January 2015 archive

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 8 is the eighth day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 357 days remaining until the end of the year (358 in leap years).

On this day in 1877, Crazy Horse and his warriors–outnumbered, low on ammunition and forced to use outdated weapons to defend themselves–fight their final losing battle against the U.S. Cavalry in Montana.

Six months earlier, in the Battle of Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse and his ally, Chief Sitting Bull, led their combined forces of Sioux and Cheyenne to a stunning victory over Lieutenant Colonel George Custer (1839-76) and his men. The Indians were resisting the U.S. government’s efforts to force them back to their reservations. After Custer and over 200 of his soldiers were killed in the conflict, later dubbed “Custer’s Last Stand,” the American public wanted revenge. As a result, the U.S. Army launched a winter campaign in 1876-77, led by General Nelson Miles (1839-1925), against the remaining hostile Indians on the Northern Plains.

On January 8, 1877, General Miles found Crazy Horse’s camp along Montana’s Tongue River. U.S. soldiers opened fire with their big wagon-mounted guns, driving the Indians from their warm tents out into a raging blizzard. Crazy Horse and his warriors managed to regroup on a ridge and return fire, but most of their ammunition was gone, and they were reduced to fighting with bows and arrows. They managed to hold off the soldiers long enough for the women and children to escape under cover of the blinding blizzard before they turned to follow them.

Though he had escaped decisive defeat, Crazy Horse realized that Miles and his well-equipped cavalry troops would eventually hunt down and destroy his cold, hungry followers. On May 6, 1877, Crazy Horse led approximately 1,100 Indians to the Red Cloud reservation near Nebraska’s Fort Robinson and surrendered. Five months later, a guard fatally stabbed him after he allegedly resisted imprisonment by Indian policemen

Nothing to be done.

I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.

So there you are again.

Am I?

I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.

Me too.

Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? Get up till I embrace you.

Not now, not now.

May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?

In a ditch.

A ditch! Where?

Over there.

And they didn’t beat you?

Beat me? Certainly they beat me.

The same lot as usual?

The same? I don’t know.

When I think of it all these years but for me… where would you be? You’d be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.

And what of it?

It’s too much for one man.

The problem with transitions like this is that one is never sure when they’ll pick up the pen again, or even if they should.  The blank page looms intimidating in it’s nakedness and covers call and naps don’t take themselves you know, you have to sieze them like Roman Herman’s Berries.

I don’t expect your praise.

And not that I’ve really napping, I’ve been erecting pyramids in honor of my escaping.  This is the land where the Pharoh died.

I tell you this- No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.

When all else fails we can whip the horse’s eyes and make them sleep.

And cry.

Yeah, I know it’s what some people think. If I say: I am disabled, I have a son on the autism spectrum and my family lives with my parents so that I can care for my mom, who has dementia, it sounds grim, and if I’m honest, sometimes it is. Sometimes.

Being stuck in the house for long stretches, potty duty, phone calls from school, fibro flares, the entirety of the situation of seven of us living here together, and having to get along, well…that fucks with my head a little, but it’s not my world. I can’t allow that. I can’t stay miserable. I can achieve it, just can’t sustain it.

This morning’s attack on the satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo“ in Paris, France that killed ten journalists and two police officers was an attack on freedom of the press and free speech everywhere.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

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Katrina vanden Heuvel: Antonin Scalia: Torture’s Not Torture Unless He Says It Is

Perhaps, as Justice Scalia told a Swiss university audience earlier this month, it is indeed “very facile” for Americans to declare that “torture is terrible.” The justice posited to his listeners a classic ticking-time-bomb scenario-this one involving “a person that you know for sure knows the location of a nuclear bomb that has been planted in Los Angeles and will kill millions of people”-and asked, “You think it’s clear that you cannot use extreme measures to get that information out of that person?” Now, I didn’t see that episode of 24, but I have read my Bill of Rights, and I’m far more inclined to align myself here with James Madison than with Jack Bauer-or with Antonin Scalia.

Psychopaths, sadists, and Scalia notwithstanding, no one really asks the asinine question, “Is torture terrible?” because it’s already been answered. Torture, George Washington told his troops in 1775, brings “shame, disgrace, and ruin” to the country; earlier this month, Sen. John McCain called the CIA’s enhanced interrogation tactics “shameful and unnecessary” and decried their employment. The UN expressly banned torture in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and twice underlined the position in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (adopted in 1966) and Convention Against Torture (adopted in 1984). Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions (1949) prohibits “violence of life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture,” as well as “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Finally, torture is illegal in the United States under federal law. [..]

