Hutzpah!


From "Red Alert Politics":
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor joined Republican and conservative interns and college students on the Senate side of the Capitol steps on Friday to protest the anticipated doubling of federally subsidized student loan interest rates. Rates will revert back to pre-2008 levels, jumping from 3.4 percent back to 6.8 percent, unless Congress takes action....
“A few weeks ago, the House of Representatives did the right thing — it acted,” Cantor said as he addressed the students. ”It said that students of this country have a right to a quality education and they shouldn’t be burdened by ever spiraling rates on their student loans.”
Sadly, no, as a great blogger once said. It said that if you thought Republicans would prefer for people who need to take out loans not to go to college, you'd be right. The bill the House passed last May specifically called for spiraling interest rates:
The House bill would allow student lending rates to reset each year, based on the interest rate of a 10-year Treasury note, plus 2.5 percentage points for Stafford loans. The Congressional Budget Office projected that rates on Stafford loans would rise to 5 percent in 2014 and 7.7 percent in 2023. 
Obama and the Senate have much more swallowable proposals, where at least the rate wouldn't be going up every year like one of those nightmare adustable-rate housing mortgages of way back in, um, 2007, but the House under Cantor's leadership ("leadership" would be too strong a word for Boehner's role in the shop) won't look at them. Instead, Cantor prefers to go before the cameras to pretend he actually cares. What a thug.
Blonde Eric Cantor.

Nickeling and Diming department

Have you heard of this? Hourly-paid workers are now getting their pay in the form of stored-value cards.
But in the overwhelming majority of cases, using the card involves a fee. And those fees can quickly add up: one provider, for example, charges $1.75 to make a withdrawal from most A.T.M.’s, $2.95 for a paper statement and $6 to replace a card. Some users even have to pay $7 inactivity fees for not using their cards....
These fees can take such a big bite out of paychecks that some employees end up making less than the minimum wage once the charges are taken into account....Devonte Yates, 21, who earns $7.25 an hour working a drive-through station at a McDonald’s in Milwaukee, says he spends $40 to $50 a month on fees associated with his JPMorgan Chase payroll card. 
Banks are really the new Mafia, shaking down everybody that doesn't have a protector. And protecting guess who?
Taco Bell, Walgreen and Walmart are among the dozens of well-known companies that offer prepaid cards to their workers; the cards are particularly popular with retailers and restaurants... a calculator on Visa’s Web site estimates that a company with 500 workers could save $21,000 a year by switching from checks to payroll cards.
Nice little wage you're getting. Wouldn't like to see anything happen to it... Image via philosecurity (and another article about bankster shakedowns).
YOU'D HAVE TO BE A WINGNUT OR A BELTWAY INSIDER TO FALL FOR THIS

I really don't believe the public is going to fall for this -- at least not directly. However, I think it's possible that the mainstream press will fall for it, repeat it endlessly, and make it seem plausible to the public:
Stuart Stevens, the top strategist for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, declared to an audience of reporters at a breakfast last month that electing Hillary Rodham Clinton would be like going back in time. "She's been around since the '70s," he said.

At a conservative conference earlier in the year, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, ridiculed the 2016 Democratic field as “a rerun of 'The Golden Girls,'" referring to Mrs. Clinton and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is 70.

And Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, seizing on the Fleetwood Mac song that became a Clinton family anthem, quipped to an audience in Washington, "If you want to keep thinking about tomorrow, maybe it’s time to put somebody new in."

The 2016 election may be far off, but one theme is becoming clear: Republican strategists and presidential hopefuls, in ways subtle and overt, are eager to focus a spotlight on Mrs. Clinton's age. The former secretary of state will be 69 by the next presidential election, a generation removed from most of the possible Republican candidates.

Despite her enduring popularity, a formidable fund-raising network and near unanimous support from her party, Mrs. Clinton, Republican leaders believe, is vulnerable to appearing a has-been....
That's from Jonathan Martin, who left Politico last month and is doing at The New York Times what everyone at Politico has done for years: listen to right-wingers' claims that their talking points are conventional wisdom and objective truth, then regurgitate those talking points as if they are conventional wisdom and objective truth.

When enough mainstream journalists do this, GOP talking points become the C.W. and the truth, as far as the political world is concerned. And then the stories get written with the talking point as a given. See, e.g., 2000, when we were all told we thought Al Gore was an annoying dweeb and George W. Bush was America's Big Man on Campus. The repetition of such talking points is what can sway voters.

But in the absence of that, I don't think the public is inclined to reject Hillary for her age. For one thing, the population is aging, with the biggest cohort being the baby boom -- particularly my age group, people born in the late 1950s. Does Hillary seem old? She's not much older than we are.

Beyond that, as Martin acknowledges, older candidates can win young people's votes. Ronald Reagan did extremely well with the young in 1984. (And Martin doesn't mention this, but the last non-Democrat to find favor with a significant segment of The Kidz is Crazy Uncle Liberty himself, Ron Paul, who's more than a decade older than Hillary.)

If Hillary is going to be the candidate in 2016, she's almost certainly going to be up against a guy who opposes abortion and gay marriage and denies that climate change is caused by humans. More to the point, unless Bobby Jindal runs every likely opponent is a pale male whose candidacy stands for a restoration, a return to the rule of white males. And no, I don't care how many Tupac lyrics Rubio recites -- bond traders know their Tupac, too.

