely misunderstood by people who heard him speak on the PPACA. I know sometimes that people in my circles of work associates, family or friends didn't hear what I said or claim I said something different. So I can certainly sympathize with the President if that's what happened to him.

Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really like that plan, what we said was you could keep it, if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed,” he said. “We wrote into the Affordable Care Act, you’re grandfathered in on that plan. But if the insurance company changes it, then what we’re saying is they’ve got to change it to a higher standard, they’ve got to make it better, they’ve got to improve the quality of the plan that they’re selling.”

Check out this video. I'm no policy wonk nor am I any sort of legal mind. But a slow Midwestern rube like me can certainly see how someone might have gotten the false idea that they could keep their health care plan if they liked it. Period. I wonder where they got that false idea from. Maybe it was John Boehner?? Hmm. Good for us that the President was here to straighten us out. After the fact of course. But better late than never I always say....

War on Syria??

Syria has been undergoing a bloody civil war. Over 100,000 people are said to have died. There are numerous rebel groups which are opposed to the Assad regime. However these groups are not exactly all a ragtag bunch of reluctant revolutionaries who sadly took up the gun and look forward to ending the war to return home and peacefully live out their days on a Tatooine moisture farm. Many of them are a pretty nasty bunch, who when they aren't enjoying such activities as cannibalism on government troops or gang rapes of women (and boys/men/girls too for that matter), are often seeking ways to impose Islamic rule over the previously secular Syria. Well that is Sunni Islamic rule. The Assad regime, despite being secular, is from the Alawite branch of Islam, and is considered akin to apostate or heretic by some fundamentalist Sunnis. This conflict isn't only a political revolution but also has ethnic and religious undertones. This last is of course being funded and fanned by our very good friends, the Saudis. Ironically of course the Muslim Brotherhood and associated groups, whom we claim to despise in Egypt, form some of the opposition in Syria. So does Al-Quaeda. Hezbollah, a Lebanese primarily Shia group, has come to the aid of the Syrian regime, without asking the Lebanese people if that was a good idea. Israel has bombed what it claimed were Syrian weapons transfers to Hezbollah. Iran and Syria have threatened Israel. Syrian Kurds, unpopular with and worried by all of the sides in the conflict have been fleeing to Iraq. Well, that is they've been fleeing to the northern portion of Iraq, which is heavily ethnically Kurdish and has enjoyed a sort of de facto home rule from the rest of Iraq. Greater numbers of Kurds could eventually pull Iraq back into a new civil war if the northern section gets emboldened to declare formal independence. Syrian refugees of all ethnicities and faiths have been fleeing the country. Both the rebels and the government have committed atrocities.

Allegedly the Syrian government used chemical weapons. I doubt that claim. It wouldn't make sense as they've been winning the war as of late. There are some issues with the evidence, not least of which is that the Secretary of State can only publicly offer youtube videos as casus belli. It's unclear as to who used chemical weapons and even if they were used. Still anything is possible. The US may or may not attack Syria in the next few days or even the next few hours. I don't know. I'm not invited to the meetings where those decisions are discussed. Neither are you in all likelihood.

This is, to quote noted foreign policy expert Yogi Berra, deja vu all over again. I don't have time or interest frankly to list all of the arguments against US involvement. You can read some of them here in the post on Libya. I'm trying to write shorter posts anyway.

No I will just raise a few issues here.
First off I agree with the man who said this :

The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation. As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent. 

Imagine if we had such a person in office today. 

• By what authority does this President muse attacking Syria?
• Next what is the point of attacking Syria? What is the US interest? Syria has not attacked the US. I have no doubt that the US can successfully drop bombs/fire missiles anywhere in Syria with zero or minimal US casualties. Then what?
• What is the political impact of bombing Syria? Is that going to make Russia and China more or less amenable to listening to us on issues where we need their assistance? Will other countries decide that they need to either upgrade their air defense forces or more likely go nuclear? After all, you must have noticed although North Korea has a fat crazy dumpling of a Fearless Leader, nobody is talking about bombing North Korea. North Korea has nukes and deliberately gives off the impression that they're itching to use them.
• Does the fact that Russia is moving additional warships to the Eastern Mediterranean concern anyone? 
• The American people are overwhelmingly against it. Is that of any interest to politicians?
• There are many violent struggles in the world, including some against rulers we support. What makes this one our business?
• If the US does attack Syria would it be time to just drop the pretense and admit that some of us don't think that the people in the Middle East are smart enough to run their own affairs?
• Do the people claiming that only a barbarian uses chemical weapons feel the same about nuclear weapons usage? If not why not? Why is it okay to incinerate people and not okay to gas them? Similarly why is it a bad thing to line up people against a wall and gun them down but just fine to drop bombs on them from three miles up and never see, hear or smell the effects of what you do? Are chemical weapons worse than depleted uranium usage? Why or why not?

None of this is meant to defend the Syrian government. But I'm not sure Syria is any nastier than Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Bahrain or any of the other nations funding the rebels for their own reasons. The Middle East is not exactly a region known for toleration of peaceful dissent. And no matter how they gained power there are few governments anywhere in the world who won't respond in kind when peaceful dissent turns violent. I say if other countries wish to intervene in Syria and likely bring about either a new military dictatorship or a fundamentalist Islamic state they are free to spend their own money, resources and lives. I'm not seeing why the US needs to be involved. And thanks to democratic blowback over a rush to judgment in Iraq, it looks like the UK may be prevented from tagging along this time as well. I think that it's past time that Congress put its foot down and wrestled back war making authority from the Executive Branch. But as always I could be woefully wrong. Let me know.

What's your take? 

Should the US do something? 

Was there a chemical attack? 

Do we owe something to the Syrian people?

US Government Seizing Verizon Phone Records????

I don't have very much to add about the below story. It grows out of the Patriot Act, which was initially passed under President Bush and extended/expanded under President Obama. All I can say is IF this is true then it once again proves my point that when you give government expanded power to investigate you, violate your privacy and keep a watch over what you're doing, government will use it. This is not just about President Obama and/or his advisers and appointees having a disregard for privacy or limited actions to discover leaks or criminal wrong doing. Although in my opinion they certainly do have that disregard. No the problem here is that under the Patriot Act and associated legislation this is probably all completely legal. The only limitation to executive branch snooping is not the law or divided government but the caprices or morality of various people in the executive branch. This is not how our society is supposed to work but you know what I'm starting not to care any more. The Patriot Act was passed and passed again. People just don't care about civil liberties.

IF this report is true and that's a big IF it would just be another nail in the coffin of limited government and privacy. Again, this isn't just about "bad people". If I had powers to do things like this I couldn't be trusted either. No one could which is why historically the power of the state to invade your privacy had to be done under warrant, had to be specific to an action that you allegedly took and had to have some sort of probable cause.  I honestly think that eventually we ought to just get rid of the Bill of Rights, or at least the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. Because IF this story is true, it's not as if anyone in power cares much about them...with the exception of whoever leaked this story.

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April. The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing. 

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19. 

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered. The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers.

Welcome to surveillance society. But don't worry. I'm sure the Republicans would have been worse on this issue. Or something like that. Big government is your friend. And we know that the Administration will get to the bottom of this. No expense will be spared...to find out who told the Guardian and Glenn Greenwald about all of this...IF it's true. I keep saying IF it's true because after all we know the government would NEVER grab up millions of phone records just because it could...right? Can you hear me now??

Thoughts?