It is a travesty that we must countenance a Supreme Court justice who holds such contempt for both domestic and international law-and for human dignity and decency as well. There is no justice in torture, and we cannot tolerate a justice who is for torture.

Zoë Carpenter: White House Threatens to Veto Keystone XL Legislation

President Obama will not sign legislation to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, the White House said Tuesday. The veto threat came as Republicans assumed the majority in both chambers of Congress, having promised to make green-lighting the tar sands project their first priority.

“There is already a well-established process in place to consider whether or not infrastructure project like this are in the best interest of the country,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.

The veto threat isn’t altogether surprising. The White House has said repeatedly that the president is committed to the review pending in the State Department, which is held up by an ongoing court case in Nebraska. Obama has also spoken skeptically in recent weeks about claims that the project would spur economic growth and contribute to domestic energy security. [..]

Obama’s commitment to the review process means we can expect the drama to carry on at least until the Nebraska Supreme Court case is decided. And even if Obama vetoes Congress’ KXL bill on the grounds that it undercuts his authority, it’s possible that he would approve the project itself later on. Activists are continuing to demonstrate against the pipeline this week, aware that the fight is very much still on.

I have 2 for you this morning on Climate Change.

The first is a big rundown with a lot of great links about the dire situation we find ourselves in with regards to the changing climate. It’s so much more than what the title says:

As Climate Disruption Advances, 26 Percent of Mammals Face Extinction

In this month’s Climate Disruption Dispatch, we look at how ACD is progressing rapidly on every front – and how even some diehard climate deniers are starting to recognize the dire danger we face.

Jump!

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 7 is the seventh day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 358 days remaining until the end of the year (359 in leap years).

On this day in 1789, the first US presidential election is held.  The United States presidential election of 1789 was the first presidential election in the United States of America. The election took place following the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1788. In this election, George Washington was elected for the first of his two terms as President of the United States, and John Adams became the first Vice President of the United States.

Before this election, the United States had no chief executive. Under the previous system-the Articles of Confederation-the national government was headed by the Confederation Congress, which had a ceremonial presiding officer and several executive departments, but no independent executive branch.

In this election, the enormously popular Washington essentially ran unopposed. The only real issue to be decided was who would be chosen as vice president. Under the system then in place, each elector cast two votes; if a person received a vote from a majority of the electors, that person became president, and the runner-up became vice president. All 69 electors cast one vote each for Washington. Their other votes were divided among eleven other candidates; John Adams received the most, becoming vice president. The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, would change this procedure, requiring each elector to cast distinct votes for president and vice president.

In the absence of conventions, there was no formal nomination process. The framers of the Constitution had presumed that Washington would be the first president, and once he agreed to come out of retirement to accept the office, there was no opposition to him. Individual states chose their electors, who voted all together for Washington when they met.

Electors used their second vote to cast a scattering of votes, many voting for someone besides Adams with Alexander Hamilton less out of opposition to him than to prevent Adams from matching Washington’s total.

Only ten states out of the original thirteen cast electoral votes in this election. North Carolina and Rhode Island were ineligible to participate as they had not yet ratified the United States Constitution. New York failed to appoint its allotment of eight electors because of a deadlock in the state legislature.

From torture and black sites to continued drone strikes on sovereign countries, the CIA has been secretly undermining US foreign policy around the world but mostly in the Middle East and Near Asia.

MSNBC’s host Rachel Maddow discusses how the CIA making deals for black site torture facilities undercut the State Department calling for open disclosure about the prisoners that were being held in those countries.

She is joined by Philip Zelikow, counselor to the State Department from 2005 to 2007, to discuss the conflict between the CIA and State Department.

It isn’t just the secret dealing to cover up the crime of torture that is damaging foreign policy, drone strikes that allegedly target Al Qaeda and ISIS leaders have angered the governments of the countries that have been attacked. The effectiveness of these strikes are dubious since there is no evidence of their effectiveness. What is certain is that the strikes have killed more civilians than terrorists and made Americans less safe.