But the press will fall for this. (Did I mention sexism? That's one big reason.) I can even imagine middle-aged male journos telling us that Hillary belongs to yesterday because Chris Christie is a big fan of that oh-so-hip Bruce Springsteen -- never mind the fact that Bruce is only two years younger than Hillary. The press might abandon this meme if the charisma-challenged Scott Walker gets the nomination -- even a press that reflexively parrots GOP spin would have tough time selling that guy as a rock star. Otherwise, we're going to hear it. And I hope we utterly reject it.


TOM FRIEDMAN'S DISPATCHES FROM A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

Tom Friedman interrupts what seems to be a not-terrible column about unrest in Turkey, Egypt, and Brazil to mention recent American protest movements, and decides that getting the facts straight is not as important as writing a sentence with clever-sounding symmetry:
In America, the Tea Party began as a protest against Republicans for being soft on deficits, and Occupy Wall Street as a protest against Democrats for being soft on bankers.
No, Tom. A thousand times no.

Even the second part of that is mind-bogglingly ignorant -- Occupy Wall Street wasn't a protest against Democrats, it was a protest against the whole damn system. But it's the first part that's preposterous -- yes, Tom, all those pictures at tea party rallies of Obama as Hitler, as a sociopathic (and socialist) Joker, as the political heir of Lenin and Mao, were waved because teabaggers were angry at Republicans.

Friedman actually starts the column by looking at an issue worth examining: why is there so much unrest right now in democratic nations? He concludes that Turkey, Brazil, and Egypt have "majoritarian" governments that don't do enough for groups that are the part of the electoral minority, and that modern capitalism makes it harder to attain and retain middle-class status.

So, perhaps naively, I though he'd ask why we don't have a million people streets in America, when the government seems not to be responsive to ordinary people's needs and the middle class is shrinking. Nahhh. His theory about other nations is that the victors aren't interested in the welfare of the losers, but his view of America is that Both Sides Do It, so I guess that's all you need to know.

After that, it's off to Friedmanland, as in: Isn't the Internet amazing!
Finally, thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, Twitter, Facebook and blogging, aggrieved individuals now have much more power to engage in, and require their leaders to engage in, two-way conversations -- and they have much greater ability to link up with others who share their views to hold flash protests. As Leon Aron, the Russian historian at the American Enterprise Institute, put it, "the turnaround time" between sense of grievance and action in today's world is lightning fast and getting faster.
Oh, right, the Internet! Almost forget about that! Now I understand the world, Tom! Thanks for clearing everything up!

Derp Farmer

Preposterously stupid Texas governor Rick Perry (via Maddowblog):
"[E]ven the woman who filibustered the Senate the other day was born into difficult circumstances. She was the daughter of a single woman, she was a teenage mother herself. She managed to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School and serve in the Texas senate. It's just unfortunate that she hasn't learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters."
I.e.,  I'm saddened that Wendy Davis hasn't learned from her relevant life experience what I know to be true based on no experience whatever and repeating the same sentences over and over again.
Image from The Meta Picture.

The Mongrel Horde

I'm having some trouble getting a grip on David Brooks's point today.
Over the past few decades, American society has been transformed in a fit of absence of mind.
Perhaps he means into a fit of absence of mind. No? [jump]

Tyrone Power in Sign of Zorro, 1940. Via Patchary's Blog.

No. He means that there are lots of immigrants around, with 12.9% of the population foreign-born in 2010, as opposed to 5.4% back around the time he was born (in Toronto, obvs, but to American parents). The absence of mind, I suppose, means that it wasn't planned this way, when the racial quota system for admitting immigrants was abolished under the Hart-Celler Act in 1965. Who could have imagined that allowing more people in would lead to more people showing up?

Plus, in those days the country was "an outpost of European civilization":
In 1960, 75 percent of the foreign-born population came from Europe, with European ideas and European heritage. Soon, we will no longer be an outpost of Europe, but a nation of mutts, a nation with hundreds of fluid ethnicities from around the world, intermarrying and intermingling.
With mutt ideas and mutt heritages, knee-deep in the tide of ethnic fluids. This is going to end in tears, I'm afraid. I love the idea of the U.S. as an "outpost", though, a tiny cultural fortress squeezed between gigantic, barbaric Canada and Mexico (where European civilization, of course, has never had any impact).

Anyhow, the original discrete communities of Angle, Saxon, and Jutlandish origin, the Dutch, French, and German entrepreneurs who soon joined them, our excitable Irish, Italian, and Jewish friends, the mercurial Pole and sullen Serb, all had something deeply in common in a reverence for Plato and Montesquieu, the use of the salad fork, and the concept of racial purity. Then, boom! In 1965, the savage Hispanics (on whom European civilization, of course, has never had any impact) began pushing their way into the blue-eyed enclaves of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Tejas I mean Texas, seducing our women with their mustaches and tango moves and turning our well-tiled gene pools into fetid swamps. ¡Don Diego, ayuda!
As we stand on the cusp of this New America, it’s understandable to feel some anxiety. If you take sociology and culture seriously, it’s sensible to wonder whether this is the sort of country we want to be.
I can see understandable, if you're a derp, but sensible not so much. If you take sociology and culture seriously, you might take history seriously as well and recall that the proportion of foreign-born US residents from 1860 to 1920 was consistently higher than it is now and, whatever you may believe, no more familiar with the thinking of Montesquieu than your average Mexican. In 1790 there were more American residents born in Africa (on whom European civilization, to be sure, had the considerable impact of keeping them in chains) than in England. And in any case if more radical developments are indeed as Brooks says ineluctable—
Soon there will be no dominant block, just complex networks of fluid streams — Vietnamese, Bengalis, Kazakhs. It’s a bit like the end of the cold war when bipolar thinking had to give way to a radically multipolar mind-set....
In other words, immigration reform won’t transform America. It will just speed up the arrival of a New America that is already guaranteed.
—then wondering whether we want them to take place is the opposite of sensible, a waste of time.

And in fact Brooks isn't worried about it at all. He is literally concern-trolling himself! He expects it to be "interesting" and "exciting". We will end up with a reconstituted social hierarchy in which the educated upper class is simultaneously hyper-mongrelized by pervasive intermarriage and cherishing its ethnic roots, while the working class is broken into dozens of mutually hostile ethnic enclaves. Divide et impera! And then what "we" are going to do—"we" being the imaginary cultural hegemon Brooks always calls on to repair society's moral bone fractures and muscle strains, to persuade parents to marry and old people to turn down cost-of-living increases and young people to major in literature—is to cast away the "religion of diversity" in favor of "an ethic of social cohesion":
We won’t have to celebrate diversity because it will be a fact. The problem will be finding the 21st-century thing that binds the fluid network of ethnic cells.
Ugh, more of those fluids. And the bizarre implication that diversity isn't a fact yet, between 1790, or for that matter 1607, and 2013, as if the particularly peculiar situation of Stuyvesant Town when little David arrived there in the 60s were really some kind of perpetual norm. Which in Brooks's mind it is:  because what Brooks really is—pay attention, Drifters—is a solipsist.

I continue to be interested in Brooks's treatment of his sources. This column mentions two. One, Anne Snyder, is a researcher at the Times who seems to be generally available to columnists; what she did for Brooks is simply left unclear (she "delineates several possible changes to the social fabric" but we don't know where or which ones he cited); as far as I can tell from her blogging at Humane Pursuits her main contribution is to have offered an explicitly Christian perspective on Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, a book that seems to account for a lot of Brooks's current preoccupations. She has an arch and literate style, though. The other is Álvaro Vargas Llosa, whose Global Crossings probably found its way into his Kindle pretty recently. The point Brooks cited is not from the book's prologue (available online); he might have overheard it on Vargas Llosa's promotion appearance on the Diane Rehm show:
You also have a very interesting situation, which is they feel so secure, just as the Irish did and the Italians did in the past, so secure about being part of this society that they begin to claim their heritage, in terms of festivities and these kinds of things. Of course, nothing very substantial in the sense that they're not going to become un-American. It's simply that they feel so secure, so assimilated and then they don't feel they're going to be looked upon or frowned upon if they begin to embrace certain holidays and certain festivities back home.
As everybody knows, he's been hanging out at the Aspen Institute (a.k.a. Davos for the Innumerate) all week, chatting on the topic "The Inverse Logic of Life: The More we Give, the More we Get" (or, as Jesus put it, "It is more profitable to give than to receive") and posing for Arianna's photo ops. I'd guess Snyder must have ghosted the whole column if it weren't that she seems to be a rather better writer than he is.
Huffington Post. Aspens don't in reality turn in clusters, though their roots do connect them.

SO WHERE IS EDWARD SNOWDEN, REALLY?

AP reporter Ian Phillips traveled from London to Ukraine with a 21-hour layover in Moscow and no visa to enter Russia, just to see if he could find Edward Snowden. He didn't:
After a nearly two-hour wait inside the terminal, a bus picks me up -- only me -- from the transit area. We drive slowly across the tarmac, through a barrier, past electronic gates covered in barbed wire and security cameras.

The main part of the Novotel is out of bounds. My allotted wing feels like a lockup: You are obliged to stay in your room, except for brief walks along the corridor. Three cameras track your movements along the hallway and beam the images back to a multiscreen monitor. It's comforting to see a sign instructing me that, in case of an emergency, the locks on heavily fortified doors leading to the elevators will open.

When I try to leave my room, the guard outside springs to his feet. I ask him why room service isn't responding and if there's any other way to get food. He growls: "Extension 70!" I rile him by asking about the Wi-Fi, which isn't working: "Extension 75!" he snarls....

Now it's midnight, and I'm getting edgy. I feel trapped inside my airless room, whose double windows are tightly sealed....

("Can't I just wait in the lobby after midday?" I asked the receptionist at check-in. "Of course not," she retorted. "You have no visa. You will stay until you are picked up.")...
If this is really the only option for anyone who lands at the Moscow airport and has no Russian visa, then Snowden is in the same grim limbo (which is also an expensive one -- a mozzarella-and-pesto appetizer from room service costs about twenty bucks, a ribeye about fifty). Phillips couldn't locate Snowden:
I've called all the 37 rooms on my floor in hopes of reaching Snowden. No reply except for when I get my security guard.