Scott Horton, human rights attorney and contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, joined Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman to the US secret foreign policy of drone sites and torture black sites.

At least nine Pakistanis were killed Sunday in a U.S. drone strike in North Waziristan, the first reported drone strike of 2015. News accounts of the strike are based on unnamed Pakistani government and security officials. The Obama administration has said nothing so far. For years, the United States did not even publicly acknowledge the existence of the drone strikes. The drone program is just one example of the national security state’s reliance on secret operations. The recent Senate Intelligence Committee report revealed another example: the shadowy network of overseas CIA black sites where the United States held and tortured prisoners. The report also noted the CIA shrouded itself in a cloak of secrecy keeping policymakers largely in the dark about the brutality of its detainee interrogations. The agency reportedly deceived the White House, the National Security Council, the Justice Department and Congress about the efficacy of its controversial interrogation techniques

And the Reign Of Morons dawns. Many in the Beltway are beside themselves which, I guess, is easier than talking to some of the new unmoored members of our national legislature — and speaking of unmoored members, congrats to my new friend, United States Senator Joni Ernst. And all of you sweaty people waiting on hold in your cars for Mark Levin or Laura Ingraham, dream big. Anything is possible. Of course, the overall narrative is that we are in for a period of sensible conservative governance which, while it may collide from time to time with a Democratic president who declines to become whit…er…turn into Mitt Romney despite the clear verdict of a third of the voting populace, can prove that our new congressional leadership can “govern” while keeping its toes out of the oatmeal. This is why I saw Dana Bash this morning, talking to new Congressman Lee Zeldin of New York, who looks more like a member of the largely mythical Not Insane caucus than does, say, Jody Hice, the guy from Georgia who believes Islam is not a religion, or Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, who believes that gay people are after him (Not bloody likely, Glenn), or Mark Walker, the North Carolinian who wants to start a new Mexican war, this time with…frickin’ laser beams. Better to bring out Zeldin as the face of the freshman follies. He did, after all, get elected from a “blue state.” Of course, Zeldin is a good little GOP squirrel who knows where all the nuts are buried. [..]

It will be interesting to see if this constructed narrative of Responsible Conservative Government holds true through the first time the president vetoes something on the new Congress’s wish list. In fact, the person for whom I would have sympathy, if I felt any sympathy for him at all, is not Boehner but Mitch McConnell, whose new senatorial majority is studded with jumped-up loons from the fringes of Republican state goverrnments, like my new friend Joni, and which also still contains both Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, with their national ambitions and their utterly self-involved attitude toward their jobs. This is a harder wrangle for McConnell, who still isn’t altogether popular, than the one Boehner faces. And, of course, it should be said that the Democratic party is positioned quite well to make the lives of both Boehner and McConnell utterly miserable, but very likely won’t do it, because Joe Manchin (D-Anthracite). If there really is rising populist power in the Democratic party, then here’s a chance to prove it. Screw with these people every way you can. Make the even more radical Republican state governments more furious at the “Washington establishment” than it already is. Monkeywrench the whole business and explain in simple terms to the country why you’re doing it. This has to start in the White House. The rest of the country needs to be protected from the hazardous material for which a third of it voted.

And first up on the agenda is the Keystone XL Pipeline but apparently not without a fight from the Democrats and the White House. Once more from Charlie

Well, give them credit. They started off the way they said they would. The first issue of the new Congress is indeed our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel that will bring the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel from the environmental moonscape of northern Alberta to the refineries on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and thence to the world. And, it seems, they’ve picked the fight they wanted to fight.

   White House press secretary Josh Earnest says he does not expect Obama would sign any Keystone legislation that reaches his desk. The spokesman says there is a “well-established” review process that is being run by the State Department that should not be undermined by legislation. Earnest also says the pipeline’s route through Nebraska also must be resolved.

Now, let us take to heart the advice of Mr. Winston Wolf. The White House veto threat is not a categorical threat to the pipeline’s construction. The president is saying that the bill in question is premature, that it is short-cutting established procedure that already is underway, and that it is an improper federal infringement upon the function of the state judiciary of Nebraska. The president has not eliminated any of his options. [..]

So, good for the White House. It said the right thing today. (Win The Morning!) If the president vetoes this faith-based legislation, good for him, too. But, in that case, the story will be White House Wins First Showdown (!) There will still be the State Department report, and the Nebraska Supreme Court, and nobody’s really out of the woods yet because the pipeline is inherently dangerous, the fuel that it will carry is inherently poisonous, the company seeking to build (and to profit by) the pipeline is inherently dishonest. Some things don’t change. You can paint pretty flowers on the death-funnel, but it’s still a death-funnel.

With the price of oil dropping like a stone, Keystone XL may not be cost effective for its Canadian owners or its foreign customers.

Homicide rates are falling in most major cities across the US, especially in cities like New York, Detroit and Chicago. What is most notable in NYC is that the overall crime rate has fallen in 2014, the first year of the de Balsio administration, despite the end of “stop and frisk,” which was declared unconstitutional as carried out by the NYPD.

While this is good news, the NYPD has continued to throw its prolonged temper tantrum. Again on Sunday at the funeral for slain NYC Police Officer Wenjian Liu, a group of thin skinned members turned their backs to the screen as the mayor spoke. Since the slaying of the two officers on December 20, arrests and ticketing had fallen dramatically in all five boroughs

Police union leaders have denied the declines represent any organized work action, though they have urged their members to put their own safety first, which could curb enforcement in all but the clearest situations that called for an arrest.

The sustained declines, however, suggest something of a coordinated effort, even if it was not sanctioned by union leaders.

“People are talking to each other,” Edward D. Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said on Sunday. “It became contagious.”

Even though both the mayor and his police commissioner William Bratton are touting  “Broken Windows” and a modified “stop and frisk,” declaring the policies are “here to stay,” the slow down may prove that the policies are broken. Civil rights attorney and former Brooklyn, N.Y., prosecutor, Charles F, Coleman, Jr. believes “Broken Windows” is a failure and it’s time to drop it.

At this point, there has been no significant impact to public safety because of the slowdown-during which tickets and summons for minor offenses have dropped more than 90 percent-and we’ve seen anything but the doomsday crime spree that Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch seemed to hope might cause widespread fear among New Yorkers.

Lynch, who leads the NYPD’s largest and most influential union, has been very critical of de Blasio in past weeks, accusing him of expressing anti-policing sentiments in his remarks after the Staten Island grand jury’s nonindictment in the Eric Garner choke hold case. [..]

In many ways, the slowdown is backfiring terribly and should force a bigger discussion about not only the need to revisit the “broken windows” approach to law enforcement in urban communities but also the age-old trend of funding America’s cities on the backs of the poor.

The broken-windows approach to law enforcement, which de Blasio endorsed during the early days of his tenure, is essentially Reaganomics’ trickle-down theory of policing. (Remember how well that worked out?) The idea is essentially that focusing on strict policing of smaller offenses will deter larger crimes from happening. However, the notion that police, by cracking down on low-level crimes like selling loose cigarettes and open containers, are going to deter hardened criminals is a dubious theory at best. This is, in part, because economics drives most real crime more than any other factor. [..]

So what is the real takeaway from the NYPD slowdown where “broken windows” is concerned? We already knew that it was flawed in theory, and we have seen it fail miserably in application. One wild and crazy idea is that this approach to policing and the slowdown are both about little more than power and economics. The Police Department is attempting to flex its muscles to remind de Blasio and the thousands of nonviolent protesters who have dared to speak out against NYPD practices that the city needs them. The message is essentially that, even beyond the prevention of crime, police are still needed to help generate critical amounts of revenue for the city’s operating budget.

These silly games aren’t limited to the Big Apple, however. From as far away as Ferguson, Mo., we’ve witnessed how municipalities balance their budgets on the backs of the poor through the financial windfall created by excessive fines and tickets (which, as an aside, invalidates the claim that there’s no such thing as police quotas). The same thing can be said forWashington, D.C., Philadelphia, Los Angeles and scores of other cities across the country. Pat Lynch is no doubt aware of this, and beyond any ineffective fear tactics, his real play here may very well be an intentional swipe at the city’s pocketbook, which could threaten to hijack next year’s budget.

If anything, that seems like a real crime worth policing.

Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC’s “All In,” addressed the massive drop in crime, the slow down and “Broken Windows” with author and former NYC police officer Pater Moskos.

It’s time for the end of this discriminatory policy and focus on the real concerns of our communities, jobs and education.