The floor above? A similarly futile attempt.

I only reach a handful of tired and irritated Russians who growl "Da? Da? Da?"
Is he even there? Is it possible he's been spirited out of the country -- or into the country?

We know from The New York Times that the Russian government is cheering him on:
While Edward J. Snowden has remained mysteriously hidden from sight during his visit to Russia this week, Russian television has been making him a hero.

On programs that were hastily arranged and broadcast on the two largest federal channels, he was compared to the dissident Andrei Sakharov, to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and to Max Otto von Stirlitz, a dashing fictional double agent from Soviet television. He was described as "the man who declared war on Big Brother and got stuck in the transit zone," and as "a soldier in the information war, who fights, of course, on the side of Russia, or maybe the side of China."

... Since Mr. Snowden landed in Moscow on Sunday, the likelihood that he will remain in Russia has steadily crept up....
I think he's out of the airport, but is somewhere in Russia or elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc. (He'd be blabbing to the press if he were anywhere he felt free.) It's ironic if he refused to return to the U.S. because he didn't want to face Bradley Manning's fate and is now effectively a prisoner somewhere in Putin's sphere of interest.
WILL FOX TURN PAULA DEEN INTO A CIVIL RIGHTS MARTYR?

Tweets from Eric Bolling of Fox News:




The tweets refer to Cashin' In, Bolling's weekend show on Fox, which is apparently going to report on a "Paula Deen comeback" despite the fact that that's not exactly what she seems to be going through right now:
... In a brief statement Friday, Ballantine Books announced it had canceled publication of "Paula Deen's New Testament: 250 Favorite Recipes, All Lightened Up." The book was scheduled for release in October...

Deen has lost many of her business relationships following revelations that she used racial slurs in the past. Sears Holdings Corp and J.C. Penney Co. Friday that they're cutting ties with Deen, following similar announcements from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and Home Depot.

Last week, the Food Network said that it would not renew her contract. She was also dropped by Smithfield Foods, Caesars Entertainment stripped her name from restaurants and drug company Novo Nordisk said it was suspending its work with her.
But, yeah, Amazon has her last book at #1 and the canceled book at #2. So a lot of fans are still with her.

The comments at the Amazon page for the last book include some people who seem as if they might be well-meaning, if perhaps inclined to hit you over the head with their well-meaning-ness:
I don't normally buy items for a policical statement but this time I have. Paula has freedom of speech and I have the power of the buck. Today I bought this book AND a box of cheerios (in support of their ad that contains a mixed race marriage). Time for American to grow up beyond the age of ten years old, get over the polical correctness crap and get on with life.
Others, not so much:
Since there seems to be a double-standard for the use of the "N" word, maybe we need a rule book on its use: e.g., whites can't use it because they have to be politically correct at all times, blacks can use it among themselves, wealthy film producers can use it and make lots of money (they get a free pass). What? No rule book? That's silly? Well then, why don't we just nix the word and be a little kinder to one another!
Although that's not nearly as bad as this Facebook post, found by The Atlantic's Alexander Abad-Santos at a Tumblr called White People Mad at the Food Network:





Are you picking up a common thread in the defenses of Deen? Referring to Deen's critics, The Atlantic's Abad-Santos says,
... people are more upset that Deen's deposition has roots in an employment discrimination lawsuit with a slew of ugly allegations, the most serious of which is that Deen enabled a hostile and racist work environment.
He notes, in particular, the detail that galled me the most: that she "fantasiz[ed] about an antebellum-themed wedding, complete with slaves."

But that's not what this is being reduced to, in the eyes of Deen's defenders. To them, she's being crucified for one decades-old use of the N-word -- and that's it.

Generally speaking, that's Fox's comfort zone: creating and/or exploiting angry white people's perceptions of what's going on, rather than what's actually going on. So, as Abad-Santos points out, we get this from Fox's Todd Starnes:
The liberal anti-South media is trying to crucify Paula Deen. They accuse her of using a derogatory word to describe a black person.

Paula admitted she used the word -- back in the 1980s - when a black guy walked into the bank, stuck a gun in her face and ordered her to hand over the cash.

The national media failed to mention that part of the story....
So, to sum up: loyal fan base, story that can be distorted to make liberals into the villains, and two Foxsters (Starnes and Bolling) already in her corner.

I expect Deen to be a regular on Fox & Friends by Labor Day.

Freedom Sucks

Non-libertarian Cal Thomas:
One doesn't have to approve of the Court's "reasoning" in order to hand it to the gay rights campaigners. They have done a magnificent job advancing their objectives, but they couldn't have done it alone. A verse from the Old Testament warns about the detrimental effects such "advances" can have on individuals and nations that abandon moral boundaries: "In those days Israel had no king; everyone did what was right in his own eyes." -- Judges 17:6, NIV
Then, fortunately, there came an era in which the potty-mouthed could be stoned to death.*

*The Lovely Daughter and I were coming home from a doctor's appointment the other day and there was a shirtless crazy guy on the opposite corner swearing away. A sweet little old lady approached us and said "They should make public swearing illegal." The Lovely Daughter can say "bullshit" in Chinese with a good accent, but unlike her dad has decorum enough to refrain from calling elderly ladies crazy and fortunate to possess a shirt.
OBAMA SCANDALS? THEY'RE STILL A THING

Jonathan Chait is prematurely declaring victory, in a post titled "Remember the Obama Scandals? That Used to Be a Thing":
Do you remember how all-consuming the "Obama scandals" once were? This was a turn of events so dramatic it defined Obama's entire second term -- he was "waylaid by controversies," or at least "seriously off track," "beset by scandals," enduring a "second-term curse," the prospect of "endless scandals," Republicans "beginning to write his legislative obituary," and Washington had "turned on Obama." A ritualistic media grilling of Jay Carney, featuring the ritualistic comparisons of him to Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, sanctified the impression of guilt.

It has come and gone, having left barely a trace. To be sure, the Obama scandals live on in the conservative world, where the evidence of deep corruption and venality grows stronger and stronger. But that is merely the confirmation of suspicions of "Chicago politics," ACORN and so on, that predate recent events and don't require any particular facts to survive.
The scandals have "left barely a trace"? Really?

I agree that the acute phase of this period of scandal -- or at least of the pre-Snowden scandals -- is over. But there are lingering effects, and Obama may not completely recover. And the NSA story continues to evolve.

Now, I agree that there doesn't seem to be much juice left in the Benghazi story. Benghazi never meant much outside the community of Obama-haters; non-haters couldn't figure out what the hell they were supposed to hate Obama for doing with regard to Benghazi, so they never linked Obama to it at all.

But the NSA story is just the opposite. I think people are having trouble grasping the details of it, but they're resolving their confusion in favor of thinking that Obama's behavior has been more blameworthy than it actually is. So you have Mick Jagger getting laughs in concert by saying,
"I don't think President Obama is here tonight, but I'm sure he's listening in."
You have this circulating online -- possibly the first Net-based anti-Obama joke that's actually funny (click to enlarge):





Yeah, these are just jokes -- but the notion that Obama's an evil snooper, personally listening in on calls and reading e-mails, is getting to be embedded in America's subconscious. Even if people don't believe that literally, it's seriously damaging.

The IRS story (and, to a much lesser extent, the AP/Fox story) were table-setters for that, of course. The IRS story is supposed to be over -- but the right doesn't think so. I yield to no one in my willingness to mock Peggy Noonan, but I don't know how to rebut what she writes today:
A breathlessly exonerative narrative swept the news media this week: that liberal groups had been singled out and, by implication, abused by the IRS, just as conservative groups had been. Therefore, the scandal wasn't a scandal but a mere bungle -- a nonpolitical series of unhelpful but innocent mistakes.

The problem with this story is that liberals were not caught in the IRS dragnet. Progressive groups were not targeted....

According to a House Ways and Means Committee source, only seven of the 298 cases flagged by the IRS for extra scrutiny appeared to represent progressive causes. Not one of the seven was subject to harassment or abuse. Of the seven, only two were even sent follow-up questionnaires after their applications for tax-exempt status were received. Neither of those two was asked inappropriate or invasive questions. And all seven saw their applications approved.
Maybe there's fatigue surrounding this story, and maybe everyone outside the right -- for good reason -- thinks Obama has nothing to do with what happened at the IRS anyway. Maybe most people, being apolitical, don't give a crap what happens to political activists of any kind. But I'm not sure we can completely wash our hands of this if the extra scrutiny was so disproportional.

And Benghazi may be dead, but there's a chance it may become undead next year:
Benghazi security team nails $3M book deal

... Twelve Books, which announced this week it signed a deal with four members of the elite security team from the annex of the US Embassy in the Mideast town, is paying a $3 million advance....

The book by the authors -- whose names were not released -- is scheduled to be released in 2014....
Twelve is not part of the wingnut media. Twelve is an imprint of Hachette's publishing division, which includes the likes of Little, Brown. Twelve's books are mostly apolitical; among political types, it's published Ted Kennedy's memoir and a book by Henry Waxman, and its righties don't get much further right than Christopher Buckley and Christopher Hitchens. (Twelve's most successful book is probably Hitchens's defense of atheism, God Is Not Great.)

So, yeah, this probably won't be a right-wing hit job. Or maybe this is a case of a non-wingnut publisher looking for a little of that sweet, sweet wingnut cash. (Action-filled military memoirs are big sellers these days as well.)

But what I find most striking is the advance. Three million bucks is a huge advance in the book biz. That's what publishers pay when they're certain they have a blockbuster.

So what the hell is in this book -- which is coming out in 2014, the year of the next midterms?


(Chait via Memeorandum.)

****

UPDATE: Charlie Pierce fisks the Noonan column. But it's not just her throwing around those numbers, so I think the meme is still alive.
YES, THIS IS CENSORSHIP, BUT NO, AMERICA IS NOT CHINA YET

This is getting a lot of attention, some of it a bit overheated:
The Army admitted Thursday to ... restricting access to The Guardian news website ... Armywide.

Presidio employees said the site had been blocked since The Guardian broke stories on data collection by the National Security Agency.

Gordon Van Vleet, an Arizona-based spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, said in an email the Army is filtering "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks."

He wrote it is routine for the Department of Defense to take preventative "network hygiene" measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information....
A couple of responses:




I don't approve of this, but Wa little perspective, please: When they start blocking civilian access to Web sites in America, then we have a Chinese-style Internet policy. People in the military always lose some freedoms the rest of us have -- that's the nature of the military -- and rightly or wrongly, restrictions on media access have often been part of the deal.

In 2010, the Air Force blocked access to sites publishing information from Wikileaks. That's an obvious parallel to what's going on now. But military censorship of the Web has even extended to a military-wide blockage of Olympics sites in 2008. (It's not clear why, but it's possible that it was because the feeds were coming from China and the military feared hacking.)

And, of course, the military blocked access to YouTube, MTV.com, and similar sites for many years, and blocked sites self-identified as blogs. The military stopped blocking social media sites as of 2010, but continued to "deny access to prohibited content sites (e.g., gambling, pornography, hate-crime related activities)," according to the Department of Defense. Earlier this year, right-wingers freaked out when reports surfaced that the Southern Baptist Convention's site was being blocked, although the DoD said that that was in response to a temporary malware problem on the SBC site, not in response to content on the site.

But content-based censorship in the miltary has a history that predates the Internet, as Jeff Sharlet notes:

Well, I get the feeling that Vietnam GI was, um, rather provocative:





Sharlet's uncle was also named Jeff Sharlet. Read about his career (which ranged from the U.S. Army Security Agency to SDS) and about Vietnam GI at Wikipedia.

My point in bringing all this up is that it may be wrong, but we haven't entered into a new, unprecedented era of fascism. It's nothing new.
OK, IMMIGRATION REFORM PASSED THE SENATE. NOW PLEASE DON'T GO INTO DENIAL ABOUT OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM'S DYSFUNCTION.

Well, great: the Senate voted for comprehensive immigration reform. Now it's on to the House, where the plan is to throw out the Senate bill, presumably cook up a bill so hard-assed it doesn't count as reform at all, and maybe not even pass that. So forgive me if I'm not breaking out the champagne.

Yeah, on one issue Republicans -- by which I mean some Republicans in one House of Congress (and a minority of those Republicans at that) -- are sufficiently concerned about their party's extremism that they're willing to see reason. But that's not going to prevent the Beltway from using this as yet another opportunity to slip into denial mode about the irreversible dysfunction of our political system, thanks to the GOP.

So we have this:
But senators see this year's immigration debate as a welcome return to some semblance of ordinary legislating.....

"It has been a step in the right direction with eight senators putting the bill forward. The committee markup was robust," said Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La....

Landrieu said that final passage of the immigration bill shows that major legislation can indeed sprout through the muck of partisan squabbles. "I'm trying to be one of those green shoots," she said a few hours before the Senate's vote.

... basic cordiality among senators was on display throughout the process. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who voted against the bill, congratulated Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., on the Senate floor for the fair and transparent way he shepherded the bill through his committee.
Stop. Just stop. This is not "a welcome return to" anything, if by "welcome return" you mean "Thank God we're back to normal." This is an anomalous situation -- one issue, and as far as I know the only issue, on which some Republicans think there are ideas worth considering (if only to preserve their political survival) that would never be heard on Fox News. After this, it's back to business as usual. And any idiot insider who tells you otherwise -- and a lot of them will -- is delusional.

Can we all get along? No, we can't. Not until the Fox-ification of the GOP is a distant memory.

Cheap shots 6/28/2013: Jesus laughed

Uncredited image via Ellen Haroutunian.
Stolen from Dr. Turk:
How bad are Samuel Alito's manners?

So bad even Dana Milbank can't come up with an example of how both sides do it. That's historic.

Incidentally, Ann Althouse (via Thers) explains that Alito's not actually being rude, just Italian-American: [jump]

Alito is too visibly expressive. He's like a movie character with an Italian name (Spicoli)? The rule is your face should be a mask? WASP-style?
And this arouses the critics' anti-Italian prejudice. Entschuldigung, Frau Doktor Althaus, but you're the one suggesting Italian-Americans are all guileless children unable to stop making faces at the president of the United States or a Supreme Court justice who happens to be twenty years older than you—not me. I bet James Gandolfini would never have done that. Or Antonin Scalia, for that matter, buffone though he may be.
Justice Alito. AP image via Politix.
From CNN's Security Clearance blog:
The U.S. intelligence community says terrorists are trying to change the way they communicate because of what they learned from Edward Snowden's admitted leaks of classified information about government surveillance programs.
"We can confirm we are seeing indications that several terrorist groups are in fact attempting to change their communications behaviors based specifically on what they are reading about our surveillance programs in the media," a U.S. intelligence official told CNN
Oh, thanks for the tip, Mr. or Ms. Unnamed. Are you anonymous because you're not authorized to discuss the matter? Because I'd sure hate to get involved with any of that leaker stuff.

And by the way, what are those terrorists up to? Flying to the US every time they want to send an email, so the NSA can't look?
Hat Trick. From Captain Scratchy.
 Ask Krugman:
Islam Karimov, alien cornball. Photo by Sarvar Urmonov, Uzbekistan National News Agency.
And thanks for all the rubles, suckers.
During his trip to the Dzhizak region on June 19th, [President Islam Karimov] spoke to the cameras...: 

“There are very few lazy people in Uzbekistan now. I describe as lazy those who go to Moscow and sweep its streets and squares. One feels disgusted with Uzbeks going there for a slice of bread. Nobody is starving to death in Uzbekistan....

"Nowadays, scrounging for things in the street is below people's dignity. The Uzbek nation's honour makes it different from others. Is that not equal to dying? Therefore, I call such people lazy because they go there in order to make big money fast, and they are a disgrace to us all.” (uznews.net)
Some of them got a little annoyed, though.
At the present time somewhere between 3 and 5 million Uzbek citizens are working in Russia. In 2012 they sent back to their home country over 6 billion dollars, which is roughly a third of the country’s GDP. 

“There is nothing shameful in sweeping streets in Moscow”, says [Moscow-based human rights activist Bakhrom] Khamroev in response to Karimov’s statement. “But when you are treated like a slave, when you are beaten and insulted, even murdered—that’s shameful”. (uznews.net)
Feruza Ashurova, 41, a devout Uzbek Muslim from Kyrgyzstan lives at an underground mosque as she waits to obtain refugee status in Russia. Ria Novosti.
Meanwhile, back in New York, our noble old police commissioner admonishes the City Council for trying to put an end to (illegal) racial profiling in the form of the stop 'n' frisk program:
Mr. Kelly sent a letter on Tuesday to each of the Council members, arguing that the profiling bill could be used to force the removal of surveillance cameras and urging them to vote against it. “The bill would allow virtually everyone in New York City to sue the Police Department and individual police officers over the entire range of law enforcement functions they perform,” Mr. Kelly wrote.
What? What? Any scum that feels abused could sue a cop? Any cop whatsoever? It's the end of civilization as we know it!
Uncredited image from ThinkProgress. The dog is amazing.
First they came for us.

Then they started coming for the dangerous guys:

Who says there's no such thing as progress?

OU Pride

As I've stated once twice 487 times before, I love Ohio University. I will argue until I'm blue in the face that OU is the best school in Ohio; that Athens is the coolest prettiest town in the state; that there is no other place that I would have rather spent 4 years for college.

Now while there are other Ohio schools that boast a better football program (and yes, I do cheer for the Buckeyes...), there is just something about Bobcat pride. A pride that partially has to do with sports, but fully has to do with a love of our school. Oh and our basketball team IS badass.

Football game sophomore year.
Sidenote: Bangs?? Why?
Going to football games was a blast. We drank in the dorms (oh dorm drinking. Why were you so much fun?) before heading to games on Saturdays. But not every Saturday. Honestly only 2-3 times a year. And this picture is misleading because the stands are packed. It was the first half...and we really only went to hear the band at half time. Because the Marching 110 is the shit. Seriously...I love them.


The OU Marching 110 doing Party Rock Anthem

And then we would leave the game and go crash house parties because we were freshman and couldn't buy beer or handle our booze or go to a party with less than 19 other girls. 


Homecoming was a whole other deal. Wake up at 5am, kegs and eggs at the bar, dress from head to toe in green (I had green and white shoes that were worn only for football games and Homecoming), hopefully stay sober enough to go to the football game, realize not even close to sober enough to go to the football game, go to the bars and drink for the rest of the day instead.


2007
2010
Homecoming is better than Christmas. It's a time for us all to return to Athens and celebrate the school we love so much. And if football happens to be included in the weekend? Cool.


Venus Trapped in Mars

Not only am I linking up with Sarah today, but I also used her tutorial to create a blog button!! So check it out on the right, and I would love to exchange buttons.

Summer jams

There are a few songs right now that no matter how popular they get and how many times I hear them on the radio, I still turn it up and rock out like no one is listening. Which unfortunately is probably not true since my windows are rolled down all the way. They are definitely my summer tunes.


Blurred Lines - Robin Thicke featuring T.I. and Pharrell Williams

I first heard this on The Voice (version I included here) early in the season and I was instantly hooked. Seriously. Repeat, all day, every day.

Wagon Wheel - Old Crow Medicine Show

When the Darius Rucker version first became possible, I loved it. Then the original Old Crow Medicine Show version started popping up on the radio and I feel even more in love. Hootie's version is good...but there is something about Old Crow Medicine Show's that just bring me back over and over. Doesn't hurt that the husband loves this song, which is weird for his country hating-strongly disliking self. And we have occasionally danced around our apartment together while listening to it...after a few beers. 

Cruise - Florida Georgia Line (remix) featuring Nelly

I know, I know. So many people think this is just the most over played song of the summer...and it's only technically been summer for 7 days. But I don't care. It really does want to 'make me wanna roll my windows down and cruise.' 

To wrap up, I'm going to do a little throwback Thursday with some of my favorite summer memories!

Kenny Chesney concert
Indian's Games
Boating, camping, beer and corn hole


More on metadata

Image from Quicklabel.
Greenwald via Raw Story:
The Bush email metadata program had restrictions on the scope of the bulk email records the NSA could analyze. Those restrictions are detailed in a legal memorandum written in a 27 November 2007, by assistant attorney general Kenneth Weinstein to his new boss, attorney general Michael Mukasey, who had taken office just a few weeks earlier.
The purpose of that memorandum was to advise Mukasey of the Pentagon’s view that these restrictions were excessive, and to obtain permission for the NSA to expand its “contact chains” deeper into Americans’ email records. The agency, the memo noted, already had “in its databases a large amount of communications metadata associated with persons in the United States”.
But, Wainstein continued, “NSA’s present practice is to ‘stop’ when a chain hits a telephone number or [internet] address believed to be used by a United States person.”
Wainstein told Mukasey that giving NSA broader leeway to study Americans’ online habits would give the surveillance agency, ironically, greater visibility into the online habits of foreigners – NSA’s original mandate.
“NSA believes that it is over-identifying numbers and addresses that belong to United States persons and that modifying its practice to chain through all telephone numbers and addresses, including those reasonably believed to be used by a United States person,” Weinstein wrote, “will yield valuable foreign intelligence information primarily concerning non-United States persons outside the United States.”
"Ironically" is the wrong word there; better would be "paradoxically". I've tried to explain this before with reference to the story about Chicago police practice. The original NSA method was a "profiling" approach which tried to limit its data by marking all the "foreign" numbers first, and it dredged up too many dolphins along with its tuna, so to speak. The method they decided to replace it with was a "network" approach, throwing each dolphin back into the water as it came up on the way to the next tuna. It's paradoxical that starting with fewer limitations should get more narrowly tailored results, but it's true.
NO, JOSH, THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT WILL NOT BE SAVED

Josh Marhall looks at reactions to the Supreme Court's Voting Rights Act decision from a couple of GOP congressmen -- James Sensenbrenner ("my colleagues and I will work in a bipartisan fashion to update Section 4 to ensure Section 5 can be properly implemented") and Eric Cantor ("I'm hopeful Congress will put politics aside ... and find a responsible path forward") -- and concludes that the VRA really might not be dead:
... I think we can infer a few things pretty clearly. The most important of which is that Cantor does not want the GOP to own this decision....

Let's walk through this.

Seven years ago the VRA passed the Senate with 98 votes. As we've seen from the immigration debate Senate Republicans are a good deal more open-minded shall we say on these issues and much more attuned to the party's need to get out of under the label of "party of white people." Remember, senators don't get to gerrymander their seats. I think there's a very decent chance Democrats could get a reasonably good bill out of the Senate.... is Mitch McConnell going to whip a filibuster on this issue? I doubt it....

So now we have "the Voting Rights Bill" passed out of the Senate and lands over at the House. Does Boehner invoke the Hastert Rule and refuse to bring it to a vote because a majority of his caucus doesn't support it? Quite possible. But again, toxic politics.

I strongly suspect that you'd have a lot of GOP elites ... really not liking that outcome....

... I’m not saying this or the next Congress will be able to resurrect section 4 of the VRA. On balance, I figure it doesn't happen. But if the attempt is made, every step along the way is going to be acutely painful for the GOP.
Would it be? Really? It seems to me that if you forced this onto the national agenda, you'd get pretty much what you've got with the politics of immigration, without the perceived incentive for the GOP of possibly winning over some minority voters: Republican members of the House and Senate with deep-red constituencies would have no problem saying "Hell no," while many Republicans in less-red states and districts would hem and haw and say, "Yes, I suppose we should pass a bill, but I have serious problems with this bill."

And that would be true no matter what was in the bill.

If the bill subjected the entire nation to strict scrutiny on election issues, Republicans would rail that liberal Democrats want to declare every city and town in America guilty of racism until proven innocent, and want to subject everyone to the massive, and inevitably expanding, decision-making bureaucracy of Evil Eric Holder.

If the bill restored the status quo ante, Republicans would solemnly proclaim that this was just the antiquated formula that the Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, threw out. And if you drew up new maps based on recent patterns of problems with minority registration and voting, Republicans would probably play the Black Panther/True the Vote/James O'Keefe/ACORN card and start saying the real problem is manipulation of our elections by black people.

Only they wouldn't say it quite that way. They wouldn't say "black," or at least not all that much. They'd say "Voter fraud." They'd say "Democratic voter fraud" (or, more likely, "Democrat voter fraud"). They'd bring out Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote ("a nice woman, a citizen, an American" --Peggy Noonan). And she'd talk about how she and her group just wanted to remove dead people from the voter rolls and prevent illegal voting -- who could object to that? And for that (cue Noonan whining) she was harassed by the Obama regime! She, a mere housewife and patriot! But now that that's come to light, if we're going to revisit voting rights, shouldn't strict scrutiny be focused primarily on urban Democratic states and districts? Oh, and voter ID -- should there be strict voter ID nationwide?

And low-info voters would think some of what they were hearing sure seemed to make sense. (Remember, huge majorities of Americans back voter ID laws, presumably because they have no idea how difficult it is for poor, elderly, and disabled people, especially those born decades ago, possibly at home with a midwife in an impoverished community, to obtain the documents necessary to vote.)

Believe me, Republicans can demagogue this endlessly, leaving much of the wet work to Republicans in the safest seats while the rest of them tut-tut and say they deeply regret the fact that Democrats keep making proposals that are unreasonable.

So, no, this would never be "acutely painful" for the GOP. It wouldn't be painful at all.
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